Chapter II

The Peculiar Institution of Columba (excerpt)

My young hostess was delighted to see me eat so heartily, and was pleased that I praised it so warmly. She appeared to me to be fitted for a higher sphere than this homely colonial dwelling. The walls of the cottage were about ten feet high, but there was an aperture of about eighteen inches between them and the thatched roof, which formed a sort of verandah all round the house, and let in a good deal of light and air. The house was not ceiled, the partitions only ran up the ten feet, and across the rafters hung a saddle and also some harness, as well as smoked and dried meat. There were also some beams overhead on which rested baskets of seeds and sieves, and some tools of which I did not know the use. The table was covered with a white cloth of cotton and the plates and dishes were some of wood and some of the coarsest earthenware I had ever seen. The knives and two-pronged forks were of bronze, and the Scottish settlers appeared to have rediscovered the secret of the Peruvians of hardening bronze till it was nearly as useful as iron, for the knife had a very good edge. My hostess offered me more and more till I bade her stop, for I knew it was unwise to eat too much after so long a fast.

“Indeed,” she said, “I know nothing about such things, for we live in a country of such abundance that I never had to do with a famishing man before this day, and it seemed to me that you had a lot to make up for.”

“Yes, but the stomach is not strong enough to digest it,” said I, “but I’ll punish your larder for the next week if you are good enough to keep me.”

“And blithe both Hugh and me will be to do it. It is such a godsend. Oh! There never was such a piece of good luck as your dandering down just at our own hill when there’s never been a stranger here for a hundred years and more, and you might have happened on the other side of the valley. I wonder what is keeping Hugh. It’s not fair for me to have all this great joy to myself and him nearer in kin.”

“Husband and wife are one, you know, both by law and gospel, Mrs. Keith.”

“But I'm not Mistress Keith. I’m only Liliard Abercrombie.”

“The descendant of the John Abercrombie who was one of the leaders of the expedition along with Archibald Keith, my ancestor and Hugh’s?”

“Oh!” said she with flashing eyes. “I see you know all about it, was there ever such a providence? I am John Abercrombie’s great-great-great-great-grandchild.”

“Well, Miss Abercrombie, I have no doubt we are related somehow too if we had my grandmother here to set us right.”

“But I’m not Miss Abercrombie either.”

“Oh I forgot, the old word was Mistress for married and unmarried ladies alike. Mistress Abercrombie is your name.”

“But you see I’m neither the one nor the other,” said the girl. “I’m only Hugh Keith’s bride.”

“Oh engaged--betrothed--trusted to be married,” said I wondering at the apparent housekeeping of the young woman for the man to whom she was troth-plighted.

“No, Maister Victor, I’m only handfasted to Hugh Keith,” and she looked at the curious ring on her finger. “Only handfasted for a year and a day. Surely you have heard of such a thing.”

Handfasted! I recollected the passage in Sir Walter Scott’s novel of The Monastery, which mentioned the Border rite by which a man and a woman bound themselves to mutual fidelity for a year and a day, at the expiry of which time, they were free either to separate for ever, or to be married for life tightly as the Roman Catholic church could do it. I recollected too the indignant denunciation of the preacher of the Reformed Faith, Henry Wardour, of the practice which bound the stronger to the weaker while she was the object of desire, and let him throw her off when she was the object of compassion, soiled, besmirched and despised into a cold and cruel world and how heartily I agreed with his eloquent protest. And here was as handsome and apparently as virtuous a young woman as I had ever seen in my life, telling me without a blush that she was handfasted to my namesake, Hugh Keith, whose house sheltered me, whose dinner I was devouring, and whose coming home was expected immediately.

“Handfasted, yes,” I said after a short pause for reflection. “I have heard of such a thing as practised long ago in Scotland in remote districts, where priests were few. The bride and bridegroom took conditional vows first to prepare for the binding ones, and I suppose that is the case with you.”

“Mostly,” said Liliard, “but whiles folk are glad to change.”

“And it is a year and a day as it was in Scotland as these old times, hundreds of years before your folk left it?”

“Aye that is aye the beginning, but whiles it is lengthened for two and even three such terms before it is made a fast marriage. Though I think, on the whole, the half of the couples are eager for the year and day to be out that they may have no more doubt.”

“Then does everybody take this extraordinary step in the first place?”

“Everybody. We cannot be married in Columba without it. Hugh Keith would fain have made quite sure but he had to hold by the law like other folk.”

“But widows and widowers…? Have they to go through this extraordinary ordeal too before they take other mates?”

“Oh! They have to go through the same time to see if they suit, and indeed though they may be older and should have more sense, I think they make as many blunders as the youngest among us, and whiles, if they don’t get on well with the bairns, it is better for them to part.”

“But how came you to begin this strange customs? You surely brought the Bible and the Church Standards with you, and certainly you could find no sanction for this thing there.”

“Oh to be sure we brought the Bible, but the minister was lost at sea in a great storm when he was working with the rest, and as for the Questions and the Standards as you call them, they were left on shore when we fought our way up to our present abiding place in the charge of some of the party, sailors and others; the pirates that took the ships, slew them or made them captive, and burnt all that did not seem good to them to keep. There was but charcoal and ashes found of the big boxes of the books as well as many other needful things when the waggons returned for them. We had to be a sort of Law and Gospel to ourselves and to order our doings as seemed best to the leaders of the band.”

“And you have no books at all then,” said I, looking round the house, which in many points, resembled an old-world country cottage in Scotland, with the spinning-wheel in one corner, and the bink or dresser set up with the store of family crocker or wooden ware in the other, only without the great chimney, for the cooking was done outside, on account of the heat of the climate. There was no shelf for books to be seen, and not even a big family Bible to give warrant of the religious character of the family, and to serve as a record of the births, deaths, and marriages of the household.

“Only a few that folk had in their private possession which were many, if ye leave out the minister’s ain, and these had been left as over bulky by Madame Keith, and the son Victor, that in a measure took the father’s place.”

“And you have made no new books all these years,” said I, again looking around the room in search of what I could not see.

“What could we do in the way of writing and printing where there were so few hands and them so full of work? No, the old ones are all in safe keeping at the Townhouse at Ebenezer, and from them our bairns learn, not on the books themselves, which would be nothing for our big schools, but the masters and mistresses learn, and teach, by word of mouth.”

“And then your children do not learn to read. Cannot you read?”

“No, not a word, more’s the pity,” said my hostess in a very sad tone of voice.

“Nor of course write either?”

“No--I was not thrown off by my parents, and that would have been my only chance. Though I had such a good father and mother, I have sometimes been sorry to be shut out.”

All this was most bewildering to me. “What then could you learn at school, if you neither read nor wrote nor ciphered?”

“Well, we learned a great part of the Bible, and question books about right and wrong and the history of the world and of Scotland, and the story of our own Columba and all its laws, and them that liked poetry learned a lot--Shakespeare’s plays and Paradise Lost and Pope’s Homer--and some of the Spectator and The Pilgrim’s Progress and Don Quixote and some things that have been made in prose and verse here out of our own folk’s heads, for though we are out of the world, we are not fools.”

“No, you are certainly not fools,” said I wonderingly, “if you can learn and recollect such great books. What memories you must have!”

“Well, it is helped with the knitting and the sticks.”

“How so?”

“You see, all the lasses learn at school to sew and knit, as well as to spin and to weave, and all these things can help us to keep mind of what we hear, and the laddies do pin-knitting (crochet) and learn to whittle sticks, and that serves the same turn.”

It dawned upon me that this simple but intelligent people who had thus been thrown upon their own resources when a printing press and types would have been a great waste of labour, must have developed a kind of artificial memory which could be combined with useful work; and as Madame Defarge and other women, noted as the terrible tricoteuses of the Revolutionary times, knitted in the names of the dangerous and the denounced, and their several offences in some occult way invisible to the ordinary eye, so on a large scale on some definite system, a good deal might be done as aids to memory.

My hostess drew out of a drawer a great bundle of little pieces of find knitting of various shapes and of no apparent use. She then showed in another drawer a regiment of sticks of various lengths notched out and cut in various ways.

“This is all I have in the way of books,” said she, “and as Hugh aye hated pin-knitting which he said was only fit for women, he has only these sticks. But mine is out of sight the biggest collection. He’s so clever with his hands at his business that he cares less for the old-world stories.”

“And his business is at the forge I suppose?”

“He’s a smith, and though he’s young yet, he’s like to be the best in all Columba. I wonder what’s keeping him, he’s not having his dinner with the wright surely, though no doubt Alison Elliot will be pressing him. She’s broken off her last handfasting with John Rutherford, and is at her father’s house again, and she has aye had a soft spot in her heart for Hugh--but he thinks nought of her.”

“But I don’t understand this strange heathenish custom of ours; surely the Bible gives no warrant for it.”

“Deed the Bible gives warrant for a lot of things a great deal worse than that, if I learned it right,” replied my handsome hostess. “And it was far from being done in a heathenish spirit. No, the handfasting is a solemn religious ordinance gone into with prayer and solemn thoughts; at least I am sure it was the case with Hugh Keith and me.”

“But both of you would have been glad to have made it as binding to marriage surely--at least you said so.”

“Hugh would, but then he was in a measure beside himself that I consented to handfasting after long courtship; but for me, I thought then, and I think now, that the year of trial is a wise thing. Nobody could be kinder and better than Hugh, but he might have been different, and I know I’m provoking whiles, and no just the good house-manager that his mother would like to see me; so it’s just as well he should see all my faults, and make up his mind to bear with them. No, you must not call it heathenish,” and she looked so earnest and so good that I felt she was justified by her own conscience in what appeared to me so dangerous to morality.

“But how did it begin? It was such a strange departure from all the Scotch or French ideas on the subject, which our ancestors and our ancestress Madame Keith would take with them to the settlement.”

“It was the Indian women that began it,” said Liliard Abercrombie. “You see there were far more men than women in our first settlement and there was a tribe of Indians here that we had whiles to fight and whiles to make treaty with, and some of our men took Indian wives or rather no wives, but what in the Spectator would be called mistresses, though little mistress-ship the poor things were like to have. Well, Madame Keith and her son and my forbear, John Abercrombie held a council with some other elders so as to give these women some rights, for Ralph Abercrombie had taken one of these daughters of Heth, called Palahna, the very first year, and others had done the same. And they would not marry the redskins out of hand, for they were not Christians, so the Council settled that they should live together for a year and a day, which would give time for their conversion and give opportunity for the instruction of these poor women in the true faith, and then if both of the parties wished it, the heathen woman should be baptised and married. If they could not agree together, they parted and maybe tried another, but if they continued to love each other, as my forebear and Palahna did, then there was a grand solemn marriage. She was baptised by the name of Margaret, and they lived to a good old age together in love and counsel, and had ten sons and daughters. And many did the same, but no doubt there were many who were not so constant. But Palahna was one among a thousand.”

“But this has nothing to do with your Christian people,” said I. “They needed no term for conversion, no sort of probation in the civilized life like savage women.”

“Maybe no, but then the elders of the plantation and Madame Keith, who had a great deal to do with these matters, saw it was a good thing for the Indians and with regard to the Christians, they were all disposed to marry so young, before as the elders and Council said they knew their own minds, and so they decreed that it would be well to give them the chance of drawing back at the end of a year and a day. And as the first of the mixed handfastings was that of my forebear Ralph Abercrombie, so the very first of the Christian handfastings was on the part of Hugh’s forbear, Victor Keith, and he was all we had for a minister till others were trained.”