John Burnet of Barns: A Romance. Buchan John
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way beneath him. Then I had to carry him to his bed, swearing deeply at his infirmities and lamenting the changes of life.
In those days the Burnets were a poor family – a poor and a proud. My grandfather had added much to the lands by rapine and extortion – ill-gotten gains which could not last. He had been a man of a violent nature, famed over all the South for his feats of horsemanship and swordsmanship. He died suddenly, of overdrinking, at the age of fifty-five, and now lies in the kirk of Lyne beneath an effigy representing the Angel Gabriel coming for his soul. His last words are recorded: "O Lord, I dinna want to dee, I dinna want to dee. If ye'll let me live, I'll run up the sklidders o' Cademuir to a' eternity." The folk of the place seldom spoke of him, though my father upheld him as a man of true spirit who had an eye to the improvement of his house. Of the family before him I had the history at my finger-ends. This was a subject of which my father never tired, for he held that the genealogy of the Burnets was a thing of vastly greater importance than that of the kings of Rome or Judah. From the old days when we held Burnetland, in the parish of Broughton, and called ourselves of that ilk, I had the unbroken history of the family in my memory. Ay, and also of the great house of Traquair, for my mother had been a Stewart, and, as my father said often, this was the only family in the country bide which could hope to rival us in antiquity or valour.
My father's brother, Gilbert, had married the heiress of a westland family, and with her had got the lands of Eaglesham, about the headwaters of Cart. His son Gilbert, my cousin, was a tall lad some four years my senior, who on several occasions rode to visit us at Barns. He was of a handsome, soldierly appearance, and looked for an early commission in a Scots company. At first I admired him mightily, for he was skilful at all sports, rode like a moss-trooper, and could use his sword in an incomparable fashion. My father could never abide him, for he could not cease to tell of his own prowess, and my father was used to say that he loved no virtue better than modesty. Also, he angered every servant about the place by his hectoring, and one day so offended old Tam Todd that Tam flung a bucket at him, and threatened to duck him in the Tweed; which he doubtless would have done, old as he was, for he was a very Hercules of a man. This presented a nice problem to all concerned, and I know not which was the more put out, Tam or my father. Finally it ended in the latter reading Gilbert a long and severe lecture, and then bidding Tam ask his pardon, seeing that the dignity of the family had to be sustained at any cost.
One other relative, though in a distant way, I must not omit to mention, for the day came when every man of our name was proud to claim the kinship. This was Gilbert Burnet, of Edinburgh, afterwards Divinity Professor in Glasgow, Bishop of Salisbury, and the author of the famous "Bishop Burnet's History of his Own Times." I met him often in after days, and once in London he had me to his house and entertained me during my stay. Of him I shall have to tell hereafter, but now he was no more than a name to me, a name which my father was fond of repeating when he wished to recall me to gravity.
Tam Todd, my father's grieve, who managed the lands about the house, deserves more than a passing word. He was about sixty years of age, stooped in the back, but with long arms and the strength of a giant. At one time he had fought for Gustavus, and might have risen high in the ranks, had not a desperate desire to see his native land come upon him and driven him to slip off one night and take ship for Leith. He had come to Peebles, where my father met him, and admiring his goodly stature, took him into his service, in which Tam soon became as expert at the breeding of sheep as ever he had been at the handling of a pike or musket. He was the best story-teller and the cunningest fisher in the place, full of quaint foreign words, French, and Swedish, and High Dutch, for the army of Gustavus had been made up of the riddlings of Europe. From him I learned to fence with the rapier, and a past-master he was, for my father told how, in his best days, he could never so much as look at Tam. Bon pied bon oeil was ever his watchword, and I have proved it a good one; for, short though it be, if a man but follow it he may fear nothing. Also, he taught me a thing which has been most useful to me, and which I will speak of again – the art of using the broadsword or claymore, as the wild Highlanders call it. My school was on a strip of green grass beside Tweed, and here I have had many a tough encounter in the long summer nights. He made me stand with my back to the deep pool, that I might fear to step back; and thus I learned to keep my ground, a thing which he held to be of the essence of swordsmanship.
My nurse, Jean Morran, was the only woman body about the place. She and Tam did the cooking between them, for that worthy had learned the art gastronomical from a Frenchman whose life he saved, and who, in gratitude, taught him many excellent secrets for dishes, and stole ten crowns. She had minded me and mended my clothes and seen to my behaviour ever since my mother died of a fever when I was scarce two years old. Of my mother I remember nothing, but if one may judge from my father's long grief and her portrait in the dining-hall, she had been a good and a gentle as well as a most beautiful woman. Jean, with her uncouth tongue and stern face, is still a clear figure in my memory. She was a kind nurse in the main, and if her temper was doubtful from many sore trials, her cakes and sugar were excellent salves to my wronged heart. She was, above all things, a famous housewife, keeping the place spotless and clean, so that when one entered the house of Barns there was always something fresh and cool in the very air.
But here I am at the end of my little gallery, for the place was bare of folk, and the life a lonely one. Here I grew up amid the woods and hills and the clean air, with a great zest for all the little excellencies of my lot, and a tolerance of its drawbacks. By the time I had come to sixteen years I had swam in every pool in Tweed for miles up and down, climbed every hill, fished in every burn, and ridden and fallen from every horse in my father's stable. I had been as far west as Tintock Hill and as far south as the Loch o' the Lowes. Nay, I had once been taken to Edinburgh in company with Tam, who bought me a noble fishing-rod, and showed me all the wondrous things to be seen. A band of soldiers passed down the High Street from the Castle with a great clanking and jingling, and I saw my guide straighten up his back and keep time with his feet to their tread. All the way home, as I sat before him on the broad back of Maisie, he told me tales of his campaigns, some of them none too fit for a boy's ear; but he was carried away and knew not what he was saying. This first put a taste for the profession of arms into my mind, which was assiduously fostered by my fencing lessons and the many martial tales I read. I found among my father's books the chronicles of Froissart and a history of the Norman Kings, both in the English, which I devoured by night and day. Then I had Tacitus and Livy, and in my fourteenth year I began the study of Greek with a master at Peebles. So that soon I had read most of the "Iliad" and all the "Odyssey," and would go about repeating the long, swinging lines. I think that story of the man who, at the siege of some French town, shouted a Homeric battle-piece most likely to be true, for with me the Greek had a like effect, and made me tramp many miles over the hills or ride the horses more hard than my father permitted.
But this book-work was, after all, but half of my life, and that the less memorable. All the sights and sounds of that green upland vale are linked for me with memories of boyish fantasies. I used to climb up the ridge of Scrape when the sun set and dream that the serried ranks of hills were a new country where all was strange, though I knew well that an hour of the morning would dispel the fancy. Then I would descend from the heights, and for weeks be so fiercely set on the sports of the time of year that I had scarcely time for a grave thought. I have often gone forth to the lambing with the shepherds, toiled all day in the brown moors, and at night dropped straight off to sleep as I sat in my chair at meat. Then there was the salmon-fishing in the late spring, when the blood ran hot at the flare of the torches and the shimmer of the spears, and I, a forlorn young fool, shivered in my skin as the keen wind blew down the water. There was the swing and crackle of the stones in winter when the haughlands of Manor were flooded, and a dozen brown-faced men came to the curling and the air rang with shouts and laughter. I have mind, too, of fierce days of snow when men looked solemn and the world was so quiet that I whistled to keep me from despondency, and the kitchen at Barns was like a place in an inn with famishing men and dripping garments. Then Tweed would be buried under some great drift and its kindly flow sorely missed by man and beast. But best I remember the loosening of winter, when the rains from the moors sent down the river roaring-red, and the vale was one pageant of delicate greenery and turbid brown torrent.
Often I would take my books and go into the heart of the hills for days and nights. This, my father scarce liked, but he never hindered me. It was glorious