The Abbey was, of course, the center of thought continually, and its red-gray walls caught the light of day and the coming shadows of night in a curious effect which no picture can report; time has dealt wondrously with this stone, leaving the rose for the day, the gray for the night.
I wandered about, stopping in the empty sloping market-place to look at the Cross, which is as old as the Abbey; looking at the graveyard which surrounds the Abbey, where men lie, common men unsung in Scottish minstrelsy, except as part of the great hosts, men who heard the news when it was swift and fresh from Bannockburn, and Flodden, and Culloden; and where men and women still insert their mortality into this immortality—Elizabeth Clephane who wrote the "Ninety and Nine" lies there; and out into the country and down by the Tweed toward the Holy Pool, the Haly Wheel, to wonder if when I came again in the middle night, I, too, should see the white lady rise in mist from the waters, this lady of Bemersyde who had loved a monk of Melrose not wisely but very well, and who drowned herself in this water where the monk in penance took daily plunges, come summer, come winter. How often this is the Middle-Age penalty!
Far across the shimmering green meadows and through the fragrant orchards came the sound of bagpipes—on this my first evening in Scotland! And whether or not you care for the pipes, there is nothing like them in a Scottish twilight, a first Scottish twilight, to reconstruct all the Scotland that has been.
The multitudes and the individuals came trooping back. At a time of famine these very fields were filled with huts, four thousand of them, for always the monks had food, and always they could perform miracles and obtain food; which they did. That for the early time. And for the late, the encampment of Leslie's men in these fields before the day when they slaughtered Montrose's scant band of royalists at Philipshaugh, and sent that most splendid figure in late Scottish history as a fugitive to the north, and to the scaffold.
I knew that in the Abbey before the high altar lay the high heart of The Bruce, which had been carried to Spain and to the Holy Land, by order of Bruce, since death overtook him before he could make the pilgrimage. Lord James Douglass did battle on the way against the Moslems in southern Spain, where "a Douglass! a Douglass!" rang in battle clash against "Allah, illah, allah," and the Douglass himself was slain. The heart of The Bruce flung against the infidel, was recovered and sent on to Jerusalem, and then back to Melrose. The body of Douglass was brought back to Scotland, to St. Bride's church in Douglass, and his heart also lies before the high altar of Melrose. "In their death they were not divided."
There lies also buried Michael Scot
"Buried on St. Michael's night,
When the bell toll'd one and the moon was bright."
On such a night as this, I hoped. And Scot is fit companion for the twilight. This strange wizard of a strange time was born in Upper Tweedale, which is the district of Merlin—the older wizard lies buried in a green mound near Drummelzier. Michael traveled the world over, Oxford, Paris, Bologna, Palermo, Toledo, and finally, perhaps because his wizardry had sent him like a wandering Jew from place to place, back to the Border, his home country, where he came and served the Evil One. Dante places him in the Purgatory of those who attempt blasphemously to tear the veil of the future. The thirteenth century was not the time in which to increase knowledge, whether of this world or the next. Even to-day perhaps we save a remnant of superstition, and we would not boast
"I could say to thee
The words that cleft the Eildon hills in three."
Very dark against the gathering dark of the night sky rose the Eildon hills above, cleft in three by the wizardry of Scot. To that height on the morrow I should climb, for it is there that Sir Walter Scott, a later wizard, had carried our Washington Irving, just a century ago, and shown him all this Borderland—which lay about me under the increasing cover of night.