← catalogue

The House with the Green Shutters

by George Douglas Brown · English · Gutenberg #25876 · 510,032 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The House with the Green Shutters
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The House with the Green Shutters

Author: George Douglas Brown


        
Release date: June 22, 2008 [eBook #25876]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25876

Credits: E-text prepared by David Clarke, Martin Pettit, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HOUSE WITH THE GREEN SHUTTERS ***


E-text prepared by David Clarke, Martin Pettit, and the Project Gutenberg
Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)



THE HOUSE WITH THE GREEN SHUTTERS

by

GEORGE DOUGLAS







[Illustration: Publisher's logo]

Thomas Nelson and Sons, Ltd.
London, Edinburgh, and New York




THE HOUSE WITH THE GREEN SHUTTERS.




CHAPTER I.


The frowsy chambermaid of the "Red Lion" had just finished washing the
front door steps. She rose from her stooping posture and, being of
slovenly habit, flung the water from her pail straight out, without
moving from where she stood. The smooth round arch of the falling water
glistened for a moment in mid-air. John Gourlay, standing in front of
his new house at the head of the brae, could hear the swash of it when
it fell. The morning was of perfect stillness.

The hands of the clock across "the Square" were pointing to the hour of
eight. They were yellow in the sun.

Blowsalinda, of the Red Lion, picked up the big bass that usually lay
within the porch, and carrying it clumsily against her breast, moved off
round the corner of the public-house, her petticoat gaping behind.
Halfway she met the hostler, with whom she stopped in amorous dalliance.
He said something to her, and she laughed loudly and vacantly. The silly
_tee-hee_ echoed up the street.

A moment later a cloud of dust drifting round the corner, and floating
white in the still air, showed that she was pounding the bass against
the end of the house. All over the little town the women of Barbie were
equally busy with their steps and door-mats. There was scarce a man to
be seen either in the Square, at the top of which Gourlay stood, or in
the long street descending from its near corner. The men were at work;
the children had not yet appeared; the women were busy with their
household cares.

The freshness of the air, the smoke rising thin and far above the red
chimneys, the sunshine glistering on the roofs and gables, the rosy
clearness of everything beneath the dawn--above all, the quietness and
peace--made Barbie, usually so poor to see, a very pleasant place to
look down at on a summer morning. At this hour there was an unfamiliar
delicacy in the familiar scene, a freshness and purity of aspect--almost
an unearthliness--as though you viewed it through a crystal dream. But
it was not the beauty of the hour that kept Gourlay musing at his gate.
He was dead to the fairness of the scene, even while the fact of its
presence there before him wove most subtly with his mood. He smoked in
silent enjoyment because on a morning such as this everything he saw was
a delicate flattery to his pride. At the beginning of a new day, to look
down on the petty burgh in which he was the greatest man filled all his
being with a consciousness of importance. His sense of prosperity was
soothing and pervasive; he felt it all round him like the pleasant air,
as real as that and as subtle; bathing him, caressing. It was the most
secret and intimate joy of his life to go out and smoke on summer
mornings by his big gate, musing over Barbie ere he possessed it with
his merchandise.

He had growled at the quarry carters for being late in setting out this
morning (for, like most resolute dullards, he was sternly methodical),
but in his heart he was secretly pleased. The needs of his business were
so various that his men could rarely start at the same hour and in the
same direction. To-day, however, because of the delay, all his carts
would go streaming through the town together, and that brave pomp would
be a slap in the face to his enemies. "I'll show them," he thought
proudly. "Them" was the town-folk, and what he would show them was what
a big man he was. For, like most scorners of the world's opinion,
Gourlay was its slave, and showed his subjection to the popular estimate
by his anxiety to flout it. He was not great enough for the carelessness
of perfect scorn.

Through the big green gate behind him came the sound of carts being
loaded for the day. A horse, weary of standing idle between the shafts,
kicked ceaselessly and steadily against the ground with one impatient
hinder foot, clink, clink, clink upon the paved yard. "Easy, damn ye;
ye'll smash the bricks!" came a voice. Then there was the smart slap of
an open hand on a sleek neck, a quick start, and the rattle of chains as
the horse quivered to the blow.

"Run a white tarpaulin across the cheese, Jock, to keep them frae
melting in the heat," came another voice. "And canny on the top there
wi' thae big feet o' yours; d'ye think a cheese was made for _you_ to
dance on wi' your mighty brogues?" Then the voice sank to the hoarse,
warning whisper of impatience--loudish in anxiety, yet throaty from fear
of being heard. "Hurry up, man--hurry up, or he'll be down on us like
bleezes for being so late in getting off!"

Gourlay smiled grimly, and a black gleam shot from his eye as he glanced
round to the gate and caught the words. His men did not know he could
hear them.

The clock across the Square struck the hour, eight soft, slow strokes,
that melted away in the beauty of the morning. Five minutes passed.
Gourlay turned his head to listen, but no further sound came from the
yard. He walked to the green gate, his slippers making no noise.

"Are ye sleeping, my pretty men?" he said softly.... "_Eih?_"

The "_Eih_" leapt like a sword, with a slicing sharpness in its tone
that made it a sinister contrast to the first sweet question to his
"pretty men." "_Eih?_" he said again, and stared with open mouth and
fierce, dark eyes.

"Hurry up, Peter," whispered the gaffer, "hurry up, for God sake. He has
the black glower in his een."

"Ready, sir; ready now!" cried Peter Riney, running out to open the
other half of the gate. Peter was a wizened little man, with a sandy
fringe of beard beneath his chin, a wart on the end of his long,
slanting-out nose, light blue eyes, and bushy eyebrows of a reddish
gray. The bearded red brows, close above the pale blueness of his eyes,
made them more vivid by contrast; they were like pools of blue light
amid the brownness of his face. Peter always ran about his work with
eager alacrity. A simple and willing old man, he affected the quick
readiness of youth to atone for his insignificance.

"Hup, horse; hup then!" cried courageous Peter, walking backwards with
curved body through the gate, and tugging at the reins of a horse the
feet of which struck sparks from the paved ground as they stressed
painfully on edge to get weigh on the great wagon behind. The cart
rolled through, then another, and another, till twelve of them had
passed. Gourlay stood aside to watch them. All the horses were brown;
"he makes a point of that," the neighbours would have told you. As each
horse passed the gate the driver left its head, and took his place by
the wheel, cracking his whip, with many a "Hup, horse; yean, horse; woa,
lad; steady!"

In a dull little country town the passing of a single cart is an event,
and a gig is followed with the eye till it disappears. Anything is
welcome that breaks the long monotony of the hours and suggests a topic
for the evening's talk. "Any news?" a body will gravely inquire. "Ou
ay," another will answer with equal gravity: "I saw Kennedy's gig going
past in the forenoon." "Ay, man; where would _he_ be off till? He's owre
often in his gig, I'm thinking." And then Kennedy and his affairs will
last them till bedtime.

Thus the appearance of Gourlay's carts woke Barbie from its morning
lethargy. The smith came out in his leather apron, shoving back, as he
gazed, the grimy cap from his white-sweating brow; bowed old men stood
in front of their doorways, leaning with one hand on short, trembling
staffs, while the slaver slid unheeded along the cutties which the left
hand held to their toothless mouths; white-mutched grannies were keeking
past the jambs; an early urchin, standing wide-legged to stare, waved
his cap and shouted, "Hooray!"--and all because John Gourlay's carts
were setting off upon their morning rounds, a brave procession for a
single town! Gourlay, standing great-shouldered in the middle of the
road, took in every detail, devoured it grimly as a homage to his pride.
"Ha, ha, ye dogs!" said the soul within him. Past the pillar of the Red
Lion door he could see a white peep of the landlord's waistcoat--though
the rest of the mountainous man was hidden deep within his porch. (On
summer mornings the vast totality of the landlord was always inferential
to the town from the tiny white peep of him revealed.) Even fat Simpson
had waddled to the door to see the carts going past. It was fat
Simpson--might the Universe blast his adipose--who had once tried to
infringe Gourlay's monopoly as the sole carrier in Barbie. There had
been a rush to him at first, but Gourlay set his teeth and drove him off
the road, carrying stuff for nothing till Simpson had nothing to carry,
so that the local wit suggested "a wee parcel in a big cart" as a new
sign for his hotel. The twelve browns prancing past would be a pill to
Simpson! There was no smile about Gourlay's mouth--a fiercer glower was
the only sign of his pride--but it put a bloom on his morning, he felt,
to see the suggestive round of Simpson's waistcoat, down yonder at the
porch. Simpson, the swine! He had made short work o' _him_!

Ere the last of the carts had issued from the yard at the House with the
Green Shutters the foremost was already near the Red Lion. Gourlay swore
beneath his breath when Miss Toddle--described in the local records as
"a spinster of independent means"--came fluttering out with a silly
little parcel to accost one of the carriers. Did the auld fool mean to
stop Andy Gow about _her_ petty affairs, and thus break the line of
carts on the only morning they had ever been able to go down the brae
together? But no. Andy tossed her parcel carelessly up among his other
packages, and left her bawling instructions from the gutter, with a
portentous shaking of her corkscrew curls. Gourlay's men took their cue
from their master, and were contemptuous of Barbie, most unchivalrous
scorners of its old maids.

Gourlay was pleased with Andy for snubbing Sandy Toddle's sister. When
he and Elshie Hogg reached the Cross they would have to break off from
the rest to complete their loads; but they had been down Main Street
over night as usual picking up their commissions, and until they reached
the Bend o' the Brae it was unlikely that any business should arrest
them now. Gourlay hoped that it might be so; and he had his desire, for,
with the exception of Miss Toddle, no customer appeared. The teams went
slowly down the steep side of the Square in an unbroken line, and slowly
down the street leading from its near corner. On the slope the horses
were unable to go fast--being forced to stell themselves back against
the heavy propulsion of the carts behind; and thus the procession
endured for a length of time worthy its surpassing greatness. When it
disappeared round the Bend o' the Brae the watching bodies disappeared
too; the event of the day had passed, and vacancy resumed her reign. The
street and the Square lay empty to the morning sun. Gourlay alone stood
idly at his gate, lapped in his own satisfaction.

It had been a big morning, he felt. It was the first time for many a
year that all his men, quarrymen and carriers, carters of cheese and
carters of grain, had led their teams down the brae together in the full
view of his rivals. "I hope they liked it!" he thought, and he nodded
several times at the town beneath his feet, with a slow up-and-down
motion of the head, like a man nodding grimly to his beaten enemy. It
was as if he said, "See what I have done to ye!"




CHAPTER II.


Only a man of Gourlay's brute force of character could have kept all the
carrying trade of Barbie in his own hands. Even in these days of
railways, nearly every parish has a pair of carriers at the least,
journeying once or twice a week to the nearest town. In the days when
Gourlay was the great man of Barbie, railways were only beginning to
thrust themselves among the quiet hills, and the bulk of inland commerce
was still being drawn by horses along the country roads. Yet Gourlay was
the only carrier in the town. The wonder is diminished when we remember
that it had been a decaying burgh for thirty years, and that its trade,
at the best of times, was of meagre volume. Even so, it was astonishing
that he should be the only carrier. If you asked the natives how he did
it, "Ou," they said, "he makes the one hand wash the other, doan't ye
know?"--meaning thereby that he had so many horses travelling on his own
business, that he could afford to carry other people's goods at rates
that must cripple his rivals.

"But that's very stupid, surely," said a visitor once, who thought of
entering into competition. "It's cutting off his nose to spite his face!
Why is he so anxious to be the only carrier in Barbie that he carries
stuff for next to noathing the moment another man tries to work the
roads? It's a daft-like thing to do!"

"To be sure is't, to be sure is't! Just the stupeedity o' spite! Oh,
there are times when Gourlay makes little or noathing from the carrying;
but then, ye see, it gies him a fine chance to annoy folk! If you ask
him to bring ye ocht, 'Oh,' he growls, 'I'll see if it suits my own
convenience.' And ye have to be content. He has made so much money of
late that the pride of him's not to be endured."

It was not the insolence of sudden wealth, however, that made Gourlay
haughty to his neighbours; it was a repressiveness natural to the man
and a fierce contempt of their scoffing envy. But it was true that he
had made large sums of money during recent years. From his father (who
had risen in the world) he inherited a fine trade in cheese; also the
carrying to Skeighan on the one side and Fleckie on the other. When he
married Miss Richmond of Tenshillingland, he started as a corn broker
with the snug dowry that she brought him. Then, greatly to his own
benefit, he succeeded in establishing a valuable connection with
Templandmuir.

It was partly by sheer impact of character that Gourlay obtained his
ascendency over hearty and careless Templandmuir, and partly by a bluff
joviality which he--so little cunning in other things--knew to affect
among the petty lairds. The man you saw trying to be jocose with
Templandmuir was a very different being from the autocrat who "downed"
his fellows in the town. It was all "How are ye the day, Templandmuir?"
and "How d'ye doo-oo, Mr. Gourlay?" and the immediate production of the
big decanter.

More than ten years ago now Templandmuir gave this fine, dour upstanding
friend of his a twelve-year tack of the Red Quarry, and that was the
making of Gourlay. The quarry yielded the best building stone in a
circuit of thirty miles, easy to work and hard against wind and weather.
When the main line went north through Skeighan and Poltandie, there was
a great deal of building on the far side, and Gourlay simply coined the
money. He could not have exhausted the quarry had he tried--he would
have had to howk down a hill--but he took thousands of loads from it for
the Skeighan folk; and the commission he paid the laird on each was
ridiculously small. He built wooden stables out on Templandmuir's
estate--the Templar had seven hundred acres of hill land--and it was
there the quarry horses generally stood. It was only rarely--once in two
years, perhaps--that they came into the House with the Green Shutters.
Last Saturday they had brought several loads of stuff for Gourlay's own
use, and that is why they were present at the great procession on the
Monday following.

It was their feeling that Gourlay's success was out of all proportion to
his merits that made other great-men-in-a-small-way so bitter against
him. They were an able lot, and scarce one but possessed fifty times his
weight of brain. Yet he had the big way of doing, though most of them
were well enough to pass. Had they not been aware of his stupidity, they
would never have minded his triumphs in the countryside; but they felt
it with a sense of personal defeat that he--the donkey, as they thought
him--should scoop every chance that was going, and leave them, the
long-headed ones, still muddling in their old concerns. They consoled
themselves with sneers, he retorted with brutal scorn, and the feud kept
increasing between them.

They were standing at the Cross, to enjoy their Saturday at e'en, when
Gourlay's "quarriers"--as the quarry horses had been named--came through
the town last week-end. There were groups of bodies in the streets,
washed from toil to enjoy the quiet air; dandering slowly or gossiping
at ease; and they all turned to watch the quarriers stepping bravely up,
their heads tossing to the hill. The big-men-in-a-small-way glowered and
said nothing.

"I wouldn't mind," said Sandy Toddle at last--"I wouldn't mind if he
weren't such a demned ess!"

"Ess?" said the Deacon unpleasantly. He puckered his brow and blinked,
pretending not to understand.

"Oh, a cuddy, ye know," said Toddle, colouring.

"Gourlay'th stupid enough," lisped the Deacon; "we all know that. But
there'th one thing to be said on hith behalf. He's not such a 'demned
ess' as to try and thpeak fancy English!"

When the Deacon was not afraid of a man he stabbed him straight; when he
was afraid of him he stabbed him on the sly. He was annoyed by the
passing of Gourlay's carts, and he took it out of Sandy Toddle.

"It's extr'ornar!" blurted the Provost (who was a man of brosy speech,
large-mouthed and fat of utterance). "It's extr'ornar. Yass, it's
extr'ornar! I mean the luck of that man--for gumption he has noan, noan
whatever! But if the railway came hereaway I wager Gourlay would go
down," he added, less in certainty of knowledge than as prophet of the
thing desired. "I wager he'd go down, sirs."

"Likely enough," said Sandy Toddle; "he wouldn't be quick enough to jump
at the new way of doing."

"Moar than that!" cried the Provost, spite sharpening his insight, "moar
than that--he'd be owre dour to abandon the auld way. _I_'m talling ye.
He would just be left entirely! It's only those, like myself, who
approach him on the town's affairs that know the full extent of his
stupeedity."

"Oh, he's a 'demned ess,'" said the Deacon, rubbing it into Toddle and
Gourlay at the same time.

"A-ah, but then, ye see, he has the abeelity that comes from character,"
said Johnny Coe, who was a sage philosopher. "For there are two kinds of
abeelity, don't ye understa-and? There's a scattered abeelity that's of
no use! Auld Randie Donaldson was good at fifty different things, and he
died in the poorhouse! There's a dour kind of abeelity, though, that has
no cleverness, but just gangs tramping on; and that's----"

"The easiest beaten by a flank attack," said the Deacon, snubbing him.




CHAPTER III.


With the sudden start of a man roused from a daydream Gourlay turned
from the green gate and entered the yard. Jock Gilmour, the "orra" man,
was washing down the legs of a horse beside the trough. It was Gourlay's
own cob, which he used for driving round the countryside. It was a
black--Gourlay "made a point" of driving with a black. "The brown for
sturdiness, the black for speed," he would say, making a maxim of his
whim to give it the sanction of a higher law.

Gilmour was in a wild temper because he had been forced to get up at
five o'clock in order to turn several hundred cheeses, to prevent them
bulging out of shape owing to the heat, and so becoming cracked and
spoiled. He did not raise his head at his master's approach. And his
head being bent, the eye was attracted to a patent leather collar which
he wore, glazed with black and red stripes. It is a collar much affected
by ploughmen, because a dip in the horse-trough once a month suffices
for its washing. Between the striped collar and his hair (as he stooped)
the sunburnt redness of his neck struck the eye vividly--the cropped
fair hairs on it showing whitish on the red skin.

The horse quivered as the cold water swashed about its legs, and turned
playfully to bite its groom. Gilmour, still stooping, dug his elbow up
beneath its ribs. The animal wheeled in anger, but Gilmour ran to its
head with most manful blasphemy, and led it to the stable door. The off
hind leg was still unwashed.

"Has the horse but the three legs?" said Gourlay suavely.

Gilmour brought the horse back to the trough, muttering sullenly.

"Were ye saying anything?" said Gourlay. "_Eih?_"

Gilmour sulked out and said nothing; and his master smiled grimly at the
sudden redness that swelled his neck and ears to the verge of bursting.

A boy, standing in his shirt and trousers at an open window of the house
above, had looked down at the scene with craning interest--big-eyed. He
had been alive to every turn and phase of it--the horse's quiver of
delight and fear, his skittishness, the groom's ill-temper, and
Gourlay's grinding will. Eh, but his father was a caution! How easy he
had downed Jock Gilmour! The boy was afraid of his father himself, but
he liked to see him send other folk to the right about. For he was John
Gourlay, too. Hokey, but his father could down them!

Mr. Gourlay passed on to the inner yard, which was close to the scullery
door. The paved little court, within its high wooden walls, was
curiously fresh and clean. A cock-pigeon strutted round, puffing his
gleaming breast and _rooketty-cooing_ in the sun. Large, clear drops
fell slowly from the spout of a wooden pump, and splashed upon a flat
stone. The place seemed to enfold the stillness. There was a sense of
inclusion and peace.

There is a distinct pleasure to the eye in a quiet brick court where
everything is fresh and prim; in sunny weather you can lounge in a room
and watch it through an open door, in a kind of lazy dream. The boy,
standing at the window above to let the fresh air blow round his neck,
was alive to that pleasure; he was intensely conscious of the pigeon
swelling in its bravery, of the clean yard, the dripping pump, and the
great stillness. His father on the step beneath had a different pleasure
in the sight. The fresh indolence of morning was round him too, but it
was more than that that kept him gazing in idle happiness. He was
delighting in the sense of his own property around him, the most
substantial pleasure possible to man. His feeling, deep though it was,
was quite vague and inarticulate. If you had asked Gourlay what he was
thinking of he could not have told you, even if he had been willing to
answer you civilly--which is most unlikely. Yet his whole being,
physical and mental (physical, indeed, rather than mental), was
surcharged with the feeling that the fine buildings around him were his,
that he had won them by his own effort, and built them large and
significant before the world. He was lapped in the thought of it.

All men are suffused with that quiet pride in looking at the houses and
lands which they have won by their endeavours--in looking at the houses
more than at the lands, for the house which a man has built seems to
express his character and stand for him before the world, as a sign of
his success. It is more personal than cold acres, stamped with an
individuality. All men know that soothing pride in the contemplation of
their own property. But in Gourlay's sense of property there was another
element--an element peculiar to itself, which endowed it with its
warmest glow. Conscious always that he was at a disadvantage among his
cleverer neighbours, who could achieve a civic eminence denied to him,
he felt nevertheless that there was one means, a material means, by
which he could hold his own and reassert himself--by the bravery of his
business, namely, and all the appointments thereof, among which his
dwelling was the chief. That was why he had spent so much money on the
house. That was why he had such keen delight in surveying it. Every time
he looked at the place he had a sense of triumph over what he knew in
his bones to be an adverse public opinion. There was anger in his
pleasure, and the pleasure that is mixed with anger often gives the
keenest thrill. It is the delight of triumph in spite of opposition.
Gourlay's house was a material expression of that delight, stood for it
in stone and lime.

It was not that he reasoned deliberately when he built the house. But
every improvement that he made--and he was always spending money on
improvements--had for its secret motive a more or less vague desire to
score off his rivals. "_That_'ll be a slap in the face to the Provost!"
he smiled, when he planted his great mound of shrubs. "There's noathing
like _that_ about the Provost's! Ha, ha!"

Encased as he was in his hard and insensitive nature, he was not the man
who in new surroundings would be quick to every whisper of opinion. But
he had been born and bred in Barbie, and he knew his townsmen--oh yes,
he knew them. He knew they laughed because he had no gift of the gab,
and could never be Provost, or Bailie, or Elder, or even Chairman of the
Gasworks! Oh, verra well, verra well; let Connal and Brodie and
Allardyce have the talk, and manage the town's affairs (he was damned if
they should manage his!)--he, for his part, preferred the substantial
reality. He could never aspire to the provostship, but a man with a
house like that, he was fain to think, could afford to do without it. Oh
yes; he was of opinion he could do without it! It had run him short of
cash to build the place so big and braw, but, Lord! it was worth it.
There wasn't a man in the town who had such accommodation!

And so, gradually, his dwelling had come to be a passion of Gourlay's
life. It was a by-word in the place that if ever his ghost was seen, it
would be haunting the House with the Green Shutters. Deacon Allardyce,
trying to make a phrase with him, once quoted the saying in his
presence. "Likely enough!" said Gourlay. "It's only reasonable I should
prefer my own house to you rabble in the graveyard!"

Both in appearance and position the house was a worthy counterpart of
its owner. It was a substantial two-story dwelling, planted firm and
gawcey on a little natural terrace that projected a considerable
distance into the Square. At the foot of the steep little bank shelving
to the terrace ran a stone wall, of no great height, and the iron
railings it uplifted were no higher than the sward within. Thus the
whole house was bare to the view from the ground up, nothing in front to
screen its admirable qualities. From each corner, behind, flanking walls
went out to the right and left, and hid the yard and the granaries. In
front of these walls the dwelling seemed to thrust itself out for
notice. It took the eye of a stranger the moment he entered the Square.
"Whose place is that?" was his natural question. A house that challenges
regard in that way should have a gallant bravery in its look; if its
aspect be mean, its assertive position but directs the eye to its
infirmities. There is something pathetic about a tall, cold, barn-like
house set high upon a brae; it cannot hide its naked shame; it thrusts
its ugliness dumbly on your notice, a manifest blotch upon the world, a
place for the winds to whistle round. But Gourlay's house was worthy its
commanding station. A little dour and blunt in the outlines like Gourlay
himself, it drew and satisfied your eye as he did.

And its position, "cockit up there on the brae," made it the theme of
constant remark--to men because of the tyrant who owned it, and to women
because of the poor woman who mismanaged its affairs. "'Deed, I don't
wonder that gurly Gourlay, as they ca' him, has an ill temper," said the
gossips gathered at the pump, with their big, bare arms akimbo;
"whatever led him to marry that dishclout of a woman clean beats _me_! I
never could make head nor tail o't!" As for the men, they twisted every
item about Gourlay and his domicile into fresh matter of assailment.
"What's the news?" asked one, returning from a long absence; to whom
the smith, after smoking in silence for five minutes, said, "Gourlay has
got new rones!" "Ha--ay, man, Gourlay has got new rones!" buzzed the
visitor; and then their eyes, diminished in mirth, twinkled at each
other from out their ruddy wrinkles, as if wit had volleyed between
them. In short, the House with the Green Shutters was on every
tongue--and with a scoff in the voice, if possible.




CHAPTER IV.


Gourlay went swiftly to the kitchen from the inner yard. He had stood so
long in silence on the step, and his coming was so noiseless, that he
surprised a long, thin trollop of a woman, with a long, thin, scraggy
neck, seated by the slatternly table, and busy with a frowsy
paper-covered volume, over which her head was bent in intent perusal.

"At your novelles?" said he. "Ay, woman; will it be a good story?"

She rose in a nervous flutter when she saw him; yet needlessly shrill in
her defence, because she was angry at detection.

"Ah, well!" she cried, in weary petulance, "it's an unco thing if a
body's not to have a moment's rest after such a morning's darg! I just
sat down wi' the book for a little, till John should come till his
breakfast!"

"So?" said Gourlay. "God, ay!" he went on; "you're making a nice job of
_him_. _He_'ll be a credit to the house. Oh, it's right, no doubt, that
_you_ should neglect your work till _he_ consents to rise."

"Eh, the puir la-amb," she protested, dwelling on the vowels in fatuous,
maternal love; "the bairn's wearied, man! He's ainything but strong, and
the schooling's owre sore on him."

"Poor lamb, atweel," said Gourlay. "It was a muckle sheep that dropped
him."

It was Gourlay's pride in his house that made him harsher to his wife
than others, since her sluttishness was a constant offence to the order
in which he loved to have his dear possessions. He, for his part, liked
everything precise. His claw-toed hammer always hung by the head on a
couple of nails close together near the big clock; his gun always lay
across a pair of wooden pegs, projecting from the brown rafters, just
above the hearth. His bigotry in trifles expressed his character. Strong
men of a mean understanding often deliberately assume, and passionately
defend, peculiarities of no importance, because they have nothing else
to get a repute for. "No, no," said Gourlay; "you'll never see a brown
cob in _my_ gig--I wouldn't take one in a present!" He was full of such
fads, and nothing should persuade him to alter the crotchets, which, for
want of something better, he made the marks of his dour character. He
had worked them up as part of his personality, and his pride of
personality was such that he would never consent to change them. Hence
the burly and gurly man was prim as an old maid with regard to his
belongings. Yet his wife was continually infringing the order on which
he set his heart. If he went forward to the big clock to look for his
hammer, it was sure to be gone--the two bright nails staring at him
vacantly. "Oh," she would say, in weary complaint, "I just took it to
break a wheen coals;" and he would find it in the coal-hole, greasy and
grimy finger-marks engrained on the handle which he loved to keep so
smooth and clean. Innumerable her offences of the kind. Independent of
these, the sight of her general incompetence filled him with a seething
rage, which found vent not in lengthy tirades but the smooth venom of
his tongue. Let him keep the outside of the house never so spick and
span, inside was awry with her untidiness. She was unworthy of the House
with the Green Shutters--that was the gist of it. Every time he set eyes
on the poor trollop, the fresh perception of her incompetence which the
sudden sight of her flashed, as she trailed aimlessly about, seemed to
fatten his rage and give a coarser birr to his tongue.

Mrs. Gourlay had only four people to look after--her husband, her two
children, and Jock Gilmour, the orra man. And the wife of Drucken
Wabster--who had to go charing because she was the wife of Drucken
Wabster--came in every day, and all day long, to help her with the work.
Yet the house was always in confusion. Mrs. Gourlay had asked for
another servant, but Gourlay would not allow that; "one's enough," said
he, and what he once laid down he never went back on. Mrs. Gourlay had
to muddle along as best she could, and having no strength either of mind
or body, she let things drift, and took refuge in reading silly fiction.

As Gourlay shoved his feet into his boots, and stamped to make them
easy, he glowered at the kitchen from under his heavy brows with a huge
disgust. The table was littered with unwashed dishes, and on the corner
of it next him was a great black sloppy ring, showing where a wet
saucepan had been laid upon the bare board. The sun streamed through the
window in yellow heat right on to a pat of melting butter. There was a
basin of dirty water beneath the table, with the dishcloth slopping over
on the ground.

"It's a tidy house!" said he.

"Ach, well," she cried, "you and your kitchen-range! It was that that
did it! The masons could have redd out the fireplace to make room for't
in the afternoon before it comes hame. They could have done't brawly,
but ye wouldna hear o't--oh no; ye bude to have the whole place gutted
out yestreen. I had to boil everything on the parlour fire this morning;
no wonder I'm a little tousy!"

The old-fashioned kitchen grate had been removed and the jambs had been
widened on each side of the fireplace; it yawned empty and cold. A
little rubble of mortar, newly dried, lay about the bottom of the
square recess. The sight of the crude, unfamiliar scraps of dropped lime
in the gaping place where warmth should have been, increased the
discomfort of the kitchen.

"Oh, that's it!" said Gourlay. "I see! It was want of the fireplace that
kept ye from washing the dishes that we used yestreen. That was
terrible! However, ye'll have plenty of boiling water when I put in the
grand new range for ye; there winna be its equal in the parish! We'll
maybe have a clean house _than_."

Mrs. Gourlay leaned, with the outspread thumb and red raw knuckles of
her right hand, on the sloppy table, and gazed away through the back
window of the kitchen in a kind of mournful vacancy. Always when her
first complaining defence had failed to turn aside her husband's tongue,
her mind became a blank beneath his heavy sarcasms, and sought refuge by
drifting far away. She would fix her eyes on the distance in dreary
contemplation, and her mind would follow her eyes in a vacant and
wistful regard. The preoccupation of her mournful gaze enabled her to
meet her husband's sneers with a kind of numb, unheeding acquiescence.
She scarcely heard them.

Her head hung a little to one side as if too heavy for her wilting neck.
Her hair, of a dry, red brown, curved low on either side of her brow, in
a thick, untidy mass, to her almost transparent ears. As she gazed in
weary and dreary absorption her lips had fallen heavy and relaxed, in
unison with her mood; and through her open mouth her breathing was
quick, and short, and noiseless. She wore no stays, and her slack cotton
blouse showed the flatness of her bosom, and the faint outlines of her
withered and pendulous breasts hanging low within.

There was something tragic in her pose, as she stood, sad and
abstracted, by the dirty table. She was scraggy helplessness, staring
in sorrowful vacancy. But Gourlay eyed her with disgust. Why, by Heaven,
even now her petticoat was gaping behind, worse than the sloven's at the
Red Lion. She was a pr-r-retty wife for John Gourlay! The sight of her
feebleness would have roused pity in some: Gourlay it moved to a steady
and seething rage. As she stood helpless before him he stung her with
crude, brief irony.

Yet he was not wilfully cruel; only a stupid man with a strong
character, in which he took a dogged pride. Stupidity and pride provoked
the brute in him. He was so dull--only dull is hardly the word for a man
of his smouldering fire--he was so dour of wit that he could never hope
to distinguish himself by anything in the shape of cleverness. Yet so
resolute a man must make the strong personality of which he was proud
tell in some way. How, then, should he assert his superiority and hold
his own? Only by affecting a brutal scorn of everything said and done
unless it was said and done by John Gourlay. His lack of understanding
made his affectation of contempt the easier. A man can never sneer at a
thing which he really understands. Gourlay, understanding nothing, was
able to sneer at everything. "Hah! I don't understand that; it's damned
nonsense!"--that was his attitude to life. If "that" had been an
utterance of Shakespeare or Napoleon it would have made no difference to
John Gourlay. It would have been damned nonsense just the same. And he
would have told them so, if he had met them.

The man had made dogged scorn a principle of life to maintain himself at
the height which his courage warranted. His thickness of wit was never a
bar to the success of his irony. For the irony of the ignorant Scot is
rarely the outcome of intellectual qualities. It depends on a falsetto
voice and the use of a recognized number of catchwords. "Dee-ee-ar me,
dee-ee-ar me;" "Just so-a, just so-a;" "Im-phm!" "D'ye tell me that?"
"Wonderful, serr, wonderful;" "Ah, well, may-ay-be, may-ay-be"--these be
words of potent irony when uttered with a certain birr. Long practice
had made Gourlay an adept in their use. He never spoke to those he
despised or disliked without "the birr." Not that he was voluble of
speech; he wasn't clever enough for lengthy abuse. He said little and
his voice was low, but every word from the hard, clean lips was a stab.
And often his silence was more withering than any utterance. It struck
life like a black frost.

In those early days, to be sure, Gourlay had less occasion for the use
of his crude but potent irony, since the sense of his material
well-being warmed him and made him less bitter to the world. To the
substantial farmers and petty squires around he was civil, even hearty,
in his manner--unless they offended him. For they belonged to the close
corporation of "bien men," and his familiarity with them was a proof to
the world of his greatness. Others, again, were far too far beneath him
already for him to "down" them. He reserved his gibes for his immediate
foes, the assertive bodies his rivals in the town--and for his wife, who
was a constant eyesore. As for her, he had baited the poor woman so long
that it had become a habit; he never spoke to her without a sneer. "Ay,
where have _you_ been stravaiging to?" he would drawl; and if she
answered meekly, "I was taking a dander to the linn owre-bye," "The
Linn!" he would take her up; "ye had a heap to do to gang there; your
Bible would fit you better on a bonny Sabbath afternune!" Or it might
be: "What's that you're burying your nose in now?" and if she faltered,
"It's the Bible," "Hi!" he would laugh, "you're turning godly in your
auld age. Weel, I'm no saying but it's time."

"Where's Janet?" he demanded, stamping his boots once more, now he had
them laced.

"Eh?" said his wife vaguely, turning her eyes from the window.
"Wha-at?"

"Ye're not turning deaf, I hope. I was asking ye where Janet was."

"I sent her down to Scott's for a can o' milk," she answered him
wearily.

"No doubt ye had to send _her_," said he. "What ails the lamb that ye
couldna send _him_--eh?"

"Oh, she was about when I wanted the milk, and she volunteered to gang.
Man, it seems I never do a thing to please ye! What harm will it do her
to run for a drop milk?"

"Noan," he said gravely, "noan. And it's right, no doubt, that her
brother should still be abed--oh, it's right that he should get the
privilege--seeing he's the eldest!"

Mrs. Gourlay was what the Scotch call "browdened[1] on her boy." In
spite of her slack grasp on life--perhaps, because of it--she clung with
a tenacious fondness to him. He was all she had, for Janet was a
thowless[2] thing, too like her mother for her mother to like her. And
Gourlay had discovered that it was one way of getting at his wife to be
hard upon the thing she loved. In his desire to nag and annoy her he
adopted a manner of hardness and repression to his son--which became
permanent. He was always "down" on John; the more so because Janet was
his own favourite--perhaps, again, because her mother seemed to neglect
her. Janet was a very unlovely child, with a long, tallowy face and a
pimply brow, over which a stiff fringe of whitish hair came down almost
to her staring eyes, the eyes themselves being large, pale blue, and
saucer-like, with a great margin of unhealthy white. But Gourlay, though
he never petted her, had a silent satisfaction in his daughter. He took
her about with him in the gig, on Saturday afternoons, when he went to
buy cheese and grain at the outlying farms. And he fed her rabbits when
she had the fever. It was a curious sight to see the dour, silent man
mixing oatmeal and wet tea-leaves in a saucer at the dirty kitchen
table, and then marching off to the hutch, with the ridiculous dish in
his hand, to feed his daughter's pets.

       *       *       *       *       *

A sudden yell of pain and alarm rang through the kitchen. It came from
the outer yard.

When the boy, peering from the window above, saw his father disappear
through the scullery door, he stole out. The coast was clear at last.

He passed through to the outer yard. Jock Gilmour had been dashing water
on the paved floor, and was now sweeping it out with a great whalebone
besom. The hissing whalebone sent a splatter of dirty drops showering in
front of it. John set his bare feet wide (he was only in his shirt and
knickers) and eyed the man whom his father had "downed" with a kind of
silent swagger. He felt superior. His pose was instinct with the
feeling: "_My_ father is _your_ master, and ye daurna stand up till
him." Children of masterful sires often display that attitude towards
dependants. The feeling is not the less real for being subconscious.

Jock Gilmour was still seething with a dour anger because Gourlay's
quiet will had ground him to the task. When John came out and stood
there, he felt tempted to vent on him the spite he felt against his
father. The subtle suggestion of criticism and superiority in the boy's
pose intensified the wish. Not that Gilmour acted from deliberate
malice; his irritation was instinctive. Our wrath against those whom we
fear is generally wreaked upon those whom we don't.

John, with his hands in his pockets, strutted across the yard, still
watching Gilmour with that silent, offensive look. He came into the
path of the whalebone. "Get out, you smeowt!" cried Gilmour, and with a
vicious shove of the brush he sent a shower of dirty drops spattering
about the boy's bare legs.

"Hallo you! what are ye after?" bawled the boy. "Don't you try that on
again, I'm telling ye. What are _you_, onyway? Ye're just a servant.
Hay-ay-ay, my man, my faither's the boy for ye. _He_ can put ye in your
place."

Gilmour made to go at him with the head of the whalebone besom. John
stooped and picked up the wet lump of cloth with which Gilmour had been
washing down the horse's legs.

"Would ye?" said Gilmour threateningly.

"Would I no?" said John, the wet lump poised for throwing, level with
his shoulder.

But he did not throw it for all his defiant air. He hesitated. He would
have liked to slash it into Gilmour's face, but a swift vision of what
would happen if he did withheld his craving arm. His irresolution was
patent in his face; in his eyes there were both a threat and a watchful
fear. He kept the dirty cloth poised in mid-air.

"Drap the clout," said Gilmour.

"I'll no," said John.

Gilmour turned sideways and whizzed the head of the besom round so that
its dirty spray rained in the boy's face and eyes. John let him have the
wet lump slash in his mouth. Gilmour dropped the besom and hit him a
sounding thwack on the ear. John hullabalooed. Murther and desperation!

Ere he had gathered breath for a second roar his mother was present in
the yard. She was passionate in defence of her cub, and rage transformed
her. Her tense frame vibrated in anger; you would scarce have recognized
the weary trollop of the kitchen.

"What's the matter, Johnny dear?" she cried, with a fierce glance at
Gilmour.

"Gilmour hut me!" he bellowed angrily.

"Ye muckle lump!" she cried shrilly, the two scraggy muscles of her neck
standing out long and thin as she screamed; "ye muckle lump--to strike a
defenceless wean!--Dinna greet, my lamb; I'll no let him meddle
ye.--Jock Gilmour, how daur ye lift your finger to a wean of mine? But
I'll learn ye the better o't! Mr. Gourlay'll gie _you_ the order to
travel ere the day's muckle aulder. I'll have no servant about _my_
hoose to ill-use _my_ bairn."

She stopped, panting angrily for breath, and glared at her darling's
enemy.

"_Your_ servant!" cried Gilmour in contempt. "Ye're a nice-looking
object to talk about servants." He pointed at her slovenly dress and
burst into a blatant laugh: "Huh, huh, huh!"

Mr. Gourlay had followed more slowly from the kitchen, as befitted a man
of his superior character. He heard the row well enough, but considered
it beneath him to hasten to a petty squabble.

"What's this?" he demanded with a widening look. Gilmour scowled at the
ground.

"This!" shrilled Mrs. Gourlay, who had recovered her breath
again--"this! Look at him there, the muckle slabber," and she pointed to
Gilmour, who was standing with a red-lowering, downcast face, "look at
him! A man of that size to even himsell to a wean!"

"He deserved a' he got," said Gilmour sullenly. "His mother spoils him,
at ony rate. And I'm damned if the best Gourlay that ever dirtied
leather's gaun to trample owre _me_."

Gourlay jumped round with a quick start of the whole body. For a full
minute he held Gilmour in the middle of his steady glower.

"Walk," he said, pointing to the gate.

"Oh, I'll walk," bawled Gilmour, screaming now that anger gave him
courage. "Gie me time to get _my_ kist, and I'll walk mighty quick. And
damned glad I'll be to get redd o' you and your hoose. The Hoose wi' the
Green Shutters," he laughed, "hi, hi, hi!--the Hoose wi' the Green
Shutters!"

Gourlay went slowly up to him, opening his eyes on him black and wide.
"You swine!" he said, with quiet vehemence; "for damned little I would
kill ye wi' a glower!"

Gilmour shrank from the blaze in his eyes.

"Oh, dinna be fee-ee-ared," said Gourlay quietly, "dinna be fee-ee-ared.
I wouldn't dirty my hand on 'ee! But get your bit kist, and I'll see ye
off the premises. Suspeecious characters are worth the watching."

"Suspeecious!" stuttered Gilmour, "suspeecious! Wh-wh-whan was I ever
suspeecious? I'll have the law of ye for that. I'll make ye answer for
your wor-rds."

"Imphm!" said Gourlay. "In the meantime, look slippy wi' that bit box o'
yours. I don't like daft folk about _my_ hoose."

"There'll be dafter folk as me in your hoose yet," spluttered Gilmour
angrily, as he turned away.

He went up to the garret where he slept and brought down his trunk. As
he passed through the scullery, bowed beneath the clumsy burden on his
left shoulder, John, recovered from his sobbing, mocked at him.

"Hay-ay-ay," he said, in throaty derision, "my faither's the boy for ye.
Yon was the way to put ye down!"

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _Browdened._ A Scot devoted to his children is said to be "browdened
on his bairns."

[2] _Thowless_, weak, useless.




CHAPTER V.


In every little Scotch community there is a distinct type known as "the
bodie." "What does he do, that man?" you may ask, and the answer will
be, "Really, I could hardly tell ye what he does--he's juist a bodie!"
The "bodie" may be a gentleman of independent means (a hundred a year
from the Funds), fussing about in spats and light check breeches; or he
may be a jobbing gardener; but he is equally a "bodie." The chief
occupation of his idle hours (and his hours are chiefly idle) is the
discussion of his neighbour's affairs. He is generally an "auld
residenter;" great, therefore, at the redding up of pedigrees. He can
tell you exactly, for instance, how it is that young Pin-oe's taking
geyly to the dram; for his grandfather, it seems, was a terrible man for
the drink--ou, just terrible. Why, he went to bed with a full jar of
whisky once, and when he left it he was dead, and it was empty. So, ye
see, that's the reason o't.

The genus "bodie" is divided into two species--the "harmless bodies" and
the "nesty bodies." The bodies of Barbie mostly belonged to the second
variety. Johnny Coe and Tam Wylie and the baker were decent enough
fellows in their way, but the others were the sons of scandal. Gourlay
spoke of them as a "wheen damned auld wives." But Gourlay, to be sure,
was not an impartial witness.

The Bend o' the Brae was the favourite stance of the bodies: here they
forgathered every day to pass judgment on the town's affairs. And,
indeed, the place had many things to recommend it. Among the chief it
was within an easy distance of the Red Lion, farther up the street, to
which it was really very convenient to adjourn nows and nans. Standing
at the Bend o' the Brae, too, you could look along two roads to the left
and right, or down upon the Cross beneath, and the three low streets
that guttered away from it. Or you might turn and look up Main Street,
and past the side of the Square, to the House with the Green Shutters,
the highest in the town. The Bend o' the Brae, you will gather, was a
fine post for observation. It had one drawback, true: if Gourlay turned
to the right in his gig he disappeared in a moment, and you could never
be sure where he was off to. But even that afforded matter for pleasing
speculation which often lasted half an hour.

It was about nine o'clock when Gourlay and Gilmour quarrelled in the
yard, and that was the hour when the bodies forgathered for their
morning dram.

"Good-moarning, Mr. Wylie!" said the Provost.

When the Provost wished you good-morning, with a heavy civic eye, you
felt sure it was going to be good.

"Mornin', Provost, mornin'! Fine weather for the fields," said Tam,
casting a critical glance at the blue dome in which a soft,
white-bosomed cloud floated high above the town. "If this weather hauds,
it'll be a blessing for us poor farming bodies."

Tam was a wealthy old hunks, but it suited his humour to refer to
himself constantly as "a poor farming bodie." And he dressed in
accordance with his humour. His clean old crab-apple face was always
grinning at you from over a white-sleeved moleskin waistcoat, as if he
had been no better than a breaker of road-metal.

"Faith ay!" said the Provost, cunning and quick; "fodder should be
cheap"--and he shot the covetous glimmer of a bargain-making eye at Mr.
Wylie.

Tam drew himself up. He saw what was coming.

"We're needing some hay for the burgh horse," said the Provost. "Ye'll
be willing to sell at fifty shillings the ton, since it's like to be so
plentiful."

"Oh," said Tam solemnly, "that's on-possible! Gourlay's seeking the
three pound! and where he leads we maun a' gang. Gourlay sets the tune,
and Barbie dances till't."

That was quite untrue so far as the speaker was concerned. It took a
clever man to make Tam Wylie dance to his piping. But Thomas, the knave,
knew that he could always take a rise out the Provost by cracking up the
Gourlays, and that to do it now was the best way of fobbing him off
about the hay.

"Gourlay!" muttered the Provost, in disgust. And Tam winked at the
baker.

"Losh," said Sandy Toddle, "yonder's the Free Kirk minister going past
the Cross! Where'll _he_ be off till at this hour of the day? He's not
often up so soon."

"They say he sits late studying," said Johnny Coe.

"H'mph, studying!" grunted Tam Brodie, a big, heavy, wall-cheeked man,
whose little, side-glancing eyes seemed always alert for scandal amid
the massive insolence of his smooth face. "I see few signs of studying
in _him_. He's noathing but a stink wi' a skin on't."

T. Brodie was a very important man, look you, and wrote "Leather
Mercht." above his door, though he cobbled with his own hands. He was a
staunch Conservative, and down on the Dissenters.

"What road'th he taking?" lisped Deacon Allardyce, craning past Brodie's
big shoulder to get a look.

"He's stoppit to speak to Widow Wallace. What will he be saying to
_her_?"

"She's a greedy bodie that Mrs. Wallace: I wouldna wonder but she's
speiring him for bawbees."

"Will he take the Skeighan Road, I wonder?"

"Or the Fechars?"

"He's a great man for gathering gowans and other sic trash. He's maybe
for a dander up the burn juist. They say he's a great botanical man."

"Ay," said Brodie, "paidling in a burn's the ploy for him. He's a weanly
gowk."

"A-a-ah!" protested the baker, who was a Burnsomaniac, "there's waur
than a walk by the bank o' a bonny burn. Ye ken what Mossgiel said:--


     'The Muse nae poet ever fand her,
     Till by himsel' he learned to wander,
     Adown some trottin' burn's meander,
           And no thick lang;
     Oh sweet to muse and pensive ponder
           A heartfelt sang.'"


Poetical quotations, however, made the Provost uncomfortable. "Ay," he
said dryly in his throat; "verra good, baker, verra good!--Who's yellow
doag's that? I never saw the beast about the town before!"

"Nor me either. It's a perfect stranger!"

"It's like a herd's doag!"

"Man, you're right! That's just what it will be. The morn's Fleckie lamb
fair, and some herd or other'll be in about the town."

"He'll be drinking in some public-house, I'se warrant, and the doag will
have lost him."

"Imph, that'll be the way o't."

"I'm demned if he hasn't taken the Skeighan Road!" said Sandy Toddle,
who had kept his eye on the minister. Toddle's accent was a varying
quality. When he remembered he had been a packman in England it was
exceedingly fine. But he often forgot.

"The Skeighan Road! the Skeighan Road! Who'll he be going to see in that
airt? Will it be Templandmuir?"

"Gosh, it canna be Templandmuir; he was there no later than yestreen!"

"Here's a man coming down the brae!" announced Johnny Coe, in a solemn
voice, as if a man "coming down the brae" was something unusual. In a
moment every head was turned to the hill.

"What's yon he's carrying on his shouther?" pondered Brodie.

"It looks like a boax," said the Provost slowly, bending every effort of
eye and mind to discover what it really was. He was giving his
profoundest cogitations to the "boax."

"It _is_ a boax! But who is it though? I canna make him out."

"Dod, I canna tell either; his head's so bent with his burden!"

At last the man, laying his "boax" on the ground, stood up to ease his
spine, so that his face was visible.

"Losh, it's Jock Gilmour, the orra man at Gourlay's! What'll _he_ be
doing out on the street at this hour of the day? I thocht he was always
busy on the premises! Will Gourlay be sending him off with something to
somebody? But no; that canna be. He would have sent it with the carts."

"I'll wager ye," cried Johnny Coe quickly, speaking more loudly than
usual in the animation of discovery--"I'll wager ye Gourlay has
quarrelled him and put him to the door!"

"Man, you're right! That'll just be it, that'll just be it! Ay,
ay--faith ay--and yon'll be his kist he's carrying! Man, you're right,
Mr. Coe; you have just put your finger on't. We'll hear news _this_
morning."

They edged forward to the middle of the road, the Provost in front, to
meet Gilmour coming down.

"Ye've a heavy burden this morning, John," said the Provost graciously.

"No wonder, sir," said Gilmour, with big-eyed solemnity, and set down
the chest; "it's no wonder, seeing that I'm carrying my a-all."

"Ay, man, John. How's that na?"

To be the centre of interest and the object of gracious condescension
was balm to the wounded feelings of Gilmour. Gourlay had lowered him,
but this reception restored him to his own good opinion. He was usually
called "Jock" (except by his mother, to whom, of course, he was "oor
Johnny"), but the best merchants in the town were addressing him as
"John." It was a great occasion. Gilmour expanded in gossip beneath its
influence benign.

He welcomed, too, this first and fine opportunity of venting his wrath
on the Gourlays.

"Oh, I just telled Gourlay what I thocht of him, and took the door ahint
me. I let him have it hot and hardy, I can tell ye. He'll no forget _me_
in a hurry"--Gilmour bawled angrily, and nodded his head significantly,
and glared fiercely, to show what good cause he had given Gourlay to
remember him--"he'll no forget _me_ for a month of Sundays."

"Ay, man, John, what did ye say till him?"

"Na, man, what did he say to you?"

"Wath he angry, Dyohn?"

"How did the thing begin?"

"Tell us, man, John."

"What was it a-all about, John?"

"Was Mrs. Gourlay there?"

Bewildered by this pelt of questions, Gilmour answered the last that hit
his ear. "There, ay; faith, she was there. It was her was the cause
o't."

"D'ye tell me that, John? Man, you surprise me. I would have thocht the
thowless trauchle[3] hadna the smeddum left to interfere."

"Oh, it was yon boy of hers. He's aye swaggerin' aboot, interferin' wi'
folk at their wark--he follows his faither's example in that, for as the
auld cock craws the young ane learns--and his mither's that daft aboot
him that ye daurna give a look! He came in my road when I was sweeping
out the close, and some o' the dirty jaups splashed about his shins. But
was I to blame for that?--ye maun walk wide o' a whalebone besom if ye
dinna want to be splashed. Afore I kenned where I was, he up wi' a dirty
washing-clout and slashed me in the face wi't! I hit him a thud in the
ear--as wha wadna? Out come his mither like a fury, skirling about _her_
hoose, and _her_ servants, and _her_ weans. 'Your servant!' says
I--'your servant! You're a nice-looking trollop to talk aboot servants,'
says I."

"Did ye really, John?"

"Man, that wath bauld o' ye."

"And what did _she_ say?"

"Oh, she just kept skirling! And then, to be sure, Gourlay must come out
and interfere! But I telled him to his face what I thocht of _him!_ 'The
best Gourlay that ever dirtied leather,' says I, ''s no gaun to make
dirt of me,' says I."

"Ay, man, Dyohn!" lisped Deacon Allardyce, with bright and eagerly
inquiring eyes. "And what did he thay to that na? _That_ wath a dig for
him! I'the warrant he wath angry."

"Angry? He foamed at the mouth! But I up and says to him, 'I have had
enough o' you,' says I, 'you and your Hoose wi' the Green Shutters,'
says I. 'You're no fit to have a decent servant,' says I. 'Pay _me my_
wages, and I'll be redd o' ye,' says I. And wi' that I flang my kist on
my shouther and slapped the gate ahint me."

"And _did_ he pay ye your wages?" Tam Wylie probed him slyly, with a
sideward glimmer in his eye.

"Ah, well, no--not exactly," said Gilmour, drawing in. "But I'll get
them right enough for a' that. He'll no get the better o' _me_." Having
grounded unpleasantly on the question of the wages, he thought it best
to be off ere the bloom was dashed from his importance, so he
shouldered his chest and went. The bodies watched him down the street.

"He's a lying brose, that," said the baker. "We a' ken what Gourlay is.
He would have flung Gilmour out by the scruff o' the neck if he had
daured to set his tongue against him!"

"Faith, that's so," said Tam Wylie and Johnny Coe together.

But the others were divided between their perception of the fact and
their wish to believe that Gourlay had received a thrust or two. At
other times they would have been the first to scoff at Gilmour's
swagger. Now their animus against Gourlay prompted them to back it up.

"Oh, I'm not so sure of tha-at, baker," cried the Provost, in the false,
loud voice of a man defending a position which he knows to be unsound;
"I'm no so sure of that at a-all. A-a-ah, mind ye," he drawled
persuasively, "he's a hardy fallow, that Gilmour. I've no doubt he gied
Gourlay a good dig or two. Let us howp they will do him good."

For many reasons intimate to the Scot's character, envious scandal is
rampant in petty towns such as Barbie. To go back to the beginning, the
Scot, as pundits will tell you, is an individualist. His religion alone
is enough to make him so; for it is a scheme of personal salvation
significantly described once by the Reverend Mr. Struthers of Barbie.
"At the Day of Judgment, my frehnds," said Mr. Struthers--"at the Day of
Judgment every herring must hang by his own tail!" Self-dependence was
never more luridly expressed. History, climate, social conditions, and
the national beverage have all combined (the pundits go on) to make the
Scot an individualist, fighting for his own hand. The better for him if
it be so; from that he gets the grit that tells.

From their individualism, however, comes inevitably a keen spirit of
competition (the more so because Scotch democracy gives fine chances to
compete), and from their keen spirit of competition comes, inevitably
again, an envious belittlement of rivals. If a man's success offends
your individuality, to say everything you can against him is a
recognized weapon of the fight. It takes him down a bit, and (inversely)
elevates his rival.

It is in a small place like Barbie that such malignity is most virulent,
because in a small place like Barbie every man knows everything to his
neighbour's detriment. He can redd up his rival's pedigree, for example,
and lower his pride (if need be) by detailing the disgraces of his kin.
"I have grand news the day!" a big-hearted Scot will exclaim (and when
their hearts are big they are big to hypertrophy)--"I have grand news
the day! Man, Jock Goudie has won the C.B."--"Jock Goudie"--an envious
bodie will pucker as if he had never heard the name--"Jock Goudie? Wha's
_he_ for a Goudie? Oh ay, let me see now. He's a brother o'--eh, a
brother o'--eh" (tit-tit-titting on his brow)--"oh, just a brother o'
Drucken Will Goudie o' Auchterwheeze! Oo-ooh, I ken _him_ fine. His
grannie keepit a sweetie-shop in Strathbungo." There you have the
"nesty" Scotsman.

Even if Gourlay had been a placable and inoffensive man, then, the
malignants of the petty burgh (it was scarce bigger than a village)
would have fastened on his character simply because he was above them.
No man has a keener eye for behaviour than the Scot (especially when
spite wings his intuition), and Gourlay's thickness of wit and pride of
place would in any case have drawn their sneers. So, too, on lower
grounds, would his wife's sluttishness. But his repressiveness added a
hundredfold to their hate of him. That was the particular cause which,
acting on their general tendency to belittle a too-successful rival,
made their spite almost monstrous against him. Not a man among them but
had felt the weight of his tongue--for edge it had none. He walked among
them like the dirt below his feet. There was no give and take in the
man; he could be verra jocose with the lairds, to be sure, but he never
dropped in to the Red Lion for a crack and a dram with the town-folk; he
just glowered as if he could devour them! And who was he, I should like
to know? His grandfather had been noathing but a common carrier!

Hate was the greater on both sides because it was often impotent.
Gourlay frequently suspected offence, and seethed because he had no idea
how to meet it--except by driving slowly down the brae in his new gig
and never letting on when the Provost called to him. That was a wipe in
the eye for the Provost! The "bodies," on their part, could rarely get
near enough Gourlay to pierce his armour; he kept them off him by his
brutal dourness. For it was not only pride and arrogance, but a
consciousness also that he was no match for them at their own game, that
kept Gourlay away from their society. They were adepts at the under
stroke, and they would have given him many a dig if he had only come
amongst them. But, oh no, not he; he was the big man; he never gave a
body a chance! Or if you did venture a bit jibe when you met him, he
glowered you off the face of the earth with thae black een of his. Oh,
how they longed to get at him! It was not the least of the evils caused
by Gourlay's black pride that it perverted a dozen characters. The
"bodies" of Barbie may have been decent enough men in their own way, but
against him their malevolence was monstrous. It showed itself in an
insane desire to seize on every scrap of gossip they might twist against
him. That was why the Provost lowered municipal dignity to gossip in the
street with a discharged servant. As the baker said afterwards, it was
absurd for a man in his "poseetion." But it was done with the sole
desire of hearing something that might tell against Gourlay. Even
countesses, we are told, gossip with malicious maids about other
countesses. Spite is a great leveller.

"Shall we adjourn?" said Brodie, when they had watched Jock Gilmour out
of sight. He pointed across his shoulder to the Red Lion.

"Better noat just now," said the Provost, nodding in slow
authority--"better noat just now! I'm very anxious to see Gourlay about
yon matter we were speaking of, doan't ye understa-and? But I'm
determined not to go to his house! On the other hand, if we go into the
Red Lion the now, we may miss him on the street. We'll noat have loang
to wait, though; he'll be down the town directly, to look at the horses
he has at the gerse out the Fechars Road. But _I'm_ talling ye, I simply
will noat go to his house--to put up with a wheen damned insults!" he
puffed in angry recollection.

"To tell the truth," said Wylie, "I don't like to call upon Gourlay
either. I'm aware of his eyes on my back when I slink beaten through his
gate, and I feel that my hurdies are wanting in dignity!"

"Huh!" spluttered Brodie, "that never affects me. I come stunting out in
a bleeze of wrath and slam the yett ahint me!"

"Oh, well," said the Deacon, "that'th one way of being dignified."

"I'm afraid," said Sandy Toddle, "that he won't be in a very good key to
consider our request this morning, after his quarrel with Gilmour."

"No," said the Provost; "he'll be blazing angry! It's most unfoartunate.
But we maun try to get his consent, be his temper what it will. It's a
matter of importance to the town, doan't ye see, and if he refuses we
simply can-noat proceed wi' the improvement."

"It was Gilmour's jibe at the House wi' the Green Shutters that would
anger him the most, for it's the perfect god of his idolatry. Eh, sirs,
he has wasted an awful money upon yon house!"

"Wasted's the word!" said Brodie, with a blatant laugh. "Wasted's the
word! They say he has verra little lying cash! And I shouldna be
surprised at all. For, ye see, Gibson the builder diddled him owre the
building o't."

"Oh, I'se warrant Cunning Johnny would get the better of an ass like
Gourlay. But how in particular, Mr. Brodie? Have ye heard ainy details?"

"I've been on the track o' the thing for a while back, but it was only
yestreen I had the proofs o't. It was Robin Wabster that telled me. He's
a jouking bodie, Robin, and he was ahint a dike up the Skeighan Road
when Gibson and Gourlay forgathered--they stoppit just forenenst him!
Gourlay began to curse at the size of Gibson's bill, but Cunning Johnny
kenned the way to get round him brawly. 'Mr. Gourlay,' says he, 'there's
not a thing in your house that a man in your poseetion can afford to be
without, and ye needn't expect the best house in Barbie for an oald
song!' And Gourlay was pacified at once! It appeared frae their crack,
however, that Gibson has diddled him tremendous. 'Verra well then,'
Robin heard Gourlay cry, 'you must allow me a while ere I pay that!' I
wager, for a' sae muckle as he's made of late, that his balance at the
bank's a sma' yin."

"More thyow than thubstanth," said the Deacon.

"Well, I'm sure!" said the Provost, "he needn't have built such a
gra-and house to put a slut of a wife like yon in!"

"I was surprised," said Sandy Toddle, "to hear about her firing up. I
wouldn't have thought she had the spirit, or that Gourlay would have
come to her support!"

"Oh," said the Provost, "it wasn't her he was thinking of! It was his
own pride, the brute. He leads the woman the life of a doag. I'm
surprised that he ever married her!"

"I ken fine how he married her," said Johnny Coe. "I was acquaint wi'
her faither, auld Tenshillingland owre at Fechars--a grand farmer he
was, wi' land o' his nain, and a gey pickle bawbees. It was the bawbees,
and not the woman, that Gourlay went after! It was _her_ money, as ye
ken, that set him on his feet, and made him such a big man. He never
cared a preen for _her_, and then when she proved a dirty trollop, he
couldna endure her look! That's what makes him so sore upon her now. And
yet I mind her a braw lass, too," said Johnny the sentimentalist, "a
braw lass she was," he mused, "wi' fine, brown glossy hair, I mind,
and--ochonee! ochonee!--as daft as a yett in a windy day. She had a
cousin, Jenny Wabster, that dwelt in Tenshillingland than, and mony a
summer nicht up the Fechars Road, when ye smelled the honeysuckle in the
gloaming, I have heard the two o' them tee-heeing owre the lads
thegither, skirling in the dark and lauching to themselves. They were of
the glaikit kind ye can always hear loang before ye see. Jock Allan
(that has done so well in Embro) was a herd at Tenshillingland than, and
he likit her, and I think she likit him; but Gourlay came wi' his gig
and whisked her away. She doesna lauch sae muckle now, puir bodie! But a
braw lass she----"

"It's you maun speak to Gourlay, Deacon," said the Provost, brushing
aside the reminiscent Coe.

"How can it be that, Provost? It'th _your_ place, surely. You're the
head of the town!"

When Gourlay was to be approached there was always a competition for who
should be hindmost.

"Yass, but you know perfectly well, Deacon, that I cannot thole the look
of him. I simply cannot thole the look. And he knows it too. The
thing'll gang smash at the outset--_I'm_ talling ye, now--it'll go
smash at the outset if it's left to me. And than, ye see, you have a
better way of approaching folk!"

"Ith that tho?" said the Deacon dryly. He shot a suspicious glance to
see if the Provost was guying him.

"Oh, it must be left to you, Deacon," said the baker and Tam Wylie in a
breath.

"Certainly, it maun be left to the Deacon," assented Johnny Coe, when he
saw how the others were giving their opinion.

"Tho be it, then," snapped the Deacon.

"Here he comes," said Sandy Toddle.

Gourlay came down the street towards them, his chest big, his thumbs in
the armholes of his waistcoat. He had the power of staring steadily at
those whom he approached without the slightest sign of recognition or
intelligence appearing in his eyes. As he marched down upon the bodies
he fixed them with a wide-open glower that was devoid of every
expression but courageous steadiness. It gave a kind of fierce vacancy
to his look.

The Deacon limped forward on his thin shanks to the middle of the road.

"It'th a fine morning, Mr. Gourlay," he simpered.

"There's noathing wrong with the morning," grunted Gourlay, as if there
was something wrong with the Deacon.

"We wath wanting to thee ye on a very important matter, Mithter
Gourlay," lisped the Deacon, smiling up at the big man's face, with his
head on one side, and rubbing his fingers in front of him. "It'th a
matter of the common good, you thee; and we all agreed that we should
speak to _you_, ath the foremost merchant of the town!"

Allardyce meant his compliment to fetch Gourlay. But Gourlay knew his
Allardyce, and was cautious. It was well to be on your guard when the
Deacon was complimentary. When his language was most flowery there was
sure to be a serpent hidden in it somewhere. He would lisp out an
innocent remark and toddle away, and Gourlay would think nothing of the
matter till a week afterwards, perhaps, when something would flash a
light; then "Damn him, did he mean '_that_'?" he would seethe, starting
back and staring at the "_that_" while his fingers strangled the air in
place of the Deacon.

He glowered at the Deacon now till the Deacon blinked.

"You thee, Mr. Gourlay," Allardyce shuffled uneasily, "it'th for your
own benefit just ath much ath ourth. We were thinking of you ath well
ath of ourthelves! Oh yeth, oh yeth!"

"Ay, man!" said Gourlay, "that was kind of ye! I'll be the first man in
Barbie to get ainy benefit from the fools that mismanage our affairs."

The gravel grated beneath the Provost's foot. The atmosphere was
becoming electric, and the Deacon hastened to the point.

"You thee, there'th a fine natural supply of water--a perfect reservore
the Provost sayth--on the brae-face just above _your_ garden, Mr.
Gourlay. Now, it would be easy to lead that water down and alang through
all the gardenth on the high side of Main Street--and, 'deed, it might
feed a pump at the Cross, too, to supply the lower portionth o' the
town. It would really be a grai-ait convenience. Every man on the high
side o' Main Street would have a running spout at his own back door! If
your garden didna run tho far back, Mr. Gourlay, and ye hadna tho muckle
land about your place"--_that_ should fetch him, thought the Deacon--"if
it werena for that, Mr. Gourlay, we could easily lead the water round to
the other gardenth without interfering with your property. But, ath it
ith, we simply can-noat move without ye. The water must come through
your garden, if it comes at a-all."

"The most o' you important men live on the high side o' Main Street,"
birred Gourlay. "Is it the poor folk at the Cross, or your ain bits o'
back doors that you're thinking o'?"

"Oh--oh, Mr. Gourlay!" protested Allardyce, head flung back, and palms
in air, to keep the thought of self-interest away, "oh--oh, Mr. Gourlay!
We're thinking of noathing but the common good, I do assure ye."

"Ay, man! You're dis-in-ter-ested!" said Gourlay, but he stumbled on the
big word and spoiled the sneer. That angered him, and, "It's likely," he
rapped out, "that I'll allow the land round _my_ house to be howked and
trenched and made a mudhole of to oblige a wheen things like you!"

"Oh--oh, but think of the convenience to uth--eh--eh--I mean to the
common good," said Allardyce.

"I howked wells for myself," snapped Gourlay. "Let others do the like."

"Oh, but we haven't all the enterprithe of you, Mr. Gourlay. You'll
surely accommodate the town!"

"I'll see the town damned first," said Gourlay, and passed on his steady
way.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] _Trauchle_, a poor trollop who trails about; _smeddum_, grit.




CHAPTER VI.


The bodies watched Gourlay in silence until he was out of earshot. Then,
"It's monstrous!" the Provost broke out in solemn anger; "I declare it's
perfectly monstrous! But I believe we could get Pow-ers to compel him.
Yass; I believe we could get Pow-ers. I do believe we could get
Pow-ers."

The Provost was fond of talking about "Pow-ers," because it implied that
he was intimate with the great authorities who might delegate such
"Pow-ers" to him. To talk of "Pow-ers," mysteriously, was a tribute to
his own importance. He rolled the word on his tongue as if he enjoyed
the sound of it.

On the Deacon's cheek bones two red spots flamed, round and big as a
Scotch penny. His was the hurt silence of the baffled diplomatist, to
whom a defeat means reflections on his own ability.

"Demn him!" he skirled, following the solid march of his enemy with
fiery eyes.

Never before had his deaconship been heard to swear. Tam Wylie laughed
at the shrill oath till his eyes were buried in his merry wrinkles, a
suppressed snirt, a continuous gurgle in the throat and nose, in beaming
survey the while of the withered old creature dancing in his rage. (It
was all a good joke to Tam, because, living on the outskirts of the
town, he had no spigot of his own to feed.) The Deacon turned the eyes
of hate on him. Demn Wylie too--what was he laughing at!

"Oh, I dare thay you could have got round him!" he snapped.

"In my opinion, Allardyce," said the baker, "you mismanaged the whole
affair. Yon wasna the way to approach him!"

"It'th a pity you didna try your hand, then, I'm sure! No doubt a clever
man like _you_ would have worked wonderth!"

So the bodies wrangled among themselves. Somehow or other Gourlay had
the knack of setting them by the ears. It was not till they hit on a
common topic of their spite in railing at him that they became a band of
brothers and a happy few.

"Whisht!" said Sandy Toddle suddenly; "here's his boy!"

John was coming towards them on his way to school. The bodies watched
him as he passed, with the fixed look men turn on a boy of whose kinsmen
they were talking even now. They affect a stony and deliberate regard,
partly to include the newcomer in their critical survey of his family,
and partly to banish from their own eyes any sign that they have just
been running down his people. John, as quick as his mother to feel, knew
in a moment they were watching _him_. He hung his head sheepishly and
blushed, and the moment he was past he broke into a nervous trot, the
bag of books bumping on his back as he ran.

"He's getting a big boy, that son of Gourlay's," said the Provost; "how
oald will he be?"

"He's approaching twelve," said Johnny Coe, who made a point of being
able to supply such news because it gained him consideration where he
was otherwise unheeded. "He was born the day the brig on the Fleckie
Road gaed down, in the year o' the great flood; and since the great
flood it's twelve year come Lammas. Rab Tosh o' Fleckie's wife was
heavy-footed at the time, and Doctor Munn had been a' nicht wi' her, and
when he cam to Barbie Water in the morning it was roaring wide frae
bank to brae; where the brig should have been there was naething but the
swashing of the yellow waves. Munn had to drive a' the way round to the
Fechars brig, and in parts o' the road the water was so deep that it
lapped his horse's bellyband. A' this time Mrs. Gourlay was skirling in
her pains and praying to God she micht dee. Gourlay had been a great
crony o' Munn's, but he quarrelled him for being late; he had trysted
him, ye see, for the occasion, and he had been twenty times at the yett
to look for him. Ye ken how little he would stomach that; he was ready
to brust wi' anger. Munn, mad for the want of sleep and wat to the bane,
swure back at him; and than Gourlay wadna let him near his wife! Ye mind
what an awful day it was; the thunder roared as if the heavens were
tumbling on the world, and the lichtnin sent the trees daudin on the
roads, and folk hid below their beds and prayed--they thocht it was the
Judgment! But Gourlay rammed his black stepper in the shafts, and drave
like the devil o' hell to Skeighan Drone, where there was a young
doctor. The lad was feared to come, but Gourlay swore by God that he
should, and he garred him. In a' the countryside driving like his that
day was never kenned or heard tell o'; they were back within the hour! I
saw them gallop up Main Street; lichtnin struck the ground before them;
the young doctor covered his face wi' his hands, and the horse nichered
wi' fear and tried to wheel, but Gourlay stood up in the gig and lashed
him on through the fire. It was thocht for lang that Mrs. Gourlay would
die; and she was never the same woman after. Atweel, ay, sirs, Gourlay
has that morning's work to blame for the poor wife he has now. Him and
Munn never spoke to each other again, and Munn died within the
twelvemonth--he got his death that morning on the Fleckie Road. But, for
a' so pack's they had been, Gourlay never looked near him."

Coe had told his story with enjoying gusto, and had told it well--for
Johnny, though constantly snubbed by his fellows, was in many ways the
ablest of them all. His voice and manner drove it home. They knew,
besides, he was telling what himself had seen. For they knew he was
lying prostrate with fear in the open smiddy-shed from the time Gourlay
went to Skeighan Drone to the time that he came back, and that he had
seen him both come and go. They were silent for a while, impressed, in
spite of themselves, by the vivid presentment of Gourlay's manhood on
the day that had scared them all. The baker felt inclined to cry out on
his cruelty for keeping his wife suffering to gratify his wrath; but the
sudden picture of the man's courage changed that feeling to another of
admiring awe: a man so defiant of the angry heavens might do anything.
And so with the others; they hated Gourlay, but his bravery was a fact
of nature which they could not disregard; they knew themselves smaller,
and said nothing for a while. Tam Brodie, the most brutal among them,
was the first to recover. Even he did not try to belittle at once, but
he felt the subtle discomfort of the situation, and relieved it by
bringing the conversation back to its usual channel.

"That was at the boy's birth, Mr. Coe?" said he.

"Ou ay, just the laddie. It was a' richt when the lassie came. It was
Doctor Dandy brocht _her_ hame, for Munn was deid by that time, and
Dandy had his place."

"What will Gourlay be going to make of him?" the Provost asked. "A
doctor or a minister or wha-at?"

"Deil a fear of that," said Brodie; "he'll take him into the business!
It's a' that he's fit for. He's an infernal dunce, just his father owre
again, and the Dominie thrashes him remorseless! I hear my own weans
speaking o't. Ou, it seems he's just a perfect numbskull!"

"Ye couldn't expect ainything else from a son of Gourlay," said the
Provost.

Conversation languished. Some fillip was needed to bring it to an easy
flow, and the simultaneous scrape of their feet turning round showed the
direction of their thoughts.

"A dram would be very acceptable now," murmured Sandy Toddle, rubbing
his chin.

"Ou, we wouldna be the waur o't," said Tam Wylie.

"We would all be the better of a little drope," smirked the Deacon.

And they made for the Red Lion for the matutinal dram.




CHAPTER VII.


John Gourlay the younger was late for school, in spite of the nervous
trot he fell into when he shrank from the bodies' hard stare at him.
There was nothing unusual about that; he was late for school every
other day. To him it was a howling wilderness where he played a
most appropriate _role_. If his father was not about he would hang
round his mother till the last moment, rather than be off to old
"Bleach-the-boys"--as the master had been christened by his scholars.
"Mother, I have a pain in _my_ heid," he would whimper, and she would
condole with him and tell him she would keep him at home with her--were
it not for dread of her husband. She was quite sure he was ainything but
strong, poor boy, and that the schooling was bad for him; for it was
really remarkable how quickly the pain went if he was allowed to stay at
home; why, he got better just directly! It was not often she dared to
keep him from school, however; and if she did, she had to hide him from
his father.

On school mornings the boy shrank from going out with a shrinking that
was almost physical. When he stole through the green gate with his bag
slithering at his hip (not braced between the shoulders like a birkie
scholar's), he used to feel ruefully that he was in for it now--and the
Lord alone knew what he would have to put up with ere he came home! And
he always had the feeling of a freed slave when he passed the gate on
his return, never failing to note with delight the clean smell of the
yard after the stuffiness of school, sucking it in through glad
nostrils, and thinking to himself, "O crickey, it's fine to be home!" On
Friday nights, in particular, he used to feel so happy that, becoming
arrogant, he would try his hand at bullying Jock Gilmour in imitation of
his father. John's dislike of school, and fear of its trampling bravoes,
attached him peculiarly to the House with the Green Shutters; there was
his doting mother, and she gave him stories to read, and the place was
so big that it was easy to avoid his father and have great times with
the rabbits and the doos. He was as proud of the sonsy house as Gourlay
himself, if for a different reason, and he used to boast of it to his
comrades. And he never left it, then or after, without a foreboding.

As he crept along the School Road with a rueful face, he was alone, for
Janet, who was cleverer than he, was always earlier at school. The
absence of children in the sunny street lent to his depression. He felt
forlorn; if there had been a chattering crowd marching along, he would
have been much more at his ease.

Quite recently the school had been fitted up with varnished desks, and
John, who inherited his mother's nervous senses with his father's lack
of wit, was always intensely alive to the smell of the desks the moment
he went in; and as his heart always sank when he went in, the smell
became associated in his mind with that sinking of the heart--to feel
it, no matter where, filled him with uneasiness. As he stole past the
joiner's on that sunny morning, when wood was resinous and pungent of
odour, he was suddenly conscious of a varnishy smell, and felt a
misgiving without knowing why. It was years after, in Edinburgh, ere he
knew the reason; he found that he never went past an upholsterer's shop,
on a hot day in spring, without being conscious of a vague depression,
and feeling like a boy slinking into school.

In spite of his forebodings, nothing more untoward befell him that
morning than a cut over the cowering shoulders for being late, as he
crept to the bottom of his class. He reached "leave," the ten minutes'
run at twelve o'clock, without misadventure. Perhaps it was this
unwonted good fortune that made him boastful when he crouched near the
pump among his cronies, sitting on his hunkers with his back to the
wall. Half a dozen boys were about him, and Swipey Broon was in front,
making mud pellets in a trickle from the pump.

He began talking of the new range.

"Yah! Auld Gemmell needn't have let welp at me for being late this
morning," he spluttered big-eyed, nodding his head in aggrieved and
solemn protest. "It wasna _my_ faut! We're getting in a grand new range,
and the whole of the kitchen fireplace has been gutted out to make room
for't; and my mother couldna get my breakfast in time this morning,
because, ye see, she had to boil everything in the parlour--and here,
when she gaed ben the house, the parlour fire was out!

"It's to be a splendid range, the new one," he went on, with a conceited
jerk of the head. "Peter Riney's bringin'd from Skeighan in the
afternune. My father says there winna be its equal in the parish!"

The faces of the boys lowered uncomfortably. They felt it was a silly
thing of Gourlay to blow his own trumpet in this way, but, being boys,
they could not prick his conceit with a quick rejoinder. It is only
grown-ups who can be ironical; physical violence is the boy's repartee.
It had scarcely gone far enough for that yet, so they lowered in
uncomfortable silence.

"We're aye getting new things up at our place," he went on. "I heard my
father telling Gibson the builder he must have everything of the best!
Mother says it'll all be mine some day. I'll have the fine times when I
leave the schule--and that winna be long now, for I'm clean sick o't;
I'll no bide a day longer than I need! I'm to go into the business, and
then I'll have the times. I'll dash about the country in a gig wi' two
dogs wallopping ahin'. I'll have the great life o't."

"Ph-tt!" said Swipey Broon, and planted a gob of mud right in the middle
of his brow.

"Hoh! hoh! hoh!" yelled the others. They hailed Swipey's action with
delight because, to their minds, it exactly met the case. It was the one
fit retort to his bouncing.

Beneath the wet plunk of the mud John started back, bumping his head
against the wall behind him. The sticky pellet clung to his brow, and he
brushed it angrily aside. The laughter of the others added to his wrath
against Swipey.

"What are you after?" he bawled. "Don't try your tricks on me, Swipey
Broon. Man, I could kill ye wi' a glower!"

In a twinkling Swipey's jacket was off, and he was dancing in his shirt
sleeves, inviting Gourlay to come on and try't.

"G'way, man," said John, his face as white as the wall; "g'way, man!
Don't have _me_ getting up to ye, or I'll knock the fleas out of your
duds!"

Now the father of Swipey--so called because he always swiped when
batting at rounders--the father of Swipey was the rag and bone merchant
of Barbie, and it was said (with what degree of truth I know not) that
his home was verminous in consequence. John's taunt was calculated,
therefore, to sting him to the quick.

The scion of the Broons, fired for the honour of his house, drove
straight at the mouth of the insulter. But John jouked to the side, and
Swipey skinned his knuckles on the wall.

For a moment he rocked to and fro, doubled up in pain, crying "_Ooh!_"
with a rueful face, and squeezing his hand between his thighs to dull
its sharper agonies. Then with redoubled wrath bold Swipey hurled him
at the foe. He grabbed Gourlay's head, and shoving it down between his
knees, proceeded to pommel his bent back, while John bellowed angrily
(from between Swipey's legs), "Let me up, see!"

Swipey let him up. John came at him with whirling arms, but Swipey
jouked and gave him one on the mouth that split his lip. In another
moment Gourlay was grovelling on his hands and knees, and triumphant
Swipey, astride his back, was bellowing "Hurroo!"--Swipey's father was
an Irishman.

"Let him up, Broon!" cried Peter Wylie--"let him up, and meet each other
square!"

"Oh, I'll let him up," cried Swipey, and leapt to his feet with
magnificent pride. He danced round Gourlay with his fists sawing the
air. "I could fight ten of him!--Come on, Gourlay!" he cried, "and I'll
poultice the road wi' your brose."

John rose, glaring. But when Swipey rushed he turned and fled. The boys
ran into the middle of the street, pointing after the coward and
shouting, "Yeh! yeh! yeh!" with the infinite cruel derision of boyhood.

"Yeh! yeh! yeh!" the cries of execration and contempt pursued him as he
ran.

       *       *       *       *       *

Ere he had gone a hundred yards he heard the shrill whistle with which
Mr. Gemmell summoned his scholars from their play.




CHAPTER VIII.


All the children had gone into school. The street was lonely in the
sudden stillness. The joiner slanted across the road, brushing shavings
and sawdust from his white apron. There was no other sign of life in the
sunshine. Only from the smiddy, far away, came at times the tink of an
anvil.

John crept on up the street, keeping close to the wall. It seemed
unnatural being there at that hour; everything had a quiet, unfamiliar
look. The white walls of the houses reproached the truant with their
silent faces.

A strong smell of wallflowers oozed through the hot air. John thought it
a lonely smell, and ran to get away.

"Johnny dear, what's wrong wi' ye?" cried his mother, when he stole in
through the scullery at last. "Are ye ill, dear?"

"I wanted to come hame," he said. It was no defence; it was the sad and
simple expression of his wish.

"What for, my sweet?"

"I hate the school," he said bitterly; "I aye want to be at hame."

His mother saw his cut mouth.

"Johnny," she cried in concern, "what's the matter with your lip, dear?
Has ainybody been meddling ye?"

"It was Swipey Broon," he said.

"Did ever a body hear?" she cried. "Things have come to a fine pass when
decent weans canna go to the school without a wheen rag-folk yoking on
them! But what can a body ettle? Scotland's not what it used to be!
It's owrerun wi' the dirty Eerish!"

In her anger she did not see the sloppy dishclout on the scullery chair,
on which she sank exhausted by her rage.

"Oh, but I let him have it," swaggered John. "I threatened to knock the
fleas off him. The other boys were on _his_ side, or I would have
walloped him."

"Atweel, they would a' be on his side," she cried. "But it's juist envy,
Johnny. Never mind, dear; you'll soon be left the school, and there's
not wan of them has the business that you have waiting ready to step
intil."

"Mother," he pleaded, "let me bide here for the rest o' the day!"

"Oh, but your father, Johnny? If _he_ saw ye!"

"If you gie me some o' your novelles to look at, I'll go up to the
garret and hide, and ye can ask Jenny no to tell."

She gave him a hunk of nuncheon and a bundle of her novelettes, and he
stole up to an empty garret and squatted on the bare boards. The sun
streamed through the skylight window and lay, an oblong patch, in the
centre of the floor. John noted the head of a nail that stuck gleaming
up. He could hear the pigeons _rooketty-cooing_ on the roof, and every
now and then a slithering sound, as they lost their footing on the
slates and went sliding downward to the rones. But for that, all was
still, uncannily still. Once a zinc pail clanked in the yard, and he
started with fear, wondering if that was his faither!

If young Gourlay had been the right kind of a boy he would have been in
his glory, with books to read and a garret to read them in. For to
snuggle close beneath the slates is as dear to the boy as the bard, if
somewhat diverse their reasons for seclusion. Your garret is the true
kingdom of the poet, neighbouring the stars; side-windows tether him to
earth, but a skylight looks to the heavens. (That is why so many poets
live in garrets, no doubt.) But it is the secrecy of a garret for him
and his books that a boy loves; there he is lord of his imagination;
there, when the impertinent world is hidden from his view, he rides with
great Turpin at night beneath the glimmer of the moon. What boy of sense
would read about Turpin in a mere respectable parlour? A hay-loft's the
thing, where you can hide in a dusty corner, and watch through a chink
the baffled minions of Bow Street, and hear Black Bess--good
jade!--stamping in her secret stall, and be ready to descend when a
friendly hostler cries, "Jericho!" But if there is no hay-loft at hand a
mere garret will do very well. And so John should have been in his
glory, as indeed for a while he was. But he showed his difference from
the right kind of a boy by becoming lonely. He had inherited from his
mother a silly kind of interest in silly books, but to him reading was a
painful process, and he could never remember the plot. What he liked
best (though he could not have told you about it) was a vivid physical
picture. When the puffing steam of Black Bess's nostrils cleared away
from the moonlit pool, and the white face of the dead man stared at
Turpin through the water, John saw it and shivered, staring big-eyed at
the staring horror. He was alive to it all; he heard the seep of the
water through the mare's lips, and its hollow glug as it went down, and
the creak of the saddle beneath Turpin's hip; he saw the smear of sweat
roughening the hair on her slanting neck, and the great steaming breath
she blew out when she rested from drinking, and then that awful face
glaring from the pool.--Perhaps he was not so far from being the right
kind of boy, after all, since that was the stuff that _he_ liked. He
wished he had some Turpin with him now, for his mother's periodicals
were all about men with impossibly broad shoulders and impossibly curved
waists who asked Angelina if she loved them. Once, it is true, a
somewhat too florid sentence touched him on the visual nerve: "Through
a chink in the Venetian blind a long pencil of yellow light pierced the
beautiful dimness of the room and pointed straight to the dainty bronze
slipper peeping from under Angelina's gown; it became a slipper of vivid
gold amid the gloom." John saw that and brightened, but the next moment
they began to talk about love and he was at sea immediately. "Dagon them
and their love!" quoth he.

To him, indeed, reading was never more than a means of escape from
something else; he never thought of a book so long as there were things
to see. Some things were different from others, it is true. Things of
the outer world, where he swaggered among his fellows and was thrashed,
or bungled his lessons and was thrashed again, imprinted themselves
vividly on his mind, and he hated the impressions. When Swipey Broon was
hot the sweat pores always glistened distinctly on the end of his
mottled nose--John, as he thought angrily of Swipey this afternoon, saw
the glistening sweat pores before him and wanted to bash them. The
varnishy smell of the desks, the smell of the wallflowers at Mrs.
Manzie's on the way to school, the smell of the school itself--to all
these he was morbidly alive, and he loathed them. But he loved the
impressions of his home. His mind was full of perceptions of which he
was unconscious, till he found one of them recorded in a book, and that
was the book for him. The curious physical always drew his mind to hate
it or to love. In summer he would crawl into the bottom of an old hedge,
among the black mould and the withered sticks, and watch a red-ended
beetle creep slowly up a bit of wood till near the top, and fall
suddenly down, and creep patiently again--this he would watch with
curious interest and remember always. "Johnny," said his mother once,
"what do you breenge into the bushes to watch those nasty things for?"

"They're queer," he said musingly.

Even if he _was_ a little dull wi' the book, she was sure he would come
to something, for, eh, he was such a noticing boy.

But there was nothing to touch him in "The Wooing of Angeline;" he was
moving in an alien world. It was a complicated plot, and, some of the
numbers being lost, he was not sharp enough to catch the idea of the
story. He read slowly and without interest. The sounds of the outer
world reached him in his loneliness and annoyed him, because, while
wondering what they were, he dared not look out to see. He heard the
rattle of wheels entering the big yard; that would be Peter Riney back
from Skeighan with the range. Once he heard the birr of his father's
voice in the lobby and his mother speaking in shrill protest, and
then--oh, horror!--his father came up the stair. Would he come into the
garret? John, lying on his left side, felt his quickened heart thud
against the boards, and he could not take his big frighted eyes from the
bottom of the door. But the heavy step passed and went into another
room. John's open mouth was dry, and his shirt was sticking to his back.

The heavy steps came back to the landing.

"Whaur's _my_ gimlet?" yelled his father down the stair.

"Oh, I lost the corkscrew, and took it to open a bottle," cried his
mother wearily. "Here it is, man, in the kitchen drawer."

"_Hah!_" his father barked, and he knew he was infernal angry. If he
should come in!

But he went tramping down the stair, and John, after waiting till his
pulses were stilled, resumed his reading. He heard the masons in the
kitchen, busy with the range, and he would have liked fine to watch
them, but he dared not go down till after four. It was lonely up here by
himself. A hot wind had sprung up, and it crooned through the keyhole
drearily; "_oo-woo-oo_," it cried, and the sound drenched him in a vague
depression. The splotch of yellow light had shifted round to the
fireplace; Janet had kindled a fire there last winter, and the ashes had
never been removed, and now the light lay, yellow and vivid, on a red
clinker of coal and a charred piece of stick. A piece of glossy white
paper had been flung in the untidy grate, and in the hollow curve of it
a thin silt of black dust had gathered--the light showed it plainly. All
these things the boy marked and was subtly aware of their
unpleasantness. He was forced to read to escape the sense of them. But
it was words, words, words, that he read; the subject mattered not at
all. His head leaned heavy on his left hand and his mouth hung open, as
his eye travelled dreamily along the lines. He succeeded in hypnotizing
his brain at last, by the mere process of staring at the page.

At last he heard Janet in the lobby. That meant that school was over. He
crept down the stair.

"_You_ were playing the truant," said Janet, and she nodded her head in
accusation. "I've a good mind to tell my faither."

"If ye wud----" he said, and shook his fist at her threateningly. She
shrank away from him. They went into the kitchen together.

The range had been successfully installed, and Mr. Gourlay was showing
it to Grant of Loranogie, the foremost farmer of the shire. Mrs.
Gourlay, standing by the kitchen table, viewed her new possession with a
faded simper of approval. She was pleased that Mr. Grant should see the
grand new thing that they had gotten. She listened to the talk of the
men with a faint smile about her weary lips, her eyes upon the sonsy
range.

"Dod, it's a handsome piece of furniture," said Loranogie. "How did ye
get it brought here, Mr. Gourlay?"

"I went to Glasgow and ordered it special. It came to Skeighan by the
train, and my own beasts brought it owre. That fender's a feature," he
added complacently; "it's onusual wi' a range."

The massive fender ran from end to end of the fireplace, projecting a
little in front; its rim, a square bar of heavy steel, with bright,
sharp edges.

"And that poker, too; man, there's a history wi' that. I made a point of
the making o't. He was an ill-bred little whalp, the bodie in Glasgow. I
happened to say till um I would like a poker-heid just the same size as
the rim of the fender! 'What d'ye want wi' a heavy-heided poker?' says
he; 'a' ye need's a bit sma' thing to rype the ribs wi'.' 'Is that so?'
says I. 'How do _you_ ken what _I_ want?' I made short work o' _him!_
The poker-heid's the identical size o' the rim; I had it made to fit."

Loranogie thought it a silly thing of Gourlay to concern himself about a
poker. But that was just like him, of course. The moment the body in
Glasgow opposed his whim, Gourlay, he knew, would make a point o't.

The grain merchant took the bar of heavy metal in his hand. "Dod, it's
an awful weapon," he said, meaning to be jocose. "You could murder a man
wi't."

"Deed you could," said Loranogie; "you could kill him wi' the one lick."

The elders, engaged with more important matters, paid no attention to
the children, who had pushed between them to the front and were looking
up at their faces, as they talked, with curious watching eyes. John,
with his instinct to notice things, took the poker up when his father
laid it down, to see if it was really the size of the rim. It was too
heavy for him to raise by the handle; he had to lift it by the middle.
Janet was at his elbow, watching him. "You could kill a man with that,"
he told her, importantly, though she had heard it for herself. Janet
stared and shuddered. Then the boy laid the poker-head along the rim,
fitting edge to edge with a nice precision.

"Mother," he cried, turning towards her in his interest, "mother, look
here! It's exactly the same size!"

"Put it down, sir," said his father with a grim smile at Loranogie.
"You'll be killing folk next."




CHAPTER IX.


"Are ye packit, Peter?" said Gourlay.

"Yes, sir," said Peter Riney, running round to the other side of a cart,
to fasten a horse's bellyband to the shaft. "Yes, sir, we're a' ready."

"Have the carriers a big load?"

"Andy has just a wheen parcels, but Elshie's as fu' as he can haud. And
there's a gey pickle stuff waiting at the Cross."

The hot wind of yesterday had brought lightning through the night, and
this morning there was the gentle drizzle that sometimes follows a heavy
thunderstorm. Hints of the farther blue showed themselves in a lofty sky
of delicate and drifting gray. The blackbirds and thrushes welcomed the
cooler air with a gush of musical piping, as if the liquid tenderness of
the morning had actually got into their throats and made them softer.

"You had better snoove away then," said Gourlay. "Donnerton's five mile
ayont Fleckie, and by the time you deliver the meal there, and load the
ironwork, it'll be late ere you get back. Snoove away, Peter; snoove
away!"

Peter shuffled uneasily, and his pale blue eyes blinked at Gourlay from
beneath their grizzled crow nests of red hair.

"Are we a' to start thegither, sir?" he hesitated. "D'ye mean--d'ye mean
the carriers too?"

"Atweel, Peter!" said Gourlay. "What for no?"

Peter took a great old watch, with a yellow case, from his fob, and,
"It wants a while o' aicht, sir," he volunteered.

"Ay, man, Peter, and what of that?" said Gourlay.

There was almost a twinkle in his eye. Peter Riney was the only human
being with whom he was ever really at his ease. It is only when a mind
feels secure in itself that it can laugh unconcernedly at others. Peter
was so simple that in his presence Gourlay felt secure; and he used to
banter him.

"The folk at the Cross winna expect the carriers till aicht, sir," said
Peter, "and I doubt their stuff won't be ready."

"Ay, man, Peter," Gourlay joked lazily, as if Peter was a little boy.
"Ay, man, Peter. You think the folk at the Cross winna be prepared?"

"No, sir," said Peter, opening his eyes very solemnly, "they winna be
prepared."

"It'll do them good to hurry a little for once," growled Gourlay, humour
yielding to spite at the thought of his enemies. "It'll do them good to
hurry a little for once. Be off, the lot of ye!"

After ordering his carriers to start, to back down and postpone their
departure, just to suit the convenience of his neighbours, would
derogate from his own importance. His men might think he was afraid of
Barbie.

He strolled out to the big gate and watched his teams going down the
brae.

There were only four carts this morning because the two that had gone to
Fechars yesterday with the cheese would not be back till the afternoon;
and another had already turned west to Auchterwheeze, to bring slates
for the flesher's new house. Of the four that went down the street two
were the usual carriers' carts, the other two were off to Fleckie with
meal, and Gourlay had started them the sooner since they were to bring
back the ironwork which Templandmuir needed for his new improvements.
Though the Templar had reformed greatly since he married his birkie
wife, he was still far from having his place in proper order, and he had
often to depend on Gourlay for the carrying of stuff which a man in his
position should have had horses of his own to bring.

As Gourlay stood at his gate he pondered with heavy cunning how much he
might charge Templandmuir for bringing the ironwork from Fleckie. He
decided to charge him for the whole day, though half of it would be
spent in taking his own meal to Donnerton. In that he was carrying out
his usual policy--which was to make each side of his business help the
other.

As he stood puzzling his wits over Templandmuir's account, his lips
worked in and out, to assist the slow process of his brain. His eyes
narrowed between peering lids, and their light seemed to turn inward as
he fixed them abstractedly on a stone in the middle of the road. His
head was tilted that he might keep his eyes upon the stone; and every
now and then, as he mused, he rubbed his chin slowly between the thumb
and fingers of his left hand. Entirely given up to the thought of
Templandmuir's account, he failed to see the figure advancing up the
street.

At last the scrunch of a boot on the wet road struck his ear. He turned
with his best glower on the man who was approaching; more of the
"Wha-the-bleezes-are-you?" look than ever in his eyes--because he had
been caught unawares.

The stranger wore a light yellow overcoat, and he had been walking a
long time in the rain apparently, for the shoulders of the coat were
quite black with the wet, these black patches showing in strong contrast
with the dryer, therefore yellower, front of it. Coat and jacket were
both hanging slightly open, and between was seen the slight bulge of a
dirty white waistcoat. The newcomer's trousers were turned high at the
bottom, and the muddy spats he wore looked big and ungainly in
consequence. In this appearance there was an air of dirty and
pretentious well-to-do-ness. It was not shabby gentility. It was like
the gross attempt at dress of your well-to-do publican who looks down on
his soiled white waistcoat with complacent and approving eye.

"It's a fine morning, Mr. Gourlay," simpered the stranger. His air was
that of a forward tenant who thinks it a great thing to pass remarks on
the weather with his laird.

Gourlay cast a look at the dropping heavens.

"Is that _your_ opinion?" said he. "I fail to see't mysell."

It was not in Gourlay to see the beauty of that gray, wet dawn. A fine
morning to him was one that burnt the back of your neck.

The stranger laughed: a little deprecating giggle. "I meant it was fine
weather for the fields," he explained. He had meant nothing of the kind,
of course; he had merely been talking at random in his wish to be civil
to that important man, John Gourlay.

"Imphm," he pondered, looking round on the weather with a wise air;
"imphm; it's fine weather for the fields."

"Are _you_ a farmer, then?" Gourlay nipped him, with his eye on the
white waistcoat.

"Oh--oh, Mr. Gourlay! A farmer, no. Hi--hi! I'm not a farmer. I dare
say, now, you have no mind of _me_?"

"No," said Gourlay, regarding him very gravely and steadily with his
dark eyes. "I cannot say, sir, that I have the pleasure of remembering
_you_."

"Man, I'm a son of auld John Wilson of Brigabee."

"Oh, auld Wilson, the mole-catcher!" said contemptuous Gourlay. "What's
this they christened him now? 'Toddling Johnnie,' was it noat?"

Wilson coloured. But he sniggered to gloss over the awkwardness of the
remark. A coward always sniggers when insulted, pretending that the
insult is only a joke of his opponent, and therefore to be laughed
aside. So he escapes the quarrel which he fears a show of displeasure
might provoke.

But though Wilson was not a hardy man, it was not timidity only that
caused his tame submission to Gourlay.

He had come back after an absence of fifteen years, with a good deal of
money in his pocket, and he had a fond desire that he, the son of the
mole-catcher, should get some recognition of his prosperity from the
most important man in the locality. If Gourlay had said, with solemn and
fat-lipped approval, "Man, I'm glad to see that you have done so well,"
he would have swelled with gratified pride. For it is often the
favourable estimate of their own little village--"What they'll think of
me at home"--that matters most to Scotsmen who go out to make their way
in the world. No doubt that is why so many of them go home and cut a
dash when they have made their fortunes; they want the cronies of their
youth to see the big men they have become. Wilson was not exempt from
that weakness. As far back as he remembered Gourlay had been the big man
of Barbie; as a boy he had viewed him with admiring awe; to be received
by him now, as one of the well-to-do, were a sweet recognition of his
greatness. It was a fawning desire for that recognition that caused his
smirking approach to the grain merchant. So strong was the desire that,
though he coloured and felt awkward at the contemptuous reference to his
father, he sniggered and went on talking, as if nothing untoward had
been said. He was one of the band impossible to snub, not because they
are endowed with superior moral courage, but because their easy
self-importance is so great that an insult rarely pierces it enough to
divert them from their purpose. They walk through life wrapped
comfortably round in the wool of their own conceit. Gourlay, though a
dull man--perhaps because he was a dull man--suspected insult in a
moment. But it rarely entered Wilson's brain (though he was cleverer
than most) that the world could find anything to scoff at in such a fine
fellow as James Wilson. A less ironic brute than Gourlay would never
have pierced the thickness of his hide. It was because Gourlay succeeded
in piercing it that morning that Wilson hated him for ever--with a hate
the more bitter because he was rebuffed so seldom.

"Is business brisk?" he asked, irrepressible.

Business! Heavens, did ye hear him talking? What did Toddling Johnny's
son know about business? What was the world coming to? To hear him
setting up his face there, and asking the best merchant in the town
whether business was brisk! It was high time to put him in his place,
the conceited upstart, shoving himself forward like an equal!

For it was the assumption of equality implied by Wilson's manner that
offended Gourlay--as if mole-catcher's son and monopolist were
discussing, on equal terms, matters of interest to them both.

"Business!" he said gravely. "Well, I'm not well acquainted with your
line, but I believe mole traps are cheap--if ye have any idea of taking
up the oald trade."

Wilson's eyes flickered over him, hurt and dubious. His mouth
opened--then shut--then he decided to speak after all. "Oh, I was
thinking Barbie would be very quiet," said he, "compared wi' places
where they have the railway. I was thinking it would need stirring up a
bit."

"Oh, ye was thinking that, was ye?" birred Gourlay, with a stupid man's
repetition of his jibe. "Well, I believe there's a grand opening in the
moleskin line, so _there's_ a chance for ye. My quarrymen wear out their
breeks in no time."

Wilson's face, which had swelled with red shame, went a dead white.
"Good-morning!" he said, and started rapidly away with a vicious dig of
his stick upon the wet road.

"Goo-ood mor-r-ning, serr!" Gourlay birred after him; "goo-ood
mor-r-ning, serr!" He felt he had been bright this morning. He had put
the branks on Wilson!

Wilson was as furious at himself as at Gourlay. Why the devil had he
said "Good-morning"? It had slipped out of him unawares, and Gourlay had
taken it up with an ironic birr that rang in his ears now, poisoning his
blood. He felt equal in fancy to a thousand Gourlays now--so strong was
he in wrath against him. He had gone forward to pass pleasant remarks
about the weather, and why should he noat?--he was no disgrace to
Barbie, but a credit rather. It was not every working-man's son that
came back with five hundred in the bank. And here Gourlay had treated
him like a doag! Ah, well, he would maybe be upsides with Gourlay yet,
so he might!




CHAPTER X.


"Such a rickle of furniture I never saw!" said the Provost.

"Whose is it?" said Brodie.

"Oh, have ye noat heard?" said the Head of the Town with eyebrows in
air. "It beloangs to that fellow Wilson, doan't ye know? He's a son of
oald Wilson, the mowdie-man of Brigabee. It seems we're to have him for
a neighbour, or all's bye wi't. I declare I doan't know what this
world's coming to!"

"Man, Provost," said Brodie, "d'ye tell me tha-at? I've been over at
Fleckie for the last ten days--my brother Rab's dead and won away, as I
dare say you have heard--oh yes, we must all go--so, ye see, I'm
scarcely abreast o' the latest intelligence. What's Wilson doing here? I
thought he had been a pawnbroker in Embro."

"Noat he! It's _whispered_ indeed, that he left Brigabee to go and help
in a pawmbroker's, but it seems he married an Aberdeen lass and sattled
there after a while, the manager of a store, I have been given to
understa-and. He has taken oald Rab Jamieson's barn at the bottom of the
Cross--for what purpose it beats even me to tell! And that's his
furniture----"

"I declare!" said the astonished Brodie. "He's a smart-looking boy that.
Will that be a son of his?"

He pointed to a sharp-faced urchin of twelve who was busy carrying
chairs round the corner of the barn, to the tiny house where Wilson
meant to live. He was a red-haired boy with an upturned nose, dressed in
shirt and knickerbockers only. The cross of his braces came comically
near his neck--so short was the space of shirt between the top line of
his breeches and his shoulders. His knickers were open at the knee, and
the black stockings below them were wrinkled slackly down his thin legs,
being tied loosely above the calf with dirty white strips of cloth
instead of garters. He had no cap, and it was seen that his hair had a
"cow-lick" in front; it slanted up from his brow, that is, in a sleek
kind of tuft. There was a violent squint in one of his sharp gray eyes,
so that it seemed to flash at the world across the bridge of his nose.
He was so eager at his work that his clumsy-looking boots--they only
_looked_ clumsy because the legs they were stuck to were so
thin--skidded on the cobbles as he whipped round the barn with a chair
inverted on his poll. When he came back for another chair, he sometimes
wheepled a tune of his own making, in shrill, disconnected jerks, and
sometimes wiped his nose on his sleeve. And the bodies watched him.

"Faith, he's keen," said the Provost.

"But what on earth has Wilson ta'en auld Jamieson's house and barn for?
They have stude empty since I kenna whan," quoth Alexander Toddle,
forgetting his English in surprise.

"They say he means to start a business! He's made some bawbees in
Aiberdeen, they're telling me, and he thinks he'll set Barbie in a lowe
wi't."

"Ou, he means to work a perfect revolution," said Johnny Coe.

"In Barbie!" cried astounded Toddle.

"In Barbie e'en't," said the Provost.

"It would take a heap to revolutionize _hit_," said the baker, the
ironic man.

"There's a chance in that hoose," Brodie burst out, ignoring the baker's
gibe. "Dod, there's a chance, sirs. I wonder it never occurred to me
before."

"Are ye thinking ye have missed a gude thing?" grinned the Deacon.

But Brodie's lips were working in the throes of commercial speculation,
and he stared, heedless of the jibe. So Johnny Coe took up his sapient
parable.

"Atweel," said he, "there's a chance, Mr. Brodie. That road round to the
back's a handy thing. You could take a horse and cart brawly through an
opening like that. And there's a gey bit ground at the back, too, when a
body comes to think o't."

"What line's he meaning to purshoo?" queried Brodie, whose mind,
quickened by the chance he saw at No. 1 The Cross, was hot on the hunt
of its possibilities.

"He's been very close about that," said the Provost. "I asked Johnny
Gibson--it was him had the selling o't--but he couldn't give me ainy
satisfaction. All he could say was that Wilson had bought it and paid
it. 'But, losh,' said I, 'he maun 'a' lat peep what he wanted the place
for!' But na; it seems he was owre auld-farrant for the like of that.
'We'll let the folk wonder for a while, Mr. Gibson,' he had said. 'The
less we tell them, the keener they'll be to ken; and they'll advertise
me for noathing by speiring one another what I'm up till.'"

"Cunning!" said Brodie, breathing the word low in expressive admiration.

"Demned cute!" said Sandy Toddle.

"Very thmart!" said the Deacon.

"But the place has been falling down since ever I have mind o't," said
Sandy Toddle. "He's a very clever man if he makes anything out of
_that_."

"Well, well," said the Provost, "we'll soon see what he's meaning to be
at. Now that his furniture's in, he surely canna keep us in the dark
much loanger!"

Their curiosity was soon appeased. Within a week they were privileged to
read the notice here appended:--


     "Mr. James Wilson begs to announce to the inhabitants of Barbie
     and surrounding neighbourhood that he has taken these commodious
     premises, No. 1 The Cross, which he intends to open shortly as a
     Grocery, Ironmongery, and General Provision Store. J. W. is
     apprised that such an Emporium has long been a felt want in the
     locality. To meet this want is J. W.'s intention. He will try to do
     so, not by making large profits on a small business, but by making
     small profits on a large business. Indeed, owing to his long
     acquaintance with the trade, Mr. Wilson will be able to supply all
     commodities at a very little over cost price. For J. W. will use
     those improved methods of business which have been confined
     hitherto to the larger centres of population. At his Emporium you
     will be able, as the saying goes, to buy everything from a needle
     to an anchor. Moreover, to meet the convenience of his customers,
     J. W. will deliver goods at your own doors, distributing them with
     his own carts either in the town of Barbie or at any convenient
     distance from the same. Being a native of the district, his
     business hopes to secure a due share of your esteemed patronage.
     Thanking you, in anticipation, for the favour of an early visit,

       "Believe me, Ladies and Gentlemen,
                             "Yours faithfully,
                                     "JAMES WILSON."


Such was the poster with which "Barbie and surrounding neighbourhood"
were besprinkled within a week of "J. W.'s" appearance on the scene. He
was known as "J. W." ever after. To be known by your initials is
sometimes a mark of affection, and sometimes a mark of disrespect. It
was not a mark of affection in the case of our "J. W." When Donald Scott
slapped him on the back and cried, "Hullo, J. W., how are the anchors
selling?" Barbie had found a cue which it was not slow to make use of.
Wilson even received letters addressed to "J. W., Anchor Merchant, No.
1 The Cross." Ours is a nippy locality.

But Wilson, cosy and cocky in his own good opinion, was impervious to
the chilly winds of scorn. His posters, in big blue letters, were on the
smiddy door and on the sides of every brig within a circuit of five
miles; they were pasted, in smaller letters, red on the gateposts of
every farm; and Robin Tam, the bellman, handed them about from door to
door. The folk could talk of nothing else.

"Dod!" said the Provost, when he read the bill, "we've a new departure
here! This is an unco splutter, as the oald sow said when she tumbled in
the gutter."

"Ay," said Sandy Toddle, "a fuff in the pan, I'm thinking. He promises
owre muckle to last long! He lauchs owre loud to be merry at the end
o't. For the loudest bummler's no the best bee, as my father, honest
man, used to tell the minister."

"Ah-ah, I'm no so sure o' that," said Tam Brodie. "I forgathered wi'
Wilson on Wednesday last, and I tell ye, sirs, he's worth the watching.
They'll need to stand on a baikie that put the branks on him. He has the
considering eye in his head--yon lang far-away glimmer at a thing from
out the end of the eyebrow. He turned it on mysell twa-three times, the
cunning devil, trying to keek into me, to see if he could use me. And
look at the chance he has! There's two stores in Barbie, to be sure. But
Kinnikum's a dirty beast, and folk have a scunner at his goods; and
Catherwood's a drucken swine, and his place but sairly guided. That's a
great stroke o' policy, too, promising to deliver folk's goods on their
own doorstep to them. There's a whole jing-bang of outlying clachans
round Barbie that he'll get the trade of by a dodge like that. The like
was never tried hereaway before. I wadna wonder but it works wonders."

It did.

It was partly policy and partly accident that brought Wilson back to
Barbie. He had been managing a wealthy old merchant's store for a long
time in Aberdeen, and he had been blithely looking forward to the
goodwill of it, when jink, at the old man's death, in stepped a nephew,
and ousted the poo-oor fellow. He had bawled shrilly, but to no purpose;
he had to be travelling. When he rose to greatness in Barbie it was
whispered that the nephew discovered he was feathering his own nest, and
that this was the reason of his sharp dismissal. But perhaps we should
credit that report to Barbie's disposition rather than to Wilson's
misdemeanour.

Wilson might have set up for himself in the nippy northern town. But it
is an instinct with men who have met with a rebuff in a place to shake
its dust from their shoes, and be off to seek their fortunes in the
larger world. We take a scunner at the place that has ill-used us.
Wilson took a scunner at Aberdeen, and decided to leave it and look
around him. Scotland was opening up, and there were bound to be heaps of
chances for a man like him! "A man like me," was a frequent phrase of
Wilson's retired and solitary speculation. "Ay," he said, emerging from
one of his business reveries, "there's bound to be heaps o' chances for
a man like me, if I only look about me."

He was "looking about him" in Glasgow when he forgathered with his
cousin William--the borer he! After many "How are ye, Jims's" and mutual
speirings over a "bit mouthful of yill"--so they phrased it; but that
was a meiosis, for they drank five quarts--they fell to a serious
discussion of the commercial possibilities of Scotland. The borer was of
the opinion that the Braes of Barbie had a future yet, "for a' the
gaffer was so keen on keeping his men in the dark about the coal."

Now Wilson knew (as what Scotsman does not?) that in the middle 'fifties
coal-boring in Scotland was not the honourable profession that it now
is. More than once, speculators procured lying reports that there were
no minerals, and after landowners had been ruined by their abortive
preliminary experiments, stepped in, bought the land, and boomed it. In
one notorious case a family, now great in the public eye, bribed a
laird's own borers to conceal the truth, and then buying the Golconda
from its impoverished owner, laid the basis of a vast fortune.

"D'ye mean--to tell--_me_, Weelyum Wilson," said James, giving him his
full name in the solemnity of the moment, "d'ye mean--to tell--_me_,
sir"--here he sank his voice to a whisper--"that there's joukery-pawkery
at work?"

"A declare to God A div," said Weelyum, with equal solemnity, and he
nodded with alarmed sapience across his beer jug.

"You believe there's plenty of coal up Barbie Valley, and that they're
keeping it dark in the meantime for some purpose of their own?"

"I do," said Weelyum.

"God!" said James, gripping the table with both hands in his
excitement--"God, if that's so, what a chance there's in Barbie! It has
been a dead town for twenty year, and twenty to the end o't. A verra
little would buy the hauf o't. But property 'ull rise in value like a
puddock stool at dark, serr, if the pits come round it! It will that. If
I was only sure o' your suspeecion, Weelyum, I'd invest every bawbee I
have in't. You're going home the night, are ye not?"

"I was just on my road to the station when I met ye," said Weelyum.

"Send me a scrape of your pen to-morrow, man, if what you see on getting
back keeps you still in the same mind o't. And directly I get your
letter I'll run down and look about me."

The letter was encouraging, and Wilson went forth to spy the land and
initiate the plan of campaign. It was an important day for him. He
entered on his feud with Gourlay, and bought Rab Jamieson's house and
barn (with the field behind it) for a trifle. He had five hundred of his
own, and he knew where more could be had for the asking.

Rab Jamieson's barn was a curious building to be stranded in the midst
of Barbie. In quaint villages and little towns of England you sometimes
see a mellow red-tiled barn, with its rich yard, close upon the street;
it seems to have been hemmed in by the houses round, while dozing, so
that it could not escape with the fields fleeing from the town. There it
remains and gives a ripeness to the place, matching fitly with the great
horse-chestnut yellowing before the door, and the old inn further down,
mantled in its blood-red creepers. But that autumnal warmth and cosiness
is rarely seen in the barer streets of the north. How Rab Jamieson's
barn came to be stuck in Barbie nobody could tell. It was a gaunt, gray
building with never a window, but a bole high in one corner for the
sheaves, and a door low in another corner for auld Rab Jamieson. There
was no mill inside, and the place had not been used for years. But the
roof was good, and the walls stout and thick, and Wilson soon got to
work on his new possession. He had seen all that could be made of the
place the moment he clapped an eye on it, and he knew that he had found
a good thing, even if the pits should never come near Barbie. The bole
and door next the street were walled up, and a fine new door opened in
the middle, flanked on either side by a great window. The interior was
fitted up with a couple of counters and a wooden floor; and above the
new wood ceiling there was a long loft for a storeroom, lighted by
skylights in the roof. That loft above the rafters, thought the
provident Wilson, will come in braw and handy for storing things, so it
will. And there, hey presto! the transformation was achieved, and
Wilson's Emporium stood before you. It was crammed with merchandise. On
the white flapping slant of a couple of awnings, one over each window,
you might read in black letters, "JAMES WILSON: EMPORIUM." The letters
of "James Wilson" made a triumphal arch, to which "Emporium" was the
base. It seemed symbolical.

Now, the shops of Barbie (the drunken man's shop and the dirty man's
shop always excepted, of course) had usually been low-browed little
places with faded black scrolls above the door, on which you might read
in dim gilt letters (or it might be in white)


                "LICENS'D TO SELL TEA & TOBACCO."


"Licens'd" was on one corner of the ribboned scroll, "To Sell Tea &"
occupied the flowing arch above, with "Tobacco" in the other corner.
When you mounted two steps and opened the door, a bell of some kind went
"_ping_" in the interior, and an old woman in a mutch, with big specs
slipping down her nose, would come up a step from a dim little room
behind, and wiping her sunken mouth with her apron--she had just left
her tea--would say, "What's your wull the day, sir?" And if you said
your "wull" was tobacco, she would answer, "Ou, sir, I dinna sell ocht
now but the tape and sweeties." And then you went away, sadly.

With the exception of the dirty man's shop and the drunken man's shop,
that kind of shop was the Barbie kind of shop. But Wilson changed all
that. One side of the Emporium was crammed with pots, pans, pails,
scythes, gardening implements, and saws, with a big barrel of paraffin
partitioned off in a corner. The rafters on that side were bristling and
hoary with brushes of all kinds dependent from the roof, so that the
minister's wife (who was a six-footer) went off with a brush in her
bonnet once. Behind the other counter were canisters in goodly rows,
barrels of flour and bags of meal, and great yellow cheeses in the
window. The rafters here were heavy with their wealth of hams,
brown-skinned flitches of bacon interspersed with the white tight-corded
home-cured--"Barbie's Best," as Wilson christened it. All along the
back, in glass cases to keep them unsullied, were bales of cloth, layer
on layer to the roof. It was a pleasure to go into the place, so big and
bien was it, and to smell it on a frosty night set your teeth watering.
There was always a big barrel of American apples just inside the door,
and their homely fragrance wooed you from afar, the mellow savour
cuddling round you half a mile off. Barbie boys had despised the
provision trade, heretofore, as a mean and meagre occupation; but now
the imagination of each gallant youth was fired and radiant--he meant to
be a grocer.

Mrs. Wilson presided over the Emporium. Wilson had a treasure in his
wife. She was Aberdeen born and bred, but her manner was the manner of
the South and West. There is a broad difference of character between the
peoples of East and West Scotland. The East throws a narrower and a
nippier breed. In the West they take Burns for their exemplar, and
affect the jovial and robustious--in some cases it is affectation only,
and a mighty poor one at that. They claim to be bigger men and bigger
fools than the Eastern billies. And the Eastern billies are very willing
to yield one half of the contention.

Mrs. Wilson, though Eastie by nature, had the jovial manner that you
find in Kyle; more jovial, indeed, than was common in nippy Barbie,
which, in general character, seems to have been transplanted from some
sand dune looking out upon the German Ocean. She was big of hip and
bosom, with sloe-black hair and eyes, and a ruddy cheek, and when she
flung back her head for the laugh her white teeth flashed splendid on
the world. That laugh of hers became one of the well-known features of
Barbie. "Lo'd-sake!" a startled visitor would cry, "whatna skirl's
tha-at!" "Oh, dinna be alarmed," a native would comfort him, "it's only
Wilson's wife lauchin at the Cross!"

Her manner had a hearty charm. She had a laugh and a joke for every
customer, quick as a wink with her answer; her gibe was in you and out
again before you knew you were wounded. Some, it is true, took exception
to the loudness of her skirl--the Deacon, for instance, who "gave her a
good one" the first time he went in for snuff. But "Tut!" quoth she; "a
mim cat's never gude at the mice," and she lifted him out by the scruff
of his neck, crying, "Run, mousie, or I'll catch ye!" On that day her
popularity in Barbie was assured for ever. But she was as keen on the
penny as a penurious weaver, for all her heartiness and laughing ways.
She combined the commercial merits of the East and West. She could coax
you to the buying like a Cumnock quean, and fleece you in the selling
like the cadgers o' Kincardine. When Wilson was abroad on his affairs he
had no need to be afraid that things were mismanaging at home. During
his first year in Barbie Mrs. Wilson was his sole helper. She had the
brawny arm of a giantess, and could toss a bag of meal like a baby; to
see her twirl a big ham on the counter was to see a thing done as it
should be. When Drucken Wabster came in and was offensive once, "Poo-oor
fellow!" said she (with a wink to a customer), "I declare he's in a high
fever," and she took him kicking to the pump and cooled him.

With a mate like that at the helm every sail of Wilson's craft was
trimmed for prosperity. He began to "look about" him to increase the
fleet.




CHAPTER XI.


That the Scot is largely endowed with the commercial imagination his
foes will be ready to acknowledge. Imagination may consecrate the world
to a man, or it may merely be a visualizing faculty which sees that as
already perfect which is still lying in the raw material. The Scot has
the lower faculty in full degree; he has the forecasting leap of the
mind which sees what to make of things--more, sees them made and in
vivid operation. To him there is a railway through the desert where no
railway exists, and mills along the quiet stream. And his _perfervidum
ingenium_ is quick to attempt the realizing of his dreams. That is why
he makes the best of colonists. Galt is his type--Galt, dreaming in
boyhood of the fine water power a fellow could bring round the hill,
from the stream where he went a-fishing (they have done it since),
dreaming in manhood of the cities yet to rise amid Ontario's woods (they
are there to witness to his foresight). Indeed, so flushed and riotous
can the Scottish mind become over a commercial prospect that it
sometimes sends native caution by the board, and a man's really fine
idea becomes an empty balloon, to carry him off to the limbo of
vanities. There is a megalomaniac in every parish of Scotland. Well, not
so much as that; they're owre canny for that to be said of them. But in
every district almost you may find a poor creature who for thirty years
has cherished a great scheme by which he means to revolutionize the
world's commerce, and amass a fortune in monstrous degree. He is
generally to be seen shivering at the Cross, and (if you are a nippy
man) you shout carelessly in going by, "Good-morning, Tamson; how's the
scheme?" And he would be very willing to tell you, if only you would
wait to listen. "Man," he will cry eagerly behind you, "if I only had
anither wee wheel in my invention--she would do, the besom! I'll sune
have her ready noo." Poor Tamson!

But these are the exceptions. Scotsmen, more than other men perhaps,
have the three great essentials of commercial success--imagination to
conceive schemes, common sense to correct them, and energy to push them
through. Common sense, indeed, so far from being wanting, is in most
cases too much in evidence, perhaps, crippling the soaring mind and
robbing the idea of its early radiance; in quieter language, she makes
the average Scotsman to be over-cautious. His combinations are rarely
Napoleonic until he becomes an American. In his native dales he seldom
ventures on a daring policy. And yet his forecasting mind is always
detecting "possibeelities." So he contents himself by creeping
cautiously from point to point, ignoring big, reckless schemes and using
the safe and small, till he arrives at a florid opulence. He has
expressed his love of _festina lente_ in business in a score of
proverbs--"Bit-by-bit's the better horse, though big-by-big's the
baulder;" "Ca' canny, or ye'll cowp;" "Many a little makes a mickle;"
and "Creep before ye gang." This mingling of caution and imagination is
the cause of his stable prosperity. And its characteristic is a sure
progressiveness. That sure progressiveness was the characteristic of
Wilson's prosperity in Barbie. In him, too, imagination and caution were
equally developed. He was always foreseeing "chances" and using them,
gripping the good and rejecting the dangerous (had he not gripped the
chance of auld Rab Jamieson's barn? There was caution in that, for it
was worth the money whatever happened; and there was imagination in the
whole scheme, for he had a vision of Barbie as a populous centre and
streets of houses in his holm). And every "chance" he seized led to a
better one, till almost every "chance" in Barbie was engrossed by him
alone. This is how he went to work. Note the "bit-by-bitness" of his
great career.

When Mrs. Wilson was behind the counter, Wilson was out "distributing."
He was not always out, of course--his volume of trade at first was not
big enough for that; but in the mornings, and the long summer dusks, he
made his way to the many outlying places of which Barbie was the centre.
There, in one and the same visit, he distributed goods and collected
orders for the future. Though his bill had spoken of "carts," as if he
had several, that was only a bit of splurge on his part; his one
conveyance at the first was a stout spring cart, with a good brown cob
between the shafts. But with this he did such a trade as had never been
known in Barbie. The Provost said it was "shtupendous."

When Wilson was jogging homeward in the balmy evenings of his first
summer at Barbie, no eye had he for the large evening star, tremulous
above the woods, or for the dreaming sprays against the yellow west. It
wasn't his business; he had other things to mind. Yet Wilson was a
dreamer too. His close, musing eye, peering at the dusky-brown nodge of
his pony's hip through the gloom, saw not that, but visions of chances,
opportunities, occasions. When the lights of Barbie twinkled before him
in the dusk, he used to start from a pleasant dream of some commercial
enterprise suggested by the country round. "Yon holm would make a fine
bleaching green--pure water, fine air, labour cheap, and everything
handy. Or the Lintie's Linn among the woods--water power running to
waste yonder--surely something could be made of that." He would follow
his idea through all its mazes and developments, oblivious of the
passing miles. His delight in his visions was exactly the same as the
author's delight in the figments of his brain. They were the same good
company along the twilight roads. The author, happy with his thronging
thoughts (when they are kind enough to throng), is no happier than
Wilson was on nights like these.

He had not been a week on his rounds when he saw a "chance" waiting for
development. When out "delivering" he used to visit the upland farms to
buy butter and eggs for the Emporium. He got them cheaper so. But more
eggs and butter could be had than were required in the neighbourhood of
Barbie. Here was a chance for Wilson! He became a collector for
merchants at a distance. Barbie, before it got the railway, had only a
silly little market once a fortnight, which was a very poor outlet for
stuff. Wilson provided a better one. Another thing played into his
hands, too, in that connection. It is a cheese-making countryside about
Barbie, and the less butter produced at a cheese-making place, the
better for the cheese. Still, a good many pounds are often churned on
the sly. What need the cheese merchant ken? it keepit the gudewife in
bawbees frae week to week; and if she took a little cream frae the
cheese now and than they werena a pin the waur o't, for she aye did it
wi' decency and caution! Still, it is as well to dispose of this kind of
butter quietly, to avoid gabble among ill-speakers. Wilson, slithering
up the back road with his spring cart in the gloaming, was the man to
dispose of it quietly. And he got it dirt cheap, of course, seeing it
was a kind of contraband. All that he made in this way was not much to
be sure--threepence a dozen on the eggs, perhaps, and fourpence on the
pound of butter--still, you know, every little makes a mickle, and
hained gear helps weel.[4] And more important than the immediate profit
was the ultimate result. For Wilson in this way established with
merchants, in far-off Fechars and Poltandie, a connection for the sale
of country produce which meant a great deal to him in future, when he
launched out as cheese-buyer in opposition to Gourlay.

It "occurred" to him also (things were always occurring to Wilson) that
the "Scotch cuddy" business had as fine a chance in "Barbie and
surrounding neighbourhood" as ever it had in North and Middle England.
The "Scotch cuddy" is so called because he is a beast of burden, and not
from the nature of his wits. He is a travelling packman, who infests
communities of working-men, and disposes of his goods on the credit
system, receiving payment in instalments. You go into a working-man's
house (when he is away from home for preference), and laying a swatch of
cloth across his wife's knee, "What do you think of that, mistress?" you
inquire, watching the effect keenly. Instantly all her covetous heart is
in her eye, and, thinks she to herself, "Oh, but John would look well in
that at the kirk on Sunday!" She has no ready money, and would never
have the cheek to go into a draper's and order the suit; but when she
sees it lying there across her knee, she just cannot resist it. (And
fine you knew that when you clinked it down before her!) Now that the
goods are in the house, she cannot bear to let them out the door again.
But she hints a scarcity of cash. "Tut, woman!" quoth you, bounteous and
kind, "there's no obstacle in _that_! You can pay me in instalments!"
How much would the instalments be, she inquires. "Oh, a mere
trifle--half a crown a week, say." She hesitates and hankers. "John's
Sunday coat's getting quite shabby, so it is, and Tam Macalister has a
new suit, she was noticing--the Macalisters are always flaunting in
their braws! And, there's that Paisley shawl for herself, too; eh, but
they would be the canty pair, cocking down the road on Sunday in _that_
rig! they would take the licht frae Meg Macalister's een--thae
Macalisters are always so en-vy-fu'!" Love, vanity, covetousness,
present opportunity, are all at work upon the poor body. She succumbs.
But the half-crown weekly payments have a habit of lengthening
themselves out till the packman has made fifty per cent. by the
business. And why not? a man must have some interest on his money!
Then there's the risk of bad debts, too--that falls to be considered.
But there was little risk of bad debts when Wilson took to
cloth-distributing. For success in that game depends on pertinacity in
pursuit of your victim, and Wilson was the man for that.

He was jogging home from Brigabee, where he had been distributing
groceries at a score of wee houses, when there flashed on his mind a
whole scheme for cloth-distribution on a large scale; for mining
villages were clustering in about Barbie by this time, and he saw his
way to a big thing.

He was thinking of Sandy Toddle, who had been a Scotch cuddy in the
Midlands, and had retired to Barbie on a snug bit fortune--he was
thinking of Sandy when the plan rose generous on his mind. He would soon
have more horses than one on the road; why shouldn't they carry swatches
of cloth as well as groceries? If he had responsible men under him, it
would be their own interest, for a small commission on the profits, to
see that payments were levied correctly every week. And those colliers
were reckless with their cash, far readier to commit themselves to
buying than the cannier country bodies round. Lord! there was money in
the scheme. No sooner thought of than put in practice. Wilson gave up
the cloth-peddling after five or six years--he had other fish to fry by
that time--but while he was at it he made money hand over fist at the
job.

But what boots it to tell of all his schemes? He had the lucky eye, and
everything he looked on prospered.

Before he had been a week in Barbie he met Gourlay, just at the Bend o'
the Brae, in full presence of the bodies. Remembering their first
encounter, the grocer tried to outstare him; but Gourlay hardened his
glower, and the grocer blinked. When the two passed, "I declare!" said
the bodies, "did ye see yon?--they're not on speaking terms!" And they
hotched with glee to think that Gourlay had another enemy.

Judge of their delight when they saw one day about a month later, just
as Gourlay was passing up the street, Wilson come down it with a load of
coals for a customer! For he was often out Auchterwheeze road in the
early morning, and what was the use of an empty journey back again,
especially as he had plenty of time in the middle of the day to attend
to other folk's affairs? So here he was, started as a carrier, in full
opposition to Gourlay.

"Did you see Gourlay's face?" chuckled the bodies when the cart went by.
"Yon was a bash in the eye to him. Ha, ha! he's not to have it all his
own way now!"

Wilson had slid into the carrying in the natural development of
business. It was another of the possibilities which he saw and turned to
his advantage. The two other chief grocers in the place, Cunningham the
dirty and Calderwood the drunken, having no carts or horses of their
own, were dependent on Gourlay for conveyance of their goods from
Skeighan. But Wilson brought his own. Naturally, he was asked by his
customers to bring a parcel now and then, and naturally, being the man
he was, he made them pay for the privilege. With that for a start the
rest was soon accomplished. Gourlay had to pay now for his years of
insolence and tyranny; all who had irked beneath his domineering ways
got their carrying done by Wilson. Ere long that prosperous gentleman
had three carts on the road, and two men under him to help in his
various affairs.

Carting was only one of several new developments in the business of J.
W. When the navvies came in about the town and accommodation was ill to
find, Wilson rigged up an old shed in the corner of his holm as a
hostelry for ten of them--and they had to pay through the nose for their
night's lodging. Their food they obtained from the Emporium, and thus
the Wilsons bled them both ways. Then there was the scheme for supplying
milk--another of the "possibeelities." Hitherto in winter, Barbie was
dependent for its milk supply on heavy farm-carts that came lumbering
down the street, about half-past seven in the morning, jangling bells to
waken sleepy customers, and carrying lanterns that carved circles of
fairy yellow out the raw air. But Mrs. Wilson got four cows,
back-calvers who would be milking strong in December, and supplied milk
to all the folk about the Cross.

She had a lass to help her in the house now, and the red-headed boy was
always to be seen, jinking round corners like a weasel, running messages
hot-foot, errand boy to the "bisness" in general. Yet, though everybody
was busy and skelping at it, such a stress of work was accompanied with
much disarray. Wilson's yard was the strangest contrast to Gourlay's.
Gourlay's was a pleasure to the eye, everything of the best and
everything in order, since the master's pride would not allow it to be
other. But though Wilson's Emporium was clean, his back yard was
littered with dirty straw, broken boxes, old barrels, stable refuse, and
the sky-pointing shafts of carts, uptilted in between. When boxes and
barrels were flung out of the Emporium they were generally allowed to
lie on the dunghill until they were converted into firewood. "Mistress,
you're a trifle mixed," said the Provost in grave reproof, when he went
round to the back to see Wilson on a matter of business. But "Tut,"
cried Mrs. Wilson, as she threw down a plank, to make a path for him
across a dub--"Tut," she laughed, "the clartier the cosier!" And it was
as true as she said it. The thing went forward splendidly in spite of
its confusion.

Though trade was brisker in Barbie than it had ever been before, Wilson
had already done injury to Gourlay's business as general conveyor. But,
hitherto, he had not infringed on the gurly one's other monopolies. His
chance came at last.

He appeared on a market-day in front of the Red Lion, a piece of pinky
brown paper in his hand. That was the first telegram ever seen in
Barbie, and it had been brought by special messenger from Skeighan. It
was short and to the point. It ran: "Will buy 300 stone cheese 8
shillings stone[5] delivery at once," and was signed by a merchant in
Poltandie.

Gourlay was talking to old Tarmillan of Irrendavie, when Wilson pushed
in and addressed Tarmillan, without a glance at the grain-merchant.

"Have you a kane o' cheese to sell, Irrendavie?" was his blithe
salutation.

"I have," said Irrendavie, and he eyed him suspiciously. For what was
Wilson speiring for? _He_ wasna a cheese-merchant.

"How much the stane are ye seeking for't?" said Wilson.

"I have just been asking Mr. Gourlay here for seven-and-six," said
Irrendavie, "but he winna rise a penny on the seven!"

"_I_'ll gi'e ye seven-and-six," said Wilson, and slapped his long thin
flexible bank-book far too ostentatiously against the knuckles of his
left hand.

"But--but," stammered Irrendavie, suspicious still, but melting at the
offer, "_you_ have no means of storing cheese."

"Oh," said Wilson, getting in a fine one at Gourlay, "there's no
drawback in that! The ways o' business have changed greatly since steam
came close to our doors. It's nothing but vanity nowadays when a country
merchant wastes money on a ramshackle of buildings for storing--there's
no need for that if he only had brains to develop quick deliveries. Some
folk, no doubt, like to build monuments to their own pride, but I'm not
one of that kind; there's not enough sense in that to satisfy a man like
me. My offer doesna hold, you understand, unless you deliver the cheese
at Skeighan Station. Do you accept the condition?"

"Oh yes," said Irrendavie, "I'm willing to agree to that."

"C'way into the Red Lion then," said Wilson, "and we'll wet the bargain
with a drink to make it hold the tighter!"

Then a strange thing happened. Gourlay had a curious stick of foreign
wood (one of the trifles he fed his pride on) the crook of which curved
back to the stem and inhered, leaving space only for the fingers. The
wood was of wonderful toughness, and Gourlay had been known to bet that
no man could break the handle of his stick by a single grip over the
crook and under it. Yet now, as he saw his bargain whisked away from him
and listened to Wilson's jibe, the thing snapped in his grip like a
rotten twig. He stared down at the broken pieces for a while, as if
wondering how they came there, then dashed them on the ground while
Wilson stood smiling by. And then he strode--with a look on his face
that made the folk fall away.

"He's hellish angry," they grinned to each other when their foe was
gone, and laughed when they heard the cause of it. "Ha, ha, Wilson's the
boy to diddle him!" And yet they looked queer when told that the famous
stick had snapped in his grasp like a worm-eaten larch-twig. "Lord!"
cried the baker in admiring awe, "did he break it with the ae chirt!
It's been tried by scores of fellows for the last twenty years, and
never a man of them was up till't! Lads, there's something splendid
about Gourlay's wrath. What a man he is when the paw-sion grups him!"

"Thplendid, d'ye ca't?" said the Deacon. "He may thwing in a towe for
his thplendid wrath yet."

From that day Wilson and Gourlay were a pair of gladiators for whom the
people of Barbie made a ring. They pitted the protagonists against each
other and hounded them on to rivalry by their comments and remarks,
taking the side of the newcomer, less from partiality to him than from
hatred of their ancient enemy. It was strange that a thing so impalpable
as gossip should influence so strong a man as John Gourlay to his ruin.
But it did. The bodies of Barbie became not only the chorus to Gourlay's
tragedy, buzzing it abroad and discussing his downfall; they became
also, merely by their maddening tattle, a villain of the piece and an
active cause of the catastrophe. Their gossip seemed to materialize into
a single entity, a something propelling, that spurred Gourlay on to the
schemes that ruined him. He was not to be done, he said; he would show
the dogs what he thought of them. And so he plunged headlong, while the
wary Wilson watched him, smiling at the sight.

There was a pretty hell-broth brewing in the little town.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] _Hained gear_, saved money.

[5] That is for the stone of fourteen pounds. At that time Scotch cheese
was selling, _roughly_, at from fifty to sixty shillings the
hundred-weight.




CHAPTER XII.


"Ay, man, Templandmuir, it's you!" said Gourlay, coming forward with
great heartiness. "Ay, man, and how are ye? C'way into the parlour!"

"Good-evening, Mr. Gourlay," said the Templar. His manner was curiously
subdued.

Since his marriage there was a great change in the rubicund squireen.
Hitherto he had lived in sluttish comfort on his own land, content with
the little it brought in, and proud to be the friend of Gourlay, whom
everybody feared. If it ever dawned on his befuddled mind that Gourlay
turned the friendship to his own account, his vanity was flattered by
the prestige he acquired because of it. Like many another robustious big
toper, the Templar was a chicken at heart, and "to be in with Gourlay"
lent him a consequence that covered his deficiency. "Yes, I'm sleepy,"
he would yawn in Skeighan Mart; "I had a sederunt yestreen wi' John
Gourlay," and he would slap his boot with his riding-switch and feel
like a hero. "I know how it is, I know how it is!" Provost Connal of
Barbie used to cry; "Gourlay both courts and cowes him--first he courts
and then he cowes--and the Templar hasn't the courage to break it off!"
The Provost hit the mark.

But when the Templar married the miller's daughter of the Mill o' Blink
(a sad come-down, said foolish neighbours, for a Halliday of
Templandmuir) there was a sudden change about the laird. In our good
Scots proverb, "A miller's daughter has a shrill voice," and the new
leddy of Templandmuir ("a leddy she is!" said the frightened
housekeeper) justified the proverb. Her voice went with the skirl of an
east wind through the rat-riddled mansion of the Hallidays. She was
nine-and-twenty, and a birkie woman of nine-and-twenty can make a good
husband out of very unpromising material. The Templar wore a scared look
in those days and went home betimes. His cronies knew the fun was over
when they heard what happened to the great punchbowl--she made it a
swine-trough. It was the heirloom of a hundred years, and as much as a
man could carry with his arms out, a massive curio in stone; but to her
husband's plaint about its degradation, "Oh," she cried, "it'll never
know the difference! It's been used to swine!"

But she was not content with the cessation of the old; she was
determined on bringing in the new. For a twelvemonth now she had urged
her husband to be rid of Gourlay. The country was opening up, she said,
and the quarry ought to be their own. A dozen times he had promised her
to warn Gourlay that he must yield the quarry when his tack ran out at
the end of the year, and a dozen times he had shrunk from the encounter.

"I'll write," he said feebly.

"Write!" said she, lowered in her pride to think her husband was a
coward. "Write, indeed! Man, have ye no spunk? Think what he has made
out o' ye! Think o' the money that has gone to him that should have come
to you! You should be glad o' the chance to tell him o't. My certy, if I
was you I wouldn't miss it for the world--just to let him know of his
cheatry! Oh, it's very right that _I_"--she sounded the _I_ big and
brave--"it's very right that _I_ should live in this tumbledown hole
while _he_ builds a palace from your plunder! It's right that _I_ should
put up with this"--she flung hands of contempt at her dwelling--"it's
right that _I_ should put up with this, while yon trollop has a
splendid mansion on the top o' the brae! And every bawbee of his
fortune has come out of you--the fool makes nothing from his other
business--he would have been a pauper if he hadn't met a softie like you
that he could do what he liked with. Write, indeed! I have no patience
with a wheen sumphs of men! Them do the work o' the world! They may wear
the breeks, but the women wear the brains, I trow. I'll have it out with
the black brute myself," screamed the hardy dame, "if you're feared of
his glower. If you havena the pluck for it, _I_ have. Write, indeed! In
you go to the meeting that oald ass of a Provost has convened, and don't
show your face in Templandmuir till you have had it out with Gourlay!"

No wonder the Templar looked subdued.

When Gourlay came forward with his usual calculated heartiness, the
laird remembered his wife and felt very uncomfortable. It was ill to
round on a man who always imposed on him a hearty and hardy
good-fellowship. Gourlay, greeting him so warmly, gave him no excuse for
an outburst. In his dilemma he turned to the children, to postpone the
evil hour.

"Ay, man, John!" he said heavily, "you're there!" Heavy Scotsmen are
fond of telling folk that they are where they are. "You're there!" said
Templandmuir.

"Ay," said John, the simpleton, "I'm here."

In the grime of the boy's face there were large white circles round the
eyes, showing where his fists had rubbed off the tears through the day.

"How are you doing at the school?" said the Templar.

"Oh, he's an ass!" said Gourlay. "He takes after his mother in that! The
lassie's more smart--she favours our side o' the house! Eh, Jenny?" he
inquired, and tugged her pigtail, smiling down at her in grim fondness.

"Yes," nodded Janet, encouraged by the petting, "John's always at the
bottom of the class. Jimmy Wilson's always at the top, and the dominie
set him to teach John his 'counts the day--after he had thrashed him!"

She cried out at a sudden tug on her pigtail, and looked up, with tears
in her eyes, to meet her father's scowl.

"You eediot!" said Gourlay, gazing at his son with a savage contempt,
"have you no pride to let Wilson's son be your master?"

John slunk from the room.

"Bide where you are, Templandmuir," said Gourlay after a little. "I'll
be back directly."

He went through to the kitchen and took a crystal jug from the dresser.
He "made a point" of bringing the water for his whisky. "I like to pump
it up _cold_," he used to say, "cold and cold, ye know, till there's a
mist on the outside of the glass like the bloom on a plum, and then, by
Goad, ye have the fine drinking! Oh no--ye needn't tell me, I wouldn't
lip drink if the water wasna ice-cold." He never varied from the tipple
he approved. In his long sederunts with Templandmuir he would slip out
to the pump, before every brew, to get water of sufficient coldness.

To-night he would birl the bottle with Templandmuir as usual, till the
fuddled laird should think himself a fine big fellow as being the
intimate of John Gourlay--and then, sober as a judge himself, he would
drive him home in the small hours. And when next they met, the
pot-valiant squireen would chuckle proudly, "Faith, yon was a night." By
a crude cunning of the kind Gourlay had maintained his ascendancy for
years, and to-night he would maintain it still. He went out to the pump
to fetch water with his own hands for their first libation.

But when he came back and set out the big decanter Templandmuir started
to his feet.

"Noat to-night, Mr. Gourlay," he stammered--and his unusual flutter of
refusal might have warned Gourlay--"noat to-night, if _you_ please; noat
to-night, if _you_ please. As a matter of fact--eh--what I really came
into the town for, doan't you see, was--eh--to attend the meeting the
Provost has convened about the railway. You'll come down to the meeting,
will ye noat?"

He wanted to get Gourlay away from the House with the Green Shutters. It
would be easier to quarrel with him out of doors.

But Gourlay gaped at him across the table, his eyes big with surprise
and disapproval.

"Huh!" he growled, "I wonder at a man like you giving your head to that!
It's a wheen damned nonsense."

"Oh, I'm no so sure of that," drawled the Templar. "I think the railway
means to come."

The whole country was agog about the new railway. The question agitating
solemn minds was whether it should join the main line at Fechars, thirty
miles ahead, or pass to the right, through Fleckie and Barbie, to a
junction up at Skeighan Drone. Many were the reasons spluttered in
vehement debate for one route or the other. "On the one side, ye see,
Skeighan was a big place a'readys, and look what a centre it would be if
it had three lines of rail running out and in! Eh, my, what a centre!
Then there was Fleckie and Barbie--they would be the big towns! Up the
valley, too, was the shortest road; it would be a daft-like thing to
build thirty mile of rail, when fifteen was enough to establish the
connection! And was it likely--I put it to ainy man of sense--was it
likely the Coal Company wouldn't do everything in their power to get the
railway up the valley, seeing that if it didn't come that airt they
would need to build a line of their own?"--"Ah, but then, ye see,
Fechars was a big place too, and there was lots of mineral up there as
well! And though it was a longer road to Fechars and part of it lay
across the moors, there were several wee towns that airt just waiting
for a chance of growth! I can tell ye, sirs, this was going to be a
close question!"

Such was the talk in pot-house and parlour, at kirk and mart and tryst
and fair, and wherever potentates did gather and abound. The partisans
on either side began to canvass the country in support of their
contentions. They might have kept their breath to cool their porridge,
for these matters, we know, are settled in the great Witenagemot. But
petitions were prepared and meetings were convened. In those days
Provost Connal of Barbie was in constant communion with the "Pow-ers."
"Yass," he nodded gravely--only "nod" is a word too swift for the grave
inclining of that mighty pow--"yass, ye know, the great thing in matters
like this is to get at the Pow-ers, doan't you see? Oh yass, yass; we
must get at the Pow-ers!" and he looked as if none but he were equal to
the job. He even went to London (to interrogate the "Pow-ers"), and
simple bodies, gathered at the Cross for their Saturday at e'en, told
each other with bated breath that the Provost was away to the "seat of
Goaver'ment to see about the railway." When he came back and shook his
head, hope drained from his fellows and left them hollow in an empty
world. But when he smacked his lips on receiving an important letter,
the heavens were brightened and the landscapes smiled.

The Provost walked about the town nowadays with the air of a man on
whose shoulders the weight of empires did depend. But for all his airs
it was not the Head o' the Town who was the ablest advocate of the route
up the Water of Barbie. It was that public-spirited citizen, Mr. James
Wilson of the Cross! Wilson championed the cause of Barbie with an
ardour that did infinite credit to his civic heart. For one thing, it
was a grand way of recommending himself to his new townsfolk, as he told
his wife, "and so increasing the circle of our present trade, don't ye
understand?"--for another, he was as keen as the keenest that the
railway should come and enhance the value of his property. "We must
agitate," he cried, when Sandy Toddle murmured a doubt whether anything
they could do would be of much avail. "It's not settled yet what road
the line's to follow, and who knows but a trifle may turn the scale in
our behalf? Local opinion ought to be expressed! They're sending a
monster petition from the Fechars side; we'll send the Company a bigger
one from ours! Look at Skeighan and Fleckie and Barbie--three towns at
our back, and the new Coal Company forbye! A public opinion of that size
ought to have a great weight--if put forward properly! We must agitate,
sirs, we must agitate; we maun scour the country for names in our
support. Look what a number of things there are to recommend _our_
route. It's the shortest, and there's no need for heavy cuttings such as
are needed on the other side; the road's there a'ready--Barbie Water has
cut it through the hills. It's the manifest design of Providence that
there should be a line up Barbie Valley! What a position for't!--And,
oh," thought Wilson, "what a site for building houses in my holm!--Let a
meeting be convened at wunst!"

The meeting was convened, with Provost Connal in the chair and Wilson as
general factotum.

"You'll come down to the meeting?" said Templandmuir to Gourlay.

Go to a meeting for which Wilson had sent out the bills! At another,
Gourlay would have hurled his usual objurgation that he would see him
condemned to eternal agonies ere he granted his request! But
Templandmuir was different. Gourlay had always flattered this man (whom
he inwardly despised) by a companionship which made proud the other. He
had always yielded to Templandmuir in small things, for the sake of the
quarry, which was a great thing. He yielded to him now.

"Verra well," he said shortly, and rose to get his hat.

When Gourlay put on his hat the shallow meanness of his brow was hid,
and nothing was seen to impair his dark, strong gravity of face. He was
a man you would have turned to look at as he marched in silence by the
side of Templandmuir. Though taller than the laird, he looked shorter
because of his enormous breadth. He had a chest like the heave of a
hill. Templandmuir was afraid of him. And fretting at the necessity he
felt to quarrel with a man of whom he was afraid, he had an unreasonable
hatred of Gourlay, whose conduct made this quarrel necessary at the same
time that his character made it to be feared; and he brooded on his
growing rage that, with it for a stimulus, he might work his cowardly
nature to the point of quarrelling. Conscious of the coming row, then,
he felt awkward in the present, and was ignorant what to say. Gourlay
was silent too. He felt it an insult to the House with the Green
Shutters that the laird should refuse its proffered hospitality. He
hated to be dragged to a meeting he despised. Never before was such
irritation between them.

When they came to the hall where the meeting was convened, there were
knots of bodies grouped about the floor. Wilson fluttered from group to
group, an important man, with a roll of papers in his hand. Gourlay,
quick for once in his dislike, took in every feature of the man he
loathed.

Wilson was what the sentimental women of the neighbourhood called a
"bonny man." His features were remarkably regular, and his complexion
was remarkably fair. His brow was so delicate of hue that the blue veins
running down his temples could be traced distinctly beneath the
whiteness of the skin. Unluckily for him, he was so fair that in a
strong light (as now beneath the gas) the suspicion of his unwashedness
became a certainty--"as if he got a bit idle slaik now and than, and
never a good rub," thought Gourlay in a clean disgust. Full lips showed
themselves bright red in the middle between the two wings of a very
blonde and very symmetrical moustache. The ugly feature of the face was
the blue calculating eyes. They were tender round the lids, so that the
white lashes stuck out in little peaks. And in conversation he had a
habit of peering out of these eyes as if he were constantly spying for
something to emerge that he might twist to his advantage. As he talked
to a man close by and glimmered (not at the man beside him, but far away
in the distance of his mind at some chance of gain suggested by the
other's words) Gourlay heard him say musingly, "Imphm, imphm, imphm!
there might be something _in_ that!" nodding his head and stroking his
moustache as he uttered each meditative "imphm."

It was Wilson's unconscious revelation that his mind was busy with a
commercial hint which he had stolen from his neighbour's talk. "The
damned sneck-drawer!" thought Gourlay, enlightened by his hate; "he's
sucking Tam Finlay's brains, to steal some idea for himsell!" And still
as Wilson listened he murmured swiftly, "Imphm! I see, Mr. Finlay;
imphm! imphm! imphm!" nodding his head and pulling his moustache and
glimmering at his new "opportunity."

Our insight is often deepest into those we hate, because annoyance fixes
our thought on them to probe. We cannot keep our minds off them. "Why do
they do it?" we snarl, and wondering why, we find out their character.
Gourlay was not an observant man, but every man is in any man somewhere,
and hate to-night driving his mind into Wilson, helped him to read him
like an open book. He recognized with a vague uneasiness--not with fear,
for Gourlay did not know what it meant, but with uneasy anger--the
superior cunning of his rival. Gourlay, a strong block of a man cut off
from the world by impotence of speech, could never have got out of
Finlay what Wilson drew from him in two minutes' easy conversation.

Wilson ignored Gourlay, but he was very blithe with Templandmuir, and
inveigled him off to a corner. They talked together very briskly, and
Wilson laughed once with uplifted head, glancing across at Gourlay as he
laughed. Curse them, were they speaking of him?

The hall was crammed at last, and the important bodies took their seats
upon the front benches. Gourlay refused to be seated with the rest, but
stood near the platform, with his back to the wall, by the side of
Templandmuir.

After what the Provost described "as a few preliminary remarks"--they
lasted half an hour--he called on Mr. Wilson to address the meeting.
Wilson descanted on the benefits that would accrue to Barbie if it got
the railway, and on the needcessity for a "long pull, and a strong pull,
and a pull all together"--a phrase which he repeated many times in the
course of his address. He sat down at last amid thunders of applause.

"There's no needcessity for me to make a loang speech," said the
Provost.

"Hear, hear!" said Gourlay, and the meeting was unkind enough to laugh.

"Order, order!" cried Wilson perkily.

"As I was saying when I was grossly interrupted," fumed the Provost,
"there's no needcessity for me to make a loang speech. I had thoat we
were a-all agreed on the desirabeelity of the rileway coming in our
direction. I had thoat, after the able--I must say the very able--speech
of Mr. Wilson, that there wasn't a man in this room so shtupid as to
utter a word of dishapproval. I had thoat we might prosheed at woance to
elect a deputation. I had thoat we would get the name of everybody here
for the great petition we mean to send the Pow-ers. I had thoat it was
all, so to shpeak, a foregone conclusion. But it seems I was mistaken,
ladies and gentlemen--or rather, I oat to say gentlemen, for I believe
there are no ladies present. Yass, it seems I was mistaken. It may be
there are some who would like to keep Barbie going on in the oald way
which they found so much to their advantage. It may be there are some
who regret a change that will put an end to their chances of
tyraneezin'. It may be there are some who know themselves so shtupid
that they fear the new condeetions of trade the railway's bound to
bring."--Here Wilson rose and whispered in his ear, and the people
watched them, wondering what hint J. W. was passing to the Provost. The
Provost leaned with pompous gravity toward his monitor, hand at ear to
catch the treasured words. He nodded and resumed.--"Now, gentlemen, as
Mr. Wilson said, this is a case that needs a loang pull, and a stroang
pull, and a pull all together. We must be unanimous. It will _noat_ do
to show ourselves divided among ourselves. Therefore I think we oat to
have expressions of opinion from some of our leading townsmen. That will
show how far we are unanimous. I had thoat there could be only one
opinion, and that we might prosheed at once with the petition. But it
seems I was wroang. It is best to inquire first exactly where we stand.
So I call upon Mr. John Gourlay, who has been the foremost man in the
town for mainy years--at least he used to be that--I call upon Mr.
Gourlay as the first to express an opinion on the subjeck."

Wilson's hint to the Provost placed Gourlay in a fine dilemma. Stupid as
he was, he was not so stupid as not to perceive the general advantage of
the railway. If he approved it, however, he would seem to support Wilson
and the Provost, whom he loathed. If he disapproved, his opposition
would be set down to a selfish consideration for his own trade, and he
would incur the anger of the meeting, which was all for the coming of
the railway, Wilson had seized the chance to put him in a false
position. He knew Gourlay could not put forty words together in public,
and that in his dilemma he would blunder and give himself away.

Gourlay evaded the question.

"It would be better to convene a meeting," he bawled to the Provost, "to
consider the state of some folk's back doors."--That was a nipper to
Wilson!--"There's a stink at the Cross that's enough to kill a cuddy!"

"Evidently not," yelled Wilson, "since you're still alive!"

A roar went up against Gourlay. All he could do was to scowl before him,
with hard-set mouth and gleaming eyes, while they bellowed him to scorn.

"I would like to hear what Templandmuir has to say on the subject," said
Wilson, getting up. "But no doubt he'll follow his friend Mr. Gourlay."

"No, I don't follow Mr. Gourlay," bawled Templandmuir with unnecessary
loudness. The reason of his vehemence was twofold. He was nettled (as
Wilson meant he should) by the suggestion that he was nothing but
Gourlay's henchman. And being eager to oppose Gourlay, yet a coward, he
yelled to supply in noise what he lacked in resolution.

"I don't follow Mr. Gourlay at all," he roared; "I follow nobody but
myself! Every man in the district's in support of this petition. It
would be absurd to suppose anything else. I'll be glad to sign't among
the first, and do everything I can in its support."

"Verra well," said the Provost; "it seems we're agreed after all. We'll
get some of our foremost men to sign the petition at this end of the
hall, and then it'll be placed in the anteroom for the rest to sign as
they go out."

"Take it across to Gourlay," whispered Wilson to the two men who were
carrying the enormous tome. They took it over to the grain merchant, and
one of them handed him an inkhorn. He dashed it to the ground.

The meeting hissed like a cellarful of snakes. But Gourlay turned and
glowered at them, and somehow the hisses died away. His was the high
courage that feeds on hate, and welcomes rather than shrinks from its
expression. He was smiling as he faced them.

"Let _me_ pass," he said, and shouldered his way to the door, the
bystanders falling back to make room. Templandmuir followed him out.

"I'll walk to the head o' the brae," said the Templar.

He must have it out with Gourlay at once, or else go home to meet the
anger of his wife. Having opposed Gourlay already, he felt that now was
the time to break with him for good. Only a little was needed to
complete the rupture. And he was the more impelled to declare himself
to-night because he had just seen Gourlay discomfited, and was beginning
to despise the man he had formerly admired. Why, the whole meeting had
laughed at his expense! In quarrelling with Gourlay, moreover, he would
have the whole locality behind him. He would range himself on the
popular side. Every impulse of mind and body pushed him forward to the
brink of speech; he would never get a better occasion to bring out his
grievance.

They trudged together in a burning silence. Though nothing was said
between them, each was in wrathful contact with the other's mind.
Gourlay blamed everything that had happened on Templandmuir, who had
dragged him to the meeting and deserted him. And Templandmuir was
longing to begin about the quarry, but afraid to start.

That was why he began at last with false, unnecessary loudness. It was
partly to encourage himself (as a bull bellows to increase his rage),
and partly because his spite had been so long controlled. It burst the
louder for its pent fury.

"Mr. Gourlay!" he bawled suddenly, when they came opposite the House
with the Green Shutters, "I've had a crow to pick with you for more than
a year."

It came on Gourlay with a flash that Templandmuir was slipping away from
him. But he must answer him civilly for the sake of the quarry.

"Ay, man," he said quietly, "and what may that be?"

"I'll damned soon tell you what it is," said the Templar. "Yon was a
monstrous overcharge for bringing my ironwork from Fleckie. I'll be
damned if I put up with that!"

And yet it was only a trifle. He had put up with fifty worse impositions
and never said a word. But when a man is bent on a quarrel any spark
will do for an explosion.

"How do ye make that out?" said Gourlay, still very quietly, lest he
should alienate the quarry laird.

"Damned fine do I make that out," yelled Templandmuir, and louder than
ever was the yell. He was the brave man now, with his bellow to hearten
him. "Damned fine do I make that out. You charged me for a whole day,
though half o't was spent upon your own concerns. I'm tired o' you and
your cheatry. You've made a braw penny out o' me in your time. But curse
me if I endure it loanger. I give you notice this verra night that your
tack o' the quarry must end at Martinmas."

He was off, glad to have it out and glad to escape the consequence,
leaving Gourlay a cauldron of wrath in the darkness. It was not merely
the material loss that maddened him. But for the first time in his life
he had taken a rebuff without a word or a blow in return. In his desire
to conciliate he had let Templandmuir get away unscathed. His blood
rocked him where he stood.

He walked blindly to the kitchen door, never knowing how he reached it.
It was locked--at this early hour!--and the simple inconvenience let
loose the fury of his wrath. He struck the door with his clenched fist
till the blood streamed on his knuckles.

It was Mrs. Gourlay who opened the door to him. She started back before
his awful eyes.

"John!" she cried, "what's wrong wi' ye?"

The sight of the she-tatterdemalion there before him, whom he had
endured so long and must endure for ever, was the crowning burden of his
night. Damn her, why didn't she get out of the way? why did she stand
there in her dirt and ask silly questions? He struck her on the bosom
with his great fist, and sent her spinning on the dirty table.

She rose from among the broken dishes and came towards him, with slack
lips and great startled eyes. "John," she panted, like a pitiful
frightened child, "what have I been doing?... Man, what did you hit me
for?"

He gaped at her with hanging jaw. He knew he was a brute--knew she had
done nothing to-night more than she had ever done--knew he had vented on
her a wrath that should have burst on others. But his mind was at a
stick; how could he explain--to _her_? He gaped and glowered for a
speechless moment, then turned on his heel and went into the parlour,
slamming the door till the windows rattled in their frames.

She stared after him a while in large-eyed stupor, then flung herself in
her old nursing-chair by the fire, and spat blood in the ribs, hawking
it up coarsely--we forget to be delicate in moments of supremer agony.
And then she flung her apron over her head and rocked herself to and fro
in the chair where she had nursed his children, wailing, "It's a pity o'
me, it's a pity o' me! My God, ay, it's a geyan pity o' me!"

The boy was in bed, but Janet had watched the scene with a white, scared
face and tearful cries. She crept to her mother's side.

The sympathy of children with those who weep is innocently selfish. The
sight of tears makes them uncomfortable, and they want them to cease, in
the interests of their own happiness. If the outward signs of grief
would only vanish, all would be well. They are not old enough to
appreciate the inward agony.

So Janet tugged at the obscuring apron, and whimpered, "Don't greet,
mother, don't greet. Woman, I dinna like to see ye greetin'."

But Mrs. Gourlay still rocked herself and wailed, "It's a pity o' me,
it's a pity o' me! My God, ay, it's a geyan pity o' me!"




CHAPTER XIII.


"Is he in himsell?" asked Gibson the builder, coming into the Emporium.

Mrs. Wilson was alone in the shop. Since trade grew so brisk she had an
assistant to help her, but he was out for his breakfast at present, and
as it happened she was all alone.

"No," she said, "he's no in. We're terribly driven this twelvemonth
back, since trade grew so thrang, and he's aye hunting business in some
corner. He's out the now after a carrying affair. Was it ainything
perticular?"

She looked at Gibson with a speculation in her eyes that almost verged
on hostility. Wives of the lower classes who are active helpers in a
husband's affairs often direct that look upon strangers who approach him
in the way of business. For they are enemies whatever way you take them;
come to be done by the husband or to do him--in either case, therefore,
the object of a sharp curiosity. You may call on an educated man, either
to fleece him or be fleeced, and his wife, though she knows all about
it, will talk to you charmingly of trifles while you wait for him in her
parlour. But a wife of the lower orders, active in her husband's
affairs, has not been trained to dissemble so prettily; though her face
be a mask, what she is wondering comes out in her eye. There was
suspicion in the big round stare that Mrs. Wilson directed at the
builder. What was _he_ spiering for "himsell" for? What could he be up
to? Some end of his own, no doubt. Anxious curiosity forced her to
inquire.

"Would I do instead?" she asked.

"Well, hardly," said Gibson, clawing his chin, and gazing at a corded
round of "Barbie's Best" just above his head. "Dod, it's a fine ham
that," he said, to turn the subject. "How are ye selling it the now?"

"Tenpence a pound retail, but ninepence only if ye take a whole one. Ye
had better let me send you one, Mr. Gibson, now that winter's drawing
on. It's a heartsome thing, the smell of frying ham on a frosty
morning"--and her laugh went skelloching up the street.

"Well, ye see," said Gibson, with a grin, "I expect Mr. Wilson to
present me with one when he hears the news that I have brought him."

"Aha!" said she, "it's something good, then," and she stuck her arms
akimbo.--"James!" she shrilled, "James!" and the red-haired boy shot
from the back premises.

"Run up to the Red Lion, and see if your father has finished his crack
wi' Templandmuir. Tell him Mr. Gibson wants to see him on important
business."

The boy squinted once at the visitor, and scooted, the red head of him
foremost.

While Gibson waited and clawed his chin she examined him narrowly.
Suspicion as to the object of his visit fixed her attention on his face.

He was a man with mean brown eyes. Brown eyes may be clear and limpid as
a mountain pool, or they may have the fine black flash of anger and the
jovial gleam, or they may be mean things--little and sly and oily.
Gibson's had the depth of cunning, not the depth of character, and they
glistened like the eyes of a lustful animal. He was a reddish man, with
a fringe of sandy beard, and a perpetual grin which showed his yellow
teeth, with green deposit round their roots. It was more than a
grin--it was a _rictus_, semicircular from cheek to cheek; and the beady
eyes, ever on the watch up above it, belied its false benevolence. He
was not florid, yet that grin of his seemed to intensify his reddishness
(perhaps because it brought out and made prominent his sandy valance and
the ruddy round of his cheeks), so that the baker christened him long
ago "the man with the sandy smile." "Cunning Johnny" was his other
nickname. Wilson had recognized a match in him the moment he came to
Barbie, and had resolved to act with him if he could, but never to act
against him. They had made advances to each other--birds of a feather,
in short.

The grocer came in hurriedly, white-waistcoated to-day, and a
perceptibly bigger bulge in his belly than when we first saw him in
Barbie, four years ago now.

"Good-morning, Mr. Gibson," he panted. "Is it private that ye wanted to
see me on?"

"Verra private," said the sandy smiler.

"We'll go through to the house, then," said Wilson, and ushered his
guest through the back premises. But the voice of his wife recalled him.
"James!" she cried. "Here for a minute just," and he turned to her,
leaving Gibson in the yard.

"Be careful what you're doing," she whispered in his ear. "It wasna for
nothing they christened Gibson 'Cunning Johnny.' Keep the dirt out your
een."

"There's no fear of that," he assured her pompously. It was a grand
thing to have a wife like that, but her advice nettled him now just a
little, because it seemed to imply a doubt of his efficiency--and that
was quite onnecessar. He knew what he was doing. They would need to rise
very early that got the better o' a man like him!

"You'll take a dram?" said Wilson, when they reached a pokey little room
where the most conspicuous and dreary object was a large bare flowerpot
of red earthenware, on a green woollen mat, in the middle of a round
table. Out of the flowerpot rose gauntly a three-sticked frame, up which
two lonely stalks of a climbing plant tried to scramble, but failed
miserably to reach the top. The round little rickety table with the
family album on one corner (placed at what Mrs. Wilson considered a
beautiful artistic angle to the window), the tawdry cloth, the green
mat, the shiny horsehair sofa, and the stuffy atmosphere, were all in
perfect harmony of ugliness. A sampler on the wall informed the world
that there was no place like home.

Wilson pushed the flowerpot to one side, and "You'll take a dram?" he
said blithely.

"Oh ay," said Gibson with a grin; "I never refuse drink when I'm offered
it for nothing."

"Hi! hi!" laughed Wilson at the little joke, and produced a cut decanter
and a pair of glasses. He filled the glasses so brimming full that the
drink ran over on the table.

"Canny, man, for God's sake canny!" cried Gibson, starting forward in
alarm. "Don't ye see you're spilling the mercies?" He stooped his lips
to the rim of his glass, and sipped, lest a drop of Scotia's nectar
should escape him.

They faced each other, sitting. "Here's pith!" said Gibson. "Pith!" said
the other in chorus, and they nodded to each other in amity, primed
glasses up and ready. And then it was eyes heavenward and the little
finger uppermost.

Gibson smacked his lips once and again when the fiery spirit tickled his
uvula.

"Ha!" said he, "that's the stuff to put heart in a man."

"It's no bad whisky," said Wilson complacently.

Gibson wiped the sandy stubble round his mouth with the back of his
hand, and considered for a moment. Then, leaning forward, he tapped
Wilson's knee in whispering importance.

"Have you heard the news?" he murmured, with a watchful glimmer in his
eyes.

"No!" cried Wilson, glowering, eager and alert. "Is't ocht in the
business line? Is there a possibeelity for me in't?"

"Oh, there might," nodded Gibson, playing his man for a while.

"Ay, man!" cried Wilson briskly, and brought his chair an inch or two
forward. Gibson grinned and watched him with his beady eyes. "What green
teeth he has!" thought Wilson, who was not fastidious.

"The Coal Company are meaning to erect a village for five hundred miners
a mile out the Fleckie Road, and they're running a branch line up the
Lintie's Burn that'll need the building of a dozen brigs. I'm happy to
say I have nabbed the contract for the building."

"Man, Mr. Gibson, d'ye tell me that! I'm proud to hear it, sir; I am
that!" Wilson was hotching in his chair with eagerness. For what could
Gibson be wanting with _him_ if it wasna to arrange about the carting?
"Fill up your glass, Mr. Gibson, man; fill up your glass. You're
drinking nothing at all. Let _me_ help you."

"Ay, but I havena the contract for the carting," said Gibson. "That's
not mine to dispose of. They mean to keep it in their own hand."

Wilson's mouth forgot to shut, and his eyes were big and round as his
mouth in staring disappointment. Was it this he was wasting his drink
for?

"Where do I come in?" he asked blankly.

Gibson tossed off another glassful of the burning heartener of men, and
leaned forward with his elbows on the table.

"D'ye ken Goudie, the Company's manager? He's worth making up to, I can
tell ye. He has complete control of the business, and can airt you the
road of a good thing. I made a point of helping him in everything, ever
since he came to Barbie, and I'm glad to say that he hasna forgotten't.
Man, it was through him I got the building contract; they never threw't
open to the public. But they mean to contract separate for carting the
material. That means that they'll need the length of a dozen horses on
the road for a twelvemonth to come; for it's no only the
building--they're launching out on a big scale, and there's lots of
other things forbye. Now, Goudie's as close as a whin, and likes to keep
everything dark till the proper time comes for sploring o't. Not a
whisper has been heard so far about this village for the miners--there's
a rumour, to be sure, about a wheen houses going up, but nothing _near_
the reality. And there's not a soul, either, that kens there's a big
contract for carting to be had 'ceptna Goudie and mysell. But or a
month's by they'll be advertising for estimates for a twelvemonth's
carrying. I thocht a hint aforehand would be worth something to you, and
that's the reason of my visit."

"I see," said Wilson briskly. "You're verra good, Mr. Gibson. You mean
you'll give me an inkling in private of the other estimates sent in, and
help to arrange mine according?"

"Na," said Gibson. "Goudie's owre close to let me ken. I'll speak a word
in his ear on your behalf, to be sure, if you agree to the proposal I
mean to put before you. But Gourlay's the man you need to keep your eye
on. It's you or him for the contract--there's nobody else to compete wi'
the two o' ye."

"Imphm, I see," said Wilson, and tugged his moustache in meditation. All
expression died out of his face while his brain churned within. What
Brodie had christened "the considering keek" was in his eyes; they were
far away, and saw the distant village in process of erection; busy with
its chances and occasions. Then an uneasy thought seemed to strike him
and recall him to the man by his side. He stole a shifty glance at the
sandy smiler.

"But I thought _you_ were a friend of Gourlay's," he said slowly.

"Friendship!" said Gibson. "We're speaking of business. And there's
sma-all friendship atween me and Gourlay. He was nebby owre a bill I
sent in the other day; and I'm getting tired of his bluster. Besides,
there's little more to be made of him. Gourlay's bye wi't. But you're a
rising man, Mr. Wilson, and I think that you and me might work thegither
to our own advantage, don't ye see? Yes; just so; to the advantage of us
both. Oom?"

"I hardly see what you're driving at," said Wilson.

"I'm driving at this," said Gibson. "If Gourlay kens you're against him
for the contract, he'll cut his estimate down to a ruinous price, out o'
sheer spite--yes, out o' sheer spite--rather than be licked by _you_ in
public competition. And if he does that, Goudie and I may do what we
like, but we canna help you. For it's the partners that decide the
estimates sent in, d'ye see? Imphm, it's the partners. Goudie has
noathing to do wi' that. And if Gourlay once gets round the partners,
you'll be left out in the cold for a very loang time. Shivering, sir,
shivering! You will that!"

"Dod, you're right. There's a danger of that. But I fail to see how we
can prevent it."

"We can put Gourlay on a wrong scent," said Gibson.

"But how, though?"

Gibson met one question by another.

"What was the charge for a man and a horse and a day's carrying when ye
first came hereaway?" he asked.

"Only four shillings a day," said Wilson promptly. "It has risen to six
now," he added.

"Exactly," said Gibson; "and with the new works coming in about the town
it'll rise to eight yet. I have it for a fact that the Company's willing
to gie that. Now if you and me could procure a job for Gourlay at the
lower rate, before the news o' this new industry gets scattered--a job
that would require the whole of his plant, you understand, and prevent
his competing for the Company's business--we would clear"--he clawed his
chin to help his arithmetic--"we would clear three hundred and
seventy-four pounds o' difference on the twelvemonth. At least _you_
would make that," he added, "but you would allow me a handsome
commission of course--the odd hundred and seventy, say--for bringing the
scheme before ye. I don't think there's ocht unreasonable in tha-at. For
it's not the mere twelvemonth's work that's at stake, you understand;
it's the valuable connection for the fee-yuture. Now, I have influence
wi' Goudie; I can help you there. But if Gourlay gets in there's just a
chance that you'll never be able to oust him."

"I see," said Wilson. "Before he knows what's coming, we're to provide
work for Gourlay at the lower rate, both to put money in our own pocket
and prevent him competing for the better business."

"You've summed it to the nines," said Gibson.

"Yes," said Wilson blankly, "but how on earth are _we_ to provide work
for him?"

Gibson leaned forward a second time and tapped Wilson on the knee.

"Have you never considered what a chance for building there's in that
holm of yours?" he asked. "You've a fortune there, lying undeveloped."

That was the point to which Cunning Johnny had been leading all the
time. He cared as little for Wilson as for Gourlay; all he wanted was a
contract for covering Wilson's holm with jerry-built houses, and a good
commission on the year's carrying. It was for this he evolved the
conspiracy to cripple Gourlay.

Wilson's thoughts went to and fro like the shuttle of a weaver. He
blinked in rapidity of thinking, and stole shifty glances at his
comrade. He tugged his moustache and said "Imphm" many times. Then his
eyes went off in their long preoccupied stare, and the sound of the
breath, coming heavy through his nostrils, was audible in the quiet
room. Wilson was one of the men whom you hear thinking.

"I see," he said slowly. "You mean to bind Gourlay to cart building
material to my holm at the present price of work. You'll bind him in
general terms so that he canna suspect, till the time comes, who in
particular he's to work for. In the meantime I'll be free to offer for
the Company's business at the higher price."

"That's the size o't," said Gibson.

Wilson was staggered by the rapid combinations of the scheme. But
Cunning Johnny had him in the toils. The plan he proposed stole about
the grocer's every weakness, and tugged his inclinations to consent. It
was very important, he considered, that he, and no other, should obtain
this contract, which was both valuable in itself and an earnest of other
business in the future. And Gibson's scheme got Gourlay, the only
possible rival, out of the way. For it was not possible for Gourlay to
put more than twelve horses on the road, and if he thought he had
secured a good contract already, he would never dream of applying for
another. Then, Wilson's malice was gratified by the thought that
Gourlay, who hated him, should have to serve, as helper and underling,
in a scheme for his aggrandizement. That would take down his pride for
him! And the commercial imagination, so strong in Wilson, was inflamed
by the vision of himself as a wealthy houseowner which Gibson put before
him. Cunning Johnny knew all this when he broached the scheme--he
foresaw the pull of it on Wilson's nature. Yet Wilson hesitated. He did
not like to give himself to Gibson quite so rapidly.

"You go fast, Mr. Gibson," said he. "Faith, you go fast. This is a big
affair, and needs to be looked at for a while."

"Fast!" cried Gibson. "Damn it, we have no time to waste. We maun act on
the spur of the moment."

"I'll have to borrow money," said Wilson slowly; "and it's verra dear at
the present time."

"It was never worth more in Barbie than it is at the present time. Man,
don't ye see the chance you're neglecting? Don't ye see what it means?
There's thousands lying at your back door if ye'll only reach to pick
them up. Yes, thousands. Thousands, I'm telling ye--thousands!"

Wilson saw himself provost and plutocrat. Yet was he cautious.

"_You_'ll do well by the scheme," he said tartly, "if you get the sole
contract for building these premises of mine, and a fat commission on
the carrying forbye."

"Can you carry the scheme without me?" said Gibson. "A word from me to
Goudie means a heap." There was a veiled threat in the remark.

"Oh, we'll come to terms," said the other. "But how will you manage
Gourlay?"

"Aha!" said Gibson, "I'll come in handy for that, you'll discover.
There's been a backset in Barbie for the last year--things went owre
quick at the start and were followed by a wee lull; but it's only for a
time, sir--it's only for a time. Hows'ever, it and you thegither have
damaged Gourlay: he's both short o' work and scarce o' cash, as I found
to my cost when I asked him for my siller! So when I offer him a big
contract for carting stones atween the quarry and

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/25876