III.

A spirit of romance and a solemn homily on mutability were in the scene

when Hirsch walked into the grounds of Quair, though he was not the man

to understand. Six hundred years of history cried from the old bastion;

still in its shelter men sowed oats, and their shabby dwellings

clustered, no way changed, to look at, since the Borderland was vexed

with wars and Quair was lord and warden; but vassals no more, save to

that grim seigneur Commerce, who took from them triple-tithes and

children instead of the service of the sword, which was all the old lords

claimed. A valley of peace, and nights untroubled, and the old bold

fighting Quairs in their resting graves, and their troopers’ dust at the

roots of English pastures; surely at eve in the woods of Quair, or riding

spirit horses through the passes of the hills, a thousand ghosts went

seeking lost passions, old delights.

It was Thursday afternoon. Hirsch stepped in at the door which led to

the Quair Collection, to find the man in charge of it had all the

customary cicerone’s dull loquacity. He dribbled dates and gushed

details of family history as if he were a gargoyle who had never got

refreshment from the currents pouring through him. Thick-set, short, and

rasped upon the chin from too-close shaving, he looked the very figure of

a man to fill one of the empty suits of mail that flanked the entrance to

the gallery, and even to the shopman’s eye of Hirsch he had an air of

truculence that somehow seemed to accord with the situation.

“You do not appear to have many visitors to-day,” said the

picture-dealer, having looked perfunctorily at dingy tapestry and

pictures, and now with eyes, in which the fires of covetousness were with

difficulty restrained, upon the tarnished Tudor Cup in its corner

cupboard.

“Ye’re the first this week,” said the guide with acerbity, as if the

shilling feed were a more personal matter than the gossips of the

countryside believed; and Hirsch the dealer, rubbing his hook-nose to

conceal the tremulous avidity of his mouth, saw that disappointed avarice

was in this creature’s eyes.

“I should like, a little later on, to see Sir Gilbert,” said the dealer,

who had five thousand pounds in his pocket, and a Jew’s conviction that

an impecunious Scot could never resist the delicious crackle of English

notes.

“Ye canna; he’s from home,” explained the guide. “He’s awa’ to Edinburgh

for a month.”

A thought came there and then to the dealer which made him pale. Avarice

and cunning were in the old man’s face; his shillings plainly meant a lot

to him; his clothing was in poor accord with the guardianship of

treasure.

“Look here,” said Hirsch in a confidential whisper. “If your master is

to be away for a month, there is no reason why the matter I meant to

arrange with him should not be arranged with you, and put a handsome sum

of money in your pocket. I have taken a fancy to this silver jug, and

though I know Sir Gilbert will not part with it, I thought he might at

least agree to let me have it copied. It’s a thing that is often done,

Mr—”

“Meldrum,” said the guide with a promising air of equanimity.

“In two or three weeks I could have my copy made in Paris, and this cup

returned to you in safety, and no one else except ourselves need be a bit

the wiser, Mr Meldrum.”

The guide gave a laugh that was half a sneer, and checked it suddenly

with a hand upon his mouth. “It’s a maist singular proposition,” he

remarked reflectively. “In the four-and-twenty years I have been showin’

folk the Quair Collection I havena heard the like of it. And it comes

from a total stranger!”

“I represent one of the most reputable firms in London,” Hirsch hastened

to explain, with the simultaneous production of his business card.

Meldrum looked at it with interest. “Harris & Hirsch. I take it that

you are Mr Hirsch? There was a Mr Harris calling on Sir Gilbert, I was

tell’t, some days ago.”

“Exactly,” answered Hirsch. “My partner. He had almost completed

negotiations for the loan of the cup for the purpose I have mentioned.

But really there seems no need for us to be troubling Sir Gilbert. The

cup will be back before his return from Edinburgh, and—”

“Just that!” said Meldrum dryly. “And what about my security?”

Delighted with such apparent pliability, Hirsch produced his English

notes, which brought a very passion of greed to Meldrum’s eyes.

“Let us not be calling it security, Mr Meldrum,” he remarked insidiously.

“If a hundred pounds—”

Again the guide ironically chuckled. “If I could trust ye for a hundred

pounds, Mr Hirsch, I could trust ye mair for ten times that,” he said.

“I take your word for’t that we needna ca’t security: if I’m to risk my

job and my reputation, the cost of three weeks loan o’ that siller

tankard is exactly a thousand pounds!”

. . . . .

Three weeks later, the Quair Cup and its duplicate came back from

Tregastel of Paris, so much alike that Hirsch would have been beat to see

a difference had it not been that he found on one a private microscopic

mark he had put on it himself.

But it was not the cup so marked that he returned to the accommodating

Meldrum.

Two months more, and the curio world was shaken once again by the

intimation of another Tudor Cup for sale at Sotheby’s. Amongst the host

of possible bidders who examined the precious piece of tarnished metal

taken out impressively from Sotheby’s strongest safe some days before the

sale, was Barraclough, the expert who had bought its fellow earlier in

the season for his client in America.

“A brilliant forgery,” he exclaimed on careful scrutiny—“one of Jules

Tregastel’s charming reproductions,” and departed.

Harris and Hirsch were sent for by the auctioneer. “Nonsense!” they

protested—and Hirsch satisfied himself again that the microscopic mark of

the veritable cup from Quair was there. “Tregastel never had a tool on

it.”

“Hadn’t you better ask?” said the auctioneer, and they asked by telegram,

with astounding consequences.

“The cup you sent was a copy made a year ago by myself for another

client. I thought you knew,” replied Tregastel.

“Mein Gott!” cried Harris, appalled. “Tregastel has made so cunning a

job of it he has even copied your private mark, and you have sent the

original back to Quair.”

“I will not believe it! I will not believe it!” said his partner, almost

weeping with chagrin.

That night the two of them went to Scotland, and in the morning Harris

went out from Peebles to the House of Quair to see Sir Gilbert.

“Might I have another look at the cup?” he asked without periphrasis, and

the baronet snuffed and chuckled.

“It seems to have wonderfully taken your fancy, Mr Harris,” he remarked

with an ironic cough. “Again you are unfortunate in the day you call,

for this is Wednesday. And in any case I thought I made it clear that

the cup was bound to stay here in spite of your most tempting offers.”

“I know,” replied the dealer; “but I should like to see it—that is all.”

“Ah! you mad collectors!” said Sir Gilbert humorously. “Ye can be as

crazy over a bashed old siller cup as I might have been mysel’ at one

time over a bonny lassie! Well, come your ways in and you shall see it.

It is aye another shillin’!”

Harris not only saw the cup, but this time got it into his hands. In a

fever of apprehension he turned it up and down and sought for a

microscopic mark like that which Hirsch had pointed out upon the

other,—it was not there!

At the sight of the blank look on his face Sir Gilbert chuckled and took

snuff. “I see you have discovered, Mr Harris,” he remarked with his

eyebrows twitching. “You connoisseurs are not to be deceived so easily!”

“Then—then you know it is a forgery!” cried Harris with amazement.

“I would not use that word for it exactly, Mr Harris,” said the baronet

with a gesture of distaste. “A copy—and a wonderful copy too, by

Tregastel of Paris. The truth is, I sold the original some months ago in

London, having first had this one made. You see my possession of a Tudor

Cup is notorious, and if it got about that the Quair Collection was being

in any way depleted, where would our shillin’s come from, Mr Harris?” and

he jocosely poked his visitor in the ribs.

Harris flew back to the inn at Peebles, an object of unutterable despair.

“Mein Gott! these Scotch!” cried Hirsch, wringing his hands. “But I will

have my money back from that Meldrum man if I have to take him to the

courts.”

“Harris and Hirsch would cut a funny figure in the courts in the

circumstances, Joel,” said his partner. “It is better that we go out

together to-morrow, when your Meldrum’s place is open, and compromise.”

The entrance to the Quair Collection had been hardly opened on the morrow

when the dealers tried to push their way within. Harris was perturbed

when he saw who checked them on the threshold—Sir Gilbert Quair himself,

who greeted him with a crafty smile, only a little shabbier in dress than

when he had seen him hitherto, and with the box for the admission

shillings hanging round his neck.

“It might be the flowin’ bowl, Mr Harris,” he exclaimed ironically. “Ye

come back so often to it.”

“I want a word or two with you,” said Mr Hirsch peremptorily, finding the

old man barred their further passage. “Did you know that cup you lent me

was an imitation?”

“I could hardly fail to be aware of it,” said the baronet. “You surely

didna think a paltry thousand pounds would be security for a genuine

Tudor Cup, and a’ the world sae keen on them at Sotheby’s.”

“I have been deceived; I must have my money back!” said Hirsch, and the

old man shrugged his shoulders and took snuff.

“Na, na!” he said. “A bargain’s aye a bargain, and ye canna get your

money back. The best I can dae for ye is to swop the cup ye sent for the

one I lent ye.”

“Look here, Meldrum—” Hirsch began, and Harris, with surprise, corrected

him.

“Not Meldrum,” he remarked. “Sir Gilbert Quair.”

“Ye’re both of ye right, and ye’re both of ye wrang,” said the old man

with a chuckle. “For twa years back I’ve been guide to my own

collection; it’s the only way to keep an eye upon the shillin’s.”

“You d—d old rogue!” exclaimed the partners simultaneously, and he

grinned at them, with his stout old breast across the doorway like a

cliff. For a little he gloated on their fury, then took them by the arms

and led them out upon the terrace.

“You see this land,” he said, and indicated all the hills and valleys,

verdant woods and furrowed fields, and the river sounding at the bend

below the mansion. “The greed of English thieves brought them here

marauding for good six hundred years, and it seems ye’re no done yet! My

forefolk fought you with the sword, but Gilbert Meldrum Quair must fight

you with his wits!”

“But, Gott in Himmel! we are not English; we are Hebrews!” protested

Hirsch with his hands palm upwards and his neck contracted.

“That is worse,” replied Sir Gilbert, making for his door. “We Scots are

still at feud wi’ the Jews for what they did out yonder in Jerusalem.”

“COPENHAGEN”:

A CHARACTER.

WHEN I go home on summer visitations, old friends, with the most generous

desire to aid one in an eccentric and indeed half-daft and wholly

disreputable way of living, come to me covertly in reckless moments “for

auld lang syne,” and remind me of native characters ancient or modern.

They themselves are (if they only knew it) characters the most superb for

any of my purposes, but, wholly unsuspecting, they narrate the whims and

oddities, the follies and conceits of others, lamenting always that the

race of characters is rapidly running done. “When Jiah, and Jocka, and

Old Split-a-dale are gone,” say they, “we’ll can take to reading your own

bits of stories, for there’ll be nothing better left to do, and not a

ploy from Martinmas to Whitsunday and back again.”

I know better, of course. I know that unconventional

characters—fantastic, whimsical, bombastic, awkward, crazed—will come to

the surface there and elsewhere as constant as the bracken comes upon the

braes in spring.

But age, undoubtedly, whether it matures an oddity or not, endears him to

you if yours be the proper sympathetic soul for such caprices of the

stars. What in a droll “going-about body” of thirty seems a rogue’s

impertinence will appear to some one else, thirty years after this, or

even to yourself perhaps, a quaint wit, and his sayings and doings will

be the cause of merriment over all the countryside. So it is that even I

am sometimes constrained to think the old characters dead and gone will

never have such brilliant successors.

I had that thought yesterday as I walked past Copenhagen’s school. Alas!

not Copenhagen’s school, for Copenhagen wields no earthly ferrule, and

lies with many of his pupils under grass in Kilmailie, and the little

thatched academy, where we drowsed in summer, and choked in winter in the

smoke of our own individual peats, is but a huddle of stones, hidden by

nettles, humbled in the shade of the birch-tree from which old Copenhagen

culled the pliant and sibilant switch for our more noisy than unpleasant

castigation. But there, persistent as are the roads old hunters made

upon the hills of long ago, as are the ways our fathers went to market

through glens for years untenanted, was the path we youngsters made

between the highway and old Copenhagen’s school!

Is it conceivable, I ask my old companions of that hillside seminary,

that Copenhagen should be dead? That a time should come when his thin,

long, bent figure, carried on one of his own legs and one (as went our

tradition) cut from an ash in the wood of Achnatra, should dart about the

little school no more, and his tales of Nelson and the sea be all

concluded?

He had been twenty years in the Navy, and had seen but a single

engagement—the one that gave him his byname, and cost him his leg. He

came home with a pension, and settled in his native parish. He was

elderly; he was—as we should think it now—ill-educated; he was without

wife or child of his own; he had at times the habit of ran-dan, as we

call a convivial rollicking. Heaven plainly meant him for a Highland

school, and so he opened one—this same, so lowly to-day among the

nettles. Of the various things he taught, the most I can remember

(besides reading, which came, I fear, more by nature than by Copenhagen’s

teaching) was the geography of the Baltic, the graphic fact that Horatio

Nelson nearly always wore a grey surtout, three ways of tying knots, and

a song of epic character called “The Plains of Waterloo.” What would

perhaps be called a “special subject” nowadays was the art he taught us

of keeping birds from cherry-trees. The cherry-trees grew up the front

of Copenhagen’s bachelor dwelling-house, half a mile from the school.

When the fruit reddened, every scholar in the school (we numbered twelve

or fourteen) rose at dawn for days and sat below the cherry-trees

chanting a Gaelic incantation that never failed to keep away the

predatory thrush. The odd thing was that Copenhagen, in spite of these

precautions, never got a single cherry, and did not seem to care. We ate

the cherries as they ripened, relieving each other alternately of the

incantation; he came out to praise us for our industry, and never cast a

glance aloft.

The fees for Copenhagen’s college were uncertain—not only in payment, but

in amount. When our parents asked him what was to pay for Bob or Sandy,

the antique pensioner blew his nose with noisy demonstration, and

invariably answered, “We don’t know what we’ll need till we see what

we’ll require.” His requirements were manifestly few, for three-fourths

of the pupils contributed nothing to the upkeep of the school but a

diurnal peat in winter, and the others had their fees wholly expended on

pens and paper for themselves when the flying stationer came round twice

a year.

We grew to like and to respect old Copenhagen, knowing nothing of his

ran-dans, that were confined to the town six miles away, and never were

allowed to interfere with his duty to his pupils. He made no brilliant

scholars, but he gave us a thousand pleasant, droll, and kindly memories

that go far as a substitute for a superficial knowledge of Greek. I

would myself have learned the cutlass from him, being the oldest of the

pupils and the likeliest to make a good practitioner of that noble marine

weapon; but, unhappily, I left the school and started my career in town

the very day he had unearthed the sword and brought it forth for my first

lesson.

It was there I learned that Copenhagen was the church precentor, and had

his little vices, whereof our folks at home, with wisdom and delicacy,

had never given us a hint. He used to come down to town each Sunday in a

pair of tightly-strapped breeches, a black surtout, and what we called a

three-storey hat. The preacher chose the psalm, but it was Copenhagen

chose the tune. He had but half a dozen airs in all his repertory—Selma,

Dundee, Martyrdom, Coleshill, and Dunfermline, and what he called “yon

one of my own.” I have sometimes been to the opera since; I fear, from

knowledge gained by that experience, that the old man was not highly

gifted for vocalism. Invariably he started on too high a key, and found

that he had done so only when a bar or two was finished. With

imperturbability unfailing, he just stopped short, and, leaning over his

desk, said to the congregation, “We’ll have another try at it, lads!”

The service was an English one, but this touching confidence was in

Gaelic, and addressed particularly to the men who, married or single, sat

apart from the women.

While Copenhagen still led the praise to Coleshill and “yon one of his

own,” a pestilent innovator came to the place who knew music, and,

unhappily, introduced a band of enterprising youths to the mysteries of

harmony. He taught them bass and alto, and showed them how the melody of

Dundee and Coleshill could be embellished and improved by those. The

first Sunday these vocalists started to display their new art in the

church, Copenhagen stopped in the middle of a verse to make a protest.

“I’ll have none of your boom-boom singing here to put me all reel-rall,”

said he, “nor praising of the Lord with such theatricals,” then baffled

them by changing the air to “yon one of his own.”

A bachelor by prejudice and conviction, he liked to hear of marriages,

and when the “cries” were read he had for long—until a new incumbent made

a protest—a cheerful, harmless habit of crying at the end of the

announcement, “I have no objections to’t whatever.”

The new incumbent was less tolerant than his predecessor; to him was due

the old man’s retirement from the office of conductor of the psalmody.

He would not countenance the ran-dans, nor consent to the perpetuation of

Copenhagen’s ancient manners in the precentor’s desk. First of all he

claimed the right of intimating the tunes as well as the psalms to be

sung to them, and sought thereby to put an end to the unseemly “yon one

of my own”; but Copenhagen started what air he pleased, no matter what

was intimated, and more often than before it was his own creation. Then

were thrust upon the old man wooden boards with the names of half a dozen

psalm tunes printed on them. They were to be displayed in front of the

desk as required, and thus save all necessity for any verbal intimation.

But Copenhagen generally showed them upside down, and still maintained

his vested rights to start what airs he chose. “I think we agreed on

Martyrdom in the vestry,” said the minister once, exasperated into a

protest in front of the congregation when Copenhagen started “yon one.”

“So we did, so we did—I mind fine; but I shifted my mind,” said

Copenhagen, looking up, and cleared his throat to start again. “Upon my

word,” said he to sympathisers in the afternoon, “upon my word the man’s

a fair torment!”

Old Copenhagen’s most notable ran-dans were after he had demitted office

as musician, out of patience at last with the “torment.” They were such

guileless, easily induced excesses, so marked by an incongruous

propriety, that I hesitate to speak of them as more than innocent

exhilarations. ’Twas then his surtout was most spick and span, his

manner most urbane and engaging. The poorest gangrel who addressed him

on the highway then was “sir” to Copenhagen, and a boy had but to look at

him to be assured of a halfpenny. His timber leg went tapping over the

causeways then with an illusive haste, for it was Copenhagen’s wish to be

thought a man immersed profoundly in affairs. He spoke in his finest

English (reserved for moments of importance) of the Admiralty, and he

never entered the inn without having in his hand a large packet of blue

envelopes tied with a boot-lace, to suggest important and delicate

negotiations with some messenger from the First Lord. Once, I remember,

he came out of the inn with a suspicious-looking bulge in the tail-pocket

of his surtout. As he passed the Beenickie and Jock Scott and me

standing at the factor’s corner, and punctiliously returned the naval

salute he always looked for from his own old pupils, a “Glenorchy pint”

(as it was called) fell out of his pocket in the street, without

suffering any damage. He never paused a moment or looked round, and the

Beenickie cried after him, “You have dropped something, Mr Bain.” “It is

just a trifle, lads,” he answered without looking back; “I will get it

when I return,” and pursued his way to his house, six miles away. He was

ashamed, I suppose, of the exposure.

Another time—on the night of St John’s, when the local Freemasons had

their flambeau march, and every boy who carried a torch got threepence on

production of its stump the following day (which induced some to cut

their stumps in two, and so get sixpence)—I saw old Copenhagen falling

down an outside stair. I hastened to his assistance, suffering sincere

alarm and pity for my ancient dominie. He was, luckily, little the

worse. “I was coming down in any case, John,” said he benignly. “Man! I

am always vexed I never learned you the fencing with the cutlass, for you

were a promising lad.” “I am sorry too, Mr Bain,” said I, though indeed

I could not see that a clerk in a law office would find the

accomplishment in question of much use to him. “I knew your Uncle

Jamie,” he added. “Him and me was pretty chief. You will say nothing

about my bit of a glide, John: I was coming down at any rate, I assure

you.”

I should like my last reminiscence of old Copenhagen to be more

reputable, for his own last words in gossiping of any one, no matter how

foolish or vile, were always generous. And I recall a day when he came

from his distant seminary through deep drifts of snow to the town to post

a letter that he wished me to revise first. The ‘Courier’ of the week

was full of tales of misery among our troops in the Crimean trenches, and

Copenhagen’s sympathies were fired. His letter was a suggestion to the

Admiralty that in these times of stress it might help my Lords a little

if they were relieved of the payment of the pension of Archibald Bain,

late of H.M.S. _Elephant_. He was very old, and frail, and tremulous in

these days; his hand of write would have sorely puzzled any one but me,

who knew so well its eccentricities. His folly touched me to the core; I

knew his object, but for the life of me I could not read his letter.

“I think it would be a mistake to send it, Mr Bain,” I said, when he

explained.

“Havers!” said he. “What I want you to tell me is if it is shipshape and

Bristol fashion, eh? and not likely to give offence. Read it, man, read

it!”

“Read it out to me yourself, Mr Bain,” I stammered, “the thing’s beyond

me.”

He put on his spectacles and looked closely at his own scrawl. “I

declare to you,” he said in a little, laughingly, “I declare to you I

cannot read a word of her myself. But no matter, John, we’ll just let

her go as she stands; they’re better scholars in London than what we

are.”

The letter went, but I never heard that the British Admiralty availed

itself of an offer so unusual and kind.

I thought of these things yesterday as I passed the ruins of Copenhagen’s

school. How far, since then, have travelled the feet that trod there;

how far, how weary, how humbled, how elate, how prosperous, how

shamefully down at heel? Dear lads, dear girls, wherever you be, my old

companions, were we not here in this poor place, among the hazel and the

fern, most fortunate and happy? Has the wide world we travel through for

fame or fortune—or, better still, content—added aught to us of joy we did

not have (at least in memory) in those irrecoverable, enduring, summer

days? Now it is mist for ever on the hill, and the rain-rot in the wood,

and clouds and cares chasing each other across our heavens, and flowers

that flame from bud to blossom and smoulder into dust almost before we

have caught their perfume; then, old friends, we pricked our days out

leisurely upon a golden calendar: the scent of the morning hay-fields

seemed eternal.