Other doubtful interments here, besides that of the magician, are those of Alexander II. and his queen Joanna. But probably the Abbey does contain the heart of the great Bruce, believed to have been deposited here, in fulfilment of the king’s written wish, after Douglas’s unsuccessful attempt to bear it to the Holy Land. Nor is it open to doubt that some of the Douglases themselves came here to rest after their stormful lives. The doughty earl who was slain at Otterburn was not “buried at the braken bush,” as says the ballad, but beneath the high altar of this Abbey. Hither also was borne Sir William Douglas, the so-called Flower of Chivalry, when Ramsay’s murder had been inadequately avenged on Williamhope, betwixt Tweed and Yarrow, by Sir William’s godson and chieftain, William Earl of Douglas. It was the wanton defacing of these tombs that nerved the arm of Angus at Ancrum Moor; and when one remembers the scathe wrought upon and within these walls by Lord Evers, it seems to be of the very essence of irony that this should be his place of sepulture. Yet it was not in scorn that he was interred amid the evidences of his destructiveness, but as a mark of honour to a brave albeit pitiless foe.
In the churchyard, under the fifth window of the nave, is the tomb of a modern worthy, Sir David Brewster, who lived at Allerly, near Gattonside, and died in 1868. Elsewhere is the grave of faithful Tom Purdie, marked by a monument raised by Scott himself, from whose pen proceeded the inscription. “In grateful remembrance,” runs this model epitaph, “of his faithful and attached service of twenty-two years, and in sorrow for the loss of a humble but sincere friend.” Poor Tom! he could not have gone about with a prepossessing aspect if he sat for Cristal Nixon in “Redgauntlet.” Yet when he was brought before Sir Walter on a charge of poaching, and with mingled pathos and humour set forth his hardships and temptations—a wife and children dependent upon him, work scarce, and grouse abundant—the Sheriff’s heart was touched; so Tom, instead of being haled off to prison, was taken on as shepherd, and afterwards made bailiff. Sir Walter was not infallible. He was grossly imposed upon by the Flemish guide at Waterloo. But perhaps no one ever lived who better understood the Lowland peasant; and in this instance he had no reason to question his insight. Purdie identified himself with all Scott’s concerns, talked of “our trees” as the plantation at Abbotsford proceeded, and of “our buiks” as the novels came out, and never ceased to amuse his generous master with his quaint humour, or to gratify him by his efficient service.
A little above the centre of the town the stream is crossed by a suspension foot-bridge, which connects Melrose with Gattonside, granted to the Abbey by its founder, and still celebrated for its orchards. The footpath which follows the windings of the river, with wooded slopes on either hand, leads past Skirmish Hill, at Darnick, the scene of the “Battle of Melrose,” one of many consequences of the disaster at Flodden, which left the realm with a king in long clothes. The gallant attempt made at the king’s own suggestion, and in his presence, by Sir Walter Scott of Buccleuch, to cut the leading-strings in which the Douglases insisted upon keeping the high-spirited monarch, was frustrated by the inopportune return of the lairds of Cessford and Fairnyhurst, and Buccleuch and his men had to flee for their lives.
In the neighbourhood of the picturesque bridge which carries the Galashiels road across the river, and gives the passing traveller a glimpse both up and down stream which must make him hunger for more, is the site of the curious old drawbridge, if so it may be called, which belonged to the Pringles of Galashiels, afterwards of Whytbank, and consisted of three octangular towers or pillars, from the centre one of which the ward would, for a consideration, lay out planks, and so extemporise an elevated footway. It was this service which Peter refused to do for the sacristan of Kennaquhair when the holy man was bearing to the monastery the Lady of Avenel’s heretical book. “Riding the water” on a moonlit night, he thought, would do the monk no harm; and so, though a “heavy water” was running, Father Philip had to ford the stream, with results so discomforting and mysterious. It was not only with Peter and his laird that the monks of St. Mary’s had disputes. Even when the monastery was founded they were not quite unsusceptible to sports dear to the profane, for in the charter which gave them rights of forestry it was thought necessary to except hunting and the taking of falcons. As they waxed sleek they did not grow less selfish, or less tenacious of their rights; and so there was much contention between them and their neighbours, whose opinion about them sometimes found vent in catches of poetry. The men of God do not appear to have retaliated in verse. But there was the pulpit, and there were penances.
Betwixt this point and Abbotsford the Alwyn and Gala Waters flow in—the one babbling down a glen which is in parts prettily wooded, and is recognised as the Glendearg where the Lady of Avenel spent the sad years of her widowhood; the other reeking with the chemical abominations of Galashiels. As the ascent is continued, the valley grows somewhat less rich in beauty, nor is it improved by the flaring red houses which look down upon Abbotsford from the slopes on the opposite bank. When Sir Walter acquired the estate—or, rather, the first bit of it—it must have been much less attractive than now. It was then a farm, a hundred acres in extent, and there was hardly a tree upon it. He was his own architect; and it was one of his boasts that there was not one of the trees which had not been planted under his direction. The house for which he is thus to be held responsible is scarcely imposing, nor can it be said to have the merit of consistency. You can see at a glance that it grew, rather than was made. On the whole, it is pleasing to the eye rather than to the architectural sense; and if, as has been said, its gables and sections and windows and turrets and towers are a little bewildering in their multitude and variety, one still ventures to think that it is better as it is, plentiful as may be its lack of plan, than it would be if it conformed more strictly to the conventional castellated type.
The interests of Abbotsford are many and great. It is indeed “a romance in stone and lime,” every outline, as Lockhart says, with little exaggeration, “copied from some old baronial edifice in Scotland, every roof and window blazoned with clan bearings, or the lion rampant gules, or the heads of the ancient Stuart kings.” And Sir Walter was from his earliest years a diligent gleaner of curiosities; so that, apart from many precious mementoes of himself, the rooms which the Hon. Mrs. Constable Maxwell Scott, his great-grand-daughter, throws open to the public, form a museum of the rarest interest. But, after all, it is chiefly the desire to make acquaintance with the scenes amid which the sanest and shrewdest of our great writers since Shakespeare spent the most eventful years of his blameless life that draws to Abbotsford its crowds of pilgrims. It was here that he wrote most of his works; here that he met the great disaster of his life in a spirit which showed in combination the loftiest chivalry and the nicest commercial integrity; here that he piously submitted himself to the stroke of death. The story of his return to Abbotsford to die is full of pathos. “As we rounded the hill at Ladhope, and the outline of the Eildons burst on him,” says his biographer, “he became greatly excited; and when ... his eye caught at length his own towers ... he sprang up with a cry of delight.” Then they bore him into the dining-room, and his dogs “began to fawn upon him and lick his hands, and he alternately sobbed and smiled over them until sleep oppressed him.” The next day he felt better, he said, and might disappoint the doctors after all. But his strength continued to leave him, and he was often delirious and unconscious. One day, about two months after his return, he sent for his son-in-law, who found him with eye “clear and calm,” though in the last extreme of feebleness. “Lockhart,” he said, “I may have but a minute to speak to you. My dear, be a good man—be virtuous, be religious—be a good man. Nothing else will give you any comfort when you come to lie here.” These were almost his last words. Four days afterwards he breathed his last, in the presence of all his children. “It was a beautiful day—so warm that every window was open, and so perfectly still that the sound of all others most delicious to his ear, the gentle ripple of the Tweed over its pebbles, was distinctly audible as we knelt around the bed, and his eldest son kissed and closed his eyes.” Surely this man died “in the odour of sanctity” as truly as Waltheof of Melrose or any tonsured saint of them all.
GALASHIELS.
The Ettrick, which joins the Tweed not a great way above Abbotsford, no longer flows through a “feir foreste;” where once there was “grete plentie” of hart and hind, of doe and roe, mighty flocks of sheep now graze. Of Ettrick House, where the pastoral poet was born; of Thirlestane Castle, the strength of “Ready, aye ready” John Scott; of Tushielaw, where another of the Scotts, Adam of that ilk, was hanged by the king who had no mercy for Johnnie Armstrang; of Carter haugh, where the “fair Janet” met “young Tamlane,” and by strength of love won him from the thraldom of the Fairy Queen; of Selkirk, whose burly “souters” (sutors) gave so good an account of themselves at Flodden Field—of all this there is no space to speak. Nor can there be anything but barest mention of the Yarrow, whose bonnie holms and dowie dens were dear to Wordsworth and other modern poets, as they were to the old folk-singers of the Border. St. Mary’s lone and silent lake, with its swans that “float double;” Henderland, where Cockburne’s widow mourned her knight “sae dear;” Dryhope, where the “Flower of Yarrow” was wooed and won by Walter Scott of Harden; Newark’s stately tower, where the last minstrel’s trembling fingers tuned his harp and swept its strings—these and other scenes must all be left unnoticed. But the Yarrow is perhaps the most benign of Border streams, and it has inspired the sweetest and saddest of Border songs, not excepting even the “Flowers of the Forest,” or “Annan Water.” And of them all, none is more sad or sweet than that which tells the story of the Baron of Oakwood, who was slain on its “dowie banks,” and there found by his “ladye gaye.”
“She kissed his cheek, she kaimed his hair,