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Sir Gibbie

by George MacDonald · English · Gutenberg #2370 · 1,051,963 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Sir Gibbie

Author: George MacDonald


        
Release date: October 1, 2000 [eBook #2370]
                Most recently updated: October 29, 2022

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SIR GIBBIE ***




See “BROAD SCOTS GLOSSARY” at end of this work.

Note from electronic text creator: I have compiled a word list with
definitions of most of the Scottish words found in this work at the
end of the book. This list does not belong to the original work,
but is designed to help with the conversations in Broad Scots found
in this work. A further explanation of this list can be found
towards the end of this document, preceding the word list.


SIR GIBBIE.


BY

GEORGE MACDONALD, LL.D.




CONTENTS

       I. THE EARRING.
      II. SIR GEORGE.
     III. MISTRESS CROALE.
      IV. THE PARLOUR.
       V. GIBBIE’S CALLING.
      VI. A SUNDAY AT HOME.
     VII. THE TOWN-SPARROW.
    VIII. SAMBO.
      IX. ADRIFT.
       X. THE BARN.
      XI. JANET.
     XII. GLASHGAR.
    XIII. THE CEILING.
     XIV. HORNIE.
      XV. DONAL GRANT.
     XVI. APPRENTICESHIP.
    XVII. SECRET SERVICE.
   XVIII. THE BROONIE.
     XIX. THE LAIRD.
      XX. THE AMBUSH.
     XXI. THE PUNISHMENT.
    XXII. REFUGE.
   XXIII. MORE SCHOOLING.
    XXIV. THE SLATE.
     XXV. RUMOURS.
    XXVI. THE GAMEKEEPER
   XXVII. A VOICE.
  XXVIII. THE WISDOM OF THE WISE.
    XXIX. THE BEAST-BOY.
     XXX. THE LORRIE MEADOW.
    XXXI. THEIR REWARD.
   XXXII. PROLOGUE.
  XXXIII. THE MAINS.
   XXXIV. GLASHRUACH.
    XXXV. THE WHELP.
   XXXVI. THE BRANDER.
  XXXVII. MR. SCLATER.
 XXXVIII. THE MUCKLE HOOSE.
   XXXIX. DAUR STREET.
      XL. MRS. SCLATER.
     XLI. INITIATION.
    XLII. DONAL’S LODGING.
   XLIII. THE MINISTER’S DEFEAT.
    XLIV. THE SINNER.
     XLV. SHOALS AHEAD.
    XLVI. THE GIRLS.
   XLVII. A LESSON OF WISDOM.
  XLVIII. NEEDFULL ODDS AND ENDS.
    XLIX. THE HOUSELESS.
       L. A WALK.
      LI. THE NORTH CHURCH.
     LII. THE QUARRY.
    LIII. A NIGHT-WATCH.
     LIV. OF AGE.
      LV. TEN AULD HOOSE O’ GALBRAITH.
     LVI. THE LAIRD AND THE PREACHER.
    LVII. A HIDING-PLACE FROM THE WIND.
   LVIII. THE CONFESSION.
     LIX. CATASTROPHE.
      LX. ARRANGEMENT AND PREPARATION.
     LXI. THE WEDDING.
    LXII. THE BURN.




CHAPTER I.

THE EARRING.

“Come oot o’ the gutter, ye nickum!” cried, in harsh, half-masculine
voice, a woman standing on the curbstone of a short, narrow, dirty
lane, at right angles to an important thoroughfare, itself none of
the widest or cleanest. She was dressed in dark petticoat and print
wrapper. One of her shoes was down at the heel, and discovered a great
hole in her stocking. Had her black hair been brushed and displayed,
it would have revealed a thready glitter of grey, but all that was now
visible of it was only two or three untidy tresses that dropped from
under a cap of black net and green ribbons, which looked as if she
had slept in it. Her face must have been handsome when it was young
and fresh; but was now beginning to look tattooed, though whether the
colour was from without or from within, it would have been hard to
determine. Her black eyes looked resolute, almost fierce, above her
straight, well-formed nose. Yet evidently circumstance clave fast to
her. She had never risen above it, and was now plainly subjected to it.

About thirty yards from her, on the farther side of the main street,
and just opposite the mouth of the lane, a child, apparently about six,
but in reality about eight, was down on his knees raking with both
hands in the grey dirt of the kennel. At the woman’s cry he lifted
his head, ceased his search, raised himself, but without getting up,
and looked at her. They were notable eyes out of which he looked--of
such a deep blue were they, and having such long lashes; but more
notable far from their expression, the nature of which, although a
certain witchery of confidence was at once discoverable, was not to be
determined without the help of the whole face, whose diffused meaning
seemed in them to deepen almost to speech. Whatever was at the heart
of that expression, it was something that enticed question and might
want investigation. The face as well as the eyes was lovely--not
very clean, and not too regular for hope of a fine development, but
chiefly remarkable from a general effect of something I can only
call _luminosity_. The hair, which stuck out from his head in every
direction, like a round fur cap, would have been of the red-gold kind,
had it not been sunburned into a sort of human hay. An odd creature
altogether the child appeared, as, shaking the gutter-drops from his
little dirty hands, he gazed from his bare knees on the curbstone at
the woman of rebuke. It was but for a moment. The next he was down,
raking in the gutter again.

The woman looked angry, and took a step forward; but the sound of a
sharp imperative little bell behind her, made her turn at once, and
re-enter the shop from which she had just issued, following a man whose
pushing the door wider had set the bell ringing. Above the door was a
small board, nearly square, upon which was painted in lead-colour on a
black ground the words, “Licensed to sell beer, spirits, and tobacco to
be drunk on the premises.” There was no other sign. “Them ’at likes my
whusky ’ill no aye be speirin’ my name,” said Mistress Croale. As the
day went on she would have more and more customers, and in the evening
on to midnight, her parlour would be well filled. Then she would be
always at hand, and the spring of the bell would be turned aside from
the impact of the opening door. Now the bell was needful to recall her
from house affairs.

“The likin’ ’at cratur his for clean dirt! He’s been at it this hale
half-hoor!” she murmured to herself as she poured from a black bottle
into a pewter measure a gill of whisky for the pale-faced toper who
stood on the other side of the counter: far gone in consumption, he
could not get through the forenoon without his _morning_. “I wad
like,” she went on, as she replaced the bottle without having spoken a
word to her customer, whose departure was now announced with the same
boisterous alacrity as his arrival by the shrill-toned bell--“I wad
like, for ’is father’s sake, honest man! to thraw Gibbie’s lug. That
likin’ for dirt I canna fathom nor bide.”

Meantime the boy’s attention seemed entirely absorbed in the gutter.
Whatever vehicle passed before him, whatever footsteps behind, he
never lifted his head, but went creeping slowly on his knees along the
curb still searching down the flow of the sluggish, nearly motionless
current.

It was a grey morning towards the close of autumn. The days began and
ended with a fog, but often between, as golden a sunshine glorified the
streets of the grey city as any that ripened purple grapes. To-day the
mist had lasted longer than usual--had risen instead of dispersing;
but now it was thinning, and at length, like a slow blossoming of
the sky-flower, the sun came melting through the cloud. Between the
gables of two houses, a ray fell upon the pavement and the gutter. It
lay there a very type of purity, so pure that, rest where it might,
it destroyed every shadow of defilement that sought to mingle with
it. Suddenly the boy made a dart upon all fours, and pounced like a
creature of prey upon something in the kennel. He had found what he
had been looking for so long. He sprang to his feet and bounded with
it into the sun, rubbing it as he ran upon what he had for trousers,
of which there was nothing below the knees but a few streamers, and
nothing above the knees but the body of the garment, which had been--I
will not say made for, but last worn by a boy three times his size. His
feet, of course, were bare as well as his knees and legs. But though
they were dirty, red, and rough, they were nicely shaped little legs,
and the feet were dainty.

The sunbeams he sought came down through the smoky air like a Jacob’s
ladder, and he stood at the foot of it like a little prodigal angel
that wanted to go home again, but feared it was too much inclined for
him to manage the ascent in the present condition of his wings. But
all he did want was to see in the light of heaven what the gutter had
yielded him. He held up his _find_ in the radiance and regarded it
admiringly. It was a little earring of amethyst-coloured glass, and in
the sun looked lovely. The boy was in an ecstasy over it. He rubbed it
on his sleeve, sucked it to clear it from the last of the gutter, and
held it up once more in the sun, where, for a few blissful moments, he
contemplated it speechless. He then caused it to disappear somewhere
about his garments--I will not venture to say in a pocket--and ran off,
his little bare feet sounding _thud, thud, thud_ on the pavement, and
the collar of his jacket sticking halfway up the back of his head, and
threatening to rub it bare as he ran. Through street after street he
sped--all built of granite, all with flagged footways, and all paved
with granite blocks--a hard, severe city, not beautiful or stately with
its thick, grey, sparkling walls, for the houses were not high, and the
windows were small, yet in the better parts, nevertheless, handsome as
well as massive and strong.

To the boy the great city was but a house of many rooms, all for his
use, his sport, his life. He did not know much of what lay within the
houses; but _that_ only added the joy of mystery to possession: they
were jewel-closets, treasure-caves, indeed, with secret fountains of
life; and every street was a channel into which they overflowed.

It was in one of quite a third-rate sort that the urchin at length
ceased his trot, and drew up at the door of a baker’s shop--a divided
door, opening in the middle by a latch of bright brass. But the child
did not lift the latch--only raised himself on tiptoe by the help of
its handle, to look through the upper half of the door, which was of
glass, into the beautiful shop. The floor was of flags, fresh sanded;
the counter was of deal, scrubbed as white almost as flour; on the
shelves were heaped the loaves of the morning’s baking, along with a
large store of scones and rolls and baps--the last, the best bread in
the world--biscuits hard and soft, and those brown discs of delicate
flaky piecrust, known as buns. And the smell that came through the very
glass, it seemed to the child, was as that of the tree of life in the
Paradise of which he had never heard. But most enticing of all to the
eyes of the little wanderer of the street were the penny-loaves, hot
smoking from the oven--which fact is our first window into the ordered
nature of the child. For the main point which made them more attractive
than all the rest to him was, that sometimes he did have a penny, and
that a penny loaf was the largest thing that could be had for a penny
in the shop. So that, lawless as he looked, the desires of the child
were moderate, and his imagination wrought within the bounds of reason.
But no one who has never been blessed with only a penny to spend and
a mighty hunger behind it, can understand the interest with which he
stood there and through the glass watched the bread, having no penny
and only the hunger. There is at least one powerful bond, though it may
not always awake sympathy, between mudlark and monarch--that of hunger.
No one has yet written the poetry of hunger--has built up in verse its
stairs of grand ascent--from such hunger as Gibbie’s for a penny-loaf
up--no, no, not to an alderman’s feast; that is the way down the
mouldy cellar-stair--but up the white marble scale to the hunger after
righteousness whose very longings are bliss.

Behind the counter sat the baker’s wife, a stout, fresh-coloured woman,
looking rather dull, but simple and honest. She was knitting, and if
not dreaming, at least dozing over her work, for she never saw the
forehead and eyes which, like a young ascending moon, gazed at her over
the horizon of the opaque half of her door. There was no greed in those
eyes--only much quiet interest. He did not want to get in; had to wait,
and while waiting beguiled the time by beholding. He knew that Mysie,
the baker’s daughter, was at school, and that she would be home within
half an hour. He had seen her with tear-filled eyes as she went, had
learned from her the cause, and had in consequence unwittingly roused
Mrs. Croale’s anger, and braved it when aroused. But though he was
waiting for her, such was the absorbing power of the spectacle before
him that he never heard her approaching footsteps.

“Lat me in,” said Mysie, with conscious dignity and a touch of
indignation at being impeded on the very threshold of her father’s shop.

The boy started and turned, but instead of moving out of the way, began
searching in some mysterious receptacle hid in the recesses of his
rags. A look of anxiety once appeared, but the same moment it vanished,
and he held out in his hand the little drop of amethystine splendour.
Mysie’s face changed, and she clutched it eagerly.

“That’s rale guid o’ ye, wee Gibbie!” she cried. “Whaur did ye get it?”

He pointed to the kennel, and drew back from the door.

“I thank ye,” she said heartily, and pressing down the thumbstall of
the latch, went in.

“Wha’s that ye’re colloguin’ wi’, Mysie?” asked her mother, somewhat
severely, but without lifting her eyes from her wires. “Ye maunna be
speykin’ to loons i’ the street.”

“It’s only wee Gibbie, mither,” answered the girl in a tone of
confidence.

“Ow weel!” returned the mother, “he’s no like the lave o’ loons.”

“But what had ye to say till him?” she resumed, as if afraid her
leniency might be taken advantage of. “He’s no fit company for the
likes o’ you, ’at his a father an’ mither, an’ a chop (_shop_). Ye maun
hae little to say to sic rintheroot laddies.”

“Gibbie has a father, though they say he never hid nae mither,” said
the child.

“Troth, a fine father!” rejoined the mother, with a small scornful
laugh. “Na, but he’s something to mak mention o’! Sic a father, lassie,
as it wad be tellin’ him he had nane! What said ye till ’im?”

“I bit thankit ’im, ’cause I tint my drop as I gaed to the schuil i’
the mornin’, an’ he fan ’t till me, an’ was at the chopdoor waitin’ to
gie me ’t back. They say he’s aye fin’in’ things.”

“He’s a guid-hertit cratur!” said the mother,--“for ane, that is, ’at’s
been sae ill broucht up.”

She rose, took from the shelf a large piece of bread, composed of many
adhering penny-loaves, detached one, and went to the door.

“Here, Gibbie!” she cried as she opened it; “here’s a fine piece to ye.”

But no Gibbie was there. Up and down the street not a child was to be
seen. A sandboy with a donkey cart was the sole human arrangement in
it. The baker’s wife drew back, shut the door and resumed her knitting.




CHAPTER II.

SIR GEORGE.

The sun was hot for an hour or two in the middle of the day, but
even then in the shadow dwelt a cold breath--of the winter, or of
death--of something that humanity felt unfriendly. To Gibbie,
however, bare-legged, bare-footed, almost bare-bodied as he was, sun
or shadow made small difference, except as one of the musical
intervals of life that make the melody of existence. His bare feet
knew the difference on the flags, and his heart recognized
unconsciously the secret as it were of a meaning and a symbol, in
the change from the one to the other, but he was almost as happy in
the dull as in the bright day. Hardy through hardship, he knew
nothing better than a constant good-humoured sparring with nature
and circumstance for the privilege of being, enjoyed what came to
him thoroughly, never mourned over what he had not, and, like the
animals, was at peace. For the bliss of the animals lies in this,
that, on their lower level, they shadow the bliss of those--few at
any moment on the earth--who do not “look before and after, and pine
for what is not,” but live in the holy carelessness of the eternal
_now_. Gibbie by no means belonged to the higher order, was as yet,
indeed, not much better than a very blessed little animal.

To him the city was all a show. He knew many of the people--some of
them who thought no small things of themselves--better than they
would have chosen he or any one else should know them. He knew all
the peripatetic vendors, most of the bakers, most of the small
grocers and tradespeople. Animal as he was, he was laying in a
great stock for the time when he would be something more, for the
time of reflection, whenever that might come. Chiefly, his
experience was a wonderful provision for the future perception of
character; for now he knew to a nicety how any one of his large
acquaintance would behave to him in circumstances within the scope
of that experience. If any such little vagabond rises in the scale
of creation, he carries with him from the street an amount of
material serving to the knowledge of human nature, human need, human
aims, human relations in the business of life, such as hardly
another can possess. Even the poet, greatly wise in virtue of his
sympathy, will scarcely understand a given human condition so well
as the man whose vital tentacles have been in contact with it for
years.

When Gibbie was not looking in at a shop-window, or turning on one
heel to take in all at a sweep, he was oftenest seen trotting.
Seldom he walked. A gentle trot was one of his natural modes of
being. And though this day he had been on the trot all the sunshine
through, nevertheless, when the sun was going down there was wee
Gibbie upon the trot in the chilling and darkening streets. He had
not had much to eat. He had been very near having a penny loaf.
Half a cookie, which a stormy child had thrown away to ease his
temper, had done further and perhaps better service in easing
Gibbie’s hunger. The green-grocer woman at the entrance of the
court where his father lived, a good way down the same street in
which he had found the lost earring, had given him a small yellow
turnip--to Gibbie nearly as welcome as an apple. A fishwife from
Finstone with a _creel_ on her back, had given him all his hands could
hold of the sea-weed called _dulse_, presumably not from its
sweetness, although it is good eating. She had added to the gift a
small crab, but that he had carried to the seashore and set free,
because it was alive. These, the half-cookie, the turnip, and the
dulse, with the smell of the baker’s bread, was all he had had. It
had been rather one of his meagre days. But it is wonderful upon
how little those rare natures capable of making the most of things
will live and thrive. There is a great deal more to be got out of
things than is generally got out of them, whether the thing be a
chapter of the Bible or a yellow turnip, and the marvel is that
those who use the most material should so often be those that show
the least result in strength or character. A superstitious
priest-ridden Catholic may, in the kingdom of heaven, be high beyond
sight of one who counts himself the broadest of English churchmen.
Truly Gibbie got no fat out of his food, but he got what was far
better. What he carried--I can hardly say under or in, but along
with those rags of his, was all muscle--small, but hard and
healthy, and knotting up like whipcord. There are all degrees of
health in poverty as well as in riches, and Gibbie’s health was
splendid. His senses also were marvellously acute. I have already
hinted at his gift for finding things. His eyes were sharp, quick,
and roving, and then they went near the ground--he was such a little
fellow. His success, however, not all these considerations could
well account for, and he was regarded as born with a special luck in
finding. I doubt if sufficient weight was given to the fact that,
even when he was not so turning his mind, it strayed in that
direction, whence, if any object cast its reflected rays on his
retina, those rays never failed to reach his mind also. On one
occasion he picked up the pocket-book a gentleman had just dropped,
and, in mingled fun and delight, was trying to put it in its owner’s
pocket unseen, when he collared him, and, had it not been for the
testimony of a young woman who, coming behind, had seen the whole,
would have handed him over to the police. After all, he remained in
doubt, the thing seemed so incredible. He did give him a penny,
however, which Gibbie at once spent upon a loaf.

It was not from any notions of honesty--he knew nothing about
it--that he always did what he could to restore the things he found;
the habit came from quite another cause. When he had no clue to the
owner, he carried the thing found to his father, who generally let
it lie a while, and at length, if it was of nature convertible,
turned it into drink.

While Gibbie thus lived in the streets like a town-sparrow--as like a
human bird without storehouse or barn as boy could well be--the
human father of him would all day be sitting in a certain dark
court, as hard at work as an aching head and a bloodless system
would afford. The said court was off the narrowest part of a long,
poverty-stricken street, bearing a name of evil omen, for it was
called the Widdiehill--the place of the gallows. It was entered by
a low archway in the middle of an old house, around which yet clung
a musty fame of departed grandeur and ancient note. In the court,
against a wing of the same house, rose an outside stair, leading to
the first floor; under the stair was a rickety wooden shed; and in
the shed sat the father of Gibbie, and cobbled boots and shoes as
long as, at this time of the year, the light lasted. Up that stair,
and two more inside the house, he went to his lodging, for he slept
in the garret. But when or how he got to bed, George Galbraith
never knew, for then, invariably, he was drunk. In the morning,
however, he always found himself in it--generally with an aching
head, and always with a mingled disgust at and desire for drink.
During the day, alas! the disgust departed, while the desire
remained, and strengthened with the approach of evening. All day he
worked with might and main, such might and main as he had--worked as
if for his life, and all to procure the means of death. No one ever
sought to _treat_ him, and from no one would he accept drink. He was
a man of such inborn honesty, that the usurping demon of a vile
thirst had not even yet, at the age of forty, been able to cast it
out. The last little glory-cloud of his origin was trailing behind
him--but yet it trailed. Doubtless it needs but time to make of a
drunkard a thief, but not yet, even when longing was at the highest,
would he have stolen a forgotten glass of whisky; and still, often
in spite of sickness and aches innumerable, George laboured that he
might have wherewith to make himself drunk honestly. Strange
honesty! Wee Gibbie was his only child, but about him or his
well-being he gave himself almost as little trouble as Gibbie caused
him! Not that he was hard-hearted; if he had seen the child in
want, he would, at the drunkest, have shared his whisky with him; if
he had fancied him cold, he would have put his last garment upon
him; but to his whisky-dimmed eyes the child scarcely seemed to want
anything, and the thought never entered his mind that, while Gibbie
always looked smiling and contented, his father did so little to
make him so. He had at the same time a very low opinion of himself
and his deservings, and justly, for his consciousness had dwindled
into little more than a live thirst. He did not do well for
himself, neither did men praise him; and he shamefully neglected his
child; but in one respect, and that a most important one, he did
well by his neighbours: he gave the best of work, and made the
lowest of charges. In no other way was he for much good. And yet I
would rather be that drunken cobbler than many a “fair professor,”
as Bunyan calls him. A grasping merchant ranks infinitely lower
than _such_ a drunken cobbler. Thank God, the Son of Man is the
judge, and to him will we plead the cause of such--yea, and of worse
than they--for He will do right. It may be well for drunkards that
they are social outcasts, but is there no intercession to be made
for them--no excuse to be pleaded? Alas! the poor wretches would
storm the kingdom of peace by the inspiration of the enemy. Let us
try to understand George Galbraith. His very existence the sense of
a sunless, dreary, cold-winded desert, he was evermore confronted,
in all his resolves after betterment, by the knowledge that with the
first eager mouthful of the strange element, a rosy dawn would begin
to flush the sky, a mist of green to cover the arid waste, a wind of
song to ripple the air, and at length the misery of the day would
vanish utterly, and the night throb with dreams. For George was by
nature no common man. At heart he was a poet--weak enough, but
capable of endless delight. The time had been when now and then he
read a good book and dreamed noble dreams. Even yet the stuff of
which such dreams are made, fluttered in particoloured rags about
his life; and colour is colour even on a scarecrow.

He had had a good mother, and his father was a man of some
character, both intellectually and socially. Now and then, it is
too true, he had terrible bouts of drinking; but all the time
between he was perfectly sober. He had given his son more than a
fair education; and George, for his part, had trotted through the
curriculum of Elphinstone College not altogether without
distinction. But beyond this his father had entirely neglected his
future, not even revealing to him the fact--of which, indeed, he was
himself but dimly aware--that from wilful oversight on his part and
design on that of others, his property had all but entirely slipped
from his possession.

While his father was yet alive, George married the daughter of a
small laird in a neighbouring county--a woman of some education, and
great natural refinement. He took her home to the ancient family
house in the city--the same in which he now occupied a garret, and
under whose outer stair he now cobbled shoes. There, during his
father’s life, they lived in peace and tolerable comfort, though in
a poor enough way. It was all, even then, that the wife could do to
make both ends meet; nor would her relations, whom she had
grievously offended by her marriage, afford her the smallest
assistance. Even then, too, her husband was on the slippery
incline; but as long as she lived, she managed to keep him within the
bounds of what is called respectability. She died, however, soon
after Gibbie was born; and then George began to lose himself
altogether. The next year his father died, and creditors appeared
who claimed everything. Mortgaged land and houses, with all upon
and in them, were sold, and George left without a penny or any means
of winning a livelihood, while already he had lost the reputation
that might have introduced him to employment. For heavy work he was
altogether unfit; and had it not been for a bottle companion--a
merry, hard-drinking shoemaker--he would have died of starvation or
sunk into beggary.

This man taught him his trade, and George was glad enough to work at
it, both to deaden the stings of conscience and memory, and to
procure the means of deadening them still further. But even here
was something in the way of improvement, for hitherto he had applied
himself to nothing, his being one of those dreamful natures capable
of busy exertion for a time, but ready to collapse into disgust with
every kind of effort.

How Gibbie had got thus far alive was a puzzle not a creature could
have solved. It must have been by charity and ministration of more
than one humble woman, but no one now claimed any particular
interest in him--except Mrs. Croale, and hers was not very tender.
It was a sad sight to some eyes to see him roving the streets, but
an infinitely sadder sight was his father, even when bent over his
work, with his hands and arms and knees going as if for very
salvation. What thoughts might then be visiting his poor worn-out
brain I cannot tell; but he looked the pale picture of misery.
Doing his best to restore to service the nearly shapeless boots of
carter or beggar, he was himself fast losing the very idea of his
making, consumed heart and soul with a hellish thirst. For the
thirst of the drunkard is even more of the soul than of the body.
When the poor fellow sat with his drinking companions in Mistress
Croale’s parlour, seldom a flash broke from the reverie in which he
seemed sunk, to show in what region of fancy his spirit wandered, or
to lighten the dulness that would not unfrequently invade that
forecourt of hell. For even the damned must at times become aware
of what they are, and then surely a terrible though momentary hush
must fall upon the forsaken region. Yet those drinking companions
would have missed George Galbraith, silent as he was, and but poorly
responsive to the wit and humour of the rest; for he was always
courteous, always ready to share what he had, never looking beyond
the present tumbler--altogether a genial, kindly, honest nature.
Sometimes, when two or three of them happened to meet elsewhere,
they would fall to wondering why the silent man sought their
company, seeing he both contributed so little to the hilarity of the
evening, and seemed to derive so little enjoyment from it. But I
believe their company was necessary as well as the drink to enable
him to elude his conscience and feast with his imagination. Was it
that he knew they also fought misery by investments in her
bonds--that they also were of those who by Beelzebub would cast out
Beelzebub--therefore felt at home, and with his own?




CHAPTER III.

MISTRESS CROALE.

The house at which they met had yet not a little character
remaining. Mistress Croale had come in for a derived worthiness, in
the memory, yet lingering about the place, of a worthy aunt
deceased, and always encouraged in herself a vague idea of
obligation to live up to it. Hence she had made it a rule to supply
drink only so long as her customers _kept decent_--that is, so long as
they did not quarrel aloud, and put her in danger of a visit from
the police; tell such tales as offended her modesty; utter oaths of
any peculiarly atrocious quality; or defame the Sabbath Day, the
Kirk, or the Bible. On these terms, and so long as they paid for
what they had, they might get as drunk as they pleased, without the
smallest offence to Mistress Croale. But if the least unquestionable
infringement of her rules occurred, she would pounce upon the
shameless one with sudden and sharp reproof. I doubt not that,
so doing, she cherished a hope of recommending herself above,
and making deposits in view of a coming balance-sheet. The result
for this life so far was, that, by these claims to respectability,
she had gathered a _clientèle_ of douce, well-disposed drunkards, who
rarely gave her any trouble so long as they were in the house, though
sometimes she had reason to be anxious about the fate of individuals
of them after they left it.

Another peculiarity in her government was that she would rarely give
drink to a woman. “Na, na,” she would say, “what has a wuman to dee
wi’ strong drink! Lat the men dee as they like, we canna help
_them_.” She made exception in behalf of her personal friends; and,
for herself, was in the way of sipping--only sipping--privately, on
account of her “trouble,” she said--by which she meant some
complaint, speaking of it as if it were generally known, although of
the nature of it nobody had an idea. The truth was that, like her
customers, she also was going down the hill, justifying to herself
every step of her descent. Until lately, she had been in the way of
going regularly to church, and she did go occasionally yet, and
always took the yearly sacrament; but the only result seemed to be
that she abounded the more in finding justifications, or, where they
were not to be had, excuses, for all she did. Probably the stirring
of her conscience made this the more necessary to her peace.

If the Lord were to appear in person amongst us, how much would the
sight of him do for the sinners of our day? I am not sure that many
like Mistress Croale would not go to him. She was not a bad woman,
but slowly and surely growing worse.

That morning, as soon as the customer whose entrance had withdrawn
her from her descent on Gibbie, had gulped down his dram, wiped his
mouth with his blue cotton handkerchief, settled his face into the
expression of a drink of water, gone demurely out, and crossed to
the other side of the street, she would have returned to the charge,
but was prevented by the immediately following entrance of the Rev.
Clement Sclater--the minister of her parish, recently appointed. He
was a man between young and middle-aged, an honest fellow, zealous
to perform the duties of his office, but with notions of religion
very beggarly. How could it be otherwise when he knew far more of
what he called the _Divine decrees_ than he did of his own heart, or
the needs and miseries of human nature? At the moment, Mistress
Croale was standing with her back to the door, reaching up to
replace the black bottle on its shelf, and did not see the man she
heard enter.

“What’s yer wull?” she said indifferently.

Mr. Sclater made no answer, waiting for her to turn and face him,
which she did the sooner for his silence. Then she saw a man
unknown to her--evidently, from his white neckcloth and funereal
garments, a minister--standing solemn, with wide-spread legs, and
round eyes of displeasure, expecting her attention.

“What’s yer wull, sir?” she repeated, with more respect, but less
cordiality than at first.

“If you ask my will,” he replied, with some pomposity, for who that
has just gained an object of ambition can be humble?--“it is that
you shut up this whisky shop, and betake yourself to a more decent
way of life in my parish.”

“My certie! but ye’re no blate (_over-modest_) to craw sae lood i’ _my_
hoose, an’ that’s a nearer fit nor a perris!” she cried, flaring up
in wrath both at the nature and rudeness of the address. “Alloo me
to tell ye, sir, ye’re the first ’at ever daured threep my hoose was
no a dacent ane.”

“I said nothing about your house. It was your shop I spoke of,”
said the minister, not guiltless of subterfuge.

“An’ what’s my chop but my hoose? Haith! my hoose wad be o’ fell
sma’ consideration wantin’ the chop. Tak ye heed o’ beirin’ fause
witness, sir.”

“I said nothing, and know nothing, against yours more than any other
shop for the sale of drink in my parish.”

“The Lord’s my shepherd! Wad ye even (_compare_) my hoose to Jock
Thamson’s or Jeemie Deuk’s, baith i’ this perris?”

“My good woman,--”

“Naither better nor waur nor my neepers,” interrupted Mistress
Croale, forgetting what she had just implied: “a body maun live.”

“There are limits even to that most generally accepted of all
principles,” returned Mr. Sclater; “and I give you fair warning that
I mean to do what I can to shut up all such houses as yours in my
parish. I tell you of it, not from the least hope that you will
anticipate me by closing, but merely that no one may say I did
anything in an underhand fashion.”

The calmness with which he uttered the threat alarmed Mistress
Croale. He might rouse unmerited suspicion, and cause her much
trouble by vexatious complaint, even to the peril of her license.
She must take heed, and not irritate her enemy. Instantly,
therefore, she changed her tone to one of expostulation.

“It’s a sair peety, doobtless,” she said, “’at there sud be sae mony
drouthie thrapples i’ the kingdom, sir; but drouth maun drink, an’
ye ken, sir, gien it war hauden frae them, they wad but see deils
an’ cut their throts.”

“They’re like to see deils ony gait er lang,” retorted the
minister, relapsing into the vernacular for a moment.

“Ow, ’deed maybe, sir! but e’en the deils themsel’s war justifeed i’
their objection to bein’ committed to their ain company afore their
time.”

Mr. Sclater could not help smiling at the woman’s readiness, and
that was a point gained by her. An acquaintance with Scripture goes
far with a Scotch ecclesiastic. Besides, the man had a redeeming
sense of humour, though he did not know how to prize it, not
believing it a gift of God.

“It’s true, my woman,” he answered. “Aye! it said something for them,
deils ’at they war, ’at they preferred the swine. But even the
swine cudna bide them!”

Encouraged by the condescension of the remark, but disinclined to
follow the path of reflection it indicated, Mistress Croale ventured
a little farther upon her own.

“Ye see, sir,” she said, “as lang ’s there’s whusky, it wull tak the
throt-ro’d. It’s the naitral w’y o’ ’t, ye see, to rin doon; an’
it’s no mainner o’ use gangin’ again’ natur. Sae, allooin’ the thing
maun be, ye’ll hae till alloo likewise, an’ it’s a trowth I’m
tellin’ ye, sir, ’at it’s o’ nae sma’ consequence to the toon ’at
the drucken craturs sud fill themsel’s wi’ dacency--an’ that’s what I
see till. Gang na to the magistrate, sir; but as sune ’s ye hae
gotten testimony--guid testimony though, sir--’at there’s been
disorder or immorawlity i’ my hoose, come ye to me, an’ I’ll gie ye
my han’ to paper on ’t this meenute, ’at I’ll gie up my chop, an’
lea’ yer perris--an’ may ye sune get a better i’ my place. Sir, I’m
like a mither to the puir bodies! An’ gien ye drive them to Jock
Thamson’s, or Jeemie Deuk’s, it’ll be jist like--savin’ the word, I
dinna inten’ ’t for sweirin’, guid kens!--I say, it’ll jist be
dammin’ them afore their time, like the puir deils. Hech! but it’ll
come sune eneuch, an’ they’re muckle to be peetied!”

“And when those victims of your vile ministrations,” said the
clergyman, again mounting his wooden horse, and setting it rocking,
“find themselves where there will be no whisky to refresh them,
where do you think you will be, Mistress Croale?”

“Whaur the Lord wulls,” answered the woman. “Whaur that may be, I
confess I’m whiles laith to think. Only gien I was you, Maister
Sclater, I wad think twise afore I made ill waur.”

“But hear me, Mistress Croale: it’s not your besotted customers only
I have to care for. Your soul is as precious in my sight as any of
which I shall have to render an account.”

“As Mistress Bonniman’s, for enstance?” suggested Mrs. Croale,
interrogatively, and with just the least trace of pawkiness in the
tone.

The city, large as it was, was yet not large enough to prevent a
portion of the private affairs of individuals from coming to be
treated as public property, and Mrs. Bonniman was a handsome and
rich young widow, the rumour of whose acceptableness to Mr. Sclater
had reached Mistress Croale’s ear before ever she had seen the
minister himself. An unmistakable shadow of confusion crossed his
countenance; whereupon with consideration both for herself and him,
the woman made haste to go on, as if she had but chosen her instance
at merest random.

“Na, na, sir! what my sowl may be in the eyes o’ my Maker, I hae ill
tellin’,” she said, “but dinna ye threep upo’ me ’at it’s o’ the
same vailue i’ _your_ eyes as the sowl o’ sic a fine, bonnie, winsome
leddy as yon. In trowth,” she added, and shook her head mournfully,
“I haena had sae mony preevileeges; an’ maybe it’ll be seen till,
an’ me passed ower a wheen easier nor some fowk.”

“I wouldn’t have you build too much upon that, Mistress Croale,”
said Mr. Sclater, glad to follow the talk down another turning, but
considerably more afraid of rousing the woman than he had been
before.

The remark drove her behind the categorical stockade of her
religious merits.

“I pey my w’y,” she said, with modest firmness. “I put my penny, and
whiles my saxpence, intil the plate at the door whan I gang to the
kirk--an’ I was jist thinkin’ I wad win there the morn’s nicht at
farest, whan I turnt an’ saw ye stan’in there, sir; an’ little I
thoucht--but that’s neither here nor there, I’m thinkin’. I tell as
feow lees as I can; I never sweir, nor tak the name o’ the Lord in
vain, anger me ’at likes; I sell naething but the best whusky; I
never hae but broth to my denner upo’ the Lord’s day, an’ broth
canna brak the Sawbath, simmerin’ awa upo’ the bar o’ the grate,
an’ haudin’ no lass frae the kirk; I confess, gien ye wull be
speirin’, ’at I dinna read my buik sae aften as maybe I sud; but,
’deed, sir, tho’ I says ’t ’at sud haud my tongue, ye hae waur folk
i’ yer perris nor Benjie Croale’s widow; an’ gien ye wunna hae a
drap to weet yer ain whustle for the holy wark ye hae afore ye the
morn’s mornin’, I maun gang an’ mak my bed, for the lass is laid up
wi’ a bealt thoom, an’ I maunna lat a’ thing gang to dirt an’ green
bree; though I’m sure it’s rale kin’ o’ ye to come to luik efter me,
an’ that’s mair nor Maister Rennie, honest gentleman, ever did me
the fawvour o’, a’ the time he ministered the perris. I haena an
ill name wi’ them ’at kens me, sir; that I can say wi’ a clean
conscience; an’ ye may ken me weel gien ye wull. An’ there’s jist
ae thing mair, sir: I gie ye my Bible-word, ’at never, gien I saw
sign o’ repentance or turnin’ upo’ ane o’ them ’at pits their legs
aneth my table--Wad ye luik intil the parlour, sir? No!--as I was
sayin’, never did I, sin I keepit hoose, an’ never wad I set mysel’
to quench the smokin’ flax; I wad hae no man’s deith, sowl or body,
lie at my door.”

“Well, well, Mistress Croale,” said the minister, somewhat dazed by
the cataract he had brought upon his brain, and rather perplexed
what to say in reply with any hope of reaching her, “I don’t doubt a
word of what you tell me; but you know works cannot save us; our
best righteousness is but as filthy rags.”

“It’s weel I ken that, Mr. Sclater. An’ I’m sure I’ll be glaid to
see ye, sir, ony time ye wad dee me the fawvour to luik in as ye’re
passin’ by. It’ll be none to yer shame, sir, for mine’s an honest
hoose.”

“I’ll do that, Mistress Croale,” answered the minister, glad to
escape. “But mind,” he added, “I don’t give up my point for all
that; and I hope you will think over what I have been saying to
you--and that seriously.”

With these words he left the shop rather hurriedly, in evident dread
of a reply.

Mistress Croale turned to the shelves behind her, took again the
bottle she had replaced, poured out a large half-glass of whisky,
and tossed it off. She had been compelled to think and talk of
things unpleasant, and it had put her, as she said, _a’ in a trim’le_.
She was but one of the many who get the fuel of their life in at
the wrong door, their comfort from the world-side of the universe.
I cannot tell whether Mr. Sclater or she was the farther from the
central heat. The woman had the advantage in this, that she had to
expend all her force on mere self-justification, and had no energy
left for vain-glory. It was with a sad sigh she set about the work
of the house. Nor would it have comforted her much to assure her
that hers was a better defence than any distiller in the country
could make. Even the whisky itself gave her little relief; it
seemed to scald both stomach and conscience, and she vowed never to
take it again. But alas! this time is never the time for
self-denial; it is always the next time. Abstinence is so much more
pleasant to contemplate upon the other side of indulgence! Yet the
struggles after betterment that many a drunkard has made in vain,
would, had his aim been high enough, have saved his soul from death,
and turned the charnel of his life into a temple. Abject as he is,
foiled and despised, such a one may not yet be half so contemptible
as many a so-counted respectable member of society, who looks down
on him from a height too lofty even for scorn. It is not the first
and the last only, of whom many will have to change places; but
those as well that come everywhere between.




CHAPTER IV.

THE PARLOUR.

The day went on, and went out, its short autumnal brightness quenched
in a chilly fog. All along the Widdiehill, the gas was alight in the
low-browed dingy shops. To the well-to-do citizen hastening home to
the topmost business of the day, his dinner, these looked the abodes
of unlovely poverty and mean struggle. Even to those behind their
counters, in their back parlours, and in their rooms above, everything
about them looked common--to most of them, save the owners, wearisome.
But to yon pale-faced student, gliding in the glow of his red gown,
through the grey mist, back to his lodging, and peeping in at every
open door as he passes, they are so full of mystery, that gladly would
he yield all he has gathered from books, for one genuine glance of
insight into the vital movement of the hearts and households of which
those open shops are the sole outward and visible signs. Each house is
to him a nest of human birds, over which brood the eternal wings of
love and purpose. Only such different birds are hatched from the same
nest! And what a nest was then the city itself!--with its university,
its schools, its churches, its hospitals, its missions; its homes, its
lodging-houses, its hotels, its drinking shops, its houses viler still;
its factories, its ships, its great steamers; and the same humanity
busy in all!--here the sickly lady walking in the panoply of love
unharmed through the horrors of vicious suffering; there the strong
mother cursing her own child along half a street with an intensity and
vileness of execration unheard elsewhere! The will of the brooding
spirit must be a grand one, indeed, to enclose so much of what cannot
be its will, and turn all to its purpose of eternal good! Our knowledge
of humanity, how much more our knowledge of the Father of it, is moving
as yet but in the first elements.

In his shed under the stair it had been dark for some time--too dark
for work, that is, and George Galbraith had lighted a candle: he never
felt at liberty to leave off so long as a man was recognizable in
the street by daylight. But now at last, with a sigh of relief, he
rose. The hour of his redemption was come, the moment of it at hand.
Outwardly calm, he was within eager as a lover to reach Lucky Croale’s
back parlour. His hand trembled with expectation as he laid from it the
awl, took from between his knees the great boot on the toe of which
he had been stitching a patch, lifted the yoke of his leather apron
over his head, and threw it aside. With one hasty glance around, as
if he feared some enemy lurking near to prevent his escape, he caught
up a hat which looked as if it had been brushed with grease, pulled
it on his head with both hands, stepped out quickly, closed the door
behind him, turned the key, left it in the lock, and made straight for
his earthly paradise--but with chastened step. All Mistress Croale’s
customers made a point of looking decent in the street--strove, in
their very consciousness, to carry the expression of being on their way
to their tea, not their toddy--or if their toddy, then not that they
desired it, but merely that it was their custom always of an afternoon:
man had no choice--he must fill space, he must occupy himself; and if
so, why not Mistress Croale’s the place, and the consumption of whisky
the occupation? But alas for their would-be seeming indifference!
Everybody in the lane, almost in the Widdiehill, knew every one of
them, and knew him for what he was; knew that every drop of toddy he
drank was to him as to a miser his counted sovereign; knew that, as
the hart for the water-brooks, so thirsted his soul ever after another
tumbler; that he made haste to swallow the last drops of the present,
that he might behold the plenitude of the next steaming before him;
that, like the miser, he always understated the amount of the treasure
he had secured, because the less he acknowledged, the more he thought
he could claim.

George was a tall man, of good figure, loosened and bowed. His face
was well favoured, but not a little wronged by the beard and dirt
of a week, through which it gloomed haggard and white. Beneath his
projecting black brows, his eyes gleamed doubtful, as a wood-fire where
white ash dims the glow. He looked neither to right nor left, but
walked on with moveless dull gaze, noting nothing.

“Yon’s his ain warst enemy,” said the kindly grocer-wife, as he passed
her door.

“Aye,” responded her customer, who kept a shop near by for old
furniture, or anything that had been already once possessed--“aye, I
daursay. But eh! to see that puir negleckit bairn o’ his rin scoorin’
aboot the toon yon gait--wi’ little o’ a jacket but the collar, an’
naething o’ the breeks but the doup--eh, wuman! it maks a mither’s hert
sair to luik upo’ ’t. It’s a providence ’at _his_ mither’s weel awa an’
canna see ’t; it wad gar her turn in her grave.”

George was the first arrival at Mistress Croale’s that night. He opened
the door of the shop like a thief, and glided softly into the dim
parlour, where the candles were not yet lit. There was light enough,
however, from the busy little fire in the grate to show the clean
sanded floor which it crossed with flickering shadows, the coloured
prints and cases of stuffed birds on the walls, the full-rigged barque
suspended from the centre of the ceiling, and, chief of all shows of
heaven or earth, the black bottle on the table, with the tumblers, each
holding its ladle, and its wine glass turned bottom upwards. Nor must
I omit a part without which the rest could not have been a whole--the
kettle of water that sat on the hob, softly crooning. Compared with the
place where George had been at work all day, this was indeed an earthly
paradise. Nor was the presence and appearance of Mistress Croale an
insignificant element in the paradisial character of the place. She
was now in a clean white cap with blue ribbons. Her hair was neatly
divided, and drawn back from her forehead. Every trace of dirt and
untidiness had disappeared from her person, which was one of importance
both in size and in bearing. She wore a gown of some dark stuff with
bright flowers on it, and a black silk apron. Her face was composed,
almost to sadness, and throughout the evening, during which she waited
in person upon her customers, she comported herself with such dignity,
that her slow step and stately carriage seemed rather to belong to the
assistant at some religious ceremony than to one who ministered at the
orgies of a few drunken tradespeople.

She was seated on the horsehair sofa in the fire-twilight, waiting for
customers, when the face of Galbraith came peering round the door-cheek.

“Come awa ben,” she said, hospitably, and rose. But as she did so,
she added with a little change of tone, “But I’m thinkin’ ye maun hae
forgotten, Sir George. This is Setterday nicht, ye ken; an’ gien it war
to be Sunday mornin’ afore ye wan to yer bed, it wadna be the first
time, an’ ye michtna be up ear’ eneuch to get yersel shaved afore kirk
time.”

She knew as well as George himself that never by any chance did he
go to church; but it was her custom, as I fancy it is that of some
other bulwarks of society and pillars of the church, “for the sake
of example,” I presume, to make not unfrequent allusion to certain
observances, moral, religious, or sanatory as if they were laws that
everybody kept.

Galbraith lifted his hand, black, and embossed with cobbler’s wax,
and rubbed it thoughtfully over his chin: he accepted the fiction
offered him; it was but the well-known prologue to a hebdomadal passage
between them. What if he did not intend going to church the next day?
Was that any reason why he should not look a little tidier when his
hard week’s-work was over, and his nightly habit was turned into the
comparatively harmless indulgence of a Saturday, in sure hope of the
day of rest behind.

“Troth, I didna min’ ’at it was Setterday,” he answered. “I wuss I had
pitten on a clean sark, an’ washen my face. But I s’ jist gang ower to
the barber’s an’ get a scrape, an’ maybe some o’ them ’ill be here or I
come back.”

Mistress Croale knew perfectly that there was no clean shirt in
George’s garret. She knew also that the shirt he then wore, which
probably, in consideration of her maid’s festered hand, she would wash
for him herself, was one of her late husband’s which she had given him.
But George’s speech was one of those forms of sound words held fast by
all who frequented Mistress Croale’s parlour, and by herself estimated
at more than their worth.

The woman had a genuine regard for Galbraith. Neither the character
nor fate of one of the rest gave her a moment’s trouble; but in her
secret mind she deplored that George should drink so inordinately,
and so utterly neglect his child as to let him spend his life in the
streets. She comforted herself, however, with the reflection, that
seeing he would drink, he drank with no bad companions--drank at all
events where what natural wickedness might be in them, was suppressed
by the sternness of her rule. Were he to leave her fold--for a fold in
very truth, and not a sty, it appeared to her--and wander away to Jock
Thamson’s or Jeemie Deuk’s, he would be drawn into loud and indecorous
talk, probably into quarrel and uproar.

In a few minutes George returned, an odd contrast visible between the
upper and lower halves of his face. Hearing his approach she met him at
the door.

“Noo, Sir George,” she said, “jist gang up to my room an’ hae a wash,
an’ pit on the sark ye’ll see lyin’ upo’ the bed; syne come doon an’
hae yer tum’ler comfortable.”

George’s whole soul was bent upon his drink, but he obeyed as if she
had been twice his mother. By the time he had finished his toilet, the
usual company was assembled, and he appeared amongst them in all the
respectability of a clean shirt and what purity besides the general
adhesiveness of his trade-material would yield to a single ablution
long delayed. They welcomed him all, with nod, or grin, or merry
word, in individual fashion, as each sat measuring out his whisky, or
pounding at the slow-dissolving sugar, or tasting the mixture with
critical soul seated between tongue and palate.

The conversation was for some time very dull, with a strong tendency
to the censorious. For in their circle, not only were the claims of
respectability silently admitted, but the conduct of this and that man
of their acquaintance, or of public note, was pronounced upon with
understood reference to those claims--now with smile of incredulity or
pity, now with headshake regretful or condemnatory--and this all the
time that each was doing his best to reduce himself to a condition in
which the word conduct could no longer have meaning in reference to him.

All of them, as did their hostess, addressed Galbraith as Sir George,
and he accepted the title with a certain unassuming dignity. For, if it
was not universally known in the city, it was known to the best lawyers
in it, that he was a baronet by direct derivation from the hand of King
James the Sixth.

The fire burned cheerfully, and the kettle making many journeys
between it and the table, things gradually grew more lively. Stories
were told, often without any point, but not therefore without effect;
reminiscences, sorely pulpy and broken at the edges, were offered
and accepted with a laughter in which sober ears might have detected
a strangely alien sound; and adventures were related in which truth
was no necessary element to reception. In the case of the postman,
for instance, who had been dismissed for losing a bag of letters the
week before, not one of those present believed a word he said; yet as
he happened to be endowed with a small stock of genuine humour, his
stories were regarded with much the same favour as if they had been
authentic. But the revival scarcely reached Sir George. He said little
or nothing, but, between his slow gulps of toddy, sat looking vacantly
into his glass. It is true he smiled absently now and then when the
others laughed, but that was only for manners. Doubtless he was seeing
somewhere the saddest of all visions--the things that might have been.
The wretched craving of the lower organs stilled, and something spared
for his brain, I believe the chief joy his drink gave him lay in the
power once more to feel himself a gentleman. The washed hands, the
shaven face, the clean shirt, had something to do with it, no doubt,
but the necromantic whisky had far more.

What faded ghosts of ancestral dignity and worth and story the evil
potion called up in the mind of Sir George!--who himself hung ready
to fall, the last, or all but the last, mildewed fruit of the tree of
Galbraith! Ah! if this one and that of his ancestors had but lived to
his conscience, and with some thought of those that were to come after
him, he would not have transmitted to poor Sir George, in horrible
addition to moral weakness, that physical proclivity which had now
grown to such a hideous craving. To the miserable wretch himself it
seemed that he could no more keep from drinking whisky than he could
from breathing air.




CHAPTER V.

GIBBIE’S CALLING.

I am not sure that his father’s neglect was not on the whole better for
Gibbie than would have been the kindness of such a father persistently
embodying itself. But the picture of Sir George, by the help of whisky
and the mild hatching oven of Mistress Croale’s parlour, softly
breaking from the shell of the cobbler, and floating a mild gentleman
in the air of his lukewarm imagination, and poor wee Gibbie trotting
outside in the frosty dark of the autumn night, through which the
moon keeps staring down, vague and disconsolate, is hardly therefore
the less pathetic. Under the window of the parlour where the light of
revel shone radiant through a red curtain, he would stand listening
for a moment, then, darting off a few yards suddenly and swiftly like
a scared bird, fall at once into his own steady trot--up the lane and
down, till he reached the window again, where again he would stand and
listen. Whether he made this departure and return twenty or a hundred
times in a night, he nor any one else could have told. Sometimes he
would for a change extend his trot along the Widdiehill, sometimes
along the parallel Vennel, but never far from Jink Lane and its glowing
window. Never moth haunted lamp so persistently. Ever as he ran, up
this pavement and down that, on the soft-sounding soles of his bare
feet, the smile on the boy’s face grew more and more sleepy, but still
he smiled and still he trotted, still paused at the window, and still
started afresh.

He was not so much to be pitied as my reader may think. Never in his
life had he yet pitied himself. The thought of hardship or wrong had
not occurred to him. It would have been difficult--impossible, I
believe--to get the idea into his head that existence bore to him any
other shape than it ought. Things were with him as they had always
been, and whence was he to take a fresh start, and question what had
been from the beginning? Had any authority interfered, with a decree
that Gibbie should no more scour the midnight streets, no more pass and
repass that far-shining splendour of red, then indeed would bitter,
though inarticulate, complaint have burst from his bosom. But there
was no evil power to issue such a command, and Gibbie’s peace was not
invaded.

It was now late, and those streets were empty; neither carriage nor
cart, wheelbarrow nor truck, went any more bumping and clattering
over their stones. They were well lighted with gas, but most of the
bordering houses were dark. Now and then a single foot-farer passed
with loud, hollow-sounding boots along the pavement; or two girls
would come laughing along, their merriment echoing rude in the wide
stillness. A cold wind, a small, forsaken, solitary wind, moist with
a thin fog, seemed, as well as wee Gibbie, to be roaming the night,
for it met him at various corners, and from all directions. But it had
nothing to do, and nowhere to go, and there it was not like Gibbie, the
business of whose life was even now upon him, the mightiest hope of
whose conscious being was now awake.

All he expected, or ever desired to discover, by listening at the
window, was simply whether there were yet signs of the company’s
breaking up; and his conclusions on that point were never mistaken:
how he arrived at them it would be hard to say. Seldom had he there
heard the voice of his father, still seldomer anything beyond its tone.
This night, however, as the time drew near when they must go, lest
the Sabbath should be broken in Mistress Croale’s decent house, and
Gibbie stood once more on tiptoe, with his head just on the level of
the windowsill, he heard his father utter two words: “Up Daurside” came
to him through the window, in the voice he loved, plain and distinct.
The words conveyed to him nothing at all; the mere hearing of them
made them memorable. For the time, however, he forgot them, for, by
indications best known to himself, he perceived that the company was on
the point of separating, and from that moment did not take his eyes off
the door until he heard the first sounds of its opening. As, however,
it was always hard for Gibbie to stand still, and especially hard on
a midnight so cold that his feet threatened to grow indistinguishable
from the slabs of the pavement, he was driven, in order not to lose
sight of it, to practise the art, already cultivated by him to a
crab-like perfection, of running first backwards, then forwards with
scarcely superior speed. But it was not long ere the much expected
sound of Mistress Croale’s voice heralded the hour for patience to
blossom into possession. The voice was neither loud nor harsh, but
clear and firm; the noise that followed was both loud and strident.
Voices had a part in it, but the movement of chairs and feet and the
sudden contact of different portions of the body with walls and tables,
had a larger. The guests were obeying the voice of their hostess all
in one like a flock of sheep, but it was poor shepherd-work to turn
them out of the fold at midnight. Gibbie bounded up and stood still as
a statue at the very door-cheek, until he heard Mistress Croale’s hand
upon the lock, when he bolted, trembling with eagerness, into the entry
of a court a few houses nearer to the Widdiehill.

One after one the pitiable company issued from its paradise, and each
stumbled away, too far gone for leave-taking. Most of them passed
Gibbie where he stood, but he took no heed; his father was always the
last--and the least capable. But, often as he left her door, never did
it close behind him until with her own eyes Mistress Croale had seen
Gibbie dart like an imp out of the court--to take him in charge, and,
all the weary way home, hover, not very like a guardian angel, but not
the less one in truth, around the unstable equilibrium of his father’s
tall and swaying form. And thereupon commenced a series of marvellous
gymnastics on the part of wee Gibbie. Imagine a small boy with a
gigantic top, which, six times his own size, he keeps erect on its peg,
not by whipping it round, but by running round it himself, unfailingly
applying, at the very spot and at the very moment, the precise measure
of impact necessary to counterbalance its perpetual tendency to fall in
one direction or another, so that the two have all the air of a single
invention--such an invention as one might meet with in an ancient
clock, contrived when men had time to mingle play with earnest--and you
will have in your mind’s eye a real likeness of Sir George attended,
any midnight in the week, by his son Gilbert. Home the big one
staggered, reeled, gyrated, and tumbled; round and round him went the
little one, now behind, now before, now on this side, now on that, his
feet never more than touching the ground but dancing about like those
of a prize-fighter, his little arms up and his hands well forward, like
flying buttresses. And such indeed they were--buttresses which flew and
flew all about a universally leaning tower. They propped it here, they
propped it there; with wonderful judgment and skill and graduation of
force they applied themselves, and with perfect success. Not once, for
the last year and a half, during which time wee Gibbie had been the
nightly guide of Sir George’s homeward steps, had the self-disabled
mass fallen prostrate in the gutter, there to snore out the night.

The first special difficulty, that of turning the corner of Jink Lane
and the Widdiehill, successfully overcome, the twain went reeling
and revolving along the street, much like a whirlwind that had half
forgotten the laws of gyration, until at length it spun into the court,
and up to the foot of the outside stair over the baronet’s workshop.
Then commenced the real struggle of the evening for Gibbie--and for his
father too, though the latter was aware of it only in the momentary and
evanescent flashes of such enlightenment as made him just capable of
yielding to the pushes and pulls of the former. All up the outside and
the two inside stairs, his waking and sleeping were as the alternate
tictac of a pendulum; but Gibbie stuck to his business like a man, and
his resolution and perseverance were at length, as always, crowned with
victory.

The house in which lords and ladies had often reposed was now filled
with very humble folk, who were all asleep when Gibbie and his
father entered; but the noise they made in ascending caused no great
disturbance of their rest; for, if any of them were roused for a
moment, it was but to recognize at once the cause of the tumult, and
with the remark, “It’s only wee Gibbie luggin’ hame Sir George,” to
turn on the other side and fall asleep again.

Arrived at last at the garret door, which stood wide open, Gibbie had
small need of light in the nearly pitch darkness of the place, for
there was positively nothing to stumble over or against between the
door and the ancient four-post bed, which was all of his father’s house
that remained to Sir George. With heavy shuffling feet the drunkard
lumbered laboriously bedward; and the bare posts and crazy frame
groaned and creaked as he fell upon the oat-chaff that lay waiting him
in place of the vanished luxury of feathers. Wee Gibbie flew at his
legs, nor rested until, the one after the other, he had got them on the
bed; if then they were not very comfortably deposited, he knew that, in
his first turn, their owner would get them all right.

And now rose the _culmen_ of Gibbie’s day! its cycle, rounded through
regions of banishment, returned to its nodus of bliss. In triumph he
spread over his sleeping father his dead mother’s old plaid of Gordon
tartan, all the bedding they had, and without a moment’s further
delay--no shoes even to put off--crept under it, and nestled close
upon the bosom of his unconscious parent. A victory more! another day
ended with success! his father safe, and all his own! the canopy of the
darkness and the plaid over them, as if they were the only two in the
universe! his father unable to leave him--his for whole dark hours to
come! It was Gibbie’s paradise now! His heaven was his father’s bosom,
to which he clung as no infant yet ever clung to his mother’s. He never
thought to pity himself that the embrace was all on his side, that no
answering pressure came back from the prostrate form. He never said
to himself, “My father is a drunkard, but I must make the best of it;
he is all I have!” He clung to his one possession--only clung: this
was his father--all in all to him. What must be the bliss of such a
heart--of any heart--when it comes to know that there is a father of
fathers, yea, a father of fatherhood! a father who never slumbers nor
sleeps, but holds all the sleeping in his ever waking bosom--a bosom
whose wakefulness is the sole fountain of their slumber!

The conscious bliss of the child was of short duration, for in a few
minutes he was fast asleep; but for the gain of those few minutes only,
the day had been well spent.




CHAPTER VI.

A SUNDAY AT HOME.

Such were the events of every night, and such had they been since
Gibbie first assumed this office of guardian--a time so long in
proportion to his life that it seemed to him as one of the laws of
existence that fathers got drunk and Gibbies took care of them. But
Saturday night was always one of special bliss; for then the joy to
come spread its arms beneath and around the present delight: all Sunday
his father would be his. On that happiest day of all the week, he never
set his foot out of doors, except to run twice to Mistress Croale’s,
once to fetch the dinner which she supplied from her own table, and
for which Sir George regularly paid in advance on Saturday before
commencing his potations.

But indeed the streets were not attractive to the child on Sundays:
there were no shops open, and the people in their Sunday clothes, many
of them with their faces studiously settled into masks intended to
express righteousness, were far less interesting, because less alive,
than the same people in their work-day attire, in their shops, or
seated at their stalls, or driving their carts, and looking thoroughly
human. As to going to church himself, such an idea had never entered
his head. He had not once for a moment imagined that anybody would
like him to go to church, that such as he ever went to church, that
church was at all a place to which Gibbies with fathers to look after
should have any desire to go. As to what church going meant, he had
not the vaguest idea; it had not even waked the glimmer of a question
in his mind. All he knew was that people went to church on Sundays.
It was another of the laws of existence, the reason of which he knew
no more than why his father went every night to Jink Lane and got
drunk. George, however, although he had taught his son nothing, was not
without religion, and had notions of duty in respect of the Sabbath.
Not even with the prize of whisky in view, would he have consented to
earn a sovereign on that day by the lightest of work.

Gibbie was awake some time before his father, and lay revelling in
love’s bliss of proximity. At length Sir George, the merest bubble of
nature, awoke, and pushed him from him.

The child got up at once, but only to stand by the bed-side. He said no
word, did not even think an impatient thought, yet his father seemed
to feel that he was waiting for him. After two or three huge yawns,
he spread out his arms, but, unable to stretch himself, yawned again,
rolled himself off the bed, and crept feebly across the room to an
empty chest that stood under the skylight. There he seated himself,
and for half an hour sat motionless, a perfect type of dilapidation,
moral and physical, while a little way off stood Gibbie, looking on,
like one awaiting a resurrection. At length he seemed to come to
himself--the expected sign of which was that he reached down his hand
towards the meeting of roof and floor, and took up a tiny last with a
half-made boot upon it. At sight of it in his father’s hands, Gibbie
clapped his with delight--an old delight, renewed every Sunday since
he could remember. That boot was for him! and this being the second,
the pair would be finished before night! By slow degrees of revival,
with many pauses between, George got to work. He wanted no breakfast,
and made no inquiry of Gibbie whether he had had any. But what cared
Gibbie about breakfast! With his father all to himself, and that father
working away at a new boot for him--for him who had never had a pair of
any sort upon his feet since the woollen ones he wore in his mother’s
lap, breakfast or no breakfast was much the same to him. It could never
have occurred to him that it was his father’s part to provide him with
breakfast. If he was to have none, it was Sunday that was to blame:
there was no use in going to look for any when the shops were all shut,
and everybody either at church, or closed in domestic penetralia, or
out for a walk. More than contented, therefore, while busily his father
wedded welt and sole with stitches infrangible, Gibbie sat on the
floor, preparing waxed ends, carefully sticking in the hog’s bristle,
and rolling the combination, with quite professional aptitude, between
the flat of his hand and what of trouser-leg he had left, gazing
eagerly between at the advancing masterpiece. Occasionally the triumph
of expectation would exceed his control, when he would spring from the
floor, and caper and strut about like a pigeon--soft as a shadow, for
he knew his father could not bear noise in the morning--or behind his
back execute a pantomimic dumb show of delight, in which he seemed with
difficulty to restrain himself from jumping upon him, and hugging him
in his ecstasy. Oh, best of parents! working thus even on a Sunday for
his Gibbie, when everybody else was at church enjoying himself! But
Gibbie never dared hug his father except when he was drunk--why, he
could hardly have told. Relieved by his dumb show, he would return,
quiet as an aged grimalkin, and again deposit himself on the floor near
his father where he could see his busy hands.

All this time Sir George never spoke a word. Incredible as it may
seem, however, he was continually, off and on, trying his hardest to
think of some Sunday lesson to give his child. Many of those that knew
the boy, regarded him as a sort of idiot, drawing the conclusion from
Gibbie’s practical honesty and his too evident love for his kind: it
was incredible that a child should be poor, unselfish, loving, and
_not_ deficient in intellect! His father knew him better, yet he often
quieted his conscience in regard to his education, with the reflection
that not much could be done for him. Still, every now and then he
would think perhaps he ought to do something: who could tell but the
child might be damned for not understanding the plan of salvation?
and brooding over the matter this morning, as well as his headache
would permit, he came to the resolution, as he had often done before,
to buy a Shorter Catechism; the boy could not learn it, but he would
keep reading it to him, and something might stick. Even now perhaps he
could begin the course by recalling some of the questions and answers
that had been the plague of his life every Saturday at school. He set
his recollection to work, therefore, in the lumber-room of his memory,
and again and again sent it back to the task, but could find nothing
belonging to the catechism except the first question with its answer,
and a few incoherent fragments of others. Moreover, he found his mind
so confused and incapable of continuous or concentrated effort, that
he could not even keep “man’s chief end” and the rosined end between
his fingers from twisting up together in the most extraordinary manner.
Yet if the child but “had the question,” he might get some good of
it. The hour might come when he would say, “My father taught me
that!”--who could tell? And he knew he had the words correct, wherever
he had dropped their meaning. For the sake of Gibbie’s immortal part,
therefore, he would repeat the answer to that first, most momentous
of questions, over and over as he worked, in the hope of insinuating
something--he could not say what--into the small mental pocket of the
innocent. The first, therefore, and almost the only words which Gibbie
heard from his father’s lips that morning, were these, dozens of times
repeated--“Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him for
ever.” But so far was Gibbie from perceiving in them any meaning, that
even with his father’s pronunciation of _chief end_ as _chifenn_, they
roused in his mind no sense or suspicion of obscurity. The word stuck
there, notwithstanding; but Gibbie was years a man before he found out
what a _chifenn_ was. Where was the great matter? How many who have
learned their catechism and deplore the ignorance of others, make the
least effort to place their chief end even in the direction of that
of their creation? Is it not the constant thwarting of their aims,
the rendering of their desires futile, and their ends a mockery, that
alone prevents them and their lives from proving an absolute failure?
Sir George, with his inveterate, consuming thirst for whisky, was but
the type of all who would gain their bliss after the scheme of their
own fancies, instead of the scheme of their existence; who would
build their house after their own childish wilfulness instead of the
ground-plan of their being. How was Sir George to glorify the God whom
he could honestly thank for nothing but whisky, the sole of his gifts
that he prized? Over and over that day he repeated the words, “Man’s
chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him for ever,” and all the
time his imagination, his desire, his hope, were centred on the bottle,
which with his very back he felt where it stood behind him, away on
the floor at the head of his bed. Nevertheless when he had gone over
them a score of times or so, and Gibbie had begun, by a merry look and
nodding of his head, to manifest that he knew what was coming next, the
father felt more content with himself than for years past; and when
he was satisfied that Gibbie knew all the words, though, indeed, they
were hardly more than sounds to him, he sent him, with a great sense of
relief, to fetch the broth and beef and potatoes from Mistress Croale’s.

Eating a real dinner in his father’s house, though without a table to
set it upon, Gibbie felt himself a most privileged person. The only
thing that troubled him was that his father ate so little. Not until
the twilight began to show did Sir George really begin to revive,
but the darker it grew without, the brighter his spirit burned.
For, amongst not a few others, there was this strange remnant of
righteousness in the man, that he never would taste drink before it
was dark in winter, or in summer before the regular hour for ceasing
work had arrived; and to this rule he kept, and that under far greater
difficulties, on the Sunday as well. For Mistress Croale would not sell
a drop of drink, not even on the sly, on the Sabbath-day: she would
fain have some stake in the hidden kingdom; and George, who had not a
Sunday stomach he could assume for the day any more than a Sunday coat,
was thereby driven to provide his whisky and that day drink it at home;
when, with the bottle so near him, and the sense that he had not to go
out to find his relief, his resolution was indeed sorely tried; but he
felt that to yield would be to cut his last cable and be swept on the
lee-shore of utter ruin.

Breathless with eager interest, Gibbie watched his father’s hands, and
just as the darkness closed in, the boot was finished. His father rose,
and Gibbie, glowing with delight, sprang upon the seat he had left,
while his father knelt upon the floor to try upon the unaccustomed foot
the result from which he had just drawn the last. Ah, pity! pity! But
even Gibbie might by this time have learned to foresee it! three times
already had the same thing happened: the boot would not go on the foot.
The real cause of the failure it were useless to inquire. Sir George
said that, Sunday being the only day he could give to the boots, before
he could finish them, Gibbie’s feet had always outgrown the measure.
But it may be Sir George was not so good a maker as cobbler. That he
meant honestly by the boy I am sure, and not the less sure for the
confession I am forced to make, that on each occasion when he thus
failed to fit him, he sold the boots the next day at a fair price to a
ready-made shop, and drank the proceeds. A stranger thing still was,
that, although Gibbie had never yet worn boot or shoe, his father’s
conscience was greatly relieved by the knowledge that he spent his
Sundays in making boots for him. Had he been an ordinary child, and
given him trouble, he would possibly have hated him; as it was, he had
a great though sadly inoperative affection for the boy, which was an
endless good to them both.

After many bootless trials, bootless the feet must remain, and George,
laying the failure down in despair, rose from his knees, and left
Gibbie seated on the chest more like a king discrowned, than a beggar
unshod. And like a king the little beggar bore his pain. He heaved
one sigh, and a slow moisture gathered in his eyes, but it did not
overflow. One minute only he sat and hugged his desolation--then,
missing his father, jumped off the box to find him.

He sat on the edge of the bed, looking infinitely more disconsolate
than Gibbie felt, his head and hands hanging down, a picture of utter
dejection. Gibbie bounded to him, climbed on the bed, and nearly
strangled him in the sharp embrace of his little arms. Sir George took
him on his knees and kissed him, and the tears rose in his dull eyes.
He got up with him, carried him to the box, placed him on it once more,
and fetched a piece of brown paper from under the bed. From this he
tore carefully several slips, with which he then proceeded to take a
most thoughtful measurement of the baffling foot. He was far more to be
pitied than Gibbie, who would not have worn the boots an hour had they
been the best fit in shoedom. The soles of his feet were very nearly
equal in resistance to leather, and at least until the snow and hard
frost came, he was better without boots.

But now the darkness had fallen, and his joy was at the door. But he
was always too much ashamed to _begin_ to drink before the child: he
hated to uncork the bottle before him. What followed was in regular
Sunday routine.

“Gang ower to Mistress Croale’s, Gibbie,” he said, “wi’ my compliments.”

Away ran Gibbie, nothing loath, and at his knock was admitted. Mistress
Croale sat in the parlour, taking her tea, and expecting him. She was
always kind to the child. She could not help feeling that no small
part of what ought to be spent on him came to her; and on Sundays,
therefore, partly for his sake, partly for her own, she always gave him
his tea--nominally tea, really blue city-milk--with as much dry bread
as he could eat, and a bit of buttered toast from her plate to finish
off with. As he ate, he stood at the other side of the table; he looked
so miserable in her eyes that, even before her servant, she was ashamed
to have him sit with her; but Gibbie was quite content, never thought
of sitting, and ate in gladness, every now and then looking up with
loving, grateful eyes, which must have gone right to the woman’s heart,
had it not been for a vague sense she had of being all the time his
enemy--and that although she spent much time in persuading herself that
she did her best both for his father and him.

When he returned, greatly refreshed, and the boots all but forgotten,
he found his father, as he knew he would, already started on the
business of the evening. He had drawn the chest, the only seat in the
room, to the side of the bed, against which he leaned his back. A penny
candle was burning in a stone blacking bottle on the chimney piece,
and on the floor beside the chest stood the bottle of whisky, a jug of
water, a stoneware mug, and a wineglass.

There was no fire and no kettle, whence his drinking was sad, as became
the Scotch Sabbath in distinction from the Jewish. There, however, was
the drink, and thereby his soul could live--yea, expand her mouldy
wings! Gibbie was far from shocked; it was all right, all in the order
of things, and he went up to his father with radiant countenance. Sir
George put forth his hands and took him between his knees. An evil wind
now swelled his sails, but the cargo of the crazy human hull was not
therefore evil.

“Gibbie,” he said, solemnly, “never ye drink a drap o’ whusky. Never
ye rax oot the han’ to the boatle. Never ye drink onything but watter,
caller watter, my man.”

As he said the words, he stretched out his own hand to the mug, lifted
it to his lips, and swallowed a great gulp.

“Dinna do ’t, I tell ye, Gibbie,” he repeated.

Gibbie shook his head with positive repudiation.

“That’s richt, my man,” responded his father with satisfaction. “Gien
ever I see ye pree (_taste_) the boatle, I’ll warstle frae my grave an’
fleg ye oot o’ the sma’ wuts ye hae, my man.”

Here followed another gulp from the mug.

The threat had conveyed nothing to Gibbie. Even had he understood, it
would have carried anything but terror to his father-worshipping heart.

“Gibbie,” resumed Sir George, after a brief pause, “div ye ken what
fowk’ll ca’ ye whan I’m deid?”

Gibbie again shook his head--with expression this time of mere
ignorance.

“They’ll ca’ ye Sir Gibbie Galbraith, my man,” said his father, “an’
richtly, for it’ll be no nickname, though some may lauch ’cause yer
father was a sutor, an’ mair ’at, for a’ that, ye haena a shee to yer
fut yersel’, puir fallow! Heedna ye what they say, Gibbie. Min’ ’at
ye’re Sir Gibbie, an’ hae the honour o’ the faimily to haud up, my
man--an’ that ye _can not_ dee an’ drink. This cursit drink’s been
the ruin o’ a’ the Galbraiths as far back as I ken. ’Maist the only
thing I can min’ o’ my gran’father--a big bonnie man, wi’ lang white
hair--twise as big ’s me, Gibbie--is seein’ him deid drunk i’ the
gutter o’ the pump. He drank ’maist a’ thing there was, Gibbie--lan’s
an’ lordship, till there was hardly an accre left upo’ haill Daurside
to come to my father--’maist naething but a wheen sma’ hooses. He was
a guid man, my father; but his father learnt him to drink afore he was
’maist oot o’ ’s coaties, an’ gae him nae schuilin’; an’ gien he red
himsel’ o’ a’ ’at was left, it was sma’ won’er--only, ye see, Gibbie,
what was to come o’ me? I pit it till ye, Gibbie--what was to come o’
me?--Gien a kin’ neeper, ’at kent what it was to drink, an’ sae had a
fallow-feelin’, hadna ta’en an’ learnt me my trade, the Lord kens what
wad hae come o’ you an’ me, Gibbie, my man!--Gang to yer bed, noo, an’
lea’ me to my ain thouchts; no ’at they’re aye the best o’ company,
laddie.--But whiles they’re no that ill,” he concluded, with a weak
smile, as some reflex of himself not quite unsatisfactory gloomed
faintly in the besmeared mirror of his uncertain consciousness.

Gibbie obeyed, and getting under the Gordon tartan, lay and looked out,
like a weasel from its hole, at his father’s back. For half an hour or
so Sir George went on drinking. All at once he started to his feet, and
turning towards the bed a white face distorted with agony, kneeled down
on the box and groaned out:

“O God, the pains o’ hell hae gotten haud upo’ me. O Lord, I’m i’ the
grup o’ Sawtan. The deevil o’ drink has me by the hause. I doobt, O
Lord, ye’re gauin’ to damn me dreidfu’. What guid that’ll do ye, O
Lord, I dinna ken, but I doobtna ye’ll dee what’s richt, only I wuss I
hed never crossed ye i’ yer wull. I kenna what I’m to dee, or what’s
to be deen wi’ me, or whaur ony help’s to come frae. I hae tried an’
tried to maister the drink, but I was aye whumled. For ye see, Lord,
kennin’ a’ thing as ye dee, ’at until I hae a drap i’ my skin, I canna
even think; I canna min’ the sangs I used to sing, or the prayers my
mither learnt me sittin’ upo’ her lap. Till I hae swallowed a moo’fu’
or twa, things luik sae awfu’-like ’at I’m fit to cut my thro’t; an’
syne ance I’m begun, there’s nae mair thoucht o’ endeevourin’ to behaud
(_withhold_) till I canna drink a drap mair. O God, what garred ye mak
things ’at wad mak whusky, whan ye kenned it wad mak sic a beast o’ me?”

He paused, stretched down his hand to the floor, lifted the mug, and
drank a huge mouthful; then with a cough that sounded apologetic, set
it down, and recommenced:

“O Lord, I doobt there’s nae houp for me, for the verra river o’ the
watter o’ life wadna be guid to me wantin’ a drap frae the boatle intil
’t. It’s the w’y wi’ a’ his ’at drinks. It’s no ’at we’re drunkards,
Lord--ow na! it’s no that, Lord; it’s only ’at we canna dee wantin’
the drink. We’re sair drinkers, I maun confess, but no jist drunkards,
Lord. I’m no drunk the noo; I ken what I’m sayin’, an’ it’s sair
trowth, but I cudna hae prayt a word to yer lordship gien I hadna had
a jooggy or twa first. O Lord, deliver me frae the pooer o’ Sawtan.--O
Lord! O Lord! I canna help mysel’. Dinna sen’ me to the ill place. Ye
loot the deils gang intil the swine, lat me tee.”

With this frightful petition, his utterance began to grow indistinct.
Then he fell forward upon the bed, groaning, and his voice died
gradually away. Gibbie had listened to all he said, but the awe of
hearing his father talk to one unseen, made his soul very still, and
when he ceased he fell asleep.

Alas for the human soul inhabiting a drink-fouled brain! It is a
human soul still, and wretched in the midst of all that whisky can do
for it. From the pit of hell it cries out. So long as there is that
which can sin, it is a man. And the prayer of misery carries its own
justification, when the sober petitions of the self-righteous and the
unkind are rejected. He who forgives not is not forgiven, and the
prayer of the Pharisee is as the weary beating of the surf of hell,
while the cry of a soul out of its fire sets the heart-strings of love
trembling. There are sins which men must leave behind them, and sins
which they must carry with them. Society scouts the drunkard because he
is loathsome, and it matters nothing whether society be right or wrong,
while it cherishes in its very bosom vices which are, to the God-born
thing we call the soul, yet worse poisons. Drunkards and sinners,
hard as it may be for them to enter into the kingdom of heaven, must
yet be easier to save than the man whose position, reputation, money,
engross his heart and his care, who seeks the praise of men and not the
praise of God. When I am more of a Christian, I shall have learnt to
be sorrier for the man whose end is money or social standing than for
the drunkard. But now my heart, recoiling from the one, is sore for the
other--for the agony, the helplessness, the degradation, the nightmare
struggle, the wrongs and cruelties committed, the duties neglected,
the sickening ruin of mind and heart. So often, too, the drunkard is
originally a style of man immeasurably nobler than the money-maker!
Compare a Coleridge, Samuel Taylor or Hartley, with--no; that man has
not yet passed to his account. God has in his universe furnaces for
the refining of gold, as well as for the burning of chaff and tares
and fruitless branches; and, however they may have offended, it is the
elder brother who is the judge of all the younger ones.

Gibbie slept some time. When he woke, it was pitch dark, and he was not
lying on his father’s bosom. He felt about with his hands till he found
his father’s head. Then he got up and tried to rouse him, and failing,
to get him on to the bed. But in that too he was sadly unsuccessful:
what with the darkness and the weight of him, the result of the boy’s
best endeavour was, that Sir George half slipped, half rolled down
upon the box, and from that to the floor. Assured then of his own
helplessness, wee Gibbie dragged the miserable bolster from the bed,
and got it under his father’s head; then covered him with the plaid,
and creeping under it, laid himself on his father’s bosom, where soon
he slept again.

He woke very cold, and getting up, turned heels-over-head several times
to warm himself, but quietly, for his father was still asleep. The room
was no longer dark, for the moon was shining through the skylight.
When he had got himself a little warmer, he turned to have a look at
his father. The pale light shone full upon his face, and it was that,
Gibbie thought, which made him look so strange. He darted to him, and
stared aghast: he had never seen him look like that before, even when
most drunk! He threw himself upon him: his face was dreadfully cold. He
pulled and shook him in fear--he could not have told of what--but he
would not wake. He was gone to see what God could do for him there, for
whom nothing more could be done here.

But Gibbie did not know anything about death, and went on trying to
wake him. At last he observed that, although his mouth was wide open,
the breath did not come from it. Thereupon his heart began to fail him.
But when he lifted an eyelid, and saw what was under it, the house rang
with the despairing shriek of the little orphan.




CHAPTER VII.

THE TOWN-SPARROW.

“This, too, will pass,” is a Persian word: I should like it better if
it were “This, too, shall pass.”

Gibbie’s agony passed, for God is not the God of the dead but of the
living. Through the immortal essence in him, life became again life,
and he ran about the streets as before. Some may think that wee Sir
Gibbie--as many now called him, some knowing the truth, and others in
kindly mockery--would get on all the better for the loss of such a
father; but it was not so. In his father he had lost his Paradise, and
was now a creature expelled. He was not so much to be pitied as many
a child dismissed by sudden decree from a home to a school; but the
streets and the people and the shops, the horses and the dogs, even
the penny-loaves though he was hungry, had lost half their precious
delight, when his father was no longer in the accessible background,
the heart of the blissful city. As to food and clothing, he did neither
much better nor any worse than before: people were kind as usual, and
kindness was to Gibbie the very milk of mother Nature. Whose the hand
that proffered it, or what the form it took, he cared no more than a
stray kitten cares whether the milk set down to it be in a blue saucer
or a white. But he always made the right return. The first thing a
kindness deserves is acceptance, the next is transmission: Gibbie gave
both, without thinking much about either. For he never had taken, and
indeed never learned to take, a thought about what he should eat or
what he should drink, or wherewithal he should be clothed--a fault
rendering him, in the eyes of the economist of this world, utterly
unworthy of a place in it. There is a world, however, and one pretty
closely mixed up with this, though it never shows itself to one who
has no place in it, the birds of whose air have neither storehouse
nor barn, but are just such thoughtless cherubs--thoughtless for
themselves, that is--as wee Sir Gibbie. It would be useless to attempt
convincing the mere economist that this great city was a little better,
a little happier, a little merrier, for the presence in it of the
child, because he would not, even if convinced of the fact, recognize
the gain; but I venture the assertion to him, that the conduct of
not one of its inhabitants was the worse for the example of Gibbie’s
apparent idleness; and that not one of the poor women who now and then
presented the small baronet with a penny, or a bit of bread, or a scrap
of meat, or a pair of old trousers--shoes nobody gave him, and he
neither desired nor needed any--ever felt the poorer for the gift, or
complained that she should be so taxed.

Positively or negatively, then, everybody was good to him, and Gibbie
felt it; but what could make up for the loss of his Paradise, the bosom
of a father? Drunken father as he was, I know of nothing that can or
ought to make up for such a loss, except that which can restore it--the
bosom of the Father of fathers.

He roamed the streets, as all his life before, the whole of the day,
and part of the night; he took what was given him, and picked up what
he found. There were some who would gladly have brought him within the
bounds of an ordered life; he soon drove them to despair, however, for
the streets had been his nursery, and nothing could keep him out of
them. But the sparrow and the rook are just as respectable in reality,
though not in the eyes of the hen-wife, as the egg-laying fowl, or the
dirt-gobbling duck; and, however Gibbie’s habits might shock the ladies
of Mr. Sclater’s congregation who sought to civilize him, the boy was
no more about mischief in the streets at midnight, than they were in
their beds. They collected enough for his behoof to board him for a
year with an old woman who kept a school, and they did get him to sleep
one night in her house. But in the morning, when she would not let him
run out, brought him into the school-room, her kitchen, and began to
teach him to write, Gibbie failed to see the good of it. He must have
space, change, adventure, air, or life was not worth the name to him.
Above all he must see friendly faces, and that of the old dame was not
such. But he desired to be friendly with her, and once, as she leaned
over him, put up his hand--not a very clean one, I am bound to give
her the advantage of my confessing--to stroke her cheek: she pushed
him roughly away, rose in indignation upon her crutch, and lifted her
cane to chastise him for the insult. A class of urchins, to Gibbie’s
eyes at least looking unhappy, were at the moment blundering through
the twenty-third psalm. Ever after, even when now Sir Gilbert more than
understood the great song, the words, “thy rod and thy staff,” like
the spell of a necromancer would still call up the figure of the dame
irate, in her horn spectacles and her black-ribboned cap, leaning with
one arm on her crutch, and with the other uplifting what was with her
no mere symbol of authority. Like a shell from a mortar, he departed
from the house. She hobbled to the door after him, but his diminutive
figure many yards away, his little bare legs misty with swiftness as he
ran, was the last she ever saw of him, and her pupils had a bad time of
it the rest of the day. He never even entered the street again in which
she lived. Thus, after one night’s brief interval of respectability, he
was again a rover of the city, a flitting insect that lighted here and
there, and spread wings of departure the moment a fresh desire awoke.

It would be difficult to say where he slept. In summer anywhere; in
winter where he could find warmth. Like animals better clad than he,
yet like him able to endure cold, he revelled in mere heat when he
could come by it. Sometimes he stood at the back of a baker’s oven,
for he knew all the haunts of heat about the city; sometimes he buried
himself in the sids (_husks of oats_) lying ready to feed the kiln of a
meal-mill; sometimes he lay by the furnace of the steam-engine of the
water-works. One man employed there, when his time was at night, always
made a bed for Gibbie: he had lost his own only child, and this one of
nobody’s was a comfort to him.

Even those who looked upon wandering as wicked, only scolded into
the sweet upturned face, pouring gall into a cup of wine too full
to receive a drop of it--and did not hand him over to the police.
Useless verily that would have been, for the police would as soon have
thought of taking up a town sparrow as Gibbie, and would only have
laughed at the idea. They knew Gibbie’s merits better than any of those
good people imagined his faults. It requires either wisdom or large
experience to know that a child is not necessarily wicked even if born
and brought up in a far viler _entourage_ than was Gibbie.

The merits the police recognized in him were mainly two--neither of
small consequence in their eyes; the first, the negative, yet more
important one, that of utter harmlessness; the second, and positive
one--a passion and power for rendering help, taking notable shape
chiefly in two ways, upon both of which I have already more than
touched. The first was the peculiar faculty now pretty generally
known--his great gift, some, his great luck, others called it--for
finding things lost. It was no wonder the town crier had sought his
acquaintance, and when secured, had cultivated it--neither a difficult
task; for the boy, ever since he could remember, had been in the
habit, as often as he saw the crier, or heard his tuck of drum in the
distance, of joining him and following, until he had acquainted himself
with all particulars concerning everything proclaimed as missing. The
moment he had mastered the facts announced, he would dart away to
search, and not unfrequently to return with the thing sought. But it
was not by any means only things sought that he found. He continued
to come upon things of which he had no simulacrum in his phantasy.
These, having no longer a father to carry them to, he now, their owners
unknown, took to the crier, who always pretended to receive them with a
suspicion which Gibbie understood as little as the other really felt,
and at once advertised them by drum and cry. What became of them after
that, Gibbie never knew. If they did not find their owners, neither did
they find their way back to Gibbie; if their owners were found, the
crier never communicated with him on the subject. Plainly he regarded
Gibbie as the favoured jackal, whose privilege it was to hunt for the
crier, the royal lion of the city forest. But he spoke kindly to him,
as well he might, and now and then gave him a penny.

The second of the positive merits by which Gibbie found acceptance in
the eyes of the police, was a yet more peculiar one, growing out of his
love for his father, and his experience in the exercise of that love.
It was, however, unintelligible to them, and so remained, except on the
theory commonly adopted with regard to Gibbie, namely, that _he wasna
a’ there_. Not the less was it to them a satisfactory whim of his,
seeing it mitigated their trouble as guardians of the nightly peace and
safety. It was indeed the main cause of his being, like themselves, so
much in the street at night: seldom did Gibbie seek his lair--I cannot
call it couch--before the lengthening hours of the morning. If the
finding of things was a gift, this other peculiarity was a passion--and
a right human passion--absolutely possessing the child: it was, to play
the guardian angel to drunk folk. If such a distressed human craft hove
in sight, he would instantly bear down upon and hover about him, until
resolved as to his real condition. If he was in such distress as to
require assistance, he never left him till he saw him safe within his
own door. The police asserted that wee Sir Gibbie not only knew every
drunkard in the city, and where he lived, but where he generally got
drunk as well. That one was in no danger of taking the wrong turning,
upon whom Gibbie was in attendance, to determine, by a shove on this
side or that, the direction in which the hesitating, uncertain mass
of stultified humanity was to go. He seemed a visible embodiment of
that special providence which is said to watch over drunk people and
children, only here a child was the guardian of the drunkard, and
in this branch of his mission, was well known to all who, without
qualifying themselves for coming under his cherubic cognizance, were in
the habit of now and then returning home late. He was least known to
those to whom he rendered most assistance. Rarely had he thanks for it,
never halfpence, but not unfrequently blows and abuse. For the first
he cared nothing; the last, owing to his great agility, seldom visited
him with any directness. A certain reporter of humorous scandal, after
his third tumbler, would occasionally give a graphic description of
what, coming from a supper-party, he once saw about two o’clock in
the morning. In the great street of the city, he overhauled a huge
galleon, which proved, he declared, to be the provost himself, not
exactly _water_-logged, and yet not very buoyant, but carrying a good
deal of sail. He might possibly have escaped very particular notice,
he said, but for the assiduous attendance upon him of an absurd little
cock-boat, in the person of wee Gibbie--the two reminding him right
ludicrously of the story of the Spanish Armada. Round and round the
bulky provost gyrated the tiny baronet, like a little hero of the ring,
pitching into him, only with open-handed pushes, not with blows, now
on this side and now on that--not after such fashion of sustentation
as might have sufficed with a man of ordinary size, but throwing all
his force now against the provost’s bulging bows, now against his
over-leaning quarter, encountering him now as he lurched, now as he
heeled, until at length he landed him high, though certainly not dry,
on the top of his own steps. The moment the butler opened the door, and
the heavy hulk rolled into dock, Gibbie darted off as if he had been
the wicked one tormenting the righteous, and in danger of being caught
by a pair of holy tongs. Whether the tale was true or not, I do not
know: with after-dinner humourists there is reason for caution. Gibbie
was not offered the post of henchman to the provost, and rarely could
have had the chance of claiming salvage for so distinguished a vessel,
seeing he generally cruised in waters where such craft seldom sailed.
Though almost nothing could now have induced him to go down Jink Lane,
yet about the time the company at Mistress Croale’s would be breaking
up, he would on most nights be lying in wait a short distance down the
Widdiehill, ready to minister to that one of his father’s old comrades
who might prove most in need of his assistance; and if he showed him no
gratitude, Gibbie had not been trained in a school where he was taught
to expect or even to wish for any.

I could now give a whole chapter to the setting forth of the pleasures
the summer brought him, city summer as it was, but I must content
myself with saying that first of these, and not least, was the mere
absence of the cold of the other seasons, bringing with it many
privileges. He could lie down anywhere and sleep when he would; or
spend, if he pleased, whole nights awake, in a churchyard, or on the
deck of some vessel discharging her cargo at the quay, or running about
the still, sleeping streets. Thus he got to know the shapes of some of
the constellations, and not a few of the aspects of the heavens. But
even then he never felt alone, for he gazed at the vista from the midst
of a cityful of his fellows. Then there were the scents of the laylocks
and the roses and the carnations and the sweet-peas, that came floating
out from the gardens, contending sometimes with those of the grocers’
and chemists’ shops. Now and then too he came in for a small feed of
strawberries, which were very plentiful in their season. Sitting then
on a hospitable doorstep, with the feet and faces of friends passing
him in both directions, and love embodied in the warmth of summer all
about him, he would eat his strawberries, and inherit the earth.




CHAPTER VIII.

SAMBO.

No one was so sorry for the death of Sir George, or had so many kind
words to say in memory of him, as Mistress Croale. Neither was her
sorrow only because she had lost so good a customer, or even because
she had liked the man: I believe it was much enhanced by a vague doubt
that after all she was to blame for his death. In vain she said to
herself, and said truly, that it would have been far worse for him,
and Gibbie too, had he gone elsewhere for his drink; she could not get
the account settled with her conscience. She tried to relieve herself
by being kinder than before to the boy; but she was greatly hindered
in this by the fact that, after his father’s death, she could not get
him inside her door. That his father was not there--would not be there
at night, made the place dreadful to him. This addition to the trouble
of mind she already had on account of the nature of her business, was
the cause, I believe, why, after Sir George’s death, she went down the
hill with accelerated speed. She sipped more frequently from her own
bottle, soon came to “tasting with” her customers, and after that her
descent was rapid. She no longer refused drink to women, though for a
time she always gave it under protest; she winked at card-playing; she
grew generally more lax in her administration; and by degrees a mist
of evil fame began to gather about her house. Thereupon her enemy, as
she considered him, the Rev. Clement Sclater, felt himself justified
in moving more energetically for the withdrawal of her license, which,
with the support of outraged neighbours, he found no difficulty in
effecting. She therefore _flitted_ to another parish, and opened a
worse house in a worse region of the city--on the river-bank, namely,
some little distance above the quay, not too far to be within easy
range of sailors, and the people employed about the vessels loading
or discharging cargo. It pretended to be only a lodging-house, and
had no license for the sale of strong drink, but nevertheless, one
way and another, a great deal was drunk in the house, and, as always,
card-playing, and sometimes worse things were going on, getting more
vigorous ever as the daylight waned; frequent quarrels and occasional
bloodshed was the consequence. For some time, however, nothing very
serious brought the place immediately within the conscious ken of the
magistrates.

In the second winter after his father’s death, Gibbie, wandering
everywhere about the city, encountered Lucky Croale in the
neighbourhood of her new abode; down there she was _Mistress_ no
longer, but, with a familiarity scarcely removed from contempt, was
both mentioned and addressed as Lucky Croale. The repugnance which
had hitherto kept Gibbie from her having been altogether to her place
and not to herself, he at once accompanied her home, and after that
went often to the house. He was considerably surprised when first he
heard words from her mouth for using which she had formerly been in
the habit of severely reproving her guests; but he always took things
as he found them, and when ere long he had to hear such occasionally
addressed to himself, when she happened to be more out of temper than
usual, he never therefore questioned her friendship. What more than
anything else attracted him to her house, however, was the jolly
manners and open-hearted kindness of most of the sailors who frequented
it, with almost all of whom he was a favourite; and it soon came about
that, when his ministrations to the incapable were over, he would
spend the rest of the night more frequently there than anywhere else;
until at last he gave up, in a great measure, his guardianship of the
drunk in the streets for that of those who were certainly in much
more danger of mishap at Lucky Croale’s. Scarcely a night passed when
he was not present at one or more of the quarrels of which the place
was a hot-bed; and as he never by any chance took a part, or favoured
one side more than another, but confined himself to an impartial
distribution of such peace-making blandishments as the ever-springing
fountain of his affection took instinctive shape in, the wee baronet
came to be regarded, by the better sort of the rough fellows, almost as
the very identical sweet little cherub, sitting perched up aloft, whose
department in the saving business of the universe it was, to take care
of the life of poor Jack. I do not say that he was always successful
in his endeavours at atonement, but beyond a doubt Lucky Croale’s
house was a good deal less of a hell through the haunting presence
of the child. He was not shocked by the things he saw, even when he
liked them least. He regarded the doing of them much as he had looked
upon his father’s drunkenness--as a pitiful necessity that overtook
men--one from which there was no escape, and which caused a great need
for Gibbies. Evil language and coarse behaviour alike passed over him,
without leaving the smallest stain upon heart or conscience, desire or
will. No one could doubt it who considered the clarity of his face and
eyes, in which the occasional but not frequent expression of keenness
and promptitude scarcely even ruffled the prevailing look of unclouded
heavenly babyhood.

If any one thinks I am unfaithful to human fact, and overcharge the
description of this child, I on my side doubt the extent of the
experience of that man or woman. I admit the child a rarity, but
a rarity in the right direction, and therefore a being with whom
humanity has the greater need to be made acquainted. I admit that
the best things are the commonest, but the highest types and the
best combinations of them are the rarest. There is more love in the
world than anything else, for instance; but the best love and the
individual in whom love is supreme are the rarest of all things. That
for which humanity has the strongest claim upon its workmen, is the
representation of its own best; but the loudest demand of the present
day is for the representation of that grade of humanity of which men
see the most--that type of things which could never have been but
that it might pass. The demand marks the commonness, narrowness,
low-levelled satisfaction of the age. It loves its own--not that which
might be, and ought to be its own--not its better self, infinitely
higher than its present, for the sake of whose approach it exists. I
do not think that the age is worse in this respect than those which
have preceded it, but that vulgarity, and a certain vile contentment
swelling to self-admiration, have become more vocal than hitherto; just
as unbelief, which I think in reality less prevailing than in former
ages, has become largely more articulate, and thereby more loud and
peremptory. But whatever the demand of the age, I insist that that
which _ought_ to be presented to its beholding, is the common good
uncommonly developed, and that not because of its rarity, but because
it is truer to humanity. Shall I admit those conditions, those facts,
to be true exponents of _humanity_, which, except they be changed,
purified, or abandoned, must soon cause that humanity to cease from its
very name, must destroy its very being? To make the admission would be
to assert that a house may be divided against itself, and yet stand. It
is the noble, not the failure from the noble, that is the true human;
and if I must show the failure, let it ever be with an eye to the final
possible, yea, imperative, success. But in our day, a man who will
accept any oddity of idiosyncratic development in manners, tastes, or
habits, will refuse, not only as improbable, but as inconsistent with
human nature, the representation of a man trying to be merely as noble
as is absolutely essential to his being--except, indeed, he be at the
same time represented as failing utterly in the attempt, and compelled
to fall back upon the imperfections of humanity, and acknowledge them
as its laws. Its improbability, judged by the experience of most men, I
admit; its unreality in fact, I deny; and its absolute unity with the
true idea of humanity, I believe and assert.

It is hardly necessary for me now to remark, seeing my narrative must
already have suggested it, that what kept Gibbie pure and honest was
the rarely-developed, ever-active love of his kind. The human face
was the one attraction to him in the universe. In deep fact, it is so
to everyone; I state but the commonest reality in creation; only in
Gibbie the fact had come to the surface; the common thing was his in
uncommon degree and potency. Gibbie knew no music except the voice of
man and woman; at least no other had as yet affected him. To be sure he
had never heard much. Drunken sea-songs he heard every night almost;
and now and then on Sundays he ran through a zone of psalm-singing;
but neither of those could well be called music. There hung a caged
bird here and there at a door in the poorer streets; but Gibbie’s love
embraced the lower creation also, and too tenderly for the enjoyment of
its melody. The human bird loved liberty too dearly to gather anything
but pain from the song of the little feathered brother who had lost it,
and to whom he could not minister as to the drunkard. In general he ran
from the presence of such a prisoner. But sometimes he would stop and
try to comfort the naked little Freedom, disrobed of its space; and on
one occasion was caught in the very act of delivering a canary that
hung outside a little shop. Any other than wee Gibbie would have been
heartily cuffed for the offence, but the owner of the bird only smiled
at the would-be liberator, and hung the cage a couple of feet higher
on the wall. With such a passion of affection, then, finding vent in
constant action, is it any wonder Gibbie’s heart and hands should be
too full for evil to occupy them even a little?

One night in the spring, entering Lucky Croale’s common room, he saw
there for the first time a negro sailor, whom the rest called Sambo,
and was at once taken with his big, dark, radiant eyes, and his white
teeth continually uncovering themselves in good-humoured smiles. Sambo
had left the vessel in which he had arrived, was waiting for another,
and had taken up his quarters at Lucky Croale’s. Gibbie’s advances he
met instantly, and in a few days a strong mutual affection had sprung
up between them. To Gibbie Sambo speedily became absolutely loving and
tender, and Gibbie made him full return of devotion.

The negro was a man of immense muscular power, like not a few of his
race, and, like most of them, not easily provoked, inheriting not a
little of their hard-learned long-suffering. He bore even with those
who treated him with far worse than the ordinary superciliousness of
white to black; and when the rudest of city boys mocked him, only
showed his teeth by way of smile. The ill-conditioned among Lucky
Croale’s customers and lodgers were constantly taking advantage of his
good nature, and presuming upon his forbearance; but so long as they
confined themselves to mere insolence, or even bare-faced cheating, he
endured with marvellous temper. It was possible, however, to go too far
even with him.

One night Sambo was looking on at a game of cards, in which all the
rest in the room were engaged. Happening to laugh at some turn it took,
one of them, a Malay, who was losing, was offended, and abused him.
Others objected to his having fun without risking money, and required
him to join in the game. This for some reason or other he declined,
and when the whole party at length insisted, positively refused.
Thereupon they all took umbrage, nor did most of them make many steps
of the ascent from displeasure to indignation, wrath, revenge; and then
ensued a row. Gibbie had been sitting all the time on his friend’s
knee, every now and then stroking his black face, in which, as insult
followed insult, the sunny blood kept slowly rising, making the balls
of his eyes and his teeth look still whiter. At length a savage from
Greenock threw a tumbler at him. Sambo, quick as a lizard, covered his
face with his arm. The tumbler falling from it, struck Gibbie on the
head--not severely, but hard enough to make him utter a little cry. At
that sound, the latent fierceness came wide awake in Sambo. Gently as
a nursing mother he set Gibbie down in a corner behind him, then with
one rush sent every Jack of the company sprawling on the floor, with
the table and bottles and glasses atop of them. At the vision of their
plight his good humour instantly returned, he burst into a great hearty
laugh, and proceeded at once to lift the table from off them. That
effected, he caught up Gibbie in his arms, and carried him with him to
bed.

In the middle of the night Gibbie half woke, and, finding himself
alone, sought his father’s bosom; then, in the confusion between
sleeping and waking, imagined his father’s death come again. Presently
he remembered it was in Sambo’s arms he fell asleep, but where he was
now he could not tell: certainly he was not in bed. Groping, he pushed
a door, and a glimmer of light came in. He was in a closet of the
room in which Sambo slept--and something was to do about his bed. He
rose softly and peeped out. There stood several men, and a struggle
was going on--nearly noiseless. Gibbie was half-dazed, and could not
understand; but he had little anxiety about Sambo, in whose prowess he
had a triumphant confidence. Suddenly came the sound of a great gush,
and the group parted from the bed and vanished. Gibbie darted towards
it. The words, “_O Lord Jesus!_” came to his ears, and he heard no
more: they were poor Sambo’s last in this world. The light of a street
lamp fell upon the bed: the blood was welling, in great thick throbs,
out of his huge black throat. They had bent his head back, and the gash
gaped wide.

For some moments Gibbie stood in ghastly terror. No sound except a low
gurgle came to his ears, and the horror of the stillness overmastered
him. He never could recall what came next. When he knew himself again,
he was in the street, running like the wind, he knew not whither. It
was not that he dreaded any hurt to himself; horror, not fear, was
behind him.

His next recollection of himself was in the first of the morning, on
the lofty chain-bridge over the river Daur. Before him lay he knew
not what, only escape from what was behind. His faith in men seemed
ruined. The city, his home, was frightful to him. Quarrels and curses
and blows he had been used to, and amidst them life could be lived. If
he did not consciously weave them into his theories, he unconsciously
wrapped them up in his confidence, and was at peace. But the last night
had revealed something unknown before. It was as if the darkness had
been cloven, and through the cleft he saw into hell. A thing had been
done that could not be undone, and he thought it must be what people
called _murder_. And Sambo was such a good man! He was almost as good a
man as Gibbie’s father, and now he would not breathe any more! Was he
gone where Gibbie’s father was gone? Was it the good men that stopped
breathing and grew cold? But it was those wicked men that had _deaded_
Sambo! And with that his first vague perception of evil and wrong in
the world began to dawn.

He lifted his head from gazing down on the dark river. A man was
approaching the bridge. He came from the awful city! Perhaps he
wanted him! He fled along the bridge like a low-flying water-bird. If
another man had appeared at the other end, he would have got through
between the rods, and thrown himself into the river. But there was no
one to oppose his escape; and after following the road a little way
up the river, he turned aside into a thicket of shrubs on the nearly
precipitous bank, and sat down to recover the breath he had lost more
from dismay than exertion.

The light grew. All at once he descried, far down the river, the
steeples of the city. Alas! alas! there lay poor black Sambo, so dear
to wee Sir Gibbie, motionless and covered with blood! He had two red
mouths now, but was not able to speak a word with either! They would
carry him to a churchyard and lay him in a hole to lie there for ever
and ever. Would all the good people be laid into holes and leave Gibbie
quite alone? Sitting and brooding thus, he fell into a dreamy state,
in which, brokenly, from here and there, pictures of his former life
grew out upon his memory. Suddenly, plainer than all the rest, came
the last time he stood under Mistress Croale’s window, waiting to help
his father home. The same instant, back to the ear of his mind came
his father’s two words, as he had heard them through the window--“_Up
Daurside._”

“Up Daurside!”--Here he was upon Daurside--a little way up too: he
would go farther up. He rose and went on, while the great river kept
flowing the other way, dark and terrible, down to the very door inside
which lay Sambo with the huge gape in his big throat.

Meantime the murder came to the knowledge of the police, Mistress
Croale herself giving the information, and all in the house were
arrested. In the course of their examination, it came out that wee Sir
Gibbie had gone to bed with the murdered man, and was now nowhere to
be found. Either they had murdered him too, or carried him off. The
news spread, and the whole city was in commotion about his fate. It
was credible enough that persons capable of committing such a crime on
such an inoffensive person as the testimony showed poor Sambo, would
be capable also of throwing the life of a child after that of the man
to protect their own. The city was searched from end to end, from
side to side, and from cellar to garret. Not a trace of him was to be
found--but indeed Gibbie had always been easier to find than to trace,
for he had no belongings of any sort to betray him. No one dreamed of
his having fled straight to the country, and search was confined to the
city.

The murderers were at length discovered, tried, and executed. They
protested their innocence with regard to the child, and therein
nothing appeared against them beyond the fact that he was missing. The
result, so far as concerned Gibbie, was, that the talk of the city,
where almost everyone knew him, was turned, in his absence, upon his
history; and from the confused mass of hearsay that reached him, Mr.
Sclater set himself to discover and verify the facts. For this purpose
he burrowed about in the neighbourhoods Gibbie had chiefly frequented,
and was so far successful as to satisfy himself that Gibbie, if he was
alive, was Sir Gilbert Galbraith, Baronet; but his own lawyer was able
to assure him that not an inch of property remained anywhere attached
to the title. There were indeed relations of the boy’s mother, who
were of some small consequence in a neighbouring county, also one in
business in Glasgow, or its neighbourhood, reported wealthy; but these
had entirely disowned her because of her marriage. All Mr. Sclater
discovered besides was, in a lumber-room next the garret in which Sir
George died, a box of papers--a glance at whose contents showed that
they must at least prove a great deal of which he was already certain
from other sources. A few of them had to do with the house in which
they were found, still known as the _Auld Hoose o’ Galbraith_; but most
of them referred to property in land, and many were of ancient date. If
the property were in the hands of descendants of the original stock,
the papers would be of value in their eyes; and, in any case, it would
be well to see to their safety. Mr. Sclater therefore had the chest
removed to the garret of the manse, where it stood thereafter, little
regarded, but able to answer for more than itself.




CHAPTER IX.

ADRIFT.

Gibbie was now without a home. He had had a whole city for his
dwelling, every street of which had been to him as another hall in his
own house, every lane as a passage from one set of rooms to another,
every court as a closet, every house as a safe, guarding the only
possessions he had, the only possessions he knew how to value--his
fellow-mortals, radiant with faces, and friendly with hands and
tongues. Great as was his delight in freedom, a delight he revelled
in from morning to night, and sometimes from night to morning, he
had never had a notion of it that reached beyond the city, he never
longed for larger space, for wider outlook. Space and outlook he had
skyward--and seaward when he would, but even into these regions he had
never yet desired to go. His world was the world of men; the presence
of many was his greater room; his people themselves were his world.
He had no idea of freedom in dissociation with human faces and voices
and eyes. But now he had left all these, and as he ran from them, a
red pall seemed settling down behind him, wrapping up and hiding away
his country, his home. For the first time in his life, the fatherless,
motherless, brotherless, sisterless stray of the streets felt himself
alone. The sensation was an awful one. He had lost so many, and had
not one left! That gash in Sambo’s black throat had slain “a whole
cityful.” His loneliness grew upon him, until again he darted aside
from the road into the bush, this time to hide from the Spectre of
the Desert--the No Man. Deprived of human countenances, the face of
creation was a mask without eyes, and liberty a mere negation. Not that
Gibbie had ever thought about liberty; he had only enjoyed: not that he
had ever thought about human faces; he had only loved them, and lived
upon their smiles. “Gibbie wadna need to gang to haiven,” said Mysie,
the baker’s daughter, to her mother one night, as they walked home from
a merry-making. “What for that, lassie?” returned her mother. “Cause
he wad be meeserable whaur there was nae drunk fowk,” answered Mysie.
And now it seemed to the poor, shocked, heart-wounded creature, as if
the human face were just the one thing he could no more look upon. One
haunted him, the black one, with the white, staring eyes, the mouth in
its throat, and the white grinning teeth.

It was a cold, fresh morning, cloudy and changeful, towards the end
of April. It had rained, and would rain again; it might snow. Heavy
undefined clouds, with saffron breaks and borders, hung about the
east, but what was going to happen there--at least he did not think;
he did not know east from west, and I doubt whether, although he had
often seen the sun set, he had ever seen him rise. Yet even to him,
city-creature as he was, it was plain _something_ was going to happen
there. And happen it did presently, and that with a splendour that
for a moment blinded Gibbie. For just at the horizon there was a long
horizontal slip of blue sky, and through that crack the topmost arc of
the rising sun shot suddenly a thousand arrows of radiance into the
brain of the boy. But the too-much light scorched there a blackness
instantly; and to the soul of Gibbie it was the blackness of the room
from which he had fled, and upon it out came the white eyeballs and the
brilliant teeth of his dead Sambo, and the red burst from his throat
that answered the knife of the Malay. He shrieked, and struck with
his hands against the sun from which came the terrible vision. Had he
been a common child, his reason would have given way; but one result
of the overflow of his love was, that he had never yet known fear for
himself. His sweet confident face, innocent eyes, and caressing ways,
had almost always drawn a response more or less in kind; and that
certain some should not repel him, was a fuller response from them than
gifts from others. Except now and then, rarely, a street boy a little
bigger than himself, no one had ever hurt him, and the hurt upon these
occasions had not gone very deep, for the child was brave and hardy. So
now it was not fear, but the loss of old confidence, a sickness coming
over the heart and brain of his love, that unnerved him. It was not
the horrid cruelty to his friend, and his own grievous loss thereby,
but the recoil of his loving endeavour that, jarring him out of every
groove of thought, every socket of habit, every joint of action, cast
him from the city, and made of him a wanderer indeed, not a wanderer in
a strange country, but a wanderer in a strange world.

To no traveller could one land well be so different from another,
as to Gibbie the country was from the town. He had seen bushes and
trees before, but only over garden walls, or in one or two of the
churchyards. He had looked from the quay across to the bare shore on
the other side, with its sandy hills, and its tall lighthouse on the
top of the great rocks that bordered the sea; but, so looking, he had
beheld space as one looking from this world into the face of the moon,
as a child looks upon vastness and possible dangers from his nurse’s
arms where it cannot come near him; for houses backed the quay all
along; the city was behind him, and spread forth her protecting arms.
He had, once or twice, run out along the pier, which shot far into the
immensity of the sea, like a causeway to another world--a stormy thread
of granite, beaten upon both sides by the waves of the German Ocean;
but it was with the sea and not the country he then made the small
acquaintance--and that not without terror. The sea was as different
from the city as the air into which he had looked up at night--too
different to compare against it and feel the contrast; on neither could
he set foot; in neither could he be required to live and act--as now in
this waste of enterable and pervious extent.

Its own horror drove the vision away, and Gibbie saw the world
again--saw, but did not love it. The sun seemed but to have looked up
to mock him and go down again, for he had crossed the crack, and was
behind a thick mass of cloud; a cold damp wind, spotted with sparkles
of rain, blew fitfully from the east; the low bushes among which he
sat, sent forth a chill sighing all about him, as they sifted the wind
into sound; the smell of the damp earth was strange to him--he did not
know the freshness, the new birth of which it breathed; below him the
gloomy river, here deep, smooth, moody, sullen, there puckered with the
grey ripples of a shallow laughter under the cold breeze, went flowing
heedless to the city. There only was--or had been, friendliness,
comfort, home! This was emptiness--the abode of things, not beings.
Yet never once did Gibbie think of returning to the city. He rose and
wandered up the wide road along the river bank, farther and farther
from it--his only guide the words of his father, “_Up Daurside_;” his
sole comfort the feeling of having once more to do with his father
so long departed, some relation still with the paradise of his old
world. Along cultivated fields and copses on the one side, and on the
other a steep descent to the river, covered here and there with trees,
but mostly with rough grass and bushes and stones, he followed the
king’s highway. There were buttercups and plenty of daisies within
his sight--primroses, too, on the slope beneath; but he did not know
flowers, and his was not now the mood for discovering what they were.
The exercise revived him, and he began to be hungry. But how could
there be anything to eat in the desert, inhospitable succession of
trees and fields and hedges, through which the road wound endlessly
along, like a dead street, having neither houses nor paving stones?
Hunger, however, was far less enfeebling to Gibbie than to one
accustomed to regular meals, and he was in no anxiety about either when
or what he should eat.

The morning advanced, and by-and-by he began to meet a fellow-creature
now and then upon the road; but at sight of everyone a feeling rose in
him such as he had never had towards human being before: they seemed
somehow of a different kind from those in the town, and they did not
look friendly as they passed. He did not know that he presented to them
a very different countenance from that which his fellow-citizens had
always seen him wear; for the mingled and conflicting emotions of his
spirit had sent out upon it an expression which, accompanied by the
misery of his garments, might well, to the superficial or inexperienced
observer, convey the idea that he was a fugitive and guilty. He was
so uncomfortable at length from the way the people he met scrutinized
him that, when he saw anyone coming, he would instantly turn aside and
take the covert of thicket, or hedge, or stone wall, until the bearer
of eyes had passed. His accustomed trot, which he kept up for several
hours, made him look the more suspicious; but his feet, hardened from
very infancy as they were, soon found the difference between the smooth
flags and the sharp stones of the road, and before noon he was walking
at quite a sober, although still active, pace. Doubtless it slackened
the sooner that he knew no goal, no end to his wandering. _Up Daurside_
was the one vague notion he had of his calling, his destiny, and with
his short, quick step, his progress was considerable; he passed house
after house, farm after farm; but, never in the way of asking for
anything, though as little in the way of refusing, he went nearer none
of them than the road led him. Besides, the houses were very unlike
those in the city, and not at all attractive to him. He came at length
to a field, sloping to the road, which was covered with leaves like
some he had often seen in the market. They drew him; and as there
was but a low and imperfect hedge between, he got over, and found it
was a crop of small yellow turnips. He gathered as many as he could
carry, and ate them as he went along. Happily no agricultural person
encountered him for some distance, though Gibbie knew no special cause
to congratulate himself upon that, having not the slightest conscience
of offence in what he did. His notions of property were all associated
with well-known visible or neighbouring owners, and in the city he
would never have dreamed of touching anything that was not given him,
except it lay plainly a lost thing. But here, where everything was so
different, and he saw none of the signs of ownership to which he was
accustomed, the idea of property did not come to him; here everything
looked lost, or on the same category with the chips and parings and
crusts that were thrown out in the city, and became common property.
Besides, the love which had hitherto rendered covetousness impossible,
had here no object whose presence might have suggested a doubt, to
supply in a measure the lack of knowledge; hunger, instead, was busy
in his world. I trust there were few farmers along the road who would
have found fault with him for taking one or two; but none, I suspect,
would have liked to see him with all the turnips he could carry, eating
them like a very rabbit: they were too near a city to look upon such a
spectacle with indifference. Gibbie made no attempt to hide his spoil;
whatever could have given birth to the sense that caution would be
necessary, would have prevented him from taking it. While yet busy he
came upon a little girl feeding a cow by the roadside. She saw how he
ate the turnips, and offered him a bit of oatmeal bannock. He received
it gladly, and with beaming eyes offered her a turnip. She refused
it with some indignation. Gibbie, disappointed, but not ungrateful,
resumed his tramp, eating his bannock. He came soon after to a little
stream that ran into the great river. For a few moments he eyed it
very doubtfully, thinking it must, like the kennels along the sides of
the streets, be far too dirty to drink of; but the way it sparkled and
sang--most unscientific reasons--soon satisfied him, and he drank and
was refreshed. He had still two turnips left, but, after the bannock,
he did not seem to want them, and stowed them in the ends of the
sleeves of his jacket, folded back into great cuffs.

All day the cold spring weather continued, with more of the past
winter in it than of the coming summer. The sun would shine out for a
few moments, with a grey, weary, old light, then retreat as if he had
tried, but really could not. Once came a slight fall of snow, which,
however, melted the moment it touched the earth. The wind kept blowing
cheerlessly by fits, and the world seemed growing tired of the same
thing over again so often. At length the air began to grow dusk: then,
first, fears of the darkness, to Gibbie utterly unknown before, and
only born of the preceding night, began to make him aware of their
existence in the human world. They seemed to rise up from his lonely
heart; they seemed to descend upon him out of the thickening air; they
seemed to catch at his breath, and gather behind him as he went. But,
happily, before it was quite dark, and while yet he could distinguish
between objects, he came to the gate of a farmyard; it waked in him
the hope of finding some place where he could sleep warmer than in the
road, and he clambered over it. Nearest of the buildings to the gate,
stood an open shed, and he could see the shafts of carts projecting
from it: perhaps in one of those carts, or under it, he might find
a place that would serve him to sleep in: he did not yet know what
facilities for repose the country affords. But just as he entered
the shed, he spied at the farther corner of it, outside, a wooden
structure, like a small house, and through the arched door of it saw
the floor covered with nice-looking straw. He suspected it to be a
dog’s kennel; and presently the chain lying beside it, with a collar
at the end, satisfied him it was. The dog was absent, and it looked
altogether enticing! He crept in, got under as much of the straw as he
could heap over him, and fell fast asleep.

In a few minutes, as it seemed to him, he was roused by the great
voice of a dog in conversation with a boy: the boy seemed, by the
sound of the chain, to be fastening the collar on the dog’s neck,
and presently left him. The dog, which had been on the rampage the
whole afternoon, immediately turned to creep in and rest till supper
time, presenting to Gibbie, who had drawn himself up at the back of
the kennel, the intelligent countenance of a large Newfoundland. Now
Gibbie had been honoured with the acquaintance of many dogs, and the
friendship of most of them, for a lover of humanity can hardly fail to
be a lover of caninity. Even among dogs, however, there are ungracious
individuals, and Gibbie had once or twice been bitten by quadrupedal
worshippers of the respectable. Hence, with the sight of the owner of
the dwelling, it dawned upon him that he must be startled to find a
stranger in his house, and might, regarding him as an intruder rather
than a guest, worry him before he had time to explain himself. He
darted forward therefore to get out, but had scarcely reached the door,
when the dog put in his nose, ready to follow with all he was and had.
Gibbie, thereupon, began a loud barking, as much as to say--“Here I
am: please do nothing without reflection.” The dog started back in
extreme astonishment, his ears erect, and a keen look of question on
his sagacious visage: what strange animal, speaking like, and yet so
unlike, an orthodox dog, could have got into his very chamber? Gibbie,
amused at the dog’s fright, and assured by his looks that he was both a
good-natured and reasonable animal, burst into a fit of merry laughter
as loud as his previous barking, and a good deal more musical. The dog
evidently liked it better, and took it as a challenge to play: after
a series of sharp bursts of barking, his eyes flashing straight in at
the door, and his ears lifted up like two plumes on the top of them,
he darted into the kennel, and began poking his nose into his visitor.
Gibbie fell to patting and kissing and hugging him as if he had been a
human--as who can tell but he was?--glad of any companion that belonged
to the region of the light; and they were friends at once. Mankind had
disappointed him, but here was a dog! Gibbie was not the one to refuse
mercies which yet he would not have been content to pray for. Both were
tired, however, for both had been active that day, and a few minutes
of mingled wrestling and endearment, to which, perhaps, the narrowness
of their play-ground gave a speedier conclusion, contented both, after
which they lay side by side in peace, Gibbie with his head on the dog’s
back, and the dog every now and then turning his head over his shoulder
to lick Gibbie’s face.

Again he was waked by approaching steps, and the same moment the dog
darted from under him, and with much rattle out of the kennel, in front
of which he stood and whined expectant. It was not quite dark, for the
clouds had drifted away, and the stars were shining, so that, when he
put out his head, he was able to see the dim form of a woman setting
down something before the dog--into which he instantly plunged his
nose, and began gobbling. The sound stirred up all the latent hunger in
Gibbie, and he leaped out, eager to have a share. A large wooden bowl
was on the ground, and the half of its contents of porridge and milk
was already gone; for the poor dog had not yet had experience enough
to be perfect in hospitality, and had forgotten his guest’s wants in
his own: it was plain that, if Gibbie was to have any, he must lose no
time in considering the means. Had he had a long nose and mouth all
in one like him, he would have plunged them in beside the dog’s; but
the flatness of his mouth causing the necessity, in the case of such
an attempt, of bringing the whole of his face into contact with the
food, there was not room in the dish for the two to feed together after
the same fashion, so that he was driven to the sole other possible
expedient, that of making a spoon of his hand. The dog neither growled
nor pushed away the spoon, but instantly began to gobble twice as fast
as before, and presently was licking the bottom of the dish. Gibbie’s
hand, therefore, made but few journeys to his mouth, but what it
carried him was good food--better than any he had had that day. When
all was gone he crept again into the kennel; the dog followed, and soon
they were both fast asleep in each other’s arms and legs.

Gibbie woke at sunrise and went out. His host came after him, and
stood wagging his tail and looking wistfully up in his face. Gibbie
understood him, and, as the sole return he could make for his
hospitality, undid his collar. Instantly he rushed off, his back going
like a serpent, cleared the gate at a bound, and scouring madly across
a field, vanished from his sight; whereupon Gibbie too set out to
continue his journey up Daurside.

This day was warmer; the spring had come a step nearer; the dog had
been a comforter to him, and the horror had begun to assuage; he began
to grow aware of the things about him, and to open his eyes to them.
Once he saw a primrose in a little dell, and left the road to look
at it. But as he went, he set his foot in the water of a chalybeate
spring, which was trickling through the grass, and dyeing the ground
red about it: filled with horror he fled, and for some time dared never
go near a primrose. And still upon his right hand was the great river,
flowing down towards the home he had left; now through low meadows,
now through upshouldered fields of wheat and oats, now through rocky
heights covered with the graceful silver-barked birch, the mountain
ash, and the fir. Every time Gibbie, having lost sight of it by some
turn of the road or some interposing eminence, caught its gleam afresh,
his first feeling was that it was hurrying to the city, where the dead
man lay, to tell where Gibbie was. Why he, who had from infancy done
just as he pleased, should now have begun to dread interference with
his liberty, he could not himself have told. Perhaps the fear was but
the shadow of his new-born aversion to the place where he had seen
those best-loved countenances change so suddenly and terribly--cease to
smile, but not cease to stare.

That second day he fared better, too, than the first; for he came on a
family of mongrel gipsies, who fed him well out of their kettle, and,
taken with his looks, thought to keep him for begging purposes. But now
that Gibbie’s confidence in human nature had been so rudely shaken,
he had already begun, with analysis unconscious, to read the human
countenance, questioning it; and he thought he saw something that would
hurt, in the eyes of two of the men and one of the women. Therefore, in
the middle of the night, he slipped silently out of the tent of rags,
in which he had lain down with the gipsy children, and ere the mothers
woke, was a mile up the river.

But I must not attempt the detail of this part of his journey. It
is enough that he got through it. He met with some adventures, and
suffered a good deal from hunger and cold. Had he not been hardy as
well as fearless he must have died. But, now from this quarter, now
from that, he got all that was needful for one of God’s birds. Once
he found in a hedge the nest of an errant and secretive hen, and
recognizing the eggs as food authorized by the shop windows and market
of the city, soon qualified himself to have an opinion of their worth.
Another time he came upon a girl milking a cow in a shed, and his
astonishment at the marvels of the process was such, that he forgot
even the hunger that was rendering him faint. He had often seen cows in
the city, but had never suspected what they were capable of. When the
girl caught sight of him, staring with open mouth, she was taken with
such a fit of laughter, that the cow, which was ill-tempered, kicked
out, and overturned the pail. Now because of her troublesomeness this
cow was not milked beside the rest, and the shed where she stood was
used for farm-implements only. The floor of it was the earth, beaten
hard, and worn into hollows. When the milk settled in one of these,
Gibbie saw that it was lost to the girl, and found to him: undeterred
by the astounding nature of the spring from which he had just seen
it flow, he threw himself down, and drank like a calf. Her laughter
ended, the girl was troubled: she would be scolded for her clumsiness
in allowing Hawkie to kick over the pail, but the eagerness of the boy
after the milk troubled her more. She told him to wait, and running to
the house, returned with two large pieces of oatcake, which she gave
him.

Thus, one way and another, food came to Gibbie. Drink was to be had
in almost any hollow. Sleep was scattered everywhere over the world.
For warmth, only motion and a seasoned skin were necessary: the latter
Gibbie had; the former, already a habit learned in the streets, had now
become almost a passion.




CHAPTER X.

THE BARN.

By this time Gibbie had got well up towards the roots of the hills of
Gormgarnet, and the river had dwindled greatly. He was no longer afraid
of it, but would lie for hours listening to its murmurs over its pebbly
bed, and sometimes even sleep in the hollows of its banks, or below the
willows that overhung it. Every here and there, a brown rivulet from
some peat-bog on a hill--brown and clear, like smoke-crystals molten
together, flowed into it, and when he had lost it, guided him back
to his guide. Farm after farm he passed, here one widely bordering a
valley stream, there another stretching its skirts up the hillsides
till they were lost in mere heather, where the sheep wandered about,
cropping what stray grass-blades and other eatables they could find.
Lower down he had passed through small towns and large villages: here,
farms and cottages, with an occasional country-seat and little village
of low thatched houses, made up the abodes of men. By this time he had
become greatly reconciled to the loneliness of Nature, and no more was
afraid in her solitary presence.

At the same time his heart had begun to ache and long after the
communion of his kind. For not once since he set out--and that seemed
months where it was only weeks, had he had an opportunity of doing
anything for anybody--except, indeed, unfastening the dog’s collar; and
not to be able to help was to Gibbie like being dead. Everybody, down
to the dogs, had been doing for him, and what was to become of him! It
was a state altogether of servitude into which he had fallen.

May had now set in, but up here among the hills she was May by courtesy
only: or if she was May, she would never be Might. She was, indeed,
only April, with her showers and sunshine, her tearful, childish
laughter, and again the frown, and the despair irremediable. Nay, as
if she still kept up a secret correspondence with her cousin March,
banished for his rudeness, she would not very seldom shake from her
skirts a snow storm, and oftener the dancing hail. Then out would come
the sun behind her, and laugh, and say--“I could not help _that_; but
here I am all the same, coming to you as fast as I can!” The green
crops were growing darker, and the trees were all getting out their
nets to catch carbon. The lambs were frolicking, and in sheltered
places the flowers were turning the earth into a firmament. And now
a mere daisy was enough to delight the heart of Gibbie. His joy in
humanity so suddenly checked, and his thirst for it left unslaked, he
had begun to see the human look in the face of the commonest flowers,
to love the trusting stare of the daisy, that gold-hearted boy, and the
gentle despondency of the girl harebell, dreaming of her mother, the
azure. The wind, of which he had scarce thought as he met it roaming
the streets like himself, was now a friend of his solitude, bringing
him sweet odours, alive with the souls of bees, and cooling with bliss
the heat of the long walk. Even when it blew cold along the waste moss,
waving the heads of the cotton-grass, the only live thing visible, it
was a lover, and kissed him on the forehead. Not that Gibbie knew what
a kiss was, any more than he knew about the souls of bees. He did not
remember ever having been kissed. In that granite city, the women were
not much given to kissing children, even their own, but if they had
been, who of them would have thought of kissing Gibbie! The baker’s
wife, kind as she always was to him, would have thought it defilement
to press her lips to those of the beggar child. And how is any child
to thrive without kisses! The first caresses Gibbie ever knew as
such, were given him by Mother Nature herself. It was only, however,
by degrees, though indeed rapid degrees, that he became capable of
them. In the first part of his journey he was stunned, stupid, lost in
change, distracted between a suddenly vanished past, and a future slow
dawning in the present. He felt little beyond hunger, and that vague
urging up Daurside, with occasional shoots of pleasure from kindness,
mostly of woman and dog. He was less shy of the country people by this
time, but he did not care to seek them. He thought them not nearly
so friendly and good as the town-people, forgetting that those knew
him and these did not. To Gibbie an introduction was the last thing
necessary for any one who wore a face, and he could not understand why
they looked at him so.

Whatever is capable of aspiring, must be troubled that it may wake and
aspire--then troubled still, that it may hold fast, be itself, and
aspire still.

One evening his path vanished between twilight and moonrise, and just
as it became dark he found himself at a rough gate, through which he
saw a field. There was a pretty tall hedge on each side of the gate,
and he was now a sufficiently experienced traveller to conclude that
he was not far from some human abode. He climbed the gate and found
himself in a field of clover. It was a splendid big bed, and even had
the night not been warm, he would not have hesitated to sleep in it. He
had never had a cold, and had as little fear for his health as for his
life. He was hungry, it is true; but although food was doubtless more
delicious to such hunger as his--that of the whole body--than it can be
to the mere palate and culinary imagination of an epicure, it was not
so necessary to him that he could not go to sleep without it. So down
he lay in the clover, and was at once unconscious.

When he woke, the moon was high in the heavens, and had melted the veil
of the darkness from the scene of still, well-ordered comfort. A short
distance from his couch, stood a little army of ricks, between twenty
and thirty of them, constructed perfectly--smooth and upright and round
and large, each with its conical top netted in with straw-rope, and
finished off with what the herd-boy called a _toupican_--a neatly tied
and trim tuft of the straw with which it was thatched, answering to the
stone-ball on the top of a gable. Like triangles their summits stood
out against the pale blue, moon-diluted air. They were treasure-caves,
hollowed out of space, and stored with the best of ammunition against
the armies of hunger and want; but Gibbie, though he had seen many
of them, did not know what they were. He had seen straw used for the
bedding of cattle and horses, and supposed _that_ the chief end of
such ricks. Nor had he any clear idea that the cattle themselves were
kept for any other object than to make them comfortable and happy. He
had stood behind their houses in the dark, and heard them munching
and grinding away even in the night. Probably the country was for
the cattle, as the towns for the men; and that would explain why
the country-people were so inferior. While he stood gazing, a wind
arose behind the hills, and came blowing down some glen that opened
northwards; Gibbie felt it cold, and sought the shelter of the ricks.

Great and solemn they looked as he drew nigh--near each other, yet
enough apart for plenty of air to flow and eddy between. Over a low
wall of unmortared stones, he entered their ranks: above him, as he
looked up from their broad base, they ascended huge as pyramids,
and peopled the waste air with giant forms. How warm it was in the
round-winding paths amongst the fruitful piles--tombs these, no
cenotaphs! He wandered about them, now in a dusky yellow gloom, and now
in the cold blue moonlight, which they seemed to warm. At length he
discovered that the huge things were flanked on one side by a long low
house, in which there was a door, horizontally divided into two parts.
Gibbie would fain have got in, to try whether the place was good for
sleep; but he found both halves fast. In the lower half, however, he
spied a hole, which, though not so large, reminded him of the entrance
to the kennel of his dog host; but alas! it had a door too, shut from
the inside. There might be some way of opening it. He felt about, and
soon discovered that it was a sliding valve, which he could push to
either side. It was, in fact, the cat’s door, specially constructed for
her convenience of entrance and exit. For the cat is the guardian of
the barn; the grain which tempts the rats and mice is no temptation to
her; the rats and mice themselves are; upon them she executes justice,
and remains herself an incorruptible, because untempted, therefore a
respectable member of the farm-community--only the dairy door must be
kept shut; that has no cat-wicket in it.

The hole was a small one, but tempting to the wee baronet; he might
perhaps be able to squeeze himself through. He tried and succeeded,
though with some little difficulty. The moon was there before him,
shining through a pane or two of glass over the door, and by her light
on the hard brown clay floor, Gibbie saw where he was, though if he had
been told he was in the barn, he would neither have felt nor been at
all the wiser. It was a very old-fashioned barn. About a third of it
was floored with wood--dark with age--almost as brown as the clay--for
threshing upon with flails. At that labour two men had been busy
during the most of the preceding day, and that was how, in the same
end of the barn, rose a great heap of oat-straw, showing in the light
of the moon like a mound of pale gold. Had Gibbie had any education
in the marvellous, he might now, in the midnight and moonlight, have
well imagined himself in some treasure-house of the gnomes. What he
saw in the other corner was still liker gold, and was indeed greater
than gold, for it was life--the heap, namely, of corn threshed from
the straw: Gibbie recognized this as what he had seen given to horses.
But now the temptation to sleep, with such facilities presented, was
overpowering, and took from him all desire to examine further: he shot
into the middle of the loose heap of straw, and vanished from the
glimpses of the moon, burrowing like a mole. In the heart of the golden
warmth, he lay so dry and comfortable that, notwithstanding his hunger
had waked with him, he was presently in a faster sleep than before. And
indeed what more luxurious bed, or what bed conducive to softer slumber
was there in the world to find!

“The moving moon went _down_ the sky,” the cold wind softened and grew
still; the stars swelled out larger; the rats came, and then came puss,
and the rats went with a scuffle and patter; the pagan grey came in
like a sleep-walker, and made the barn dreary as a dull dream; then
the horses began to fidget with their big feet, the cattle to low with
their great trombone throats, and the cocks to crow as if to give
warning for the last time against the devil, the world, and the flesh;
the men in the adjoining chamber woke, yawned, stretched themselves
mightily, and rose; the god-like sun rose after them, and, entering the
barn with them, drove out the grey; and through it all, the orphan lay
warm in God’s keeping and his nest of straw, like the butterfly of a
huge chrysalis.

When at length Gibbie became once more aware of existence, it was
through a stormy invasion of the still realm of sleep; the blows of two
flails fell persistent and quick-following, first on the thick head of
the sheaf of oats untied and cast down before them, then grew louder
and more deafening as the oats flew and the chaff fluttered, and the
straw flattened and broke and thinned and spread--until at last they
thundered in great hard blows on the wooden floor. It was the first of
these last blows that shook Gibbie awake. What they were or indicated
he could not tell. He wormed himself softly round in the straw to look
out and see.

Now whether it was that sleep was yet heavy upon him, and bewildered
his eyes, or that his imagination had in dreams been busy with foregone
horrors, I cannot tell; but, as he peered through the meshes of the
crossing and blinding straws, what he seemed to see was the body of an
old man with dishevelled hair, whom, prostrate on the ground, they were
beating to death with great sticks. His tongue clave to the roof of his
mouth, not a sound could he utter, not a finger could he move; he had
no choice but to lie still, and witness the fierce enormity. But it is
good that we are compelled to see some things, life amongst the rest,
to what we call the end of them. By degrees Gibbie’s sight cleared;
the old man faded away; and what was left of him he could see to be
only an armful of straw. The next sheaf they threw down, he perceived,
under their blows, the corn flying out of it, and began to understand
a little. When it was finished, the corn that had flown dancing from
its home, like hail from its cloud, was swept aside to the common heap,
and the straw tossed up on the mound that harboured Gibbie. It was well
that the man with the pitchfork did not spy his eyes peering out from
the midst of the straw: he might have taken him for some wild creature,
and driven the prongs into him. As it was, Gibbie did not altogether
like the look of him, and lay still as a stone. Then another sheaf
was unbound and cast on the floor, and the blows of the flails began
again. It went on thus for an hour and a half, and Gibbie although
he dropped asleep several times, was nearly stupid with the noise.
The men at length, however, swept up the corn and tossed up the straw
for the last time, and went out. Gibbie, judging by his own desires,
thought they must have gone to eat, but did not follow them, having
generally been ordered away the moment he was seen in a farmyard. He
crept out, however, and began to look about him--first of all for
something he could eat. The oats looked the most likely, and he took
a mouthful for a trial. He ground at them severely, but, hungry as he
was, he failed to find oats good for food. Their hard husks, their
dryness, their instability, all slipping past each other at every
attempt to crush them with his teeth, together foiled him utterly. He
must search farther. Looking round him afresh, he saw an open loft,
and climbing on the heap in which he had slept, managed to reach it.
It was at the height of the walls, and the couples of the roof rose
immediately from it. At the farther end was a heap of hay, which he
took for another kind of straw. Then he spied something he knew; a row
of cheeses lay on a shelf suspended from the rafters, ripening. Gibbie
knew them well from the shop windows--knew they were cheeses, and good
to eat, though whence and how they came he did not know, his impression
being that they grew in the fields like the turnips. He had still the
notion uncorrected, that things in the country belonged to nobody in
particular, and were mostly for the use of animals, with which, since
he became a wanderer, he had almost come to class himself. He was very
hungry. He pounced upon a cheese and lifted it between his two hands;
it smelled good, but felt very hard. That was no matter: what else were
teeth made strong and sharp for? He tried them on one of the round
edges, and, nibbling actively, soon got through to the softer body
of the cheese. But he had not got much farther when he heard the men
returning, and desisted, afraid of being discovered by the noise he
made. The readiest way to conceal himself was to lie down flat on the
loft, and he did so just where he could see the threshing-floor over
the edge of it by lifting his head. This, however, he scarcely ventured
to do; and all he could see as he lay was the tip of the swing-bar of
one of the flails, ever as it reached the highest point of its ascent.
But to watch for it very soon ceased to be interesting; and although
he had eaten so little of the cheese, it had yet been enough to make
him dreadfully thirsty, therefore he greatly desired to get away. But
he dared not go down: with their sticks those men might knock him over
in a moment! So he lay there thinking of the poor little hedgehog he
had seen on the road as he came; how he stood watching it, and wishing
he had a suit made all of great pins, which he could set up when he
pleased; and how the driver of a cart, catching sight of him at the
foot of the hedge, gave him a blow with his whip, and, poor fellow!
notwithstanding his clothes of pins, that one blow of a whip was too
much for him! There seemed nothing in the world but killing!

At length he could, unoccupied with something else, bear his thirst no
longer, and, squirming round on the floor, crept softly towards the
other end of the loft, to see what was to be seen there.

He found that the heap of hay was not in the loft at all. It filled a
small chamber in the stable, in fact; and when Gibbie clambered upon
it, what should he see below him on the other side, but a beautiful
white horse, eating some of the same sort of stuff he was now lying
upon! Beyond he could see the backs of more horses, but they were very
different--big and clumsy, and not white. They were all eating, and
this was their food on which he lay! He wished he too could eat it--and
tried, but found it even less satisfactory than the oats, for it nearly
choked him, and set him coughing so that he was in considerable danger
of betraying his presence to the men in the barn. How did the horses
manage to get such dry stuff down their throats? But the cheese was dry
too, and he could eat that! No doubt the cheese, as well as the fine
straw, was there for the horses! He would like to see the beautiful
white creature down there eat a bit of it; but with all his big teeth
he did not think he could manage a whole cheese, and how to get a piece
broken off for him, with those men there, he could not devise. It
would want a long-handled hammer like those with which he had seen men
breaking stones on the road.

A door opened beyond, and a man came in and led two of the horses out,
leaving the door open. Gibbie clambered down from the top of the hay
into the stall beside the white horse, and ran out. He was almost in
the fields, had not even a fence to cross.

He cast a glance around, and went straight for a neighbouring hollow,
where, taught by experience, he hoped to find water.




CHAPTER XI.

JANET.

Once away, Gibbie had no thought of returning. _Up Daurside_ was the
sole propulsive force whose existence he recognized. But when he lifted
his head from drinking at the stream, which was one of some size, and,
greatly refreshed, looked up its channel, a longing seized him to know
whence came the water of life which had thus restored him to bliss--how
a burn first appears upon the earth. He thought it might come from the
foot of a great conical mountain which seemed but a little way off. He
would follow it up and see. So away he went, yielding at once, as was
his wont, to the first desire that came. He had not trotted far along
the bank, however, before, at a sharp turn it took, he saw that its
course was a much longer one than he had imagined, for it turned from
the mountain, and led up among the roots of other hills; while here
in front of him, direct from the mountain, as it seemed, came down a
smaller stream, and tumbled noisily into this. The larger burn would
lead him too far from the Daur; he would follow the smaller one. He
found a wide shallow place, crossed the larger, and went up the side of
the smaller.

Doubly free after his imprisonment of the morning, Gibbie sped joyously
along. Already, nature, her largeness, her openness, her loveliness,
her changefulness, her oneness in change, had begun to heal the child’s
heart, and comfort him in his disappointment with his kind. The stream
he was now ascending ran along a claw of the mountain, which claw was
covered with almost a forest of pine, protecting little colonies of
less hardy timber. Its heavy green was varied with the pale delicate
fringes of the fresh foliage of the larches, filling the air with
aromatic breath. In the midst of their soft tufts, each tuft buttoned
with a brown spot, hung the rich brown knobs and tassels of last year’s
cones. But the trees were all on the opposite side of the stream, and
appeared to be mostly on the other side of a wall. Where Gibbie was,
the mountain-root was chiefly of rock, interspersed with heather.

A little way up the stream, he came to a bridge over it, closed at the
farther end by iron gates between pillars, each surmounted by a wolf’s
head in stone. Over the gate on each side leaned a rowan-tree, with
trunk and branches aged and gnarled amidst their fresh foliage. He
crossed the burn to look through the gate, and pressed his face between
the bars to get a better sight of a tame rabbit that had got out of its
hutch. It sat, like a Druid white with age, in the midst of a gravel
drive, much overgrown with moss, that led through a young larch wood,
with here and there an ancient tree, lonely amidst the youth of its
companions. Suddenly from the wood a large spaniel came bounding upon
the rabbit. Gibbie gave a shriek, and the rabbit made one white flash
into the wood, with the dog after him. He turned away sad at heart.

“Ilka cratur ’at can,” he said to himself, “ates ilka cratur ’at canna!”

It was his first generalization, but not many years passed before he
supplemented it with a conclusion:

“But the man ’at wad be a man, he maunna.”

Resuming his journey of investigation, he trotted along the bank of the
burn, farther and farther up, until he could trot no more, but must go
clambering over great stones, or sinking to the knees in bog, patches
of it red with iron, from which he would turn away with a shudder.
Sometimes he walked in the water, along the bed of the burn itself;
sometimes he had to scramble up its steep side, to pass one of the many
little cataracts of its descent. Here and there a small silver birch,
or a mountain-ash, or a stunted fir-tree, looking like a wizard child,
hung over the stream. Its banks were mainly of rock and heather, but
now and then a small patch of cultivation intervened. Gibbie had no
thought that he was gradually leaving the abodes of men behind him; he
knew no reason why in ascending things should change, and be no longer
as in plainer ways. For what he knew, there might be farm after farm,
up and up for ever, to the gates of heaven. But it would no longer
have troubled him greatly to leave all houses behind him for a season.
A great purple foxglove could do much now, just at this phase of his
story, to make him forget--not the human face divine, but the loss of
it. A lark aloft in the blue, from whose heart, as from a fountain
whose roots were lost in the air, its natural source, issued, not a
stream, but an ever spreading lake of song, was now more to him than
the memory of any human voice he had ever heard, except his father’s
and Sambo’s. But he was not yet quite out and away from the dwellings
of his kind.

I may as well now make the attempt to give some idea of Gibbie’s
appearance, as he showed after so long wandering. Of dress he had
hardly enough left to carry the name. Shoes, of course, he had none.
Of the shape of trousers there remained nothing, except the division
before and behind in the short petticoat to which they were reduced;
and those rudimentary divisions were lost in the multitude of rents
of equal apparent significance. He had never, so far as he knew,
had a shirt upon his body; and his sole other garment was a jacket,
so much too large for him, that to retain the use of his hands he
had folded back the sleeves quite to his elbows. Thus reversed they
became pockets, the only ones he had, and in them he stowed whatever
provisions were given him of which he could not make immediate
use--porridge and sowens and mashed potatoes included: they served
him, in fact, like the first of the stomachs of those animals which
have more than one--concerning which animals, by the way, I should
much like to know what they were in “Pythagoras’ time.” His head had
plentiful protection in his own natural crop--had never either had or
required any other. That would have been of the gold order, had not a
great part of its colour been sunburnt, rained, and frozen out of it.
All ways it pointed, as if surcharged with electric fluid, crowning
him with a wildness which was in amusing contrast with the placidity
of his countenance. Perhaps the resulting queerness in the expression
of the little vagrant, a look as if he had been hunted till his body
and soul were nearly ruffled asunder, and had already parted company in
aim and interest, might have been the first thing to strike a careless
observer. But if the heart was not a careless one, the eye would look
again and discover a stronger stillness than mere placidity--a sort
of live peace abiding in that weather-beaten little face under its
wild crown of human herbage. The features of it were well-shaped, and
not smaller than proportioned to the small whole of his person. His
eyes--partly, perhaps, because there was so little flesh upon his
bones--were large, and in repose had much of a soft animal expression:
there was not in them the look of _You and I know_. Frequently, too,
when occasion roused the needful instinct, they had a sharp expression
of outlook and readiness, which, without a trace of fierceness or
greed, was yet equally animal. Only, all the time there was present
something else, beyond characterization: behind them something seemed
to lie asleep. His hands and feet were small and childishly dainty, his
whole body well-shaped and well put together--of which the style of his
dress rather quashed the evidence.

Such was Gibbie to the eye, as he rose from Daurside to the last
cultivated ground on the borders of the burn, and the highest dwelling
on the mountain. It was the abode of a cottar, and was a dependency
of the farm he had just left. The cottar was an old man of seventy;
his wife was nearly sixty. They had reared stalwart sons and shapely
daughters, now at service here and there in the valleys below--all
ready to see God in nature, and recognize Him in providence. They
belong to a class now, I fear, extinct, but once, if my love prejudice
not my judgment too far, the glory and strength of Scotland: their
little acres are now swallowed up in the larger farms.

It was a very humble dwelling, built of turf upon a foundation of
stones, and roofed with turf and straw--warm, and nearly impervious to
the searching airs of the mountain-side. One little window of a foot
and a half square looked out on the universe. At one end stood a stack
of peat, half as big as the cottage itself. All around it were huge
rocks, some of them peaks whose masses went down to the very central
fires, others only fragments that had rolled from above. Here and
there a thin crop was growing in patches amongst them, the red grey
stone lifting its baldness in spots numberless through the soft waving
green. A few of the commonest flowers grew about the door, but there
was no garden. The door-step was live rock, and a huge projecting rock
behind formed the back and a portion of one of the end walls. This
latter rock had been the attraction to the site, because of a hollow
in it, which now served as a dairy. For up there with them lived the
last cow of the valley--the cow that breathed the loftiest air on all
Daurside--a good cow, and gifted in feeding well upon little. Facing
the broad south, and leaning against the hill, as against the bosom
of God, sheltering it from the north and east, the cottage looked so
high-humble, so still, so confident, that it drew Gibbie with the spell
of heart-likeness. He knocked at the old, weather-beaten, shrunk and
rent, but well patched door. A voice, alive with the soft vibrations of
thought and feeling, answered,

“Come yer wa’s in, whae’er ye be.”

Gibbie pulled the string that came through a hole in the door, so
lifting the latch, and entered.

A woman sat on a creepie, her face turned over her shoulder to see who
came. It was a grey face, with good simple features and clear grey
eyes. The plentiful hair that grew low on her forehead, was half grey,
mostly covered by a white cap with frills. A clean wrapper and apron,
both of blue print, over a blue winsey petticoat, blue stockings, and
strong shoes completed her dress. A book lay on her lap: always when
she had finished her morning’s work, and made her house tidy, she sat
down to _have her comfort_, as she called it. The moment she saw Gibbie
she rose. Had he been the angel Gabriel, come to tell her she was
wanted at the throne, her attention could not have been more immediate
or thorough. She was rather a little woman, and carried herself
straight and light.

“Eh, ye puir ootcast!” she said, in the pitying voice of a mother, “hoo
cam ye here sic a heicht? Cratur, ye hae left the warl’ ahin’ ye. What
wad ye hae here? _I_ hae naething.”

Receiving no answer but one of the child’s betwitching smiles, she
stood for a moment regarding him, not in mere silence, but with a
look of dumbness. She was a mother. One who is mother only to her own
children is not a mother; she is only a woman who has borne children.
But here was one of God’s mothers.

Loneliness and silence, and constant homely familiarity with the vast
simplicities of nature, assist much in the development of the deeper
and more wonderful faculties of perception. The perceptions themselves
may take this or that shape according to the education--may even embody
themselves fantastically, yet be no less perceptions. Now the very
moment before Gibbie entered, she had been reading the words of the
Lord: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my
brethren, ye have done it unto me”; and with her heart full of them,
she lifted her eyes and saw Gibbie. For one moment, with the quick
flashing response of the childlike imagination of the Celt, she fancied
she saw the Lord himself. Another woman might have made a more serious
mistake, and seen there _only_ a child. Often had Janet pondered, as
she sat alone on the great mountain, while Robert was with the sheep,
or she lay awake by his side at night, with the wind howling about the
cottage, whether the Lord might not sometimes take a lonely walk to
look after such solitary sheep of his flock as they, and let them know
he had not lost sight of them, for all the ups and downs of the hills.
There stood the child, and whether he was the Lord or not, he was
evidently hungry. Ah! who could tell but the Lord was actually hungry
in every one of his hungering little ones!

In the mean time--only it was but thought-time, not clock-time--Gibbie
stood motionless in the middle of the floor, smiling his innocent
smile, asking for nothing, hinting at nothing, but resting his wild
calm eyes, with a sense of safety and mother-presence, upon the grey
thoughtful face of the gazing woman. Her awe deepened; it seemed to
descend upon her and fold her in as with a mantle. Involuntarily she
bowed her head, and stepping to him took him by the hand, and led him
to the stool she had left. There she made him sit, while she brought
forward her table, white with scrubbing, took from a hole in the wall
and set upon it a platter of oatcakes, carried a wooden bowl to her
dairy in the rock through a whitewashed door, and bringing it back
filled, half with cream half with milk, set that also on the table.
Then she placed a chair before it, and said--

“Sit ye doon, an’ tak. Gien ye war the Lord himsel’, my bonnie man,
an’ ye may be for oucht I ken, for ye luik puir an’ despised eneuch, I
cud gie nae better, for it’s a’ I hae to offer ye--’cep it micht be an
egg,” she added, correcting herself, and turned and went out.

Presently she came back with a look of success, carrying two eggs,
which, having raked out a quantity, she buried in the hot ashes of the
peats, and left in front of the hearth to roast, while Gibbie went on
eating the thick oatcake, sweet and substantial, and drinking such milk
as the wildest imagination of town-boy could never suggest. It was
indeed angels’ food--food such as would have pleased the Lord himself
after a hard day with axe and saw and plane, so good and simple and
strong was it. Janet resumed her seat on the low three-legged stool,
and took her knitting that he might feel neither that he was watched as
he ate, nor that she was waiting for him to finish. Every other moment
she gave a glance at the stranger she had taken in; but never a word he
spoke, and the sense of mystery grew upon her.

Presently came a great bounce and scramble; the latch jumped up,
the door flew open, and after a moment’s pause, in came a sheep
dog--a splendid thorough-bred collie, carrying in his mouth a tiny,
long-legged lamb, which he dropped half dead in the woman’s lap. It
was a late lamb, born of a mother which had been sold from the hill,
but had found her way back from a great distance, in order that her
coming young one might have the privilege of being yeaned on the same
spot where she had herself awaked to existence. Another moment, and her
_mba-a_ was heard approaching the door. She trotted in, and going up to
Janet, stood contemplating the consequences of her maternal ambition.
Her udder was full, but the lamb was too weak to suck. Janet rose,
and going to the side of the room, opened the door of what might have
seemed an old press, but was a bed. Folding back the counterpane, she
laid the lamb in the bed, and covered it over. Then she got a _caup_, a
wooden dish like a large saucer, and into it milked the ewe. Next she
carried the caup to the bed; but what means she there used to enable
the lamb to drink, the boy could not see, though his busy eyes and
loving heart would gladly have taken in all.

In the mean time the collie, having done his duty by the lamb, and
perhaps forgotten it, sat on his tail, and stared with his two brave
trusting eyes at the little beggar that sat in the master’s chair, and
ate of the fat of the land. Oscar was a gentleman, and had never gone
to school, therefore neither fancied nor had been taught that rags
make an essential distinction, and ought to be barked at. Gibbie was a
stranger, and therefore as a stranger Oscar gave him welcome--now and
then stooping to lick the little brown feet that had wandered so far.

Like all wild creatures, Gibbie ate fast, and had finished everything
set before him ere the woman had done feeding the lamb. Without a
notion of the rudeness of it, his heart full of gentle gratitude, he
rose and left the cottage. When Janet turned from her shepherding,
there sat Oscar looking up at the empty chair.

“What’s come o’ the laddie?” she said to the dog, who answered with a
low whine, half-regretful, half-interrogative. It may be he was only
asking, like Esau, if there was no residuum of blessing for him also;
but perhaps he too was puzzled what to conclude about the boy. Janet
hastened to the door, but already Gibbie’s nimble feet refreshed to
the point of every toe with the food he had just swallowed, had borne
him far up the hill, behind the cottage, so that she could not get a
glimpse of him. Thoughtfully she returned, and thoughtfully removed
the remnants of the meal. She would then have resumed her Bible, but
her hospitality had rendered it necessary that she should put on her
_girdle_--not a cincture of leather upon her body, but a disc of iron
on the fire--to bake thereon cakes ere her husband’s return. It was a
simple enough process, for the oat-meal wanted nothing but water and
fire; but her joints had not yet got rid of the winter’s rheumatism,
and the labour of the baking was the hardest part of the sacrifice of
her hospitality. To many it is easy to give what they have, but the
offering of weariness and pain is never easy. They are indeed a true
salt to salt sacrifices withal. That it was the last of her meal till
her youngest boy should bring her a bag on his back from the mill the
next Saturday, made no point in her trouble.

When at last she had done, and put the things away, and swept up the
hearth, she milked the ewe, sent her out to nibble, took her Bible, and
sat down once more to read. The lamb lay at her feet, with his little
head projecting from the folds of her new flannel petticoat; and every
time her eye fell from the book upon the lamb, she felt as if somehow
the lamb was the boy that had eaten of her bread and drunk of her milk.
After she had read a while, there came a change, and the lamb seemed
the Lord himself, both lamb and shepherd, who had come to claim her
hospitality. Then, divinely invaded with the dread lest in the fancy
she should forget the reality, she kneeled down and prayed to the
friend of Martha and Mary and Lazarus, to come as he had said, and sup
with her indeed.

Not for years and years had Janet been to church; she had long been
unable to walk so far; and having no book but the best, and no help
to understand it but the highest, her faith was simple, strong,
real, all-pervading. Day by day she pored over the great gospel--I
mean just the good news according to Matthew and Mark and Luke and
John--until she had grown to be one of the noble ladies of the kingdom
of heaven--one of those who inherit the earth, and are ripening to
see God. For the Master, and his mind in hers, was her teacher. She
had little or no theology save what he taught her, or rather, what he
is. And of any other than that, the less the better; for no theology,
except the _Θεοῡ λόγος_, is worth the learning, no other being true. To
know _him_ is to know God. And he only who obeys him, does or can know
him; he who obeys him cannot fail to know him. To Janet, Jesus Christ
was no object of so-called theological speculation, but a living man,
who somehow or other heard her when she called to him, and sent her the
help she needed.




CHAPTER XII.

GLASHGAR.

Up and up the hill went Gibbie. The path ceased altogether; but when
_up_ is the word in one’s mind--and _up_ had grown almost a fixed idea
with Gibbie--he can seldom be in doubt whether he is going right, even
where there is no track. Indeed in all more arduous ways, men leave no
track behind them, no finger-post--there is always but the steepness.
He climbed and climbed. The mountain grew steeper and barer as he went,
and he became absorbed in his climbing. All at once he discovered that
he had lost the stream, where or when he could not tell. All below and
around him was red granite rock, scattered over with the chips and
splinters detached by air and wind, water and stream, light and heat
and cold. Glashgar was only about three thousand feet in height, but it
was the steepest of its group--a huge rock that, even in the midst of
masses, suggested solidity.

Not once while he ascended had the idea come to him that by and by
he should be able to climb no farther. For aught he knew there were
oat-cakes and milk and sheep and collie dogs ever higher and higher
still. Not until he actually stood upon the peak did he know that
there was the earthly _hitherto_--the final obstacle of unobstancy,
the everywhere which, from excess of perviousness, was to human foot
impervious. The sun was about two hours towards the west, when Gibbie,
his little legs almost as active as ever, surmounted the final slope.
Running up like a child that would scale heaven, he stood on the bare
round, the head of the mountain, and saw, with an invading shock of
amazement, and at first of disappointment, that there was no going
higher: in every direction the slope was downward. He had never been
on the top of anything before. He had always been in the hollows of
things. Now the whole world lay beneath him. It was cold; in some of
the shadows lay snow--weary exile from both the sky and the sea and
the ways of them--captive in the fetters of the cold--prisoner to
the mountain top; but Gibbie felt no cold. In a glow with the climb,
which at the last had been hard, his lungs filled with the heavenly
air, and his soul with the feeling that he was above everything that
was, uplifted on the very crown of the earth, he stood in his rags,
a fluttering scarecrow, the conqueror of height, the discoverer of
immensity, the monarch of space. Nobody knew of such marvel but him!
Gibbie had never even heard the word _poetry_, but none the less was
he the very stuff out of which poems grow, and now all the latent
poetry in him was set a swaying and heaving--an ocean inarticulate
because unobstructed--a might that could make no music, no thunder
of waves, because it had no shore, no rocks of thought against which
to break in speech. He sat down on the topmost point; and slowly,
in the silence and the loneliness, from the unknown fountains of
the eternal consciousness, the heart of the child filled. Above him
towered infinitude, immensity, potent on his mind through shape to his
eye in a soaring dome of blue--the one visible symbol informed and
insouled of the eternal, to reveal itself thereby. In it, centre and
life, lorded the great sun, beginning to cast shadows to the south
and east from the endless heaps of the world that lifted themselves
in all directions. Down their sides ran the streams, down busily,
hasting away through every valley to the Daur, which bore them back
to the ocean-heart--through woods and meadows, park and waste, rocks
and willowy marsh. Behind the valleys rose mountains; and behind the
mountains, other mountains, more and more, each swathed in its own
mystery; and beyond all hung the curtain-depth of the sky-gulf. Gibbie
sat and gazed, and dreamed and gazed. The mighty city that had been
to him the universe, was dropped and lost, like a thing that was now
nobody’s, in far indistinguishable distance; and he who had lost it
had climbed upon the throne of the world. The air was still; when a
breath awoke, it but touched his cheek like the down of a feather, and
the stillness was there again. The stillness grew great, and slowly
descended upon him. It deepened and deepened. Surely it would deepen to
a voice!--it was about to speak! It was as if a great single thought
was the substance of the silence, and was all over and around him, and
closer to him than his clothes, than his body, than his hands. I am
describing the indescribable, and compelled to make it too definite
for belief. In colder speech, an experience had come to the child; a
link in the chain of his development glided over the windlass of his
uplifting; a change passed upon him. In after years, when Gibbie had
the idea of God, when he had learned to think about him, to desire his
presence, to believe that a will of love enveloped his will, as the
brooding hen spreads her wings over her eggs--as often as the thought
of God came to him, it came in the shape of the silence on the top of
Glashgar.

As he sat, with his eyes on the peak he had just chosen from the rest
as the loftiest of all within his sight, he saw a cloud begin to grow
upon it. The cloud grew, and gathered, and descended, covering its
sides as it went, until the whole was hidden. Then swiftly, as he
gazed, the cloud opened as it were a round window in the heart of it,
and through that he saw the peak again. The next moment a flash of blue
lightning darted across the opening, and whether Gibbie really saw what
follows, he never could be sure, but always after, as often as the
vision returned, in the flash he saw a rock rolling down the peak. The
clouds swept together, and the window closed. The next thing which in
after years he remembered was, that the earth, mountains, meadows, and
streams, had vanished; everything was gone from his sight, except a
few yards around him of the rock upon which he sat, and the cloud that
hid world and heaven. Then again burst forth the lightning. He saw no
flash, but an intense cloud-illumination, accompanied by the deafening
crack, and followed by the appalling roar and roll of the thunder. Nor
was it noise alone that surrounded him, for, as if he were in the heart
and nest of the storm, the very wind-waves that made the thunder rushed
in driven bellowing over him, and had nearly swept him away. He clung
to the rock with hands and feet. The cloud writhed and wrought and
billowed and eddied, with all the shapes of the wind, and seemed itself
to be the furnace-womb in which the thunder was created. Was this then
the voice into which the silence had been all the time deepening?--had
the Presence thus taken form and declared itself? Gibbie had yet to
learn that there is a deeper voice still into which such a silence may
grow--and the silence not be broken. He was not dismayed. He had no
conscience of wrong, and scarcely knew fear. It was an awful delight
that filled his spirit. Mount Sinai was not to him a terror. To him
there was no wrath in the thunder any more than in the greeting of the
dog that found him in his kennel. To him there was no being in the sky
so righteous as to be more displeased than pitiful over the wrongness
of the children whom he had not yet got taught their childhood.
Gibbie sat calm, awe-ful, but, I imagine, with a clear forehead and
smile-haunted mouth, while the storm roared and beat and flashed and
ran about him. It was the very fountain of tempest. From the bare crest
of the mountain the water poured down its sides, as if its springs were
in the rock itself, and not in the bosom of the cloud above. The tumult
at last seized Gibbie like an intoxication; he jumped to his feet,
and danced and flung his arms about, as if he himself were the storm.
But the uproar did not last long. Almost suddenly it was gone, as if,
like a bird that had been flapping the ground in agony, it had at last
recovered itself, and taken to its great wings and flown. The sun shone
out clear, and in all the blue abyss not a cloud was to be seen, except
far away to leeward, where one was spread like a banner in the lonely
air, fleeting away, the ensign of the charging storm--bearing for its
device a segment of the many-coloured bow.

And now that its fierceness was over, the jubilation in the softer
voices of the storm became audible. As the soul gives thanks for the
sufferings that are overpast, offering the love and faith and hope
which the pain has stung into fresh life, so from the sides of the
mountain ascended the noise of the waters the cloud had left behind.
The sun had kept on his journey; the storm had been no disaster to him;
and now he was a long way down the west, and Twilight, in her grey
cloak, would soon be tracking him from the east, like sorrow dogging
delight. Gibbie, wet and cold, began to think of the cottage where he
had been so kindly received, of the friendly face of its mistress, and
her care of the lamb. It was not that he wanted to eat. He did not
even imagine more eating, for never in his life had he eaten twice
of the same charity in the same day. What he wanted was to find some
dry hole in the mountain, and sleep as near the cottage as he could.
So he rose and set out. But he lost his way; came upon one precipice
after another, down which only a creeping thing could have gone; was
repeatedly turned aside by torrents and swampy places; and when the
twilight came, was still wandering upon the mountain. At length he
found, as he thought, the burn along whose bank he had ascended in
the morning, and followed it towards the valley, looking out for the
friendly cottage. But the first indication of abode he saw, was the
wall of the grounds of the house through whose gate he had looked in
the morning. He was then a long way from the cottage, and not far
from the farm; and the best thing he could do was to find again the
barn where he had slept so well the night before. This was not very
difficult even in the dusky night. He skirted the wall, came to his
first guide, found and crossed the valley-stream, and descended it
until he thought he recognized the slope of clover down which he had
run in the morning. He ran up the brae, and there were the solemn cones
of the corn-ricks between him and the sky! A minute more and he had
crept through the cat-hole, and was feeling about in the dark barn.
Happily the heap of straw was not yet removed. Gibbie shot into it like
a mole, and burrowed to the very centre, there coiled himself up, and
imagined himself lying in the heart of the rock on which he sat during
the storm, and listening to the thunder winds over his head. The fancy
enticed the sleep which before was ready enough to come, and he was
soon far stiller than Ariel in the cloven pine of Sycorax.




CHAPTER XIII.

THE CEILING.

He might have slept longer the next morning, for there was no threshing
to wake him, in spite of the cocks in the yard that made it their
business to rouse sleepers to their work, had it not been for another
kind of cock inside him, which bore the same relation to food that the
others bore to light. He peeped first, then crept out. All was still
except the voices of those same prophet cocks, crying in the wilderness
of the yet sunless world; a moo now and then from the byres; and the
occasional stamp of a great hoof in the stable. Gibbie clambered up
into the loft, and turning the cheeses about until he came upon the one
he had gnawed before, again attacked it, and enlarged considerably the
hole he had already made in it. Rather dangerous food it was, perhaps,
eaten in that unmitigated way, for it was made of skimmed milk, and was
very dry and hard; but Gibbie was a powerful little animal, all bones
and sinews, small hard muscle, and faultless digestion. The next idea
naturally rising was the burn; he tumbled down over the straw heap to
the floor of the barn, and made for the cat-hole. But the moment he
put his head out, he saw the legs of a man: the farmer was walking
through his ricks, speculating on the money they held. He drew back,
and looked round to see where best he could betake himself should he
come in. He spied thereupon a ladder leaning against the end-wall
of the barn, opposite the loft and the stables, and near it in the
wall a wooden shutter, like the door of a little cupboard. He got up
the ladder, and opening the shutter, which was fastened only with a
button, found a hole in the wall, through which popping his head too
carelessly, he knocked from a shelf some piece of pottery, which fell
with a great crash on a paved floor. Looking after it, Gibbie beheld
below him a rich prospect of yellow-white pools ranged in order on
shelves. They reminded him of milk, but were of a different colour. As
he gazed, a door opened hastily, with sharp clicking latch, and a woman
entered, ejaculating, “Care what set that cat!” Gibbie drew back, lest
in her search for the cat she might find the culprit. She looked all
round, muttering s

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