3. A BORDER FAMILY


Such an unequal intimacy has never been uncommon in Scotland, where the 
clan spirit survives; where the servant tends to spend her life in the 
same service, a helpmeet at first, then a tyrant, and at last a 
pensioner; where, besides, she is not necessarily destitute of the pride 
of birth, but is, perhaps, like Kirstie, a connection of her master's, 
and at least knows the legend of her own family, and may count kinship 
with some illustrious dead.  For that is the mark of the Scot of all 
classes: that he stands in an attitude towards the past unthinkable to 
Englishmen, and remembers and cherishes the memory of his forebears, 
good or bad; and there burns alive in him a sense of identity with the 
dead even to the twentieth generation.  No more characteristic instance 
could be found than in the family of Kirstie Elliott.  They were all, 
and Kirstie the first of all, ready and eager to pour forth the 
particulars of their genealogy, embellished with every detail that 
memory had handed down or fancy fabricated; and, behold! from every 
ramification of that tree there dangled a halter.  The Elliotts 
themselves have had a chequered history; but these Elliotts deduced, 
besides, from three of the most unfortunate of the border clans - the 
Nicksons, the Ellwalds, and the Crozers.  One ancestor after another 
might be seen appearing a moment out of the rain and the hill mist upon 
his furtive business, speeding home, perhaps, with a paltry booty of 
lame horses and lean kine, or squealing and dealing death in some 
moorland feud of the ferrets and the wild cats.  One after another 
closed his obscure adventures in mid-air, triced up to the arm of the 
royal gibbet or the Baron's dule-tree.  For the rusty blunderbuss of 
Scots criminal justice, which usually hurt nobody but jurymen, became a 
weapon of precision for the Nicksons, the Ellwalds, and the Crozers.  
The exhilaration of their exploits seemed to haunt the memories of their 
descendants alone, and the shame to be forgotten.  Pride glowed in their 
bosoms to publish their relationship to "Andrew Ellwald of the 
Laverockstanes, called `Unchancy Dand,' who was justifeed wi' seeven 
mair of the same name at Jeddart in the days of King James the Sax."  In 
all this tissue of crime and misfortune, the Elliotts of Cauldstaneslap 
had one boast which must appear legitimate: the males were gallows-
birds, born outlaws, petty thieves, and deadly brawlers; but, according 
to the same tradition, the females were all chaste and faithful.  The 
power of ancestry on the character is not limited to the inheritance of 
cells.  If I buy ancestors by the gross from the benevolence of Lyon 
King of Arms, my grandson (if he is Scottish) will feel a quickening 
emulation of their deeds.  The men of the Elliotts were proud, lawless, 
violent as of right, cherishing and prolonging a tradition.  In like 
manner with the women.  And the woman, essentially passionate and 
reckless, who crouched on the rug, in the shine of the peat fire, 
telling these tales, had cherished through life a wild integrity of 
virtue.

Her father Gilbert had been deeply pious, a savage disciplinarian in the 
antique style, and withal a notorious smuggler.  "I mind when I was a 
bairn getting mony a skelp and being shoo'd to bed like pou'try," she 
would say.  "That would be when the lads and their bit kegs were on the 
road.  We've had the riffraff of two-three counties in our kitchen, 
mony's the time, betwix' the twelve and the three; and their lanterns 
would be standing in the forecourt, ay, a score o' them at once.  But 
there was nae ungodly talk permitted at Cauldstaneslap.  My faither was 
a consistent man in walk and conversation; just let slip an aith, and 
there was the door to ye!  He had that zeal for the Lord, it was a fair 
wonder to hear him pray, but the family has aye had a gift that way."  
This father was twice married, once to a dark woman of the old Ellwald 
stock, by whom he had Gilbert, presently of Cauldstaneslap; and, 
secondly, to the mother of Kirstie.  "He was an auld man when he married 
her, a fell auld man wi' a muckle voice - you could hear him rowting 
from the top o' the Kye-skairs," she said; "but for her, it appears she 
was a perfit wonder.  It was gentle blood she had, Mr. Archie, for it 
was your ain.  The country-side gaed gyte about her and her gowden hair.  
Mines is no to be mentioned wi' it, and there's few weemen has mair hair 
than what I have, or yet a bonnier colour.  Often would I tell my dear 
Miss Jeannie - that was your mother, dear, she was cruel ta'en up about 
her hair, it was unco' tender, ye see - 'Houts, Miss Jeannie,' I would 
say, 'just fling your washes and your French dentifrishes in the back o' 
the fire, for that's the place for them; and awa' down to a burn side, 
and wash yersel' in cauld hill water, and dry your bonny hair in the 
caller wind o' the muirs, the way that my mother aye washed hers, and 
that I have aye made it a practice to have wishen mines - just you do 
what I tell ye, my dear, and ye'll give me news of it!  Ye'll have hair, 
and routh of hair, a pigtail as thick's my arm,' I said, `and the 
bonniest colour like the clear gowden guineas, so as the lads in kirk'll 
no can keep their eyes off it!'  Weel, it lasted out her time, puir 
thing!  I cuttit a lock of it upon her corp that was lying there sae 
cauld.  I'll show it ye some of thir days if ye're good.  But, as I was 
sayin', my mither - "

On the death of the father there remained golden-haired Kirstie, who 
took service with her distant kinsfolk, the Rutherfords, and black-a-
vised Gilbert, twenty years older, who farmed the Cauldstaneslap, 
married, and begot four sons between 1773 and 1784, and a daughter, like 
a postscript, in '97, the year of Camperdown and Cape St. Vincent.  It 
seemed it was a tradition in the family to wind up with a belated girl.  
In 1804, at the age of sixty, Gilbert met an end that might be called 
heroic.  He was due home from market any time from eight at night till 
five in the morning, and in any condition from the quarrelsome to the 
speechless, for he maintained to that age the goodly customs of the 
Scots farmer.  It was known on this occasion that he had a good bit of 
money to bring home; the word had gone round loosely.  The laird had 
shown his guineas, and if anybody had but noticed it, there was an ill-
looking, vagabond crew, the scum of Edinburgh, that drew out of the 
market long ere it was dusk and took the hill-road by Hermiston, where 
it was not to be believed that they had lawful business.  One of the 
country-side, one Dickieson, they took with them to be their guide, and 
dear he paid for it!  Of a sudden in the ford of the Broken Dykes, this 
vermin clan fell on the laird, six to one, and him three parts asleep, 
having drunk hard.  But it is ill to catch an Elliott.
For a while, in the night and the black water that was deep as to his 
saddle-girths, he wrought with his staff like a smith at his stithy, and 
great was the sound of oaths and blows.  With that the ambuscade was 
burst, and he rode for home with a pistol-ball in him, three knife 
wounds, the loss of his front teeth, a broken rib and bridle, and a 
dying horse.  That was a race with death that the laird rode!  In the 
mirk night, with his broken bridle and his head swimming, he dug his 
spurs to the rowels in the horse's side, and the horse, that was even 
worse off than himself, the poor creature! screamed out loud like a 
person as he went, so that the hills echoed with it, and the folks at 
Cauldstaneslap got to their feet about the table and looked at each 
other with white faces.  The horse fell dead at the yard gate, the laird 
won the length of the house and fell there on the threshold.  To the son 
that raised him he gave the bag of money.  "Hae," said he.  All the way 
up the thieves had seemed to him to be at his heels, but now the 
hallucination left him - he saw them again in the place of the ambuscade 
- and the thirst of vengeance seized on his dying mind.  Raising himself 
and pointing with an imperious finger into the black night from which he 
had come, he uttered the single command, "Brocken Dykes," and fainted.  
He had never been loved, but he had been feared in honour.  At that 
sight, at that word, gasped out at them from a toothless and bleeding 
mouth, the old Elliott spirit awoke with a shout in the four sons.
"Wanting the hat," continues my author, Kirstie, whom I but haltingly 
follow, for she told this tale like one inspired, "wanting guns, for 
there wasna twa grains o' pouder in the house, wi' nae mair weepons than 
their sticks into their hands, the fower o' them took the road.  Only 
Hob, and that was the eldest, hunkered at the doorsill where the blood 
had rin, fyled his hand wi' it - and haddit it up to Heeven in the way 
o' the auld Border aith.  `Hell shall have her ain again this nicht!' he 
raired, and rode forth upon his earrand."  It was three miles to Broken 
Dykes, down hill, and a sore road.  Kirstie has seen men from Edinburgh 
dismounting there in plain day to lead their horses.  But the four 
brothers rode it as if Auld Hornie were behind and Heaven in front.  
Come to the ford, and there was Dickieson.  By all tales, he was not 
dead, but breathed and reared upon his elbow, and cried out to them for 
help.  It was at a graceless face that he asked mercy.  As soon as Hob 
saw, by the glint of the lantern, the eyes shining and the whiteness of 
the teeth in the man's face, "Damn you!" says he; "ye hae your teeth, 
hae ye?" and rode his horse to and fro upon that human remnant.  Beyond 
that, Dandie must dismount with the lantern to be their guide; he was 
the youngest son, scarce twenty at the time.  "A' nicht long they gaed 
in the wet heath and jennipers, and whaur they gaed they neither knew 
nor cared, but just followed the bluid stains and the footprints o' 
their faither's murderers.  And a' nicht Dandie had his nose to the 
grund like a tyke, and the ithers followed and spak' naething, neither 
black nor white.  There was nae noise to be heard, but just the sough of 
the swalled burns, and Hob, the dour yin, risping his teeth as he gaed."  
With the first glint of the morning they saw they were on the drove 
road, and at that the four stopped and had a dram to their breakfasts, 
for they knew that Dand must have guided them right, and the rogues 
could be but little ahead, hot foot for Edinburgh by the way of the 
Pentland Hills.  By eight o'clock they had word of them - a shepherd had 
seen four men "uncoly mishandled" go by in the last hour.  "That's yin a 
piece," says Clem, and swung his cudgel.  "Five o' them!" says Hob.  
"God's death, but the faither was a man!  And him drunk!"  And then 
there befell them what my author termed "a sair misbegowk," for they 
were overtaken by a posse of mounted neighbours come to aid in the 
pursuit.  Four sour faces looked on the reinforcement.  "The Deil's 
broughten you!" said Clem, and they rode thenceforward in the rear of 
the party with hanging heads.  Before ten they had found and secured the 
rogues, and by three of the afternoon, as they rode up the Vennel with 
their prisoners, they were aware of a concourse of people bearing in 
their midst something that dripped.  "For the boady of the saxt," 
pursued Kirstie, "wi' his head smashed like a hazelnit, had been a' that 
nicht in the chairge o' Hermiston Water, and it dunting it on the 
stanes, and grunding it on the shallows, and flinging the deid thing 
heels-ower-hurdie at the Fa's o' Spango; and in the first o' the day, 
Tweed had got a hold o' him and carried him off like a wind, for it was 
uncoly swalled, and raced wi' him, bobbing under brae-sides, and was 
long playing with the creature in the drumlie lynns under the castle, 
and at the hinder end of all cuist him up on the starling of 
Crossmichael brig.  Sae there they were a'thegither at last (for 
Dickieson had been brought in on a cart long syne), and folk could see 
what mainner o'man my brither had been that had held his head again sax 
and saved the siller, and him drunk!"  Thus died of honourable injuries 
and in the savour of fame Gilbert Elliott of the Cauldstaneslap; but his 
sons had scarce less glory out of the business.  Their savage haste, the 
skill with which Dand had found and followed the trail, the barbarity to 
the wounded Dickieson (which was like an open secret in the county), and 
the doom which it was currently supposed they had intended for the 
others, struck and stirred popular imagination.  Some century earlier 
the last of the minstrels might have fashioned the last of the ballads 
out of that Homeric fight and chase; but the spirit was dead, or had 
been reincarnated already in Mr. Sheriff Scott, and the degenerate 
moorsmen must be content to tell the tale in prose, and to make of the 
"Four Black Brothers" a unit after the fashion of the "Twelve Apostles" 
or the "Three Musketeers."

Robert, Gilbert, Clement, and Andrew - in the proper Border diminutives, 
Hob, Gib, Clem, and Dand Elliott - these ballad heroes, had much in 
common; in particular, their high sense of the family and the family 
honour; but they went diverse ways, and prospered and failed in 
different businesses.  According to Kirstie, "they had a' bees in their 
bonnets but Hob."  Hob the laird was, indeed, essentially a decent man.  
An elder of the Kirk, nobody had heard an oath upon his lips, save 
perhaps thrice or so at the sheep-washing, since the chase of his 
father's murderers.  The figure he had shown on that eventful night 
disappeared as if swallowed by a trap.  He who had ecstatically dipped 
his hand in the red blood, he who had ridden down Dickieson, became, 
from that moment on, a stiff and rather graceless model of the rustic 
proprieties; cannily profiting by the high war prices, and yearly 
stowing away a little nest-egg in the bank against calamity; approved of 
and sometimes consulted by the greater lairds for the massive and placid 
sense of what he said, when he could be induced to say anything; and 
particularly valued by the minister, Mr. Torrance, as a right-hand man 
in the parish, and a model to parents.  The transfiguration had been for 
the moment only; some Barbarossa, some old Adam of our ancestors, sleeps 
in all of us till the fit circumstance shall call it into action; and, 
for as sober as he now seemed, Hob had given once for all the measure of 
the devil that haunted him.  He was married, and, by reason of the 
effulgence of that legendary night, was adored by his wife.
He had a mob of little lusty, barefoot children who marched in a caravan 
the long miles to school, the stages of whose pilgrimage were marked by 
acts of spoliation and mischief, and who were qualified in the country-
side as "fair pests."  But in the house, if "faither was in," they were 
quiet as mice.  In short, Hob moved through life in a great peace - the 
reward of any one who shall have killed his man, with any formidable and 
figurative circumstance, in the midst of a country gagged and swaddled 
with civilisation.

It was a current remark that the Elliotts were "guid and bad, like 
sanguishes"; and certainly there was a curious distinction, the men of 
business coming alternately with the dreamers.  The second brother, Gib, 
was a weaver by trade, had gone out early into the world to Edinburgh, 
and come home again with his wings singed.  There was an exaltation in 
his nature which had led him to embrace with enthusiasm the principles 
of the French Revolution, and had ended by bringing him under the hawse 
of my Lord Hermiston in that furious onslaught of his upon the Liberals, 
which sent Muir and Palmer into exile and dashed the party into chaff.  
It was whispered that my lord, in his great scorn for the movement, and 
prevailed upon a little by a sense of neighbourliness, had given Gib a 
hint.  Meeting him one day in the Potterrow, my lord had stopped in 
front of him: "Gib, ye eediot," he had said, "what's this I hear of you?  
Poalitics, poalitics, poalitics, weaver's poalitics, is the way of it, I 
hear.  If ye arena a'thegither dozened with cediocy, ye'll gang your 
ways back to Cauldstaneslap, and ca' your loom, and ca' your loom, man!"  
And Gilbert had taken him at the word and returned, with an expedition 
almost to be called flight, to the house of his father.  The clearest of 
his inheritance was that family gift of prayer of which Kirstie had 
boasted; and the baffled politician now turned his attention to 
religious matters - or, as others said, to heresy and schism.  Every 
Sunday morning he was in Crossmichael, where he had gathered together, 
one by one, a sect of about a dozen persons, who called themselves 
"God's Remnant of the True Faithful," or, for short, "God's Remnant."  
To the profane, they were known as "Gib's Deils."  Bailie Sweedie, a 
noted humorist in the town, vowed that the proceedings always opened to 
the tune of "The Deil Fly Away with the Exciseman," and that the 
sacrament was dispensed in the form of hot whisky-toddy; both wicked 
hits at the evangelist, who had been suspected of smuggling in his 
youth, and had been overtaken (as the phrase went) on the streets of 
Crossmichael one Fair day.  It was known that every Sunday they prayed 
for a blessing on the arms of Bonaparte.  For this "God's Remnant," as 
they were "skailing" from the cottage that did duty for a temple, had 
been repeatedly stoned by the bairns, and Gib himself hooted by a 
squadron of Border volunteers in which his own brother, Dand, rode in a 
uniform and with a drawn sword.  The "Remnant" were believed, besides, 
to be "antinomian in principle," which might otherwise have been a 
serious charge, but the way public opinion then blew it was quite 
swallowed up and forgotten in the scandal about Bonaparte.  For the 
rest, Gilbert had set up his loom in an outhouse at Cauldstaneslap, 
where he laboured assiduously six days of the week.  His brothers, 
appalled by his political opinions, and willing to avoid dissension in 
the household, spoke but little to him; he less to them, remaining 
absorbed in the study of the Bible and almost constant prayer.  The 
gaunt weaver was dry-nurse at Cauldstaneslap, and the bairns loved him 
dearly.  Except when he was carrying an infant in his arms, he was 
rarely seen to smile - as, indeed, there were few smilers in that 
family.  When his sister-in-law rallied him, and proposed that he should 
get a wife and bairns of his own, since he was so fond of them, "I have 
no clearness of mind upon that point," he would reply.  If nobody called 
him in to dinner, he stayed out.  Mrs. Hob, a hard, unsympathetic woman, 
once tried the experiment.  He went without food all day, but at dusk, 
as the light began to fail him, he came into the house of his own 
accord, looking puzzled.  "I've had a great gale of prayer upon my 
speerit," said he.  "I canna mind sae muckle's what I had for denner."  
The creed of God's Remnant was justified in the life of its founder.  
"And yet I dinna ken," said Kirstie.  "He's maybe no more stockfish than 
his neeghbours!  He rode wi' the rest o' them, and had a good stamach to 
the work, by a' that I hear!  God's Remnant!  The deil's clavers!  There 
wasna muckle Christianity in the way Hob guided Johnny Dickieson, at the 
least of it; but Guid kens!  Is he a Christian even?  He might be a 
Mahommedan or a Deevil or a Fire-worshipper, for what I ken."

The third brother had his name on a door-plate, no less, in the city of 
Glasgow, "Mr.  Clement Elliott," as long as your arm.  In his case, that 
spirit of innovation which had shown itself timidly in the case of Hob 
by the admission of new manures, and which had run to waste with Gilbert 
in subversive politics and heretical religions, bore useful fruit in 
many ingenious mechanical improvements.  In boyhood, from his addiction 
to strange devices of sticks and string, he had been counted the most 
eccentric of the family.  But that was all by now; and he was a partner 
of his firm, and looked to die a bailie.  He too had married, and was 
rearing a plentiful family in the smoke and din of Glasgow; he was 
wealthy, and could have bought out his brother, the cock-laird, six 
times over, it was whispered; and when he slipped away to Cauldstaneslap 
for a well-earned holiday, which he did as often as he was able, he 
astonished the neighbours with his broadcloth, his beaver hat, and the 
ample plies of his neckcloth.  Though an eminently solid man at bottom, 
after the pattern of Hob, he had contracted a certain Glasgow briskness 
and APLOMB which set him off.  All the other Elliotts were as lean as a 
rake, but Clement was laying on fat, and he panted sorely when he must 
get into his boots.  Dand said, chuckling: "Ay, Clem has the elements of 
a corporation."  "A provost and corporation," returned Clem.  And his 
readiness was much admired.

The fourth brother, Dand, was a shepherd to his trade, and by starts, 
when he could bring his mind to it, excelled in the business.  Nobody 
could train a dog like Dandie; nobody, through the peril of great storms 
in the winter time, could do more gallantly.  But if his dexterity were 
exquisite, his diligence was but fitful; and he served his brother for 
bed and board, and a trifle of pocket-money when he asked for it.  He 
loved money well enough, knew very well how to spend it, and could make 
a shrewd bargain when he liked.  But he preferred a vague knowledge that 
he was well to windward to any counted coins in the pocket; he felt 
himself richer so.  Hob would expostulate: "I'm an amature herd."  Dand 
would reply, "I'll keep your sheep to you when I'm so minded, but I'll 
keep my liberty too.  Thir's no man can coandescend on what I'm worth."  
Clein would expound to him the miraculous results of compound interest, 
and recommend investments.  "Ay, man?" Dand would say; "and do you 
think, if I took Hob's siller, that I wouldna drink it or wear it on the 
lassies?  And, anyway, my kingdom is no of this world.  Either I'm a 
poet or else I'm nothing."  Clem would remind him of old age.  "I'll die 
young, like, Robbie Burns," he would say stoutly.  No question but he 
had a certain accomplishment in minor verse.  His "Hermiston Burn," with 
its pretty refrain -


"I love to gang thinking whaur ye gang linking,
Hermiston burn, in the howe;"


his "Auld, auld Elliotts, clay-cauld Elliotts, dour, bauld Elliotts of 
auld," and his really fascinating piece about the Praying Weaver's 
Stone, had gained him in the neighbourhood the reputation, still 
possible in Scotland, of a local bard; and, though not printed himself, 
he was recognised by others who were and who had become famous.  Walter 
Scott owed to Dandie the text of the "Raid of Wearie" in the MINSTRELSY; 
and made him welcome at his house, and appreciated his talents, such as 
they were, with all his usual generosity.  The Ettrick Shepherd was his 
sworn crony; they would meet, drink to excess, roar out their lyrics in 
each other's faces, and quarrel and make it up again till bedtime.  And 
besides these recognitions, almost to be called official, Dandie was 
made welcome for the sake of his gift through the farmhouses of several 
contiguous dales, and was thus exposed to manifold temptations which he 
rather sought than fled.  He had figured on the stool of repentance, for 
once fulfilling to the letter the tradition of his hero and model.  His 
humorous verses to Mr. Torrance on that occasion - "Kenspeckle here my 
lane I stand" - unfortunately too indelicate for further citation, ran 
through the country like a fiery cross - they were recited, quoted, 
paraphrased, and laughed over as far away as Dumfries on the one hand 
and Dunbar on the other.

These four brothers were united by a close bond, the bond of that mutual 
admiration - or rather mutual hero-worship - which is so strong among 
the members of secluded families who have much ability and little 
culture.  Even the extremes admired each other.  Hob, who had as much 
poetry as the tongs, professed to find pleasure in Dand's verses; Clem, 
who had no more religion than Claverhouse, nourished a heartfelt, at 
least an open-mouthed, admiration of Gib's prayers; and Dandie followed 
with relish the rise of Clem's fortunes.  Indulgence followed hard on 
the heels of admiration.  The laird, Clem, and Dand, who were Tories and 
patriots of the hottest quality, excused to themselves, with a certain 
bashfulness, the radical and revolutionary heresies of Gib.  By another 
division of the family, the laird, Clem, and Gib, who were men exactly 
virtuous, swallowed the dose of Dand's irregularities as a kind of clog 
or drawback in the mysterious providence of God affixed to bards, and 
distinctly probative of poetical genius.  To appreciate the simplicity 
of their mutual admiration it was necessary to hear Clem, arrived upon 
one of his visits, and dealing in a spirit of continuous irony with the 
affairs and personalities of that great city of Glasgow where he lived 
and transacted business.  The various personages, ministers of the 
church, municipal officers, mercantile big-wigs, whom he had occasion to 
introduce, were all alike denigrated, all served but as reflectors to 
cast back a flattering side-light on the house of Cauldstaneslap.  The 
Provost, for whom Clem by exception entertained a measure of respect, he 
would liken to Hob. "He minds me o' the laird there," he would say.  "He 
has some of Hob's grand, whunstane sense, and the same way with him of 
steiking his mouth when he's no very pleased."  And Hob, all 
unconscious, would draw down his upper lip and produce, as if for 
comparison, the formidable grimace referred to.  The unsatisfactory 
incumbent of St. Enoch's Kirk was thus briefly dismissed: "If he had but 
twa fingers o' Gib's, he would waken them up."  And Gib, honest man! 
would look down and secretly smile.  Clem was a spy whom they had sent 
out into the world of men.  He had come back with the good news that 
there was nobody to compare with the Four Black Brothers, no position 
that they would not adorn, no official that it would not be well they 
should replace, no interest of mankind, secular or spiritual, which 
would not immediately bloom under their supervision.  The excuse of 
their folly is in two words: scarce the breadth of a hair divided them 
from the peasantry.  The measure of their sense is this: that these 
symposia of rustic vanity were kept entirely within the family, like 
some secret ancestral practice.  To the world their serious faces were 
never deformed by the suspicion of any simper of self-contentment.  Yet 
it was known.  "They hae a guid pride o' themsel's!" was the word in the 
country-side.

Lastly, in a Border story, there should be added their "two-names."  Hob 
was The Laird. "Roy ne puis, prince ne daigne"; he was the laird of 
Cauldstaneslap - say fifty acres - IPSISSIMUS.  Clement was Mr. Elliott, 
as upon his door-plate, the earlier Dafty having been discarded as no 
longer applicable, and indeed only a reminder of misjudgment and the 
imbecility of the public; and the youngest, in honour of his perpetual 
wanderings, was known by the sobriquet of Randy Dand.

It will be understood that not all this information was communicated by 
the aunt, who had too much of the family failing herself to appreciate 
it thoroughly in others.  But as time went on, Archie began to observe 
an omission in the family chronicle.

"Is there not a girl too?" he asked.

"Ay: Kirstie.  She was named for me, or my grandmother at least - it's 
the same thing," returned the aunt, and went on again about Dand, whom 
she secretly preferred by reason of his gallantries.

"But what is your niece like?" said Archie at the next opportunity.

"Her?  As black's your hat!  But I dinna suppose she would maybe be what 
you would ca' ILL-LOOKED a'thegither.  Na, she's a kind of a handsome 
jaud - a kind o' gipsy," said the aunt, who had two sets of scales for 
men and women - or perhaps it would be more fair to say that she had 
three, and the third and the most loaded was for girls.

"How comes it that I never see her in church?" said Archie.

" 'Deed, and I believe she's in Glesgie with Clem and his wife.  A heap 
good she's like to get of it!  I dinna say for men folk, but where 
weemen folk are born, there let them bide.  Glory to God, I was never 
far'er from here than Crossmichael."

In the meanwhile it began to strike Archie as strange, that while she 
thus sang the praises of her kinsfolk, and manifestly relished their 
virtues and (I may say) their vices like a thing creditable to herself, 
there should appear not the least sign of cordiality between the house 
of Hermiston and that of Cauldstaneslap.  Going to church of a Sunday, 
as the lady housekeeper stepped with her skirts kilted, three tucks of 
her white petticoat showing below, and her best India shawl upon her 
back (if the day were fine) in a pattern of radiant dyes, she would 
sometimes overtake her relatives preceding her more leisurely in the 
same direction.  Gib of course was absent: by skreigh of day he had been 
gone to Crossmichael and his fellow-heretics; but the rest of the family 
would be seen marching in open order: Hob and Dand, stiff-necked, 
straight-backed six-footers, with severe dark faces, and their plaids 
about their shoulders; the convoy of children scattering (in a state of 
high polish) on the wayside, and every now and again collected by the 
shrill summons of the mother; and the mother herself, by a suggestive 
circumstance which might have afforded matter of thought to a more 
experienced observer than Archie, wrapped in a shawl nearly identical 
with Kirstie's, but a thought more gaudy and conspicuously newer.  At 
the sight, Kirstie grew more tall - Kirstie showed her classical 
profile, nose in air and nostril spread, the pure blood came in her 
cheek evenly in a delicate living pink.

"A braw day to ye, Mistress Elliott," said she, and hostility and 
gentility were nicely mingled in her tones.  "A fine day, mem," the 
laird's wife would reply with a miraculous curtsey, spreading the while 
her plumage - setting off, in other words, and with arts unknown to the 
mere man, the pattern of her India shawl.  Behind her, the whole 
Cauldstaneslap contingent marched in closer order, and with an 
indescribable air of being in the presence of the foe; and while Dandie 
saluted his aunt with a certain familiarity as of one who was well in 
court, Hob marched on in awful immobility.  There appeared upon the face 
of this attitude in the family the consequences of some dreadful feud.  
Presumably the two women had been principals in the original encounter, 
and the laird had probably been drawn into the quarrel by the ears, too 
late to be included in the present skin-deep reconciliation.

"Kirstie," said Archie one day, "what is this you have against your 
family?"

"I dinna complean," said Kirstie, with a flush. "I say naething."

"I see you do not - not even good-day to your own nephew," said he.

"I hae naething to be ashamed of," said she.  "I can say the Lord's 
prayer with a good grace.  If Hob was ill, or in preeson or poverty, I 
would see to him blithely.  But for curtchying and complimenting and 
colloguing, thank ye kindly!"

Archie had a bit of a smile: he leaned back in his chair.  "I think you 
and Mrs. Robert are not very good friends," says he slyly, "when you 
have your India shawls on?"

She looked upon him in silence, with a sparkling eye but an 
indecipherable expression; and that was all that Archie was ever 
destined to learn of the battle of the India shawls.

"Do none of them ever come here to see you?" he inquired.

"Mr. Archie," said she, "I hope that I ken my place better.  It would be 
a queer thing, I think, if I was to clamjamfry up your faither's house - 
that I should say it! - wi' a dirty, black-a-vised clan, no ane o' them 
it was worth while to mar soap upon but just mysel'!  Na, they're all 
damnifeed wi' the black Ellwalds.  I have nae patience wi' black folk."  
Then, with a sudden consciousness of the case of Archie, "No that it 
maitters for men sae muckle," she made haste to add, "but there's 
naebody can deny that it's unwomanly.  Long hair is the ornament o' 
woman ony way; we've good warrandise for that - it's in the Bible - and 
wha can doubt that the Apostle had some gowden-haired lassie in his mind 
- Apostle and all, for what was he but just a man like yersel'?"



CHAPTER VI - A LEAF FROM CHRISTINA'S PSALM-BOOK



ARCHIE was sedulous at church.  Sunday after Sunday he sat down and 
stood up with that small company, heard the voice of Mr. Torrance 
leaping like an ill-played clarionet from key to key, and had an 
opportunity to study his moth-eaten gown and the black thread mittens 
that he joined together in prayer, and lifted up with a reverent 
solemnity in the act of benediction.  Hermiston pew was a little square 
box, dwarfish in proportion with the kirk itself, and enclosing a table 
not much bigger than a footstool.  There sat Archie, an apparent prince, 
the only undeniable gentleman and the only great heritor in the parish, 
taking his ease in the only pew, for no other in the kirk had doors.  
Thence he might command an undisturbed view of that congregation of 
solid plaided men, strapping wives and daughters, oppressed children, 
and uneasy sheep-dogs.  It was strange how Archie missed the look of 
race; except the dogs, with their refined foxy faces and inimitably 
curling tails, there was no one present with the least claim to 
gentility.  The Cauldstaneslap party was scarcely an exception; Dandie 
perhaps, as he amused himself making verses through the interminable 
burden of the service, stood out a little by the glow in his eye and a 
certain superior animation of face and alertness of body; but even 
Dandie slouched like a rustic.  The rest of the congregation, like so 
many sheep, oppressed him with a sense of hob-nailed routine, day 
following day - of physical labour in the open air, oatmeal porridge, 
peas bannock the somnolent fireside in the evening, and the night-long 
nasal slumbers in a box-bed.  Yet he knew many of them to be shrewd and 
humorous, men of character, notable women, making a bustle in the world 
and radiating an influence from their low-browed doors.  He knew besides 
they were like other men; below the crust of custom, rapture found a 
way; he had heard them beat the timbrel before Bacchus - had heard them 
shout and carouse over their whisky-toddy; and not the most Dutch-
bottomed and severe faces among them all, not even the solemn elders 
themselves, but were capable of singular gambols at the voice of love.  
Men drawing near to an end of life's adventurous journey - maids 
thrilling with fear and curiosity on the threshold of entrance - women 
who had borne and perhaps buried children, who could remember the 
clinging of the small dead hands and the patter of the little feet now 
silent - he marvelled that among all those faces there should be no face 
of expectation, none that was mobile, none into which the rhythm and 
poetry of life had entered.  "O for a live face," he thought; and at 
times he had a memory of Lady Flora; and at times he would study the 
living gallery before him with despair, and would see himself go on to 
waste his days in that joyless pastoral place, and death come to him, 
and his grave be dug under the rowans, and the Spirit of the Earth laugh 
out in a thunder-peal at the huge fiasco.

On this particular Sunday, there was no doubt but that the spring had 
come at last.  It was warm, with a latent shiver in the air that made 
the warmth only the more welcome.  The shallows of the stream glittered 
and tinkled among bunches of primrose.  Vagrant scents of the earth 
arrested Archie by the way with moments of ethereal intoxication.  The 
grey Quakerish dale was still only awakened in places and patches from 
the sobriety of its winter colouring; and he wondered at its beauty; an 
essential beauty of the old earth it seemed to him, not resident in 
particulars but breathing to him from the whole.  He surprised himself 
by a sudden impulse to write poetry - he did so sometimes, loose, 
galloping octo-syllabics in the vein of Scott - and when he had taken 
his place on a boulder, near some fairy falls and shaded by a whip of a 
tree that was already radiant with new leaves, it still more surprised 
him that he should have nothing to write.  His heart perhaps beat in 
time to some vast indwelling rhythm of the universe.  By the time he 
came to a corner of the valley and could see the kirk, he had so 
lingered by the way that the first psalm was finishing.  The nasal
psalmody, full of turns and trills and graceless graces, seemed the
essential voice of the kirk itself upraised in thanksgiving, 
"Everything's alive," he said; and again cries it aloud, "thank God, 
everything's alive!"  He lingered yet a while in the kirk-yard.  A tuft 
of primroses was blooming hard by the leg of an old black table 
tombstone, and he stopped to contemplate the random apologue.  They 
stood forth on the cold earth with a trenchancy of contrast; and he was 
struck with a sense of incompleteness in the day, the season, and the 
beauty that surrounded him - the chill there was in the warmth, the 
gross black clods about the opening primroses, the damp earthy smell 
that was everywhere intermingled with the scents.  The voice of the aged 
Torrance within rose in an ecstasy.  And he wondered if Torrance also 
felt in his old bones the joyous influence of the spring morning; 
Torrance, or the shadow of what once was Torrance, that must come so 
soon to lie outside here in the sun and rain with all his rheumatisms, 
while a new minister stood in his room and thundered from his own 
familiar pulpit?  The pity of it, and something of the chill of the 
grave, shook him for a moment as he made haste to enter.

He went up the aisle reverently, and took his place in the pew with 
lowered eyes, for he feared he had already offended the kind old 
gentleman in the pulpit, and was sedulous to offend no further.  He 
could not follow the prayer, not even the heads of it.  Brightnesses
of azure, clouds of fragrance, a tinkle of falling water and singing
birds, rose like exhalations from some deeper, aboriginal memory, that
was not his, but belonged to the flesh on his bones.  His body
remembered; and it seemed to him that his body was in no way gross, 
but ethereal and perishable like a strain of music; and he felt for it 
an exquisite tenderness as for a child, an innocent, full of beautiful 
instincts and destined to an early death.  And he felt for old Torrance 
- of the many supplications, of the few days - a pity that was near to 
tears.  The prayer ended.  Right over him was a tablet in the wall, the 
only ornament in the roughly masoned chapel - for it was no more; the 
tablet commemorated, I was about to say the virtues, but rather the 
existence of a former Rutherford of Hermiston; and Archie, under that 
trophy of his long descent and local greatness, leaned back in the pew 
and contemplated vacancy with the shadow of a smile between playful and 
sad, that became him strangely.  Dandie's sister, sitting by the side of 
Clem in her new Glasgow finery, chose that moment to observe the young 
laird.  Aware of the stir of his entrance, the little formalist had kept 
her eyes fastened and her face prettily composed during the prayer.  It 
was not hypocrisy, there was no one further from a hypocrite.  The girl 
had been taught to behave: to look up, to look down, to look 
unconscious, to look seriously impressed in church, and in every 
conjuncture to look her best.  That was the game of female life, and she 
played it frankly.  Archie was the one person in church who was of
interest, who was somebody new, reputed eccentric, known to be young,
and a laird, and still unseen by Christina.  Small wonder that, as
she stood there in her attitude of pretty decency, her mind should run
upon him!  If he spared a glance in her direction, he should know she
was a well-behaved young lady who had been to Glasgow.  In reason he
must admire her clothes, and it was possible that he should think her
pretty.  At that her heart beat the least thing in the world; and she
proceeded, by way of a corrective, to call up and dismiss a series of
fancied pictures of the young man who should now, by rights, be looking
at her.  She settled on the plainest of them, - a pink short young man
with a dish face and no figure, at whose admiration she could afford to
smile; but for all that, the consciousness of his gaze (which was really
fixed on Torrance and his mittens) kept her in something of a flutter
till the word Amen.  Even then, she was far too well-bred to gratify her
curiosity with any impatience.  She resumed her seat languidly - this was
a Glasgow touch - she composed her dress, rearranged her nosegay of
primroses, looked first in front, then behind upon the other side, and
at last allowed her eyes to move, without hurry, in the direction of
the Hermiston pew.  For a moment, they were riveted.  Next she had
plucked her gaze home again like a tame bird who should have meditated
flight.  Possibilities crowded on her; she hung over the future and grew
dizzy; the image of this young man, slim, graceful, dark, with the
inscrutable half-smile, attracted and repelled her like a chasm.  "I
wonder, will I have met my fate?" she thought, and her heart swelled.

Torrance was got some way into his first exposition, positing a deep 
layer of texts as he went along, laying the foundations of his 
discourse, which was to deal with a nice point in divinity, before 
Archie suffered his eyes to wander.  They fell first of all on Clem, 
looking insupportably prosperous, and patronising Torrance with the 
favour of a modified attention, as of one who was used to better things 
in Glasgow.  Though he had never before set eyes on him, Archie had no 
difficulty in identifying him, and no hesitation in pronouncing him 
vulgar, the worst of the family.  Clem was leaning lazily forward when 
Archie first saw him.  Presently he leaned nonchalantly back; and that 
deadly instrument, the maiden, was suddenly unmasked in profile.  Though 
not quite in the front of the fashion (had anybody cared!), certain 
artful Glasgow mantua-makers, and her own inherent taste, had arrayed 
her to great advantage.  Her accoutrement was, indeed, a cause of heart-
burning, and almost of scandal, in that infinitesimal kirk company.  
Mrs. Hob had said her say at Cauldstaneslap.  "Daft-like!" she had 
pronounced it.  "A jaiket that'll no meet!  Whaur's the sense of a 
jaiket that'll no button upon you, if it should come to be weet?  What 
do ye ca' thir things?  Demmy brokens, d'ye say?  They'll be brokens wi' 
a vengeance or ye can win back!  Weel, I have nae thing to do wi' it - 
it's no good taste."  Clem, whose purse had thus metamorphosed his 
sister, and who was not insensible to the advertisement, had come to the 
rescue with a "Hoot, woman!  What do you ken of good taste that has 
never been to the ceety?"  And Hob, looking on the girl with pleased 
smiles, as she timidly displayed her finery in the midst of the dark 
kitchen, had thus ended the dispute: "The cutty looks weel," he had 
said, "and it's no very like rain.  Wear them the day, hizzie; but it's 
no a thing to make a practice o'."  In the breasts of her rivals, coming 
to the kirk very conscious of white under-linen, and their faces 
splendid with much soap, the sight of the toilet had raised a storm of 
varying emotion, from the mere unenvious admiration that was expressed 
in a long-drawn "Eh!" to the angrier feeling that found vent in an 
emphatic "Set her up!"  Her frock was of straw-coloured jaconet muslin, 
cut low at the bosom and short at the ankle, so as to display her DEMI-
BROQUINS of Regency violet, crossing with many straps upon a yellow 
cobweb stocking.  According to the pretty fashion in which our 
grandmothers did not hesitate to appear, and our great-aunts went forth 
armed for the pursuit and capture of our great-uncles, the dress was 
drawn up so as to mould the contour of both breasts, and in the nook 
between, a cairngorm brooch maintained it.  Here, too, surely in a very 
enviable position, trembled the nosegay of primroses.  She wore on her 
shoulders - or rather on her back and not her shoulders, which it 
scarcely passed - a French coat of sarsenet, tied in front with Margate 
braces, and of the same colour with her violet shoes.  About her face 
clustered a disorder of dark ringlets, a little garland of yellow French 
roses surmounted her brow, and the whole was crowned by a village hat of 
chipped straw.  Amongst all the rosy and all the weathered faces that 
surrounded her in church, she glowed like an open flower - girl and 
raiment, and the cairngorm that caught the daylight and returned it in a 
fiery flash, and the threads of bronze and gold that played in her hair.

Archie was attracted by the bright thing like a child.  He looked at her 
again and yet again, and their looks crossed.  The lip was lifted from 
her little teeth.  He saw the red blood work vividly under her tawny 
skin.  Her eye, which was great as a stag's, struck and held his gaze.  
He knew who she must be - Kirstie, she of the harsh diminutive, his 
housekeeper's niece, the sister of the rustic prophet, Gib - and he 
found in her the answer to his wishes.

Christina felt the shock of their encountering glances, and seemed to 
rise, clothed in smiles, into a region of the vague and bright.  But the 
gratification was not more exquisite than it was brief.  She looked away 
abruptly, and immediately began to blame herself for that abruptness.  
She knew what she should have done, too late - turned slowly with her 
nose in the air.  And meantime his look was not removed, but continued 
to play upon her like a battery of cannon constantly aimed, and now 
seemed to isolate her alone with him, and now seemed to uplift her, as 
on a pillory, before the congregation.  For Archie continued to drink 
her in with his eyes, even as a wayfarer comes to a well-head on a 
mountain, and stoops his face, and drinks with thirst unassuageable.  In 
the cleft of her little breasts the fiery eye of the topaz and the pale 
florets of primrose fascinated him.  He saw the breasts heave, and the 
flowers shake with the heaving, and marvelled what should so much 
discompose the girl.  And Christina was conscious of his gaze - saw it, 
perhaps, with the dainty plaything of an ear that peeped among her 
ringlets; she was conscious of changing colour, conscious of her 
unsteady breath.  Like a creature tracked, run down, surrounded, she 
sought in a dozen ways to give herself a countenance.  She used her 
handkerchief - it was a really fine one - then she desisted in a panic: 
"He would only think I was too warm."  She took to reading in the 
metrical psalms, and then remembered it was sermon-time.  Last she put a 
"sugar-bool" in her mouth, and the next moment repented of the step.  It 
was such a homely-like thing!  Mr. Archie would never be eating sweeties 
in kirk; and, with a palpable effort, she swallowed it whole, and her 
colour flamed high.  At this signal of distress Archie awoke to a sense 
of his ill-behaviour.  What had he been doing?  He had been exquisitely 
rude in church to the niece of his housekeeper; he had stared like a 
lackey and a libertine at a beautiful and modest girl.  It was possible, 
it was even likely, he would be presented to her after service in the 
kirk-yard, and then how was he to look?  And there was no excuse.  He 
had marked the tokens of her shame, of her increasing indignation, and 
he was such a fool that he had not understood them.  Shame bowed him 
down, and he looked resolutely at Mr. Torrance; who little supposed, 
good, worthy man, as he continued to expound justification by faith, 
what was his true business: to play the part of derivative to a pair of 
children at the old game of falling in love.

Christina was greatly relieved at first.  It seemed to her that she was 
clothed again.  She looked back on what had passed.  All would have been 
right if she had not blushed, a silly fool!  There was nothing to blush 
at, if she HAD taken a sugar-bool.  Mrs. MacTaggart, the elder's wife in 
St. Enoch's, took them often.  And if he had looked at her, what was 
more natural than that a young gentleman should look at the best-dressed 
girl in church?  And at the same time, she knew far otherwise, she knew 
there was nothing casual or ordinary in the look, and valued herself on 
its memory like a decoration.  Well, it was a blessing he had found 
something else to look at!  And presently she began to have other 
thoughts.  It was necessary, she fancied, that she should put herself 
right by a repetition of the incident, better managed.  If the wish was 
father to the thought, she did not know or she would not recognise it.  
It was simply as a manoeuvre of propriety, as something called for to 
lessen the significance of what had gone before, that she should a 
second time meet his eyes, and this time without blushing.  And at the 
memory of the blush, she blushed again, and became one general blush 
burning from head to foot.  Was ever anything so indelicate, so forward, 
done by a girl before?  And here she was, making an exhibition of 
herself before the congregation about nothing!  She stole a glance upon 
her neighbours, and behold! they were steadily indifferent, and Clem had 
gone to sleep.  And still the one idea was becoming more and more potent 
with her, that in common prudence she must look again before the service 
ended.  Something of the same sort was going forward in the mind of 
Archie, as he struggled with the load of penitence.  So it chanced that, 
in the flutter of the moment when the last psalm was given out, and 
Torrance was reading the verse, and the leaves of every psalm-book in 
church were rustling under busy fingers, two stealthy glances were sent 
out like antennae among the pews and on the indifferent and absorbed 
occupants, and drew timidly nearer to the straight line between Archie 
and Christina.  They met, they lingered together for the least fraction 
of time, and that was enough.  A charge as of electricity passed through 
Christina, and behold! the leaf of her psalm-book was torn across.