The weather that greeted us on our unheralded arrival in Scotland was of the precise sort offered by Edinburgh to her unfortunate queen, when, `After a youth by woes o'ercast, After a thousand sorrows past, The lovely Mary once again Set foot upon her native plain.'
John Knox records of those memorable days: `The very face of heaven did manifestlie speak what comfort was brought to this country with hir--to wit, sorrow, dolour, darkness and all impiety--for in the memorie of man never was seen a more dolorous face of the heavens than was seen at her arryvall . . . the myst was so thick that skairse micht onie man espy another; and the sun was not seyn to shyne two days befoir nor two days after.'
We could not see Edina's famous palaces and towers because of the haar, that damp, chilling, drizzling, dripping fog or mist which the east wind summons from the sea; but we knew that they were there, shrouded in the heart of that opaque, mysterious greyness, and that before many hours our eyes would feast upon their beauty.
Perhaps it was the weather, but I could think of nothing but poor Queen Mary! She had drifted into my imagination with the haar, so that I could fancy her homesick gaze across the water as she murmured, `Adieu, ma chere France! Je ne vous verray jamais plus!'--could fancy her saying as in Allan Cunningham's verse:-`The sun rises bright in France, And fair sets he;
But he hath tint the blithe blink he had In my ain countree.'
And then I recalled Mary's first good-night in Edinburgh: that `serenade of 500 rascals with vile fiddles and rebecks'; that singing, `in bad accord,' of Protestant psalms by the wet crowd beneath the palace windows, while the fires on Arthur's Seat shot flickering gleams of welcome through the dreary fog. What a lullaby for poor Mary, half Frenchwoman and all Papist!
It is but just to remember the `indefatigable and undissuadable' John Knox's statement, `the melody lyked her weill, and she willed the same to be continewed some nightis after.' For my part, however, I distrust John Knox's musical feeling, and incline sympathetically to the Sieur de Brantome's account, with its `vile fiddles' and `discordant psalms,' although his judgment was doubtless a good deal depressed by what he called the si grand brouillard that so dampened the spirits of Mary's French retinue.
Ah well, I was obliged to remember, in order to be reasonably happy myself, that Mary had a gay heart, after all; that she was but nineteen; that, though already a widow, she did not mourn her young husband as one who could not be comforted; and that she must soon have been furnished with merrier music than the psalms, for another of the sour comments of the time is, `Our Queen weareth the dule [weeds], but she can dance daily, dule and all!'
These were my thoughts as we drove through invisible streets in the Edinburgh haar, turned into what proved next day to be a Crescent, and drew up to an invisible house with a visible number 22 gleaming over a door which gaslight transformed into a probability. We alighted, and though we could scarcely see the driver's outstretched hand, he was quite able to discern a half-crown, and demanded three shillings.
The noise of our cab had brought Mrs. M'Collop to the door,--good (or at least pretty good) Mrs. M'Collop, to whose apartments we had been commended by English friends who had never occupied them.
