A SCOTTISH LEGEND
Among the recollections of Scotland which come thronging on from
other days, the supernatural always plays a part. I admit they are
not easy to deal with. If you believe in ghosts or in legends, a
great majority of your readers do not believe in you. If you are a
sceptic, the credulous pass you by with an air of pained superiority.
If you neither believe nor disbelieve, you are set down as an
agnostic; and there are great numbers of excellent people to whom the
word agnostic implies reproach. An agnostic, however, is not one who
believes or disbelieves, but who, whatever his private conviction may
be, declines either to affirm or deny the truth of the matter in
question.
But, although an unbeliever, I know of one story connecting itself
with a famous legend, which is, so far as it goes, absolutely true,
and this I am going to tell exactly as it happened.
In 1883 I was staying at Brechin Castle with Lord and Lady Dalhousie,
and Lady Dalhousie proposed one morning that we should drive over to
Cortachy Castle to lunch. Brechin Castle and Cortachy Castle are
both in Forfarshire and {396} fourteen miles apart. At that time
Cortachy Castle was let to the late Earl of Dudley; the seventh Earl
of Airlie to whom it belonged having lately died. There's a tragic
atmosphere for the eighth Earl was killed at Diamond Hill in South
Africa in 1900; one of the many men of rank and position and fortune
and everything to live for who, in the early disastrous days of the
Boer War, gave up everything to fight for the flag and for their
country and sovereign.
The family name is Ogilvy, and the family name and title are both
old, going back to at least 1491. They were Ambassadors and great
officers of State, and the seventh Lord Ogilvy was made an Earl. Two
acts of attainder are testimony to the active part they took in those
troubled times, and to their capacity for holding fast to the losing
side. They were in the Earl of Mar's rebellion in 1715, and fought
for the Pretender at Culloden.
Besides all that, the Ogilvys carried on for generations a feud with
the Campbells. On both sides there were burnings and harryings and
much shedding of blood. There's no need to ask which of them was the
more in fault. The standards of those days were not as the standards
of ours; and there was a good deal less of that homage which vice now
pays to virtue. So it happened that one day early in the seventeenth
century the Ogilvys found themselves besieged in Cortachy Castle by
the then Earl of Argyll or his lieutenant. The besiegers sent in a
herald with a drummer-boy to demand the surrender of the castle. The
{397} Ogilvy people took the drummer-boy and hanged him over the
battlements, his mother looking from the camp outside. As the
fashion was in those days, she launched a curse, or more than one, at
the Ogilvys, and a prophecy. She foretold that whenever, through all
the ages to come, death or disaster should visit them they would
first hear the beating of the drum by the drummer-boy.
Such is the story as it was told to me. It is a well-known
tradition, and you are told also that her prophecy has been strictly
fulfilled. The beating of the drum by the drummer-boy has been heard
at least once in each generation during the centuries that ever since
then have witnessed the varying fortunes of this family. That is a
matter as to which I neither affirm nor deny. How could I? I was
not there. But the narrative is a necessary preface to the account
of the day when the events I set out to describe did actually occur.
At luncheon Lady Dudley, known then and still as the beautiful Lady
Dudley, told us that when Lord Hardwicke, one of the guests staying
with them, came down to breakfast that morning he asked her whether
the drummer-boy legend applied to the tenants of the castle for the
time being or only to the Ogilvys.
"Oh, only to the Ogilvys, of course."
"Then you won't mind my telling you that I heard the drummer-boy
beating his drum last night."
And Lady Dudley added:
"I did not mind in the least. Whether I believe {398} in the menace
or not, I never heard that it had anything to do with anybody but the
Ogilvys. If it could effect anybody in this case it would be Lord
Hardwicke, who heard it, and not us who did not hear it."
With which we naturally agreed. We finished our lunch peacefully and
pleasantly, and at three o'clock Lady Dalhousie and I drove back to
Brechin Castle, where there were in all twelve guests. We dined as
usual at a quarter past eight, and shortly before ten the ladies left
the dining-room. Just after ten the door opened again. Lady
Dalhousie sailed in, her face brilliant with excitement, but her
manner serene as usual, and said to her husband:
"Dalhousie, Cortachy Castle is burnt to the ground; the Dudleys are
here and you must come at once."
At the drawing-room door stood Lady Dudley, pale and beautiful, and
warned us that her husband knew as yet nothing of what had happened,
and asked us to be careful to say nothing which should alarm him. He
was at that time very ill, and his mind was affected. The rest of
the evening after we went into the drawing-room passed without any
mention of the disaster to Cortachy. Lord Dudley sat down to his
rubber of whist, won it, and went to bed not knowing that the house
in which he had expected to sleep had been destroyed by fire. When
he was told next morning he said, "Very well," and turned again to
his newspaper.
The explanation was this: After Lady Dalhousie {399} and I left
Cortachy Lady Dudley took her husband for a drive, as usual. As they
were returning, late, they were stopped by a messenger who handed
Lady Dudley a note from the factor, saying the castle was on fire and
there was no hope of saving it.
"What is it?" asked Lord Dudley.
"Oh, nothing much," answered his wife. "The kitchen chimney has been
on fire and the place is in a mess. I think we had better drive over
to Brechin and ask the Dalhousies to give us dinner."
This ready wit carried the day and saved Lord Dudley the shock which
his wife dreaded. But the whole company of guests at Cortachy were
also left homeless, and they also came to Brechin and slept there. I
never quite understood how, for Brechin Castle can put up, in a
normal way, fourteen people, and we slept that night fifty-six. But
Lady Dalhousie besides being a reigning beauty, had practical talents
and managed it all as if an inundation of unexpected guests were an
everyday affair.
There is one thing to be added. Past Cortachy Castle flows a shallow
stream with a stony bed. It was early in September. The water was
very low, and what there was rippled and broke over the stones with a
noise which, at night and amid uncertain slumbers, might easily be
mistaken for the beating of a drum by a man whose mind was full of
the drummer-boy story. After I had heard about Lord Hardwicke at
luncheon I had walked along the banks of this burn, and the faint
likeness {400} of the waters beating on the stones to the beating of
a drum occurred to me. Perhaps a mere fancy on my part. I don't
press it. If anybody prefers to believe in the legend I don't ask
him to believe in my conjecture. By all means let him nourish his
own faith in his own way.
He may like to know, moreover, that Lord Hardwicke, now dead, was one
of the last persons in the world to conceive or cherish an illusion.
A well-known man of the world; in his way a celebrity, if only known
for his hats, which were the glossiest ever seen outside of the stock
Exchange. He had gone the pace; "climbed outside of every stick of
property he possessed," said one of his friends, and had acquired a
vast and varied stock of experience in the process. On the face of
it, not at all the kind of man to believe too much; nor to believe in
anything, as was said of Mr. Lowe, which he could not bite.
He came into the dining-room that night at Brechin and stayed on the
next day. Among Lady Dalhousie's guests was Mr. Huxley. Certainly a
man of the world was Mr. Huxley, but of a different world from Lord
Hardwicke's. They had never met. You might have said they had not a
subject in common. But they talked to each other, and to the
surprise of the company it presently became evident that they got on
together. I said as much to Mr. Huxley afterward. He answered in
his decisive way:
"Don't make any mistake. Lord Hardwicke has powers of mind for which
even his own set, so {401} far as I know, has never given him credit.
We did not talk about the weather. He was a man who would put his
mind to yours no matter what you talked about, and it would take you
all your time to keep up with him."
Years afterward I reminded Mr. Huxley of this, and asked him had he
ever met Lord Hardwicke again.
"No, never; and I regret it. But we did not move quite in the same
orbits. I have hardly seen anybody since who made such an impression
on me. It's not a question of orbits, it's a question of men."
I asked Lord Hardwicke about the same time whether he remembered
meeting Mr. Huxley.
"Remember? How many Huxleys are there in the world that you should
suppose I could forget this one?"
It is one of the distinctions of English life in general, and of
London, to which New York will perhaps some day attain, that sooner
or later it brings together men and women, each of the first rank in
his or her own department and each unlike the other. They have long
understood here that a society which is not various ends in monotony;
and of all forms of dulness that is the dullest.
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