five gowden guineas to tell her; and, as I couldna be sure, I thought I
couldna do better than to make safe and sure wark o’t; so I took five
shillings out o’ the five guineas and gave it to the Carlin o’ the
Cowgate, a wise woman, frae the very native place o’ thae far-seeing
creatures, Auldearn, Auld Eppie, as they ca’ her, (they were all
Eppies,) and she settled the thing in the trice o’ a cantrup; so you
see the fact is sure that the strawberry belanged to the first-born.”
“And did you tell Lady Gorthley you went to Eppie?” inquired the
discomfited writer.
“Gude faith na, she might hae asked back the five guineas,” answered
Peggy; “and besides, if she got the truth, it was a’ ane to her, ye
ken, where it cam’ frae; and you’ll be discreet and say naething.”
“Did you ask from the old woman the name of her who bore the mark?”
rejoined Mr Bayne.
“Ay, but she said she didna like to spier that at the auld ane--Nick,
ye ken--because he might have got angry and told her a lee, and that
might hae brought me into a scrape wi’ her ladyship, who knew hersel
which o’ her daughters bore the mark.”
“Very prudent,” muttered again the writer, as he rose, “this is a most
satisfactory witness.”
And carrying this satisfaction along with him, he proceeded to the
small garret occupied by Jean Gilchrist, the direction to which he had
got from Mrs Macintosh. Believing as he did the statement made to him
by the latter, he had very little hope of getting anything satisfactory
out of his present witness, and wishing to keep her more to the point
than he had been able to effect in the prior case, he assumed her
presence at the birth, and came straight out with the question,
whether she knew if there had been noticed on one of the children the
mark of the strawberry.
“The strawberry?” said she, “ay, wi’ a’ wondered at that, but then it’s
no uncommon things in weans to be marked in that way, so we sune got
ower’t.”
“And was this mark on the child which was first born?” inquired he.
“I’ll tell you that, sir,” replied she, “if ye’ll tell me first which
o’ the twa cam’ first into the world.”
Whereby Mr Bayne found himself where he was, in the hands of a Scotch
metaphysician, for, was there not here an example of the _à priori_
argument, to use the old jargon, wherein the cause is assumed to
prove the effect, and the effect is then brought forward to prove the
cause--a trick of wisdom we are yet in the nineteenth century playing
every day?
“That is just what I want to know, Jean,” said he.
“And it’s just what I want to ken, too,” rejoined Jean, “for to tell
you God’s truth, sir,” she continued in a lower tone, “I hae something
on my conscience, and yet it’s no muckle either.”
“And what is that?” said he, expecting to get at something on which he
could rely, whatever it might be.
“Just this,” answered Jean. “Years agane, Gorthley came to me, and
said, ‘Jean Gilchrist, here is something for you,’ and I took it--it
was a purse o’ gowd,--and then he said, ‘I would die happy, Jean, if I
could think that Martha Bruce, who bears the mark, was the second born
of my daughters;’ and, looking at the purse, said I, ‘Weel, sir, if
that will mak ye happy, ye may be happy, for it was even so.’ Then said
he, ‘Will you stand to that, Jean?’ And I said, ‘Ay, will I, through
thick and thin;’ and when he went away, I began to consider if I had
dune wrang, but I couldna see it, for doesna the Bible say, that man
and wife are ane flesh? and if that be true, how could their children
be separate flesh? Weel then, whichever o’ the twa, the first or the
second born, carried the mark, they baith being ane flesh, behoved to
bear it, and so, if the ane bore it the other bore it, and if the other
bore it the ane bore it. Besides, wha doesna ken that twins are just ae
bairn cut in twa? They’re aye less than the single bairns, and isna a
double-yokit egg just twa eggs joined thegither into ane.”
A kind of logic common at the time, and which, indeed, touched upon
the most obscure question of metaphysics, and not very satisfactory to
Mr Bayne, who, however, knew the subtle character of the Scotch mind
too well to try a fall with so acute a dialectician. So, altogether
disappointed with his precognition he left and came away, meeting in
the passage Mr Pollock, who had been with Mrs Macintosh, and was now
on his way to Jean Gilchrist. They were very intimate, and did not
hesitate to compare notes, the result of which was that the case was to
realise once more the truth of the toast generally drunk by Edinburgh
practitioners at the end of the session, “The glorious uncertainty;”
and if Mr Pollock thought so before he examined Jean Gilchrist, his
opinion must have been pretty well confirmed by what she said. The
case, in short, was not one in which there is conflicting evidence,
and where the judges can make out the weight by a hair of prejudice;
it was a case in which there was no evidence at all as to which of the
girls was the heir; but, then, it was just on account of this equipoise
that the two claimants, Martha, helped by her mother on the one side,
and Sarah, supported by her lover, Walkinshaw, on the other, waxed the
more bitter; and the contention which had so long raged in Gorthley
House became hotter and hotter. Nor need we fancy that the writers
would try to get the right compromised in some way, where they had so
good a chance of making a money certainty out of a moral uncertainty;
and so the case went into court under two competing briefs, that is
just two claims by the daughters, each insisting to be served heir.
The witnesses, whose precognitions we have given, were examined; and
a great number of servants who had been in the family, who swore that
Gorthley himself always called Sarah Miss Bruce, and Mrs Bruce always
called Martha by that dignified title, so that the servants tried to
please both master and mistress by calling the one daughter or the
other miss, just according to the chance of being overheard by the
heads of the house. When before the sheriff, and when the claims were
equally suspended, a strange plea was set up by Sarah’s counsel, Mr
Fotheringham, to the effect that, taking the question of priority of
birth to be doubtful, the doubt could be resolved by a kind of _nobile
officium_ on the part of the father as the head of the house, and that
as Gorthley had declared for Sarah this should be held as sufficient;
but Mr Maitland answered this by saying that the question being one of
fact, and that fact coming more within the presumed knowledge of the
mother, ought to be settled by the voice of the mother, who declared
for Martha; and here again the argument being nearly equal, the judge
on the inquest was nonplussed. And thus it came to pass that the old
irony of the ancients, directed against a sow coming in place of
Minerva as a judge of some very fine matter of truth, turned out to be
in this case no irony at all, for the sow was here as good a judge
as Minerva. The scales were so nearly balanced that the mere breath
which conveyed the doubt might disperse the doubt by moving one of
the scales--a very fine irony in itself, in so much as all truth may
be resolved, in the far end, into the mere breath of man’s opinion.
At length the sheriff gave the cast of the scale to the side of the
mother, as the “_domestic witness_.”
But Sarah was, of course, dissatisfied; or, rather, Fotheringham, who
advised her to take the case before the Fifteen, by what is called an
Advocation, and so to be sure these lords got a burden thrown upon
them which cost them no little trouble. They got the case argued and
argued, and were in the end so mystified, that if they could have
decided that the question was undecidable, they would have been very
glad to have hung it up among the eternal dubieties as an everlasting
proof of “the glorious uncertainty;” but they could not agree even to
do that, for the entail could not be compromised or set aside, and so
they behoved to decide one way or another. Meanwhile, the case having
made a noise, a great number of people were collected in court on the
day when the judgment was to be finally given. And given it was so far,
for seven judges were for Sarah, and seven for Martha, so it came to
the president, who said, “I have read of a case somewhere in which
the judges drew cuts, and decided by the Goddess Chance in place of
justice; and, indeed, if the latter is blind, as they say she is, we
may take the one as well as the other as the umpire of the right or
the wrong. But there is one consideration which moves me in this case,
and that is, that as it is the wife’s duty to bear the children of the
family, so it is her privilege to know more about that interesting
affair than the husband, who is, as I understand, never present at the
mysteries of Lucina, and, therefore, I would be inclined to declare
that Martha was the first-born.”
“It’s a lee, my lord,” cried a shrill screaming voice from the court.
Whereat the judges directed their eyes with much amazement to the place
whence the scream came.
“And who are you,” said the president, “who dare to speak in a court of
justice?”
“I deny it’s a court o’ justice,” cried the voice again. “My name is
Janet Glennie, and it was me that had the first handlin’ o’ the bairns,
and I tell your lordship to your face, that you’re clean wrang, and ken
nae mair about the case than Jenkins did about the colour o’ the great
grandmother o’ his hen. I tell ye it was Sarah wha came first, and
Martha wi’ her strawberry came second, for I saw the mark wi’ my ain
een.”
A speech followed by the inevitable laugh of a curious audience, and
the better received that the people had always a satirical feeling
against the fifteen wise wigs. Nor was this late testimony too late:
Mrs Glennie was subsequently sworn, and the judgment went for Sarah. It
turned out that Mrs Glennie had been absent for a time from Scotland,
and, having, upon visiting Edinburgh, heard of the famous trial, made
it a point to be present. Nay, there was a little retribution in the
affair, for Lady Gorthley knew she was alive, and had reported her
death to serve her own ends.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
The Story of the Chalk Line.
For the truth of the story I am now to relate I have the word of a
godly minister of the Church of Scotland, whose father had been in the
house in Burnet’s Close, and had seen the two females and examined “the
chalk line” in the middle of the floor. I do not say this to conciliate
your belief; for perhaps if this were my object, I should be nearer
the attainment of it by asserting, as Mr Thackeray used to do when he
wanted his readers to believe him, that there is not a word of truth
in the whole affair. There is a certain species of fish in the Ganges
which is never happy but when it is pushing up against the stream; and
people, as civilisation goes on, find themselves so often cheated, that
they go by contraries, just as the old sorcerers divined by reading
backwards. But surely in this age of subtleties it is a pleasant thing
to think that you are so much the object of an author’s care as that
he would not only save you from thinking, but think for you; and so I
proceed to tell you of the personages in Burnet’s Close, leading from
the High Street to the Cowgate.
In a room of the second flat of the third tall tenement on your left
hand as you descend lived Martha and Mary Jopp. They were, so far as I
have been able to discover, the daughters of a writer of the name of
Peter Jopp. You cannot be wrong in supposing that they had been once
young, though, in regard to the aged, this is not always conceded by
those who are buoyant with the spirit of youth. Yes, these aged maidens
had not only been once young, they had been very fair and very comely.
They had passed through the spring and summer flowers without treading
upon the speckled serpent of the same colour. They had heard the song
of love where there was no risk of the deceptions of the siren. They
had been tempted; but they had resisted the temptation of some who
could well have returned their affection. Nor was this the result of
any want of natural sensibility; if it was not that they had too much
of that quality, which, if it is the source of pleasure, is also that
of pain--perhaps more of the latter than the former, though we dare not
say so in this our time of angelic perfection.
To be a little more particular upon a peculiarity of our two ladies,
which enters as rather a “loud colour” in the web of our story, there
was a sufficient reason for their celibacy. They had a mother who, as
the saying goes, was “a woman of price”--such a one as Solomon excepts
from so many, that I am afraid to mention the number. She was a good
Calvinist, without insisting too much for election and predestination.
She was affectionate, without the weakness which so often belongs to
doating mothers; and she possessed, along with the charm of universal
kindness, a strength of mind which demanded respect without diminishing
love. No wonder that her daughters loved her even to that extent that
neither of the two could think of leaving her so long as she lived.
An inclination this, or rather a resolution, which had been confirmed
in them by certain experiences they had had of what their mother had
suffered from having been deprived by death of an elder daughter, and
by marriage of a younger; the latter of whom had gone with her husband,
a Mr Darling, to Calcutta, under the patronage of Major Scott, the
friend of Warren Hastings.
But there was another reason which kept the sisters from marrying--one
which will, I suspect, be very slow to be believed; and that was,
their love for each other. But I am resolute in urging it, because,
in the first place, it is not absolutely against the experience of
mankind; and, secondly, because, while it forms a part of the story as
narrated to me, it is necessary as one of the two sides of a contrast,
without which I could not answer for a certain effect in my picture.
Certain, at least, it was that more than one external revolving body
in the shape of lovers came within the sphere of their attraction for
each other, and could produce no deflection in the lines of their
mutual attachment. It was said that one of them had been jilted. I do
not know; but the circumstance would explain a fact more certain that
the sisters, in their then lively humour of young blood, used to sing
a love-defiance song, which might have been both sport and earnest.
My informant gave me the words. It is a kind of rough mosaic, with
borrowed verses, yet worth recording:--
A farmer’s daughter fair am I,
As blithe as May-day morning,
And when my lover passes by,
I laugh at him wi’ scorning.
Ha! ha! ha! fal lal la!
Ha! ha! fal lal laldy!
There came a cock to our father’s flock,
And he wore a double kaim, O;
He flapt his wings, and fain would craw,
But craw he could craw nane, O.
A braw young man came courting me,
And swore his wife he’d make me;
But when he knew my pounds were few,
The rogue he did forsake me.
Gae whistle on your thumb, young man,
You left me wae and weary;
But, now I’ve got my heart again,
Gude faith, I’ll keep it cheery.
There’s world’s room for you to pass,
And room enough for Nan, O;
The deil may tak her on his back
Who dies for faithless man, O.
There’s still as good fish in the sea
As ever yet were taken;
I’ll spread my net and catch again,
Though I have been forsaken.
Ha! ha! ha! &c.
A better medicine, I suspect, than an action of damages. But to
continue. The sisters read the same books, took the same walks, wrought
at the same work as steadfastly and lovingly as they worshipped the
same mother, and revered the memory of the same father--a remark this
last which helps us on to a point of our story; for the father had been
dead for some years, leaving the mother a competent annuity, besides a
residue, which would afford at least so much to the daughters as would
tocher them to a kind of independence, though not to a husband with
much hope of being benefited in a money point of view by marriage. But
the time came--as what time does not come, even to those who think in
the heyday of their happiness it will never come--when there would be
a change, when the charm of this threefold relation should cease.
The mother died, and with her the annuity; and the attraction she had
exercised over the daughters had just drawn them so far past the point
of the shaking of the blossoms of youth and beauty and hope, that their
affection for each other stood now no chance of being broken by even
one of those moral comets that burn up more incombustible bodies than
old spinsters with very small competences.
And so, with bleared eyes of uncontrollable grief, and no hope, and
a trifle of twenty pounds a-year each to be paid them by Mr David
Ross, writer, their father’s agent, our two spinsters took up their
solitary residence in the foresaid room in the second flat of the big
tenement in Burnet’s Close to which I have alluded. Even at the first
moment of their retreat they seem to have shaken off with the blossoms,
which, in the human plant no less than in the vegetable one, alone
contain the beauties and sweets of life--the stem being, alas, only
at best the custodier of an acid--much of their interest in the busy,
gossipping, scandalising, hating, and loving Edinburgh; but so far this
resistance to the charms of the outer world only served to make them
live even more and more to each other. And then, had they not the sweet
though melancholy solace of that Calvinistic tenet which imparted such
mildness and equanimity to the face of their beloved mother--even that
mysterious scroll which contains the ordination and predestination of
all things which shall ever come to pass? Yes; but even this solace was
modified by the regret that the portrait of that mother, painted by
no unskilful hand--a pupil of George Jameson’s--was not, as it ought
to have been, in that room hanging over the mantelpiece; the more by
reason that that picture had been surreptitiously taken away by their
sister Margaret when she sailed with her husband, Mr Darling, to India.
And would they not have it back? Mr Ross might tell them when he was
there on a certain evening.
“You have as good a right to it,” said the man of the law, “as your
sister; for I believe it was never given to her by your mother.”
“No more it ever was,” said Martha; “for did not our mother write
herself for it, but it never came; and she was to have got herself
painted again, but death came at the predestinated hour, and took away
her life, and with it all our happiness in this world.”
“Not all your happiness, Miss Martha,” rejoined the agent; “for have
you not your mutual affection left?--ay, and even your love for her who
is only removed to a distance--even among blessed spirits?--from whence
she is at this moment looking down upon you to bless that love which
you bear to each other, and which, I trust, will never decay.”
“I hope not,” said Mary, calmly; “but I remember how, when the evil
spirit took hold of us, and made us fretful and discontented with each
other, she calmed our rebellious spirits by a look so justly reproving,
and yet so mild and heavenly-like, that for very love of her we would
dote on each other the more. And now I think if we had that picture,
with the same eye as if still fixed on us, we would be secured against
all fretfulness; for O sir, we are all weak and wilful. Will you write
for it, Mr Ross? It would hang so well up there over the fire, where,
you see, there is an old nail, which seems to have been left by the
former tenant for the very purpose.”
“I will,” replied Mr Ross; “but I may as well tell you I have little
chance of success, for Margaret, I suspect, would nearly as soon
part with her life. Nor do I wonder at it; for the countenance of
your mother as there represented seems so far above that of ordinary
mortals, both in beauty and benignity, that methinks,”--and here Mr
Ross smiled in his own grave way,--“if I ever felt inclined to put down
six-and-eightpence against a client in place of three-and-fourpence,
that look of hers would bring back my sense of honesty. You know I have
Mrs Ross over the mantelpiece of my business room; and though she
never approached your mother in that peculiar expression, which your
father used to say to me, in a half-jocular way, humanised him into
that wonderful being, a conscientious writer, yet I have been benefited
in the same way by the mild light of my Agnes’s eyes.”
And Mr Ross stopped, in consequence of feeling a small tendency to a
thickening in the throat, which he seldom felt except when he had a
cold.
“And you will write Margaret, then?” resumed Martha.
“That I will,” said he; “but I do not say may Heaven bless my effort,
because you know Heaven has made up its mind on that and all other
subjects long ago.”
“Even from the foundations of the earth,” sighed Mary.
“Even so,” rejoined Mr Ross as he departed, leaving the sisters to
their small supper of a Newhaven haddock, each half of which was
sweetened to the receiver by the consciousness that the other was being
partaken of by her sister. And thereafter, having said their prayers,
they retired to the same bed, to fall asleep in each other’s arms,
without a regret that said arms were not a little more sinewy, or that
their faces did not wear beards, and to dream of their mother.
And it would have been well if affairs in Burnet’s Close had continued
to go on as smoothly as we have here indicated. Nor did there seem any
reason why they should not. The sisters had a sufficiency to live on;
they had no evil passions to disturb the equanimity of their thoughts;
they were religious, and resigned to the predestinated; they were among
“the elect,” that is, orthodoxically, they elected to think so, which
is the same thing. They had their house in order, and could afford to
have Peggy Fergusson to clean out the room occasionally, and to go the
few messages that their few wants required. But Time is a sower as well
as a reaper; and he casts about with an equally ready hand the seeds
of opinions and imaginations, the germs of feelings and the spores of
mildewed hopes: some for the young, some for the old, but all inferring
change from what was yesterday to what is to-day; from what is to-day
to what will be to-morrow. As the days passed into years, they appeared
to get shorter and shorter--a process with all of us, which no theory
can explain, if it is not against all theory; for if time is generated
by ideas, it should appear to go more slowly the more slowly those
ideas arise and pass, and yet the practical effect of the working is
the very reverse. But whatever were the changes that were taking place
in the habits and feelings of the two sisters, they were altogether
unconscious of them. The indisposition to go out and mix with their
friends was gradually increasing, as they felt, without being aware of
the feeling, that they had less and less in common with the ways of the
world; and the seldomer they went out, the seldomer their friends came
to see them, nor when they did come, did they receive any encouragement
to repeat the visit.
In all this I do not consider that I am describing human nature in the
aspect in which we generally see it; for we more often find in those
who are advancing into age a felt necessity for enlivenment, were it
for nothing else than to relieve them from solitary musings and the
perilous stuff of old memories; but here, as it will by and by be seen,
I have not to do with ordinary human nature. These sisters were fated
to be strange, and to do strange things. The indisposition to go out
degenerated in the course of some years into a love of total seclusion.
They never passed the threshold of their room; and as time went on,
their friends gradually renounced their efforts to get either of them
to change a purpose to which they seemed to have attained by the
sympathy of two natures exactly similar. They probably knew nothing of
the words of the poet, nor would they have cared for them:--
“The world careth not a whit
For him who careth not for it:
One only duty and one right,
That he be buried out of sight.”
But amidst this strange asceticism the one still remained to the other
as a dear, loving, and beloved sister; and if all the world should be
nothing to them, they would still be all the world to each other. The
seclusion had lasted five years since the death of the mother, and
still no decay of their mutual attachment could be observed.