Romances of the old town of Edinburgh

by Alexander Leighton

The Story of Davie Dempster’s Ghaist.

THERE was once an old saying very common in the mouths of the Edinburgh people—“As dead as Davie Dempster.” It has long since passed away; but whether it was preferable to the one to which it has given place, viz.,—“As dead as a door-nail,” we must leave to those wise people who can measure degrees of nonvitality in objects which are without life. Be all which as it may, the imputed deadness of David Dempster may appear to have some interest to us when we know the story from which the old popular saying took its rise; and the more, that the story cannot be said to want a moral vitality, if it has not even a spice of humour in it. Certain, to begin with, David Dempster was at least once alive, for we can vouch for his having been a very respectable denizen of the old city. We can even impart the nature of his calling, that of a trafficker in the stuff of man’s wearing apparel, which he sold to those who were willing to buy, and even to some who were unwilling to buy; for David’s tongue, if not so long as his ell-wand, was a deuced deal more supple. Nor does our information end here, for we can, we are happy to say, tell the name of his wife, which was Dorothy; nay, we know even the interesting particular, that when David had more Edinburgh ale in his stomach than humility in his head, he got so far into the heroics as to call her Dorothea; but as for the maiden name of this woman, who was the wife of a man so famous as to have been the source and origin of a proverb, we regret to say that it has gone into the limbo of things that are lost. To make amends, we can, however, add that Mrs Dempster was, at the time of our story, as plump and well coloured as Florabel; but as for David, who was ten years older than his wife, he was just as plain as any man needs be without pretension to being disagreeable.

We have said that David Dempster and his wife were respectable, and we do not intend to offer a jot more evidence on the point, than the fact that they went to “the kirk” on Sundays, and that, too, with faces of the normal Calvinistic elongation, and in good clothes; Dorothy being covered, head and all, with her red silk plaid, and David immersed in the long square coat of the times, with cuffs as big as four-pound tea-bags, buttons as broad as crown-pieces, and pockets able to have held Dr Webster’s—their minister’s—pulpit Bible in the one, and as many bottles of wine as the worthy gentleman could carry away at a sitting, in the other; an allusion this last by no means ill-natured, as we may show by making the admission that, if David and Dorothy had had heads big enough to carry away all that their excellent preacher told them, they required no more for unction and function for a whole week. But, however fair things looked in the sanctuary, it was otherwise at home in Lady Stair’s Close, where they resided, for it so happened that our worthy clothes-merchant had got into debt; nay, there were hornings and captions out against him, and he stood a chance any day in all the year round of being shut up in “The Heart of Mid-Lothian,” not nearly so soft a one as Dorothy’s. Not that all David’s creditors were equally hard upon him, for the laird of Rubbledykes—a small property on the left-hand side of the road to Cramond—Mr Thomas Snoddy, who had lent him two hundred pounds Scots, never asked him for a farthing; the reason of which requires a little explanation.

In real secret truth the laird had been a lover of Dorothy’s before she was married to David, and there is no doubt that if he had declared himself, with Rubbledykes to back him, he would have carried off the adorable Dorothy in triumph; but then it was the laird’s misfortune to be what the Scotch call “a blate lover;” which is just to say, a belated one; and Dorothy was married to the spruce and ardent David before she knew that a real laird of an estate was dying in secret for her. Nor could she have had any doubt of the fact, for Mr Snoddy summoned up courage to tell her so himself—a circumstance which cost him something, insomuch as no sooner did David know the fact than he asked him for the loan of the said two hundred pounds Scots money. Of course, David being, as we have said, a man with a supple tongue, and brains at the end of it, knew what he was about, and so sure enough he succeeded; for Rubbledykes, who would not have lent two hundred pound Scots to the treasurer of the Virgin Mary on a note-of-hand, payable in Heaven, was even delighted to advance that sum to the husband of his once loved, and for ever lost, Dorothy. And in this act the laird was wonderfully liberal; for in his secret heart he conditioned for no more than the liberty of being allowed to visit the house in Lady Stair’s Close on market days, and sit beside Dorothy, and look at her, and wonder at her still red cheeks—albeit, more of the pickling cabbage than the rose—and sigh at the loss of such a treasure. Neither in suffering all this adoration did Mrs Dempster commit any very heinous sin; nay, being, as a good Calvinist, a believer in the excellent doctrine (if acted up to) of “total depravity,” she was necessarily in the highway of salvation.

Neither did Mrs Dempster think it necessary to conceal any of these doings from David. Nay, on one particular Wednesday, after the laird had had his fill of this will-worship, she brought the subject up in so particular a way to her husband, that we are thereby led to believe that they understood each other, and could act in concert. The occasion was the complaint of David that some of his other creditors were likely to be down upon him.

“Ah, Dorothy, if they were a’ like Snoddy.”

Not a very respectful way of alluding to no less a personage than the laird of Rubbledykes, let alone his kindness; but then David, being a debtor, did not respect himself, and nothing was ever more true than the saying, “That our own self-respect is the foundation of that respect which we pay to others.”

“But they’re no’ a’ like the laird,” replied Dorothy; “and what’s mair, David, my man, the laird winna be ane o’ your creditors lang either.”

“What mean you, lass?” inquired David.

“I just mean neither mair nor less than that Thomas Snoddy o’ Rubbledykes, wha should hae been my gudeman, is deein’ as fast as he can bicker; and that by and by I might have been my Leddy Rubbledykes wi’ three hundred a year, and nae husband to trouble me.”

“That’s ill news,” continued David; “for if he dees, the debt will gae to his brother, a man who would raze the skin frae the mother’s face that bore him, if he could mak a leather purse out o’t. But what maks ye think he is deein’, lass?”

“Deein’!” rejoined Dorothy, with an ill-timed, if not cruel laugh. “That cough o’ his would kill baith you and me in a year, even if we should only cough time about.”

“Ower true, I fear,” groaned David; “and then there’s a’ thae ither debts upon me. Hark, Dorothy, ye’re a clever dame; could ye no’ get the laird to discharge the debt?”

“Maybe I might, were I to kiss him, David,” was the answer, with another smile.

“And what for no’?” asked this honest man, who raised his voice in the Tron every Sunday.

“Because I am neither a Judith nor a Judas,” replied she.

“But ye’re a Christian,” was the ready rejoinder; “and what’s mair, a Calvinist.”

“As if a body could be a Christian without being a Calvinist,” said she. “But what do ye mean, David—are ye crazy? Why should I kiss another man because I’m a Calvinist?”

“Nae sin, nae salvation,” said he.

Whereupon the worthy couple laughed at a tenet which, being liable to a double construction, has always been dangerous to the common people of Scotland. And what was worse, this laugh was only the prelude to a further conversation so deep and mysterious, and withal conducted in so low a train of whispers and re-whispers, that even our familiar, endowed as he is with the power of going through stone walls, could carry off no more than smiles and nods and winks, and more and more of the same kind of laughs. But as the son of Sirach says, “There is an exquisite subtlety, and the same is unjust;” and “Wrath will surely search it.” Nor was there in this case much time required for the retribution, for the very next day a man rushed into the house of Mrs Dempster with the intelligence on his tongue that David Dempster was drowned at Granton. The dreadful story was indeed corroborated into a certainty by a bundle of clothes which the messenger of evil tidings laid on the table, no other than the suit which David had put on that morning, including the linen shirt which Dorothy’s own fingers had adorned with the breast-ruffle, and identified with the beloved initials, D. D., more precious to her than the symbols of ecclesiastical honours. All were there as he had left them on the beach before the plunge which was to be unto death—yea, something after death, and more terrible, for had not David been a scoffer? If Mrs Dempster had at first been able to collect her scattered senses, she would have been satisfied even with the look of the clothes, for she had heard her husband say, with a blithe look, that he was to go to Granton to bathe, and she would, moreover, have had some minutes sooner the melancholy satisfaction that one so dear to her had not committed suicide.

But the sudden impression left no room for consolations of any kind. Struggling nature could do no more than work itself out of one swoon to fall into another, and how long it was before she could listen to the inrushing neighbours with their news that he had been boated for, and dived for, and hooked for, and searched for, no record remains to tell. But that all these efforts had been made there was no doubt, and as the hours passed bringing as yet no assuagement of a grief which is only amenable to time, it came to be known that the coast had been examined all about the fatal spot with no return but the inevitable non inventus; nor did it require many days to satisfy the unfortunate widow that the catastrophe was of that complete kind where the remaining victim is not only deprived of a husband, but denied the poor consolation of seeing his dead body.

Yet how true it is that the kingdom of Death is in the land of forgetfulness, not only to the ghostly denizens who there dwell, but also to those who are left in this region of quick memories. Wherein surely there is a kindness in the cruelty; for assuredly there is no one who could suffer for a protracted period the intensity of the first onset of a grief of a privation which is to be for ever in this world and be able to live. And this kindliness of the fates was experienced by Mrs Dorothy Dempster, who, after a decent period, and amidst the consolations of friends, felt herself in a condition to be able to wait upon the creditors of her husband and get them to be contented with the small stock left by him, and give her acquittances of their debts; nay, so heartrending were her appeals, and so miserable she appeared in her weeds, that these good men even voted her a small sum out of the wreck as a beautiful tribute to pity and humanity. All which went for its value, so creditable as it is to human nature, and we need hardly add that the frequent reading of the encomium in the Mercury on the merits of the deceased—which, of course, proceeded on the inevitable rule that a man is only good provided he is dead—heaped up the consolation even to a species of melancholy pleasure.

And, surely, if on this occasion there was any one ipsis charitibus humanior, it was Mr Thomas Snoddy, the good laird of Rubbledykes. Nor were his attentions merely empty-handed visits to the house of the widow, for he brought her money, often, after all, the chief of consolations. Of the manner in which that might be accepted he probably suspected there was nothing to be feared; but there was another gift he had in store, in regard to the acceptability of which he was not quite so sure—and that was his old love kindled up into a new flame—probably enough he had never heard or read the lines to the effect that—

“Cupid can his wings apply,

To other uses than to fly;

Serving as a handkerchief

To dry the tears of widows’ grief.”

But, whether so or not, he resolved upon trying what he himself could do in that remedial way; and, accordingly, he began with a small dose, the success of which urged him to a repetition; and on he went from small quantities to greater, till he was overjoyed to find that the patient could bear any amount he was able to administer. Nor could it be said that the aforesaid cough made any abatement from the success of these efforts, if we might not rather surmise that it entered as an element in their recommendation—at least it indicated no hollowness in Rubbledykes.

We all know that “the question” once meant torture. At the period of our story, and we hope not less in our day, it meant rapture; and it is not unlikely that Mrs Dempster on that market-day, when the laird sat by the side of the parlour fire in Lady Stair’s Close, enjoyed something of that kind when the words fell on her ear.

“Now, my dear Dorothy—to come to the point in the lang-run—will ye hae me for your second husband, wha should hae been your first?”

“I hae no objection,” replied Dorothy, as she held away her head and covered her eyes with her handkerchief; “but——”

And Mrs Dempster stopped short, with an effect almost as great on the astonished suitor as that of the memorable answer given by a certain Mrs Jean of Clavershalee to another laird, whose property lay not far distant from Rubbledykes.

“But!” ejaculated the laird, with an effort that brought an attack of his cough upon him. “You maun ‘but’ me nae ‘buts,’ Dorothy, unless ye want to kill me. I aye thought I had a better claim to you than David. Heaven rest his body in the deep waters o’ the Forth, and his soul in heaven!”

“Ay,” continued she, as she applied the handkerchief again, as if this time to receive some tears which ought to have come and didn’t; “but that just puts me in mind o’ what I was going to say. You have seen how David was ta’en awa. What if onything should happen to you? What would become o’ me? Rubbledykes would gae to your brother.”

“The de’il a stane o’t, Dorothy,” cried the laird. “It will be a’ yours. I will mak it ower to you; tofts and crofts, outhouses and inhouses, muirs and mosses, pairts and pertinents. Will that please you?”

“Ay, will’t,” answered Dorothy from behind the handkerchief.

Whereupon the laird took her in his arms with a view to kiss her; but there is many a slip not only between the cup and the lip, but between one lip and another; for no sooner had Thomas so prepared himself for, perhaps, the greatest occasion of his life—even that of kissing a woman, and that woman the very idol of his heart—than that dreadful cough came again upon him, and Dorothy could not help thinking that it was now more hollow, or, as the Scotch call it, toom, than ever she had heard it.

“I will awa to Mr Ainslie and get the contract written out at length,” he said, to cover his disgrace.

Nor was it sooner said than done. Away he went, leaving Dorothy virtually a bride, and the lady in esse of an estate, albeit a small one, yet great to her. At all which she laughed a most enigmatical laugh, as if some secret thoughts had risen in her mind with the effect of a ridiculous incongruity; but what these thoughts were no one ever knew. Nor shall we try to imagine them, considering ourselves to be better employed in setting forth that shortly afterwards Mrs Dorothy Dempster was joined in the silken bands of holy wedlock with Thomas Snoddy, Esquire, of Rubbledykes, and that by the hands of Dr Webster of the Tron, who accompanied the happy couple in the evening to the gray-slated mansion-house, where he made another celebration of the event by draining a couple of bottles of good old claret. Strange enough all these things; but the real wonders of our story would seem only to begin with the settlement of Mr David Dempster’s widow in the mansion-house of the veritable laird; even though, consistently with the manners of the time, there was a duck-pond at the door, a peat-stack on the gable, and a midden gracing the byre not five yards from the parlour window; spite of all which Mrs Dorothy was a lady, while David lay with glazed eyes in the Forth among the fishes scarcely a mile distant from his enchanted widow.

We think it a strange thing that mortals should laugh and weep by turns, yet we think sunshine and showers a very natural alternation; and surely it is far more wonderful that we often weep when we should laugh, and laugh when we should weep—of which hypocrisy, notwithstanding, there is a hundred times more in the world than man or woman wots of. And we are sorry to be obliged to doubt the extent of the new-made lady’s grief when she saw the laird’s cough increasing as his love waxed stronger and his lungs grew less. Nay, we are not sure that when she saw that he was dying, and hailed the signs with grief in her eyes and joy in her heart, she was under the impression that she was acting up to the amiable tenet of her religious creed—total depravity. Be all which as it may, it is certain that though Dorothy’s tears had been of that real kind of which Tully says they are—“the easiest dried of all things,” they would not have retarded the progress of the laird’s disease. It was not yet three months, and he was confined to bed, with Dorothy hanging over him, watching him with all the care of a seeker for favourable symptoms. But one evening there was a symptom which she was unprepared for—nay, she was this time serious in her alarm.

“I have done that which is evil in the sight o’ God.”

The words came as from a far-away place, they were so hollow.

“What is it, Tammas?” asked she.

“I have seen David Dempster’s ghaist,” said he. “It looked in at that window, and disappeared in an instant; but no’ before I kent what the een said. Yea, Dorothy, they said as plainly as een can speak—‘Tammas Snoddy, ye made love to Dorothy Dempster when I was alive in the body, and her lawful husband.’”

And the laird shook all over so violently that Dorothy could see the clothes move.

“Just your conscience, Tammas,” said she. “Ye maun fley thae visions awa in the auld way. It is the deevil tempting ye. We maun flap the leaves o’ the Bible at him, and ye’ll see nae mair o’ him in this warld at any rate.”

And Dorothy, taking up the holy book and opening it at the middle, flapt it with such energy that more dust came out of it than should have been found in a Calvinist’s Bible.

“Ye’ll see nor hilt, nor hair, nor hoop, nor horn mair o’ him,” she added, with, we almost fear to surmise, a laugh.

And Mrs Snoddy’s prophecy was of that kind—the safest of all—which comes after knowledge.

“Then I will dee in peace,” said the relieved laird; “for I hae nae ither sin on my conscience.”

“Nae sin, nae salvation,” added Dorothy.

“A maist comfortable doctrine,” sighed the laird.

And comfortable, surely, it must have been to him, for two days afterwards the good laird slipt away out of this bad world as lightly and easily as if he had felt the burden of his sins as imponderous as the flying dove does the white feathers on its back. Nor did many more days elapse before the mortal remains of the good man were deposited in the churchyard of Cramond, leaving the double widow with her contract of marriage and her tears for a second husband lying in the earth so near the first, deep in the bosom of the Forth. But, sooner or later, there comes comfort of some kind to these amiable creatures in distress, especially if they are possessed of those cabalistic things called marriage contracts. We do not say that that comfort comes always from the grave in the shape of a veritable ghost, but sure it is that if we could in any case fancy a spirit visiting the earth for any rational purpose, it would be where a comely widow was ready to receive it, and warm its cold hands, and wrap the winding-sheet well round it, and treat it kindly. All which we may leave for suggestion and meditation, but we demand conviction, and assent, as we proceed, to set forth that the very next evening after the funeral of Laird Tammas, the ghaist of David Dempster, despising all secret openings, and even giving up the privilege of keyholes, went straight into the house of Rubbledykes, and entered the room where Dorothy was sitting. Extraordinary enough, no doubt; but not even so much so as the fact we are about to relate—viz., that Mrs Dorothy was no more astonished at its appearance before her than she had been when she heard the laird say that he saw the face of that same spirit at the window; nor did she on this occasion have recourse to the Bible as an exorcist, by flapping the leaves of the same, to terrify it away, in the supposition that it was the devil in disguise. It is very true that she held up her hands, but then that was only a prelude to the arms being employed in clasping the appearance to her breast; an embrace which was responded to with a fervour little to be expected from one of these flimsy creatures. Nay, things waxed even more enigmatical and ridiculous, for the two actually kissed each other—a fact which ought to be treasured up as a psychological curiosity of some use, insomuch as it may diminish the fear we so irrationally feel at the expected visit of supernatural beings. But worse and more ridiculous still—

“When had you anything to eat Davie? Ye’ll be hungry.”

“No’ unlikely, Dorothy lass,” answered the wraith; “for I didna like the cauld fish, and there’s nae cooking apparatus in the Forth.”

“Ye would maybe tak a whang o’ the round o’ beef we had at the laird’s funeral yesterday?”

“The very thing, woman,” answered the ghaist; “and if ye have a bottle o’ brandy to wash it down, it will tak awa the cauld o’ the saut water.”

“Twa, an ye like, lad,” responded the apparently delighted widow, as she ran away to set before the visitor the edible and drinkable comforts which had been declared so acceptable.

And you may believe or reject the whisperings of our familiar just as you please, but we have all the justification of absolute veritability for the fact that this extraordinary guest, or ghaist, if you so please, sat down before the said round of beef, brandishing a knife in the one hand and a fork in the other, and looking so heartily purposed to attack the same, that you might have augured it had not had a chop since that forenoon when in the embodied state it went down to cool and wash itself in the sea at Granton. Nor need we be more squeamish than we have been in declaring at once that it did so much justice to the meat and the drink, that you might have thought it had been fed for months on Hecate’s short-commons in Hades. And then a text so ample and substantial could surely bear a running commentary.

“It would have been o’ nae use, Dorothy. If ye hadna been as gude a prophetess as Deborah, I might hae been obliged to conceal myself in England lang enough.”

“It didna need a Deborah, David,” answered she, “to see that nae human body could stand that cough mair than a month or two. Ye hadna lang to wait, man; and though ye had had langer, there, see, was your comfort at the end.”

And Dorothy put into the ghaist’s hand the marriage contract—a worldly thing which seemed to vie with the junket of beef in its influence over mere spirit, insomuch as he perused the same by snatches between the bites and draughts, both processes going on almost simultaneously—the eye fixed on the paper, while a protruding lump in the cheek was in the act of being diminished.

“A’ right, lass,” was at length the exclamation.

“Ay; but ye maun be gude to me now, Davie,” said she; “for ye see it’s a’ in my ain power: Rubbledykes is mine, and I hae wrought for’t.”

“And so hae I,” ejaculated the other. “You forget my banishment and difficulty of living, for I took scarcely any siller wi’ me; and, mairower, how am I to face the people o’ E’nbro’?”

“And the gude Calvinists o’ the Tron?” added the wife.

Notwithstanding which difficulties the visitor contrived to make a hearty meal; nor was he contented with the brandy taken during the time of eating, for with all their spiritual tenderness, there was a crave for toddy—a request which was complied with by the introduction of warm water and sugar. How often the tumbler was tumbled up to pour the last drops, which defied the silver toddy-ladle in the glass, we are not authorised to say; but we have authority for the assertion that any man of flesh and blood could not have perpetrated that number of tumblings without changing almost his nature—that is, being so far spiritualised as to be entitled to say, in the words of the old song by Pinkerton—

“Death, begone—here’s none but souls.”

And therefore the spiritual nature of David Dempster, in his new part, was not so wonderful after all. But the doubt recurs again, as we proceed to say that Mrs Dorothy Snoddy helped her visitor to bed, nay, she actually went very blithely into that same bed herself, where they both slumbered very comfortably till next morning.

We may add that these same doubts were liable to be dispelled by another fact we have to relate. The visitor, it will be remembered, put the question to Dorothy, “How was he to meet the people of Edinburgh?” a question which implied a mortal presence, besides no prescience. We say this last deliberately, because in place of the fear of meeting being on his side, it was altogether on theirs. It happened that, two days after the occurrences we have described, an object bearing the figure of David Dempster was seen on the Cramond road by a carrier called Samuel Finlayson, who had had transactions with the dealer in corduroys—an occasion which had the inevitable effect of raising Samuel’s bonnet along with the standing hair, besides that of inducing him to whip his horse to force the animal on, just in the way of another animal of cognate species under similar circumstances. He, of course, took the story of a ghaist, all cut and dry, into the city. On the same day, Andrew Gilfillan saw the same figure on Corstorphine Hill, and flew past the seat marked “Rest and be thankful,” without even looking at it. He, too, carried the same tidings. George Plenderleith encountered the identical object in the village of Corstorphine busy eating Corstorphine cream—that is, cream mixed with oatmeal, (a finer kind of crowdy,) and he hastened to Edinburgh with a speed only to be accounted for by terror. He, too, told his tale; the effect of all which, added to and inflamed by other reports, was, that Edinburgh was stirred from the Castle gate to the Palace yett, by the conviction that David Dempster had returned from the kingdom of death to this world of life for some purpose which would most certainly come out; but, in due time, whether with or without a purpose, here it was proved that ghosts were no dream, and David Hume no philosopher. Many people sought the Cramond road, and hung about Rubbledykes to get their scepticism or dogmatism confirmed. The end of these things is pretty uniform—res locuta est; the people began to see where the truth lay, and the laughter came in due course, to revive the hearts that had been chilled by fear.

We would be sorry if we were necessitated to end our story at the very nick of the triumph of vice. Happily, we have something more to say—nothing less, indeed, than that James Snoddy, the brother of the laird, raised a process—that is, instituted a suit before the Court of Session, to have his brother’s contract of marriage with Mrs Dorothy Dempster annulled and set aside, upon the grounds of deception, circumvention, and prava causa; nor had he any trouble in getting a decree, for David and his wife made no appearance, neither could they make any appearance in Edinburgh. Their only resource was to take advantage of that kind of bail called “leg;” an easy affair, insomuch as there is no bond required for appearance anywhere. It was at the time supposed that they had gone to America, that asylum of unfortunates, where one-half of the people cut the throats of the other in the name of liberty.