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Chapter VII. Francesca meets th’ unconquer’d Scot
Francesca’s experiences were not so fortunate; indeed, I have never seen her more out of sorts than she was during our long chat over the fire, after our return to Breadalbane Terrace.
“How did you get on with your delightful minister?” inquired Salemina of the young lady, as she flung her unoffending wrap over the back of a chair. “He was quite the handsomest man in the room; who is he?”
“He is the Reverend Ronald Macdonald, and the most disagreeable, condescending, ill-tempered prig I ever met!”
“Why, Francesca!” I exclaimed. “Lady Baird speaks of him as her favourite nephew, and says he is full of charm.”
“He is just as full of charm as he was when I met him,” returned the girl nonchalantly; “that is, he parted with none of it this evening. He was incorrigibly stiff and rude, and oh! so Scotch! I believe if one punctured him with a hat-pin, oatmeal would fly into the air!”
“Doubtless you acquainted him, early in the evening, with the immeasurable advantages of our sleeping-car system, the superiority of our fast-running elevators, and the height of our buildings?” observed Salemina.
“I mentioned them,” Francesca answered evasively.
“You naturally inveighed against the Scotch climate?”
“Oh, I alluded to it; but only when he said that our hot summers must be insufferable.”
“I suppose you repeated the remark you made at luncheon, that the ladies you had seen in Princes Street were excessively plain?”
“Yes, I did!” she replied hotly; “but that was because he said that American girls generally looked bloodless and frail. He asked if it were really true that they ate chalk and slate pencils. Wasn’t that unendurable? I answered that those were the chief solid article of food, but that after their complexions were established, so to speak, their parents often allowed them pickles and native claret to vary the diet.”
“What did he say to that?” I asked.
“Oh, he said, ‘Quite so, quite so’; that was his invariable response to all my witticisms. Then when I told him casually that the shops looked very small and dark and stuffy here, and that there were not as many tartans and plaids in the windows as we had expected, he remarked that as to the latter point, the American season had not opened yet! Presently he asserted that no royal city in Europe could boast ten centuries of such glorious and stirring history as Edinburgh. I said it did not appear to be stirring much at present, and that everything in Scotland seemed a little slow to an American; that he could have no idea of push or enterprise until he visited a city like Chicago. He retorted that, happily, Edinburgh was peculiarly free from the taint of the ledger and the counting-house; that it was Weimar without a Goethe, Boston without its twang!”
“Incredible!” cried Salemina, deeply wounded in her local pride. “He never could have said ‘twang’ unless you had tried him beyond measure!”
“I dare say I did; he is easily tried,” returned Francesca. “I asked him, sarcastically, if he had ever been in Boston. ‘No,’ he said, ‘it is not necessary to GO there! And while we are discussing these matters,’ he went on, ‘how is your American dyspepsia these days,—have you decided what is the cause of it?’
“‘Yes, we have,’ said I, as quick as a flash; ‘we have always taken in more foreigners than we could assimilate!’ I wanted to tell him that one Scotsman of his type would upset the national digestion anywhere, but I restrained myself.”
“I am glad you did restrain yourself—once,” exclaimed Salemina. “What a tactful person the Reverend Ronald must be, if you have reported him faithfully! Why didn’t you give him up, and turn to your other neighbour?”
“I did, as soon as I could with courtesy; but the man on my left was the type that always haunts me at dinners; if the hostess hasn’t one on her visiting-list she imports one for the occasion. He asked me at once of what material the Brooklyn Bridge is made. I told him I really didn’t know. Why should I? I seldom go over it. Then he asked me whether it was a suspension bridge or a cantilever. Of course I didn’t know; I am not an engineer.”
“You are so tactlessly, needlessly candid,” I expostulated. “Why didn’t you say boldly that the Brooklyn Bridge is a wooden cantilever, with gutta-percha braces? He didn’t know, or he wouldn’t have asked you. He couldn’t find out until he reached home, and you would never have seen him again; and if you had, and he had taunted you, you could have laughed vivaciously and said you were chaffing. That is my method, and it is the only way to preserve life in a foreign country. Even my earl, who did not thirst for information (fortunately), asked me the population of the Yellowstone Park, and I simply told him three hundred thousand, at a venture.”
“That would never have satisfied my neighbour,” said Francesca. “Finding me in such a lamentable state of ignorance, he explained the principle of his own stupid Forth Bridge to me. When I said I understood perfectly, just to get into shallower water, where we wouldn’t need any bridge, the Reverend Ronald joined in the conversation, and asked me to repeat the explanation to him. Naturally I couldn’t, and he knew that I couldn’t when he asked me, so the bridge man (I don’t know his name, and don’t care to know it) drew a diagram of the national idol on his dinner-card and gave a dull and elaborate lecture upon it. Here is the card, and now that three hours have intervened I cannot tell which way to turn the drawing so as to make the bridge right side up; if there is anything puzzling in the world, it is these architectural plans and diagrams. I am going to pin it to the wall and ask the Reverend Ronald which way it goes.”
“Do you mean that he will call upon us?” we cried in concert.
“He asked if he might come and continue our ‘stimulating’ conversation, and as Lady Baird was standing by I could hardly say no. I am sure of one thing: that before I finish with him I will widen his horizon so that he will be able to see something beside Scotland and his little insignificant Fifeshire parish! I told him our country parishes in America were ten times as large as his. He said he had heard that they covered a good deal of territory, and that the ministers’ salaries were sometimes paid in pork and potatoes. That shows you the style of his retorts!”
“I really cannot decide which of you was the more disagreeable,” said Salemina; “if he calls, I shall not remain in the room.”
“I wouldn’t gratify him by staying out,” retorted Francesca. “He is extremely good for the circulation; I think I was never so warm in my life as when I talked with him; as physical exercise he is equal to bicycling. The bridge man is coming to call, too. I made him a diagram of Breadalbane Terrace, and a plan of the hall and staircase, on my dinner-card. He was distinctly ungrateful; in fact, he remarked that he had been born in this very house, but would not trust himself to find his way upstairs with my plan as a guide. He also said the American vocabulary was vastly amusing, so picturesque, unstudied, and fresh.”
“That was nice, surely,” I interpolated.
“You know perfectly well that it was an insult.”
“Francesca is very like that young man,” laughed Salemina, “who, whenever he engaged in controversy, seemed to take off his flesh and sit in his nerves.”
“I’m not supersensitive,” replied Francesca, “but when one’s vocabulary is called picturesque by a Britisher, one always knows he is thinking of cowboys and broncos. However, I shifted the weight into the other scale by answering ‘Thank you. And your phraseology is just as unusual to us.’ ‘Indeed?’ he said with some surprise. ‘I supposed our method of expression very sedate and uneventful.’ ‘Not at all,’ I returned, ‘when you say, as you did a moment ago, that you never eat potato to your fish.’ ‘But I do not,’ he urged obtusely. ‘Very likely,’ I argued, ‘but the fact is not of so much importance as the preposition. Now I eat potato WITH my fish.’ ‘You make a mistake,’ he said, and we both laughed in spite of ourselves, while he murmured, ‘eating potato WITH fish—how extraordinary.’ Well, the bridge man may not add perceptibly to the gaiety of the nations, but he is better than the Reverend Ronald. I forgot to say that when I chanced to be speaking of doughnuts, that ‘unconquer’d Scot’ asked me if a doughnut resembled a peanut? Can you conceive such ignorance?”
“I think you were not only aggressively American, but painfully provincial,” said Salemina, with some warmth. “Why in the world should you drag doughnuts into a dinner-table conversation in Edinburgh? Why not select topics of universal interest?”
“Like the Currie Brig or the shade of Montrose,” I murmured slyly.
“To one who has ever eaten a doughnut, the subject is of transcendent interest; and as for one who has not—well, he should be made to feel his limitations,” replied Francesca, with a yawn. “Come, let us forget our troubles in sleep; it is after midnight.”
About half an hour later she came to my bedside, her dark hair hanging over her white gown, her eyes still bright.
“Penelope,” she said softly, “I did not dare tell Salemina, and I should not confess it to you save that I am afraid Lady Baird will complain of me; but I was dreadfully rude to the Reverend Ronald! I couldn’t help it; he roused my worst passions. It all began with his saying he thought international marriages presented even more difficulties to the imagination than the other kind. I hadn’t said anything about marriages nor thought anything about marriages of any sort, but I told him INSTANTLY I considered that every international marriage involved two national suicides. He said that he shouldn’t have put it quite so forcibly, but that he hadn’t given much thought to the subject. I said that I had, and I thought we had gone on long enough filling the coffers of the British nobility with American gold.”
“FRANCES!” I interrupted. “Don’t tell me that you made that vulgar, cheap newspaper assertion!”
“I did,” she replied stoutly, “and at the moment I only wished I could make it stronger. If there had been anything cheaper or more vulgar, I should have said it, but of course there isn’t. Then he remarked that the British nobility merited and needed all the support it could get in these hard times, and asked if we had not cherished some intention in the States, lately, of bestowing it in greenbacks instead of gold! I threw all manners to the winds after that and told him that there were no husbands in the world like American men, and that foreigners never seemed to have any proper consideration for women. Now, were my remarks any worse than his, after all, and what shall I do about it anyway?”
“You should go to bed first,” I murmured sleepily; “and if you ever have an opportunity to make amends, which I doubt, you should devote yourself to showing the Reverend Ronald the breadth of your own horizon instead of trying so hard to broaden his. As you are extremely pretty, you may possibly succeed; man is human, and I dare say in a month you will be advising him to love somebody more worthy than yourself. (He could easily do it!) Now don’t kiss me again, for I am displeased with you; I hate international bickering!”
“So do I,” agreed Francesca virtuously, as she plaited her hair, “and there is no spectacle so abhorrent to every sense as a narrow-minded man who cannot see anything outside of his own country. But he is awfully good-looking,—I will say that for him: and if you don’t explain me to Lady Baird, I will write to Mr. Beresford about the earl. There was no bickering there; it was looking at you two that made us think of international marriages.”
“It must have suggested to you that speech about filling the coffers of the British nobility,” I replied sarcastically, “inasmuch as the earl has twenty thousand pounds a year, probably, and I could barely buy two gold hairpins to pin on the coronet. There, do go away and leave me in peace!”
“Good night again, then,” she said, as she rose reluctantly from the foot of the bed. “I doubt if I can sleep for thinking what a pity it is that such an egotistic, bumptious, pugnacious, prejudiced, insular, bigoted person should be so handsome! And who wants to marry him any way, that he should be so distressed about international alliances? One would think that all female America was sighing to lead him to the altar!”
Chapter VIII. ‘What made th’ Assembly shine?’
Two or three days ago we noted an unusual though subdued air of excitement at 22 Breadalbane Terrace, where for a week we had been the sole lodgers. Mrs. Menzies, whom we call Mingess, has returned to Kilconquhar, which she calls Kinyuchar; Miss Cockburn-Sinclair has purchased her wedding outfit and gone back to Inverness, where she will be greeted as Coburn-Sinkler; the Hepburn-Sciennes will be leaving to-morrow, just as we have learned to pronounce their names; and the sound of the scrubbing-brush is heard in the land. In corners where all was clean and spotless before, Mrs. M’Collop is digging with the broom, and the maiden Boots is following her with a damp cloth. The stair carpets are hanging on lines in the back garden, and Susanna, with her cap rakishly on one side, is always to be seen polishing the stair-rods. Whenever we traverse the halls we are obliged to leap over pails of suds, and Miss Diggity-Dalgety has given us two dinners which bore a curious resemblance to washing-day repasts in suburban America.
“Is it spring house-cleaning?” I ask Mistress M’Collop.
“Na, na,” she replies hurriedly; “it’s the meenisters.”
On the 19th of May we are a maiden castle no longer. Black coats and hats ring at the bell, and pass in and out of the different apartments. The hall table is sprinkled with letters, visiting-cards, and programmes which seem to have had the alphabet shaken out upon them, for they bear the names of professors, doctors, reverends, and very reverends, and fairly bristle with A.M.‘s, M.A.‘s, A.B.‘s, D.D.‘s, and LL.D.‘s. The voice of family prayer is lifted up from the dining-room floor, and paraphrases and hymns float down the stairs from above. Their Graces the Lord High Commissioner and the Marchioness of Heatherdale will arrive to-day at Holyrood Palace, there to reside during the sittings of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, and to-morrow the Royal Standard will be hoisted at Edinburgh Castle from reveille to retreat. His Grace will hold a levee at eleven. Directly His Grace leaves the palace after the levee, the guard of honour will proceed by the Canongate to receive him on his arrival at St. Giles’ Church, and will then proceed to Assembly Hall to receive him on his arrival there. The Sixth Inniskilling Dragoons and the First Battalion Royal Scots will be in attendance, and there will be Unicorns, Carricks, pursuivants, heralds, mace-bearers, ushers, and pages, together with the Purse-bearer, and the Lyon King-of-Arms, and the national anthem, and the royal salute; for the palace has awakened and is ‘mimicking its past.’
‘Should the weather be wet, the troops will be cloaked at the discretion of the commanding officer.’ They print this instruction as a matter of form, and of course every man has his macintosh ready. The only hope lies in the fact that this is a national function, and ‘Queen’s weather’ is a possibility. The one personage for whom the Scottish climate will occasionally relax is Her Majesty Queen Victoria, who for sixty years has exerted a benign influence on British skies and at least secured sunshine on great parade days. Such women are all too few!
In this wise enters His Grace the Lord High Commissioner to open the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland; and on the same day there arrives by the railway (but travelling first class) the Moderator of the Church of Scotland Free, to convene its separate supreme Courts in Edinburgh. He will have no Union Jacks, Royal Standards, Dragoons, bands, or pipers; he will bear his own purse and stay at an hotel; but when the final procession of all comes, he will probably march beside His Grace the Lord High Commissioner, and they will talk together, not of dead-and-gone kingdoms, but of the one at hand, where there are no more divisions in the ranks, and where all the soldiers are simply ‘king’s men,’ marching to victory under the inspiration of a common watchword.
It is a matter of regret to us that the U.P.‘s, the third branch of Scottish Presbyterianism, could not be holding an Assembly during this same week, so that we might the more easily decide in which flock we really belong. 22 Breadalbane Terrace now represents all shades of religious opinion within the bounds of Presbyterianism. We have an Elder, a Professor of Biblical Criticism, a Majesty’s Chaplain, and even an ex-Moderator under our roof, and they are equally divided between the Free and the Established bodies.
Mrs. M’Collop herself is a pillar of the Free Kirk, but she has no prejudice in lodgers, and says so long as she ‘mak’s her rent she doesna care aboot their releegious principles.’ Miss Diggity-Dalgety is the sole representative of United Presbyterianism in the household, and she is somewhat gloomy in Assembly time. To belong to a dissenting body, and yet to cook early and late for the purpose of fattening one’s religious rivals, is doubtless trying to the temper; and then she asserts that ‘meenisters are aye tume [empty].’
“You must put away your Scottish ballads and histories now, Salemina, and keep your Concordance and your umbrella constantly at hand.”
This I said as we stood on George IV. Bridge and saw the ministers glooming down from the Mound in a dense Assembly fog. As the presence of any considerable number of priests on an ocean steamer is supposed to bring rough weather, so the addition of a few hundred parsons to the population of Edinburgh is believed to induce rain,—or perhaps I should say, more rain.
Of course, when one is in perfect bodily health one can more readily resist the infection of disease. Similarly if Scottish skies were not ready and longing to pour out rain, were not ignobly weak in holding it back, they would not be so susceptible to the depressing influences of visiting ministers. This is Francesca’s theory as stated to the Reverend Ronald, who was holding an umbrella over her ungrateful head at the time; and she went on to boast of a convention she once attended in California, where twenty-six thousand Christian Endeavourers were unable to dim the American sunshine, though they stayed ten days.
“Our first duty, both to ourselves and to the community,” I continued to Salemina, “is to learn how there can be three distinct kinds of proper Presbyterianism. Perhaps it would be a graceful act on our part if we should each espouse a different kind; then there would be no feeling among our Edinburgh friends. And again what is this ‘union’ of which we hear murmurs? Is it religious or political? Is it an echo of the 1707 Union you explained to us last week, or is it a new one? What is Disestablishment? What is Disruption? Are they the same thing? What is the Sustentation Fund? What was the Non-Intrusion party? What was the Dundas Despotism? What is the argument at present going on about taking the Shorter Catechism out of the schools? What is the Shorter Catechism, any way,—or at least what have they left out of the Longer Catechism to make it shorter,—and is the length of the Catechism one of the points of difference? then when we have looked up Chalmers and Candlish, we can ask the ex-Moderator and the Professor of Biblical Criticism to tea; separately, of course, lest there should be ecclesiastical quarrels.”
Salemina and Francesca both incline to the Established church, I lean instinctively toward the Free; but that does not mean that we have any knowledge of the differences that separate them. Salemina is a conservative in all things; she loves law, order, historic associations, old customs; and so when there is a regularly established national church,—or, for that matter, a regularly established anything, she gravitates to it by the law of her being. Francesca’s religious convictions, when she is away from her own minister and native land, are inclined to be flexible. The church that enters Edinburgh with a marquis and a marchioness representing the Crown, the church that opens its Assembly with splendid processions and dignified pageants, the church that dispenses generous hospitality from Holyrood Palace,—above all, the church that escorts its Lord High Commissioner from place to place with bands and pipers,—that is the church to which she pledges her constant presence and enthusiastic support.
As for me, I believe I am a born protestant, or ‘come-outer,’ as they used to call dissenters in the early days of New England. I have not yet had time to study the question, but as I lack all knowledge of the other two branches of Presbyterianism, I am enabled to say unhesitatingly that I belong to the Free Kirk. To begin with, the very word ‘free’ has a fascination for the citizen of a republic; and then my theological training was begun this morning by a gifted young minister of Edinburgh whom we call the Friar, because the first time we saw him in his gown and bands (the little spot of sheer whiteness beneath the chin, that lends such added spirituality to a spiritual face) we fancied that he looked like some pale brother of the Church in the olden time. His pallor, in a land of rosy redness and milky whiteness; his smooth, fair hair, which in the light from the stained-glass window above the pulpit looked reddish gold; the Southern heat of passionate conviction that coloured his slow Northern speech; the remoteness of his personality; the weariness of his deep-set eyes, that bespoke such fastings and vigils as he probably never practised,—all this led to our choice of the name.
As we walked toward St. Andrew’s Church and Tanfield Hall, where he insisted on taking me to get the ‘proper historical background,’ he told me about the great Disruption movement. He was extremely eloquent,—so eloquent that the image of Willie Beresford tottered continually on its throne, and I found not the slightest difficulty in giving an unswerving allegiance to the principles presented by such an orator.
We went first to St. Andrew’s, where the General Assembly met in 1843, and where the famous exodus of the Free Protesting Church took place,—one of the most important events in the modern history of the United Kingdom.
The movement was promoted by the great Dr. Chalmers and his party, mainly to abolish the patronage of livings, then in the hands of certain heritors or patrons, who might appoint any minister they wished, without consulting the congregation. Needless to say, as a free-born American citizen, and never having had a heritor in the family, my blood easily boiled at the recital of such tyranny. In 1834 the Church had passed a law of its own, it seems, ordaining that no presentee to a parish should be admitted, if opposed by the majority of the male communicants. That would have been well enough could the State have been made to agree, though I should have gone further, personally, and allowed the female communicants to have some voice in the matter.
The Friar took me into a particularly chilly historic corner, and, leaning against a damp stone pillar, painted the scene in St. Andrew’s when the Assembly met in the presence of a great body of spectators, while a vast throng gathered without, breathlessly awaiting the result. No one believed that any large number of ministers would relinquish livings and stipends and cast their bread upon the waters for what many thought a ‘fantastic principle.’ Yet when the Moderator left his place, after reading a formal protest signed by one hundred and twenty ministers and seventy-two elders, he was followed first by Dr. Chalmers, and then by four hundred and seventy men, who marched in a body to Tanfield Hall, where they formed themselves into the General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland. When Lord Jeffrey was told of it an hour later, he exclaimed, ‘Thank God for Scotland! there is not another country on earth where such a deed could be done!’ And the Friar reminded me proudly of Macaulay’s saying that the Scots had made sacrifices for the sake of religious opinion for which there was no parallel in the annals of England. On the next Sunday after these remarkable scenes in Edinburgh there were heart-breaking farewells, so the Friar said, in many village parishes, when the minister, in dismissing his congregation, told them that he had ceased to belong to the Established Church and would neither preach nor pray in that pulpit again; that he had joined the Free Protesting Church of Scotland, and, God willing, would speak the next Sabbath morning at the manse door to as many as cared to follow him. “What affecting leave-takings there must have been!” the Friar exclaimed. “When my grandfather left his church that May morning, only fifteen members remained behind, and he could hear the more courageous say to the timid ones, ‘Tak’ your Bible and come awa’, mon!’ Was not all this a splendid testimony to the power of principle and the sacred demands of conscience?” I said “Yea” most heartily, for the spirit of Jenny Geddes stirred within me that morning, and under the spell of the Friar’s kindling eye and eloquent voice I positively gloried in the valiant achievements of the Free Church. It would always be easier for a woman to say, “Yea” than “Nay” to the Friar. When he left me in Breadalbane Terrace I was at heart a member of his congregation in good (and irregular) standing, ready to teach in his Sunday-school, sing in his choir, visit his aged and sick poor, and especially to stand between him and a too admiring feminine constituency.
When I entered the drawing-room, I found that Salemina had just enjoyed an hour’s conversation with the ex-Moderator of the opposite church wing.
“Oh, my dear,” she sighed, “you have missed such a treat! You have no conception of these Scottish ministers of the Establishment,—such culture, such courtliness of manner, such scholarship, such spirituality, such wise benignity of opinion! I asked the doctor to explain the Disruption movement to me, and he was most interesting and lucid, and most affecting, too, when he described the misunderstandings and misconceptions that the Church suffered in those terrible days of 1843, when its very life-blood, as well as its integrity and unity, were threatened by the foes in its own household; when breaches of faith and trust occurred on all sides, and dissents and disloyalties shook it to its very foundation! You see, Penelope, I have never fully understood the disagreements about heritors and livings and state control before, but here is the whole matter in a nut-sh—”
“My dear Salemina,” I interposed, with dignity, “you will pardon me, I am sure, when I tell you that any discussion on this point would be intensely painful to me, as I now belong to the Free Kirk.”
“Where have you been this morning?” she asked, with a piercing glance.
“To St. Andrew’s and Tanfield Hall.”
“With whom?”
“With the Friar.”
“I see! Happy the missionary to whom you incline your ear, FIRST!”—which I thought rather inconsistent of Salemina, as she had been converted by precisely the same methods and in precisely the same length of time as had I, the only difference being in the ages of our respective missionaries, one being about five-and-thirty, and other five-and-sixty. Even this is to my credit after all, for if one can be persuaded so quickly and fully by a young and comparatively inexperienced man, it shows that one must be extremely susceptible to spiritual influences or—something.
