Memoirs of a Highland Lady

by Elizabeth Grant

  The name of the old Rector of Seaham I cannot recollect; he was a nice kind old man, who most goodnaturedly, when we drank tea at the parsonage, played chess with me, and once or twice let me beat him. He had a kind homely wife too, our great ally. She had many housekeeping ways of pleasing children. The family, a son and two or three daughters, were more aspiring; they had annual opportunities of seeing the ways of more fashionable people, and so tried a little finery at home, in particular drilling an awkward lout of a servant boy into a caricature of a lady’s page. One evening, in the drawing room, the old quiet Mama observing that she had left her knitting in the parlour, the sprucest of the daughters immediately rose and rang the bell and desired this attendant to fetch it, which he did upon a silver salver; the thick gray woollen stocking for the parson’s winter wear! presented with a bow—such a bow! to his mistress. No comments that ever I heard were ever made upon this scene, but it haunted me as in some way incongruous. Next day, when we were at our work in the parlour, I came out with, ‘Mamma, wouldn’t you rather have run down yourself and brought up that knitting?’ ‘You would, I hope, my dear,’ answered she with her smile—she had such a sweet smile when she was pleased—‘you would any of you.’ How merrily we worked on, though our work was most particularly disagreeable, an economical invention of our Aunt Mary’s. She had counselled my Mother to cut up some fine old cambrick petticoats into pocket handkerchiefs for us, thus giving us four hems to each, so that they were very long in hand. Jane never got through one during the whole time we were at Seaham; it was so dragged, and so wetted with tears, and so dirtied from being often begun and ripped and begun again, I believe at last it went into the rag bag, while I, in time, finished the set for both, not, however, without a little private grudge against the excellent management of Aunt Mary. Aunt Mary was then living at Hough ton with her maiden Aunt, Miss Jane Nesham. She and Aunt Fanny had been there for some months, but Aunt Mary was to go on to the highlands with us whenever my father returned from Circuit, and in the meanwhile she often came over for a day or two to Seaham.

  Except the clergyman’s family there was none of gentle degree in the village, it was the most primitive hamlet ever met with, a dozen or so of cottages, no trade, no manufacture, no business doing that we could see: the owners were mostly servants of Sir Ralph Milbanke’s. He had a pretty villa on the cliff surrounded by well kept grounds, where Lady Milbanke liked very much to retire to in the autumn with her little daughter, the unfortunate child granted to her after eighteen years of childless married life.5 She generally lived quite privately here, seeing only the Rector’s family, when his daughters took their lessons in high breeding; and for a companion for the future Lady Byron at these times she selected the daughter of our landlady, a pretty and quite elegant looking girl, who bore very ill with the publick house ways after living for weeks in Miss Milbanke’s apartments. I have often wondered since what became of little Bessy. She liked very much being with us. She was in her element only when with refined people, and unless Lady Milbanke took her entirely and provided for her, she had done her irremediable injury by raising her ideas beyond her home. Her mother seemed to feel this, but they were dependants, and did not like to refuse my Lady. Surely it could not have been that modest graceful girl, who was ‘Born in a garret, in a kitchen bred.’6 I remember her mother and herself washing their hands in a tub in the back yard after some work they had been engaged in, and noticing sadly, I know not why, the bustling hurry with which the one pair of red, rough hands was yellow soaped, well plunged, and then dried off hard on a dish cloth; and the other pale, thin delicate pair was gently soaped and slowly rinsed, and softly wiped on a towel brought down for the purpose. What strangely curious incidents make impression upon some minds. Bessy could make seaweed necklaces and shell bags and work very neatly. She could understand our books too, and was very grateful for having them lent to her. My Mother never objected to her being with us, but our Hough ton cousins did not like playing with her, their father and mother, they thought, would not approve of it. So when they were with us our more humble companion retired out of sight, giving us a melancholy smile if we chanced to meet with her. My Mother had no finery.

  She often let us, when at Houghton, drink tea with an old Nanny Appleby, who had been their nursery maid. She lived in a very clean house with a niece, an eight day clock, a chest of drawers, a cornerset chair, and a quantity of bright pewter. The niece had twelve caps, all beautifully done up, though of various degrees of rank. One was on her head, the other eleven in one of the drawers of this chest, as we counted, for we were purposefully taken to inspect them. The Aunt gave us girdle cakes, some plain, some spiced, that is with currants in them, and plenty of tea, Jane getting hers in a real china cup, which was afterwards given to her on account of her possessing the virtue of being named after my Mother.

  There were grander parties, too, in Houghton, among the Aunts and the Uncles and the cousins. At these gayer meetings my great Aunts Peggy and Elsy appeared in the very handsome head gear my Mother had brought them from London, and which particularly impressed me as I watched the old ladies bowing and jingling at the tea table night after night. They were called dress turbans, and were made alike of rolls of muslin folded round a catgut headpiece and festooned with large loops of large beads ending in bead tassels, after the most approved prints of Tippoo Sahib.7 They were considered extremely beautiful as well as fashionable, and were much admired. We also drove in the mornings to visit different connexions, on one occasion going as far as Sunderland, where the iron bridges so delighted Jane and me, and the shipping and the busy quays, that we were reproved afterwards for a state of over excitement that prevented our responding properly to the attentions of our great Aunt Blackburn, a very remarkably handsome woman, although then upwards of eighty.

  It was almost with sorrow that we heard Circuit was over; whether sufficient business had been done on it to pay the travelling expenses, no one ever heard, or I believe enquired, for my father was not communicative upon his business matters; he returned in his usual good spirits. Mrs Millar and Johnny also reappeared; Aunt Mary packed up; we took rather a doleful leave of all and started. There had been a great many mysterious conversations of late between my Mother and Aunt Mary, and as they had begun to suspect the old how-vus do-vus language was become in some degree comprehensible to us, they now substituted a more difficult style of disguised English. This took us a much longer time to translate into common sense. ‘Herethegee isthegee athegee letthegee terthegee comethegee fromthegee,’ etc. I often wondered how with words of many syllables they managed to make out such a puzzle, or even to speak it, themselves. It baffled us for several days; at last we discovered the key, or the clew, and then we found a marriage was preparing—whose, never struck us—it was merely a marriage in which my Mother and my Aunts were interested, the arrangements of which were nearly completed, so that the event itself was certain to take place in the course of the summer. We were very indifferent about it, almost grudging the pains we had taken to master the gibberish that concealed the parties from us, no fragment of a name having ever been uttered in our hearing.

  At Edinburgh, of course, my father’s affairs detained him as usual. This time my Mother had something to do there. Aunt Mary had been so long rusticating at Houghton—four months, I think—that her wardrobe had become very old fashioned, and as there was always a great deal of company in the highlands during the shooting season, it was necessary for her to add considerably to it. Dress makers consequently came to fit on dresses, and we went to silk mercers, linen drapers, haberdashers, etc. Very amusing indeed, and no way extraordinary; and so we proceeded to Perth, where, for the last time, we met our great Uncle Sandy. This meeting made the more impression on me, not because of his death soon after, for we did not much care for him, but for his openly expressed disappointment in my changed looks. I had given promise of resembling his handsome mother, the Lady Jean Gordon, with her fair oval face, her golden hair, and brill
iant skin; I had grown into a Raper, to his dismay, and he was so ungallant as to enter into particulars—yellow, peaky, skinny, drawn up, lengthened out, every thing disparaging; true enough, I believe, for I was neither strong in health nor exactly happy, except during the Seaham interlude, and many a long year had to pass before a gleam of the Gordon beauty settled on me again. It passed whole and entire to Mary, who grew up an embodyment of all the perfection of the old family portraits. Jane was a true Ironside then and ever, William ditto, John like me, a cross between Grant and Raper.

  They did not understand me, and they did not use me well. The physical constitution of children nobody thought it necessary to attend to then, the disposition was equally neglected. No peculiarities were ever studied; how many early graves were the consequence. I know now that my constitution was eminently nervous. This extreme susceptibility went by many names in my childhood, and all were linked with evil. I was affected, sly, sullen, insolent, every thing but what I really was, nervously shy when noticed. Jealous too, they called me, jealous of dear good Jane, because her fearless nature, fine healthy temperament, as shown in her general activity, her bright eyes and rosy cheeks, made her a much more satisfactory plaything than her timid sister. Her mind, too, was precocious; she loved poetry, understood it, learned it by heart, and expressed it with the feeling of a much older mind, acting bits from her favourite Shakespeare like another Roscius.8 These exhibitions and her dancing made her quite a little show, while I, called up on second thoughts to avoid distinctions, cut but a sorry figure beside her; this inferiority I felt, and felt it still further paralyse me. Then came the unkind, cutting rebuke, which my loving heart could ill bear with. I have been taunted with affectation when my fault was ignorance, called sulky when I was spirit crushed. I have been sent supper less to bed for not, as Cassius, giving the cue to Brutus, flogged by my father at my Mother’s representations of the insolence of my silence, or the impudence of the pert reply I was goaded on to make; jeered at as the would be modest, flouted as envious. How little they knew the heart thus outraged or guessed the depth of that affection they tortured. They did it ignorantly, but how much after grief this want of wisdom caused. A very unfavourable effect on my temper was the immediate result, and health and temper go together. Well, will our children profit by their better training.

  On reaching the Doune a great many changes at first perplexed us. The stables in front of the house were gone, also the old barn, the poultry house, the duck pond; every appurtenance of the old farm yard was removed to the new offices at the back of the hill; a pretty lawn extended round two sides of the house, and the backwater was gone, the broom island existed no longer, no thickets of birch and alder intercepted the view of the Spey. A green field dotted over with trees stretched from the broad terrace on which the house now stood to the river, and the washing shed was gone. All that scene of fun was over, pots, tubs, baskets and kettles were removed with the maids and their attendants to a new building, always at the back of the hill, better adapted, I daresay, for the purposes of a regular Laundry, but not near so picturesque, altho’ quite as merry, as our beloved broom island. I am sure I have backwoods tastes, like my Aunt Frere, whom I never could, by letter or in conversation, interest in the Rothiemurchus improvements. She said the whole romance of the place was gone. She prophesied, and truly, that with the progress of knowledge all the old feudal affections would be overwhelmed, individuality of character would cease, manners would change, the highlands would become like the rest of the world, all that made life most charming there would fade away, little would be left of the olden time, and life there would become as uninteresting as in other little remarkable places. The change had not begun yet, however. There was plenty of all in the rough as yet in and about the Doune, where we passed a very happy summer, for tho’ just round the house were alterations, all else was the same. The old servants were there, and the old relations were there, and the lakes and the burnies, and the paths through the forest, and we enjoyed our out of door life more this season than usual, for Cousin James Griffith arrived shortly after ourselves with his sketch books and paint boxes, and he passed the greater part of the day wandering through all that beautiful scenery, Jane and I his constant companions. Mary was a fat, heavy, lumpy child unable to move very far from the side of the nurse. She was a mere baby too, but William, Jane, and I, who rode in turns on the gray pony, thought ourselves very big little people, and expected quite as matter of right to belong to all the excursion trains, were they large or small. Cousin James was fond of the Lochans with their pretty fringe of birch wood, and the peeps through it of the Croft, Tullochgrue, and the mountains. A sheep path running along by the side of the burn which fed these picturesque and small lakes was a favourite walk of Aunt Mary’s, and my father had christened it by her name. It started from the Polchar, and followed the water to the entrance of the forest, where, above all, we loved to lose ourselves, wandering on amongst the immense roots of the fir trees, and then scattering to gather cranberries, while our artist companion made his sketches. He liked best to draw the scenery round Loch an Eilein; he always talked to us if we were near him, explaining the perspective and the colouring and the lights and shadows, in a way we never forgot, and which made those same scenes very dear to us afterwards. It was, indeed, hardly possible to choose amiss; at every step there lay a picture. All through the forest, which then measured in extent nearly twenty square miles, small rivers ran with sometimes narrow strips of meadow land beside them; many lakes of various sizes spread their tranquil waters here and there in lonely beauty. In one of them, as its name implied, was a small island quite covered by the ruins of a stronghold, a memento of the days of the Bruce, for it was built by the Red Comyns, who then owned all Strathspey and Badenoch. A low square tower at the end of the ruin supported an eagle’s nest. Often the birds rose majestically as we were watching their eyrie, and wheeled skimming over the lake in search of the food required by the young eaglets, who could be seen peeping over the pile of sticks that formed their home. Up towards the mountains the mass of fir broke into straggling groups of trees at the entrance of the Glens which ran far up among the bare rocky crags of the Grampians. Here and there upon the forest streams rude sawmills were constructed, where one or at most two trees were cut up into planks at one time. The sawmiller’s hut close beside, a cleared field at hand with a slender crop of oats growing in it, the peatstack near the door, the cow, and of course a pony, grazing at will among the wooding. Nearer to the Spey the fir wood yielded to banks of lovely birch, the one small field expanded into a farm; yet over all hung the wild charm of nature, mountain scenery in mountain solitude beautiful under every aspect of the sky.

  Our summer was less crowded with company than usual, very few except connexions or a passing stranger coming to mar the sociability of the family party. Some of the Gumming Gordons were with us, the Lady Logie, and Mrs Cooper, with whom my Mother held several mysterious conferences. There were Kinrara gaieties too, but we did not so frequently share in them, some very coarse speeches of the Duchess of Manchester having too much disgusted Cousin James to make him care for such company too often repeated. He had a very short time before been elected Head of his College at Oxford. As Master of University with a certain position, a good income, a fine house, and still better expectations through his particular friends Lord Eldon the Chancellor, and his brother Sir William Scott, he was now able to realise a long cherished hope of securing his Cousin Mary to share his prosperous fortunes. This was the expected marriage that the hethegee-shethegee language had attempted to conceal from us, and did, in fact, till very near the time of its completion, when we found it out more by the pains my Mother took to leave the lovers alone together than by any alteration in their own imperturbably calm deportment. They were going together in middle age, very sensibly on both parts, first loves on either side, fervent as they were, having been long forgotten, and they were to be married and be at home in Oxford by the Gaudy day in October.
The marriage was to take place in the episcopal chapel at Inverness, and the whisperings with Mrs Cooper had reference to the necessary arrangements.

  It was on the 19th of September, my brother William’s birthday, that the bridal party set out; a bleak day it was for encountering Slough Mouich; that wild, lonely road could have hardly looked more dreary. I accompanied the Aunt I was so very much attached to, in low enough spirits, hating the thought of losing her for ever, dreading many a trial she had saved me from, and Mrs Millar, who feared her searching eye. My prospects individually were not brightened by the happy event every one congratulated the family on. Cousin James was to take his wife by the coast road to Edinburgh, and then to Tennochside. Some other visits were to be paid by the way, so my Aunt had packed the newest portion of her wardrobe, much that she had been busied on herself with her own neat fingers all those summer days, and all her trinkets, in a small trunk to take with her on the road; while her heavy boxes had preceded us by Thomas Mathieson, the Carrier, to Inverness, and were to be sent on from thence by sea to London. We arrived at Grant’s Hotel, the carriage was unpacked, and no little trunk was forthcoming. It had been very unwisely tied on behind, and had been cut off from under the rumble by some exemplary highlander in the dreary waste named from the wild boars.9 My poor aunt’s little treasures! for she was far from rich, and had strained her scanty purse for her outfit. Time was short, too, but my Mother prevailed on a dressmaker—a Grant—to work. She contributed of her own stores. The heavy trunks had luckily not sailed; they were ransacked for linen, and on the 20th of September good Bishop McFarlane united as rationally happy a pair as ever undertook the chances of matrimony together.