She did not die. Darnley visited her one day, coming from Glasgow. Bothwell came as soon as he could be moved, and the two made convalescence together in this old house of Jedburgh, perhaps the happiest house of all those where the legend of Mary persists. Even to-day it has its charm. The windowed turret looks out on the large fruit garden that stretches down to the Jed, very like that very little turret of "Queen Mary's Lookout" at Roscoff where the child queen had landed in France less than twenty years before.
Five years later, when Mary was in an English prison, a proclamation was read in her name at the town cross of Jedburgh, the herald was roughly handled by the Provost who received his orders from England, and Buccleuch and Ker of Fernihurst revenged themselves by hanging ten loyal (?) citizens who stood with the Provost.
Later, a century later, when at the town cross the magistrates were drinking a health to the new sovereign, a well-known Jacobite came by. They insisted on his joining in the toast. And he pledged—"confusion to King William, and the restitution of our sovereign and the heir!" Bravo, the Borderers!
Selkirk
The sentimental journeymen—with whom I count myself openly—may hesitate to visit Yarrow. It lies so near the Melrose country, and is so much a part of that, in song and story, that it would seem like leaving out the fragrance of the region to omit Yarrow. And yet—. One has read "Yarrow Unvisited," one of the loveliest of Wordsworth's poems. And one has read "Yarrow Visited." And the conclusion is too easy that if the unvisitings and visitings differ as much as the poems it surely were better not to "turn aside to Yarrow," to accept it as
"Enough if in our hearts we know
There's such a place as Yarrow....
For when we're there although 'tis fair,
'Twill be another Yarrow."
There is peril at times in making a dream come true, in translating the dream into reality, in lifting the mists from the horizon of imagination. Should one hear an English skylark, an Italian nightingale? should one see Carcassonne, should one visit Yarrow?
Ah, welladay. I have heard, I have seen. Just at first, because no dream can ever quite come true, not the dream of man in stone, or of song in bird-throat, or even of nature in trees and sky and hills, there is a disappointment. But after the reality these all slip away into the misty half-remembered things, even Carcassonne, even Yarrow; the dream enriched by the vision, the vision softened again into dream.
And so, I will down into Yarrow.