The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Volume 1 Page 12

  CHAPTER SEVENTH

  Arthur's Seat shall be my bed, The sheets shall ne'er be pressed by me, St. Anton's well shall be my drink, Sin' my true-love's forsaken me. Old Song.

  If I were to choose a spot from which the rising or setting sun could beseen to the greatest possible advantage, it would be that wild pathwinding around the foot of the high belt of semicircular rocks, calledSalisbury Crags, and marking the verge of the steep descent which slopesdown into the glen on the south-eastern side of the city of Edinburgh.The prospect, in its general outline, commands a close-built, high-piledcity, stretching itself out beneath in a form, which, to a romanticimagination, may be supposed to represent that of a dragon; now, a noblearm of the sea, with its rocks, isles, distant shores, and boundary ofmountains; and now, a fair and fertile champaign country, varied withhill, dale, and rock, and skirted by the picturesque ridge of thePentland mountains. But as the path gently circles around the base of thecliffs, the prospect, composed as it is of these enchanting and sublimeobjects, changes at every step, and presents them blended with, ordivided from, each other, in every possible variety which can gratify theeye and the imagination. When a piece of scenery so beautiful, yet sovaried,--so exciting by its intricacy, and yet so sublime,--is lighted upby the tints of morning or of evening, and displays all that variety ofshadowy depth, exchanged with partial brilliancy, which gives charactereven to the tamest of landscapes, the effect approaches near toenchantment. This path used to be my favourite evening and morningresort, when engaged with a favourite author, or new subject of study. Itis, I am informed, now become totally impassable; a circumstance which,if true, reflects little credit on the taste of the Good Town or itsleaders.*

  * A beautiful and solid pathway has, within a few years, been formedaround these romantic rocks; and the Author has the pleasure to think,that the passage in the text gave rise to the undertaking.

  It was from this fascinating path--the scene to me of so much deliciousmusing, when life was young and promised to be happy, that I have beenunable to pass it over without an episodical description--it was, I say,from this romantic path that Butler saw the morning arise the day afterthe murder of Porteous. It was possible for him with ease to have found amuch shorter road to the house to which he was directing his course, and,in fact, that which he chose was extremely circuitous. But to compose hisown spirits, as well as to while away the time, until a proper hour forvisiting the family without surprise or disturbance, he was induced toextend his circuit by the foot of the rocks, and to linger upon his wayuntil the morning should be considerably advanced. While, now standingwith his arms across, and waiting the slow progress of the sun above thehorizon, now sitting upon one of the numerous fragments which storms haddetached from the rocks above him, he is meditating, alternately upon thehorrible catastrophe which he had witnessed, and upon the melancholy, andto him most interesting, news which he had learned at Saddletree's, wewill give the reader to understand who Butler was, and how his fate wasconnected with that of Effie Deans, the unfortunate handmaiden of thecareful Mrs. Saddletree.

  Reuben Butler was of English extraction, though born in Scotland. Hisgrandfather was a trooper in Monk's army, and one of the party ofdismounted dragoons which formed the forlorn hope at the storming ofDundee in 1651. Stephen Butler (called from his talents in reading andexpounding, Scripture Stephen, and Bible Butler) was a stanchIndependent, and received in its fullest comprehension the promise thatthe saints should inherit the earth. As hard knocks were what had chieflyfallen to his share hitherto in the division of this common property, helost not the opportunity which the storm and plunder of a commercialplace afforded him, to appropriate as large a share of the better thingsof this world as he could possibly compass. It would seem that he hadsucceeded indifferently well, for his exterior circumstances appeared, inconsequence of this event, to have been much mended.

  The troop to which he belonged was quartered at the village of Dalkeith,as forming the bodyguard of Monk, who, in the capacity of general for theCommonwealth, resided in the neighbouring castle. When, on the eve of theRestoration, the general commenced his march from Scotland, a measurepregnant with such important consequences, he new-modelled his troops,and more especially those immediately about his person, in order thatthey might consist entirely of individuals devoted to himself. On thisoccasion Scripture Stephen was weighed in the balance, and found wanting.It was supposed he felt no call to any expedition which might endangerthe reign of the military sainthood, and that he did not consider himselfas free in conscience to join with any party which might be likelyultimately to acknowledge the interest of Charles Stuart, the son of "thelast man," as Charles I. was familiarly and irreverently termed by themin their common discourse, as well as in their more elaboratepredications and harangues. As the time did not admit of cashiering suchdissidents, Stephen Butler was only advised in a friendly way to give uphis horse and accoutrements to one of Middleton's old troopers whopossessed an accommodating conscience of a military stamp, and whichsquared itself chiefly upon those of the colonel and paymaster. As thishint came recommended by a certain sum of arrears presently payable,Stephen had carnal wisdom enough to embrace the proposal, and with greatindifference saw his old corps depart for Coldstream, on their route forthe south, to establish the tottering Government of England on a newbasis.

  The _zone_ of the ex-trooper, to use Horace's phrase, was weighty enoughto purchase a cottage and two or three fields (still known by the name ofBeersheba), within about a Scottish mile of Dalkeith; and there didStephen establish himself with a youthful helpmate, chosen out of thesaid village, whose disposition to a comfortable settlement on this sideof the grave reconciled her to the gruff manners, serious temper, andweather-beaten features of the martial enthusiast. Stephen did not longsurvive the falling on "evil days and evil tongues," of which Milton, inthe same predicament, so mournfully complains. At his death his consortremained an early widow, with a male child of three years old, which, inthe sobriety wherewith it demeaned itself, in the old-fashioned and evengrim cast of its features, and in its sententious mode of expressingitself, would sufficiently have vindicated the honour of the widow ofBeersheba, had any one thought proper to challenge the babe's descentfrom Bible Butler.

  Butler's principles had not descended to his family, or extendedthemselves among his neighbours. The air of Scotland was alien to thegrowth of independency, however favourable to fanaticism under othercolours. But, nevertheless, they were not forgotten; and a certainneighbouring Laird, who piqued himself upon the loyalty of his principles"in the worst of times" (though I never heard they exposed him to moreperil than that of a broken head, or a night's lodging in the main guard,when wine and cavalierism predominated in his upper storey), had found ita convenient thing to rake up all matter of accusation against thedeceased Stephen. In this enumeration his religious principles made nosmall figure, as, indeed, they must have seemed of the most exaggeratedenormity to one whose own were so small and so faintly traced, as to bewell nigh imperceptible. In these circumstances, poor widow Butler wassupplied with her full proportion of fines for nonconformity, and all theother oppressions of the time, until Beersheba was fairly wrenched out ofher hands, and became the property of the Laird who had so wantonly, asit had hitherto appeared, persecuted this poor forlorn woman. When hispurpose was fairly achieved, he showed some remorse or moderation, ofwhatever the reader may please to term it, in permitting her to occupyher husband's cottage, and cultivate, on no very heavy terms, a croft ofland adjacent. Her son, Benjamin, in the meanwhile, grew up to massestate, and, moved by that impulse which makes men seek marriage, evenwhen its end can only be the perpetuation of misery, he wedded andbrought a wife, and, eventually, a son, Reuben, to share the poverty ofBeersheba.

  The Laird of Dumbiedikes* had hitherto been moderate in his exactions,perhaps because he was ashamed to tax too highly the miserable
means ofsupport which remained to the widow Butler.

  * Dumbiedikes, selected as descriptive of the taciturn character of theimaginary owner, is really the name of a house bordering on the King'sPark, so called because the late Mr. Braidwood, an instructor of the deafand dumb, resided there with his pupils. The situation of the real houseis different from that assigned to the ideal mansion.

  But when a stout active young fellow appeared as the labourer of thecroft in question, Dumbiedikes began to think so broad a pair ofshoulders might bear an additional burden. He regulated, indeed, hismanagement of his dependants (who fortunately were but few in number)much upon the principle of the carters whom he observed loading theircarts at a neighbouring coal-hill, and who never failed to clap anadditional brace of hundredweights on their burden, so soon as by anymeans they had compassed a new horse of somewhat superior strength tothat which had broken down the day before. However reasonable thispractice appeared to the Laird of Dumbiedikes, he ought to have observed,that it may be overdone, and that it infers, as a matter of course, thedestruction and loss of both horse, and cart, and loading. Even so itbefell when the additional "prestations" came to be demanded of BenjaminButler. A man of few words, and few ideas, but attached to Beersheba witha feeling like that which a vegetable entertains to the spot in which itchances to be planted, he neither remonstrated with the Laird, norendeavoured to escape from him, but, toiling night and day to accomplishthe terms of his taskmaster, fell into a burning fever and died. His wifedid not long survive him; and, as if it had been the fate of this familyto be left orphans, our Reuben Butler was, about the year 1704-5, left inthe same circumstances in which his father had been placed, and under thesame guardianship, being that of his grandmother, the widow of Monk's oldtrooper.

  The same prospect of misery hung over the head of another tenant of thishardhearted lord of the soil. This was a tough true-blue Presbyterian,called Deans, who, though most obnoxious to the Laird on account ofprinciples in church and state, contrived to maintain his ground upon theestate by regular payment of mail-duties, kain, arriage, carriage, drymulture, lock, gowpen, and knaveship, and all the various exactions nowcommuted for money, and summed up in the emphatic word rent. But theyears 1700 and 1701, long remembered in Scotland for dearth and generaldistress, subdued the stout heart of the agricultural whig. Citations bythe ground-officer, decreets of the Baron Court, sequestrations,poindings of outside and inside plenishing, flew about his ears as fastas the tory bullets whistled around those of the Covenanters at Pentland,Bothwell Brigg, or Airsmoss. Struggle as he might, and he struggledgallantly, "Douce David Deans" was routed horse and foot, and lay at themercy of his grasping landlord just at the time that Benjamin Butlerdied. The fate of each family was anticipated; but they who prophesiedtheir expulsion to beggary and ruin were disappointed by an accidentalcircumstance.

  On the very term-day when their ejection should have taken place, whenall their neighbours were prepared to pity, and not one to assist them,the minister of the parish, as well as a doctor from Edinburgh, receiveda hasty summons to attend the Laird of Dumbiedikes. Both were surprised,for his contempt for both faculties had been pretty commonly his themeover an extra bottle, that is to say, at least once every day. The leechfor the soul, and he for the body, alighted in the court of the littleold manor-house at almost the same time; and when they had gazed a momentat each other with some surprise, they in the same breath expressed theirconviction that Dumbiedikes must needs be very ill indeed, since hesummoned them both to his presence at once. Ere the servant could usherthem to his apartment, the party was augmented by a man of law, NichilNovit, writing himself procurator before the sheriff-court, for in thosedays there were no solicitors. This latter personage was first summonedto the apartment of the Laird, where, after some short space, thesoul-curer and the body-curer were invited to join him.

  Dumbiedikes had been by this time transported into the best bedroom, usedonly upon occasions of death and marriage, and called, from the former ofthese occupations, the Dead-Room. There were in this apartment, besidesthe sick person himself and Mr. Novit, the son and heir of the patient, atall gawky silly-looking boy of fourteen or fifteen, and a housekeeper, agood buxom figure of a woman, betwixt forty and fifty, who had kept thekeys and managed matters at Dumbiedikes since the lady's death. It was tothese attendants that Dumbiedikes addressed himself pretty nearly in thefollowing words; temporal and spiritual matters, the care of his healthand his affairs, being strangely jumbled in a head which was never one ofthe clearest.

  "These are sair times wi' me, gentlemen and neighbours! amaist as ill asat the aughty-nine, when I was rabbled by the collegeaners.*

  * Immediately previous to the Revolution, the students at the EdinburghCollege were violent anti-catholics. They were strongly suspected ofburning the house of Prestonfield, belonging to Sir James Dick, the LordProvost; and certainly were guilty of creating considerable riots in1688-9.

  --They mistook me muckle--they ca'd me a papist, but there was never apapist bit about me, minister.--Jock, ye'll take warning--it's a debt wemaun a' pay, and there stands Nichil Novit that will tell ye I was nevergude at paying debts in my life.--Mr. Novit, ye'll no forget to draw theannual rent that's due on the yerl's band--if I pay debt to other folk, Ithink they suld pay it to me--that equals aquals.--Jock, when ye haenaething else to do, ye may be aye sticking in a tree; it will begrowing, Jock, when ye're sleeping.*

  * The Author has been flattered by the assurance, that this _naive_ modeof recommending arboriculture (which was actually delivered in these verywords by a Highland laird, while on his death-bed, to his son) had somuch weight with a Scottish earl as to lead to his planting a large tractof country.

  "My father tauld me sae forty years sin', but I ne'er fand time to mindhim--Jock, ne'er drink brandy in the morning, it files the stamach sair;gin ye take a morning's draught, let it be aqua mirabilis; Jenny theremakes it weel--Doctor, my breath is growing as scant as a broken-windedpiper's, when he has played for four-and-twenty hours at a pennywedding--Jenny, pit the cod aneath my head--but it's a' needless!--MassJohn, could ye think o' rattling ower some bit short prayer, it wad dome gude maybe, and keep some queer thoughts out o' my head, Saysomething, man."

  "I cannot use a prayer like a rat-rhyme," answered the honest clergyman;"and if you would have your soul redeemed like a prey from the fowler,Laird, you must needs show me your state of mind."

  "And shouldna ye ken that without my telling you?" answered the patient."What have I been paying stipend and teind, parsonage and vicarage, for,ever sin' the aughty-nine, and I canna get a spell of a prayer for't, theonly time I ever asked for ane in my life?--Gang awa wi' your whiggery,if that's a' ye can do; auld Curate Kilstoup wad hae read half theprayer-book to me by this time--Awa wi' ye!--Doctor, let's see if ye cando onything better for me."

  The doctor, who had obtained some information in the meanwhile from thehousekeeper on the state of his complaints, assured him the medical artcould not prolong his life many hours.

  "Then damn Mass John and you baith!" cried the furious and intractablepatient. "Did ye come here for naething but to tell me that ye canna helpme at the pinch? Out wi' them, Jenny--out o' the house! and, Jock, mycurse, and the curse of Cromwell, go wi' ye, if ye gie them either fee orbountith, or sae muckle as a black pair o' cheverons!"*

  *_Cheverons_--gloves.

  The clergyman and doctor made a speedy retreat out of the apartment,while Dumbiedikes fell into one of those transports of violent andprofane language, which had procured him the surname of Damn-me-dikes."Bring me the brandy bottle, Jenny, ye b--," he cried, with a voice inwhich passion contended with pain. "I can die as I have lived, withoutfashing ony o' them. But there's ae thing," he said, sinking hisvoice--"there's ae fearful thing hings about my heart, and an anker ofbrandy winna wash it away.--The Deanses at Woodend!--I sequestrated themin the dear years, and now they are to flit, they'll starve--and thatBeersheba, and that auld trooper's wife and her oe, they'llstarve--they'
ll starve! --Look out, Jock; what kind o' night is't?"

  "On-ding o' snaw, father," answered Jock, after having opened the window,and looked out with great composure.

  "They'll perish in the drifts!" said the expiring sinner--"they'll perishwi' cauld!--but I'll be het eneugh, gin a' tales be true."

  This last observation was made under breath, and in a tone which made thevery attorney shudder. He tried his hand at ghostly advice, probably forthe first time in his life, and recommended as an opiate for the agonisedconscience of the Laird, reparation of the injuries he had done to thesedistressed families, which, he observed by the way, the civil law called_restitutio in integrum._ But Mammon was struggling with Remorse forretaining his place in a bosom he had so long possessed; and he partlysucceeded, as an old tyrant proves often too strong for his insurgentrebels.

  "I canna do't," he answered, with a voice of despair. "It would kill meto do't--how can ye bid me pay back siller, when ye ken how I want it? ordispone Beersheba, when it lies sae weel into my ain plaid-nuik? Naturemade Dumbiedikes and Beersheba to be ae man's land--She did, by Nichil,it wad kill me to part them."

  "But ye maun die whether or no, Laird," said Mr. Novit; "and maybe ye waddie easier--it's but trying. I'll scroll the disposition in nae time."

  "Dinna speak o't, sir," replied Dumbiedikes, "or I'll fling the stoup atyour head.--But, Jock, lad, ye see how the warld warstles wi' me on mydeathbed--be kind to the puir creatures, the Deanses and the Butlers--bekind to them, Jock. Dinna let the warld get a grip o' ye, Jock--but keepthe gear thegither! and whate'er ye do, dispone Beersheba at no rate. Letthe creatures stay at a moderate mailing, and hae bite and soup; it willmaybe be the better wi' your father whare he's gaun, lad."

  After these contradictory instructions, the Laird felt his mind so muchat ease, that he drank three bumpers of brandy continuously, and "soughedawa," as Jenny expressed it, in an attempt to sing "Deil stick theMinister."

  His death made a revolution in favour of the distressed families. JohnDumbie, now of Dumbiedikes, in his own right, seemed to be close andselfish enough, but wanted the grasping spirit and active mind of hisfather; and his guardian happened to agree with him in opinion, that hisfather's dying recommendation should be attended to. The tenants,therefore, were not actually turned out of doors among the snow-wreaths,and were allowed wherewith to procure butter-milk and peas-bannocks,which they ate under the full force of the original malediction. Thecottage of Deans, called Woodend, was not very distant from that atBeersheba. Formerly there had been but little intercourse between thefamilies. Deans was a sturdy Scotsman, with all sort of prejudicesagainst the southern, and the spawn of the southern. Moreover, Deans was,as we have said, a stanch Presbyterian, of the most rigid and unbendingadherence to what he conceived to be the only possible straight line, ashe was wont to express himself, between right-hand heats and extremes andleft-hand defections; and, therefore, he held in high dread and horrorall Independents, and whomsoever he supposed allied to them.

  But, notwithstanding these national prejudices and religious professions,Deans and the widow Butler were placed in such a situation, as naturallyand at length created some intimacy between the families. They had shareda common danger and a mutual deliverance. They needed each other'sassistance, like a company, who, crossing a mountain stream, arecompelled to cling close together, lest the current should be toopowerful for any who are not thus supported.

  On nearer acquaintance, too, Deans abated some of his prejudices. Hefound old Mrs. Butler, though not thoroughly grounded in the extent andbearing of the real testimony against the defections of the times, had noopinions in favour of the Independent party; neither was she anEnglishwoman. Therefore, it was to be hoped, that, though she was thewidow of an enthusiastic corporal of Cromwell's dragoons, her grandsonmight be neither schismatic nor anti-national, two qualities concerningwhich Goodman Deans had as wholesome a terror as against papists andmalignants, Above all (for Douce Davie Deans had his weak side), heperceived that widow Butler looked up to him with reverence, listened tohis advice, and compounded for an occasional fling at the doctrines ofher deceased husbands to which, as we have seen, she was by no meanswarmly attached, in consideration of the valuable counsels which thePresbyterian afforded her for the management of her little farm. Theseusually concluded with "they may do otherwise in England, neighbourButler, for aught I ken;" or, "it may be different in foreign parts;" or,"they wha think differently on the great foundation of our covenantedreformation, overturning and mishguggling the government and disciplineof the kirk, and breaking down the carved work of our Zion, might be forsawing the craft wi' aits; but I say peace, peace." And as his advice wasshrewd and sensible, though conceitedly given, it was received withgratitude, and followed with respect.

  The intercourse which took place betwixt the families at Beersheba andWoodend became strict and intimate, at a very early period, betwixtReuben Butler, with whom the reader is already in some degree acquainted,and Jeanie Deans, the only child of Douce Davie Deans by his first wife,"that singular Christian woman," as he was wont to express himself,"whose name was savoury to all that knew her for a desirable professor,Christian Menzies in Hochmagirdle." The manner of which intimacy, and theconsequences thereof, we now proceed to relate.