"That nice soldier yesterday—Mr. Douglas at Carlisle—thinks they were a charming family," said I. "He has an old proverb something like this:
"So many, so good as of Douglases have been
Of one surname in Scotland never yet was seen."
and he told me a great deal about the Douglas Heart."
"He would!" mumbled Sir S. "There were good hearts and bad hearts among them, but all were great hearts in the old days; anyhow, I'm not surprised that Crockett got inspiration from this place when he used to play here, coming over from Castle Douglas, where he was at school. He must have had his head buzzing with story plots when he'd climbed up inside the walls and crawled out to sit astride of the hanging stone. I'll warrant he saw Maclellan beheaded in the courtyard while Sir Patrick Gray, the King's messenger, supped with Douglas; and heard Mons Meg fire off the first granite cannon-ball, that shot away the hand of the Countess as she held a wine-glass up, drinking confusion to her enemies. No wonder little boy Crockett got absent-minded one day, when he dropped his watch instead of a pebble in wanting to test the time the stone would take to fall."
The next bit of Crockett-lore I heard was at Auchencairn in the deep, indented bay we'd reached by turning south for the coast again. There, it seemed, we were in the heart of Crockettland, for Hestan Island is the Rathan Island of the "Raiders." All round was sweet, welcoming country, low mountains and rippling meadows, where it seemed that the Douglas soldiers had laid their glittering helmets down in long straight ranks on a carpet of cloth o' gold. Over these fields of garnered wheat came a breeze from the sea, with a tang of salt like a tonic mixture, and there was a murmurous sound on the air, a message from the tide.
There were hundreds of historic things to see, in every direction, if we had had time for all: traces of the Attecott Picts; Pict forts and tombs, castles of the Middle Ages; robber caves; Convenanters' monuments; and at Balcarry, near Auchencairn, the landing-place of the smuggler Yawkins, who was Scott's "Dirk Hatteraick." But we had only five days for everything before the Great Day—which will be coming so soon now. From Auchencairn we turned inland to a rolling country where the Gray Dragon would be down one hill and halfway up another before he knew what had happened. At Dundrennan—"Hill of the Thorn Bushes"—he had his first mishap; but after the surprise of thinking a bomb had exploded, I was glad he'd seized just that opportunity of bursting a tire, because it gave us more time for the Abbey than we should have given ourselves.
While the chauffeur made the dragon's toilet, patching up a fat white foot as he might have doctored the pad of an elephant, we wandered about, and finally decided to lunch in a secluded corner of the twelfth-century ruins.
Mrs. James and I set out our picnic-table, a folding thing that Sir S. carries in the car, and we counted on having the place to ourselves. Tourists though we are, we scorn other tourists. But it seems incredible that such as they can scorn us. We talked about Queen Mary and of her last meal within those walls, and it felt sacrilegious to laugh and joke where she had been so sad. We pictured her, young and beautiful, taking leave of the loyal men who had begged her in vain not to trust Elizabeth; and we could fancy the town turning out to see her vessel set sail—a very different town it would have been then from the charming little place it is to-day, with its low white cottages half covered with flowers, the spotless walls as clean as damask tablecloths, and all so gay and bright to the eye that grim Dundrennan Abbey in its midst is like a skull fallen in a rose-garden.
"Ah," sighed Mrs. James, shaking her head, with a jam puff in her hand, "if the Queen had listened to Maxwell she might have lived in safety to be an old woman!"
"True, she might have kept her head," Sir S. agreed, comfortably cutting himself a piece of plum cake; "but if she'd taken Maxwell's advice, instead of sailing from Port Mary, never to see Scotland again, wouldn't the whole civilized world miss its best-loved heroine of romance? No other woman since history began has so captured the hearts of men, and made herself so adored through the centuries, in spite of all her faults, or because of them. Mary Stuart and Napoleon Bonaparte are the two figures in history of whom no one ever tires of talking or reading."