Читать книгу The Life of Sir Walter Scott: A Biography - S. Fowler Wright - Страница 6

CHAPTER II.

We need not doubt that Walter and Anne Scott set up housekeeping together very happily in College Wynd, having, many common interests, and a bond of love which would endure, but across the natural course of their marriage an inexplicable shadow fell—fell, and would not lift.

They were themselves in vigorous youth, and of an abundant vitality. They were of healthy stock, and their lives had been continent and well-ordered. Anne had children. They came rapidly. Babies that were strong at birth, as the children of such parents should be. But yet, after a few months, one after one, they tailed and died. It seems that love could not save them, nor any care. Family counsels were of no avail. The Professor of Medicine, with his grandchildren’s lives at stake had no sufficient wisdom to give.

The fact seems to have been that these children, of such entirely moorland ancestry, could not thrive in the smoke—and germ-laden city atmosphere. There could be no enduring life for them in the sunless rooms of that narrow ungardened house, at the end of the College Wynd. They could not resist the infections which the slum-bred child, of weaker vitality, was adapted to overcome. But who was to know that? The bitter lesson which industrial England was to learn in the following century was still unguessed.

Other children of seemingly weaker stocks thrived well enough; or lived, if they did not thrive. But prayers and tears were of an equal vanity here. There must have been many prayers. There is nothing surer than that. But it seemed that they prayed to a deaf God.

Pregnant again, and near the time of a fifth birth, Anne folded up four little packets of hair. She was arranging her private drawer, as a woman should who is approaching the ordeal of childbirth, so that it should be left neatly if anything should go wrong, as we know it may, though we are not so cowardly as to talk of that. She wrote on the packet in her slanting Italian hand: All these are dead. With what thoughts or tears she wrote we cannot tell now. She knew herself a failure among mothers. Four times. Was there any value in those short frustrated lives? Immortal futures, as she would have said with confidence, in her darkest hour? Nothing but a physical failure, and the folly of unspaced births, as some of us, with an equal confidence, would assert today? Well, God knows.

But this time she was to be rewarded with a child that would not die. Robert they named him, after his grandfather, still farming at Sandy-Knowe. That was to be his name, and his destiny was a naval life. There was a Scottish obstinacy about this programme—or was it a joke?

If it were so, we must go back a generation or two to understand its subtlety, for the elder Robert, life-long sheep-farmer at Sandy-Knowe, had been bred for the sea also, and that by a father of very obstinate disposition.

Robert’s father had been another Walter by the christening rite, but it was as “Old Beardie” that he was remembered, the nickname earned by a flowing beard that he had vowed not to shave or trim till the Stuarts should be re-established on the Scottish throne.

But the Covenanters had held their ground, and the beard thrived.

Old Beardie, a man not to be lightly crossed, had destined his second son, Robert, to the sea, and to the sea he went. His first voyage was on a ship of which we know little more than that it took a northerly course, possibly for Scandinavia or the Baltic ports. But the North Sea was unkind. Robert’s ship must have met a tempest from north or east, for it ended as a broken wreck on the Dundee coast. Robert got to the land alive, and on the land he would remain. He had a long walk home. When he arrived he said he had come to stay. He was emphatic about that. Old Beardie was emphatic too. He should go back to the sea, or he should never have another bawbee from him, or another meal at his board.

Robert agreed very cheerfully. He demonstrated his independence by turning Covenanter on the spot. It must have been a lively discussion.

He walked out, and went to John Scott of Harden, who was the chief of the clan. He asked for the lease of Sandy-Knowe, which was vacant. Sandy-Knowe was a high moorland farm with a poor soil. The ruins of Smailholm Tower stood at its centre—one of those small square-built Lowland holds, which had been so numerous in the Border counties.

Perhaps the fact that Robert had quarrelled with his father was no bad credential to bring. Certainly Old Beardie’s political activity must have been an embarrassment to the family. It had cost him the forfeiture of some ancestral lands. It had led him (he was a man of scholarly repute) to a club in Edinburgh where the members talked treason exclusively in the Latin tongue. It had once led him into the folly of active rebellion, from which he had escaped unhanged through the intervention of the Duke of Monmouth, which his wife, the Duchess of Buccleuch, had influenced in favour of this misguided member of her own clan.

Anyway, Robert got the farm.

As it must be stocked if it were to be of any profit, he next made a bargain with an old shepherd named Hogg, doubtless an ancestor of James, the Ettrick celebrity of that name, though the exact pedigree might not be easy to trace.

Hogg was to lend Robert the thirty pounds which he had accumulated in a life of penurious saving, and Robert was to appoint Hogg head-shepherd of a yet sheepless farm. Together, they were to buy sheep.

On this errand they journeyed to a Northumbrian fair, Robert carrying the money-bag. They separated on arrival and Hogg made a tour of the sheep-pens. When he had matured his opinions upon the prices and qualities that the market offered, he rejoined his master, who was now on horseback. There was no need to worry further about the price of sheep. The horse was bought, and the thirty pounds were gone.

Tradition says that there was some difficulty in explaining matters to the satisfaction of the ancient shepherd. As to that we may think what we will, and that Robert had to face a second interview of a lively kind is a very probable thing, but if we go on to suppose that this is no more than a tale of youth indiscretion we are miles out.

Robert could ride. In fact, he liked riding as much as he disliked having to swim. He rode that horse after the hounds when he got home. He was a judge of a good horse, and he knew how to take a fence. In a few days’ time the horse was sold for a doubled price. After that, he bought sheep.

Robert settled down on the moorland farm, married Barbara Haliburton, and reared a numerous family. It was land from which a Welshman might have wrung a meagre living, and on which an English farmer would have promptly starved. But Robert had some uncommon qualities, beside the thriftiness of those who are reared on a shallow soil. Where he was, his success would be. He became a dealer in cattle, his operations extending from the Scottish Highlands to the midland counties of England. Shrewd, sagacious, quick of thought and speech, of a tireless activity, and with a name for scrupulous honesty, his reputation grew, and his business with it. We may think of him as sheep-farmer and cattle-drover, for such he was; but we must regard him also as a Harden Scott, whose name entitled him to meet the gentlefolk of the countryside on an equal footing, and whose thriving finances enabled him not only to establish his eldest son as an Edinburgh lawyer (as we have seen) but to provide on a similar scale for other members of the rather large family that he and Barbara raised beneath the shadow of Smailholm Tower, including a boy named Robert who was sent to sea!

He found time also for the games and field-sports in which he delighted, and in which he had a cultivated proficiency, not only in their exercise, but in their rules and traditions, as he had in other questions of country rites or usage, so that he became widely reputed as an arbiter of dispute. At the period to which we are coming, we must think of him as a white-haired man, of medium height, and a spare activity, the sporting proclivities of earlier years still symbolised in the jockey cap which is his usual head-gear. Barbara is alive also. She will outlive him, and with an activity and capacity which will carry on the farm when he is dead; but it is the gentleness of her disposition which is most impressive to those who meet her. When we remember the ‘sweetness’ which was remarked in more than one of her children, and particularly in the Walter with whom we have been concerned, which was hardly discernable as a characteristic of the earlier Scotts, we may confirm our thought that the Haliburtons must not be overlooked when we consider his ancestry, and that of his greater son.