Maid Margaret of Galloway: The Life Story of Her Whom Four Centuries Have Called The Fair Maid of Galloway

Lord, Lord! how I hated it—I, Margaret Douglas, who had been the petted of great men and strong men ever since I could remember—ay, and before! I, who had known Maud Lindsay (called the “Snarer of Hearts”) in her best time, who had sworn, when no more than thirteen, that I would outdo her—to end thus, to be despatched like a bale of goods at sixteen years of age out of Scotland! (Well, that I would not have minded so greatly. ’Tis a dull sour place, wet above and boggy below, with much damp mist between!)

But what irked me was that I, who before I could walk had been called the Fair Maid of Galloway, should be let grow fusty and frowsy as the Sister of Mercy who goes from door to door, begging for the poor—all because I had a cousin who wanted to marry me and so keep Galloway and the Highland estates in the family coffer—bah!

Well, at any rate, I had just to bear it. Tinkle-tankle! Oh yes, there went the weary bells, like cracked tin mugs which the gipsy-folk peddle out of their asses’ saddlebags along with coarse cloth for “jupes,” or sleeved waistcoats, and at the bottom red earth for marking sheep withal!

At six o’clock in the morning, black roaring winter or gracious June—out you must turn in this our Convent of the Birch—ay, though you be thrice a princess in your own right. And they would not let you have so much as a drop of warm water in a pottery jar for the foot of your bed (mightily comforting it is to lone women!), nor even suffer you to sleep in your woollen gonelle, which is to say gown, that hath a hood to it, and, being turned head-and-heels, makes an admirable nest for cold great-toes a-nights. I have suffered from cold feet all my days. Indeed, if I had not, perhaps I had been a happier woman.

Then tinkle-tankle all over again and prayers and reading of the Scripture at nine. Never a bite or a sup till half-past ten, when, while you feed in silence, they read to you out of the Lives of the Saints—about how Sister Brigida, afterwards martyred, established this holy order of nuns and died in the hope of a better life. The which I judged to be an espérance noways over-sanguine! For the Good God knows she would have had to travel fast and far, that same holy Bridget, to find a worse life than that rule conventual she established, and which, for my sins, had been transported from the savage land of Ireland (where it belonged) to the sweet and smiling Touraine that lay outside these weary walls. But since you cannot see a smile even thirty miles broad through walls four feet thick, I might just as well have been on the Bog of Allen.

So it went on. Tinkle-tank of bells—whirr of doves’ wings (we had them three times a week to evening refection—the wings oftener than the doves, so far as I was concerned). Coo-roo-coo-roo! From high up in the bell-tower the sound came. Then the buzz of flies and wasps and angry red-bottomed bees trying to find their way through the painted window-panes. Yes, oh yes, it was peaceful, and hungrysome and chastening, and made me wish to be a crow or a sparrow or a midge—I was not at all particular—at any rate something that could fly away into the blue beyond the confinement of these sorrowful walls, within which the Lady Superior for ever snored in her cell and Sister Eulalie yattered eternally at one’s tail, snivelling out threats of punishment if you climbed a tree or so much as took a garden ladder to look over the wall. Not that there was much to see, when you did look over—only the wide spread of the forest and the green fields—not in patches, as in Scotland, with heather and whin-bloom everywhere, but all in cultivated squares, like a painted chess-board. There were poor men, also, with legs blackened in the sun, half-naked or even with no more than a clout about them, that ran at a look, or shrieked for the clink of an iron ring.