Marjorie Dudingstoune: a tale of old St. Andrews

Front matter

FIRST EDITION, Two Vols., crovm Svo SECOND EDITION, One Vol., 1895 MORRISON AND GIBB, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH, % &%k oi #fo Saint %xtimtxm BY WILLIAM FRANCIS COLLIER, LL.D NE W EDITION EDINBURGH & LONDON OLIPHANT ANDERSON & FERRIER i895 NEW 3s. 6d. SERIES Croivn &vo, on antique paper, cloth extra JAMES INWICK, Ploughman and Elder. By P. Hay Hunter. Fourth Thousand. WILLIAM BLACK.LOCK, Journalist. A Story of Press Life. By T. B. Maclachlan. CROWNED VICTOR. A Story of Strife. By H. B. Mackenzie. MY DUCATS AND MY DAUGHTER. By P. Hay Hunter and Walter Whyte. Fourth Edition. A FAIR NORWEGIAN. By Andrew Stewart. MARJORIE DUDINGSTOUNE. A Tale of Old Saint Andrews. By William Francis Collier, LL.D. Edinburgh & London OLIPHANT ANDERSON & FERRIER and all booksellers TO ELLA THIS STORY OF HER BIRTHPLACE WRITTEN IN REMEMBRANCE OF THREE HAPPY YEARS IS LOVINGLY INSCRIBED CONTENTS — *> — CHAP. PAGE I. THE WRECK OF THE WINE-SHIP .... 9 II.

THE DUDINGSTOUNES AT HOME .... 19 III. THE ENGLISH BOOK ..... 36 IV. THE CASTLE GUARD-BOOM . . . .45 v. st. Leonard's college ..... 58 VI. HAND in hand ...... 71 vn. hogmanay ...... 80 VIII. PICKING SEAWEED ON THE SANDS . . .90 IX. THE BRODESTER'S BOOTH ..... 101 X. THE WITCH'S BEN ...... 110 XI. THE ARCHEEY BONSPIEL ..... 120 XII. THE DUEL ON THE LINKS .... 130 XIII. THE SENZIE FAIR ...... 136 XIV. KINKELL BRAES ...... 151 XV. NORTH BERWICK KIRKYARD .... 161 XVI. A ROYAL MARRIAGE . . . . .173 XVII. TILTING AT STRATHTYBUM . . . .184 XVIII. TEMPTED AND FALLEN ..... 197 XIX. THE TRIAL OF ALISOUNE LYNNE . . . 207 XX. SYM PENNANGO'S TRIP TO EDINBUBGH . . . 223 XXI. RETRIBUTION ...... 241 XXII. MAEJORIE PAYS HER DEBT .... 257 XXIII. REPULSED ....... 279 XXIV. A SECOND THOUGHT ..... 298 XXV. FIVE YEARS LATER ..... MAEJORIE DUDINGSTOUNE — ♦ —

Chapter I The Wreck Of The Wine-ship One

evening in the November of 1537, the winter sun, sinking towards the west, was turning to russet gold the short brown grass on the sloping upland of that island of the Bass, which, like some huge monster risen for breath and looking seaward for a foe, guards the entrance of the Firth of Forth. Here and there in a wet spot there shone a dash of rich green. The deep-scarped face of the rock confronted the beat ing surges of the North Sea in a sheer precipice, gashed with lines of shadow and dappled with splashes of brilliant white. The furrows of the sea rose pleasantly into ridges of grey and blue, save where a sweeping flaw ruffled its surface with a patch of moving purple. Round the rugged pentagon of greenstone, guHs and geese were drifting like flakes of snow ; and, now and then, the scream of a shoreward-flying bird touched the ear amid the ceaseless whisper of creaming waves, that left white kisses upon crag and sand.

Peace and beauty were the features of the scene ; and, so far as sky and sea could indicate, it might have been the close of a pleasant August day, instead of a sunset in November. As the sentinel on one of the sea-towers of Tantallon leant listlessly upon his halberd, gazing upon this picture, the gleam of a flag caught his eye ; and a carvel, on whose higher mast the Red Lion of Scotland was flying, crept slowly before the wind into the channel. Its square and clumsy hull, elaborately windowed in tiers, betokened a purpose in the mind of its builder rather of safety than of speed ; and, from the general appearance of the ship, the soldier judged it to be one of those daring merchant craft, which were wont to defy the Black Act of 1535, in venturing to confront the perds of a voyage between St. Simon's Day and Candlemas.

As the vessel hove to, the veer ing breeze carried in occasional fragments of the cries of the marinals, hauling at the ropes — veyra, vcyra — pourbossa — coupon, caupona — and so forth, as was then the fashion of sadors at their tod. The firing of a signal-culverin dispeUed all doubt as to the mission of the ship ; and in a short time, from that cosy curve now known as Canty Bay, where a projecting arm of rock encloses a httle harbour, a heavy boat went pull ing out, to receive from the skipper of the Thistle some casks of French wine, destined for the cellars of Tantadon. While the barrels were being slung into the boat, two young men, lounging on the high-peaked stern, looked on in sdence. They were almost of an age — not far from twenty-one. One, whose posture, as he lay at fuU length, defined a kind of insolent disdain and haughty languor, wore a dress of the French fashion, but not of costly material, his doublet being merely of grey canvas, trimmed with red woollen lace.

His dark face, cast in the finest mould of aquiline beauty, betrayed in the form of the THE WRECK OF THE WINE-SHIP 11 mouth, the mobde nostrd, and the audacity of a bold bright eye, overhung with raven locks, traces of strong passions, and a wiU that could not easdy brook control. He lay watching the marinals toiling at the heavy casks with an air of scornful indifference, which he did not mean to show, but which was his usual manner. The eyes of the other youth, as he leant with folded arms on the taffrad, had often turned from the red bluffs of Tantadon to the Fife coast, melting hazily from the soft ascent of Largo Law into a dim blue slender point. His garb of plain russet Flemish cloth was much simpler in form and fashion. A high white forehead, gentle eyes of dark grey, and a soft brown beard, shadowing rather than concealing his well-cut hp and chin, were the points of his attractive face on which a gazing eye would first linger.

There was something almost womanly in the gentleness of his expression ; but a glance at his strong, well-knit frame dispelled all ideas of weakness or effeminacy. These young men, passengers in the Thistle, had been thrown a good deal together during the five days which had elapsed since the vessel, sailing originally from Bordeaux, had touched at Dieppe and taken them on board; and they had talked much together of the scenes they had left. Alan Lockhart, the darker of the two, was returning to Scotland from France, where he had been residing for some years, at first as a student in the schools of Paris, but latterly as page in the service of a French nobleman. His talk, which was plentifully spiced and garnished with the newest oaths of Parisian invention, consisted largely of bits of brdhant scandal and gossip, coloured with second-hand wit and satire.

He could describe how Marie de Bourbon penetrated the disguise of James V. by running to her secret coffer for a picture of the Scottish king she had hidden there — how James jdted her for pretty, pale Magdalene, whom he afterwards made his wife — how a young French lord was dying for love of Magdalene, who had worn her Scottish crown but a short forty days — and a thousand other gleams of courtly talk, reflected from that great centre of gaiety and fashion in whose rays he had been lately basking. And when, in the course of conversation, he discovered that his fedow-passenger, Walter Lynne, was the son of a widow in Saint Andrews, and that he had been in the Low Countries, at Bruges and Antwerp, learning the business of a mercer and dealer in woollen cloths, his manner changed, becoming tinged, perhaps unconsciously, with patronage and condescension.

For Lockhart's father, a gallant old soldier who had escaped the carnage of Flodden, had been lately stationed at Saint Andrews as Captain of the Castle ; and it was but right, the French-bred youngster thought, to take his stand at once with a low mercer-fedow, whose fingers were more famdiar with the eUwand than with the sword. When the boat had rowed off with its freight, the prow of the Thistle was turned seaward, her ultimate destination being Crad, a port of Fifeshire close to the rock-bound Ness or nose of the land. By the time she had cleared the Bass, the wind had freshened considerably. The rays of the setting sun, now resting on the margin of the western hills, flooded the sky with angry fire, and turned the heaving Firth into a sea of blood. Banks of dark cloud then gathered, untd the heavens were overcast.

The soft green furrows of the sea swelled into white-crested ridges of dark heaving water. And every few minutes there would come a stiff gust, with THE WRECK OF THE WINE-SHIP 13 dashes of icy rain, wrinkling the surface of the broad watery slopes with a thousand httle creases that fore boded the force and persistency of an approaching storm. With looks fixed often and anxiously upon the quarter whence the wind blew, the master of the ship whistled his crew to their quarters, and sang out his orders in his loudest voice. The boatswain sprang up the tackling to the top in the faint hope of spying some streak of light in the mass of indigo cloud, which in an hour's time had darkened down upon the face of the sea. Displacing the rudderman, the master took the helm in his own hand. The wind increased in fury as darkness, coming earlier from the dense clouds that obscured the sky, fell on the deep ; and, as it screamed through the shivering tackle of the ship, the skipper's whistle was soon unheard, and fierce blasts blew the vain words from his hps away into the tempest and the night, It was with much tod and imminent perd of hfe that the marinals altered and trimmed the sails in the darkness.

Lynne and Lockhart gave what help they could. Manfully every one aboard the ship struggled with the tempest, and strove to keep to sea, though showers of bitter spray, splintered from the crests of the tormented waves, numbed their limbs with cold and stung their cheeks hke arrows tipped with ice. But when, during a brief lud, a fitful moonbeam shone through a chink in the driving mass of ebon cloud that scudded overhead, and they saw that they had missed the shelter of the May, towards which their course had been directed, dismay and despair settled on the men. The harmonious Sarrabossa, pupela, corresponding to the modern Yeo-heave-oh, ceased to be heard as they pulled a rope ; and more than one of the marinals sank in a sullen heap to the bottom of the boat and refused to work. By and by, with a terrific crack, hke the explosion of a cannon, the mizzen-mast gave way ; and, tumbling over the side with a tangled mass of cordage and sads, now loosed from their furling-strings and flouting the air in rattling ribands, almost caused the ship to heel completely over.

The terror-stricken crew, crouching abjectly in the bottom of the boat, or clinging with the clutch of despair to its sides, were utterly helpless at this crisis. Lockhart also seemed to have yielded to the palsy of fear. Walter Lynne alone preserved enough of calmness to act with prompt decision in the emergency. Drawing a short knife from its sheath, he sawed away at the tackling next him ; and the master, fired by his example, seized an axe and hewed at the stump of the splintered mast and the chaos of twisted ropes, until the wreck was clear and the vessel righted, half-full of water. Thus all night — and how endless seemed those hours of darkness — they struggled with the wind and waves, hoping a httle, despairing much. At last, just as the grey pallor of dawn began to streak the east, there came one monstrous wave, the climax of many seas that had for hours been sweeping over the doomed ship, often bearing a life away in their triumphant whirls ; and, as the master saw its towering mass curling in green terror above the rent and battered hull, which trembled and groaned at its base, he raised his hands to heaven as if in dumb appeal, and in the agony and madness of the moment rose to meet his fate.

No shock half so tremendous in its force had yet struck the ship ; and, when Walter Lynne, half choked with seething brine, ventured to open his eyes and relax his grasp, he saw the master's place empty, and the broken rudder floating a dozen yards away. Even he then ceased to hope. THE WRECK OF THE WINE- SHIP 15 As the wine-ship drifted rapidly landward, the growing hght disclosed to the few survivors a high rocky shore, at whose base the sea was sweeping in white fury over long diagonal reefs, keen and pitiless as a knife or saw. On a projection of this iron coast rose the turrets and spires of a small city, whde to the north gleamed a long low tract of sand, fringing the margin of the bay. To these sands the eyes of the surviving few were piteously turned, in hopes that the storm might drive them thither, and so afford them a chance of escape, which could not be hoped for amid the teeth of the bristling ledges on the lee.

" Sweet Mother of God ! had we but the rudder now ! " was the cry of anguish that broke from the boatswain ; " but no ! we must go where the storm lists to drive us." By this time the perd of the ship had been per ceived by the people of Saint Andrews, the city on the rocks ; and they crowded to the hill above the httle harbour. But to pity and to watch was all that they could do, since no boat could hve for a minute in the wdd surf that bit, and tore, and beat itself to bubbles on the reefs. There was no long interval of suspense. On before the pitdess wind, which made the women's hair stream out like banners, and well-nigh blew the sturdiest craftsman from his feet, the Thistle drifted to her doom. She struck midway between the Castle and the harbour of the old city, and was instantly jammed by the shock of a heavy sea into a crevice between two jagged ledges of rock.

The crash was heard by the people on the hdl, and was echoed by a groan from the crowd, as one wdd billow after another leapt over the dl-fated ship, carrying away her spars and grinding her poor ribs upon the rock. " If she can hold thegither tdl the tide falls a wee thing mair, some life might be saved yet, if there be any life to save," cried a grey-haired fisher to a burly, red-faced citizen, whose gold chain of office proclaimed his rank as a Badie of the town. " Ah, Davie, I fear that these wild beasts of waves have beaten the breath oot of the poor feUows long ago. But nay ! " he cried eagerly ; " there's a red cloth waving, and something like an arm. There's life in her yet. Follow me to the rocks, lads, and for Heaven's sake get a cod o' rope, and a stout sax-foot bow. Ha ! there's Geordie, the ranger o' Strathtyrum ; he'll lend his bow and a thick-timbered shaft or twa."

Hurrying to the base of the cliffs, where the pro jecting reefs were now partially uncovered by the ebbing tide, the brave old Badie, followed by a knot of stalwart fisher-folk and a score of other citizens, waded through seething foam, over slippery seaweed, along the face of one of the long ledges that jag the shore ; and, keeping his feet with difficulty in the whistling storm, arrived, bareheaded and breathless, at a point some fifty yards distant from the wreck. The rope and the bow were at hand. Shouting to attract the attention of those alive upon the ship, he lashed one end of the rope firmly to a shaft, and, placing the other beneath his feet, bade the stoutest of his assistants shoot over the ship. " Draw it to the very head, man, and mak' great allowance for the wind. Bah ! " he cried in disgust, as the arrow flew far to leeward.

" Haul it in ! haul it in ! " " Now, Jock, for a better shot. Steady, lad. Now ! " And the heavy arrow whizzed angularly across the THE WRECK OF THE WINE- SHIP 17 wind, drifted down, as it lost its force, and carried the cord right over the breaking timbers of the Thistle. When it fell, it was clutched by Walter Lynne, who alone of all the crew preserved his senses. Lockhart lay beside him in a swoon, but living yet. The boatswain and the rest were dead, and every sea washed their bodies hither and thither in the hollow of the ship. For a single second, when Lynne felt the rope within his grasp, the brute instinct of self-preservation rose in his breast, tempting him to abandon the chance companion of a five days' voyage. But a nobler impulse prevailed. Tying the rope securely round the body of the senseless page, he sprang with it into the whirling waters, and, holding the head as high as he could above the waves, was drawn swiftly in through a surf that tumbled them about like logs of driftwood.

The cord, which he had coded loosely round his own wrist, shpped from his grasp under the furious blow of a sea, just as his feet had touched the rock. A cry of anguish burst from him, as he clutched madly through the foaming water, but felt that his hope was gone. A million hghts showered before his eyes. The brine was choking him, and his consciousness was well-nigh gone, when he felt his hands scrape the surface of the rock, as the returning waves swung him forward. In the energy of a fearful despair he dug his nails into the shed-encrusted stone, and strove, with every fibre of his frame strained to its utmost tension, to chng to the perdous surface. The sucking reflux of the waves dragged him some feet backward towards the sea, but then, retreating from the contest, left him lying stranded there, tdl it should return and claim its un resisting prey.

Blind with blood, and scarcely knowing what he did, he rose upon the instant and staggered towards the shore over the wet and weed-tangled boulders that filled a cleft between two ledges. But the effort quite exhausted brain and limb. He had scarcely reached the hne of safety, when all grew dark, and he stumbled prone among the stones in a death like swoon. The fierce returning sea came on upon his track with a monstrous curl and a roar of snowy foam ; but it gnashed its cruel jaws in vain. He was safe upon its very hp. Its utmost force and fury came washing only to his feet. " Guid St. Rule preserve us ! " ejaculated Badie Dudingstoune, as they laid the rescued man on a safe shelf of rock beside the yet senseless form of Lockhart, who had been drawn ashore ; " it's Widow Lynne's lad that went to Flanders three years syne.

I ken his face weel, all blanched and bloody as it is. How faint his pulse beats ! But there's life in him yet." " Who's the other lad, can any of you tell ? " A hagbutter from the Castle, here breaking through the crowd, recognised his old playmate, the Captain's son ; and ere long the two survivors of the wreck were borne on hurdles to their homes, within sight of which they had almost perished. The day brightened, and the wind went down. Cadgers and fisher-folk and the idle boys of the city swarmed down to the rocks to pick up the fragments of the Thistle. And, ere the sun had sunk behind the distant Sidlaws in peaceful splendour, nothing remained to tell of this scene of terror except the broken hull, whose ribs fleecy seas were lipping smoothly, and the staves of shattered casks and bits of splintered spar that fided the pools and sandy nooks along aU the rock bound margin of the bay.

Chapter II The Dudingstounes At Home

A LEGEND in Fordun's Scotichronicon tells us how a Greek monk named Regulus (Scotice, St. Rule), who dwelt at Patræ in Achaia, was warned in a vision one night, early in the Christian centuries, to take certain portions of the skeleton of St. Andrew, of which he was custodian, and carry them away to the utmost limit of the Western world. Putting the arm, three finger-joints, a tooth, and a knee-cap of the dead apostle into a coffer, he committed himself, in company with some foUowers, to the sea; and, after much suffering and peril from Mediterranean and Atlantic biUows, was wrecked with his treasure almost at the very spot where the Thistle, as just recorded, went to pieces. The saint and the box were both saved ; and the king of the Picts, extending his protection to the guardians of a trust so sacred, conferred upon the strangers the Boar Forest, which then occupied the rocky promontory on which the city of Saint Andrews now stands, and built for them a church, whose tall square steeple, formed of a masonry that seems to bid defiance to time and weather, stdl rises from the grave yard of the ruined Cathedral.

This rehgious settlement at first bore the name KUrule, but the presence of St. Andrew's bones induced later residents to call it by tbe name of the apostle who became patron saint of Scotland. The Culdee monastery of the Kirkheugh, which arose, after the days of St. Columba, on the seaward angle of the hdl that overlooks the harbour of Saint Andrews, became in time the nucleus of a Romish bishopric, the third in order of foundation on Scottish sod. But more than ad other events, that contributed to make Saint Andrews the ecclesiastical capital of mediæval Scotland, was the institution there in 1144 of a house of Augustine Friars, whose prior was entitled to wear the ring, mitre, and crozier of a bishop, and to take a place in Parhament above all other prelates of the clergy. To this foundation, strengthened with bulls from Rome and enriched with grants from the Scottish kings, were chiefly due the architectural grandeur of the sacred buddings and the splendour of cleric life which distinguished Saint Andrews in the centuries before the Scottish Reformation.

To this centre of Scottish wealth and power commerce was early attracted, for the merchant of the Middle Ages derived a large proportion of his gains from the luxury of the priesthood. Moreover, the bones of St. Andrew drew thither crowds of pdgrims, who laid offerings upon his shrine and spent their money among the residents of the place. In addition to its Scottish inhabitants, the city contained settlers from France, Flanders, and England ; and, though never much larger in area than it now is, it held, in the days of which I write, at least twice its present population of about five thousand souls. The ground-plan of old Saint Andrews was very similar to that of its modern representative. Three main streets converged towards the grand Cathedral or Abbey Church, whose turreted spires stood up on the margin of the sea, visible alike to passing shipmen and inland traveUers.

Along the northern Scaurs, where the rocks fell with a precipitous descent, there curved a fourth way, called the Swallowgate, not lined with dwellings like the central thoroughfares, but hemmed on one side by the kale-yards of the northern houses, and open on the other to the sea. Between the stately churches, colleges, and monastic buddings which formed the prominent features of the place, the streets were bordered with rows of top-heavy timber houses with peaked gables, surmounting two or three stories, each of which projected considerably over that below, so as to allow rain to drip freely down without soaking into and rotting the wood. The discoloured plaster, laced with verdant moss — the diamond -paned lattices, seamed with leaden threads, and stretching across the whole front of the house — the thick black beams running crosswise and along — the quaint and grotesque carving of the corbels — the flowered corner beams — the roofs of heavy thatch or red tdes, fluted to send off the rain — the booths or stalls, answering to our modern shops, in which the craftsmen plied their trades or exhibited their wares for sale, — made up a picture differing excessively in character from the clean modern city built of stone, which, during the short Scottish summer, doffs the sober university garb it wears in winter months, and breaks out into all the hues of fashion and of sport, sprinkling its greensward with the gay scarlet of the golfer, and its sands with the many-hued gowns of " the inex pressive She."

In the main street of this ancient archiepiscopal city, now known as South Street, in accordance with a Scottish tendency to refer everything to the points of the compass, there stood, at the date of my tale, one of the most massive timber houses of the place. It formed the central mansion of a block, which faced the house of the Dominicans or Black Friars, of whose chapel an ivy-wreathed fragment still decorates the yard of the Madras College. The house was oaken and two-storied ; its gable, of dark vertical planking, surmounted by a sharply-sloping roof of thatch, over hung the pavement with a broad square projecting casement, mullioned, and resting on carved corbels. The street floor, somewhat darkened by the shadow of the upper story, was hghted in front by an archway, unglazed, but defended at night by a strong iron banded shutter.

Within was the booth in which Adam Dudingstoune, Bailie and burgess of Saint Andrews, vended silks and tapestries to the clergy, nobles, and squirehood of the East Neuk of Fife. A round-arched doorway, surmounted by a stone scroll wreathed with palm leaves, on which were graven the words, " Laus Leo, 1432 A.D.," bore witness to the age of the roof-tree under which the Dudingstounes had dwelt and died for fully a century. Some days after the wreck of the Thistle, Badie Dudingstoune shut and clasped the veUum book in which the particulars of his dealings were engrossed in a female hand — not the thin Itahan angles of a modern penwoman, but rather a kind of black-letter run wild, and tangling into thorny tendrds — and passed, bareheaded, between pdes of costly cloth, fragrant with spice-woods, to the outer door.

It had been a wild wet day, and though the rain was over for the time, the dripping of the overhanging eaves, swept along hi showers by a fitful wind, made the outer world comfortless enough. The twilight of the short day was beginning to blot out even the dull leaden reflections of the pools that patched the causeway and the side-paths. Except a few red-splashed labourers returning from their tod in the muddy fields, or a chance friar, abroad upon some errand of ecclesiastical duty, and hurrying along with cowl-shaded head and clinking sandals, there were scarcely any persons out of doors. " By the knee-pan of our Saint, little good would come of a stroll to-night," said the mercer, looking up at the watery sky and along the chill, wet street, " except a catarrh to put groats in the pouch of Jock Barbour the leech or Nannie the herb-wife.

Hi, Sym, my good lad ! bar the booth, and see you forget not the double chain, for there be pdlours abroad, and my French velvets would fetch a round sum in the Thieves' Wynd of Edinburgh." Whde Sym Pennango, the booth-assistant, a strange skeleton of a man, whose fustian doublet hung in ungainly folds upon his gaunt ribs, was putting on the shutter for the night, old Adam, sheltered by the jutting of his upper floor, continued to gaze up and down the spacious street and mutter whimsical objections to the weather, — for he loved to breathe the keen salt air on the verge of the Swallowgate before his supper, and he did not take kindly to the loss of bis afternoon constitutional. After a close inspection of the bolts and chains that fortified his booth, the mercer betook himself to a cosy, low-browed room behind, where sat a httle spare woman, with the most wonderful brown eyes, that darted into every nook and corner, and were skilled in spying specks of dust where common people saw a clear and spotless surface.

This was Mistress Elspeth Dudingstoune, his goodwife for five-and-twenty years, and the mother of the four bairns in whom all their hopes and fears were centred. Though httle and spare, she was far from uncomely or haggard, being one of those women on whom age acts by shrivelling the skin into hair-like wrinkles, yet sparing the blossom of cheek and hp. Her cheeks were as pink as they had ever been. Her hair, bleached from a black-brown to a sdver grey, was banded smoothly above her bright and restless eyes. The trim neatness of her grey woollen gown, and the gloss of her linen coUar, indicated the presence in her character of that intense devotion to details of dress and household gear, which the Scottish tongue particu larises by the adjective " pernickity " — a quality, by the way, wrongly supposed to belong to old maids only ; for some of the best wives are those to whom a scrap of white thread where it shouldn't be, an inch of carpet awry, or a speck of rust on the steel fender, are sources of much discomfort and irritation.