Marjorie Fleming

In a letter from “Isa” to

she says: “I long much to see you, and talk over all our old stories together, and to hear you read and repeat. I am pining for my old friend Cesario, and poor Lear, and wicked Richard. How is the dear Multiplication table going on? Are you still as much attached to 9 times 9 as you used to be?”

But this dainty, bright thing is about to flee,—to come “quick to confusion.” The measles she writes of seized her, and she died on the 19th of December, 1811. The day before her death, Sunday, she sat up in bed, worn and thin, her eye gleaming as with the light of a coming world, and with a tremulous, old voice repeated the following lines by Burns,—heavy with the shadow of death, and lit with the phantasy of the judgment-seat,—the publican’s prayer in paraphrase:—

It is more affecting than we care to say to read her Mother’s and Isabella Keith’s letters written immediately after her death. Old and withered, tattered and pale, they are now: but when you read them, how quick, how throbbing with life and love! how rich in that language of affection which only women and Shakespeare and Luther can use,—that power of detaining the soul over the beloved object and its loss!

What variations cannot love play on this one string!

In her first letter to Miss Keith, Mrs. Fleming says of her dead Maidie: “Never did I behold so beautiful an object. It resembled the finest wax-work. There was in the countenance an expression of sweetness and serenity which seemed to indicate that the pure spirit had anticipated the joys of heaven ere it quitted the mortal frame. To tell you what your Maidie said of you would fill volumes; for you was the constant theme of her discourse, the subject of her thoughts, and ruler of her actions. The last time she mentioned you was a few hours before all sense save that of suffering was suspended, when she said to Dr. Johnstone, ‘If you let me out at the New Year, I will be quite contented.’ I asked her what made her so anxious to get out then? ‘I want to purchase a New Year’s gift for Isa Keith with the sixpence you gave me for being patient in the measeles; and I would like to choose it myself.’ I do not remember her speaking afterwards, except to complain of her head, till just before she expired, when she articulated, ‘O mother! mother!’”

Do we make too much of this little child, who has been in her grave in Abbotshall Kirkyard these fifty and more years? We may of her cleverness,—not of her affectionateness, her nature. What a picture the animosa infans gives us of herself,—her vivacity, her passionateness, her precocious love-making, her passion for nature, for swine, for all living things, her reading, her turn for expression, her satire, her frankness, her little sins and rages, her great repentances! We don’t wonder Walter Scott carried her off in the neuk of his plaid, and played himself with her for hours.

The year before she died, when in Edinburgh, she was at a Twelfth Night Supper at Scott’s, in Castle Street. The company had all come,—all but Marjorie. Scott’s familiars, whom we all know, were there,—all were come but Marjorie; and all were dull because Scott was dull. “Where’s that bairn? what can have come over her? I’ll go myself and see.” And he was getting up, and would have gone; when the bell rang, and in came Duncan Roy and his henchman Tougald, with the sedan chair, which was brought right into the lobby, and its top raised. And there, in its darkness and dingy old cloth, sat Maidie in white, her eyes gleaming, and Scott bending over her in ecstasy—“hung over her enamored.” “Sit ye there, my dautie, till they all see you”; and forthwith he brought them all. You can fancy the scene. And he lifted her up and marched to his seat with her on his stout shoulder, and set her down beside him; and then began the night, and such a night! Those who knew Scott best said, that night was never equalled; Maidie and he were the stars; and she gave them Constance’s speeches and Helvellyn, the ballad then much in vogue, and all her répertoire,—Scott showing her off, and being ofttimes rebuked by her for his intentional blunders.

We are indebted for the following—and our readers will be not unwilling to share our obligations—to her sister: “Her birth was 15th January, 1803; her death, 19th December, 1811. I take this from her Bibles.[3] I believe she was a child of robust health, of much vigor of body, and beautifully formed arms, and, until her last illness, never was an hour in bed. She was niece to Mrs. Keith, residing in No. 1 North Charlotte Street, who was not Mrs. Murray Keith, although very intimately acquainted with that old lady. My aunt was a daughter of Mr. James Rae, surgeon, and married the younger son of old Keith of Ravelstone. Corstorphine Hill belonged to my aunt’s husband; and his eldest son, Sir Alexander Keith, succeeded his uncle to both Ravelstone and Dunnottar. The Keiths were not connected by relationship with the Howisons of Braehead, but my grandfather and grandmother (who was), a daughter of Cant of Thurston and Giles-Grange, were on the most intimate footing with our Mrs. Keith’s grandfather and grandmother; and so it has been for three generations, and the friendship consummated by my cousin William Keith marrying Isabella Craufurd.

“As to my aunt and Scott, they were on a very intimate footing. He asked my aunt to be godmother to his eldest daughter Sophia Charlotte. I had a copy of Miss Edgeworth’s ‘Rosamond, and Harry and Lucy’ for long, which was ‘a gift to Marjorie from Walter Scott,’ probably the first edition of that attractive series, for it wanted ‘Frank,’ which is always now published as part of the series, under the title of Early Lessons. I regret to say these little volumes have disappeared.

“Sir Walter was no relation of Marjorie’s, but of the Keiths, through the Swintons; and, like Marjorie, he stayed much at Ravelstone in his early days, with his grandaunt Mrs. Keith; and it was while seeing him there as a boy, that another aunt of mine composed, when he was about fourteen, the lines prognosticating his future fame that Lockhart ascribes in his Life to Mrs. Cockburn, authoress of ‘The Flowers of the Forest’:—

Mrs. Keir was my aunt’s name, another of Dr. Rae’s daughters.” We cannot better end than in words from this same pen: “I have to ask you to forgive my anxiety in gathering up the fragments of Marjorie’s last days, but I have an almost sacred feeling to all that pertains to her. You are quite correct in stating that measles were the cause of her death. My mother was struck by the patient quietness manifested by Marjorie during this illness, unlike her ardent, impulsive nature; but love and poetic feeling were unquenched. When Dr. Johnstone rewarded her submissiveness with a sixpence, the request speedily followed that she might get out ere New Year’s day came. When asked why she was so desirous of getting out, she immediately rejoined, ‘Oh, I am so anxious to buy something with my sixpence for my dear Isa Keith.’ Again, when lying very still, her mother asked her if there was anything she wished: ‘Oh yes! if you would just leave the room door open a wee bit, and play ‘The Land o’ the Leal,’ and I will lie and think, and enjoy myself’ (this is just as stated to me by her mother and mine). Well, the happy day came, alike to parents and child, when Marjorie was allowed to come forth from the nursery to the parlor. It was Sabbath evening, and after tea. My father, who idolized this child, and never afterwards in my hearing mentioned her name, took her in his arms; and, while walking her up and down the room, she said, ‘Father, I will repeat something to you; what would you like?’ He said, ‘Just choose yourself, Maidie.’ She hesitated for a moment between the paraphrase, ‘Few are thy days, and full of woe,’ and the lines of Burns already quoted, but decided on the latter, a remarkable choice for a child. The repeating these lines seemed to stir up the depths of feeling in her soul. She asked to be allowed to write a poem; there was a doubt whether it would be right to allow her, in case of hurting her eyes. She pleaded earnestly, ‘Just this once’; the point was yielded, her slate was given her, and with great rapidity she wrote an address of fourteen lines, ‘to her loved cousin on the author’s recovery,’ her last work on earth:—

“She went to bed apparently well, awoke in the middle of the night with the old cry of woe to a mother’s heart, ‘My head, my head!’ Three days of the dire malady, ‘water in the head,’ followed, and the end came.”

It is needless, it is impossible, to add anything to this: the fervor, the sweetness, the flush of poetic ecstasy, the lovely and glowing eye, the perfect nature of that bright and warm intelligence, that darling child,—Lady Nairne’s words, and the old tune, stealing up from the depths of the human heart, deep calling unto deep, gentle and strong like the waves of the great sea hushing themselves to sleep in the dark; the words of Burns, touching the kindred chord, her last numbers “wildly sweet” traced, with thin and eager fingers, already touched by the last enemy and friend,—moriens canit,—and that love which is so soon to be her everlasting light, is her song’s burden to the end.

Cambridge: Stereotyped and Printed by Welch, Bigelow, & Co.