My Aunt Margaret\'s Mirror
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Sir Walter Scott >> My Aunt Margaret\'s Mirror
From SHORT STORIES PUBLISHED IN "THE KEEPSAKE" ANNUAL of 1828
My Aunt Margaret's Mirror
by Sir Walter Scott
INTRODUCTION.
The species of publication which has come to be generally known
by the title of ANNUAL, being a miscellany of prose and verse,
equipped with numerous engravings, and put forth every year about
Christmas, had flourished for a long while in Germany before it
was imitated in this country by an enterprising bookseller, a
German by birth, Mr. Ackermann. The rapid success of his work,
as is the custom of the time, gave birth to a host of rivals,
and, among others, to an Annual styled The Keepsake, the first
volume of which appeared in 1828, and attracted much notice,
chiefly in consequence of the very uncommon splendour of its
illustrative accompaniments. The expenditure which the spirited
proprietors lavished on this magnificent volume is understood to
have been not less than from ten to twelve thousand pounds
sterling!
Various gentlemen of such literary reputation that any one might
think it an honour to be associated with them had been announced
as contributors to this Annual, before application was made to me
to assist in it; and I accordingly placed with much pleasure at
the Editor's disposal a few fragments, originally designed to
have been worked into the Chronicles of the Canongate, besides a
manuscript drama, the long-neglected performance of my youthful
days--"The House of Aspen."
The Keepsake for 1828 included, however, only three of these
little prose tales, of which the first in order was that entitled
"My Aunt Margaret's Mirror." By way of INTRODUCTION to this,
when now included in a general collection of my lucubrations, I
have only to say that it is a mere transcript, or at least with
very little embellishment, of a story that I remembered being
struck with in my childhood, when told at the fireside by a lady
of eminent virtues and no inconsiderable share of talent, one of
the ancient and honourable house of Swinton. She was a kind of
relation of my own, and met her death in a manner so shocking--
being killed, in a fit of insanity, by a female attendant who had
been attached to her person for half a lifetime--that I cannot
now recall her memory, child as I was when the catastrophe
occurred, without a painful reawakening of perhaps the first
images of horror that the scenes of real life stamped on my mind.
This good spinster had in her composition a strong vein of the
superstitious, and was pleased, among other fancies, to read
alone in her chamber by a taper fixed in a candlestick which she
had had formed out of a human skull. One night this strange
piece of furniture acquired suddenly the power of locomotion,
and, after performing some odd circles on her chimney-piece,
fairly leaped on the floor, and continued to roll about the
apartment. Mrs. Swinton calmly proceeded to the adjoining room
for another light, and had the satisfaction to penetrate the
mystery on the spot. Rats abounded in the ancient building she
inhabited, and one of these had managed to ensconce itself within
her favourite MEMENTO MORI. Though thus endowed with a more than
feminine share of nerve, she entertained largely that belief in
supernaturals which in those times was not considered as sitting
ungracefully on the grave and aged of her condition; and the
story of the Magic Mirror was one for which she vouched with
particular confidence, alleging indeed that one of her own family
had been an eye-witness of the incidents recorded in it.
"I tell the tale as it was told to me."
Stories enow of much the same cast will present themselves to the
recollection of such of my readers as have ever dabbled in a
species of lore to which I certainly gave more hours, at one
period of my life, than I should gain any credit by confessing.
AUGUST 1831.
*
AUNT MARGARET'S MIRROR.
"There are times
When Fancy plays her gambols, in despite
Even of our watchful senses--when in sooth
Substance seems shadow, shadow substance seems--
When the broad, palpable, and mark'd partition
'Twixt that which is and is not seems dissolved,
As if the mental eye gain'd power to gaze
Beyond the limits of the existing world.
Such hours of shadowy dreams I better love
Than all the gross realities of life." ANONYMOUS.
My Aunt Margaret was one of that respected sisterhood upon whom
devolve all the trouble and solicitude incidental to the
possession of children, excepting only that which attends their
entrance into the world. We were a large family, of very
different dispositions and constitutions. Some were dull and
peevish--they were sent to Aunt Margaret to be amused; some were
rude, romping, and boisterous--they were sent to Aunt Margaret to
be kept quiet, or rather that their noise might be removed out of
hearing; those who were indisposed were sent with the prospect of
being nursed; those who were stubborn, with the hope of their
being subdued by the kindness of Aunt Margaret's discipline;--in
short, she had all the various duties of a mother, without the
credit and dignity of the maternal character. The busy scene of
her various cares is now over. Of the invalids and the robust,
the kind and the rough, the peevish and pleased children, who
thronged her little parlour from morning to night, not one now
remains alive but myself, who, afflicted by early infirmity, was
one of the most delicate of her nurslings, yet, nevertheless,
have outlived them all.
It is still my custom, and shall be so while I have the use of my
limbs, to visit my respected relation at least three times a
week. Her abode is about half a mile from the suburbs of the
town in which I reside, and is accessible, not only by the
highroad, from which it stands at some distance, but by means of
a greensward footpath leading through some pretty meadows. I
have so little left to torment me in life, that it is one of my
greatest vexations to know that several of these sequestered
fields have been devoted as sites for building. In that which is
nearest the town, wheelbarrows have been at work for several
weeks in such numbers, that, I verily believe, its whole surface,
to the depth of at least eighteen inches, was mounted in these
monotrochs at the same moment, and in the act of being
transported from one place to another. Huge triangular piles of
planks are also reared in different parts of the devoted
messuage; and a little group of trees that still grace the
eastern end, which rises in a gentle ascent, have just received
warning to quit, expressed by a daub of white paint, and are to
give place to a curious grove of chimneys.
It would, perhaps, hurt others in my situation to reflect that
this little range of pasturage once belonged to my father (whose
family was of some consideration in the world), and was sold by
patches to remedy distresses in which he involved himself in an
attempt by commercial adventure to redeem his diminished fortune.
While the building scheme was in full operation, this
circumstance was often pointed out to me by the class of friends
who are anxious that no part of your misfortunes should escape
your observation. "Such pasture-ground!--lying at the very
town's end--in turnips and potatoes, the parks would bring L20
per acre; and if leased for building--oh, it was a gold mine!
And all sold for an old song out of the ancient possessor's
hands!" My comforters cannot bring me to repine much on this
subject. If I could be allowed to look back on the past without
interruption, I could willingly give up the enjoyment of present
income and the hope of future profit to those who have purchased
what my father sold. I regret the alteration of the ground only
because it destroys associations, and I would more willingly (I
think) see the Earl's Closes in the hands of strangers, retaining
their silvan appearance, than know them for my own, if torn up by
agriculture, or covered with buildings. Mine are the sensations
of poor Logan:--
"The horrid plough has rased the green
Where yet a child I strayed;
The axe has fell'd the hawthorn screen,
The schoolboy's summer shade."
I hope, however, the threatened devastation will not be
consummated in my day. Although the adventurous spirit of times
short while since passed gave rise to the undertaking, I have
been encouraged to think that the subsequent changes have so far
damped the spirit of speculation that the rest of the woodland
footpath leading to Aunt Margaret's retreat will be left
undisturbed for her time and mine. I am interested in this, for
every step of the way, after I have passed through the green
already mentioned, has for me something of early remembrance:--
There is the stile at which I can recollect a cross child's-maid
upbraiding me with my infirmity as she lifted me coarsely and
carelessly over the flinty steps, which my brothers traversed
with shout and bound. I remember the suppressed bitterness of
the moment, and, conscious of my own inferiority, the feeling of
envy with which I regarded the easy movements and elastic steps
of my more happily formed brethren. Alas! these goodly barks
have all perished on life's wide ocean, and only that which
seemed so little seaworthy, as the naval phrase goes, has reached
the port when the tempest is over. Then there is the pool,
where, manoeuvring our little navy, constructed out of the broad
water-flags, my elder brother fell in, and was scarce saved from
the watery element to die under Nelson's banner. There is the
hazel copse also, in which my brother Henry used to gather nuts,
thinking little that he was to die in an Indian jungle in quest
of rupees.
There is so much more of remembrance about the little walk, that
--as I stop, rest on my crutch-headed cane, and look round with
that species of comparison between the thing I was and that which
I now am--it almost induces me to doubt my own identity; until I
find myself in face of the honeysuckle porch of Aunt Margaret's
dwelling, with its irregularity of front, and its odd, projecting
latticed windows, where the workmen seem to have made it a study
that no one of them should resemble another in form, size, or in
the old-fashioned stone entablature and labels which adorn them.
This tenement, once the manor house of the Earl's Closes, we
still retain a slight hold upon; for, in some family
arrangements, it had been settled upon Aunt Margaret during the
term of her life. Upon this frail tenure depends, in a great
measure, the last shadow of the family of Bothwell of Earl's
Closes, and their last slight connection with their paternal
inheritance. The only representative will then be an infirm old
man, moving not unwillingly to the grave, which has devoured all
that were dear to his affections.
When I have indulged such thoughts for a minute or two, I enter
the mansion, which is said to have been the gate-house only of
the original building, and find one being on whom time seems to
have made little impression; for the Aunt Margaret of to-day
bears the same proportional age to the Aunt Margaret of my early
youth that the boy of ten years old does to the man of (by'r
Lady!) some fifty-six years. The old lady's invariable costume
has doubtless some share in confirming one in the opinion that
time has stood still with Aunt Margaret.
The brown or chocolate-coloured silk gown, with ruffles of the
same stuff at the elbow, within which are others of Mechlin lace;
the black silk gloves, or mitts; the white hair combed back upon
a roll; and the cap of spotless cambric, which closes around the
venerable countenance--as they were not the costume of 1780, so
neither were they that of 1826; they are altogether a style
peculiar to the individual Aunt Margaret. There she still sits,
as she sat thirty years since, with her wheel or the stocking,
which she works by the fire in winter and by the window in
summer; or, perhaps, venturing as far as the porch in an
unusually fine summer evening. Her frame, like some well-
constructed piece of mechanics, still performs the operations for
which it had seemed destined--going its round with an activity
which is gradually diminished, yet indicating no probability that
it will soon come to a period.
The solicitude and affection which had made Aunt Margaret the
willing slave to the inflictions of a whole nursery, have now for
their object the health and comfort of one old and infirm man--
the last remaining relative of her family, and the only one who
can still find interest in the traditional stores which she
hoards, as some miser hides the gold which he desires that no one
should enjoy after his death.
My conversation with Aunt Margaret generally relates little
either to the present or to the future. For the passing day we
possess as much as we require, and we neither of us wish for
more; and for that which is to follow, we have, on this side of
the grave, neither hopes, nor fears, nor anxiety. We therefore
naturally look back to the past, and forget the present fallen
fortunes and declined importance of our family in recalling the
hours when it was wealthy and prosperous.
With this slight introduction, the reader will know as much of
Aunt Margaret and her nephew as is necessary to comprehend the
following conversation and narrative.
Last week, when, late in a summer evening, I went to call on the
old lady to whom my reader is now introduced, I was received by
her with all her usual affection and benignity, while, at the
same time, she seemed abstracted and disposed to silence. I
asked her the reason. "They have been clearing out the old
chapel," she said; "John Clayhudgeons having, it seems,
discovered that the stuff within--being, I suppose, the remains
of our ancestors--was excellent for top-dressing the meadows."
Here I started up with more alacrity than I have displayed for
some years; but sat down while my aunt added, laying her hand
upon my sleeve, "The chapel has been long considered as common
ground, my dear, and used for a pinfold, and what objection can
we have to the man for employing what is his own to his own
profit? Besides, I did speak to him, and he very readily and
civilly promised that if he found bones or monuments, they should
be carefully respected and reinstated; and what more could I ask?
So, the first stone they found bore the name of Margaret
Bothwell, 1585, and I have caused it to be laid carefully aside,
as I think it betokens death, and having served my namesake two
hundred years, it has just been cast up in time to do me the same
good turn. My house has been long put in order, as far as the
small earthly concerns require it; but who shall say that their
account with, Heaven is sufficiently revised?"
"After what you have said, aunt," I replied, "perhaps I ought to
take my hat and go away; and so I should, but that there is on
this occasion a little alloy mingled with your devotion. To
think of death at all times is a duty--to suppose it nearer from
the finding an old gravestone is superstition; and you, with your
strong, useful common sense, which was so long the prop of a
fallen family, are the last person whom I should have suspected
of such weakness."
"Neither would I deserve your suspicions, kinsman," answered Aunt
Margaret, "if we were speaking of any incident occurring in the
actual business of human life. But for all this, I have a sense
of superstition about me, which I do not wish to part with. It
is a feeling which separates me from this age, and links me with
that to which I am hastening; and even when it seems, as now, to
lead me to the brink of the grave, and bid me gaze on it, I do
not love that it should be dispelled. It soothes my imagination,
without influencing my reason or conduct."
"I profess, my good lady," replied I, "that had any one but you
made such a declaration, I should have thought it as capricious
as that of the clergyman, who, without vindicating his false
reading, preferred, from habit's sake, his old Mumpsimus to the
modern Sumpsimus."
"Well," answered my aunt, "I must explain my inconsistency in
this particular by comparing it to another. I am, as you know, a
piece of that old-fashioned thing called a Jacobite; but I am so
in sentiment and feeling only, for a more loyal subject never
joined in prayers for the health and wealth of George the Fourth,
whom God long preserve! But I dare say that kind-hearted
sovereign would not deem that an old woman did him much injury if
she leaned back in her arm-chair, just in such a twilight as
this, and thought of the high-mettled men whose sense of duty
called them to arms against his grandfather; and how, in a cause
which they deemed that of their rightful prince and country,
'They fought till their hand to the broadsword was glued,
They fought against fortune with hearts unsubdued.'
Do not come at such a moment, when my head is full of plaids,
pibrochs, and claymores, and ask my reason to admit what, I am
afraid, it cannot deny--I mean, that the public advantage
peremptorily demanded that these things should cease to exist. I
cannot, indeed, refuse to allow the justice of your reasoning;
but yet, being convinced against my will, you will gain little by
your motion. You might as well read to an infatuated lover the
catalogue of his mistress's imperfections; for when he has been
compelled to listen to the summary, you will only get for answer
that 'he lo'es her a' the better.'"
I was not sorry to have changed the gloomy train of Aunt
Margaret's thoughts, and replied in the same tone, "Well, I can't
help being persuaded that our good King is the more sure of Mrs.
Bothwell's loyal affection, that he has the Stewart right of
birth as well as the Act of Succession in his favour."
"Perhaps my attachment, were its source of consequence, might be
found warmer for the union of the rights you mention," said Aunt
Margaret; "but, upon my word, it would be as sincere if the
King's right were founded only on the will of the nation, as
declared at the Revolution. I am none of your JURE DIVINO
folks."
"And a Jacobite notwithstanding."
"And a Jacobite notwithstanding--or rather, I will give you leave
to call me one of the party which, in Queen Anne's time, were
called, WHIMSICALS, because they were sometimes operated upon by
feelings, sometimes by principle. After all, it is very hard
that you will not allow an old woman to be as inconsistent in her
political sentiments as mankind in general show themselves in all
the various courses of life; since you cannot point out one of
them in which the passions and prejudices of those who pursue it
are not perpetually carrying us away from the path which our
reason points out."
"True, aunt; but you are a wilful wanderer, who should be forced
back into the right path."
"Spare me, I entreat you," replied Aunt Margaret. "You remember
the Gaelic song, though I dare say I mispronounce the words--
'Hatil mohatil, na dowski mi.'
(I am asleep, do not waken me.)
I tell you, kinsman, that the sort of waking dreams which my
imagination spins out, in what your favourite Wordsworth calls
'moods of my own mind,' are worth all the rest of my more active
days. Then, instead of looking forwards, as I did in youth, and
forming for myself fairy palaces, upon the verge of the grave I
turn my eyes backward upon the days and manners of my better
time; and the sad, yet soothing recollections come so close and
interesting, that I almost think it sacrilege to be wiser or more
rational or less prejudiced than those to whom I looked up in my
younger years."
"I think I now understand what you mean," I answered, "and can
comprehend why you should occasionally prefer the twilight of
illusion to the steady light of reason."
"Where there is no task," she rejoined, "to be performed, we may
sit in the dark if we like it; if we go to work, we must ring for
candles."
"And amidst such shadowy and doubtful light," continued I,
"imagination frames her enchanted and enchanting visions, and
sometimes passes them upon the senses for reality."
"Yes," said Aunt Margaret, who is a well-read woman, "to those
who resemble the translator of Tasso,--
'Prevailing poet, whose undoubting mind
Believed the magic wonders which he sung.
It is not required for this purpose that you should be sensible
of the painful horrors which an actual belief in such prodigies
inflicts. Such a belief nowadays belongs only to fools and
children. It is not necessary that your ears should tingle and
your complexion change, like that of Theodore at the approach of
the spectral huntsman. All that is indispensable for the
enjoyment of the milder feeling of supernatural awe is, that you
should be susceptible of the slight shuddering which creeps over
you when you hear a tale of terror--that well-vouched tale which
the narrator, having first expressed his general disbelief of all
such legendary lore, selects and produces, as having something in
it which he has been always obliged to give up as inexplicable.
Another symptom is a momentary hesitation to look round you, when
the interest of the narrative is at the highest; and the third, a
desire to avoid looking into a mirror when you are alone in your
chamber for the evening. I mean such are signs which indicate
the crisis, when a female imagination is in due temperature to
enjoy a ghost story. I do not pretend to describe those which
express the same disposition in a gentleman."
"That last symptom, dear aunt, of shunning the mirror seems
likely to be a rare occurrence amongst the fair sex."
"You are a novice in toilet fashions, my dear cousin. All women
consult the looking-glass with anxiety before they go into
company; but when they return home, the mirror has not the same
charm. The die has been cast--the party has been successful or
unsuccessful in the impression which she desired to make. But,
without going deeper into the mysteries of the dressing-table, I
will tell you that I myself, like many other honest folks, do not
like to see the blank, black front of a large mirror in a room
dimly lighted, and where the reflection of the candle seems
rather to lose itself in the deep obscurity of the glass than to
be reflected back again into the apartment, That space of inky
darkness seems to be a field for Fancy to play her revels in.
She may call up other features to meet us, instead of the
reflection of our own; or, as in the spells of Hallowe'en, which
we learned in childhood, some unknown form may be seen peeping
over our shoulder. In short, when I am in a ghost-seeing humour,
I make my handmaiden draw the green curtains over the mirror
before I go into the room, so that she may have the first shock
of the apparition, if there be any to be seen, But, to tell you
the truth, this dislike to look into a mirror in particular times
and places has, I believe, its original foundation in a story
which came to me by tradition from my grandmother, who was a
party concerned in the scene of which I will now tell you."
*
THE MIRROR.
CHAPTER I.
You are fond (said my aunt) of sketches of the society which has
passed away. I wish I could describe to you Sir Philip Forester,
the "chartered libertine" of Scottish good company, about the end
of the last century. I never saw him indeed; but my mother's
traditions were full of his wit, gallantry, and dissipation.
This gay knight flourished about the end of the seventeenth and
beginning of the eighteenth century. He was the Sir Charles Easy
and the Lovelace of his day and country--renowned for the number
of duels he had fought, and the successful intrigues which he had
carried on. The supremacy which he had attained in the
fashionable world was absolute; and when we combine it with one
or two anecdotes, for which, "if laws were made for every
degree," he ought certainly to have been hanged, the popularity
of such a person really serves to show, either that the present
times are much more decent, if not more virtuous, than they
formerly were, or that high-breeding then was of more difficult
attainment than that which is now so called, and consequently
entitled the successful professor to a proportional degree of
plenary indulgences and privileges. No beau of this day could
have borne out so ugly a story as that of Pretty Peggy
Grindstone, the miller's daughter at Sillermills--it had well-
nigh made work for the Lord Advocate. But it hurt Sir Philip
Forester no more than the hail hurts the hearthstone. He was as
well received in society as ever, and dined with the Duke of A---
the day the poor girl was buried. She died of heartbreak. But
that has nothing to do with my story.
Now, you must listen to a single word upon kith, kin, and ally; I
promise you I will not be prolix. But it is necessary to the
authenticity of my legend that you should know that Sir Philip
Forester, with his handsome person, elegant accomplishments, and
fashionable manners, married the younger Miss Falconer of King's
Copland. The elder sister of this lady had previously become the
wife of my grandfather, Sir Geoffrey Bothwell, and brought into
our family a good fortune. Miss Jemima, or Miss Jemmie Falconer,
as she was usually called, had also about ten thousand pounds
sterling--then thought a very handsome portion indeed.