Summers & Winter's at 'BaJmawhapple ftjythe North Sea Among the Summed Isles Alpine "Resting Places Home Again ! Summers and Winters at Balmawhapple " sD MARY STUART. From the Sketch by Janet in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. The Second Series of "Table -Talk Summers and Winters at Balmawhappl_e_ a Second Series of The Table -Talk of Shirley by John Skelton C.B. LL.D. ^ ^ With Illustrations Volume One Second Edition William Blackwood & Sons Edinburgh and London 1897 All Rights rcstrotd To A. A. S. 1867-1897. Fides, nudaqtte Veritas. THE PRELUDE. hundred years ago (or thereby) a Yorkshire Shirley crossed the Border, and settled on the banks of Loch Leven. There his sons and grandsons continued to reside till the other day : famous anglers when living, they now sleep peacefully on its shores, dreaming, it may be, of the big trout they landed or of the bigger that they lost. A grandson or a great-grandson, more adventurous than the others, migrated from the inland water to the sea, and it VI THE PRELUDE. was thus that in due season I came to know Balmawhapple. 1 Here we have no continuing city ; but in Balmawhapple I have been content to abide. My constancy is somewhat singular, I admit. Our royal and ancient burgh may be compared to the hive which sends off swarm after swarm. Among sea-bred people the sea-bird's instinct is strong. There are Balmawhapple men to be found in every corner of the globe. The boys who were with me at school have wandered away to Canada and the States, to Central Africa and Pacific islands. One of them is an engineer on the line that is crossing the Andes. Another is shooting ibex in Thibet. Another has a fruit-farm in California. They write to me at times, letters arrive with strange stamps and outlandish post-marks, that bring a sense of romance and adventure into our uneventful life. But Fate, though not unkind to me on the whole, why should I fret, who have been spared through it all, while so many strong men have gone down down even unto Hades ? has ordained that I 1 TTie Shirley s (/ may venture to add in the modest obscurity of a foot- note} remained persistently "English" until, marrying into a great Scottish house {Mary Stuart was niece of Thomas and Methuen, the last Earls of Kellie of the family of Cambo), they were able to trace their descent back to Celtic Mormaers and the Victor of Bannockburn, and so became entirely acclimatised, and indeed more "Scotch" than the Scots, The "Shirra" (who married Mary Stuart sometime in the 'nineties) was the most expert fly-fisher of his day, and came to be known far and wide as " The Shirra of the Loch." " Will the Shirra of the Loch take a glass of wine with the Shirra of the Forest ? " was Sir Walter's greeting when they met each year at Blair Adam. THE PRELUDE. vii should stay at home. Unlike so many of our people, I have not been permitted to walk "by the long wash of Austral- asian seas," nor " breathe in converse seasons." I have not been a rover. Do not mistake me. I do not complain. For even in Balmawhapple the sluggish current is sometimes interrupted, is sometimes accelerated. During the fifty years on which I can look back, the pulse of the community has sometimes beat faster than is common with, or probably good for, that somewhat feeble organ. When young Dr Diamond was found dead in his bed, with an empty bottle on the table which smelt of bitter almonds ; when pretty Nellie Barton ran away with the groom ; when lawyer Jenkins, who was also the local banker, took an autumn holiday with the mid- summer rents of half the county gentlemen of the district in his pocket and forgot to return, the usual afternoon crowd on the High Street became positively animated. A nd when Mark Holdfast came back from the south, where his " strong and simple words, Keen to wound as sharpened swords" had won him fame and fortune; and But Mark must have the opening chapter to himself. S. CONTENTS. BOOK ONE. BY THE NORTH SEA. PAGE I. MARK'S RETURN . . . . . . 3 ii. QUEEN MARY'S HOLDFAST . . 25 III. THE DEVIL TO PAY . . . . .69 IV. OUT OF THE DARK . . . QO V. IN THE YEAR ONE : THE STORY OF THE CROOKIT MEG I IO VI. LISETTE'S DREAM . . . . .215 VII. AFTER CULLODEN . . . . .242 BOOK ONE BY THE NORTH SEA BY THE NORTH SEA. I. MARK'S RETURN. MARK HOLDFAST was one of my early friends. He was not exactly a Balmawhapple boy ; but his father's house was only a few miles round the bay, and so we came to know each other. The Cleuch was rather a lonely place, a gaunt old - fashioned house, built in the time of Anne or the first George, which overlooked the sea, and where morning and night one heard the curlews piping, and round which the sea-mews wheeled as though it had been one of their own skerries. The moorland closed round it, and on a moist autumn day the air was sweet and aromatic with the scent of the moorland, the scent of bog- myrtle and heather. There was the breezy upland on one side, the breezy sea on the other, and such solitude 4 MARK'S RETURN. as boys and poets love. I could not go with him to the great peat-hags on the hill where the grey goose and the dun duck lodged ; but I used to wait for him at the smithy Jock Tamson's smithy just below the lochan famous for teal, and we would saunter home together through the autumn gloaming. Even as a boy he was a fine shot ; but it was on the water that he was most in his element. He could swim like a fish. He would take his boat out to sea when even John Dun John Dun, who once saved him from drowning preferred to smoke his pipe on shore. I was often his only companion ; there was a fascination about these foolhardy doings which I could not resist. It was the one manly excitement for which my in- firmity did not unfit me : when the Daisy, close hauled to the wind, with a double reef on her sail and the water at her gunwale, was rushing across the bay, I forgot that I was a cripple. It was a hardy and independent life for a lad, a life that could scarcely fail to leave its mark behind. His family, though one of the oldest in the county, had by ill luck or ill guidance lost much of the land that once belonged to them, and Mark was early taught to practise thrift. They had few neighbours, as I have said, and these were of a rank somewhat lower than their own. They did not associate easily with country doctors and country lawyers. My own father was the Duke's factor, a man with plenty of rough sense and humour, and who was much trusted by rich and poor. There was a long-standing acquaintance be- MARK'S RETURN. 5 tween him and the Holdfasts ; and what business they needed to be done was done by him. But even from him they held aloof, and the friendship, such as it was, never ripened into cordial intimacy. Each respected the other, and there an end. The boyish friendship between Mark and myself was accidental ; it came about without any seeking or set purpose on either side ; it would hardly have lived had it not been that then, as always, I was a hero-worshipper, and that my unreasoning devotion touched him. He was very proud, and he was very shy ; his instinctive and inherited reserve was forbidding. I think the only people who really knew him at that time save myself were the " Buckie boys," a truculent and somewhat disreputable race of fishermen. With them he was popular. With them (and he often passed the night far from land in one or other of their yawls) he un- bent wholly ; his reserve melted away, his moodiness vanished; the picture of the nut-brown lad, tanned up to the temples, his cheeks flushed, the wind in his hair, the sunlight in his eyes, steering the great herring-boat into harbour, while the rough tars looked on, is one on which, after all these years, I like to dwell. Young Irvine, who went to London, and is now a R.A., painted him in his " sou' -wester" and sailor -jacket, and it hangs to this day in the smoking- room at the Cleuch. When long afterwards (and yet it was not so long, for he rose with uncommon rapidity) he came to be a Q.C. and a leader at the Bar, his coolness was pro- 6 MARK'S RETURN. verbial. So people said ; but I knew better. He kept himself well in hand, it is true ; but no discipline how- ever severe, no effort however sustained, could change his nature. A shy, nervous, sensitive, highly strung temperament like his does not harden into immobility. His self-control was certainly very complete ; but, all the same, the inner recoil the tremor of the racer before the start could not always be disguised. And the meanness, baseness, vulgarity, from which no pro- fession is free, hurt him as a blow hurts a woman. That sensitive shiver of disgust at the squalid effrontery of the men who paid him would have ruined a less capable lawyer. When he was eighteen he went to the university. Up to that time I had been, I fancy, almost his only confidant. He had had as private tutor the minister of the parish, a fine scholar and a competent teacher, a man, moreover, of immense energy and variously gifted, whose services to the Church have not been forgotten, or, to speak more correctly, are now begin- ning to be recognised. But Dr Evergreen was even then well up in years; and though he and Mark became afterwards close friends, the brilliant and trenchant thinker, the great ecclesiastical reformer, failed to recognise in his shy and diffident pupil a spirit as ardent and fearless as his own. So that the dreams and visions of what the future had in store for him were reserved for his diary or for my private ear. That future he had mapped out with uncommon and almost startling lucidity. MARK'S RETURN. 7 We were sitting one afternoon in the late summer on the beach beneath the Cleuch. He had shot a brace of ducks, and his gun and the birds were lying beside him. I was occupied on a bit of crabbed Latin in an old charter ; his eye wandered vaguely over sea and sky. We had been silent for some time. It was our last day together; next morning he was to leave for college. " It has been a pleasant time," he began, speaking at first more to himself than to his companion. " I shall never quite forget it, I fancy, in all the years that are to come nor you, Dick," he added, with a kindly nod. " Dick, my boy, why don't you go into the Church ? When I'm Lord Chancellor I'll give you a living. But, perhaps, you don't fancy the white tie or the silk apron. Well, then, try your pen, and when I am editor of the Times you shall have the place of honour. I wonder which is best, to be a great lawyer or a great writer ? I mean to be both. Please don't laugh at me, Dick. I'm quite serious, as you will see by-and-by. I would hate to be a mere lawyer," he went on, "but I would hate still more to be a mere scribbler. Which do you think the more despicable the glib pen or the glib tongue? But it is better to make history than to write it ; and a man from a Temple garret may be Prime Minister before the game is played out." So he went away to the university, to the great world beyond the moorland. He began by using his pen, and he wrote deftly and brilliantly. He would 8 MARK'S RETURN. send me articles now and again ; and I fancied that besides being deft and dexterous I could discern some- thing better that gave them their charm to me a ground - swell of passion, of emotion, which was stronger and deeper than the easy cynicism of the lawyer. Then almost without warning he became a power at the Bar. He woke one morning to find him- self famous. For ten or twelve years thereafter he had the most lucrative practice among the younger men. He was reading briefs all night; he was speaking all day. Some great client coming straight from the great city told us once that if he went on as he was doing he would be on the woolsack before he was fifty. Then there were rumours that he was to stand for the county ; " Pam " wanted to find a seat for the Solicitor that was to be; and Mark Holdfast with his easily won guineas had already contrived to buy back a goodly slice of the land which in the bad times had been parted with by his grandfather, the Admiral. It was likely enough that he would win; a stronger candidate could not be found. So we all said. But it was ordered otherwise. It was a dull day in early autumn. The wind was in the south, and there was rain in the sky. I had been limping along the shore, thinking of many things, but chiefly of my old friend. I had come to the very spot where we had parted thirty years before, when, turning inland to cross the links to the highroad, I met him face to face. He was sorely changed. He had grown an old man MARK'S RETURN. 9 an old man before his time a man prematurely worn. He had come back to his birthplace, could it be that he had come back only to die ? We shook hands ; we looked hard at each other ; in less time than it takes to write this sentence we were on the old friendly footing. " Yes," he said, " Pam sent for me last Sunday. The great office would be vacant directly ; a seat would be found for me : they would be pleased to have me in the House. It was all very flattering; no man can be more cordial or appreciative than the Chief. Then I thought I would look up Clarkson. I had felt rather queer for a week or two, a slight difficulty in breathing, a nasty worrying pain down the left arm. Clarkson is our family doctor, you know a very good fellow, and sharp as a needle. I told him with a jest that it was a mere matter of form just idle curiosity nothing more. He took out his stethoscope, listened for a few seconds, and then turned away to the window. Dick, I knew my doom before a word was spoken. ' Tell me the truth right out,' I said, as calmly as I could, though my voice sounded strangely in my ears ; ' I see that you have bad news.' ' You are hurt,' he answered frankly, looking me in the face with his honest eyes ; ' it is not a mortal hurt as yet, but without absolute rest you are a dead man.' It was the knock-down blow, Dick, one gets once in a lifetime. If I wanted to live six weeks why, good-bye to the Bar. Thrust out of Paradise, banished, outlawed, where was the good of living ? I took the night to consider : next morning I io MARK'S RETURN. wrote Pam that I was going to sell my house in town and live at Balmawhapple ! Could he give me some- thing in the Customs? He must have thought me mad. And here we are." This was the beginning of the close friendship which has brightened my later life. These after-years indeed have been my Indian summer. Our early intimacy was renewed. He did not come alone ; his wife came with him his wife and three bright-eyed curly-headed girls. He had married Sybil Keppel for love a year or two after he was called ; Sybil had been the object of his shy boyish devotion ; and the slight delicate slip of a girl that I dimly remembered (the Keppels were a family of old standing and crippled means, who owned a tumble-down barrack at the other end of the parish), though she had grown meanwhile into a brilliant woman of the world, had lost none of her girlish charm. They became my dearest friends ; but I cannot say that they were popular. Husband and wife were wrapt up in each other. The knowledge that he might be taken from her at any moment gave to her wifely regard a tender solicitude. The tacit apprehension that any moment he might look his last upon the sweetest face he cared to see either in this world or the next was never entirely banished. The outside public, however (ignorant of its cause), resented this unconscious and quite innocent exclusiveness. Nor can it be denied that the scorn for his fellow-mortals which he had always felt, I daresay, and which grew upon him in his retirement, was sometimes too keenly expressed. He MARK'S RETURN. u had fallen out of the race ; he had, by no fault of his own, been forced to stand aside while others pressed on to the goal such as it was ; and failure had made him caustic, possibly bitter. So Balmawhapple, when its cordial, if somewhat florid, convivialities were per- sistently declined, began to look askance at the new- comers. The Holdfasts were cold, proud, taciturn, and I know not what besides. I did what I could to remove the misunderstanding with little success. Mark's abrupt retreat from public life and a great position had from the first been regarded as an unaccountable eccen- tricity ; no one except myself knew the exact state of matters ; it was given out that he had been overworked and was taking a prolonged holiday ; and though the provost and bailies continued to touch their hats to him when they met on the street, there was only one house in town (save my own and the editorial sanctum of the Tomahawk] where he was quite at his ease, where he was cordially welcome and an honoured guest, and that was the grey old house overlooking the harbour where Miss Christian and Miss Anne everybody knew Miss Christian and Miss Anne had lived since they were girls. And there were other elements of discord. The Bay of Balmawhapple is protected from the fierce easterly gales by two rocky headlands which run far out into the sea. The Cleuch, as we have seen, is 12 MARK'S RETURN. built at the extreme point of the one, and is a con- spicuous landmark for the ships that pass along the coast ; Keppel Court, which faces it from the other side of the bay here a mile across is less conspicuous. The old tower is a ruin; and the modern mansion where the Keppel girls were all born might be taken from the outside for a mere farm-steading. Inside it is better ; the Keppels had been soldiers and travellers ; the tables were crowded with oriental bric-a-brac, the walls with portraits of men and women, not undis- tinguished for valour and beauty in their day. The " Keppel girls " were the toast of the country- side when I was a lad. Their mother had died before the eldest of the six daughters was in her teens ; and the breezy and beery old captain their father had left them thereafter very much to their own devices. It was not to be wondered at, therefore, that they should have grown up strong, independent, and self-willed. But wilfulness and obstinacy were their worst faults ; for, each and all, as their rustic admirers declared, were proud as the devil, and quite able to take care of themselves. Sybil, indeed, it was admitted but Sybil after all was only a cousin had little in common with the others : she had been delicate as a child, and unable to take part in their rough scrambles and rather masculine pastimes ; and though she outgrew her childish ailments, her cheek had never the plump- ness, nor her voice the vigour, of the true " Keppel girls." Death, marriage, domestic strife, and family feuds MARK'S RETURN. 13 (for they were never so happy as when at war) had thinned their ranks. At the time of which I am writing, indeed, only two remained, the eldest and the youngest, Martha and Barbara ; and the old house which had once been clamorous with boisterous girl- hood had grown strangely silent. The two sisters, with a couple of rheumatic retainers, occupied the wing which looked out upon the dreary and ill-kept garden, while the wind whistled through the broken panes of the main building, and the rats ran riot. As the years passed the characteristics of the family became in each more marked. They had few neigh- bours, few friends; the Court, upon its bare pro- montory, was very solitary except for the sea-gulls. So, for society they were thrown mainly upon them- selves. Their tempers were intrinsically alike; both were exacting ; but while the one was actively, the other was passively, domineering. Martha was the shriller and more vehemently feminine of the two; but Barbara's indolent obstinacy was invincible. Martha, as she advanced in life, had taken to religion ; and while the one sister devoted herself altogether to the ailments of the body, the other occupied herself mainly with the maladies of the soul. Martha was evangelical and ritualistic, High Church and Low Church, meagrely Presbyterian and floridly Episcopalian by turns ; and Barbara oscillated between a famous London physician and an old woman in the village who cured by conjurations and the laying on of hands. 14 MARK'S RETURN. These were the only families of any standing in the rural part of the parish of Balmawhapple the Hold- fasts and the Keppels; for Kirkstone, though it was hardly a mile from the Court, belonged to the next parish the parish of Cuddiestone. Our county society was thus very limited, or, as we preferred to say, select : if you were asked to Pittendreich, you might meet an Earl or an Ambassador ; but Pitten- dreich was fifteen miles away as the crow flies, and the Pittendreich people knew little of the Balma- whapple people, and cared less. In the burgh of Balmawhapple itself we were more fortunate : we had not only the inevitable lawyers and doctors and merchants and ministers, but more than one elderly lady who had been brought up in a big country house, and could call the best in the county "cousin." We were particularly prbud of Miss Christian and Miss Anne, two inexhaustibly delightful old gentlewomen who lived in an old house standing in its own court- yard above the harbour, who had been famous beauties in their youth, but who had clung to each other all their lives with the purest sisterly devotion, and had grown by degrees into the sweetest, daintiest, spright- liest, nattiest old maids that one could wish to meet. The ancient ladies were my dear friends ; and their cheery drawing-room of a summer evening, with the murmur of voices on the pier -head and of the sea beyond coming in through the open window, with the bright, brisk, prosperous, pugnacious Doctor (Doctor Jackson had brought most of us into this rather bare MARK'S RETURN. 15 and bleak world) ventilating a paradox or airing an epigram, the cheery drawing-room, where the modest "tray" appeared punctually at 9.30, was the salon of our very best society, and entirely charming and en- joyable to those of us who had the password. There was a vast deal of individuality in that society ; the language was idiomatic, the characters strongly marked ; it was good-natured upon the whole, but it spoke its mind pretty plainly ; and it hated cant and dulness as it hated a Radical or a cad. They were perfect ladies and gentlemen who composed it ; but I am afraid the prudes of the present day would have dubbed them " Bohemians," and resented a certain freedom of definition which does not find favour now. It was for this reason, I daresay, that certain of the most eminently respectable citizens of Balmawhapple were not precisely popular with Miss Christian and Miss Anne and the inner circle of friends who had gathered round them. If they called us " Bohemians " we called them " Philistines " (or its popular equivalent for the time being) ; and as from the bleak hills of Judea the chosen people looked down upon the sin- ful Cities of the Plain, so did we regard the faction which was led by "Pike," " G. G." the butter- merchant, and other secular and ecclesiastical lumin- aries of the royal and ancient burgh. 1 1 There has been much controversy, I observe, as to the true site of Bal- mawhapple a controversy which it would be a pity to close prematurely. The impression, however, that there are at least two Balmawhapples appears to be gaining ground. 16 MARK'S RETURN. Jacob Corbie (commonly called " Pike ") was the pet aversion of my boyhood. He came of a family of local lawyers who had since the year One been well known in these parts for their rather unscrupu- lous keenness of scent and sharpness of speech ; and his resemblance to a weasel or ferret a weasel, I think, but at any rate to a class of animals where the eyes, brought into unpleasant proximity, regard each other with ill -disguised hostility was unmistakable. Moreover, the brow was low, narrow, and sensual, and the lip-deep smile was furtive, all which were quite in keeping with a certain unclean and slimy animalism which characterised the man. " Pike " was never at his ease ; the affectation of jocose frankness which he commonly assumed was mani- festly a pretence, and the impression that he had something to hide (not silver spoons exactly) was one that he never failed to leave. At the same time, it was quite clear that the man knew on which side his bread was buttered ; and that his thoughts even when in the pulpit, even when addressing a glib prayer to the Almighty, or dropping a sticky tear over a lost sheep were steadily fixed upon the main chance. But he was a good actor, a good second- rate actor in his way; he could feign a cordiality which he did not feel, and simulate a passion which had no true warmth; and though he was generally detected in the long - run by the quicker - witted of his persuasion, he continued to enjoy with the un- observant masses a certain equivocal popularity. MARK'S RETURN. 17 I have spoken of Corbie as if he were an ordained clergyman ; but he was only one of the lay products of an evangelical revival that had swept over the district when he was keeping the books in his uncle's office. He had a share in the business, which had something to do with blubber ; but he was now a sleeping partner, and merely drew (with praiseworthy punctuality) his half-yearly dividend. The rest of his time was devoted to " saving souls " ; and his loose logic and flabby rhetoric were always in considerable request during the periodical fits of religious hysteria to which his countrymen are subject. George Gilbert Gannet (or " G. G." as our busy mercantile community called him for brevity) sinned against our Bohemian code in quite another fashion. He was not only oppressively respectable, but he was dull offensively and criminally dull. His wife was dull ; his children were dull ; the house was dull ; the servants in the house were dull ; the very dogs and cats were dull. Though the Gannets really belonged to the mercantile class the money had been made in trade : pickled herrings and the like both husband and wife maintained with implicit confidence that they belonged to the " county." This was the rock on which they were anchored ; had it been taken away from them, they would have suffered irreparable shipwreck. So besides employing on occasion a solemn butler and a lugubrious " buttons," they drove the only carriage (except the doctor's old gig) that was kept in Balma- whapple, a four-wheeler, lined with purple and fine VOL. i. B i8 MARK'S RETURN. linen like the Lord Mayor's, and emblazoned all over with griffins and unicorns, and other legendary animals. Otherwise, the whole family father, mother, and daughters were the visible incarnation of the Com- monplace. No fire of passion, no gleam of imaginative light, could penetrate the thick fog in which they spent a grey, sombre, and monotonous life. Our little Bohe- mian doctor regarded this dismal household with a peculiar energy of dislike. They were, he declared, dull as ditchwater, dry as sticks, dreary as ghosts. Even in their diseases they were incapable of invention or originality. " Why, sir," the little man would con- clude, as he trotted off on his rounds, "why, sir, they cannot rise above mumps ! " Corbie and " G. G." belonged to the rank and file : the leader of the Philistines was a man of a very differ- ent calibre. David Dewar of Kirkstone, who during the winter months became a citizen of Balmawhapple by occupying one of the ugly aristocratic old mansions overlooking the harbour, was as much a fanatic as David Deans of St Leonards or John Balfour of Bur- ley ; and, like all fanatics, he had the most perfect con- fidence in his own wisdom and his own integrity. His very tricks of manner, his idiosnycrasies of gait and gesture, proclaimed that in their owner's estimation he was infallible as any pope. He held his chin in the air high in the air and looked down on his adversary with the superior scorn of a Westbury or a Mill. His cold and distant condescension, his visibly contemptu- ous effort to adapt himself to the meanest capacity, MARK'S RETURN. 19 would have irritated the meekest of men. God Al- mighty to a black beetle ! Yet, though his manner was cold and impassive, fire burnt beneath. His arguments, it is true, were worthless; for he was a fantastical visionary ; but they were urged with a red-hot intensity of conviction that at times was not unimpressive. He was vindictively virtuous. That steely ire, when once kindled, was not quickly quenched. Fanaticism is in- trinsically cruel, for it disregards the decent and charit- able conventions which obtain among gentlemen, and which make life tolerable. Even experience, which teaches most of us to be humble, could not mellow the laird of Kirkstone. If a client did not follow his advice, if a friend was not convinced by his logic, he took it as a personal insult an insult to his own immunity from error. And a personal insult needed to be avenged. For the miserable dissenter from the decrees of infal- lible wisdom there was little peace thereafter. The Grand Inquisitor was never satisfied until the victim had expiated his unreasonableness at the stake. This Radical of the Radicals was the foe of all noncon- formity. People said that if Kirkstone was hard and impracticable, he was honest honest at least. He may have been so. At any rate, we had the satisfaction of knowing that whatever he did, however unpleasant, was done from " the highest motives." He was bitter, sarcastic, pitiless, cruel, supercilious from " the highest motives." It was not perhaps altogether surprising that this inquisitorial integrity should not have been appreciated by the Gallios of an easy-going society ; 20 MARK'S RETURN. and in spite of fair abilities David Dewar had been from the first a persistent failure. He could only indeed have been an eminent success in a world from which common-sense and prudence and sound judgment had been banished. Mark, who had known him pretty in- timately at one time, did not hesitate to declare that he was one of those dangerous lunatics whose orbits are incalculable. Kirkstone was certainly more or less crazy at irregular intervals ; but there was method in his madness, and, happily or unhappily, he was too sane to be shut up. David Dewar had spent the best part of his life in the United States, and he had returned on the death of an uncle who had left him the old Dewar Mansion- house that overlooked the harbour, and a few acres in the parish of Cuddiestone. He had brought little or nothing back with him from New England except the nasal twang of the Yankee, a bitter contempt for mon- archical institutions all over the world, and a profound belief in David Dewar. There was thus plenty of explosive materials about. " Mark was standing on the brink of a volcano ; he was sitting on the roof of a powder magazine ; he might be drawn in, he might be blown up, at any moment." These were the doctor's similes when one day he spoke to me of the matter rather urgently : for the doctor, like myself, though he belonged ostensibly to neither of our factions, was a bit of a hero-worshipper, and Mark had been his hero, as he had in a more personal and inti- mate way been mine. The similes were perhaps a little MARK'S RETURN. 21 mixed, but they represented a substantial truth ; for the foes of our own household are the most bitter and un- scrupulous, and Corbies, Keppels, and Dewars were either by birth or marriage closely allied with the Hold- fasts. " Mark hasn't the remotest idea that they hate him," the doctor added. " I must get Dr Evergreen to speak to him. But why don't you warn him your- self? There's that clever cat, Martha Keppel, hates him like poison ; Mrs G. G.'s malicious tittle-tattle is all over the place ; Corbie knows that Holdfast wouldn't touch him with a pair of tongs ; and what daft Davie Dewar, who is as mad as a March hare, will or will not do under any conceivable circumstances, God only knows ! " And the worthy doctor, perspiring profusely, started on the daily round which he so immensely en- joyed. I saw him moping the bald pate the bald pate that rose like a dome over the inquisitive eyes and the solid gold spectacles all down the High Street. I had almost omitted to mention that Dr Evergreen, Mark's old tutor, the senior minister of our collegiate church, was still alive. The earthly tabernacle indeed had wasted away, had become perilously delicate and transparent, as if its owner were already clothed with that spiritual body of which the apostle speaks; but the unclouded intellect was alert and luminous as ever. He resided at what was called " the Old Manse," a quaint, pleasant, old-fashioned house upon the outskirts of the town, sheltered from the wild winds of winter by the high walls and the thick hedges (often white in storm-time with driven spray) of the cosy garden in 22 MARK'S RETURN. which, like Topsy, it had " growed." All Balma- whapple loved Dr Evergreen. He had by this time indeed almost entirely withdrawn from public life ; but the noble and venerable figure was familiar to all of us. In these later years he had grown very lonely ; the children he idolised had one by one been taken from him to a distant heaven (a heaven, alas ! in which he did not entirely believe) ; yet the sunset light on the worn face the after-glow was full of sweetness ; and he had emerged from the waves of controversy and strife with the heart of a child, and a spirit that had been tempered as by fire. The battle was already won it had been a stiff fight, though the ultimate issue was never doubtful but he had not doffed his armour, nor would he while he was able to bear it ; for he was one of those who hold, with a great poet of our time (as the editor of the Tomahawk remarked in his obituary notice), that the energy of life may be kept on after the grave, but not begun " And he who flagged not in the earthly strife, From strength to strength advancing only he, His soul well knit, and all his battles won, Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life." Nor must I forget the Tomahawk, for the Tomahawk was a power in Balmawhapple, and the Tomahawk did not love the Philistines. The Tomahawk cost a penny, and was published on Saturday, on Saturday as a rule, though, if the editor happened to be " other- wise engaged," it sometimes failed to appear till the middle of the following week. MARK'S RETURN. 23 Pat Salamander, the editor of Balmawhapple's sole literary organ, had seen a good deal of Mark in the early years when the young barrister was still writing leading articles for the daily papers, and Mark always retained a kindly remembrance of the frank and friendly intercourse of that rather skittish Bohemia. Pat had drifted about the world a good deal, and it was probably owing to Mark's good offices that he had finally settled down in the editorial sanctum of the Balmawhapple Tomahawk, and become our censor morum. Except Pat, the Tomahawk had no regular staff, and it trusted for its occasional diversions De omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis mainly to amateurs. It was in the Poet's Corner of the Tomahawk that Dobbs Dante Gabriel Dobbs, of whom we shall hear anon first wooed his modest muse. Thus though the forces of the Philistines were formidable, the chosen people in Balmawhapple were able to hold their own, especially when reinforced by their allies from St Abb's. Of the Homeric battle which was waged by the contending factions over Hector's body we shall hear anon. But, as becomes an orderly and veracious chronicler, I am going to begin at the beginning, and the stories that in the meantime I purpose to relate will take us a long way back to primitive Balmawhapple and Holdfasts of historic record. By easy gradations stepping nimbly but cautiously from century to century, and leaving behind us as we move the evil figures of an ugly past, 24 MARK'S RETURN. " Waving each a bloody sword, For the service of their Lord ! " we shall by-and-by return to the men and women who meet us in the street, and whose lives are bound up with our own. I choose instinctively a humble arena. History transacts itself on the grand scale in Courts and Camps ; but in every nook and corner of the land, age after age, men and women were living their own more or less uneventful lives, while they listened to the echoes from the great world outside. Mark and I tried hard to live that old Balmawhapple life over again ; it was our favourite occupation for many years (the audience growing as the years wore on) the Table-Talk of many a Winter Night. In this book that TABLE -TALK is reproduced in forms for which I am solely responsible. But in each case behind the literary presentation there is a solid basis of fact ; I have taken the narrative from records which are still accessible, and easily to be deciphered by experts. If in the earlier pages I have mainly followed the fortunes of a single house, it is because in the Hold- fast charter - chest the documents from which I borrow, "convey, the wise it call," are for the most part lodged. II. QUEEN MARY'S HOLDFAST. 'THHE Holdfast charter-chest is one of the institu- *- tions of Balmawhapple. When it was sent in to our office on the occasion of a famous lawsuit, the whole community turned out to inspect this masterpiece of a medieval artist. The fineness and intricacy of the decorative ironwork on lock and hinge and handle are only rivalled by the dexterous adjust- ment of the crowd of figures on the panels of carven oak. The incidents represented on the worm-eaten panels are taken from the old miracle - plays and moralities which served to amuse and edify the people in what Charles Kingsley has called "the milky youth of this great English land," Joseph of Arimathea, and the long -bearded Eastern sages, and the devil himself with horns and tail and cloven hoof. Rude snatches of verse in archaic characters are deftly inserted here and there, to aid the unlearned spectator in following the action of the play. A compendious history of the world from the time when Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden " stabunt nudi, 26 QUEEN MARY'S HOLDFAST. et non verecundabuntur " ! To Mark and myself, when boys, the exterior of the Holdfast charter-chest was as good as a story-book, and later on we found that when the lid was unlocked the contents were by no means so dry and musty as they looked. Even in the mere title-deeds the name of some long- forgotten Muriel, or Eufame, or Alyne, or Agatha, or Alicia, or Veronica, or Clare, or Ursula, came like a flash of light out of the past. There were, moreover, records of the fifteenth and sixteenth century Holdfasts, written by themselves in quaint little note-books of the time, which in spite of a certain grandiose gravity and stately deliberation were eagerly perused by us. We knew that the Holdfasts could wield their swords ; it now appeared that more than one of the house had been as clever with the pen. But the story we liked best was the story of a girl who had lived as maiden and wife and mother through the wild times that followed the flight of Mary, who had been taken as a child to hear Knox preach in the great church in the High Street, and who in extreme old age heard in her northern home of that tragedy on the scaffold at Whitehall which revived the memory of the still more cruel tragedy at Fother- inghay. I had a copy made once, and Mark says that I may use it if I like. This is the story of Lilias Maitland and Gilbert Holdfast, as written out by Amias his brother, with some such slight modern- ising of archaic phrases and obsolete modes of speech as will make it intelligible to the reader of to-day. QUEEN MARY'S HOLDFAST. 27 WE were twins Gilbert and I born in the year of our Lord 1560. We had lived together in the old house that our grandfather had built about the time of Flodden ever since we could remember. Ravenscleuch it was called (more commonly " The Cleuch " for brevity), a simple square tower, with narrow slits which served for windows in the upper flats, and a strong oaken door below. Such towers are common all over Scotland ; they are the homes of the gentry and lesser barons ; and though not to be compared with Lething- ton or Craigmillar, or the vast castle that the Chancellor is building beside the Water of Lauder, they are fairly com- fortable ; ours is at least, especially in the summer-time, when we take the air on the flat roof, and look across the estuary of the Whapple to the hunting-lodge which belongs to the king himself, and the rough moorland park where, as the twilight falls, the bittern booms and the stags bellow. Ravenscleuch stands high, and the view from the leads embraces all the country round about. Far away to the east there is the sea itself; then the white line of breakers along the bar ; then the landlocked bay, noisy with screaming terns and black with water-fowl ; then the sandhills clothed with yellow bent on either side of the estuary, which gradu- ally narrows until it reaches the reef of rock on which the Cleuch is built; then the great park on the farther shore, golden in spring with the broom, purple in autumn with the heather, the turrets of the lodge half hidden by the group of giant firs which shelter it from the sea ; then, on our side of the stream, dotted over the level carse, some half-dozen weather-beaten keeps, with battlements and pepper-boxes like our own ; then right under our feet the huts of a few poverty-stricken fishermen clustered round the ruins of the abbey, which had been swept by " the fiery besom " a month or two before we were born. The abbey of Balmawhapple had been famous in its day ; but it was among the first that the iconoclasts wrecked ; and the community which it had 28 QUEEN MARY'S HOLDFAST. sheltered for five hundred years had been broken up, and driven into a world with which they were unfamiliar. The kirk of the Reformation was a low barn-like building, which, with the manse, stood in what had once been the orchard of the monastery. But the fertile fields which the monks had industriously tilled had been allowed to run to waste, and the whole monastic domain was in the meantime little better than a wilderness. This vast pile of ruin was our favourite play- ground when boys. It had a fascination for us which we did not try to explain, though we rather avoided it after dusk, when the owls began to hoot, and the shadows cast by the moon took bodily shape, and moved in ghostly procession along the ruined aisle. It was here that the old lords of the district had been buried Holdfasts, Maitlands, and Grays ; but the carven slabs, on which knight and lady rested, had been cracked and blackened by the action of the fire, and epitaphs in stately Latin were no longer decipherable. Our nearest neighbours (with the exception of the Reverend Peter Gibson, who occupied the manse) were the Maitlands of that Ilk, who lived at Balmain, a mile or so up the river. Still farther inland, at the Cadger's Pot, where the salt water ceases to mingle with the fresh, there is Greystone a seat of the Master of Gray, as the eldest son of the peer of that name is called among us, according to our Scottish usage. There was a bridge across the Whapple within a few hundred yards of Greystone, a venerable bridge, which had been built by the first James, when one of his train, crossing at the ford to Earlshall the royal hunting-lodge had been carried away by the flooded water and drowned. There were only the two of us, Gilbert and Amias Hold- fast. Our mother died when we were infants ; she had been the close friend of the Dowager-Queen, Marie of Lorraine, who had been loath to part with her favourite maid to Sir Martin Holdfast ; for our father, she knew, had been infected with the heresies of his namesake, and it seemed probable, should civil war break out, that he would cast in his lot with " the congregation of Jesus Christ," as the followers of Knox QUEEN MARY'S HOLDFAST. 29 and the Lord James were pleased to call themselves. But his wife, as Knox sorrowfully complained, was more dear to him than his religion ; and when the fierce band of icono- clasts swept down upon Edinburgh, he retired to the Cleuch, and declined to take any active part in the conflict with the dying queen. Marie of Lorraine breathed her last on the day that we were born ; and from the double shock our mother never recovered. There was a vein of fanatical intemperance in our father's character; so long as he was allied with Knox he was persuaded that he belonged to the elect ; and the deep gloom that settled upon him when his young wife had bidden him a tender, tearful farewell, was due in no small measure to the conviction that, for mere carnal gratification, he had forfeited his spiritual birthright. He lived for eight or ten years; but the shadows never lifted. Prayer and penance were in vain ; night and day he was assailed by visionary fiends who would not relent ; and even when Knox solemnly assured him that his sin had been blotted out, and that his name was registered in the book of life, he refused to be comforted. I cannot tell how he had come to persuade himself that he was guilty of the sin against the Holy Ghost ; but the vision of a jealous God, who hated the creatures He had made with more than mortal bitterness, haunted him to the end. The gloom that had settled upon the Cleuch during my father's widowhood was not dispelled by his death. The two bewildered little fellows who crept noiselessly about the darkened rooms until the neighbours came and bore the black coffin to the niche in the abbey vault, which had been hastily prepared for its reception, could hardly have been left more lonely and friendless had they been gipsy-born. There was the clergyman, to be sure the Reverend Peter Gibson who paid us an occasional visit ; but he was tedious and pedantic, and his clumsy efforts at cheerfulness rather added to our depression. Gilbert, who was my senior by an hour, and consequently entitled to all the privileges of primogeni- ture, would abruptly disappear whenever he heard the strident voice on the stair ; and but for an uneasy conviction on my 30 QUEEN MARY'S HOLDFAST. part that the good man really wished us well, I would have followed the example that was set me. An hour afterwards I would find Gilbert on the roof, gazing wistfully and dreamily into space. For Gilbert was a dreamer, and in these visionary hours, when he escaped from the harsh environment of our ordinary life into an ideal kingdom, he was comparatively content. I was too matter-of-fact to follow him ; and left behind, could only sit down by the dusty roadside and cry myself to sleep. There were compensations, however. Meg our ancient nurse, and Mathy our pompous major-domo, never thought of troub- ling Gilbert with the financial anxieties of the household ; I was their confidant, and I was flattered by the preference. We were taught to ride and fish and shoot by the keeper ; and our education otherwise was not entirely neglected. A lean and lanky divinity student from the College of St Mary's was engaged by Mr Gibson to introduce us to the Etymologic of Lilius and Hunter's Nomenclatura ; and though he was shy and nervous, and hardly capable of controlling a couple of able-bodied lads, who were growing out of their jackets, we made fair progress in the " humanities." Then there was a store of curious old poems and romances on a shelf in the great hall; Lancilot de Laik, printed at Rouen in 1488, as well as the Morte