She had Laurence Hutton’s Literary Landmarks and Royal Edinburgh, by Mrs. Oliphant; I had Lord Cockburn’s Memorials of his Time; and somebody had given Salemina, at the moment of leaving London, a work on ‘Scotias’s darling seat,’ in three huge volumes. When all this printed matter was heaped on the top of Salemina’s hold-all on the platform, the guard had asked, “Do you belong to these books, ma’am?”
“We may consider ourselves injured in going from London to Edinburgh in a third-class carriage in eight or ten hours, but listen to this,” said Salemina, who had opened one of her large volumes at random when the train started.
“‘The Edinburgh and London Stage-coach begins on Monday, 13th October 1712. All that desire… let them repair to the Coach and Horses at the head of the Canongate every Saturday, or the Black Swan in Holborn every other Monday, at both of which places they may be received in a coach which performs the whole journey in thirteen days without any stoppage (if God permits) having eighty able horses. Each passenger paying 4 pounds, 10 shillings for the whole journey, allowing each 20 lbs. weight and all above to pay 6 pence per lb. The coach sets off at six in the morning’ (you could never have caught it, Francesca!), ‘and is performed by Henry Harrison.’ And here is a ‘modern improvement,’ forty-two years later. In July 1754, the Edinburgh Courant advertises the stage-coach drawn by six horses, with a postilion on one of the leaders, as a ‘new, genteel, two-end glass machine, hung on steel springs, exceedingly light and easy, to go in ten days in summer and twelve in winter. Passengers to pay as usual. Performed (if God permits) by your dutiful servant, Hosea Eastgate. CARE IS TAKEN OF SMALL PARCELS ACCORDING TO THEIR VALUE.’”
“It would have been a long, wearisome journey,” said I contemplatively; “but, nevertheless, I wish we were making it in 1712 instead of a century and three-quarters later.”
“What would have been happening, Salemina?” asked Francesca politely, but with no real desire to know.
“The Union had been already established five years,” began Salemina intelligently.
“Which Union?”
“Whose Union?”
Salemina is used to these interruptions and eruptions of illiteracy on our part. I think she rather enjoys them, as in the presence of such complete ignorance as ours her lamp of knowledge burns all the brighter.
“Anne was on the throne,” she went on, with serene dignity.
“What Anne?”
“I know all about Anne!” exclaimed Francesca. “She came from the Midnight Sun country, or up that way. She was very extravagant, and had something to do with Jingling Geordie in The Fortunes of Nigel. It is marvellous how one’s history comes back to one!”
“Quite marvellous,” said Salemina dryly; “or at least the state in which it comes back is marvellous. I am not a stickler for dates, as you know, but if you could only contrive to fix a few periods in your minds, girls, just in a general way, you would not be so shamefully befogged. Your Anne of Denmark, Francesca, was the wife of James VI. of Scotland, who was James I. of England, and she died a hundred years before the Anne I mean,—the last of the Stuarts, you know. My Anne came after William and Mary, and before the Georges.”
“Which William and Mary?”
“What Georges?”
But this was too much even for Salemina’s equanimity, and she retired behind her book in dignified displeasure, while Francesca and I meekly looked up the Annes in a genealogical table, and tried to decide whether ‘b.1665’ meant born or beheaded.
Chapter II. Edina, Scotia’s Darling Seat
The weather that greeted us on our unheralded arrival in Scotland was of the precise sort offered by Edinburgh to her unfortunate queen, when,
‘After a youth by woes o’ercast,
After a thousand sorrows past,
The lovely Mary once again
Set foot upon her native plain.’
John Knox records of those memorable days: ‘The very face of heaven did manifestlie speak what comfort was brought to this country with hir—to wit, sorrow, dolour, darkness and all impiety—for in the memorie of man never was seen a more dolorous face of the heavens than was seen at her arryvall… the myst was so thick that skairse micht onie man espy another; and the sun was not seyn to shyne two days befoir nor two days after.’
We could not see Edina’s famous palaces and towers because of the haar, that damp, chilling, drizzling, dripping fog or mist which the east wind summons from the sea; but we knew that they were there, shrouded in the heart of that opaque, mysterious greyness, and that before many hours our eyes would feast upon their beauty.
Perhaps it was the weather, but I could think of nothing but poor Queen Mary! She had drifted into my imagination with the haar, so that I could fancy her homesick gaze across the water as she murmured, ‘Adieu, ma chere France! Je ne vous verray jamais plus!’—could fancy her saying as in Allan Cunningham’s verse:—
‘The sun rises bright in France,
And fair sets he;
But he hath tint the blithe blink he had
In my ain countree.’
And then I recalled Mary’s first good-night in Edinburgh: that ‘serenade of 500 rascals with vile fiddles and rebecks’; that singing, ‘in bad accord,’ of Protestant psalms by the wet crowd beneath the palace windows, while the fires on Arthur’s Seat shot flickering gleams of welcome through the dreary fog. What a lullaby for poor Mary, half Frenchwoman and all Papist!
It is but just to remember the ‘indefatigable and undissuadable’ John Knox’s statement, ‘the melody lyked her weill, and she willed the same to be continewed some nightis after.’ For my part, however, I distrust John Knox’s musical feeling, and incline sympathetically to the Sieur de Brantome’s account, with its ‘vile fiddles’ and ‘discordant psalms,’ although his judgment was doubtless a good deal depressed by what he called the si grand brouillard that so dampened the spirits of Mary’s French retinue.
Ah well, I was obliged to remember, in order to be reasonably happy myself, that Mary had a gay heart, after all; that she was but nineteen; that, though already a widow, she did not mourn her young husband as one who could not be comforted; and that she must soon have been furnished with merrier music than the psalms, for another of the sour comments of the time is, ‘Our Queen weareth the dule [weeds], but she can dance daily, dule and all!’
These were my thoughts as we drove through invisible streets in the Edinburgh haar, turned into what proved next day to be a Crescent, and drew up to an invisible house with a visible number 22 gleaming over a door which gaslight transformed into a probability. We alighted, and though we could scarcely see the driver’s outstretched hand, he was quite able to discern a half-crown, and demanded three shillings.
The noise of our cab had brought Mrs. M’Collop to the door,—good (or at least pretty good) Mrs. M’Collop, to whose apartments we had been commended by English friends who had never occupied them.
Dreary