Chapter VII: Book II: According to Barrie (3)

No one would guess, who had only seen Mrs. James with Grandma, how much the little woman knows, or how nicely she can talk, and I blurted this thought out, before I stopped to reflect that it might sound rude. An hour passed like five minutes in listening to her story of the Lord Chancellor's wedding at Gretna, and Lord Westmorland's shooting of Banker Child's horse, to save his young bride from capture by her father; the tale of Robert Burns almost inveigled into marriage by a pretty girl he met on the road; and best of all the exciting history of the brave lass of Langholm, who ran through brooks and bushes to snatch her lover at the last minute from a rival he was marrying in the Blacksmith's Shop. This last anecdote had been "the doctor's" favourite. One chapter of his history was devoted entirely to the Old Glasgow Road. In it he gave three whole pages to the young man's bet and the two lassies who were ready to help him win it. "The doctor was romantic at heart," explained Mrs. James, sighing, and pausing with an ice-cold chocolate éclair in her hand. "All romance appealed to his imagination, and in his notes he gave much space to Gretna Green, from the day of Paisley, the first priest, up to the present time, when couples marry in the Blacksmith's Shop in fun and not in fear. But," she went on, anxious to impress the great Somerled, "Doctor James gave space in plenty to the serious history of the Road: the Raider episodes; the journey of Queen Mary; the march of Prince Charlie's Highlanders in charge of Cumberland's soldiers, on their way to prison at Carlisle; the tramping of many penniless Scottish geniuses seeking their fortune in London town; the visits of famous men like Scott and Dickens, and Edward Irving the preacher, who made his bride get down from her carriage on the bridge, and walk on foot into her adopted country, England."

Mrs. James always grows excited when she talks about the doctor and his unfinished history of Scotland; and though she'd known Sir S. only a day and a half, she was mesmerized into telling him secrets Grandma couldn't have dragged from her with wild horses. She even showed him Doctor James's photograph, which, in a shut-up velvet case, she had put into the handbag Sir S. gave her. "Do _you_, an artist, with your great knowledge of human faces and the souls behind them, believe a man with those eyes and that forehead would take his own life to escape scandal?" she appealed to him. "Wouldn't it be more natural to disappear, trusting to his wife's faith, until he had made a new career somewhere and won back the honour of his name?"

Very gravely Sir S. examined the photograph, which she had painted in water colours, rather faded now; and I looked at it, though I've seen it before. Apparently he was sincerely interested in her story, and in the picture. But then he seems interested always, in a quiet way, in what people tell him, never interrupting or talking of himself and his affairs, as Grandma does if any one comes to see her. "You are right, Mrs. James," he said. "That man is a dreamer, but not a coward. He might do strange things, but never a contemptible one."

"Oh, what a judge of character!" she breathed ecstatically. "And how sympathetic! It's wonderful, in the busy, flattered life you must have led for many years, how you've kept your kind heart and generous thought for others. But it's your artistic temperament!"

The great Somerled laughed and looked embarrassed. "My enemies say that my 'artistic temperament' has been swamped long ago by my love of money-making and getting difficult things to turn my way. I think the enemies are probably right; but you and this princess would dig up any decent qualities a man might have left, no matter how deep they were buried under rubbish."

"How do we dig them up?" I wanted to know.

"By being children--both of you--in your different ways."

Then he gave Mrs. James back the faded photograph, with a few more compliments on the doctor's eyes and the shape of his forehead. It was time to be starting on, but the grateful dear would not accept his offer of help in clearing up. She sent me away with him down the road to gather a bunch of bluebells, azure as a handful of sky, to put into our hanging vase--my first Scotch bluebells. And as soon as we were well away, he began asking questions about Doctor James, which showed that he really cared. What was his first name? How old was he when he disappeared? And how long ago was that?

"His Christian name was Richard," said I. "It was seventeen years ago that he disappeared--or died. And he must have been twenty-nine then, because Heppie says he was too young for Mrs. James--only a year older than she--which would make him forty-six now."

"You mustn't give her away like that," Sir Somerled reproached me. "I should have guessed her seven or eight years younger."

"Ah, that's the massage and the skin food and neck exercises," said I, wisely. "She _will_ be pleased when I tell her what a success you think they are."

"She'll be much more pleased if you don't tell her you've mentioned them, and I strongly advise you not to. Do you happen to know whether Doctor James had a scar on the left temple?"

"Yes," I eagerly answered. "She's told me about it. That's why he turned the right side of his face to be photographed. But why? Did you ever come to Carlisle and see him before you sailed for America as a boy?"

"I came to Carlisle. I may have seen him," Sir S. replied. "But say nothing to Mrs. James about this conversation of ours. Some time, perhaps, I may tell you why. If not, it's not worth remembering. And now, I see she's got everything ready, and is waiting for us. So is Vedder. The car's had a good drink of petrol, and we can be off--for a sight of Carlyle's country. Will that bore you?" He looked at me almost anxiously, as if something depended on my answer.

"Bore me? Oh, no: I shall love to go there," I assured him.

"Why? What do you know of Carlyle?"

"Not much," I had to confess, "But there were three books of his my father had, which I've read. And there's a picture of him still in the library."

"Which books? What picture?"

"'The French Revolution,' and 'Hero Worship,' and 'Sartor Resartus,' It was that last one I read first. I took it off the shelf because it had such a queer name. I wanted to find out what it meant. Don't you always desperately want to find out what everything means? I do. But I suppose you know everything by now. Well, I began to read without being so very much interested. Then, suddenly, my mind seemed to wake up. It was a wonderful feeling, just as if I stood near to a man who was playing marvellous and startling music on the grandest organ ever made. And the man who played could sing too. He sang in a voice sometimes harsh and sometimes sweet. It seemed to me as I read the book that it was humorous and sad, tender and stern at the same time. And till the very end I was carried along on the wave of that organ music, which had in it always a thrill of the divine. I never found any other book in the library that made me feel exactly like that, except Shakespeare--and Grandma had all the Shakespeare volumes carted off to the garret after she came in one day when I was eleven, and found me reading 'Macbeth.' As for the picture of Carlyle, it shows him, sitting in a chair, with a look on his face of a sad man alone in a gray world."

"Whistler's portrait! You shall have all Carlyle's works and Shakespeare's for your own. I'll give them to you," said Sir Somerled, looking at me with an interested look, as if suddenly he liked me better than he had before.

"Oh, you _are_ good, and I should love to have them," I said. "But now there'll be my mother I shall have to ask permission of for everything. I must do just what she wants me to do, for I shall die if she doesn't love me."

"Yes. I'd forgotten," said he.

"I hadn't, for a minute," I answered. "But I suppose, as mother is a great actress, she loves Shakespeare and has all his works; and perhaps she has Carlyle, too, in her library."

"Perhaps," he echoed.

"Don't you like her?" I asked. "You always look odd, and speak in a short, snappy way when I talk of my mother."

"I like and admire her immensely," he answered, in that remote tone which tries to frighten me, and does almost--but not quite. "All the same, I don't think you'll find Carlyle in her library, so you'll have to let me give him to you. But meanwhile, you shall learn to understand him better by seeing the little village where he was born, and the house his father the stonemason built."

So we started off in the car, going back to the highway and along a road which perhaps would not have seemed extraordinary if it hadn't been made surpassingly beautiful by men who lit the path of history with a shining light. I had a gay, irresponsible feeling, sitting beside Sir S. on the springy front seat of the luxurious motor-car, as if I were a neat little parcel clearly addressed to my destination, and going there safely by registered post. By this time even Mrs. James had ceased to "bite her heart" when she saw another motor dashing toward us, or a man sauntering across the road and filling the whole horizon. The car is so singularly intelligent that you feel it is a friend, too kind-hearted and chivalrous a creature to let anything bad happen. Of course, about every ten minutes something _almost_ happens, but that is invariably the fault of other people's cars. You dash up to the mouth of a cross-road which you couldn't possibly have seen, because it is subtly disguised as a clump of trees or a flowery knoll; and you discover its true identity only because another motor--a blundering brute of a motor--bursts out at fifty miles an hour in front of your nose. If you'd reached that point an instant later, your own virtuous automobile and the wretch that isn't yours would certainly have telescoped, and you'd have been sitting in the nearest tree with your head in your lap. But already I begin to notice that you may pretty well count on reaching the danger point (produced by alien autos) at precisely the right instant, never the wrong one, and this gives you a beautiful confidence in your luck and your driver: although the real secret must lie in the acuteness of your guardian angel or patron saint. Vedder, who when young was a champion boxer, is very superstitious, and Mr. Somerled allows him a large gold medal of St. Christopher on the dashboard. St. Christopher, it seems, has undertaken the spiritual care of motor-cars, and as by this time he has millions under his guidance, his plans for keeping them out of each other's way must be as complicated as the traffic arrangements of a railway superintendent. When I contrasted the angelic behaviour of our car with the appalling perversity of other people's, Sir S. burst out laughing, and said that evidently I was born with the motor instinct: that he'd seen women who took days or weeks learning these great truths, whereas I came by them naturally. "It's remarkable what a lot of valuable knowledge can be picked up by an enterprising princess in a glass retort, when the dragon isn't looking!" said he.

"Princesses in glass retorts are perhaps forced to learn lessons tabooed by dragons," I replied to this; "so if I know things or have thought things that every other girl doesn't think or know, it's because they were forbidden fruit. They were my only fun."

"They've made you a splendid little 'pal,' if you know what that means," said he. "I'm not sure the glass-retort system hasn't some advantages for the bringing up of women. The proverb is that truth lies at the bottom of a well. I begin to think it may be looked for in glass retorts in the land of dragons."

"You mean that I'm truthful?" I asked.

"Yes. I'm inclined to believe, up to date, that you've remained as transparent as the glass of your late prison."

"What makes you think so?" I wanted to know.

"Observation--partly. And the way you talk to me."

"What way?"

"Well--that's a knotty question. I can hardly explain, but----"

"I wonder," I began to think out aloud, "whether you mean that I say what comes into my mind without being afraid you mayn't like it?"

"Er--um--perhaps that covers a good deal of the ground. But what put the idea into your head? Why should you be afraid of me?"

"I'm not. Only--I've thought that it would be more respectful if I were. You are so celebrated, you see. That's the first thing I heard about you--I mean, about your being such a famous artist. I heard you were rich too, but of course that didn't interest me so much."

"No? That proves the benefit of the glass-retort system."

"Why--how, please?"

"Because princesses who haven't been bottled up in them, but have lived in the lap of luxury--and in the laps of luxurious mothers--understand the value of money, and consider men famed for their millions worth a dozen who've wrapped themselves up in a few rags of some lesser kind of fame."

"You call being a great artist a lesser kind of fame?"

"I didn't once. But since I've got into the money-making habit, I've accepted the world's opinion."

"Pooh!" said I rudely. "I don't believe you have, because the first minute I saw you, I felt sure you were a _real_ man. That's why I just had to speak to you in the station, instead of one of the others. I knew--by instinct, I suppose, as you say I know about motors. Think of the glory of being able to _create_ beautiful things!"

"Think of being able to buy them! Jewels and castles and yachts, and all sorts of things that women love. Motor-cars for instance."

"You could buy motor-cars with money you earned by painting pictures, couldn't you?"

"Yes; but not castles or yachts: and not enough jewels to please princesses who haven't spent eighteen years in a glass retort."

"Well," I said, "I may be no judge, but I think jewels and castles would be a bother, and I should be seasick in yachts. Give me a man who brings beautiful things out of his soul, not out of his pockets. You're very nice now; but you must have been much nicer before you buried your talents under the shields and bracelets you told me about. Even I know what you mean by them--and what happened to Tarpeia."

"_Even_ you! I begin to think you were born knowing about a good many things besides motor-cars. And you are entirely right. I was much nicer before I began to collect the shields and bracelets."

"Can't you give a lot of them away, and do what I said--go back to the time before you bargained for them?"

"You don't understand how difficult it is to go back."

"But you are back--in Scotland."

"You're right. Now's my one chance to return to my youth and ideals. Bright little Princess, thank you for polishing up the dulled surface of my soul."

"It's only the surface that needs polishing," said I. "The inside part is shining, even when the outside looks dim. But I'm afraid you're making fun of me?"

"I was never more in earnest. I'm crossing more than one border with you to-day."

"Borders you like crossing?"

"Great heavens, yes!"

"I'm glad of that," said I, in a self-satisfied way, "for then you won't miss Mrs. West so much."

"Miss Mrs. West? Good Lord, I'd forgotten her!"

"That's very ungrateful and horrid of you, then," I scolded him, "because you and she were friends, and she knows how to be perfectly charming."

"Yes. She knows how."

"She knows just what to do and say."

"Yes. She's an agreeable--and experienced--woman."

"And if it hadn't been for me, she'd be sitting by you now."

"I have little doubt of that."

"And you would have been happy."

"I should have been contented. There's a big difference between contentment and happiness. You can't have learned it, yet."

"Oh, can't I! It's all the difference between--between--well, the difference between this borderland seen on a dark day and seen on a day of sunshine. It's the same landscape, but it doesn't look the same to the eyes or give the same feelings to the heart. The dark-day feelings would be calm and quietly pleasant; the sunshine feelings would be full of thrills and heartbeats--as to-day."

"By Jove, you've hit it!" he exclaimed as if to please me by agreeing. "Full of thrills and heartbeats--as to-day."

"Then you _do_ feel the romance of everything in this sunshine?" I asked, quick to drag a "yes" from him while he was in the mood.

"I should say I did. And I'm not ashamed, with you to back me up. But I've a sneaking idea I should have been ashamed of it with Mrs. West. And I shouldn't have felt the thrills, only a calm, peaceful pleasure, as in the gray days--contentment. I shouldn't have known what I was missing, perhaps. I should have respected myself for outgrowing my enthusiasms. But--in my best moments, Princess, I've pitied people more for not knowing what they miss in life than for missing the things."

"Yes," I answered, "because it's better to know there are beautiful things, and to want them in vain, than grub along without knowing of their existence. But all that's got nothing to do with Mrs. West."

"Perhaps not. Yet it has something to do with me. No need to bother about the connection."

"I won't bother about anything!" I laughed in my joy of life and of motoring, which seemed one and indivisible just then. "I'm wrapped up in the magic golden web that Sir Walter Scott and Burns have woven round every mile of this land across the border--_our_ land, yours and mine."

"So am I, caught in the web, lost in it--to my own surprise." He laughed as he drove, his eyes alert and young. "Burns, by the way, came to Ecclefechan, where we're arriving now. He had an uproarious time, and wrote verses to the Lass of Ecclefechan, which shows the place must have been a good deal livelier then than now. Or else, which is as likely, he had a faculty of squeezing the juice out of the driest, most unpromising fruit--the same faculty you have."

"Perhaps the fruit dried up later," I suggested. "Burns died soon after Carlyle was born, didn't he? And maybe people began to be primmer when they were forgetting his influence."

"No. Those of us Scots who were meant to be dour were always dour," Sir. S argued, "since the days of John Knox, and long before. It was partly climate--partly persecution. Both agreed with our constitutions. But look, here's the little house where one of the greatest geniuses who ever saw the light in Scotland first opened his eyes. I dare say he didn't get much light--but he spent most of his life in giving it to other people, out of his own gloom. Wouldn't Burns have been interested, passing that house (as he must have, in the 'uproarious time' at Ecclefechan), if his prophetic soul had said, 'Here, in this little dwelling as humble as your own birthplace, will be born a man as great as you--and one of your keenest critics?'"

I didn't answer, because no answer was needed, and because we were both gazing hard at a small, whitewashed, double house made into one by an archway joining the two parts together. Coming from Gretna Green it was on our left in the midst of a gray and white village which would have looked commonplace if it had not been framed by an immense sky. It was as if this vast blue crystal case had been set down over Carlyle's birthplace to protect and mark it out from other places. There was the narrow, high-banked brook--"the gentle Kuhbach kindly gushing by" (as Sir S. quoted)--which had made music in Carlyle's childish ears, to echo through them all his life. Perhaps he paddled in the brook on hot summer days, just as little boys were paddling when our Gray Dragon suddenly broke the respectable silence of Ecclefechan; and I know that he must have seen stormy sun-rises and fiery sunsets reflected in it as in a mirror, just as the Lady of Shalott saw all the things that really mattered passing in her looking-glass.

It is the kind of village, and the gray or whitewashed houses with their red door-sills are the kind of houses, where you would say, rushing through in a motor, "Nothing can possibly happen." Yet Carlyle happened; and he was an event for the whole world, which now makes pilgrimages to his birthplace. And I think that when his memory travelled back to Ecclefechan, he would not have changed it for a garden of palaces and flowers and fountains. Even the wee bairns playing in the road where Carlyle played, knew why we stopped our car. They pointed out the Carlyle house, gazing at us in solemn pity because we were poor tourist-bodies, who couldna bide the rest of our lives in the best village in a' the wurlld.

For my part, I pitied them, because their feet were bare, whereas the poorest children in my native Carlisle have wonderfully nice shoes, bound in brass. But all the Scot--and perhaps the crofter--rose in Sir S. when I mourned over the little dusty feet. "Do you think they go barefoot because they've no shoes?" he asked. "You're wrong. You don't know your own country-folk yet. They've as good shoes as those Carlisle kids, and better, maybe. It's because they don't like the feel of the shoes when they play, and they're saving them for Sundays. I did the same myself. Not a pair of shoes did I have on my feet, except on the Sabbath day, till I was turned eleven."

It seemed to me that suddenly he had quite a Scotch burr in his voice, and I did like him for it!

An apple-cheeked old body opened the door. On it was a brass plate which would have told us, if we hadn't known already, that in this house Thomas Carlyle was born. Remembering what he grew to be and to mean in the big world, the three tiny rooms and the few simple relics were a thousand times more pathetic than if we'd been led through apartment after apartment of a palace, seeing christening cups and things under glass cases. They did not seem sad to me, only a little dour in a wholesome way, as porridge is dour compared to plum-cake. But the cemetery which we went to after we had seen the house made me want to cry. I didn't like to think that, coming back here to sleep after all those many years, Carlyle had not his wife to rest beside him. Lying with his ain folk behind grim iron railings couldn't have consoled him for her absence. This is the only graveyard I ever saw except the one where my father is buried; and somehow, it doesn't seem respectful to the dead to go and criticise their graves, unless you are their friends, bringing them flowers--pansies for thoughts and rosemary for remembrance. It's like walking into people's houses and opening their doors to look at them in bed when they're asleep, and can't resent your intrusion, though they would hate it if they knew. I said this to Sir S., and he partly agreed with me on principle; but he warned me that there are cemeteries I must visit in Scotland unless I want to miss the last volumes of several interesting human documents. I don't know exactly what a human document is; still, I suppose I shall go to the graveyards for the sake of finding out what he means.

He spoke as if I were likely to go to these places with him, and said that he would enjoy showing me Carlyle's house in Chelsea, which is "more full of the man's heart and soul than Ecclefechan is." But, of course, he said this without stopping to think. He will go back to America and forget the forlorn little princess he happened to rescue from a neighbouring dragon. Yet never mind, I shan't be forlorn after this! I shall have my mother, and mothers are more important to princesses than the most glittering knights. I shall, of course, travel about with her wherever she goes, so I can never be lonely or sad. I ought to be even more impatient than I am for the day to come when she is due in Edinburgh, and I can surprise her there: but I suppose, having lived without her so long, it is difficult to realize that I'm actually to see her at last. However, I think of her every minute--or perhaps every other minute; and I haven't fully realized until to-day how much there is for which I have to thank her: the gayety and hopefulness she must have kept in her heart, and handed down to me. Without gayety and hopefulness neither of us would have dared or cared to run away from Hillard House.

I think, far-fetched as it seems, it was seeing Carlyle's birthplace, and feeling the influence of his parents upon him, which made me understand. Great genius as he was, I wonder if he might not have been even greater if his mother or father had taught him that it was right to be happy and wrong to be sad? Sir S. says that Jenny his wife could have taught him all that, if he had chosen to learn; but he was grown up then, and so it was too late. The sunshine must be in your blood when you are a child, and then no shadows can ever quite darken the gold--or at least, that is the thought which has come into my mind to-day.

It was the right thing to turn southward off the Glasgow highway after Ecclefechan, to go to Annan and see the place where Carlyle got his schooling. The Gray Dragon, travelling slowly (for it, or "her," as Sir S. and Vedder always say), came to the end of the journey in a few minutes; but when Carlyle walked along that pleasant shadowy road, carrying his school books, he must have had plenty of time for day-dreams. Now and then he could have seen the Solway gleaming, and I can imagine how the beautiful, winding river must have given that grave, wise boy thoughts of the great river of life, running to and from eternity. We passed close to Hoddam Hill, where--Sir S. and Mrs. James told me--the Carlyle family lived for a while when Thomas was grown up, he translating German romances, and his brother working on the farm.

At Annan, looking at the statue of Carlyle's friend, Edward Irving, in the broad High Street, we came back to the subject of Doctor James, and I heard for the first time the real truth at the bottom of the bad gossip.

We had got down from the car to look at the statue, and read what it said on the pedestal. We were not thinking at first about the doctor, but only of Edward Irving, and Sir S. was saying to Mrs. James how Annan was only one of many towns where statues are put up to the memory of men once misunderstood and cruelly persecuted in the very place where they are afterward honoured. It seems that Edward Irving (who loved Mrs. Carlyle when she was Jenny Welsh) had to come back to his native town to be tried for heresy by the presbytery, after a brilliant career in London as a fashionable preacher and founder of a new faith. All the theologians of Scotland and crowds of other people (Sir S. says all true Scots are theologians at heart) came pouring into Annan by coach and chaise on the great day of the trial; and in spite of Irving's passionate appeal, he was found guilty by a unanimous vote.

Talking of the trial, and of the preacher's death the next year, took Mrs. James's mind to the subject which is never farther away than at the back of her head. She found a likeness between Edward Irving's fate and her husband's. "Richard was born in Carlisle and loved the place, but they believed evil of him and persecuted him," she said. "Some day he will come back and make Carlisle proud of her son. That's what I expect. That's what I live for." And she gazed up at the statue of Irving the preacher with quite the look of a prophetess in her eyes.

I was afraid that Sir S. would think her mad; but he seemed interested, as before, and asked if she had in her mind any particular kind of success her husband might be working to obtain. Was there something, apart from his profession, and the unfinished volume of history, which had occupied the thoughts of Doctor James in old days?

The little woman answered this question almost reluctantly, and I soon guessed why. There was a serum which the doctor had been trying to perfect. It was to be used instead of chloroform or ether, for people with weak hearts, or when for other reasons anaesthetics were dangerous. A patient in peril of death had begged Doctor James to try it upon him. The doctor had consented. The patient had died, and though it was not really because of the serum, but because the man couldn't possibly have lived in any case, the doctor's enemies had blamed him. "That was what broke his heart," Mrs. James explained, still staring at the statue with wide-open eyes, to keep the tears from falling. "That is why he died to the world which misjudged him."

"And do you think, if he can perfect this serum, he will come back?" asked Sir Somerled.

"_When_, not 'if.' But I always knew it would take a long time, because unless some rich person or people had faith and helped him, he would have to get together a good deal of money for a laboratory before he could make a great success or a great name. And he went away almost without a penny."

"I see," said Sir S., thoughtfully. "Well, such faith as yours is enough to inspire a man with courage to push the stone of Sisyphus to the top of the hill. And it deserves a high reward. I hope the reward may come, and that I may see the day. Now, we must go on, for this afternoon won't last as long as I could wish."

He helped Mrs. James to her place with extra kindness, almost tenderness, tucking behind her back the gray silk-covered air-cushion which she says makes her feel she is leaning against a nice pudding.

Neither of us had asked Sir S. what we were to see next, for we trusted him to choose; but when we were ready to leave Annan and go back to the high road, he said that the thought of Galloway was haunting him. "We can spin on to Glasgow by way of Moffat and see a lot of interesting places; or we can turn west from Carlyle country, for a run through Crockett country," he explained. "Which, shall it be?"

I was ashamed to confess that I didn't know why he called Galloway "Crockett country"; but Mrs. James saw my sheepish look, and excused me. "The child has had no novels to read later than Scott."

"Crockett has done for Galloway what Scott did for Tweedside," said Sir S. "It's his country. He has made it live. When I give this girl the promised present of Carlyle and Shakespeare, I must add Crockett. That is, as she reminded me"--and he smiled--"if Mrs. Ballantree MacDonald allows Ian of that ilk to lay gifts at her daughter's feet."

"Oh, she'll permit Barrie to accept books," said Mrs. James, with her pretty primness. "How the child will love the 'Raiders,' and the 'Men of the Moss Hags.' Yes, certainly she ought to see 'gray Galloway.'"

"Galloway be it, then," said Sir S., looking pleased. "But it won't be gray at this time of year. It will be purple and gold and emerald, and silvered with rivers running between flowery banks. And it will smell sweet as a Scotsman's paradise, with bog myrtle and peat."

"I too have often wanted to see Galloway," said Mrs. James, "even before I read the Crockett books; for the doctor devoted a particularly interesting chapter to its history. I remember well, the ancient name was most romantic: Gallgaidhel, for the country of the stranger Gaels. That was the heading he gave his chapter, and I fear I did not know what 'stranger Gaels' meant until I read it. The Celtic Gaels who lived there used to be called Atecott Picts; and though they were very independent and wild, and the Romans didn't govern them long, they accepted the Northumbrians as their overlords--oh, it must have been in the seventh century, I think. And two hundred years later they made common cause with the Vikings: so the other Gaels, who would have nothing to do with the foreigners, scornfully named the men of Galloway 'stranger Gaels.'"

"It was just jealousy, then!" said I. "Because the people of Galloway were so broad-minded and hospitable, and ahead of their times. It's the right country for strangers to visit first----"

"But we're not strangers," Sir S. cut me short. "You and I, Barrie, are coming into our own. To-night for the first time you'll sleep in your ain countree, under the 'heather moon.'"

"It ought to be a wonderful place, for our first night of the heather moon," I said, half shutting my eyes--"a mysterious, beautiful, _lucky_ place, to remember always. What shall it be? Have you decided on what is appropriate?"

"I'd thought of Dumfries," he said. "But it doesn't answer that description, and though it's in Galloway, it concerns Burns and is out of Crockett land. Still----"

"Sweetheart Abbey!" Mrs. James exclaimed rapturously. "It should be at Sweetheart Abbey that Barrie dreams her first Scottish dreams."

The knight laughed rather bitterly for some reason. "Are Scottish dreams different from other dreams?"

"Perhaps," said Mrs. James, "they are the dreams that come true."

VI

It is days later, it seems a long time ago that I wrote of our plan to spend the first night in Scotland at Sweetheart Abbey--a long time since the night itself; for I have lived more in these few days than in all my life before.

Soon we are to reach Edinburgh. Monday is the day when my mother will begin acting there in her new play. I shall see her. It is to be the Great Day of all, the day to which all the others have been leading up, and I ought to be perfectly happy. So I am! Still, there's one little heavy spot in my heart. All the yeast of happiness won't make it light. The beginning of the new means the end of the old. The trip will be over--for me; though the Knight and the Gray Dragon will go on and have hundreds of adventures without me. They will be my knight and my dragon no longer. Perhaps I shall never see them again.

Before our days together slip away into the background of my mind (it seems as if they never could!) I want to write down things about them to keep and read when I am _old_.

First of all, there was Ruthwell Cross.

We went there from Annan; and as we flew along in the car over a good white road, we could see across widening waters the mountains of the English Lake country floating like a mirage along the southern sky, Skiddaw with its twin peaks higher and bluer than the rest. How I love the names of the Cumberland places and mountains! I made Sir S. say Helvellyn and Blencathra and Glaramara over very slowly, just for the music in my ears. And when his voice says a thing it sounds particularly well. I like to hear it roll out such a word as Northumberland, for instance. The way he says it makes you think of thunder on great moorlands, or a rush of wild Scotsmen over the border. But the Celtic names he speaks most lovingly, most softly, so that they ring on your ear for a long time after they are spoken, like an echo of fairy bells.

I did not mean to write all this about him and his voice when I began. There is so much else to say. Yet, somehow, I keep running back to him in my thoughts, especially now the trip is nearly over. And while I still cling to the subject, I have found out that he can sing as well as paint. But the singing belongs to Sweetheart Abbey; and Ruthwell Cross came before.

Mrs. James and Sir S. excited my interest in Galloway by telling me bits from the "Raiders," then stopping in exciting places to talk of something else. And somehow Galloway does seem a country where almost anything might happen--big, sensational, historic things. There was nothing gray to see except glimpses of the Solway, where the sea poured in its resistless tide; and that was the gray of polished silver. I had an impression of high hills, blunt in shape yet strangely dignified, and wide-spreading moors which sent out exquisite smells like lovely unseen messengers to meet us, as the car seemed to break through crystal walls of wind. Here and there were piles of pansy-brown peat, ready for burning. Children with heads wrapped in scarlet flame ran out of cottages to stare at us. Sir S. actually admired their red hair. He exclaimed suddenly, "By Jove, it's worth crossing the ocean to see that glorious stuff again! It's the hair of Circe." I don't know when anything has made me feel so much like a kitten that purrs over a dish of cream. For you know the hair he loved was _just_ my colour, not a bit less scarlet. What would Grandma say?

It rained once--sharp rain like thin daggers of glass stabbing our faces as the car dashed through--and the wet road looked like a shining silver ribbon flung down anyhow on purple velvet. The purple velvet was heather, and I never saw any before we started on our trip, except a little sad, tame heather in the garden of Hillard House--heather moulting like a bird in a cage, with all the spirit of the moors gone out of it. But this Galloway heather was real heather, the heather of poetry; and I knew that by and by I was going to see the heather moon rise over it. The very thought brought a thrill--and I was glad, as I had it, that Mrs. West was somewhere else in her own car. She does so damp you, somehow, in your high moments, and make you feel too young for anybody to care for your crude little thrills or take them seriously.

When the rain stopped, it left a thin white mist floating over the heather, until the sun broke out and the deep purple was lit to crimson, like a running fire.

I'm not quite sure if all this happened before Ruthwell Church (called Rivvel by the people near), but in my memory it is part of the same picture, of that first day in Galloway.

I know we skimmed through a little place called Cummer-trees, and then Sir S. slowed down to show us, he said, one of the "sights of the world." He had never seen it himself, but he knew all about it, and even Mrs. James knew a little. It is a great advantage to a simple woman to have had a clever husband, and feel obliged, to live up to him.

We had come not so much for the church as for a wonderful stone cross which it contains, as a jewel-box contains treasure of pearls and diamonds. This cross is worth countless numbers of both; and it has a history as intricate as its own strange carvings.

In the manse they gave Sir S. the key of the small old church behind a high wall with steps up and down: and once inside he led us straight to the north end, where, in a side aisle, we saw a great shape rise. We must have known it to be a marvel, even if we had heard nothing beforehand.

The cross used to stand, not in the church, but out in the open long before the church was built, and it towered eighteen feet tall against the sky. There it lived year after year, generation after generation, and nobody knew what its carved birds and beasts and hieroglyphic inscriptions meant. Nobody cared much, until a gloomy set of men in a General Assembly, when Charles I was King of England, threw it down and broke it up, because it was an idolatrous emblem. Luckily, some wise person hid all the pieces in the church; but after a while another person not so wise threw them out into the backyard. There they stayed until a Doctor Duncan thought he would have the cross put up in his manse garden: and some great Norwegian scholars, to whom he sent copies of the writings, grew very excited, and contradicted each other about them in 1802. But no one knew what the letters really meant till the eldest son of the famous actor John Kemble came to the neighbourhood for a holiday. He was a learned authority on Anglo-Saxon times, and he discovered that the writing was really Early English, the very earliest of all, the rudiments of the language which--as Sir S. expressed it--"Chaucer helped to form and Shakespeare perfected"; because they had to _make_ their words, as well as group them together--which is all that lazy authors have to do nowadays. The quaint carvings relate to the life of Christ and saints, and they are described in Latin from the Vulgate; but it was the runic inscriptions which John Mitchell Kemble puzzled out--a kind of rhymed soliloquy the cross itself was supposed to speak; and afterward he found the whole thing in an Anglo-Saxon MS. of the seventh or eighth century, far away from Scotland, in a library at Vercelli, near Milan. But it was written by the Northumbrian bard Caedmon, in a poem called "The Dream of the Holy Rood."

No wonder Sir S. wished to see Ruthwell Cross. There's nothing else of the kind, he thinks, so splendid anywhere.

Even then my first wonderful day in Scotland wasn't over, for we had time to see Caerlaverock Castle, which, according to Sir S., is another of the best things on earth. I suppose, in old days, when the world was small because it was difficult to travel great distances, it didn't seem odd to find magnificent runic crosses, and castles, and historic blacksmiths' shops, and houses of geniuses all standing cheek by jowl within a step of each other. They had to be like that, or nobody from the next county would ever have seen them: but now, especially to a person who has seen nothing except in dreams, it is startling, almost incredible.

Caerlaverock, Mrs. James said, was probably Scott's Ellangowan in "Guy Mannering"; so I shall read "Guy Mannering" as soon as I settle down to live with my mother. We couldn't help getting a little mixed up with Scott even here, at the gate of the Crockett country; and there were traces of Burns too, because of our being near already to Dumfries, where he lived for years and finally died. But the idea Sir S. had set his heart upon was for us to come back to Dumfries after we had seen Galloway and had run up to Burns's birthplace at Ayr. It would make each part of the trip more "concrete," he said.

Whether or no the stronghold of the Maxwells was Ellangowan, it was in any case the key to southwest Scotland, and in looking at the place it is easy to understand why. A great red-gold Key it was when we saw it, red-gold in the western sunlight in a hollow near the river; such red and gold colour as the old sandstone had, in contrast with the green of lichen and green of waving grass, I wouldn't have believed in, if I'd seen it in a picture. I should have said, "The artist who painted that ruined castle put on the colours he would like to see, not those he did see." But I should have misjudged him, because the colours were real.

Once there was a double moat all round the vast, triangular castle, and still there's water in one of them. You would have thought the Maxwell ladies had thrown their rubies and diamonds into it one wild day when they were escaping from enemies, and that the jewels had lain ever since at the bottom of the moat unnoticed, though the sunlight found out and treacherously tried to tell the secret. Think of Ptolemy writing about Caerlaverock, and calling it Carbantorigun! I'm glad we haven't to call it that now, or I should always have to say _it_--as one goes on saying "you" to a person whose name one hasn't caught.

Even if Caerlaverock were in hideous surroundings, it would be magnificent: but the river Solway is its silver foreground, and Lochar Moss is its mysterious background; so it is perfect in beauty as in strength, and if only no such hateful things as cannons had been invented, it would not now be a ruin. Although it lies so low, it was built to resist everything but gunpowder: for how could the Maxwells dream that all their beautiful arrangements for pouring down molten lead and boiling oil would be useless against a new foe?

Edward I took the castle in 1300, but Bruce got it back thirteen years later; and there was much fighting and tossing back of the Key from one hand to the other even before the great siege when the Earl of Essex punished Lord Herries for defending Queen Mary. Still, the walls stood bravely, and after the Essex affair they were made stronger than ever--so strong and so splendid it must have seemed as if Caerlaverock need never capitulate again to any enemy. But no sooner had the Maxwells finished a lovely new façade, the best they'd ever had, with carved window and door caps of the latest fashion, than Colonel Home came along with his grim Covenanters and blew up everything with his horrid cannons. I can't help disliking him, for the Maxwells seem to have been the most fascinating people. One Lord Maxwell of the seventeenth century, who was Roman Catholic when it wasn't safe to be Roman Catholic, used to disguise himself as a beggar, and play the fiddle in the market-place of Dumfries as a signal to tell the faithful of his own religion where and when they might come to Mass. They understood according to certain tunes agreed upon, which was easy, as they had only three meeting-places. A nice old man in the castle told us these stories and showed us the exquisite courtyard where Burns came one day when he was seventeen and cut on a stone in the wall the initials R. B. in a triangle, like a masonic sign, which suggests the wedge shape of the castle.

Sir S. knew all about this carving, and said that Americans had offered two thousand pounds for the stone. But the Duchess of Norfolk, who is mistress of Caerlaverock in her own right, turned up her nose, metaphorically speaking, at the offer. "I bid ye fair:" is the motto that goes with the crest over the huge gateway between two towers, and the rumour is that the Americans, in bidding for the stone of the initials, quoted this motto; but their aptness did them no good. In one of those towers Murdoch, the blind Duke of Albany, was imprisoned for seven years by James I before he was executed at Stirling; and they say that in the green hollow where the great red ruin glows he can be seen walking in the moonlight on the anniversary of his beheading.

One of my favourite stories in history is about Lord Nithsdale and his brave, clever wife who saved him on the eve of his execution by dressing him in her clothes and letting him walk calmly out of the Tower of London in her place. Think of being able to do such a thing for a man you loved! He was one of the Lords Nithsdale who came from Caerlaverock; and not far away, at Terregles House, is a portrait of that Countess of Nithsdale, with the cloak which her husband wore when he escaped. They have a Prayer Book, too, of Queen Mary's in that house, for she gave it to Lord Herries, who sheltered her in her flight after the battle at Langside, eighty miles away. But we didn't see these things. It was the old man at the castle who told us of them, because they are still in the keeping of the Maxwell family, of which he is very proud.

We hurried quickly through Dumfries, not to see or think of the Burns associations there until we should come back; but at Lincluden Abbey, close by, we were forced to think of him--although, as far as our trip was concerned, he wasn't born. At Lincluden, where he loved to come, walking out from Dumfries (as he must have walked to Caerlaverock to cut his initials) he saw the Vision. And Lincluden is so sweet a place that my thoughts of it, mingling very humbly with the great poet's thoughts, will lie together in my memory as pressed flowers lie between the pages of a book.

The road which leads from Dumfries to Lincluden seems like a quiet prelude to a lovely burst of music, so gentle and pretty it is. Then suddenly you come to the promontory stitched on to the mainland with great silver stitches of rivers, the Cluden and the Nith; and there are old earthworks, fallen into ruin, which guard the Abbey as the skeletons of watch-dogs might lie guarding a dead master. There's a mound, too, by the side of the ruined church, and it is called a Mote, which means something desperately interesting and historic, and there's a Peel-tower in ruin. Indeed, all is in ruin at Lincluden Abbey; but that makes it the sweeter and sadder. And as we came, the red of the crumbling sandstone burned in the fire of sunset like a funeral pyre heaped with roses. The melancholy, crowding trees and the delicate groups of little bushes were like mourners coming with their children to look on at the great burning.

We went into the church to see the tomb of Margaret Countess of Douglas, who was a daughter of King Robert the Third; and somehow the mutilations of the effigy made it more beautiful, causing you to see as in a blurred picture the thousand events of troublous times which had passed over the figure, leaving it through all peacefully asleep. A daughter of a king, with the Douglas Heart to guard her, she would be too noble in her stony slumber to show that she minded losing her features and a few other trifling accessories which might spoil the looks of less important women.

When we came out, high in the sunset glory gleamed a silver sickle, reaping roses. It was the heather moon, and I cried out to Sir S. as I saw it, "Wish--wish! Your first sight of the heather moon, and over our right shoulders for luck! Whatever we wish _must_ come true!"

I was so excited that I seized his hand; and he was too polite to give it back to me like a thing he didn't want. So he held it firmly in his while we both looked up to the sky, silently making our wishes. My wish was to be that my mother might love me; but I stopped and thought, "What is the good of making such a wish, when I've only one, and I'm sure to get that one without the heather moon, as mothers all love their children." This caution was very "canny" and proved my Scottish blood, I couldn't help thinking, as I paused in order to select the most appropriate wish for the heather moon to grant.