When the company had crushed themselves into seats around the table, and were just going to operate upon the braxy, a big-boned, bleached-looking old man was furtively led on to the end of a bench that had been placed near the door. I soon discovered that, after the minister, this was for the time being the most important of the invited assembly. He was in fact no less a personage than the fiddler, and was, as he ought to have been, in keeping with the character of the traditionary musician, almost stone-blind. This Demodocus had been led hither from his dwelling five miles over the hills by a little boy, his grandson, who had fair hair, and wore faded velvet and corduroys. The heartiness with which the veteran musician laid in a store of victual against the labour of a long night’s fiddling, was a most refreshing sight. He was a long-faced, heavy-jawed man, and had rusty gray hair that fell unkempt upon a much worn velvet collar. A large scarlet cotton handkerchief was twisted carelessly about his neck, and came down in a loose fold upon his breast. He wore an aspect of silent passive misfortune; and as you looked at him it was difficult to imagine music dwelling in his soul, how much soever it might dwell in his fiddle.
As soon as the tea was ended, or rather this first instalment of it, he was guided to an elevated seat that had been prepared for him in a corner of the kitchen, where he began scraping and preluding with his fiddle. To many of the lads and lasses this was the first intimation of the musician’s presence; and it was the signal for a little preliminary coquetry with the eyes, while it lit up their honest faces with blushes and expectant smiles.
A Scottish wedding without a dance is next door to no wedding at all, so little time was lost in stepping to the floor. There were Scotch reels, country-dances, and polkas, and now and then a quadrille was decorously walked through by the two or three young farmers and their sweethearts. But unquestionably the Scotch reel was the favourite, and maintained the precedence throughout the whole of the entertainment. As most readers doubtless know, this is a lively and stirring dance, that permits a good deal of jumping and stamping, and is admirably adapted to the social requirements of a warm-hearted and excitable people. Whether its popularity in Scotland has anything to do with the Celtic origin of the inhabitants, I do not take upon me to suggest; but certain it is, that after seeing it performed, as on the present occasion, with all the vivacity that belongs to it, you would not think of associating it with a grave and solemn-minded race. To the uninitiated onlooker it is nothing but an indistinguishable confusion; in which he may observe that there is a great deal of bobbing with the head and shuffling with the feet, and that it is in nowise adapted to a staid person of fashion. Nevertheless it stood in high favour on the present occasion, and seemed to please abundantly the agile young persons who performed in it. What matter to them though it should be unfashionable! They had come to this wedding to enjoy themselves; and much as the horrid crew in ‘Alloway’s auld haunted kirk’ despised foreign cotillons, so did these children of hills and valleys stick to their native reels and country-dances.
After a time, when the music had begun to work in his soul, and he had been set athinking upon ‘the brave days of old,’ you would notice a reverend senior bravely leading out some gay and handsome maiden, and challenging another gray-headed veteran to face him in the dance. These exhibitions of pluck and spirit in the fathers uniformly evoked hearty plaudits from the company; and some one would call out to ‘Archie’ the fiddler, ‘to put his best foot foremost this time.’ Archie had by this time got worked into a state of considerable energy and enthusiasm, and was in some respects quite a different character from that of two hours ago at the tea-table. The colour had travelled back to his old withered cheek, and his features looked a deal more soft and flexible; his face and form seemed much more indicative of life; youth seemed to be coming back to him at the call of his own fiddle. It was interesting to observe as he became enthusiastic in his fiddling, how sympathetic was his every motion. How his rickety old legs crossed and bobbed up and down; the body in a tremble, and constant movement in the shoulders; while the head was perpetual motion, now hanging down upon his breast, now erect and turning on its socket, now thrown backwards, and such eyes as were in it—poor ‘ruined orbs’—directed restlessly towards the ceiling. Archie’s tout ensemble was a visible embodiment of the doctrine that music incites to motion.
Music has charms to stir the savage breast
no less than to ‘soothe’ it. Now and then the dancers would cease a while, and seated in benches round the room, would listen in silence to a song. A broad-faced, dull-eyed, young shepherd, with more energy than finish, sang My Hielan’ Hills, and a dark pawky little man recited out of a corner very slyly, Rabbin Tamson’s Smiddy. The Laird o’ Cockpen, Why Left I my Hame? and Willie brewed a Peck o’ Maut, were also given; the last named being received with great enthusiasm. There was little culpable indulgence in whisky that I observed. This may have been owing to the judicious arrangements of the host for refreshing his guests during the evening with the national ‘toddy’ instead of the more potent undiluted spirit. Several times a tray was handed round, bearing piles of bread-and-cheese, and a large jug full of the resuscitating beverage; and though the latter in some cases was a little freely partaken of, there was no unseemly manifestation of its effects.
And thus, through the warm hours of that summer’s night, with lonely hills listening in their dreams, the wedding festival of the shepherd’s daughter glided merrily along. The sun had been already near two hours climbing up the east, and the pale morning light had once more shot its rays into many a glen and hollow, when these mountain merry-makers ceased their saturnalia. The evening before, they had assembled for the feast trim, fresh, rosy, and buoyant; and when the ‘garish day’ sent his mocking light through the narrow window-panes and shone upon the forms of the dancers, they looked rosy and buoyant still. The smoothness had departed from their hair and the aspect of freshness from their garments; frills and ribbons had been dragged awry; but the colour was as fresh in their cheeks, and their eyes were quite as lustrous as when eight hours before they had stamped and bobbed and ‘hooch’d’ through their first Scotch reel. The most of them would tramp their half-dozen miles and more back over the hills, and go through the usual labours of the day with hardly a symptom of fatigue.
When all had come out of the cottage, and immediately before the separation, about three-fourths of the party congregating on the little knoll before the door where the bride’s-maid had stood with the handkerchief on the previous evening, sent forth a long-drawn, far-reverberating cheer. Then followed a tumultuous shaking of hands, with many a kindly spoken farewell; and then finally they departed, each group on its own path, for their wide-scattered farms and cottages. Some days would pass during which the memory of the wedding would be continually in their thoughts, forming a mental picture that gave them solace in the midst of outward dreariness. But gradually the lines of the picture would lose their vividness, and it would be less frequently recurred to by the fancy, less fervently yearned after by the heart. Emotions that had been stirred by that night’s entertainment would after a while subside again; the old duties would present themselves anew, calling for the old labour and attention; and harmony would be again established between the inward life and the outward circumstances.
The newly married couple had arranged to stay at the cottage till the afternoon, and then to set out for their future home, which lay in the adjoining parish, and about ten miles away. That parish in its whole extent was high-lying and pastoral; and therefore the dwelling to which they were going would be in every way as lonely as the one from which they were departing. From what I had noticed of the bride’s mother, she would undoubtedly feel melancholy over the losing of her daughter, the last that had remained with her out of five; and I can think of her that afternoon, when the two young people had left her, slipping out to the door, and having shaded her eyes with her hand, taking a far look at them as they passed out of her sight among the hills. Then she would walk pensively back into her now dull-looking kitchen, and perhaps ponder with some sadness about becoming old. The bride and bridegroom would arrive at their abode in the gray hours of the evening, where some relative would be waiting to receive them. It would be such another cottage as the one we have been visiting; and there, in the wide wilderness, untamed nature on every side of them, they would settle down to await the domesticities that fate might send.
Is there not something almost awe-striking in the thought of civilised human beings settling down to face perhaps half a century of life in solitudes like these, all unconscious of the mighty pulse-beats of the world they dwell in? It is to be presumed that this red-haired Briton who has just led home his bride across ten miles of moorland, possesses a fair share of practical energy and some fragments of intellect; he has the faculty of loving his fellow-men and of gaining happiness, perhaps also wisdom, from hours of bright social intercourse. If he were now planted amid stimulating circumstances, a fine moral nature might possibly be developed by the time his years were through. But immured in this mountain fastness, away from human din, his mind will probably never be unfolded to the least self-conscious effort; and he will leave life at seventy little advanced in intellectual attainment on what he was at twenty-five. For although Nature is an open book, teeming over with wise and great lessons, it is only after toiling through initiatory stages of culture that we can intelligently read her book, or even believe that it exists. The unlettered shepherd nestling in her shaggy bosom, unless she has gifted him with genius, rarely dreams of the truths that she is symbolically publishing around him. And I think of the future life of him whose marriage we have been celebrating as something far different from that of a home-bred philosopher or poet. Performing his simple pastoral duties with honesty of purpose, I can still imagine his life to be monotonous, irksome, and stagnant; having in it many hours of idleness unillumined by neighbourly greetings or the mystic gleams of intelligent research. As he goes his rounds in summer-time, he will see the wide stillness of morning upon the hills; in winter he will have to battle with the fury of the storm. The gloaming will find him cultivating an unfruitful garden, or gathering hay out of morasses for his cow, or sitting over his peat-fire knitting homespun stockings or reading legends of the Covenanters. Now and then a distant neighbour, leading a life as lonely as himself, or some wandering angler, will drop in upon him, and be treated to a hospitable meal. But he will hardly see another face the whole year through, except perchance on Sunday—until the ‘clipping’ season comes round, when he will be called away, now in one direction now in another, to days of social labour.