Ragged Lion

by Allan Massie

  And here is an odd thing, in itself no doubt partly explicable by the infirmity of age. I have rarely been gratified by evidence of such public attention, feeling, rightly, I believe, that there is a proper distinction to be made between the author who excites it, and the mere mortal on whom it is imposed. But on this occasion I was aware of a softening of my heart, of a certain gratification. It puzzled me to feel thus; and it was not till I had retired to my bedchamber at the inn of Douglas Mill that it occurred to me that my changed temper must owe something to my memories of the rabbling to which I had been subjected at Jedburgh. This thought, it may well be imagined, was of little comfort, for I had supposed myself to have been but little affected by distress on account of that experience. I passed a wretched night, sleeping but ill, disturbed by the thought that, if I had arrived at a point when satisfaction might rest only in being lionized, I was indeed in a sorry state, my nerves frail, and my virtue fast departing.

  The wan moon is setting behind the white wave,

  And the wind tears the leaves from the trees, O;

  The pale moon of winter’s last glimmer of light

  Dies ere the dawning is near, O.

  Summer’s without, but wan winter’s within

  A body that’s long past repair, O;

  The roses may bloom and the eglantine twine

  In a morning that smells sweet and fair, O.

  But the moon that is setting behind the white wave

  Is the light that is dying for me, O;

  And the sound that I hear from the black-veilèd barge

  Is the raven of death calling me, O.

  And the morning indeed brought, in a grey light, intimations of the mortality of man, the evanescence of splendour, the end to which earthly greatness must inevitably come. We descended into the crypt of the abbey kirk, long since itself deserted as a place of worship, though still displaying remnants of sculpture of rare quality, many however having been defaced and desecrated by Cromwell’s soldiery who, after their barbarous fashion, used the holy place as a stable. And yet, as I remarked to Lockhart, that works of the sculptor’s art equal to any of the fourteenth century to be seen in Westminster Abbey should be found, even in this condition, in so remote and indeed desolate a spot, testifies more surely than the witness of mere words to the grandeur and wealth of those haughty lords whose coronet so often counterpoised the crown. The effigy of the founder of the Douglas greatness, the Good Lord James, friend and companion-in-arms of the Bruce, was still visible, represented cross-legged in the manner of the Crusader who fell in battle against the Moors in Spain while carrying the heart of his king to Jerusalem.

  The crypt itself which we surveyed by torchlight was full almost to overflowing of leaden coffins, piled one on top of the other, ‘until the lower ones had been pressed flat as sheets of pasteboard’, as Lockhart observed with pardonable exaggeration. Some indeed of more recent date stood vertical, there being no room to lay them flat, and, on these, inscriptions and coronets and other signs of heraldry could still be distinguished even in the dim light thrown by the flickering torches. Here, crowded in disorder and covered with the thick dust of long neglect, were to be found the pride and terror of Scotland, higgledy-piggledy in an airless den, a charnel-house where the brave note of chivalry and the fierce defiance of resented authority, which were the marks of this family, were no more to be heard.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘so be it. So may it be for all. Foxes may sty and litter in St Paul’s and owls roost in St Giles. Troia Fuit, and its windy plains are bare.’

  When we emerged from the crypt a crowd had gathered, and a cheer was raised. An old man was presented to me as remembering the visit paid to Douglasdale by one to whom he referred as ‘Duke Willie’, and it was some little time before I established that this personage was none other than the Duke of Cumberland, the victor of Culloden – shameful and cruel in his hour of triumph, and yet in this westland moorland, which had sixty years earlier been the refuge of the persecuted Covenanters, recalled by this ancient with a degree of reverence which reminded me of the devotion to the graves of the so-called martyrs – and yet, I suppose, they were indeed in their fashion martyrs – which had been shewn by my own Old Mortality.

  While I was conversing with the old man, who was proudly garrulous, but not the most coherent of narrators – a thing which could scarcely be wondered at since, at the lowest computation of his age, he must, from his own account, have been nigh on ninety – while, as I say, we were conversing, a fiddler on the fringe of the crowd, whom I had not previously observed, struck up as if in mockery the old Jacobite ballad ‘Kenmure’s On and Awa’, Willie’, an old tune to which Robert Burns supplied new, or additional words. For a moment this pleased me, and I murmured the verses:

  There’s a rose in Kenmure’s cap, Willie,

  A bright sword in his hand –

  A hundred Gordons at his side,

  And hey for English land.

  And then the fiddler looked me in the eye, and winked, and I knew him to be the fiddler of Hastie’s Close, and I felt my heart chill and my mind in turmoil; for, no sooner did he mark my recognition, than he struck up a different song, which I had heard before. And as he did so, a girl detached herself from the crowd and with a soft swaying movement advanced into the centre of a ring that had been formed and began to dance. She, whom I also knew, from my night alarums, dreams, strange fancies, I knew not what, moved in languorous fashion, and, as she did so, crooned:

  And will ye come wi’ me, cuddy,

  Beyond the land and sea,

  And will ye tak the road, cuddy,

  The road you ken, wi’ me?

  And whatten a road is that, cuddy,

  You hae nae need to speir;

  And whatten a road is that, cuddy?

  The road that all men fear.

  I felt Lockhart’s arm sudden around me, as if I had stumbled and would have fallen.

  ‘You look faint, Sir Walter,’ he said, ‘I fear the day’s excursion and the pressure of the crowd have overtaxed your strength. I have sent to summon the carriage, and we shall take the descent to it by slow and gentle stages.’

  ‘No,’ I protested. ‘It was but a moment’s weakness.’

  But, even as I spoke, I heard the cackle of an old woman from the crowd:

  ‘Tak up your bonnie bridegroom while ye may, Ailsie, for his time is but short. His winding-sheet is up as high as his throat already, believe it wha list. His sand has but few grains to rin out, and nae wonder – they’ve been weel and brawly shaken. The leaves are withering fast on the trees, and he’ll never see the Martinmas wind gar them dance round Tweeddale again in swirls like the fairy rings that enclosed and held fast the Young Tamlane.’

  ‘Sir Walter,’ Lockhart spoke now with an urgency which I could not mistake, and in which, tenderly, I heard love as well as anxiety, ‘I am much concerned. Notwithstanding the force and merit of the interdict which your doctors have placed upon spirits, yet, desperate moments require desperate remedies, and such is your pallor and your shaken condition, that I am persuaded this is such a time’; and with that, he pressed a flask to my lips, murmuring, ‘Drink it, pray, it is the finest Armagnac’ I swallowed perhaps half a dram and felt the blood surge in my veins, and shuddered, and would have fallen, but for the firm hold on me which he maintained. Then the brandy commenced its recuperative work, and I felt myself steady.

  ‘My head cloudy as the Eildon Hills, though no’ sae firm,’ I muttered. ‘Yet time and I against any two . . .’

  ‘What was that, Sir Walter?’ he inquired, not hearing, for I jalouse my speech was indistinct.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, summoning up my strength, ‘nothing of great matter. Thank you, Lockhart, thank you, my dear, I am myself again.’

  But as we moved gently down the slope towards the waiting carriage, the singer’s voice followed me, and I could not tell what note it held: mockery? menace? desire? regret? pity?

  And will ye come wi’ me
, cuddy,

  To Elfland’s fair estate?

  Far frae the strife of men, cuddy,

  And troubles of the great.

  Now that you’re auld and grey, cuddy,

  A ragged lion poor,

  Oh what can haud ye back, cuddy,

  Frae my enchanter’s lure?

  When we settled in the carriage, we were silent for a long time, and then, in a wondering tone, I found myself repeating the words that the old woman had pronounced.

  ‘Did you not hear her?’ I said. ‘Did you not hear her, John?’

  He looked at me as if he did not know how to answer, and would fain have remained wordless in his perplexity, but something urgent, something pleading in my eyes, must have told him that I required a response, for he then, after long pondering, said with the utmost gentleness:

  ‘Sir Walter, I must tell you I heard no woman speak.’

  ‘Nor any sing?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘Nor fiddler play?’

  ‘None,’ he said again, ‘But these words you have recited, though in a broken and quavering voice that it pains me to hear, these words I recognize. They are your own, Sir Walter, taken with some modification and a change of person from The Bride of Lammermoor.’

  Then we fell silent again, for we were both sair oppressed, I by the devilry it seemed that my mind played on me, and Lockhart by this evidence of my frailty; and there was no sound but the horses’ hooves and the carriage wheels, and the sough of the wind as it played over the barren land.

  Nine months have passed since that day of awful warning or presentiment, and I write this in Rome* where we are well lodged in the Casa Bernini; but the city is full of ghosts and my mind in a turmoil. On the one hand, I am happy, for I believe I have paid all my debts and am therefore at liberty to die free of all pecuniary encumbrances. Indeed, if my health, which is in general, or at least often feels, improved, since I abandoned the regime imposed upon me by my doctors, and have permitted myself to eat and drink what I fancy, permits me another year or two of life, I may yet purchase the adjoining estate of Faldonside from my old friend Mr Nicol Milne and so complete the accumulation which I have so long desired, and be master of a stretch of Tweed from its junction with the Ettrick to Melrose brig. That would be a fine thing indeed. On the other hand, I have cause for sadness. I long for Abbotsford and my poor dogs, and insensibly and foolishly expect, when my hand dangles from my chair, to feel one of them nuzzle it. Then there was the grief occasioned by the news of the death of my beloved grandson, little Johnny Lockhart, a pain too deep for words. The night we heard of his passing, when in Naples, I attended the opera, and I believe poor Anne was a little shocked and dismayed, for she loved the boy as if he had been her own, and her grief was such that she felt compelled to retire in tears to her bed. She did not understand that I attended the opera to staunch my wound. I could not have borne to sit at home and mope; it was that or the oblivion of the bottle, the refuge of Prince Charlie in his long years of exile here.

  Here in Rome I am afflicted by a consciousness of certain presences, or rather absences. First, there is Charlotte. I cannot but remember that this of all cities was the one which she, who was normally content with her own domestic circle, most longed to see. ‘I cannot say you why,’ she would remark, ‘for you know, Scott, I take no interest in history, which in general I find verry boring. But to visit Rome, that would be different. You will laugh at me, I know, who can scarce tell Brutus from Caesar, but there it is, I believe I should like Rome excessively, and I ’ope that one day you may take me there . . .’

  And indeed I can picture too easily, and therefore sadly, how she would have delighted in the beauty of the city, and in taking a picnic or fête-champêtre among the flowery ruins of the Palatine . . . Thinking of this, I am conscious of her ghostly presence, and yet, waking in the cool morning, and stretching out my hand to touch her, I find nothing but the renewed pain of bereavement.

  Then there is Byron. Wherever I move in Rome I see the city through his eyes and the verses of Childe Harold echo in my troubled mind:

  A world is at our feet as fragile as our clay . . .

  I have dreamed the last three nights again of Green-breeks, the young Goth of my far-distant youth, as he was in his boyish glory, and I can only account for the recurrence of this persistent memory of one who played so brief a part in my life by reflecting that I apply to him, and to his fall in our Causeway bicker, the lines Byron penned on the dying gladiator:

  . . . his manly brow

  Consents to death, but conquers agony,

  And his doomed head sinks gradually low.

  But most of all I am conscious of the perpetual presence of the Stuart kings. I have visited the Cardinal of York’s villa at Frascati, with its Romantic view over the serene Campagna so delightfully depicted by Poussin and Claude Lorraine. I have seen the monument in St Peter’s which His Majesty George IV nobly had raised to his unfortunate cousins, and I have stood in the little courtyard of the Palazzo Muti where the piper played ‘Lochaber No More’ as the Prince lay dying; and I too heard that noble and melancholy music.

  How true the note of exile rings!

  Oh, it’s hame, hame, hame, fain wad I be,

  Hame ance mair in my ain countrie;

  To the green braes of Yarrow and Newark’s ruined tower,

  Where the broom shines yalla and the whaups cry on the moor

  Hame, hame, hame, fain wad I be,

  Hame ance mair in my ain countrie.

  The exiled sons of Albion have ilka ane a spot

  That’s dear to them as Paradise and canna be forgot;

  Be it Appin or Lochaber or the bonnie braes o Mar,

  Or the long moor of Rannoch, the song arises from afar:

  Hame, hame, hame, fain wad I be,

  Hame ance mair in my ain countrie.

  In the cause of Prussia, the great Marshal Keith may die,

  Honoured by its King, and yet expiring sigh:

  ‘There’s an eye that ever weeps and a fair face will be fain

  When I ride through Ythan water wi’ my bonnie bands again’:

  Hame, hame, hame, fain wad I be,

  Hame ance mair in my ain countrie.

  Oh the lands of France are lush and Italian flowers are braw

  But the white rose o Scotland’s the bonniest of a’,

  And my hert will no be healed, nor my spirit be restored,

  Till Charlie has his right, and I’m back at my ain board.

  For it’s hame, hame, hame, fain wad I be,

  Hame ance mair in my ain countrie.

  Hame, hame, hame, fain wad I be,

  Hame ance mair in my ain countrie;

  Let me ride down Gala Water, let me satisfy my need

  To hae one mair sight of Eildon and one hearing o the Tweed;

  For it’s hame, hame, hame, fain wad I be,

  Hame ance mair in my ain countrie.

  If I continue in this vein I shall unman myself.

  That dark eerie day in Douglasdale was to my pleased surprise succeeded by a renewal of strength and spirit, and the absence of any strange or supernatural presentiment. Throughout the lave of summer at Abbotsford, I worked well, and to good purpose, contriving to finish both Count Robert of Paris and Castle Dangerous. Neither work, I was aware, was representative of my best – though the best I could then accomplish – but both served well enough. They were greeted with sufficient enthusiasm by the public, and the latter at least has scenes and moments of which I should not have been ashamed in the days of my full strength. Only in one respect was it affected by my own experiences at Douglas Castle, for the weather of the tale ensures that all events take place under hoddengrey skies, in bone-chilling mists, and driving rain.

  That autumn, having also completed the introductions to the remaining novels to be published by Cadell in his Collected Edition, I prepared to obey my doctors and go abroad for my health’s sake, sceptical though I was of the efficacy of th
e proposed remedy. Since, however, to give expression to my doubts would have pained those who loved me, I acceded to the proposed journey with such equanimity as I could muster. I believed death was close at hand, for I felt his cold breath on my cheek; and I was resolved to meet him with all the fortitude of which I was capable. I would indeed have welcomed greater pain if it could have been granted instead of the heartless muddiness of mind which too often oppressed me.

  Lord Grey’s Government, with a generosity of spirit not to have been expected by a political opponent, most kindly put the frigate Barham at my disposal for our trip to the Mediterranean.

  ‘Come, Sir Walter,’ said Lockhart, ‘you are about to achieve what your admired Samuel Johnson declared to be the great object of travel: to see the shores of the Mediterranean – an ambition which he never gratified himself.’

  I endeavoured to respond in the same spirit, for it was my determination to conceal from all, even my dearest, the misery occasioned by my departure and the fear that I might not see Abbotsford again. Indeed, I felt like Moses who was permitted to view the Promised Land only from the heights of Mount Pisgah, but forbidden by the Lord to cross over Jordan, because, as the Book of Deuteronomy says, ‘ye trespassed against me among the children of Israel at the waters of Meribah-Kadesh, in the wilderness of Zin; because ye sanctified me not in the midst of the children of Israel.’ Only, in my case, I had abided in the Promised Land, from which I was now driven into exile.

  However the sea-voyage saw a restoration of both bodily and intellectual vigour – after we had passed through the Bay of Biscay where we were all confoundedly sea-sick; and I delighted in our passage of Cape St Vincent and Trafalgar, the scene of two of Nelson’s great victories. We reached Malta on the 22nd November, less than four weeks after setting sail from Portsmouth. There we put up at Beverly’s Hotel, where we were comfortably accommodated. I was pleased to meet certain old friends, particularly Mr John Hookham Frere, a notable antiquary who had retired to the island for his health’s sake, and whose guidance around its historical sites was both instructive and stimulating. Indeed I was so refreshed that I set to work on a new novel, to be called The Siege of Malta, which I completed during our subsequent sojourn in Naples, and which I verily think as good a piece of work – of its type – as I have achieved since Quentin Durward. I also wrote a short story, garnered from a local legend, and began to feel that the expedition might be as productive of good as my doctors had assured me would be the case.