corns, who passes much of his time with a knife in one hand and his big
toe in the other, is nephew of that Beattie who saw his way to bed by
the gleam of post-boy's lamps, and spent his days unsnibbing the Queen's
Head door to let runaways in, and barring it to keep their pursuers out.
Much depends on habit, and Beattie slept most soundly to the drone of
the priest in his parlor, and the rub-a-dub of baffled parents on his
window-sills. His nephew, also a Beattie, brings his knife with him into
the immortal room, where peers of the realm have mated with country
wenches, and fine ladies have promised to obey their father's
stable-boys, and two lord chancellors of England with a hundred others
have blossomed into husbands, and one wedding was celebrated of which
neither Beattie nor the world takes any account. There are half a dozen
tongues in the inn--itself a corpse now that wearily awaits
interment--to show you where Lord Erskine gambolled in a tablecloth,
while David Lang united him in the bonds of matrimony with his
housekeeper, Sarah Buck. There is the table at which he composed some
Latin doggerel in honor of the event, and the doubtful signature on a
cracked pane of glass. A strange group they must have made--the gaping
landlord at the door, Mrs. Buck, the superstitious, with all her
children in her arms, David Lang rebuking the lord chancellor for posing
in the lady's bonnet, Erskine in his tablecloth skipping around the
low-roofed room in answer, and Christina Johnstone, the female witness,
thinking sadly that his lordship might have known better. Here, too,
Lord Eldon galloped one day with his "beloved Bessy;" and it is not
uninteresting to note that though he came into the world eighteen months
after Lord Erskine, he paid Gretna Green a business visit nearly fifty
years before him. Lang's books are a veritable magic-lantern, and the
Queen's Head the sheet on which he casts his figures. The slides change.
Joseph Paisley sees his shrewd assistant, David Lang, marry his
granddaughter, and dies characteristically across the way. David has his
day, and Simon, his son, succeeds him; and in the meantime many a
memorable figure glides shadow-like across the screen. The youth with
his heart in his mouth is Lord George Lambton. It is an Earl of
Westmoreland that plants his shoulders against the door, and tells the
priest to hurry. The foot that drums on the floor is Lady Alicia
Parson's. A son of Lord Chief Justice Ellenborough makes way for his own
son; a daughter follows in the very footsteps of her father, only a few
hours between them. A daughter of Archdeacon Philpot arrives at four
o'clock in the morning, and her companion forgets to grease the
landlord's hand. The Hon. Charles Law just misses Lord Deerhurst. There
are ghosts in cocked hats, and naval and military uniform, in muslin,
broadcloth, tweed and velvet, gold lace and pigskin; swords flash,
pistols smoke, steaming horses bear bleeding riders out of sight, and a
thousand forms flit weird and shadowy through the stifling room.
The dinner of the only surviving priest of Gretna Hall frizzled under
the deft knife of his spouse as he rubbed his hands recently over the
reminiscences of his youth. Willum Lang never officiated at the Hall.
Intelligent Jardine, full of years and honors, now enjoys his ease, not
without a priestly dignity, on a kitchen sofa, in his pocket edition of
a home at Springfield, and it is perhaps out of respect to his visitor
that he crowns his hoary head with a still whiter hat. His arms
outstretched to the fire, he looks, by the flashes of light, in his
ingle-nook a Shakespearian spirit crouching over an unholy pot, but his
genial laugh betrays him, and his comely wife does not scruple to recall
him to himself when he threatens to go off in an eternal chuckle. A
stalwart border-woman she, in short petticoats and delightful cap, such
as in the killing times of the past bred the Johnny Armstrongs and the
terrible moss-troopers of the border. A storehouse of old ballads, and a
Scotchwoman after Scott's own heart.
The day that Gretna Hall became an inn, its landlord felt himself called
to the priesthood, and as long as he and his son remained above ground,
marriage was the heaviest item in their bills. But when Gretna knew them
no more, Jardine's chance had come. Even at Springfield the line has
always been drawn at female priests, and from the "big house" used to
come frequent messages to the shoemaker with its mistress's compliments
and would he step up at once. The old gentleman is a bit of a dandy in
his way, and it is pleasant to know that Nature herself gave him on
those occasions a hint when it was time to dress. The rush for him down
dark fields and across the Headless Cross was in a flurry of haste, but
in the still night the rumble of a distant coach had been borne to him
over the howes and meadows, and Jardine knew what that meant as well as
the marriage service. Sometimes the coaches came round by Springfield,
when the hall was full, and there was a tumbling out and in again by
trembling runaways at the rival inns. Even the taverns have run couples,
and up and down the sleety street horses pranced and panted in search of
an idle priest. Jardine remembers one such nightmare time when the
clatter of a pursuing vehicle came nearer and nearer, and a sweet young
lady in the Queen's Head flung up her hands to heaven. Crash went her
true lovers' fist through a pane of glass to awaken the street (which
always slept with one eye open) with the hoarse wail, "A hundred pounds
to the man that marries me!" But big as was the bribe, the speed of the
pursuers was greater, and the maiden's father looking in at the inn at
an inconvenient moment called her away to fulfill another engagement.
The Solway lies white from Gretna Hall like a sheet of mourning paper,
between edges of black trees and hills. The famous long, low room still
looks out on an ageing park, but they are only ghosts that join hands
in it now, and it is a clinging to old days that makes the curious moon
peep beneath the blind. The priest and the unbidden witness still are,
but brides and bridegrooms come no more. To the days of his youth
Jardine had to fling back his memory to recall the gravel springing from
the wheels of Wakefield's flying chariot. The story is told in
Hutchinson's _Chronicles of Gretna Green_, the first volume of which
leads up to but does not broach the subject, and is common property at
Springfield. The adventurer's dupe was an affectionate school-girl on
whose feelings he worked by representing himself as the one friend who
could save her father from ruin and disgrace. The supposed bankrupt was
said to have taken flight to Scotland, and the girl of fifteen, jumping
into Wakefield's coach at Liverpool, started with him in pursuit. A more
graceless rascal never was, for at Carlisle the adventurer swore that he
had talked with Miss Turner's father in an hotel where he was lying
hidden from the sheriff's officers, and that the fugitive's wish was
that she should, without delay, accept Mr. Wakefield's hand. The poor
lassie, frantic with anxiety, was completely gulled, and on the eighth
of March, 1826, Wakefield's coach drew up at Gretna Hall. Too late came
the pursuit to stop the marriage, but the runaways were traced to
France, and the law soon had the husband of a week by the heels. He had
trusted, like all his brotherhood, to the lady's father making the best
of it; and so, perhaps, he did; for the adventurer's address for the
next three years was--Newgate, London.
Spiders of both sexes kept their nets at Gretna Green, but a tragedy was
only enacted at the hall between a score of comedies; and they were
generally love-sick youths and maidens who interrupted the priest to ask
if that was not the "so--sound of wh--wheels on the gravel walk?" A
couple whom it would almost have been a satisfaction to marry without a
fee (for the mere example of the thing) was that which raced from the
south of England with the lady's father. When they reached the top of a
hill his arms were gesticulating at the bottom, and they never turned
one corner without seeing his steaming horse take another. Poor was the
fond lover (dark his prospects at Gretna Green in consequence) but brave
the maid, to whom her friends would insist on leaving money, which was
the cause of the whole to-do. The father, looking on the swain with
suspicious eye, took to dreaming of postillions, high-roads, blacksmiths
and Gretna Green. He would not suffer his daughter to move from his
sight, and even to dances he escorted her in his private carriage,
returning for her (for he was a busy man) at night. Quick of invention
were the infuriated lovers. Threading the mazes of a dance, the girl was
one evening snatched from her partner's arms by the announcement that
her father's carriage barred the way below. A hurried explanation of why
he had come so soon, a tripping down the stairs with trembling limbs
into a close coach, a maiden in white in her lover's arms, and hey-ho
for Gretna Green. Jardine is mellowed with a gentle cynicism, and
sometimes he breaks off in his reminiscences to wonder what people want
to be married for. The Springfield priest, he chuckles, is a blacksmith
at whom love cannot afford to laugh. Ay, friend Jardine, but what about
the blacksmith who laughs at love?
Half a century ago Mr. McDiarmid, a Scotch journalist of repute,
loosened the tongue of a Springfield priest with a bowl of toddy. The
result was as if the sluice had been lifted bodily from a dam, and
stories (like the whisky) flowed like water. One over-curious
_paterfamilias_ there was who excused his visit to the village of
weddings on the ground that he wished to introduce to the priest a
daughter who might one day require his services. "And sure enough," old
Elliot, who entered into partnership with Simon Lang, crowed to his
toddy-ladle, "I had her back with a younger man in the matter of three
months!" There lives, too, in Springfield's memory the tale of the
father who bolted with an elderly spinster, and returning to England
passed his daughter and her lover on the way. Dark and wintry was the
night, the two coaches rattled by, and next morning four persons who had
gone wrong opened the eyes of astonishment.
When David Lang was asked during Wakefield's trial how much he had been
paid for discharging the duties of priest, he replied pleasantly, "L20
or L30, or perhaps L40; I cannot say to a few pounds." This was pretty
well, but there are authenticated cases in which L100 was paid. The
priests had no fixed fee, and charged according to circumstances. If
business was slack and the bridegroom not pressing, they lowered their
charges, but where the bribed post-boys told them of high rank, hot
pursuit, and heavy purses, they squeezed their dupes remorselessly. It
is told of Joseph Paisley that when on his death-bed he heard the
familiar rumble of coaches into the village, he shook death from him,
ordered the runaways to approach his presence, married three couples
from his bed, and gave up the ghost with three hundred pounds in his
palsied hands. Beattie at the toll-bar, on the other hand, did not scorn
silver fees, and as occasion warranted the priests have doubtless ranged
in their charges from half-a-crown and a glass of whisky to a hundred
pounds.
Though the toll-bar only at rare intervals got wealthy pairs into its
clutches, Murray had not been long installed in office when pockets
crammed with fees made him waddle as heavily as a duck. Fifty marriages
a month was no uncommon occurrence at Gretna at that time, and it was
then that the mansion was built which still stands about a hundred yards
on the English side of the Sark. The toll-keeper, to whom it owes its
existence, erected it for a hotel that would rival Gretna Hall, and
prove irresistible to the couples who, on getting married on the Scotch
side, would have to pass it on their return journey. But the
alterations in the Marriage Laws marred the new hotel's chances, and
Murray found that he had over-reached himself. Perhaps one reason why he
no longer prospered was because he pursued a niggardly policy with the
postillions, ostlers, and other rapscallions who demanded a share of the
booty. The Langs knew what they were about far too well to quarrel with
the post-boys, and stories are still current in Springfield of these
faithful youths tumbling their employers into the road rather than take
them to a "blacksmith" with whom they did not deal.
There is no hope for Gretna. Springfield was and is the great glory of
its inhabitants. Here ran the great wall of Adrian, the scene of many a
tough fight in the days of stone weapons and skin-clad Picts. The
Debatable Land, sung by Trouvere and Troubadour, is to-day but a sodden
moss, in which no King Arthur strides fearfully away from the "grim
lady" of the bogs; and moss-troopers, grim and gaunt and terrible, no
longer whirl with lighted firebrands into England. With a thousand stars
the placid moon lies long drawn out and drowned at the bottom of the
Solway, without a lovesick maid to shed a tear; the chariots that once
rattled and flashed along the now silent road were turned into firewood
decades ago, and the runaways, from a Prince of Capua to a beggar-maid,
are rotten and forgotten.
MY FAVORITE AUTHORESS.
Just out of the four-mile radius--to give the cabby his chance--is a
sleepy lane, lent by the country to the town, and we have only to open a
little gate off it to find ourselves in an old-fashioned garden. The
house, with its many quaint windows, across which evergreens spread
their open fingers as a child makes believe to shroud his eyes, has a
literary look--at least, so it seems to me, but perhaps this is because
I know the authoress who is at this moment advancing down the walk to
meet me.
She has hastily laid aside her hoop, and crosses the grass with the
dignity that becomes a woman of letters. Her hair falls over her
forehead in an attractive way, and she is just the proper height for an
authoress. The face, so open that one can watch the process of thinking
out a new novel in it, from start to finish, is at times a little
careworn, as if it found the world weighty, but at present there is a
gracious smile on it, and she greets me heartily with one hand, while
the other strays to her neck, to make sure that her lace collar is lying
nicely. It would be idle to pretend that she is much more than eight
years old, "but then Maurice is only six."
Like most literary people who put their friends into books, she is very
modest, and it never seems to strike her that I would come all this way
to see her.
"Mamma is out," she says simply, "but she will be back soon; and papa is
at a meeting, but he will be back soon, too."
I know what meeting her papa is at. He is crazed with admiration for
Stanley, and can speak of nothing but the Emin Relief Expedition. While
he is away proposing that Stanley should get the freedom of Hampstead,
now is my opportunity to interview the authoress.
"Won't you come into the house?"
I accompany the authoress to the house, while we chat pleasantly on
literary topics.
"Oh, there is Maurice, silly boy!"
Maurice is too busy shooting arrows into the next garden to pay much
attention to me; and the authoress smiles at him good-naturedly.
"I hope you'll stay to dinner," he says to me, "because then we'll have
two kinds of pudding."
The authoress and I give each other a look which means that children
will be children, and then we go indoors.
"Are you not going to play any more?" cries Maurice to the authoress.
She blushes a little.
"I was playing with him," she explains, "to keep him out of mischief
till mamma comes back."
In the drawing-room we talk for a time of ordinary matters--of the
allowances one must make for a child like Maurice, for instance--and
gradually we drift to the subject of literature. I know literary people
sufficiently well to be aware that they will talk freely--almost too
freely--of their work if approached in the proper spirit.
"Are you busy just now?" I ask, with assumed carelessness, and as if I
had not been preparing the question since I heard papa was out.
She looks at me, suspiciously, as authors usually do when asked such a
question. They are not certain whether you are really sympathetic.
However, she reads honesty in my eyes.
"Oh, well, I am doing a little thing." (They always say this.)
"A story or an article?"
"A story."
"I hope it will be good."
"I don't know. I don't like it much." (This is another thing they say,
and then they wait for you to express incredulity.)
"I have no doubt it will be a fine thing. Have you given it a name?"
"Oh, yes; I always write the name. Sometimes I don't write any more."
As she was in a confidential mood this seemed an excellent chance for
getting her views on some of the vexed literary questions of the day.
For instance, everybody seems to be more interested in hearing during
what hours of the day an author writes than in reading his book.
"Do you work best in the early part of the day or at night?"
"I write my stories just before tea."
"That surprises me. Most writers, I have been told, get through a good
deal of work in the morning."
"Oh, but I go to school as soon as breakfast is over."
"And you don't write at night?"
"No; nurse always turns the gas down."
I had read somewhere that among the novelist's greatest difficulties is
that of sustaining his own interest in a novel day by day until it is
finished.
"Until your new work is completed do you fling your whole heart and soul
into it? I mean, do you work straight on at it, so to speak, until you
have finished the last chapter?"
"Oh, yes."
The novelists were lately reproved in a review for working too quickly,
and it was said that one wrote a whole novel in two months.
"How long does it take you to write a novel?"
"Do you mean a long novel?"
"Yes."
"It takes me nearly an hour."
"For a really long novel?"
"Yes, in three volumes. I write in three exercise-books--a volume in
each."
"You write very quickly."
"Of course, a volume doesn't fill a whole exercise-book. They are penny
exercise-books. I have a great many three-volume stories in the three
exercise-books."
"But are they really three-volume novels?"
"Yes, for they are in chapters, and one of them has twenty chapters."
"And how many chapters are there in a page?"
"Not very many."
Some authors admit that they take their characters from real life, while
others declare that they draw entirely upon their imagination.
"Do you put real people into your novels?"
"Yes, Maurice and other people, but generally Maurice."
"I have heard that some people are angry with authors for putting them
into books."
"Sometimes Maurice is angry, but I can't always make him an
engine-driver, can I?"
"No. I think it is quite unreasonable on his part to expect it. I
suppose he likes to be made an engine-driver?"
"He is to be an engine-driver when he grows up, he says. He is a silly
boy, but I love him."
"What else do you make him in your books?"
"To-day I made him like Stanley, because I think that is what papa would
like him to be; and yesterday he was papa, and I was his coachman."
"He would like that?"
"No, he wanted me to be papa and him the coachman. Sometimes I make him
a pirate, and he likes that, and once I made him a girl."
"He would be proud?"
"That was the day he hit me. He is awfully angry if I make him a girl,
silly boy. Of course he doesn't understand."
"Obviously not. But did you not punish him for being so cruel as to hit
you?"
"Yes, I turned him into a cat, but he said he would rather be a cat than
a girl. You see he's not much more than a baby--though I was writing
books at his age."
"Were you ever charged with plagiarism? I mean with copying your books
out of other people's books."
"Yes, often."
"I suppose that is the fate of all authors. I am told that literary
people write best in an old coat----."
"Oh, I like to be nicely dressed when I am writing. Here is papa, and I
do believe he has another portrait of Stanley in his hand. Mamma will be
so annoyed."
THE CAPTAIN OF THE SCHOOL.
When Peterkin, who is twelve, wrote to us that there was a possibility
("but don't count on it," he said) of his bringing the captain of the
school home with him for a holiday, we had little conception what it
meant. The captain we only knew by report as the "man" who lifted
leg-balls over the pavilion and was said to have made a joke to the
head-master's wife. By-and-by we understood the distinction that was to
be conferred on us. Peterkin instructed his mother to send the captain a
formal invitation addressed "J. Rawlins, Esq." This was done, but in
such a way that Peterkin feared we might lose our distinguished visitor.
"You shouldn't have asked him for all the holidays," Peterkin wrote, "as
he has promised a heap of fellows." Then came a condescending note from
the captain, saying that if he could manage it he would give us a few
days. In this letter he referred to Peterkin as his young friend.
Peterkin wrote shortly afterwards asking his sister Grizel to send him
her photograph. "If you haven't one," he added, "what is the color of
your eyes?" Grizel is eighteen, which is also, I believe, the age of J.
Rawlins. We concluded that the captain had been sounding Peterkin about
the attractions that our home could offer him; but Grizel neither sent
her brother a photograph nor any account of her personal appearance. "It
doesn't matter," Peterkin wrote back; "I told him you were dark." Grizel
is rather fair, but Peterkin had not noticed that.
Up to the very last he was in an agony lest the captain should
disappoint him. "Don't tell anybody he is coming," he advised us, "for,
of course, there is no saying what may turn up." Nevertheless the
captain came and we sent the dog-cart to the station to meet him and
Peterkin. On all previous occasions one of us had gone to the station
with the cart; but Peterkin wrote asking us not to do so this time.
"Rawlins hates any fuss," he said.
Somewhat to our relief, we found the captain more modest than it would
have been reasonable to expect. "This is Rawlins," was Peterkin's simple
introduction; but it could not have been done with more pride had the
guest been Mr. W. G. Grace himself. One thing I liked in Rawlins from
the first: his consideration for others. When Peterkin's mother and
sister embraced that boy on the doorstep, Rawlins pretended not to see.
Peterkin frowned, however, at this show of affection, and with a red
face looked at the captain to see how he took it. With much good taste,
Peterkin said nothing about this "fuss" on the doorstep, and I concluded
that he would let it slide. It has so far been a characteristic of that
boy that he can let anything which is disagreeable escape his memory.
This time, however, as I subsequently learned he had only bottled up his
wrath to pour it out upon his sister. Finding her alone in the course of
the day, he opened his mind by remarking that this was a nice sort of
thing she had done, making a fool of him before another fellow. Asked
boldly--for Grizel can be freezing on occasion not only to her own
brother, but to other people's brothers--what he meant, Peterkin
inquired hotly if she was going to pretend that she had not kissed him
in Rawlins' presence. Grizel replied that if Rawlins thought anything of
that he was a nasty boy; at which Peterkin echoed "boy" with a grim
laugh, and said he only hoped she would see the captain some day when
the ground suited his style of bowling. Grizel replied contemptuously
that the time would come when both Peterkin and his disagreeable friend
would be glad to be kissed; upon which her brother flung out of the
room, warmly protesting that she had no right to bring such charges
against fellows.