|
(Continued from page 92.)
Though Euphame and Katie
bore no bond of sisterhood between them, they were now and then thrown
together, and marked out in a species of association. They were of an age,
womanly little maidens of thirteen, and they were as well born as any
gentlewoman under Lady Somerville's protection. Crichton was a good name
in the south of Scotland, and Euphame was able to look across the Borough
Moor to the setting sun gleaming in rays of gold on the imposing mass of
irregular buildings, crowded with suggestive coats of arms, mottoes, and
distiches, whose venerable and grotesque character, charmed and puzzled
future generations, which was called the Wrichtishouse, and which might
have been founded originally by the carpenters who cut down the waving
oaks on the Borough Moor, but which was as much a testimony to the state
and influence of this branch of the Napiers, as Merchiston to that greener
stem; yet here was poor Euphame educated by charity, and her mother no
better than a bedeswoman in the Trinity; and Katie Crichton's brother
receiving alms from the shade of George Heriot; and many of the girls and
young women had well-to-do connexions and comfortable homes, and had only
played upon Lady Somerville's bounty, like the abusers of the purport of
Christchurch, with the intention of securing the education, the geography
and the dancing, (there was dancing in the douce town, though the
magistrates and ministers only permitted it to be taught by licensed
professors,) which distinguished it from a dame's school, and which was so
rare in Anne's reign that Macaulay is compelled to give over the
Englishwomen —the great-grand-daughters of Elizabeth's learned ladies, the
grand-daughters and daughters of the Lady Russells and Lady Hutchesons —
to their accompt-books and family recipes, after they had spelt out their
chapters in their Bibles; and Pope could not be expected to grant more
than "Taylor and the Book of Martyrs." But though Mary, princess and
queen, of solid parts and reasonable industry, and taught by a bishop,
stumbled in her grammar, and fell in her spelling, in Scotland the love of
learning survived the dreary dissipation and frivolity of the second
Charles's lustre, and the religious troubles excited thought and
stimulated genius. Lady Kenmure, to whom Samuel Rutherford addressed his
letters, was no illiterate woman; Grizel Baillie sang sweetly on her
hill-side perch; and at not a very distant date, Lady Wardlaw of Pitreavie,
from her castle, with the sound and the sight of Largs awakening old
echoes in her imagination, executed such an imitation of the heroic march
of a ballad of the sea-border, as might have laid the dark spirit in the
burdened breast of a warlike Saul. But these interlopers for the sake of
the loaves and the fishes of knowledge in Lady Somerville's Hospital, did
not hesitate to shed their wit on more honest recipients of the provost's
widow's gift; they scorned the poverty-stricken pensioners; in great
inconsistency, they viewed with contempt their debt to other charities;
and without any particular acquaintance with the history of the knights of
St John, they would dub Euphame Napier and Katie Crichton hospitallers, in
contradistinction to themselves, who only wore Lady Somerville's badge,
and, so far as food and raiment were concerned, could drop it any day. How
often old and young, with no primitive inclination, are forced into
communications and combinations for which they can scarcely account, and
which they cannot shake off—which come to affect them seriously, perhaps
to influence their whole lives; and looking back, and tracing the first
almost compulsory beginning of the association, the faithless call it
fate, and the faithful providence.
Morning after morning, for
half a score of years. Lady Somerville's maidens were aroused in the sunny
summer dawn and the bleak winter's darkness by the warning bell; rose from
their hard pallets, washed, dressed expeditiously at their tiny
looking-glasses, met at the early exercises in the hall, where the sole
license of the day was allowed to the chaplain. Mr Durie (something of a
fragrant name in old covenanting Edinburgh ears) might hold forth at
will—time was not dribbled out, or autocratically allotted to him. The
porridge might be scalding, the message-boy tirling at the pin, no quiver
of impatience disturbed Mrs Jonet's fixed features and folded hands; no
sleepy, hungry girl might yawn at her peril. But Mr Durie was generally
merciful as well as earnest; and there was something touching and
significant in this loyal homage to spiritual duties and needs, and
something fair, with the lofty fairness of Jephthah's daughter among the
poet's "fair women," in the intentness and care, whatever might be lacking
besides, with which the thoughtful among the maidens set their soft,
dimpled faces, and folded their hands like Mrs Jonet, and laboured to feel
in a devout frame of mind, to hate the world, to mortify the
flesh—advanced and isolated limbs of Christianity, of which they were in
danger of framing a distorted body—forgetting to receive the kingdom of
heaven as a little child. Afterwards Mr Durie said grace, and returned
thanks for the bowls of porridge and porringers of milk; and he also heard
the girls read and repeat portions of geography and history, and presided
over maps, copies, and slates—subsiding marvellously from a serious,
solemn divine into quite a simple, abstracted dominie, upon whom the more
waggish of his pupils, and even the grave girls like Euphame, moved by
their thirteen or fifteen years, played little tricks and ludicrous
manoeuvres, in all affection and respect, when Mrs Jonet's back was
turned. A half-cracked little Frenchman came in and instructed them in
English 'country-dances and French minuets, when Mrs Jonet was always
present, though she looked as if she could have snapped up both violinist
and violin. The rest of the day was much given over to the elaborate
embroidery, whose sale assisted the funds of the Hospital, and which took
the place of the languages, literature, and dash of science of modern
polite accomplishments; with lessons in cookery, meals, and airings in the
garden, and errands under particular stipulations and restrictions into
the town, under the stone crown of St Giles's itself—on to the evening
catechism and diet of worship, and the early retirement to rest, and
sinking down of profound silence on the old house in Bristo Street, which
had once contained its rough-riders and its gay ladies, its pert
waiting-women and its boisterous serving-men. Why, they were like nuns
these Somerville maidens, say you? Kay, they were free—they were training,
wisely or unwisely, for work and warfare and life in the world —not for
the prolongation of this overlooked, fenced, and guarded seed-time into a
barren harvest.
III.
Now, see the girls at their
embroidery frames. The two girls selected for notice, Euphame and Katie,
side by side: Katie losing her needle, entangling her silks, yawning,
whispering, humming snatches of "Robin's Testament," or "A mousie sat on
yon mill pin," or some "Waly, waly, by yon bank," all in the same voice;
and Euphame creating her faint roses with real artistic
satisfaction—scarcely looking up for an hour—recalling the text of the
rose of Sharon, which Mr Durie had quoted when he passed behind the
bench—wondering if the balm of Gilead were the same as the balm on their
terrace, and whether the cedars of Lebanon were greater than their
larch-tree, a shoot, as Lady Somer-ville averred, from one of Queen Mary's
larches which she brought over from France in a flower-pot—and descending
to a verse of William Dunbar's— "Nor hold nane other flower in sic daintie,
As the fresh rose of colour red and white, For if thou dois, hurt is thyne
honesty, Considdering that na flower is sae perfyte, Sae full of blisfull
angellyke beauty, Imperial truth, honour, and dignity."
Euphame did not possess the
key to the old ballads yet, and she was only conscious of a lurking,
doubtful kindness for Johnnie Armstrong and the Battle of Harlaw. There
Katie begins surreptitiously munching fragments of sweet cake and comfits,
with which her mother stuffed her pockets the last time she ran away to
the High Street. Euphame glances at her with supreme disdain. Bristo
Street is drearily dull to Katie, and the offence is trifling; and yet
there is something that excites disgust in the greed with which Katie
Crichton expatiates physically on sweetmeats. Just so the Flemish girls
mortally offended the wonderful daughter of the Vicar of Haworth. But that
was a morbid arid harsh mood; and it will be a grievous pity if upright,
intelligent, pure-tasted Euphame Napier becomes keen, irritable, and
miserable.
"George Barnwell" was
written about this time, and the scene may also remind you of Hogarth's
idle and industrious apprentices. Well, well, Euphame could not be the
Lord Mayor of London; and the mind may at once be relieved by the
assurance that Katie, poor child ! did not live to be hanged.
"Euphame Napier," whispers
Katie Crichton, "I saw a puggy in the Bow yesterday. Oh, Euphame, it was
so funny, I stood a whole half-hour before one of the forges watching it."
"And Mrs Jonet wanting the
lawn!" Euphame reproved her.
"Eh, Euphame, it was funny;
you would have laughed as well as I. It had on a red coat, like the
volunteers starting for Holland, and it danced a hornpipe. Euphame, would
you not have laughed?"
"May be," Euphame granted;
"but I would not have waited half-an-hour."
"You dinna ken; you would
have forgotten yourself."
"Not if Mrs Jonet had
bidden me be quick—the last word."
"You are aye to be in the
right, Euphame. Do you never commit wrong at all?" Childish as Katie was
in the midst of her precocious womanliness, she could mock at her Mentor.
"Whiles," confessed Euphame,
simply and sorrowfully.
"And what do you then, for
I never see or hear tell of it?"
"I tell Mrs Jonet, and say
I'm sorry, and I try to mind it in my prayers."
Katie was silenced, and
stared vaguely at her companion. Then she added briskly, "I think you 're
not very humble, Euphame. I think you mean to be a saint."
"And if I do, Katie, is
that an ill wish? Are we not all to strive to grow into saints?"
"Not me, Euphame; I think I
wadna like it. I think I would prefer to be the same as other folk—
neither better nor worse. I think it would be ower hard for me. Oh, I'm
tired of this frame! Euphame, Mrs Susannah has promised my mother a silk
sacque which she has left off wearing, and my mother is to keep it for me.
Mysie and Jean are served already.
Oh, Euphame, Mrs Susannah
is the bonniest, brawest lady you ever saw—her een are like diamonds, and
her cheek is more damask than your rose; and when she drinks the claret,
you see the purple stream blushing down her lily throat to the halse bane.
Since her father, Sir Alexander, brought her up from the south, there has
been no end of gallants about our house taking a dish of tea with her, and
hearkening to her wit—she's fond of her book for as braw as she is— and
they're aye carrying her away to the cock-fights, and the races, and the
assemblies, and to walk on the hill or at the pier of Leith. There is the
Laird of Penicuik, who comes ben and speirs for us, to win our word in his
favour, and sings and loups and snaps his fingers to his ain sang, 'Merry
may the maid be who marries wi' the miller'—he 's no sma' graith— and,
Euphame, I 'm to have her cast sacque with the yellow flowers."
"But you 're not to attend
cock-fights, or races, or be courted by the Laird of Penicuik, and you
maun wear Lady Somerville's badge—of what use will it be to you?"
"I wonder to hear you ! I
never go like this an hour at hame, and I walk out by the Palace Gardens,
and in the King's Park, with my sisters, in our trains and negliges and
fans, as fine as our betters. We are Crichtons, you maun mind, Euphame,
and you 're a Napier yourself; but you are poor-spirited, like Mark, who
will wear none but George Heriot's coat on holidays—no, though the
Parliament procession were to walk again—and says he does not care what he
has upon his back, and is aye flyting on us for silly, vain gipsies. Mark
is not guid company, but my mother will have him with us every time he is
abroad."
Euphame was pursuing her
own line of thought— "What would you do if you chanced to forgather with
Lady Somerville, or Mrs Jonet herself, when you were masquerading?"
"It sets you ill to say
that, Euphame Napier; we are masquerading here. I would make them a
courtesy and pass on; they are not my mistresses on the causeway."
"You would run away, or
creep out of sight," contradicted Euphame, with a girl's full, hearty
laugh, quickly restrained.
"Well, Euphame, I do not
believe I cared so much for grand clothes till I was put in here. Do you
mind how I grat the first week?—you were kind to me, though you looked
down on me, for you've no feeling, Euphame. But to wear duds like these
day after day—ne'er a bonny red roquelay, or a sky-blue snood ribband, or
a buckle to put into our shoon, though Mrs Jonet shews the last on her own
person —it would drive any poor lass wild for dress."
"Who's clavering here?"
cried Mrs Jonet, suddenly appearing in the doorway. "Lasses to be diligent
maun hold their tongues. I'll allow no clashing, or gaping and laughing,
during work-hours. The best lesson you can learn is discretion and
silence. I'll bid Mr Durie discourse upon a modest and sober conversation,
after your four-hours. I reck you've need of the exhortation."
"Mrs Jonet," proclaimed a
firm, pleasant voice, penitently, "I spoke and I laughed—I beg your
pardon."
"You may well do so,
Euphame Napier. Since you've owned your fault, you may still wait on your
mother at the Trinity; but as you've proved yourself as glaikit as the
lave, you maun keep the house till Highland Bawbie's work is through, and
she can walk fore and back with you. Better that you abide where you are
altogether. Your mother should consider your welfare, lass, and not be for
ever seeking a sight of you."
Euphame's calm breast
panted, and the carnation on her cheeks became poppy red, and something
like a flash escaped from her gray eyes, but she submitted with a struggle
to the hardship and the aggravation of the censure.
Fortunately her attention
was soon diverted by Katie, who whispered impressively, almost before Mrs
Jonet was beyond hearing—
"What made you tell,
Euphame? You've lost half your play, and it is your own blame, and she
would never have found out who was to bear the wyte." "But I was in the
offence, and she might have blamed the innocent; and I 'm not to speak
another word after I've begged her pardon."
"I never promised, Euphame.
I tell you that you're too strict; you are not the house mistress; how are
you to get through the world crying out in this way? Mark would not do
this; Mark just goes his gate, and scorns one and all. I would not tell a
lee myself; at least, I never telled a lee till I came to be so curbed and
questioned here, and I make the littlest that I can find serve my
purpose."
"O Katie!" cried Euphame,
in horror; "it is the devil makes the difference between big and little
lees —the Lord's command is, 'Thou shalt not bear false witness.'"
"I can say the commandments
weel enough, Euphame, though I may be beat by 'the reasons annexed' and
'what is forbidden.' But you were not to speak, Euphame Napier, and it is
you who have broken your word; now, what do you say to that, lass?"
IV.
Away in old Trinity
Hospital, by the beautiful College Church, with its rich English
architecture, its slanting roof, and lofty windows, and its angels and
tortured monsters alternating on its corbels—where Mary of Gueldres slept,
and where, though her benevolence lived on, no priest, in the terms of her
testament, after every mass repaired to her tomb, read the "De Profundis,"
and sprinkled the holy water—poor Mary's anxious provision for the repose
of her soul found no respondent now in Protestant Edinburgh, but let us
hope that though the ceremonies, which were idle pageants, were laid
aside, her great works did follow her. The adjoining collegiate buildings
had been presented by Regent Murray to Sir Simon Preston, provost of
Edinburgh, and to them had been transferred from their original ruinous
domicile the company of bedesmen, (including bedeswomen,) enjoying a safe
and easy retreat for the decline of their . days by the charity of the
departed queen.
Within those walls,
venerable even in Anne's reign, past a hall with noble roof, royal coat of
arms, carved reading-desk and heavy oak chairs, to which the eating-room
in Bristo Street was a very insignificant apartment; threading labyrinths
of priceless oaken balustrades, open galleries, and great wooden presses;
by cupboards which contained the most curiously chased antique plate, out
of the Castle and the Palace; enriched by many another donation besides
the fee of Katharine Norvell, the widow of the great printer Bassendyne,—a
stranger, arrived at the ranges of monastic cells, recognises that this
hoary old house, and its perfect Gothic furniture and fine relics, like an
enchanted pile stranded in a busy, changing town, till the inexorable
necessities of the steam age sweep even this single vestige clean away, is
entirely dedicated to the shelter and comfort of the old bedesmen in blue
gowns, and the bedeswomen in blue coats and kirtles, whose brothers and
sisters in the world abroad receive such scanty respect, are generally
overlooked and carelessly trodden down.
In one of the tiny cells,
like a figure in a niche, or the blandest and most respectable of old
women in blue coat and kirtle, replacing the scurvy giantess or white lady
of the box of a caravan, sat Mrs Napier spinning. In this convent
world—for Mary of Gueldres' institution retained to the last much of the
stillness and dimness of the cloister—the widow, who had been the hearty
wife of an aristocratically descended, liberal, hospitable Edinburgh
merchant, drew out the lapsing thread of her life. She had known her day
when she was prosperous, gay, and beloved, and now she was content to be
one of the dependent, submissive, buried pensioners of the Trinity, so
that her dear Euphame was cared for, and in a way to acquire the means of
compassing an honourable and comfortable livelihood, besides being trained
in piety and godliness for a world to come. She was content; and what a
commentary that was on the woman ! on her frank equanimity, her sweet
endurance, her Christian faith and charity! She was neither a wise woman,
nor a strong woman. Euphame took a very moderate portion of her qualities
from her mother; but she was as loveable as foolish old Lear. As she had
not swayed a sceptre, she did not stand out on her dignity, or insist on
her hundred knights; but she had the old king's impulsive, unreasonable
fits of wrath and indignation, alternating with a lavishly kind and
indulgent temper. She had not been a prudent woman in saving her husband's
income; she was for ever worsted in her encounters with her worldly
neighbours; she was susceptible of lively prejudices and partialities; and
was, like many another old lady, comically honest and wicked in her
enjoyment of a little gossip and scandal. But ah ! her wickedness went
such a little bit, was made up so purely of curiosity and experience, and
a spice of conceit in her own penetration and judgment (of which, though
she was a quick old lady, she had little or none); she contradicted so
earnestly, with such perfect sincerity, and without the least hypocrisy,
to-day's cynical views in the benevolence of to-morrow; and in her most
satirical and severe moods she would have so pitied her neighbours in any
unlooked-for misfortune, and would have served them with such good-will
and alacrity, and that with her fatted calf, her very best.
Mrs Napier would have been
invaluable in a besieged fort. As long as self-denial and bodily fatigue
were the questions, that old woman would have stood in the breach; and if
Mrs Napier would have thus pleased, comforted, relieved the world at
large, what would she not have done for Euphame? Euphame, who was the very
apple of her eye! Euphame, the thought of whom was sufficient to gladden
her dullest day; and when she was able to get a good bit of news, or
manufacture some little comfort, or procure some little delicacy, and have
it put by her, and be all ready for Euphame's next visit, and nothing to
do but to look forward to it, and while away the delay by spinning at her
little wheel, and being profoundly interested in the affairs of the
Trinity Hospital, and the stirring herself up occasionally with a
persuasion that she was responsible for her nephew, Adie Napier, one of
George Heriot's boys—she was as happy as when she filled the " land" and
tenement in the Canongate, not so far below the Wrichtishouse of the
Napiers, and stood behind the parapet of her own roof to witness the city
shows, and presided at substantial burghers' suppers, graced by a knight
or a nobleman on an occasion, and was waited on by her serving-women and
her husband's apprentices.
Euphame stands beside her,
in the narrow space of her dormitory, the erect, blooming young girl, in
her old-fashioned attire, in the childless atmosphere of the Trinity,
sacred to age alone; and Mrs Napier quivers, and flushes, and sparkles
like a young beauty with joy, and looks Euphame all over, and feels and
pats her as if she were blind; and presents her with the warm hose she had
just knitted, and the lace neckerchief she has had given her by one of the
other old ladies whom she has nursed through her third spring sickness ;
and accepts Euphame's flowers—her daffodils and pinks—and points out her
last Wednesday's flowers still preserved, but now to be superseded, with
great delight; and must hear every particular of the last week, though it
be the very same as the one that went before; and tells her own little
stories, how the governor was cross to Mr Mair, because he always stayed
out beyond his time; how Mrs Guthrie was allowed to keep a cat, because a
great rat had gnawed its way in the corner under her bed; and Mrs
Christine could not sleep, because she would maintain that the eat might
fly through the closed doors into her room, and then see if it would not
seek up to her breast, and sit there and suck her sleeping breath away,
and Mrs Guthrie would be guilty of her death; and Mrs Christine had told
her such a story of Mrs Guthrie's half-sister, who came in her chair
sometimes to the hospital—how she had sold her yellow hair to the
periwig-makers, to pay the charges of her "whims," and "follies," and
"treats," at Mutrie's Hill and Broughton, and persuaded the advocate that
it was caught in the flame of a sconce, and scorched at one side, so that
she had to clip the other short to make them equal—a racketing, deceitful
quean! The advocate supped sorrow with his marrow.
"But I saw the lady a week
syne, riding down Bristo Street, with her long curls waving over her
jacket," asserts the accurate Euphame.
Mrs Napier fancies that the
lady may have adopted one of the periwigs, to whose raw material she has
contributed, or that Euphame may have seen her before the deed; and when
Euphame is resolute that it is not so, Mrs Napier gets hot, and cries that
bairns are always wiser than their elders; and that from the days in which
she has seen evil, her eyesight alone may be trusted to detect a giddy
pate and a waster. But Euphame has only to say, "Mother, I did not mean to
vex you," and the huff is gone, and the old lady is off as cheerily as
ever, describing how Adie Napier had smuggled to her his torn holiday
suit, and Mark Crichton had carried the parcel, and been in trouble for
it. Adie was so vexed because Mark had withheld an explanation, and it was
too late for Adie to dissipate the mystery.
"It was wrong in Adie and
in Mark Crichton, too," judged Euphame.
"May be, my dear, I might
be the furthest wrong of the three. Na, I admit it, Euphame. I 'm weak, I
downa be hard to young folk; but you've never tempted me, my daughter."
"You're ower guid to me,
mother." Then, after a pause—"Katie Crichton says Mark is not good company
at home."
See what inveterate gossips
we are, when even Euphame takes her turn at it! But what is gossip? Where
does the wholesome check of public opinion end, and the lash of detraction
and calumny begin?
"She's bold to say it, Euphame. Adie tells me the lad was reported beyond
hours for three successive free nights, because he had to guard these
witless lasses, who would be out in their screens to see some crowd, or
fire, or fight; and he wared his gift-money that he had gathered to help
his 'prentice fee, to save his mother from spending her whole lodgers'
rent on the mantuamaker, and the butcher and baker—the heartless woman!
I've no patience with that wife, Euphame—to spoil her idle lasses might be
forgiven her, but to sorn on her lad! Adie found it out; ne'er a word did
he speak of it to Adie; he's a close chield, and a thocht sour, but he's
manful."
"He's eydent, mother, but
he's harsh, they say. What right has he to be proud and stern, when man
and woman, fervent and slothful, are alike sinners?"
"Never specr the right,
bairn, but deplore the fact; for poor Mark Crichton's heart will never be
lighter than it should be, in these the days of his youth."
"Mother," observed Euphame,
escaping to a more satisfactory topic, "in four years, if the Lord spare
me, I will be seventeen, and I will be a year and more fit for work—but
that is the age fixed for quitting the Hospital. I think Lady Somerville
will recommend me to a place; and I will be very steady and save my fee,
and it will soon gather, until it be sufficient to take up house with. I
can teach bairns as I've been taught; or embroider for the great ladies
and the great houses. You will spin when you're inclined—for you will
leave this Trinity, mother, and come home to me."
"That I will, my bird; and
so blythe as we will bo together! I wish your poor father may be permitted
to look down upon us, Euphame," concluded Mrs Napier, wistfully, and
afterwards she joked about spinning their plenishing, for her old
lily-white sheets and blankets, which she had spun as a bride, were worn
and wasted, and lost in the dispersion of their property long ago. Yet all
the time the simple old woman knew right well that she would never live to
see the end of these four years, and Euphame's term with Lady Somerville.
She was conscious of failing strength and sinking powers. She had not been
very foreseeing in the course of her life, nevertheless she anticipated
its close. "But Euphame will be a stately woman, a braw, bonnie cummer,
though I'm not here to see her. I'll maybe be permitted to see her, like
her father, far off from the golden heights of heaven, when the Lord will
have forgiven me, on account of His dear Son, for being too proud of my
lass in the mountain of my sins," added the poor mother, with a little
sob, and was cheery and hopeful, and self-forgetful and happy the next
moment.
(To be continued.) |
