It made me feel very loyal to Scotland hearing stories like this—though I was proud of the Castle too. And I loved the tale of Willie Armstrong, Kinmont Willie, treacherously given up to Lord Scrope, for the worst dungeon of all, by troopers who in taking him violated a border truce. His escape was a real romance; and I am glad Lord Buccleugh, who saved him, was an ancestor of Sir Walter Scott.
It was no use appealing to Lord Scrope, the Warden of the West Marches, for justice, so Lord Buccleugh resolved to make a dash, and rescue the raider, whom he loved. He got forty men (the English said two hundred, but I know better), attacked the Castle, took it by assault, and carried Willie, with fetters still dangling from his wrists, clear away across the Eden and the roaring Esk, where none dared follow. When Queen Elizabeth asked him afterward how he had dared, he said, "What is there a brave man will not dare to do?"
It was not in the first dungeons that we heard the story of Willie Armstrong, but later, in the part of the Castle which the public is not allowed to see. We got there by climbing steep stairs into what are now the soldiers' storerooms: and it's because they are storerooms that they're kept so private. Once these rooms too were prisons; and behind an immense door of oak, almost in darkness, are perfectly wonderful wall-carvings cut into the reddish sandstone by prisoners: figures of men and devils; scenes of history; initials woven into ingenious monograms, Prince Charlie's among them, and hearts interlaced. I wish I had lived in those days, and I wondered aloud if there were any girls named Barribel then. Donald Douglas said yes; it was a very ancient and well-loved Scottish name.
Stupid people in 1835 tore down most of the tower where Queen Mary was imprisoned; but they were stopped before it was all gone, so luckily there is a corner left, with a few graceful carvings on the outer wall. And only three years ago a wonderful old table was found hidden away in a dungeon which, it is thought, must have been used as her dining-table, before she was whisked away from Carlisle to Bolton Castle in 1568. We saw the table—very dark, very rough, looking like a prehistoric animal turned to wood; and Donald Douglas said it was perhaps the oldest table alive in England to-day—as old as King Edward's, and of the shape which gave an idea later for Tudor tables. As he talked, I could almost see Queen Mary sitting by this queer piece of furniture eating a poor meal, and reading some book which might help her forget—perhaps idly fingering the splendid black pearls which Mrs. James said were bought last year in a tiny shop in Scotland, kept by descendants of a faithful maid who went with her to the scaffold. And the shopkeeper, who thought they were wax beads, lying in an old forgotten box, sold them for ten shillings!
They found in another dungeon of the Castle, hidden in a crack of the wall, a silver snuff-box with a withered finger in it, which must have been a prisoner's "fetich." But it couldn't have brought him luck; otherwise, if he'd been released, he would have taken it away with him. Probably he swung on the hanging beam that sticks out over the window of the old "condemned cell."
Next to Queen Mary's table, and perhaps the roof of the keep whence we could see away over the border into mystery-land, I liked best of all the Castle things a little deserted house in a courtyard, where Richard III lived for a while, when he was young. Few people know about it, or are taken to see it. But it alone would be enough to make the Castle interesting if there were nothing else. Only a few empty, echoing, half-ruinous rooms there are, with a queer chimney or two to give comfort; but Richard's enemies made it a charge against him that he lived in Carlisle Castle, splendidly housed in sinful luxury. What a pity all the tales against him were not so little true as that!
III
We're in Scotland!
Cæsar could not have revelled in crossing the Rubicon as I revelled in crossing the border. The very word rings out like the sudden sound of bells, or the mysterious music that thrills one's blood in dreams.