Part 2
“I am going to-morrow to a delightfull place, Braehead by name, belonging to Mrs. Crraford, where there is ducks cocks hens bubbly-jocks 2 dogs 2 cats and swine which is delightful. I think it is shocking to think that the dog and cat should bear them” (this is a meditation physiological), “and they are drowned after all. I would rather have a man-dog than a woman-dog, because they do not bear like women-dogs; it is a hard case--it is shocking. I cam here to enjoy natures delightful breath it is sweeter than a fial (phial) of rose oil.”
Braehead is the farm the historical Jock Howison asked and got from our gay James the Fifth, “the gudeman o’ Ballengiech,” as a reward for the services of his flail, when the King had the worst of it at Cramond Brig with the gypsies. The farm is unchanged in size from that time, and still in the unbroken line of the ready and victorious thrasher. Braehead is held on the condition of the possessor being ready to present the King with a ewer and basin to wash his hands, Jock having done this for his unknown king after the _splore_, and when George the Fourth came to Edinburgh this ceremony was performed in silver at Holyrood. It is a lovely neuk this Braehead, preserved almost as it was 200 years ago. “Lot and his wife,” mentioned by Maidie--two quaintly cropped yew-trees--still thrive, the burn runs as it did in her time, and sings the same quiet tune,--as much the same and as different as _Now_ and _Then_. The house full of old family relics and pictures, the sun shining on them through the small deep windows with their plate glass; and there, blinking at the sun, and chattering contentedly, is a parrot, that might, for its looks of eld, have been in the ark, and domineered over and _deaved_ the dove. Everything about the place is old and fresh.
This is beautiful: “I am very sorry to say that I forgot God--that is to say I forgot to pray to-day and Isabella told me that I should be thankful that God did not forget me--if he did, O what become of me if I was in danger and God not friends with me--I must go to unquenchable fire and if I was tempted to sin--how could I resist it O no I will never do it again--no no--if I can help it.” (Canny wee wifie!) “My religion is greatly falling off because I dont pray with so much attention when I am saying my prayers, and my charecter is lost among the Braehead people. I hope I will be religious again--but as for regaining my charecter I despare for it.” (Poor little ‘habit and repute’!)
Her temper, her passion, and her “badness” are almost daily confessed and deplored: “I will never again trust to my own power, for I see that I cannot be good without God’s assistance,--I will not trust in my own selfe, and Isa’s health will be quite ruined by me,--it will indeed.” “Isa has giving me advice, which is, that when I feal Satan beginning to tempt me, that I flea him and he would flea me.” “Remorse is the worst thing to bear, and I am afraid that I will fall a marter to it.”
Poor dear little sinner! Here comes the world again: “In my travels I met with a handsome lad named Charles Balfour Esq., and from him I got ofers of marage--offers of marage, did I say? Nay plenty heard me.” A fine scent for “breach of promise”!
This is abrupt and strong: “The Divil is curced and all works. ’Tis a fine work _Newton on the profecies_. I wonder if there is another book of poems comes near the Bible. The Divil always girns at the sight of the Bible.” “Miss Potune” (her “simpliton” friend) “is very fat; she pretends to be very learned. She says she saw a stone that dropt from the skies; but she is a good Christian.” Here come her views on church government: “An Annibabtist is a thing I am not a member of--I am a Pisplekan (Episcopalian) just now, and” (O you little Laodicean and Latitudinarian!) “a Prisbeteran at Kirkcaldy!”--(_Blandula! Vagula! cœlum et animum mutas quæ trans mare_ [i. e. _trans Bodotriam_]_-curris!_)--“my native town.” “Sentiment is not what I am acquainted with as yet, though I wish it, and should like to practise it.” (!) “I wish I had a great, great deal of gratitude in my heart, in all my body.” “There is a new novel published, named _Self-Control_” (Mrs. Brunton’s)--“a very good maxim forsooth!” This is shocking: “Yesterday a marrade man, named Mr. John Balfour, Esq., offered to kiss me, and offered to marry me, though the man” (a fine directness this!) “was espused, and his wife was present and said he must ask her permission; but he did not. I think he was ashamed and confounded before 3 gentlemen--Mr. Jobson and 2 Mr. Kings.” “Mr. Banester’s” (Bannister’s) “Budjet is to-night; I hope it will be a good one. A great many authors have expressed themselves too sentimentally.” You are right, Marjorie. “A Mr. Burns writes a beautiful song on Mr. Cunhaming, whose wife desarted him--truly it is a most beautiful one.” “I like to read the Fabulous historys, about the histerys of Robin, Dickey, flapsay, and Peccay, and it is very amusing, for some were good birds and others bad, but Peccay was the most dutiful and obedient to her parients.” “Thomson is a beautiful author, and Pope, but nothing to Shakespear, of which I have a little knolege. _Macbeth_ is a pretty composition, but awful one.” “The _Newgate Calender_ is very instructive.” (!) “A sailor called here to say farewell; it must be dreadful to leave his native country when he might get a wife; or perhaps me, for I love him very much. But O I forgot, Isabella forbid me to speak about love.” This antiphlogistic regimen and lesson is ill to learn by our Maidie, for here she sins again: “Love is a very papithatick thing” (it is almost a pity to correct this into pathetic), “as well as troublesome and tiresome--but O Isabella forbid me to speak of it.” Here are her reflections on a pine-apple: “I think the price of a pine-apple is very dear: it is a whole bright goulden guinea, that might have sustained a poor family.” Here is a new vernal simile: “The hedges are sprouting like chicks from the eggs when they are newly hatched or as the vulgar say, _clacked_.” “Doctor Swift’s works are very funny; I got some of them by heart.” “Moreheads sermons are I hear much praised but I never read sermons of any kind; but I read novelettes and my Bible, and I never forget it, or my prayers.” Bravo Marjorie!
She seems now, when still about six, to have broken out into song:--
“EPHIBOL (EPIGRAM OR EPITAPH--WHO KNOWS WHICH?) ON MY DEAR LOVE, ISABELLA.”
Here lies sweet Isabel in bed, With a night-cap on her head; Her skin is soft, her face is fair, And she has very pretty hair: She and I in bed lies nice, And undisturbed by rats or mice. She is disgusted with Mr. Worgan, Though he plays upon the organ. Her nails are neat, her teeth are white; Her eyes are very, very bright. In a conspicuous town she lives, And to the poor her money gives. Here ends sweet Isabella’s story, And may it be much to her glory!
Here are some bits at random:--
“Of summer I am very fond And love to bathe into a pond: The look of sunshine dies away, And will not let me out to play. I love the morning’s sun to spy Glittering through the casement’s eye; The rays of light are very sweet, And puts away the taste of meat. The balmy breeze comes down from heaven, And makes us like for to be living.”
“The casawary is an curious bird, and so is the gigantic crane, and the pelican of the wilderness, whose mouth holds a bucket of fish and water. Fighting is what ladies is not qualyfied for, they would not make a good figure in battle or in a duel. Alas! we females are of little use to our country. The history of all the malcontents as ever was hanged is amusing.” Still harping on the Newgate Calendar!
“Braehead is extremely pleasant to me by the companie of swine, geese, cocks, etc., and they are the delight of my soul.”
“I am going to tell you of a melancholy story. A young turkie of 2 or 3 months old, would you believe it, the father broke its leg, and he killed another! I think he ought to be transported or hanged.”
“Queen Street is a very gay one, and so is Princes Street, for all the lads and lasses, besides bucks and beggars parade there.”
“I should like to see a play very much, for I never saw one in all my life, and don’t believe I ever shall; but I hope I can be content without going to one. I can be quite happy without my desire being granted.”
“Some days ago Isabella had a terrible fit of the toothake, and she walked with a long nightshift at dead of night like a ghost, and I thought she was one. She prayed for nature’s sweet restorer--balmy sleep--but did not get it--a ghostly figure indeed she was, enough to make a saint tremble. It made me quiver and shake from top to toe. Superstition is a very mean thing and should be despised and shunned.”
Here is her weakness and her strength again:--“In the love-novels all the heroines are very desperate. Isabella will not allow me to speak about lovers and heroins, and ’tis too refined for my taste.” “Miss Egward’s (Edgeworth’s) tails are very good, particularly some that are very much adapted for youth (!) as Laz Laurance and Tarelton, False Keys, etc. etc.”
“Tom Jones and Grey’s Elegey in a country churchyard are both excellent, and much spoke of by both sex, particularly by the men.” Are our Marjories now-a-days better or worse because they cannot read Tom Jones unharmed? More better than worse; but who among them can repeat Gray’s Lines on a distant prospect of Eton College as could our Maidie?
Here is some more of her prattle: “I went into Isabella’s bed to make her smile like the Genius Demedicus” (the Venus de Medicis) “or the statute in an ancient Greece, but she fell asleep in my very face, at which my anger broke forth, so that I awoke her from a comfortable nap. All was now hushed up again, but again my anger burst forth at her biding me get up.”
She begins thus loftily:--
“Death the righteous love to see, But from it doth the wicked flee.”
Then suddenly breaks off as if with laughter,--
“I am sure they fly as fast as their legs can carry them!”
“There is a thing I love to see,-- That is, our monkey catch a flee!”
“I love in Isa’s bed to lie,-- Oh, such a joy and luxury! The bottom of the bed I sleep, And with great care within I creep; Oft I embrace her feet of lillys, But she has goton all the pillys. Her neck I never can embrace, But I do hug her feet in place.”
How childish and yet how strong and free is her use of words!--“I lay at the foot of the bed because Isabella said I disturbed her by continial fighting and kicking, but I was very dull, and continially at work reading the Arabian Nights, which I could not have done if I had slept at the top. I am reading the Mysteries of Udolpho. I am much interested in the fate of poor, poor Emily.”
Here is one of her swains:--
“Very soft and white his cheeks; His hair is red, and grey his breeks; His tooth is like the daisy fair: His only fault is in his hair.”
This is a higher flight:--
“DEDICATED TO MRS. H. CRAWFORD BY THE AUTHOR, M. F.
Three turkeys fair their last have breathed, And now this world forever leaved; Their father, and their mother too, They sigh and weep as well as you: Indeed, the rats their bones have crunched; Into eternity theire laanched. A direful death indeed they had, As wad put any parent mad; But she was more than usual calm: She did not give a single dam.”
This last word is saved from all sin by its tender age, not to speak of the want of the _n_. We fear “she” is the abandoned mother, in spite of her previous sighs and tears.
“Isabella says when we pray we should pray fervently, and not rattel over a prayer,--for that we are kneeling at the footstool of our Lord and Creator, who saves us from eternal damnation, and from unquestionable fire and brimston.”
She has a long poem on Mary Queen of Scots:--
“Queen Mary was much loved by all, Both by the great and by the small; But hark! her soul to heaven doth rise, And I suppose she has gained a prize; For I do think she would not go Into the _awful_ place below. There is a thing that I must tell,-- Elizabeth went to fire and hell! He who would teach her to be civil, It must be her great friend, the divil!”
She hits off Darnley well:--
“A noble’s son,--a handsome lad,-- By some queer way or other, had Got quite the better of her heart; With him she always talked apart: Silly he was, but very fair; A greater buck was not found there.”
“By some queer way or other”; is not this the general case and the mystery, young ladies and gentlemen? Goethe’s doctrine of “elective affinities” discovered by our Pet Maidie.
SONNET TO A MONKEY.
“O lively, O most charming pug! Thy graceful air and heavenly mug! The beauties of his mind do shine, And every bit is shaped and fine. Your teeth are whiter than the snow; Your a great buck, your a great beau; Your eyes are of so nice a shape, More like a Christian’s than an ape; Your cheek is like the rose’s blume; Your hair is like the raven’s plume; His nose’s cast is of the Roman: He is a very pretty woman. I could not get a rhyme for Roman, So was obliged to call him woman.”
This last joke is good. She repeats it when writing of James the Second being killed at Roxburgh:--
“He was killed by a cannon splinter, Quite in the middle of the winter; Perhaps it was not at that time, But I can get no other rhyme!”
Here is one of her last letters, dated Kirkcaldy, 12th October, 1811. You can see how her nature is deepening and enriching:--
“MY DEAR MOTHER,--You will think that I entirely forget you but I assure you that you are greatly mistaken I think of you always and often sigh to think of the distance between us two loving creatures of nature. We have regular hours for all our occupations first at 7 o’clock we go to the dancing and come home at 8 we then read our Bible and get our repeating, and then play till ten, then we get our music till 11 when we get our writing and accounts we sew from 12 till 1 after which I get my gramer and then work till five. At 7 we come and knit till 8 when we dont go to the dancing. This is an exact description. I must take a hasty farewell to her whom I love, reverence and doat on and who I hope thinks the same of
“MARJORY FLEMING.
“_P. S._--An old pack of cards (!) would be very exeptible.”
This other is a month earlier:--
“MY DEAR LITTLE MAMA,--I was truly happy to hear that you were all well. We are surrounded with measles at present on every side, for the Herons got it and Isabella Heron was near Death’s Door, and one night her father lifted her out of bed, and she fell down as they thought lifeless. Mr. Heron said, ‘That lassie’s deed noo,’--‘I’m no deed yet.’ She then threw up a big worm nine inches and a half long. I have begun dancing, but am not very fond of it, for the boys strikes and mocks me.--I have been another night at the dancing; I like it better. I will write to you as often as I can; but I am afraid not every week. _I long for you with the longings of a child to embrace you,--to fold you in my arms. I respect you with all the respect due to a mother. You dont know how I love you. So I shall remain your loving child_,--M. FLEMING.”
What rich involution of love in the words marked! Here are some lines to her beloved Isabella, in July, 1811:--
“There is a thing that I do want,-- With you these beauteous walks to haunt; We would be happy if you would Try to come over if you could. Then I would all quite happy be _Now and for all eternity_. My mother is so very sweet, _Ana checks my appetite to eat_; My father shows us what to do; But O I’m sure that I want you. I have no more of poetry; O Isa do remember me, And try to love your Marjory.”
In a letter from “Isa” to
“Miss Muff Maidie Marjory Fleming, favored by Rare Rear-Admiral Fleming,”
she says: “I long much to see you, and talk over all our old stories together, and to hear you read and repeat. I am pining for my old friend Cesario, and poor Lear, and wicked Richard. How is the dear Multiplication table going on? Are you still as much attached to 9 times 9 as you used to be?”
But this dainty, bright thing is about to flee,--to come “quick to confusion.” The measles she writes of seized her, and she died on the 19th of December, 1811. The day before her death, Sunday, she sat up in bed, worn and thin, her eye gleaming as with the light of a coming world, and with a tremulous, old voice repeated the following lines by Burns,--heavy with the shadow of death, and lit with the phantasy of the judgment-seat,--the publican’s prayer in paraphrase:--
“Why am I loth to leave this earthly scene? Have I so found it full of pleasing charms?-- Some drops of joy, with draughts of ill between, Some gleams of sunshine ’mid renewing storms? Is it departing pangs my soul alarms? Or Death’s unlovely, dreary, dark abode? For guilt, for GUILT, my terrors are in arms; I tremble to approach an angry God, And justly smart beneath his sin-avenging rod.
“Fain would I say, Forgive my foul offence, Fain promise never more to disobey; But should my Author health again dispense, Again I might forsake fair virtue’s way, Again in folly’s path might go astray, Again exalt the brute and sink the man. Then how should I for heavenly mercy pray, Who act so counter heavenly mercy’s plan, Who sin so oft have mourned, yet to temptation ran?
“O thou great Governor of all below, If I might dare a lifted eye to thee, Thy nod can make the tempest cease to blow, And still the tumult of the raging sea; With that controlling power assist even me Those headstrong furious passions to confine, For all unfit I feel my powers to be To rule their torrent in the allowed line; O aid me with thy help, OMNIPOTENCE DIVINE.”
It is more affecting than we care to say to read her Mother’s and Isabella Keith’s letters written immediately after her death. Old and withered, tattered and pale, they are now: but when you read them, how quick, how throbbing with life and love! how rich in that language of affection which only women and Shakespeare and Luther can use,--that power of detaining the soul over the beloved object and its loss!
“_K. Philip to Constance_-- You are as fond of grief as of your child.
_Const._--Grief fills the room up of my absent child, Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me; Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, Remembers me of all his gracious parts, Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form, Then I have reason to be fond of grief.”
What variations cannot love play on this one string!
In her first letter to Miss Keith, Mrs. Fleming says of her dead Maidie: “Never did I behold so beautiful an object. It resembled the finest wax-work. There was in the countenance an expression of sweetness and serenity which seemed to indicate that the pure spirit had anticipated the joys of heaven ere it quitted the mortal frame. To tell you what your Maidie said of you would fill volumes; for you was the constant theme of her discourse, the subject of her thoughts, and ruler of her actions. The last time she mentioned you was a few hours before all sense save that of suffering was suspended, when she said to Dr. Johnstone, ‘If you let me out at the New Year, I will be quite contented.’ I asked her what made her so anxious to get out then? ‘I want to purchase a New Year’s gift for Isa Keith with the sixpence you gave me for being patient in the measeles; and I would like to choose it myself.’ I do not remember her speaking afterwards, except to complain of her head, till just before she expired, when she articulated, ‘O mother! mother!’”
Do we make too much of this little child, who has been in her grave in Abbotshall Kirkyard these fifty and more years? We may of her cleverness,--not of her affectionateness, her nature. What a picture the _animosa infans_ gives us of herself,--her vivacity, her passionateness, her precocious love-making, her passion for nature, for swine, for all living things, her reading, her turn for expression, her satire, her frankness, her little sins and rages, her great repentances! We don’t wonder Walter Scott carried her off in the neuk of his plaid, and played himself with her for hours.
The year before she died, when in Edinburgh, she was at a Twelfth Night Supper at Scott’s, in Castle Street. The company had all come,--all but Marjorie. Scott’s familiars, whom we all know, were there,--all were come but Marjorie; and all were dull because Scott was dull. “Where’s that bairn? what can have come over her? I’ll go myself and see.” And he was getting up, and would have gone; when the bell rang, and in came Duncan Roy and his henchman Tougald, with the sedan chair, which was brought right into the lobby, and its top raised. And there, in its darkness and dingy old cloth, sat Maidie in white, her eyes gleaming, and Scott bending over her in ecstasy--“hung over her enamored.” “Sit ye there, my dautie, till they all see you”; and forthwith he brought them all. You can fancy the scene. And he lifted her up and marched to his seat with her on his stout shoulder, and set her down beside him; and then began the night, and such a night! Those who knew Scott best said, that night was never equalled; Maidie and he were the stars; and she gave them _Constance’s_ speeches and _Helvellyn_, the ballad then much in vogue, and all her _répertoire_,--Scott showing her off, and being ofttimes rebuked by her for his intentional blunders.