Poor Isabella did not always have an easy task. The “multiplication table” gave particular trouble. “I am now going to tell you about the horible and wretched plaege that my multiplication gives me you can’t conceive it—the most Devilish thing is 8 times 8 and 7 times 7; it is what nature itself can’t endure....” Sometimes the Devil gets out of the “multiplication table” and comes even near more sacred ground. “To-day I have been very ungrateful and bad and disobedient, Isabella gave me my writing, I wrote so ill that she took it away and locked it up in her desk where I stood trying to open it till she made me come and read my bible, but I was in a bad homour and red it so carelessly and ill that she took it from me and her blood ran cold, but she never punished me, she is as gental as a lamb to me an ungrateful girl.”
Isabella tries the effect of praise:—
“Isabella has given me praise for checking my temper, for I was sulky even when she was kneeling an hole hour teaching me to write.”
But Marjorie is honest enough to think a whipping would do herself good: “But she never whipes me, so that I thinke I should be the better of it, and the next time that I behave ill, I think she should do it, for she never does it, but she is very indulgent to me, but I am very ungrateful to her.”
It may have been at Ravelston (where “I am enjoying nature’s fresh air, the birds are singing sweetly, the calf doth frisk and play, and nature shows her glorious face, the sun shines through the trees”) that Marjorie first saw and conquered Sir Walter. For all readers of Waverley will remember how deeply its author loved the old house and garden, where he had played as a boy. The conquest was completed when Marjorie returned to Edinburgh, and by all accounts it was not her beauty that worked the charm. As Marjorie herself says, “I am very strong and robust and not of the delicate sex, nor of the fair, but of the deficient in looks,” and poor Isa Keith is quite concerned about her plainness: “She is grown excessively fat and strong,” she writes about this time to Kirkcaldy, “but I cannot say she is in great beauty, as she has lost two front teeth, and her continued propensity to laugh exhibits the defect rather strongly.” But in the eyes of Sir Walter, she was better than beautiful: “She’s the most extraordinary creature I ever met with,” he told Mrs. Keith, “and her repeating of Shakespeare overpowers me as nothing else does.”
Dr. Brown draws some charming pictures of the great man and the little child together, Marjorie teaching him nursery rhymes:—“He used to say when he came to Alibi Crackaby he broke down. Pin-Pan, Musky-Dan, Tweedle-um, Tweedle-um made him roar with laughter. He said Musky Dan especially was beyond his endurance, bringing up an Irishman and his hat fresh from the Spice Islands and odoriferous Ind; she getting quite bitter in her displeasure at his ill behaviour and stupidity. Then he would read ballads to her in his own glorious way, the two getting wild with excitement over Gil Morrice or the Baron of Smailholm, and he would take her on his knees and make her repeat Constance’s speeches in King John till he swayed to and fro sobbing his fill.”
The year before she died she was at a Twelfth Night Supper at Scott’s in Castlestreet. The company had all come—all but Marjorie; and all were dull because Scott was dull. “Where’s that bairn? What can have come over her? I’ll go myself and see!” And he was getting up, and would have gone, when the bell rang, and in came Duncan Roy and his henchman Dougal, with the Sedan chair which was brought right into the lobby and its top raised. And there in its darkness and dingy old cloth sat Maidie in white, her eyes gleaming, and Scott bending over her in ecstacy. “Sit ye there, my dautie, till they all see you,” and forthwith he brought them all. You can fancy the scene. And he lifted her up and marched to his seat with her on his stout shoulder, and set her down beside him; and then began the night, and such a night! Those who knew Scott best said that night was never equalled. Maidie and he were the stars; and she gave them Constance’s speeches, and Helvellyn, and all her repertoire, Scott showing her off, and being oftimes rebuked by her for his intentional blunders.
Perhaps the prudent mother at home in Kirkcaldy began to fear the effects of all this notoriety and excitement on her little daughter’s character. At all events she did not leave her in Edinburgh very many months after this. In July, 1811, Marjorie bade good-bye to her darling Isabella and returned to Kirkcaldy.
We have letters of hers, mainly to Isa, to fill up the simple story of the next few months. In one of them, she refers to an epidemic of measles. Little did Isabella think, as she laughed over the quaint phrases, that there was something ominous in it. In November Marjorie herself fell a victim to the epidemic, and was very ill for many weeks.