A Lost Lady of Old Years E-Book

John Buchan

• Herausgeber: Polygon
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 396

Beschreibung

Young and dissolute, Francis Birkenshaw carouses around Edinburgh, caring nothing for the Jacobite Rebellion. An encounter with the beautiful Margaret Murray, wife of Bonnie Prince Charlie's secretary John Murray of Broughton, and his lust for riches and adventure draw him inexorably into a dangerous involvement, duplicity and betrayal. Best known for his Richard Hannay spy thrillers, John Buchan reveals a dark and compelling side in this portrayal of Bonnie Prince Charlie's ill-fated campaign. With an introduction by James Robertson. This edition is authorised by the John Buchan Society.

Leseprobe

A LOST LADY OF OLD YEARS

JOHN BUCHAN led a truly extraordinary life: he was a diplomat, soldier, barrister, journalist, historian, politician, publisher, poet and novelist. He was born in Perth in 1875, the eldest son of a Free Church of Scotland minister, and educated at Hutcheson’s Grammar School in Glasgow. He graduated from Glasgow University then took a scholarship to Oxford. During his time there - ‘spent peacefully in an enclave like a monastery’ - he wrote two historical novels, one of them being A Lost Lady of Old Years.

In 1901 he became a barrister of the Middle Temple and a private secretary to the High Commissioner for South Africa. In 1907 he married Susan Charlotte Grosvenor; they had three sons and a daughter. After spells as a war correspondent, Lloyd George’s Director of Information and a Conservative MP, Buchan moved to Canada in 1935 where he became the first Baron Tweedsmuir of Elsfield.

Despite poor health throughout his life, Buchan’s literary output was remarkable - thirty novels, over sixty non-fiction books, including biographies of Sir Walter Scott and Oliver Cromwell, and seven collections of short stories. His distinctive thrillers - ‘shockers’ as he called them - were characterised by suspenseful atmosphere, conspiracy theories and romantic heroes, notably Richard Hannay (based on the real-life military spy William Ironside) and Sir Edward Leithen. Buchan was a favourite writer of Alfred Hitchcock, whose screen adaptation of The Thirty-Nine Steps was phenomenally successful.

John Buchan served as Governor-General of Canada from 1935 until his death in 1940, the year his autobiography Memory Hold-the-door was published.

JAMES ROBERTSON’S novels are The Fanatic, Joseph Knight (recipient of both the Saltire Society and Scottish Arts Council Scottish Book of the Year awards in 2003/4), The Testament of Gideon Mack (long-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2006) and And the Land Lay Still (which also received the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year award in 2010). He has also published two volumes of short stories, several collections of poetry, and many books in Scots for young readers. His edition of the Selected Poems of Robert Fergusson is published by Polygon. He is an honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Scottish Literature, University of Glasgow.

JOHN BUCHAN

A Lost Lady of Old Years

Introduced by James Robertson

This eBook edition published in 2012 by

Birlinn Limited

West Newington House

Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

www.birlinn.co.uk

First published in 1899 by John Lane

This edition published in Great Britain in 2008 by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd

Introduction copyright © James Robertson, 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-84697-203-4

eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-505-5

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Introduction

‘A sneaking piece of imbecility’ was how Sir Walter Scott privately described his young hero Edward Waverley, not long after the publication of Waverley in 1814. There is no record of John Buchan having applied any such dismissive epithet to Francis Birkenshaw, the protagonist of A Lost Lady of Old Years, but perhaps this is because Buchan does not spare him in the pages of the novel itself. If Edward Waverley is insipid and impressionable, he is also far too polite ever to be in danger of serious misconduct. Francis, on the other hand, is an angry young man with a tendency to violence. He has none of the honest decency of John Burnet, the hero of Buchan’s preceding novel. Francis has fought his way through a rough childhood in Edinburgh ‘inch by inch, wound by wound’, and by the age of eighteen has knocked out a rival in love, stabbed a landlord, struck a woman, and tossed a would-be comrade into a ditch. There is plenty to suggest, as the narrative does, that he might ‘grow to a blackguard of some quality’. When he turns his back on relative comfort and security for adventure he does so not for honour or romance, but out of selfishness: ‘the only baseness seemed to lie in settling upon his lees in the warm air of the reputable. A hard conscience and a ready hand were a man’s truest honour, and with this facile catchword he went whistling into a new life.’

Vital though the influence of Scott was on Buchan’s development as a novelist, it is worth remembering that, in purely Scottish terms, more immediate precedence lay in the work of Stevenson, including his last, unfinished work Weir of Hermiston. That potentially magnificent, big-themed novel was published posthumously in 1896, in the middle of a decade which was the heyday of the sentimental and often parochial Kailyard school of writing; A Lost Lady of Old Years appeared in 1899; and two years later came The House with the Green Shutters, George Douglas Brown’s vicious response to the Kailyard. The young Buchan was well aware that change was afoot in the world of Scottish fiction, and it could be said that Francis Birkenshaw picks his morally ambiguous way through a literary as well as a physical landscape.

Buchan was also learning from his own enviably prolific output. This was his third published novel and his seventh published book. He completed most of it when he was twenty-two years old and a student at Brasenose College, Oxford, and it appeared shortly after he celebrated his twenty-fourth birthday. His biographer Janet Adam Smith is unenthusiastic in her assessment: ‘It is not nearly such a good story as John Burnet of Barns. We have to put up with the vacillations of Mr. Francis Birkenshaw before we are caught up into any excitement of action, and Buchan’s study of this romantic temperament is not keen or subtle enough to hold attention on its own merits …’ This rather misses the point. It is the vacillations of Francis Birkenshaw, his swithering between idealism and self-interest, meanness and generosity of spirit, that make him interesting. True, some of the plotting is clunky - on one occasion a new character is suddenly introduced to get the author, it seems, rather than the hero, out of a tight spot - but while A Lost Lady may not be perfectly executed, its themes are handled with remarkable maturity and confidence by such a young author. Several of the hallmarks of Buchan’s work are here - high adventure, scheming adversaries, a lonely man at large in wild country - but there is also a strikingly bleak view of human nature, where divisions between heroism and villainy, principle and compromise, youth and old age, are ragged and in some cases broken entirely, which has the ring of truth about it.

Another strand of authenticity is to be found in Buchan’s mastery of Scots language, particularly but not exclusively in dialogue. His understanding of how eighteenth-century Gaelic-speaking Highlanders and Scots-speaking Lowlanders would have moved between different linguistic registers is also impressive. As always, too, his descriptions of weather and landscape are first-rate. This is a writer who listens and hears, who looks and sees. And there is that other aspect of Buchan’s writing, the notion of ‘the hurried journey’. ‘We live our lives under the twin categories of time and space,’ he wrote in the posthumously published Memory Hold-the-Door, ‘and when the two come together we get the great moment. Whether failure or success is the result, life is sharpened, intensified, idealised.’

What better ‘moment in which to explore these ideas than the Jacobite Rising of 1745-6? The plot takes Francis Birkenshaw from the Lowlands to the Highlands, to London, and back to Scotland again. His physical route is matched by a journey towards virtue, a destination - like the settled, unassuming Fife town of Dysart where he ends up - to which his own nature seems not at all suited. The vision of a beautiful woman is at times his inspiration, at times his goad and torment; he sways between disgust and admiration as witness to the self-serving machinations of the old clan chief, Lord Lovat; and, still in his teens, he emerges from his experiences ‘a grave old-featured man’:

A year ago he had been a boy; now he felt himself an ageing, broken man, driven in curb along a stony path of virtue, a man passionate yet austere, with a cold, scrupulous heart and a head the prey of every vagrom fancy. A man with great capabilities, truly, but scarcely a man to live pleasantly, at ease with himself and the world.

Virtue, sombre and mundane, is forced upon him, not won voluntarily by conscious endeavour. If A Lost Lady is cast in the mould of Waverley, the compromise between prudent head and impassioned heart is not nearly so comfortable in Buchan as it is in Scott. For Francis Birkenshaw, there is no room in the future for affection for a past, lost cause. As the novel closes, he declines the opportunity of adventures abroad, accepting that his lot is to return to ‘the vulgarity of home’. ‘I must bide in my own land, for I cannot flee from myself …’ He receives no romantic reward for making this choice. Unlike Edward Waverley, Francis doesn’t win the ‘right’ girl as a consolation for losing the ‘wrong’ one. The conclusion of Buchan’s novel is a variation on Scott’s, certainly, but it is delivered in a minor key. All the moving scenes leading to the execution of Lord Lovat are designed to show how a man must ultimately come to terms with himself as he is, not as he might wish to be. In enclosing this sobering message in a novel about the ‘Forty-five, Buchan may have upset the expectations of some of his readers. At any rate, A Lost Lady was among his commercially least successful novels, and has been unjustly neglected down the years.

It appears not to have been an easy book to write. ‘The Lost Lady has now reduced my hair to a silvery white,’ he complained. In a letter to his old friend Charlie Dick in February 1897 he wrote, ‘I have lately been reluctantly compelled to the conclusion that Mrs. Murray of Broughton was really a very bad lot, and that her life does not bear inspection. So I shall have to put a note to my book saying that I have abandoned the historical conception.’ This indeed he did, in the dedication to Duncan Grant Warrand, but he need not have apologised on this score. His treatment of the historical figures, Duncan Forbes, Lord Lovat and the Murrays in particular, is skilful and effective: lightly sketched they may be, but - as with his wonderful portrait of the young Samuel Johnson in his second Jacobite novel Midwinter, written twenty-four years later - he has the imaginative touch that marks a good historian as much as a fine novelist, and shows them as human beings where a lesser writer might have pasted them in as mere historical cut-outs.

Few names in Scottish history are as tarnished as that of John Murray of Broughton. The year before the publication of A Lost Lady, Robert Fitzroy Bell produced an edition of the Memorials of John Murray of Broughton, a collection of his papers and journals. In his introduction Bell makes a valiant attempt to redress the balance of opinion in Murray’s favour, but it feels very much as if he knows he himself is fighting a lost cause. Eventually he is reduced to slighting Mrs. Murray in order to cast her husband in a better light. While he was in the Tower of London, Bell says, she deserted him for the continent, never to return, and was subsequently ‘unfaithful’ to him. In a footnote, Bell mentions a tradition in the Murray family that she became Prince Charles Edward’s mistress, only to add the qualification that there is no evidence for this. A strange defence indeed of Mr. ‘Evidence’ Murray, as Jacobites referred to him after his appearance for the Crown against the Lords Kilmarnock, Balmerino and Lovat, but probably it is about the best Murray was likely to get, even so long after the event. For it was not only the Jacobites who despised him. Murray had become a Freemason when in Rome in 1737, and the following year affiliated to Lodge Canongate Kilwinning No. 2 in Edinburgh. Wherever his name or signature appear in the Lodge’s transactions, they have been obliterated.

Then there is the story behind ‘Broughton’s Saucer’, one of a number of ‘out-of-the-way things’ that the young Walter Scott collected while still living at his parents’ house in George Square, Edinburgh. The story dates from around 1764 - seven years before Scott s birth - the year Murray, who had been living in London since his release from the Tower in 1747, sold the ancestral estate of Broughton for £16,000 to Mr. Dickson of Ednam House, Kelso. Dickson’s agent was Mr. Scott, the father of the novelist. At this time the new development of George Square had not been built, so the following extract (from J.G. Lockharfs biography of Scott) presumably relates to an earlier residence, perhaps the one in College Wynd where Scott was born in 1771:

Mrs Scott’s curiosity was strongly excited one autumn by the regular appearance, at a certain hour every evening, of a sedan chair, to deposit a person carefully muffled up in a mantle, who was immediately ushered into her husband’s private room, and commonly remained with him there until long after the usual bed-time of this orderly family. Mr. Scott answered her repeated inquiries with a vagueness which irritated the lady’s feelings more and more; until, at last, she could bear the thing no longer; but one evening, just as she heard the bell ring for the stranger’s chair to carry him off, she made her appearance within the forbidden parlour with a salver in her hand, observing, that she thought the gentlemen had sat so long, they would be better of a dish of tea, and had ventured accordingly to bring some for their acceptance. The stranger, a person of distinguished appearance, and richly dressed, bowed to the lady, and accepted a cup; but her husband knit his brows, and refused very coldly to partake the refreshment. A moment afterwards the visitor withdrew - and Mr. Scott lifting up the window-sash, took the cup, which he had left empty on the table, and tossed it out upon the pavement. The lady exclaimed for her china, but was put to silence by her husband’s saying, ‘I can forgive your little curiosity, madam, but you must pay the penalty. I may admit into my house, on a piece of business, persons wholly unworthy to be treated as guests by my wife. Neither lip of me nor mine comes after Mr. Murray of Broughton’s.’

‘This was the unhappy man,’ Lockhart continues, ‘who, after attending Prince Charles Edward Stuart as his secretary throughout the greater part of his expedition, condescended to redeem his own life and fortune by bearing evidence against the noblest of his late master’s adherents … The saucer belonging to Broughton’s teacup chanced to be preserved; and Walter had made prize of it.’

Murray’s betrayal, and the subsequent trial and execution of the Jacobite lords in London, fill some of the last pages of Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather, which would have been a staple of John Buchan’s early reading. The same episodes are played out in the later chapters of A Lost Lady, and are brilliantly done. The subtle conversations between Francis and, one after another, Duncan Forbes the Lord President, John Murray, and Simon Fraser Lord Lovat, serve to focus on the central theme, the fine line between honour and expediency, and between self-fulfilment and selfless devotion to a cause; on, in short, what permits individuals to live with themselves. Buchan deals angrily but humanely with Murray, and this is reflected in the moment when Francis contemplates murder as a means of silencing him:

But the white, weak, unwholesome face deterred him. The man seemed worn with toils, seemed spiritless, friendless, and feeble. He could not draw upon him any more than upon a woman. With a cry of despair he turned upon his heel and left the room.

If Francis’s view of Murray is grounded in contempt, his relationship with the devious, scheming but massively imposing Fraser of Lovat, whom he admires and despises almost in alternate sentences, is much more complex. Buchan’s portrait of this complex, gross yet fascinating figure is superb, as the New York Times observed in its review:

For its striking portrayal of Lovat this new Scots narrative is chiefly noteworthy. Crafty Simon Fraser’s strange personality is depicted with a masterful touch. He is exhibited, in his old age, in many moods, violent, brutish, calm, and majestic. A traitor, a gourmand, a sot, a decayed debauche, he is also a scholar, a wit, a soldier, and a statesman. The Highlands never produced an odder character, while few of the Highland romancers have put a historical personage into fiction with greater power and pictur-esqueness. He has, almost, Gargantuan breadth of humour, Hogarthian strength of outline.

In Margaret Murray, the Lost Lady herself (the fine title is taken from Robert Browning’s poem ‘Waring’) , the memory of whose tears drives Francis frantic before her feckless husband, Buchan fashioned another extraordinary character, this time from limited historical information. Robert Chambers’ History of the Rebellion in Scotland 1745-6 records the famous incident after the Highland army’s entry into Edinburgh, when Prince Charles had his father proclaimed king at the Cross: ‘During the ceremony, Mrs. Murray of Broughton, whose enthusiasm was only surpassed by her beauty, sat on horseback beside the Cross, with a drawn sword in her hand, and her person profusely decorated with white ribbons, which signified devotion to the House of Stuart.’ After Culloden, Chambers writes later, ‘Mrs. Murray went abroad at her husband’s request, but did not remain faithful to him.’ (Note the slight but significant difference between this and Robert Fitzroy Bell’s account.) The rest of her story is largely a mystery.

From John Murray’s own account of the post-Culloden flight across the West Highlands, we know that she was four months pregnant at the battle. After an unsuccessful attempt to secure her safe passage through the government troops, she parted from Murray and ‘came in the most private manner imaginable passing in the low Country for a Soldiers wife, and induring hardships hardly to be bore by one in health, much less by a person with a big belly, till lately accustom’d to all the care and conveniences of Life.’ By the end of June 1746 she was at her mother’s house in Edinburgh, where she stayed three days before being moved to a succession of safe houses (including one belonging to a Mrs. Cumming which was ‘fixed on as a place not suspected, it being often frequented by young Gentlemen to get cured of a desease of a very different nature’) while efforts were made to procure her a passage to Holland. In September she gave birth to a son, her fourth, who however died soon after. According to Murray, her poor health and the risk of discovery prevented her from going abroad, and, if his account is true, she may have rejoined him in London about the time of his release from the Tower (March or April 1747, subsequent to Lovat’s execution). An incident in 1749 indicates that the Murrays were still in contact, if not together: the Reverend James Leslie, sometime chaplain to Lord Traquair, had pawned a gold repeater watch belonging to Mrs. Murray, in order to raise money for Alastair Ruadh, eldest son of the chief of Glengarry, who was in exile and so destitute that he had been forced to sell his sword and shoe-buckles. Leslie had John Murray’s permission but not his wife’s, and she was very angry at the disposal of her property. Murray apparently reconciled her to the loss, but thereafter she is absent from the historical record. Murray, according to Chambers, ‘dragged out a wretched life upon a pension of £200 a year’, and died in 1777 at Cheshunt, Hertfordshire, possibly insane. Of his wife, the historian Andrew Lang wrote, ‘when Mrs. Murray left her intolerable lord is not exactly known, nor is anything certain about her later fortunes’.

Buchan, then, was able to mythologise her for the purposes of his fiction, despite his misgivings about her as ‘a very bad lot’. As Professor David Daniell has commented, he gave her a romantic ferocity quite unlike anything in Buchan’s previous female characters, Marjory Veitch in John Burnet of Barns or the ‘pretty misses of the modern short stories in Grey Weather.’ Francis may not be able to draw his sword on a woman, but in his early career he was not above striking an Edinburgh whore with his open hand, sending her staggering with a blow that ‘comforted his soul’. Yet it is he who is assaulted by the woman he comes to worship, Mrs. Murray, when she discovers him to be, as she believes, no more than a treacherous servant. Here a whole range of emotions, charged with a sexual current that will run between the two throughout the novel, is on display:

… she struck Francis full in the face with her lash.

… Francis stood immovable, his mind crushed and writhing, his cheeks flaming with disgrace. This bright creature before him had tumbled his palace of cards about his ears. He felt with acid bitterness the full ignomy, the childish, servile shame of his position. The charm of her young beauty drove him frantic; her whole mien, as of a world unknown to him and eternally beyond his reach, mocked him to despair … He stood with bowed head, not daring to meet her arrogant eyes, careless of the lash which curled round his cheek and scarred his brow. Marvellous the power of that slender arm! He felt the blood trickle over his eyes and half blind him, but he scarce had a thought of pain.

This is the start, not of a love affair (although later it threatens to become one), but of a love-hate relationship. Something in him resists the urge to retaliate and overpower her, and he realises that his renunciation of virtue is a feeble delusion: he can no more turn off the path of virtue than he can consciously follow it. ‘Dimly he saw that her gaze was fixed on his bleeding forehead, and in her look he seemed to see a gleam of pity and at her mouth a quiver of regret. Then with crazy speed he ran blindly to the open moor.’

It is a key moment: we are at the mercy of feelings and obligations quite beyond our control, Buchan seems to be saying, and are swept along by powers that surge both within and around us. This is as true for Margaret as it is for Francis; for John Murray, Lovat and all. All our youthful struggles, Buchan concludes (at twenty-two!), are just the ‘brave flickerings of life’ before ‘the ageless quiet of our destiny’. Virtue, if it befalls us, may not be lovely to gaze upon, like Margaret Murray, but, like the portrait of Francis Birkenshaw as provost of Dysart, be ‘grey-haired, hard-faced … with cold unfriendly-looking eyes’. The moral compass swings wildly for a while, then settles with resignation to its true bearing and thereafter - so we are told -never again wavers. Perhaps this tells us something about the personality and values, not of Francis Birkenshaw, but of John Buchan himself. In any case, it is an austere, compelling ending, with its own strange beauty.

James Robertson

To

Duncan Grant Warrand

To you, the well-read historian, there is little need to say that every event in this tale is not recorded for gospel. It is the story of the bleak side of the ‘Forty-Jive, of goodness without wisdom, of wisdom first cousin to vice, of those who, like a certain lord, had no virtue but an undeniable greatness. You will ask my authority for Francis’ mission to Lovat - or the singular conduct of Mr. John Murray. You will inquire how the final execution came six months too soon, and you will ransack Broughton’s ‘Journal’ in vain to find my veracious narrative of the doings of his beautiful wife. Such little matters are the chronicler’s licence. But some excuse is needed for the introduction of your kinsman, the Lord President, and the ragged picture of so rare a character. My apology must be that on my canvas there was no room for full-length portraits of statesmanship and honesty.

Such as it is, I dedicate to you this chronicle of moorland wars, for the sake of an ‘auld Highland story’, which neither of us would wish to see forgotten.

JB June 1899

‘E’en so, swimmingly appears,

Through one’s after supper musings,

Some lost lady of old years

With her beauteous vain endeavour

And goodness unrepaid as ever.’

Browning

BOOK I

ONE

The Birkenshaws of that Ilk and their Fortunes

When Gideon Birkenshaw - of Birkenshaw Tower in the Forest and the lands of Markit beneath the brow of Cheviot - was summoned by death to his account, he left all to his eldest son and turned the other penniless upon the world. Robert, the heir, stepped unthinking into the dead man’s shoes, and set himself to the family task of amassing gear. He was a man already grim and ageing at thirty, with the stoop of an inquisitor and deep eyes to search out the intents of the heart. Of old the house had been insignificant raiders, adding field to field and herd to herd by a method which it seemed scarce fair to call plunder, so staidly was it pursued. No minstrel sang their deeds, no tale of them was told at nightfall in the village, but in all decency and hardness they went like oxen to their resting places. They cared naught for politics, but every now and again the stock bred a religious enthusiast. A Birkenshaw had served with the Lords of the Congregation, and another had spoken his testimony in the face of the Grassmarket and a thousand people, and swung off valiantly into eternity. The watchword of all was decency and order, and as peace settled upon the land they had left off their old huntings and harryings and fallen to money-making with the heartiest goodwill. And they prospered deservedly. While the old poor Tweedies, Horsebrocks, and Burnets, whose names were in a hundred songs and tales, who had fought with quixotic gallantry always on the losing side, and spent their substance as gaily as they had won it, sank into poverty and decline, the crabbed root of the Birkenshaws budded and put forth shoots. With anxious eyes and prayerful lips they held on their wonted path, delighting in the minutes of bargaining and religious observance, yet full of pride of house and brave with the stubborn valour of the unimaginative.

It was indeed their pride of race, their inherited spirit, and their greater wealth which alone marked them off from the burly farmers of the countryside. To see them at kirk or market, their clothes were as coarse, their talk as rude, and their companions the same as their neighbours of the sheep-farms. But all knew and owned the distinction. Somewhere in the heavy brow and chin of a Birkenshaw there lurked passion and that ferocity which can always awe the born retainer. The flashes were scarce, but they were long remembered. When a son of the house broke the jaw of Chasehope for venturing to sell him a useless collie bitch, the countryside agreed that the man but got his deserts for seeking to overreach a Birkenshaw beyond the unwritten rules of dealing. And darker stories were told - of men maimed and slain in change-houses, even, it was whispered, at the door of the House of God, for chancing in their folly upon the family madness.

They married women like themselves, hard, prudent, and close-lipped; seeking often far and wide for such a wife and never varying from their choice. Such marriages were seldom fruitful but never barren; one or two sons were always left to hand on the name and the inheritance. No man had yet been found of sufficient courage to mate with a daughter of the house, and so it fell out that those gaunt women, strong and tall as the men, stayed in the Birkenshaw Tower till their brothers’ marriage, and then flitted to the lonely dwelling of Markit, where there always waited some brother or uncle in need of a housekeeper. Such an order in life brought its reward. There were no weaklings to spoil the family credit, and like a stripped unlovely pine the stock survived, abiding solitary on its hilltop and revelling in storms.

But in their lives they paid assiduous court to a certain kind of virtue. In the old riding days the house had robbed and harried, as it were, under protest; and now, being fallen on settled times, they cultivated honesty with the greatest diligence.

A Birkenshaw’s word was as good as his oath, and his oath as his bond, and woe befall the man who doubted either. The milk of human kindness was confined with them to family channels and embittered with the grudging which comes of obedience to the letter. By the canon of the Word of God they were men of a singular uprightness, but it was a righteousness which took the colour of the family traits. They set diligence, honour, and a freedom from gross vices on the one hand, and passion, relentless severity, and little love for their neighbours on the other, and, finding the result to be a species of pride, labelled it an excellence. Withal, their penuriousness made their lives frugal and their toils gave them health, so that, a race of strong men, they ran their imperious course, feared in their faults and hated in their virtues.

The pastimes of their class were little thought of. It was long since one of the name had been seen with the deerhounds or playing a salmon in the floods of Tweed. Long days of riding over their broad lands were varied with noisy mornings in the clatter of a marketplace or evenings filled with the sleep of well-fed lassitude. But when they came among their fellows it was with something of a presence - the air of masters who cared little for the quibblings of superiority but were ready if occasion came to prove it by deed. Hence came the owercomes of ‘A Birkenshaw’s glower’, and ‘”Gang out o’ my gate,” quo’ auld Birkenshaw,’ with which the conversation of the valley was garnished.

In such manner did life pass by in the grey stone dwelling which crowned the Yarrow braes, with Yarrow crooning in the nooks below. It was but yesterday I passed the place, which no lapse of years can change. The vale of long green hills which falls eastward from the lochs is treeless and desert for miles, with a wan stream sweeping ‘neath barren hill-shoulders and the grey-green bent lending melancholy to all. But of a sudden it changes to a defile; the hills huddle together till the waters can scarce find passage; and a forest of wild-wood chokes the gorge. Brown heather and green hazels crest every scarred rock and fringe the foot of Birkenshaw Tower, which looks steeply down on its woodland valley. Soft meadow-grass is shaded by a tangle of ashes, and in every dell the burn’s trickle slips through a wild flower garden; while in broad pools and shining stretches Yarrow goes singing her ageless song for evermore.

Of the two sons born to Gideon Birkenshaw in the house on the hill, the elder was even as his father, a man of few words and hard deeds, ungenial, honest, and with all his qualities grounded on that rock of devilment which lay deep in the temper of his house. His person was even as his nature, and it was not hard to see in the spare and sinewy figure of the son the immature presentment of the father. But the younger, Francis, was like a changeling in the place. From his birth he had none of the ways of the rest; his very form was like a caricature of the family traits, and whatever was their strength was in him perverted to weakness. He had the Birkenshaw high cheekbones, the fleshy chin and the sunken eyes, but all were set carelessly together, as if by nature in a moment of sport. He had his father’s long limbs and broad back, but in him the former were feeble and knoitering, the latter bent in an aimless stoop. In character the parody was the more exaggerated. Shrewdness became a debased cunning which did not halt at a fraud; energy, mere restlessness; and persistence, stupidity. Also the mastery over the bodily appetites which marked the kin was wholly absent in him, and early in life he took to brandy drinking and tavern loafing. Every fold has its black sheep and every house its weakling, but to the proud family whence he sprung Francis was something more than a ne’er-do-weel. He was a lasting disgrace, always at the doors, staring in their faces at kirk and market. It is the curse of such a kin that a man who shows somewhat weaker than the rest marches straight to the devil without a chance of redemption, and the house ofBirkenshaw with drawn lips and averted eyes suffered the prodigal to go his way.

But in the trivial Mr. Francis there remained some shreds and rags of quality unperceived by his kinsfolk. He alone in the whole history of his race possessed a tincture of the humanities, picked up in a ragged way but worthy of note. He had something of a poetic soul and saw wonders in hill and water which were not for the busy men of affairs who rode their horses over the countryside solely that they might reach an end. He was humane in little matters, and no dumb creature suffered ill usage at his hands. Even in his vices he preserved some tatters of kindliness which endeared him to the folk with whom he consorted. In a dim, confused way he strove to guide his shambling life in the way of mercy, and in his stumbling made helpless efforts to rise.

It was clear to all that such a state of matters could not long continue, and the mind of the countryside waited for a crisis. It arrived at length and in the expected way. The blacksmith of Birkenshaw was one Reuben Gowanlock, a drunken, ill-conditioned fellow, with a set hatred of the family in the Tower and a marvellous power of quarrelling. His daughter Marion, a handsome girl of twenty, fell much in the way of Mr. Francis in his village sojournings, and an intimacy sprang up between them which endured all through the spring and summer of a year. No record exists of its nature, but it is certain that the couple took long walks in the sunset vale, during which Francis would charm her ears with his flowery rhapsodic talk and her vanity with his presence. In the winter a child was born, and in the eyes of all the laird’s son stood confessed as the father. The blacksmith cursed deep and swore vengeance; poor Marion dared not show herself abroad; and things looked black enough for both. But worse was still to follow, for the place was startled one morn by the news that Francis had married the girl in all good faith. Here was food for gossip and speculation, and it was the common verdict that the man had made reparation in terror of Reuben’s menaces. Yet it is certain that nothing was less in Francis’ mind. Whatever grave lack he had there was no stint in his share of the family courage. His motive for the deed was an indistinct sense of honour, a certain ill-defined compassionateness of heart, which he scarcely realized and would not have sought to defend.

For the twain the end came sharp and cruel. There was long speech in the place of the interview between Francis and his father, and stray fragments of what passed were spread abroad.

The wretched creature with his farcical handsomeness stood shivering before the terrible old man, who represented the essence of a long line which knew no mercy. Every inch of his face was browned and wrinkled with sun and wind; his eye glanced steely as an October sun; and his figure was alive with vigour and wrath. He had been absent on a visit to Markit when the events occurred, and all was over ere he returned. So in riding-boots and greatcoat he sat at the table’s end with a hunting crop before him. He heard the village explanation of his son’s folly and he was not slow to believe it. His sentences came out with a dry rasp and with an ominous accompaniment of lowering brows, ‘I will not speak of the crime against God’s law as written in His book, for that is a matter between you and your saul.’ Indeed, it was said that others of the Birkenshaws had erred in like manner, and in any case it was not a sin which involved any surcease of pride. ‘But of one thing I will speak,’ he went on, ‘and that is of your offence against the bluid of the man that begat ye and the house that gives ye your name. Ye have mairrit a tinkler lass, ye splaittering body, because ye were feared at her faither’s mauvering. By God, there was never yet ane o’ your race wi’ sic a taid’s hert.’

The wretched son made no attempt at a defence which he would have scarcely told to himself. He shuffled with ineffectual feeling, a prey to sentiment and inward tears.

‘But “my son” did I say?’ the other went on. ‘Na, na, ye are nae son o’ mine. Gang to the midden ye’ve been pikin’ on and let a cleanly honest house be quit o’ ye. Gang off, the pair o’ ye, and breed up bairns to rin for porters and serve in byres. By the Lord Almichty I disown ye, and I wis nae mair than to see ye in the kennel ye’ve made for yoursel’. Gang out o’ my sicht, ye thing o’ strae.’

Francis went out of the room with an indistinct pain of heart, for he was no more than sober from his morning cups. Yet the grating tones had scarcely ceased, the door was scarcely closed, ere the old man laid his head on his hands and suffered in dry-eyed misery the pangs of pride wounded through affection.

Of the exact movements of Mr. Francis after that hour there remains no adequate tale. He could not bide in the house, nor did his remnants of pride suffer him to remain in the village. With such small belongings as were his he took himself and his wife to Edinburgh, and set up dwelling in a dingy room in the Monk’s Vennel. How he lived no man could tell, but it seems likely that when all his gear had gone for brandy this scion of a reputable house did odd jobs for whoever was willing to hire him, from copying a bill to carrying a bundle. One thing is certain, that his course, whatever it was, soon drew to an end. His body was never strong, and his impressionable and capricious temper of mind was not far removed from craziness. Poverty and dram-drinking so wrought upon him that soon he was little better than an enfeebled idiot, sitting melancholy on tavern benches and feeding the fire of life on crude spirits. Two more children - daughters - were born to him, and some five years after his departure from home Mr. Francis Birkenshaw had become a mere wreck of his former wreckage, a parody of a parody. Six months later a fever took him, and kindly Death stepped in with his snuffer and turned the guttering candle into blackness.

Hitherto we have not spoken of Mistress Marion Birkenshaw, who adorned the dim house in the Monk’s Vennel. Her beauty, at first considerable, had grown with the years to heaviness, and naught remained but singular black eyebrows. Her nature was not extraordinary, but rejoiced in the niceties of gossip and the refinements of housekeeping. Her early behaviour was the sudden blossoming of romance in an orderly mind, and with the advancing months she returned to the placid level of the common. Had she married decently and dwelt in her native village she would have been a matron without reproach, a mistress of gossip and old-wives’ tales, glorying in little hospitalities and petty hatreds. As it was, she ruled her household with a bustling hand, and found neighbours in a desert of strangers. The clack of her tongue sounded all day about the doors, or was sunk in the afternoon to a contented sing-song when Mistress Gilfillan dropped in to sew with her and tell her woes.

Even in so hard a place she attained to some measure of happiness, and ordered sprawling children and feckless husband with a pride in the very toil. Loud-tongued, noisy, coarse as sackcloth, a wallower in the juicily sentimental, she yet had something of the spirit of a general, and marshalled her ragged forces in decent array.

On the death of Mr. Francis her action took a characteristic path. For, meeting Robert, now master of the broad lands of Birkenshaw, in the High Street one chill February morn, she forthwith detailed to him his brother’s debts, and with the abandon of her class glided from becoming tears into the necessary question of maintenance. The Laird’s feelings at the moment would be hard to tell. The thought that one of his house should have sunk so low that his widow had to beg her bread, stung him like a lash. He lost for the moment his habitual reserve. With a mumbled ‘Tak it, wumman, tak it; there’ll be mair to follow,’ he thrust some gold into her hand; and thenceforth came quarterly payments from Birkenshaw with a bare word of communication. Marion took them gladly, for she had no other choice, and on such means she reared her children to grown age.

One incident in her character remains which is eloquent in its strangeness. From the day of her departure she held no communication with her folk at the smithy, manifesting no interest in their doings and shunning even the mention of their names. Deep in her soul was a well of sentiment. She had mated with a Birkenshaw, and some peace-offering was due to the fetich of the family pride. A sense of an honour paid to her hung ever on her conscience; it made her look with respect on her own children as something higher than herself; and it forced her to the severance of natural ties. It is doubtful, indeed, whether they were ever tightly knit, for the drunken father had little kindness for any. But, such as they were, they were gladly renounced, and with something not far from heroism this foolish woman took loneliness for her portion, a solitude brightened with the halo of a great connection.

TWO

How Mr. Francis Birkenshaw Departed his Native City

The child Francis grew up to manhood with precipitancy, for in that house life was not suited for a lengthy play-day. At five he had been as ugly as sin in face, though well-grown and straight in body. His father’s hard features and ruddy skin were joined to Marion’s sloe-black eyes and hair, and such a conjunction is not fair in childhood. So peculiarly sinister an appearance would have made him the butt of his coevals, had he not possessed a hot temper and an uncommonly hard fist. From his sixth year battles were of daily occurrence, and it was rarely that the weekend found him with his face unmarked. But inch by inch, wound by wound, he fought his way to fame, till the mere sight of his black countenance was more than enough to hush the wrangling of the others and incline their ears to his words.

But with those days we have little to do, and it is at the maturity of eighteen that we would take up the tale of his life. His sisters, Jean and Lisbeth, were now grown to high-coloured, loud-spoken girls, who shared their mother’s likings and their mother’s comeliness. The Birkenshaw payments made comfort possible, and the house was conducted in a pleasant stir, with gossips sitting at all hours and the sharp tones of the housewife guarding its cleanliness and order. The two lasses were the blacksmith’s true grandchildren, and in no way different from a thousand such maids in the city. They loved to dress in their best of a Sabbath and walk in decent procession to the Cross Kirk, where the ministrations of Mr. Linklater were sugared with the attentions of the young apprentices. They were notable cooks and wrought all day to their mother’s bidding with a cheery bustle. In a word, they were of their mother’s pattern -honest, fresh-coloured, hearty, and forthcoming to all.

Had it not been for their brother’s presence, the household in the Monk’s Vennel might have been an abode of prosperous peace. But Francis was a puzzle to most folk and a grief to his mother such as her foolish loose-lived husband had never been. The years brought him height and strength and a handsome face. It would have been hard to find in all the town a nobler figure of a youth, when anger did not distort the features. From some unknown forebear he derived an air of uncommon masterfulness, and a carriage which might have vied with that of the greatest buck of the day, my Lord Craigforth himself. His temper was like his body, fierce and strong, and hot as a red fire, so that no man could anger him with safety. In happier conditions he might have followed the paths of virtue, for there seemed nothing ignoble in that brow and eye. But in the kitchen of his home, among the clatter of neighbour tongues and women’s gossip, in the presence of his mother and sisters and the rotund housewives who called them friends, he was woefully out of place.

In his childhood he had cared little for the thing, for the street was his home at most hours; but as he grew to age the whole life oppressed him with deep disgust. To him alone had fallen a share of the Birkenshaw temper, and he revolted from this unctuous existence. For his kin he had fits of tenderness, but at his age no feeling is so weak as domestic love. The result was not hard to foresee. With such share as he had of the family income he took to his own pleasures, and the house saw him not save at meal-times and the late night.