I think I might almost have said the last: somewhere, indeed, in the
uttermost glens of the Lammermuir or among the southwestern hills there
may yet linger a decrepid representative of this bygone good fellowship;
but as far as actual experience goes, I have only met one man in my life
who might fitly be quoted in the same breath with Andrew
Fairservice,—though without his vices. He was a man whose very presence
could impart a savour of quaint antiquity to the baldest and most modern
flower-plots. There was a dignity about his tall stooping form, and an
earnestness in his wrinkled face that recalled Don Quixote; but a Don
Quixote who had come through the training of the Covenant, and been
nourished in his youth on _Walker’s Lives_ and _The Hind let Loose_.
Now, as I could not bear to let such a man pass away with no sketch
preserved of his old-fashioned virtues, I hope the reader will take this
as an excuse for the present paper, and judge as kindly as he can the
infirmities of my description. To me, who find it so difficult to tell
the little that I know, he stands essentially as a _genius loci_. It is
impossible to separate his spare form and old straw hat from the garden
in the lap of the hill, with its rocks overgrown with clematis, its
shadowy walks, and the splendid breadth of champaign that one saw from
the north-west corner. The garden and gardener seem part and parcel of
each other. When I take him from his right surroundings and try to make
him appear for me on paper, he looks unreal and phantasmal: the best that
I can say may convey some notion to those that never saw him, but to me
it will be ever impotent.
The first time that I saw him, I fancy Robert was pretty old already: he
had certainly begun to use his years as a stalking horse. Latterly he
was beyond all the impudencies of logic, considering a reference to the
parish register worth all the reasons in the world, “_I am old and well
stricken in years_,” he was wont to say; and I never found any one bold
enough to answer the argument. Apart from this vantage that he kept over
all who were not yet octogenarian, he had some other drawbacks as a
gardener. He shrank the very place he cultivated. The dignity and
reduced gentility of his appearance made the small garden cut a sorry
figure. He was full of tales of greater situations in his younger days.
He spoke of castles and parks with a humbling familiarity. He told of
places where under-gardeners had trembled at his looks, where there were
meres and swanneries, labyrinths of walk and wildernesses of sad
shrubbery in his control, till you could not help feeling that it was
condescension on his part to dress your humbler garden plots. You were
thrown at once into an invidious position. You felt that you were
profiting by the needs of dignity, and that his poverty and not his will
consented to your vulgar rule. Involuntarily you compared yourself with
the swineherd that made Alfred watch his cakes, or some bloated citizen
who may have given his sons and his condescension to the fallen
Dionysius. Nor were the disagreeables purely fanciful and metaphysical,
for the sway that he exercised over your feelings he extended to your
garden, and, through the garden, to your diet. He would trim a hedge,
throw away a favourite plant, or fill the most favoured and fertile
section of the garden with a vegetable that none of us could eat, in
supreme contempt for our opinion. If you asked him to send you in one of
your own artichokes, “_That I wull_, _mem_,” he would say, “_with
pleasure_, _for it is mair blessed to give than to receive_.” Ay, and
even when, by extra twisting of the screw, we prevailed on him to prefer
our commands to his own inclination, and he went away, stately and sad,
professing that “_our wull was his pleasure_,” but yet reminding us that
he would do it “_with feelin’s_,”—even then, I say, the triumphant master
felt humbled in his triumph, felt that he ruled on sufferance only, that
he was taking a mean advantage of the other’s low estate, and that the
whole scene had been one of those “slights that patient merit of the
unworthy takes.”
In flowers his taste was old-fashioned and catholic; affecting sunflowers
and dahlias, wallflowers and roses and holding in supreme aversion
whatsoever was fantastic, new-fashioned or wild. There was one exception
to this sweeping ban. Foxgloves, though undoubtedly guilty on the last
count, he not only spared, but loved; and when the shrubbery was being
thinned, he stayed his hand and dexterously manipulated his bill in order
to save every stately stem. In boyhood, as he told me once, speaking in
that tone that only actors and the old-fashioned common folk can use
nowadays, his heart grew “_proud_” within him when he came on a
burn-course among the braes of Manor that shone purple with their
graceful trophies; and not all his apprenticeship and practice for so
many years of precise gardening had banished these boyish recollections
from his heart. Indeed, he was a man keenly alive to the beauty of all
that was bygone. He abounded in old stories of his boyhood, and kept
pious account of all his former pleasures; and when he went (on a
holiday) to visit one of the fabled great places of the earth where he
had served before, he came back full of little pre-Raphaelite
reminiscences that showed real passion for the past, such as might have
shaken hands with Hazlitt or Jean-Jacques.
But however his sympathy with his old feelings might affect his liking
for the foxgloves, the very truth was that he scorned all flowers
together. They were but garnishings, childish toys, trifling ornaments
for ladies’ chimney-shelves. It was towards his cauliflowers and peas
and cabbage that his heart grew warm. His preference for the more useful
growths was such that cabbages were found invading the flower-pots, and
an outpost of savoys was once discovered in the centre of the lawn. He
would prelect over some thriving plant with wonderful enthusiasm, piling
reminiscence on reminiscence of former and perhaps yet finer specimens.
Yet even then he did not let the credit leave himself. He had, indeed,
raised “_finer o’ them_;” but it seemed that no one else had been
favoured with a like success. All other gardeners, in fact, were mere
foils to his own superior attainments; and he would recount, with perfect
soberness of voice and visage, how so and so had wondered, and such
another could scarcely give credit to his eyes. Nor was it with his
rivals only that he parted praise and blame. If you remarked how well a
plant was looking, he would gravely touch his hat and thank you with
solemn unction; all credit in the matter falling to him. If, on the
other hand, you called his attention to some back-going vegetable, he
would quote Scripture: “_Paul may plant and Apollos may water_;” all
blame being left to Providence, on the score of deficient rain or
untimely frosts.
There was one thing in the garden that shared his preference with his
favourite cabbages and rhubarb, and that other was the beehive. Their
sound, their industry, perhaps their sweet product also, had taken hold
of his imagination and heart, whether by way of memory or no I cannot
say, although perhaps the bees too were linked to him by some
recollection of Manor braes and his country childhood. Nevertheless, he
was too chary of his personal safety or (let me rather say) his personal
dignity to mingle in any active office towards them. But he could stand
by while one of the contemned rivals did the work for him, and protest
that it was quite safe in spite of his own considerate distance and the
cries of the distressed assistant. In regard to bees, he was rather a
man of word than deed, and some of his most striking sentences had the
bees for text. “_They are indeed wonderfu’ creatures_, _mem_,” he said
once. “_They just mind me o’ what the Queen of Sheba said to Solomon—and
I think she said it wi’ a sigh_,—‘_The half of it hath not been told unto
me_.’”
As far as the Bible goes, he was deeply read. Like the old Covenanters,
of whom he was the worthy representative, his mouth was full of sacred
quotations; it was the book that he had studied most and thought upon
most deeply. To many people in his station the Bible, and perhaps Burns,
are the only books of any vital literary merit that they read, feeding
themselves, for the rest, on the draff of country newspapers, and the
very instructive but not very palatable pabulum of some cheap educational
series. This was Robert’s position. All day long he had dreamed of the
Hebrew stories, and his head had been full of Hebrew poetry and Gospel
ethics; until they had struck deep root into his heart, and the very
expressions had become a part of him; so that he rarely spoke without
some antique idiom or Scripture mannerism that gave a raciness to the
merest trivialities of talk. But the influence of the Bible did not stop
here. There was more in Robert than quaint phrase and ready store of
reference. He was imbued with a spirit of peace and love: he interposed
between man and wife: he threw himself between the angry, touching his
hat the while with all the ceremony of an usher: he protected the birds
from everybody but himself, seeing, I suppose, a great difference between
official execution and wanton sport. His mistress telling him one day to
put some ferns into his master’s particular corner, and adding, “Though,
indeed, Robert, he doesn’t deserve them, for he wouldn’t help me to
gather them,” “_Eh_, _mem_,” replies Robert, “_But I wouldnae say that_,
_for I think he’s just a most deservin’ gentleman_.” Again, two of our
friends, who were on intimate terms, and accustomed to use language to
each other, somewhat without the bounds of the parliamentary, happened to
differ about the position of a seat in the garden. The discussion, as
was usual when these two were at it, soon waxed tolerably insulting on
both sides. Every one accustomed to such controversies several times a
day was quietly enjoying this prize-fight of somewhat abusive wit—every
one but Robert, to whom the perfect good faith of the whole quarrel
seemed unquestionable, and who, after having waited till his conscience
would suffer him to wait no more, and till he expected every moment that
the disputants would fall to blows, cut suddenly in with tones of almost
tearful entreaty: “_Eh_, _but_, _gentlemen_, _I wad hae nae mair words
about it_!” One thing was noticeable about Robert’s religion: it was
neither dogmatic nor sectarian. He never expatiated (at least, in my
hearing) on the doctrines of his creed, and he never condemned anybody
else. I have no doubt that he held all Roman Catholics, Atheists, and
Mahometans as considerably out of it; I don’t believe he had any sympathy
for Prelacy; and the natural feelings of man must have made him a little
sore about Free-Churchism; but at least, he never talked about these
views, never grew controversially noisy, and never openly aspersed the
belief or practice of anybody. Now all this is not generally
characteristic of Scotch piety; Scotch sects being churches militant with
a vengeance, and Scotch believers perpetual crusaders the one against the
other, and missionaries the one to the other. Perhaps Robert’s
originally tender heart was what made the difference; or, perhaps, his
solitary and pleasant labour among fruits and flowers had taught him a
more sunshiny creed than those whose work is among the tares of fallen
humanity; and the soft influences of the garden had entered deep into his
spirit,
“Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.”
But I could go on for ever chronicling his golden sayings or telling of
his innocent and living piety. I had meant to tell of his cottage, with
the German pipe hung reverently above the fire, and the shell box that he
had made for his son, and of which he would say pathetically: “_He was
real pleased wi’ it at first_, _but I think he’s got a kind o’ tired o’
it now_”—the son being then a man of about forty. But I will let all
these pass. “’Tis more significant: he’s dead.” The earth, that he had
digged so much in his life, was dug out by another for himself; and the
flowers that he had tended drew their life still from him, but in a new
and nearer way. A bird flew about the open grave, as if it too wished to
honour the obsequies of one who had so often quoted Scripture in favour
of its kind. “Are not two sparrows sold for one farthing, and yet not
one of them falleth to the ground.”
Yes, he is dead. But the kings did not rise in the place of death to
greet him “with taunting proverbs” as they rose to greet the haughty
Babylonian; for in his life he was lowly, and a peacemaker and a servant
of God.