But first I would find where she had lived. Kirkcaldy is close set against the sea. Here on winding High Street, I found the house in which she had lived, standing much as it did no doubt a hundred years ago, except for a new coat of tan on the stone. From those upper windows Marjorie looked out on the coach going away toward Edinburgh. The ground floor is occupied by a book store, where I could buy no book about Marjorie. Under a window you enter the archway and find yourself in a little green-grassed court, which is all that is left of Marjorie's garden. The house proper fronted the garden in that comfortable excluding way which British people still prefer for their places of habitation. It is still occupied as a dwelling, and the nursery still looks as it did in Marjorie's day, and the drawing-room, where she wrote that letter to Isa Keith—"I now sit down on my botom to answer all your kind and beloved letters." The door of the nursery was open. I remembered those last days, when lying ill, her mother asked Marjorie if there was anything she wished. "Oh, yes, if you would just leave the room door open a wee bit, and play 'The Land o' the Leal,' and I will lie still and think and enjoy myself."
"I'm wearin' awa', Jean,
Like snaw wreaths in thaw, Jean,
I'm wearin' awa',
To the Land o' the Leal."
The kirkyard lies on the outskirts of the town. It was a beautiful place as the Scotch sun sank behind the Fife hills and the Firth. The organist was playing and the music drifted out through the narrow lancet windows when I found the little white cross marked "Pet Marjorie," and the old gray tombstone with its simple token, "M. F. 1811."
For a hundred years then she has been lying there. But Marjorie has become one of the immortal dream children of the world. I laid my fresh flowers beside another's which had withered, and went my ways into the dusk.
St. Andrews
Past Kirkcaldy the road leaves the sea and runs northward through meadows between fields which have the look of centuries-old cultivation, at peace like the fields and villages of the English Midland, to St. Andrews.
"St. Andrews by the Northern Sea,
A haunted town it is to me!
A little city, worn and gray,
The gray North Ocean girds it round;
And o'er the rocks, and up the bay,
The long sea-rollers surge and sound;
And still the thin and biting spray
Drives down the melancholy street,
And still endure, and still decay,
Towers that the salt winds vainly beat.
Ghost-like and shadowy they stand
Dim mirrored in the wet sea-sands.
"St. Leonard's Chapel, long ago
We loitered idly where the tall
Fresh-budded mountain ashes blow
Within thy desecrated wall;
The tough roots rent the tombs below,
And April birds sang clamorous,
We did not dream, we could not know
How hardly Fate would deal with us!
"O broken minster, looking forth
Beyond the bay, above the town,
O winter of the kindly North,
O college of the scarlet gown!"
Small wonder St. Andrews is the ecclesiastical capital of Scotland, and smaller wonder, remembering the Calvinistic wind, that here happened the brunt of the fight between the old faith and the new.
It is a clean and seemly town, with much historic memory and much present day dignity, a small gray town, "the essence of all the antiquity of Scotland in good clean condition," said Carlyle. Its ancient sights the cathedral and the castle; its living sight the university and the golf links.
The town stands on a promontory, three long streets converging on the cathedral and castle lying in ruins. The cathedral, a hundred years in the building, and very splendid in its wealth of detail, its vastness of space like that of York or Amiens, was dedicated in the days of The Bruce, with the king present to endow it with a hundred marks "for the mighty victory of the Scots at Bannockburn, by St. Andrew's, the guardian of the realm." For three hundred years its wax tapers lighted the old rites according to which The Bruce worshiped; he was not covenanted. Then the torch of the reformation was applied to it, the torch of the flaming tongue of John Knox.