CHAPTER II
SCOTTS-LAND
t is possible to enter the Middle Marches from Berwick; in truth, Kelso lies scarcely farther from Flodden than does Berwick. But Flodden is on English soil to-day, and memory is content to let it lie there. These Middle Marches however are so essentially Scottish, the splendour and the romance, the history and the tragedy, that one would fain keep them so, and come upon them as did the kings from David I, or even the Celtic kings before him, who sought refuge from the bleak Scottish north in this smiling land of dales and haughs, of burns and lochs. Not at any moment could life become monotonous even in this realm of romance, since the Border was near, and danger and dispute so imminent, so incessant.
Preferably then one goes from Edinburgh (even though never does one go from that city, "mine own romantic town," but with regret; not even finally when one leaves it and knows one will not return till next time) to Melrose; as Scottish kings of history and story have passed before. There was James II going to the siege of Roxburgh, and not returning; there was James IV going to the field of Flodden and not returning; there was James V going to hunt the deer; there was James VI going up to London to be king; Mary Queen on that last journey to the South Countrie; Charles I and Charles II losing and getting a crown; Charles III—let us defy history and call the Bonnie Prince by his title—when he went so splendidly after Prestonpans.
It is a royal progress, out of Edinburgh into the Middle Marches; past Dalkeith where James IV rode to meet and marry Margaret of England; past Borthwick, where Queen Mary spent that strange hot-trod honeymoon with Bothwell—of all place of emotion this is the most difficult to realize, and I can but think Mary's heart was broken here, and the heartbreak at Carberry Hill was but an echo of this; past Lauder, where the nobles of ignoble James III hung his un-noble favourite from the stone arch of the bridge; into the level rays of a setting sun—always the setting sun throws a more revealing light than that of noonday over this Scotland.
Melrose
I remember on my first visit to Melrose, of course during my first visit to Scotland, I scheduled my going so as to arrive there in the evening of a night when the moon would be at the full. I had seen it shine gloriously on the front of York, splendidly on the towers of Durham. What would it not be on fair Melrose, viewed aright?
I hurried northward, entered Edinburgh only to convey my baggage, and then closing my eyes resolutely to all the glory and the memory that lay about, I went southward through the early twilight. I could see, would see, nothing before Melrose.
The gates of the Abbey were, of course, closed. But I did not wish to enter there until the magic hour should strike. The country round about was ineffably lovely in the rose light of the vanishing day.
"Where fair Tweed flows round holy Melrose
And Eildon slopes to the plain."
The Abbey was, of course, the center of thought continually, and its red-gray walls caught the light of day and the coming shadows of night in a curious effect which no picture can report; time has dealt wondrously with this stone, leaving the rose for the day, the gray for the night.
I wandered about, stopping in the empty sloping market-place to look at the Cross, which is as old as the Abbey; looking at the graveyard which surrounds the Abbey, where men lie, common men unsung in Scottish minstrelsy, except as part of the great hosts, men who heard the news when it was swift and fresh from Bannockburn, and Flodden, and Culloden; and where men and women still insert their mortality into this immortality—Elizabeth Clephane who wrote the "Ninety and Nine" lies there; and out into the country and down by the Tweed toward the Holy Pool, the Haly Wheel, to wonder if when I came again in the middle night, I, too, should see the white lady rise in mist from the waters, this lady of Bemersyde who had loved a monk of Melrose not wisely but very well, and who drowned herself in this water where the monk in penance took daily plunges, come summer, come winter. How often this is the Middle-Age penalty!
Far across the shimmering green meadows and through the fragrant orchards came the sound of bagpipes—on this my first evening in Scotland! And whether or not you care for the pipes, there is nothing like them in a Scottish twilight, a first Scottish twilight, to reconstruct all the Scotland that has been.
The multitudes and the individuals came trooping back. At a time of famine these very fields were filled with huts, four thousand of them, for always the monks had food, and always they could perform miracles and obtain food; which they did. That for the early time. And for the late, the encampment of Leslie's men in these fields before the day when they slaughtered Montrose's scant band of royalists at Philipshaugh, and sent that most splendid figure in late Scottish history as a fugitive to the north, and to the scaffold.
I knew that in the Abbey before the high altar lay the high heart of The Bruce, which had been carried to Spain and to the Holy Land, by order of Bruce, since death overtook him before he could make the pilgrimage. Lord James Douglass did battle on the way against the Moslems in southern Spain, where "a Douglass! a Douglass!" rang in battle clash against "Allah, illah, allah," and the Douglass himself was slain. The heart of The Bruce flung against the infidel, was recovered and sent on to Jerusalem, and then back to Melrose. The body of Douglass was brought back to Scotland, to St. Bride's church in Douglass, and his heart also lies before the high altar of Melrose. "In their death they were not divided."
There lies also buried Michael Scot
"Buried on St. Michael's night,
When the bell toll'd one and the moon was bright."
On such a night as this, I hoped. And Scot is fit companion for the twilight. This strange wizard of a strange time was born in Upper Tweedale, which is the district of Merlin—the older wizard lies buried in a green mound near Drummelzier. Michael traveled the world over, Oxford, Paris, Bologna, Palermo, Toledo, and finally, perhaps because his wizardry had sent him like a wandering Jew from place to place, back to the Border, his home country, where he came and served the Evil One. Dante places him in the Purgatory of those who attempt blasphemously to tear the veil of the future. The thirteenth century was not the time in which to increase knowledge, whether of this world or the next. Even to-day perhaps we save a remnant of superstition, and we would not boast
"I could say to thee
The words that cleft the Eildon hills in three."
Very dark against the gathering dark of the night sky rose the Eildon hills above, cleft in three by the wizardry of Scot. To that height on the morrow I should climb, for it is there that Sir Walter Scott, a later wizard, had carried our Washington Irving, just a century ago, and shown him all this Borderland—which lay about me under the increasing cover of night.
"I can stand on the Eildon Hill and point out forty-three places famous in war and verse," Sir Walter said to our Irving. "I have brought you, like a pilgrim in the Pilgrim's Progress, to the top of the Delectable Mountains, that I may show you all the goodly regions hereabouts. Yonder is Lammermuir and Smailholm; and there you have Galashiels and Torwoodelee and Gala Water; and in that direction you see Teviotdale and the Braes of Yarrow; and Ettrick
