In Kirkcaldy, in 1803, Marjorie was born of good stock both in the paternal and maternal line. A grandfather who had fought for “Bonnie Prince Charlie” at Culloden on the Fleming side, and a grandfather who had distinguished himself in surgery, on the Rae side, were fit progenitors for romantic and clever Marjorie. Her Highland descent is well justified; for Marjorie, humorous, vivid, impulsive, high-spirited, and generous is a Celt to her finger-tips. Her face, too, as shown in Isa Keith’s sketches, has the Celtic characteristics, especially the deep-set eyes, with their indications of thought and humour, and the funny little mouth that could, one feels, coax and pout equally well.
The Fleming nursery, when Marjorie made her first appearance in it, had already two occupants, five-year-old William and two-year-old Isabella. The presiding genius of the place was a certain Jeanie Robertson. Nurse Jeanie was very particular about teaching her young charges their Catechism, and Willie, at two years’ old, did her so much credit that she was fond of showing off her young theologian, for the benefit of some militia officers stationed in town. Jeanie put the questions in broad Scots, beginning with: “Wha made ye, ma bonnie man?” For the correctness of this, and the three next replies, Jeanie had no anxiety, but her tone changed to menace and her closed “nieve” (fist) was shaken in the child’s face as she demanded: “Of what are you made?” “Durrt” was the invariable reply, delivered in an uncompromising tone. Whereat Jeanie would cuff him, soundly. “Wull ye never learn to say ‘dust,’ ye thrawn deevil?”
Whether or not, it was from Jeanie that Marjorie learned to know so much about the “deevil” I cannot say. But, at all events, she had a very wholesome fear of him, mixed with a certain interest in her methods. Cousin Isa, later on, taught her how to get the better of him (as she taught her so many other useful things, as, for instance, to make “simecolings, nots of interrigation, pearids and commas.”) She advised her: “When I feel Satan beginning to tempt me that I flee from him and he would flee from me.” But in the meantime there was a certain horrible fascination in thinking of him going about “like a roaring lyon in search of his pray,” and finding it in a little girl who “behaved extremely ill in God’s most holy church,” and “would never attande” herself “nor let Isabella attand,” or in a little girl “who stamped with her feet and threw her new hat on the ground” when Isabella brought her upstairs to teach her “religion and my multiplication and to be good and all my other lessons.”
It was when Marjorie had just turned five that Cousin Isabella Keith engaged on the course of education thus comprehensively described. Isabella was hardly out of her teens herself, but to Marjorie she was the embodiment of all wisdom. “Isabella,” she says in the second journal, “teaches me everything I know, I am much indebted to her, she is learn, and witty and sensible.” Then in another place: “I hope that at 12 or 13 years old I will be as learned as Miss Isa and Nancy Keith, for many girls have not the advantage I have, and I am very very glad that Satan has not given bols and many other misfortunes.” The reference to “bols,” it must be explained, was suggested by the story of Job, in whom Marjorie was much interested, feeling bound by their common enmity against the “Divel.” “It was the same Divel that tempted Job that tempted me, I am sure, but he resisted Satan, though he had boils and many many other misfortunes which I have escaped.”
Isabella Keith had come on a visit from her Edinburgh home to her aunt’s house at Kirkcaldy, and fell in love so deeply with her little cousin, that she begged to be allowed to take her back with her to Edinburgh to take charge of her education. The Flemings thought well of the plan, and in the summer of 1808 Marjorie left Kirkcaldy and went to live at her Aunt Keith’s house in No. 1, Charlotte-street, Edinburgh.
Young as she was, she had read all sorts of things before she had left home. She seems to have learned to read, as some children will, who grow up among books, almost unconsciously, and she made herself free of her father’s library in the most complete manner. Charles Lamb’s recipe for producing “incomparable old maids” had been tried in her case with extraordinary results. Like “Cousin Bridget” in Mackery End, “she was tumbled early, by accident or design, into a spacious closet of good old English reading, and browsed at will upon that fair and wholesome pasturage.” The plan may be all that Charles Lamb claims for producing “incomparable old maids,” but its effects on children are more questionable. Fortunately Marjorie seems to have got nothing worse from it than a vocabulary and stock of phrases that seem a little beyond her control, and a tremendous interest in romance, which cousin Isa has to keep in check. She is constantly losing her heart, now to “a sailer” who called here to say farewell; “it must be dreadful to leave his native country where he might get a wife and perhaps me, for I love him very much and with all my heart, but O I forgot Isabella forbid me to speak about love.” Again to Mr. Crakey, with whom she “walked to Crakyhall hand in hand in Innocence and metitation sweet thinking on the kind love which flows in our tender hearted mind which is overflowing with majestick pleasure.” And yet again to “Philip Caddie, who paid no little attention to me, he took my hand and led me downstairs and shook my hand cordialy.” But indeed it was a very innocent kind of romance, and Cousin Isa need not have been alarmed, for Marjorie’s “own true love” was Cousin Isa herself. Indeed once she has got away from the jargon of books—Kotzebue’s Pigeon and Fawny Rachel and The Cottage Cook, we hear no more of her as a “loveress” except it be of “swine, geese, cocks, and turkeys that made Ravelston so pleasant to me, indeed they are the delight of my heart.”
She had not been long in Edinburgh when she wrote to tell her sister all about it. The occasion was one of much solemnity, for, as she observes, “this is the first time I ever wrote a letter in my life.” In this letter she tells of the girls who play with her in the square, “and they cry just like a pig when we are under the painful necessity of putting it to death.” She draws a rather unflattering portrait of a certain Miss Potune, “a lady of my acquaintance,” and this in spite of the fact that “she praises me dreadfully.” “I repeated something out of Dean Swift, and she said I was fit for the stage, and you may think I was primmed up with majestick pride, but upon my word I felt myself turn a little birsay.” Perhaps she felt that Miss Potune was only trying to flatter her, just as she was doing with Aunt Keith. “This horrid fat simpliton says that my aunt is beautiful, which is entirely impossible, for that is not her nature.”
She returns again to the subject of Miss Potune in her diary, into which we shall now be privileged to peep.
“Miss Potune is very fat, she pretends to be very learned, she says she saw a stone that dropt from the skies, but she is a good Christian.” (The sequence of thought is not particularly apparent, but we begin to follow with more confidence in the next “lap,” starting with “Christian.”) “An annababtist is a thing I am not a member of; I am a Pisplikan just now and a Prisbeteren at Kercaldy, my native town, which though dirty is clein in the country; sentiment is what I am not acquainted with, though I wish it and should like to pratise it. I wish I had a great deal of gratitude in my heart and in all my body. The English have great power over the french; Ah me per adventure at this moment some noble Colnel at this moment sinks to the ground without breath; and in convulsive pangs dies; it is a melancholy consideration.”
Cousin Isabella had the little maid for a bedfellow, and we get some funny glimpses of what she had to endure from that arrangement. “I’ve slept with Isabella, but she cannot sleep with me. I’m so very restless. I danced over her legs in the morning and she cried ‘Oh! dear, you mad girl, Madgie,’ for she was very sleepy.”—(Oh! those little “Early wide-awakes!” Which of us who have been wakened by them at four o’clock in the morning will not sympathise with poor Isa Keith?) “Every morn I awake before Isa, and oh I wish to be up and out with the larkies, but I must take care of Isa, who when aslipe is as beautiful as Viness and Jupiter in the sky.” On a later occasion Marjorie records: “I went into Isabella’s bed to make her smile like the Genius Demedicus, or the statute in ancient Greece, but she fell asleep in my very face, at which my anger broke forth, so that I awoke her from a very comfortable nap. All was now hushed up, but my anger again burst forth at her bidding me get up.” Finally poor Isabella, in self-defence against “continual figiting and kicking” had to banish Marjorie to the foot of the bed, an arrangement not without its advantages, for it gave a certain young person opportunity “to be continialy at work reading the Arabian nights entertainment, which I could not have done had I slept at the top.” The situation, moreover, inspired the following remarkable verses:—