i think i might almost have said the last: somewhere, indeed, in the uttermost glens of the lammermuir or among the southwestern hills there may yet linger a decrepid representative of this bygone good fellowship; but as far as actual experience goes, i have only met one man in my life who might fitly be quoted in the same breath with andrew fairservice, — though without his vices. he was a man whose very presence could impart a savour of quaint antiquity to the baldest and most modern flower-plots. there was a dignity about his tall stooping form, and an earnestness in his wrinkled face that recalled don quixote; but a don quixote who had come through the training of the covenant, and been nourished in his youth on walker’s lives and the hind let loose.
now, as i could not bear to let such a man pass away with no sketch preserved of his old-fashioned virtues, i hope the reader will take this as an excuse for the present paper, and judge as kindly as he can the infirmities of my description. to me, who find it so difficult to tell the little that i know, he stands essentially as a genius loci. it is impossible to separate his spare form and old straw hat from the garden in the lap of the hill, with its rocks overgrown with clematis, its shadowy walks, and the splendid breadth of champaign that one saw from the north-west corner. the garden and gardener seem part and parcel of each other. when i take him from his right surroundings and try to make him appear for me on paper, he looks unreal and phantasmal: the best that i can say may convey some notion to those that never saw him, but to me it will be ever impotent.
the first time that i saw him, i fancy robert was pretty old already: he had certainly begun to use his years as a stalking horse. latterly he was beyond all the impudencies of logic, considering a reference to the parish register worth all the reasons in the world, “i am old and well stricken in years,” he was wont to say; and i never found any one bold enough to answer the argument. apart from this vantage that he kept over all who were not yet octogenarian, he had some other drawbacks as a gardener. he shrank the very place he cultivated. the dignity and reduced gentility of his appearance made the small garden cut a sorry figure. he was full of tales of greater situations in his younger days. he spoke of castles and parks with a humbling familiarity. he told of places where under-gardeners had trembled at his looks, where there were meres and swanneries, labyrinths of walk and wildernesses of sad shrubbery in his control, till you could not help feeling that it was condescension on his part to dress your humbler garden plots. you were thrown at once into an invidious position. you felt that you were profiting by the needs of dignity, and that his poverty and not his will consented to your vulgar rule. involuntarily you compared yourself with the swineherd that made alfred watch his cakes, or some bloated citizen who may have given his sons and his condescension to the fallen dionysius. nor were the disagreeables purely fanciful and metaphysical, for the sway that he exercised over your feelings he extended to your garden, and, through the garden, to your diet. he would trim a hedge, throw away a favourite plant, or fill the most favoured and fertile section of the garden with a vegetable that none of us could eat, in supreme contempt for our opinion. if you asked him to send you in one of your own artichokes, “that i wull, mem,” he would say, “with pleasure, for it is mair blessed to give than to receive.” ay, and even when, by extra twisting of the screw, we prevailed on him to prefer our commands to his own inclination, and he went away, stately and sad, professing that “our wull was his pleasure,” but yet reminding us that he would do it “with feelin’s,” — even then, i say, the triumphant master felt humbled in his triumph, felt that he ruled on sufferance only, that he was taking a mean advantage of the other’s low estate, and that the whole scene had been one of those “slights that patient merit of the unworthy takes.”
in flowers his taste was old-fashioned and catholic; affecting sunflowers and dahlias, wallflowers and roses and holding in supreme aversion whatsoever was fantastic, new-fashioned or wild. there was one exception to this sweeping ban. foxgloves, though undoubtedly guilty on the last count, he not only spared, but loved; and when the shrubbery was being thinned, he stayed his hand and dexterously manipulated his bill in order to save every stately stem. in boyhood, as he told me once, speaking in that tone that only actors and the old-fashioned common folk can use nowadays, his heart grew “proud” within him when he came on a burn-course among the braes of manor that shone purple with their graceful trophies; and not all his apprenticeship and practice for so many years of precise gardening had banished these boyish recollections from his heart. indeed, he was a man keenly alive to the beauty of all that was bygone. he abounded in old stories of his boyhood, and kept pious account of all his former pleasures; and when he went (on a holiday) to visit one of the fabled great places of the earth where he had served before, he came back full of little pre-raphaelite reminiscences that showed real passion for the past, such as might have shaken hands with hazlitt or jean-jacques.
but however his sympathy with his old feelings might affect his liking for the foxgloves, the very truth was that he scorned all flowers together. they were but garnishings, childish toys, trifling ornaments for ladies’ chimney-shelves. it was towards his cauliflowers and peas and cabbage that his heart grew warm. his preference for the more useful growths was such that cabbages were found invading the flower-pots, and an outpost of savoys was once discovered in the centre of the lawn. he would prelect over some thriving plant with wonderful enthusiasm, piling reminiscence on reminiscence of former and perhaps yet finer specimens. yet even then he did not let the credit leave himself. he had, indeed, raised “finer o’ them;” but it seemed that no one else had been favoured with a like success. all other gardeners, in fact, were mere foils to his own superior attainments; and he would recount, with perfect soberness of voice and visage, how so and so had wondered, and such another could scarcely give credit to his eyes. nor was it with his rivals only that he parted praise and blame. if you remarked how well a plant was looking, he would gravely touch his hat and thank you with solemn unction; all credit in the matter falling to him. if, on the other hand, you called his attention to some back-going vegetable, he would quote scripture: “paul may plant and apollos may water;” all blame being left to providence, on the score of deficient rain or untimely frosts.
there was one thing in the garden that shared his preference with his favourite cabbages and rhubarb, and that other was the beehive. their sound, their industry, perhaps their sweet product also, had taken hold of his imagination and heart, whether by way of memory or no i cannot say, although perhaps the bees too were linked to him by some recollection of manor braes and his country childhood. nevertheless, he was too chary of his personal safety or (let me rather say) his personal dignity to mingle in any active office towards them. but he could stand by while one of the contemned rivals did the work for him, and protest that it was quite safe in spite of his own considerate distance and the cries of the distressed assistant. in regard to bees, he was rather a man of word than deed, and some of his most striking sentences had the bees for text. “they are indeed wonderful creatures, mem,” he said once. “they just mind me o’ what the queen of sheba said to solomon — and i think she said it wi’ a sigh, — ‘the half of it hath not been told unto me.’”
as far as the bible goes, he was deeply read. like the old covenanters, of whom he was the worthy representative, his mouth was full of sacred quotations; it was the book that he had studied most and thought upon most deeply. to many people in his station the bible, and perhaps burns, are the only books of any vital literary merit that they read, feeding themselves, for the rest, on the draff of country newspapers, and the very instructive but not very palatable pabulum of some cheap educational series. this was robert’s position. all day long he had dreamed of the hebrew stories, and his head had been full of hebrew poetry and gospel ethics; until they had struck deep root into his heart, and the very expressions had become a part of him; so that he rarely spoke without some antique idiom or scripture mannerism that gave a raciness to the merest trivialities of talk. but the influence of the bible did not stop here. there was more in robert than quaint phrase and ready store of reference. he was imbued with a spirit of peace and love: he interposed between man and wife: he threw himself between the angry, touching his hat the while with all the ceremony of an usher: he protected the birds from everybody but himself, seeing, i suppose, a great difference between official execution and wanton sport. his mistress telling him one day to put some ferns into his master’s particular corner, and adding, “though, indeed, robert, he doesn’t deserve them, for he wouldn’t help me to gather them.” “eh, mem,” replies robert, “but i wouldnae say that, for i think he’s just a most deservin’ gentleman.” again, two of our friends, who were on intimate terms, and accustomed to use language to each other, somewhat without the bounds of the parliamentary, happened to differ about the position of a seat in the garden. the discussion, as was usual when these two were at it, soon waxed tolerably insulting on both sides. every one accustomed to such controversies several times a day was quietly enjoying this prize-fight of somewhat abusive wit — every one but robert, to whom the perfect good faith of the whole quarrel seemed unquestionable, and who, after having waited till his conscience would suffer him to wait no more, and till he expected every moment that the disputants would fall to blows, cut suddenly in with tones of almost tearful entreaty: “eh, but, gentlemen, i wad hae nae mair words about it!” one thing was noticeable about robert’s religion: it was neither dogmatic nor sectarian. he never expatiated (at least, in my hearing) on the doctrines of his creed, and he never condemned anybody else. i have no doubt that he held all roman catholics, atheists, and mahometans as considerably out of it; i don’t believe he had any sympathy for prelacy; and the natural feelings of man must have made him a little sore about free-churchism; but at least, he never talked about these views, never grew controversially noisy, and never openly aspersed the belief or practice of anybody. now all this is not generally characteristic of scotch piety; scotch sects being churches militant with a vengeance, and scotch believers perpetual crusaders the one against the other, and missionaries the one to the other. perhaps robert’s originally tender heart was what made the difference; or, perhaps, his solitary and pleasant labour among fruits and flowers had taught him a more sunshiny creed than those whose work is among the tares of fallen humanity; and the soft influences of the garden had entered deep into his spirit,
“annihilating all that’s made
to a green thought in a green shade.”
but i could go on for ever chronicling his golden sayings or telling of his innocent and living piety. i had meant to tell of his cottage, with the german pipe hung reverently above the fire, and the shell box that he had made for his son, and of which he would say pathetically: “he was real pleased wi’ it at first, but i think he’s got a kind o’ tired o’ it now” — the son being then a man of about forty. but i will let all these pass. “’tis more significant: he’s dead.” the earth, that he had digged so much in his life, was dug out by another for himself; and the flowers that he had tended drew their life still from him, but in a new and nearer way. a bird flew about the open grave, as if it too wished to honour the obsequies of one who had so often quoted scripture in favour of its kind. “are not two sparrows sold for one farthing, and yet not one of them falleth to the ground.”
yes, he is dead. but the kings did not rise in the place of death to greet him “with taunting proverbs” as they rose to greet the haughty babylonian; for in his life he was lowly, and a peacemaker and a servant of god.
