The Story of the Merrillygoes.
THE world has been compared to many things,—a playhouse, a madhouse, a penitentiary, a caravanserai, and so forth; but I think a show-box wherein all, including man, is turned by machinery, is better than any of them. And every one looks through his own little round hole at all the rest, he being both object and subject. How the scenes shift too! the belief of one age being the laughing-stock of the next. Witches and brownies and fairies and ghosts and bogles have lost their quiddity, and given birth to quips and laughs; but I have here, as a simple storyteller, to do with one example of these vanished beliefs, what was in folk-lore called the “Merrillygoes,” sometimes in the old Scotch dictionaries spelled “Mirrligoes.” It was a supposed affection of the eyes, in which the victim or patient, as you suppose the visitation brought on by natural or supernatural powers, fancied he saw men and women and inanimate things which were not at the time before him. I think the affection was different from the “glamour” which was generally attributed to the wrath of fairies; and both indeed might, after all, be resolved into the pseudoblepsy of the old, and the monomania of the new nosologies. But dismissing all learning—which, however potent to puff up man’s pride, and then prick the bladder of his conceit, has no concern with a story—I at once introduce to you Mr David Tweedie. He was one of those Davids who, for some Scotch reason, are called Dauvit; and, like other simple men, he had a wife, whose name, I think, was Semple, Robina Semple, certainly not Simple. These worthies figured in Berenger’s Close of Edinburgh some time about the provostship of the unfortunate Alexander Wilson; and were not only man and wife by holy Kirk, but a copartnership, insomuch as, Dauvit being a tailor, she after marriage, and having no children to “fash her,” became a tailor also, sitting on the same board with him, using the same goose, yea, pricking the same flea with emulous needle.
Yet our couple were in some respects the most unlike each other in the world; Robina being a sharp, clear-witted, nay, ingenious woman—Dauvit a mere big boy. I do not know if I could give the reader a better explanation of the expression I have used than by referring him to the notion he might form of Holbein’s picture of his son, whom he quaintly and humorously painted as a man, but retaining all the features, except size, of a boy: the chubby cheeks, small snub nose, pinking eyes, and delicate colours. Nor was Dauvit a big chubby man merely as respected the body, for he was also little better than chubby in mind; at least in so far as regards credulity, passiveness, and softness. He had a marvellous appetite for worldly wonders, the belief being in the direct ratio of the wonderfulness, and he gave credit to the last thing he heard, for no other reason than that it was the last thing; one impression thus effacing another, so that the soft round lump remained always much the same. All which peculiarities were, it may easily be supposed, not only known to, but very well appreciated by, his loving, but perhaps not over-faithful, Binny.
If you keep these things in your mind, you will be able the better to estimate the value of the facts as I proceed to tell you that one morning Dauvit was a little later in getting out of bed than was usual with him, by reason that he had on the previous night been occupied with a suit of those sacredly-imperative things called in Scotland “blacks,” that is, mourning. But then the time was not lost; for Robina was up and active, very busily engaged in preparing breakfast. Not that Dauvit condescended to take much notice of these domestic duties of Binny, because he had ample faith not only in her housewifery, but the wonderful extent of her understanding; only it just happened, as indeed anything may happen in a world where we do not know why anything does happen, that as he lay very comfortably under the welcome pressure of the soft blankets, with his eyes looking as it were out of a hole, he heard a tap at the door, which tap was just as like that of the letter-carrier as any two blunts of exactly the same length could possibly be. Nor did his observation stop here; for he saw with these same eyes, as if confirming his ears, Binny go to the door and open it; then came the words of doubtless the said letter-carrier, “That’s for Dauvit;” and at the same instant a letter was put into his wife’s hands, and thereafter disappeared at the hole of her pocket, where there were many things that David knew nothing about.
Strange as this seemed to Mr Tweedie, even the last act of pocketing would not have appeared to him so very curious if at the moment of secreting the letter she had not very boldly, and even with a kind of smile upon her face, looked fully into the open eyes of her husband. But more still, this sagacious and honest woman immediately thereafter retired into the inner room, where, no doubt, she made herself acquainted with the contents of the communication, whatever it might be, and from which she came again to resume, as she did resume, her preparations for breakfast just as if nothing had happened beyond what was common. Of course I need not say that Dauvit was astonished; but his astonishment was an increasing quantity in proportion to the time that now passed without her going forward to the bedside and reading the letter to him, as she had often done before; and if we might be entitled to wonder why he didn’t at once put the question, “What letter was that, Binny?” perhaps the answer which would have been given by David himself might have been that his very wonder prevented him from asking for an explanation of the wonder—just as miracles shut people’s mouths at the same moment that they make them open their eyes.
However this might be—and who knows but that David might have a pawky curiosity to try Binny?—the never a word did he say; but, rising slowly and quietly, he dressed himself, in that loose way in which of all tradesmen the tailors most excel, for a reason of which I am entirely ignorant. He then sat down by the fire; and Binny having seated herself on the other side, the operation of breakfast began without a word being said on either part, but with mutual looks, which on the one side, viz., Robina’s, were very well understood, but on the other not at all. A piece of pantomime all this which could not last very long, for the good reason that impatience is the handmaiden of curiosity; and David at length, in spite of a bit of bread which almost closed up his mouth, got out the words—
“What letter was that, Binny, which the letter-carrier handed in this mornin’?”
“Letter! there was nae letter, man,” was the answer of Binny, accompanied with a look of surprise, which might in vain compete with the wonder immediately called up in the eyes of her simple husband.