It was an idiotic time and place for the question. We had certainly arranged that she should ask it, but something must be left to the judgment in such cases. Francesca was hanging over a stone wall regarding a herd of cows in a pasture, and there was no possible shelter for a Mrs. Macstronachlacher within a quarter of a mile. What made the remark more unfortunate was the fact that, although she had on a different dress and bonnet, the person interrogated was the Disagreeable Woman; but Francesca is particularly slow in discerning resemblances. She would have gone on mechanically asking for new-laid eggs, had I not caught her eye and held it sternly. The foe looked at us suspiciously for a moment (Francesca’s hats are not easily forgotten), and then vanished up the path, to tell the people at Crummylowe, I suppose, that their grounds were invested by marauding strangers whose curiosity was manifestly the outgrowth of a republican government.
As she disappeared in one direction, we walked slowly in the other; and just as we reached the corner of the pasture where two stone walls meet, and where a group of oaks gives grateful shade, we heard children’s voices.
“No, no!” cried somebody; “it must be still higher at this end, for the tower—this is where the king will sit. Help me with this heavy one, Rafe. Dandie, mind your foot. Why don’t you be making the flag for the ship?—and do keep the Wrig away from us till we finish building!”
Chapter XVII. Playing Sir Patrick Spens
We forced our toes into the crevices of the wall and peeped stealthily over the top. Two boys of eight or ten years, with two younger children, were busily engaged in building a castle. A great pile of stones had been hauled to the spot, evidently for the purpose of mending the wall, and these were serving as rich material for sport. The oldest of the company, a bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked boy in an Eton jacket and broad white collar, was obviously commander-in-chief; and the next in size, whom he called Rafe, was a laddie of eight, in kilts. These two looked as if they might be scions of the aristocracy, while Dandie and the Wrig were fat little yokels of another sort. The miniature castle must have been the work of several mornings, and was worthy of the respectful but silent admiration with which we gazed upon it; but as the last stone was placed in the tower, the master builder looked up and spied our interested eyes peering at him over the wall. We were properly abashed, and ducked our heads discreetly at once, but were reassured by hearing him run rapidly towards us, calling, “Stop, if you please! Have you anything on just now—are you busy?”
We answered that we were quite at leisure.
“Then would you mind coming in to help us play ‘Sir Patrick Spens’? There aren’t enough of us to do it nicely.”
This confidence was touching, and luckily it was not in the least misplaced. Playing ‘Sir Patrick Spens’ was exactly in our line, little as he suspected it.
“Come and help?” I said. “Simply delighted! Do come, Fanny dear. How can we get over the wall?”
“I’ll show you the good broken place!” cried Sir Apple-Cheek; and following his directions we scrambled through, while Rafe took off his Highland bonnet ceremoniously and handed us down to earth.
“Hurrah! now it will be something like fun! Do you know ‘Sir Patrick Spens’?”
“Every word of it. Don’t you want us to pass an examination before you allow us in the game?”
“No,” he answered gravely; “it’s a great help, of course, to know it, but it isn’t necessary. I keep the words in my pocket to prompt Dandie, and the Wrig can only say two lines, she’s so little.” (Here he produced some tattered leaves torn from a book of ballads.) “We’ve done it many a time, but this is a new Dunfermline Castle, and we are trying the play in a different way. Rafe is the king, and Dandie is the ‘eldern knight,’—you remember him?”
“Certainly; he sat at the king’s right knee.”
“Yes, yes, that’s the one! Then Rafe is Sir Patrick part of the time, and I the other part, because everybody likes to be him; but there’s nobody left for the ‘lords o’ Noroway’ or the sailors, and the Wrig is the only maiden to sit on the shore, and she always forgets to comb her hair and weep at the right time.”
The forgetful and placid Wrig (I afterwards learned that this is a Scots word for the youngest bird in the nest) was seated on the grass, with her fat hands full of pink thyme and white wild woodruff. The sun shone on her curly flaxen head. She wore a dark blue cotton frock with white dots, and a short-sleeved pinafore; and though she was utterly useless from a dramatic point of view, she was the sweetest little Scotch dumpling I ever looked upon. She had been tried and found wanting in most of the principal parts of the ballad, but when left out of the performance altogether she was wont to scream so lustily that all Crummylowe rushed to her assistance.
“Now let us practise a bit to see if we know what we are going to do,” said Sir Apple-Cheek. “Rafe, you can be Sir Patrick this time. The reason why we all like to be Sir Patrick,” he explained, turning to me, “is that the lords o’ Noroway say to him—
and then he answers,—
and a lot of splendid things like that. Well, I’ll be the king,” and accordingly he began:—
A dead silence ensued, whereupon the king said testily, “Now, Dandie, you never remember you’re the eldern knight; go on!”
Thus reminded, Dandie recited:—
“Now I’ll write my letter,” said the king, who was endeavouring to make himself comfortable in his somewhat contracted tower.
“Read the letter out loud, Rafe, and then you’ll remember what to do.”
read Rafe.
“Now do the next part!”
“I can’t; I’m going to chuck up that next part. I wish you’d do Sir Patrick until it comes to ‘Ye lee! ‘ye lee!’”
“No, that won’t do, Rafe. We have to mix up everybody else, but it’s too bad to spoil Sir Patrick.”
“Well, I’ll give him to you, then, and be the king. I don’t mind so much now that we’ve got such a good tower; and why can’t I stop up there even after the ship sets sail and look out over the sea with a telescope? That’s the way Elizabeth did the time she was king.”
“You can stay till you have to come down and be a dead Scots lord. I’m not going to lie there as I did last time, with nobody but the Wrig for a Scots lord, and her forgetting to be dead!”
Sir Apple-Cheek then essayed the hard part ‘chucked up’ by Rafe. It was rather difficult, I confess, as the first four lines were in pantomime, and required great versatility:—