The Stickit Minister's Wooing, and Other Galloway Stories
by unknown · English · Gutenberg #49342 · 586,379 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Stickit Minister's Wooing, and Other Galloway Stories
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 Stickit Minister's Wooing, and Other Galloway Stories
Creator: S. R. Crockett
Release date: July 1, 2015 [eBook #49342]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/49342
Credits: Produced by Al Haines
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STICKIT MINISTER'S WOOING, AND OTHER GALLOWAY STORIES ***
Produced by Al Haines.
*THE*
*STICKIT MINISTER'S WOOING*
*AND OTHER GALLOWAY STORIES*
By
*S. R. CROCKETT*
LONDON
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
PATERNOSTER ROW
MCM
_Printed by Hazell, Watson, & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury._
_To
The Well-Beloved Memory
of_
_R. L. S._
_to whom, eight years ago, I
dedicated the first series of
the "Stickit Minister" stories_
Eight years ago "The Stickit Minister" stood friendless without the door
of letters. He knew no one within, and feared greatly lest no hand of
welcome should be held out to him from those already within, so that,
being encouraged, he too might pluck up heart of grace to enter.
Yet when the time came, the Stickit One found not one, but two right
hands outstretched to greet him, which, after all, is as many as any man
may grasp at once. One was reached out to me from far-away Samoa. The
other belonged to a man whom, at that time, I knew only as one of the
most thoughtful, sympathetic, and brilliant of London journalists, but
who has since become my friend, and at whose instance, indeed, this
Second Series of "The Stickit Minister" stories has been written. To
these two men, the London man of letters and the Samoan exile, I owe the
first and greatest of an author's literary debts--that of a first
encouragement.
They were both men I had never seen; and neither was under any
obligation to help me. Concerning the former, still strenuously and
gallantly at work among us, I will in this place say nothing further.
But, after having kept silence for eight years lest I should appear as
one that vaunted himself, I may be permitted a word of that other who
sleeps under the green tangle of Vaea Mountain.
Mr. Stevenson and I had been in occasional communication since about the
year 1886, when, in a small volume of verse issued during the early part
of that year, the fragment of a "Transcript from the Song of Songs,
which is Solomon's," chanced to attract his attention. He wrote
immediately, with that beautiful natural generosity of appreciation of
his, to ask the author to finish his translation in verse, and to
proceed to other dramatic passages, some of which, chiefly from Isaiah
and Job, he specified. I remember that "When the morning stars sang
together" was one of those indicated, and "O, thou afflicted, tossed
with tempest and not comforted," another. "I have tried my hand at them
myself," he added kindly; "but they were not so good as your Shulamite."
After this he made me more than once the channel of his practical
charity to certain poor miner folk, whom disaster had rendered homeless
and penniless on the outskirts of his beloved Glencorse.
A year or two afterwards, having in the intervals of other work written
down certain countryside stories, which managed to struggle into print
in rather obscure corners, I collected these into a volume, under the
title of "The Stickit Minister and Some Common Men." Then after the
volume was through the press, in a sudden gulp of venturesomeness I
penned a dedication.
TO
Robert Louis Stevenson
OF SCOTLAND AND SAMOA,
I DEDICATE THESE STORIES OF THAT
GREY GALLOWAY LAND
WHERE
ABOUT THE GRAVES OF THE MARTYRS
THE WHAUPS ARE CRYING--
HIS HEART REMEMBERS HOW.
Still much fearing and trembling, how needlessly I guessed not then, I
packed up and despatched a copy to Samoa. Whereupon, after due
interval, there came back to these shores a letter--the sense of which
reached me deviously--not to myself but to his friend, Mr. Sidney
Colvin. "If I could only be buried in the hills, under the heather, and
a table tombstone like the martyrs; 'where the whaups and plovers are
crying!' Did you see a man who wrote 'The Stickit Minister,' and
dedicated it to me, in words that brought the tears to my eyes every
time I looked at them? 'Where about the graves of the martyrs the
whaups are crying--his heart remembers how.' Ah, by God, it does!
Singular that I should fulfil the Scots destiny throughout, and live a
voluntary exile and have my head filled with the blessed, beastly place
all the time!"
To another friend he added some criticism of the book. "Some of the
tales seem to me a trifle light, and one, at least, is too slender and
fantastic--qualities that rarely mingle well." (How oft in the stilly
night have I wondered which one he meant!) "But the whole book breathes
admirably of the soil. 'The Stickit Minister,' 'The Heather Lintie,'
are two that appeal to me particularly. They are drowned in Scotland.
They have refreshed me like a visit home. 'Cleg Kelly' also is a
delightful fellow. I have enjoyed his acquaintance particularly."
Curiously enough, it was not from Samoa, but from Honolulu, that I first
received tidings that my little volume had not miscarried. It was quite
characteristic of Mr. Stevenson not to answer at once: "I let my
letters accumulate till I am leaving a place," he said to me more than
once; "then I lock myself in with them, and my cries of penitence can be
heard a mile!"
In a San Francisco paper there appeared a report of a speech he had made
to some kindly Scots who entertained him in Honolulu, In it he spoke
affectionately of "The Stickit Minister." I have, alas! lost the
reference now, but at the time it took me by the throat. I could not
get over the sheer kindness of the thing.
Then came a letter and a poem, both very precious to me:
"Thank you from my heart, and see with what dull pedantry I have been
tempted to extend your beautiful phrase of prose into three indifferent
stanzas:
"Blows the wind to-day, and the sun and the rain are flying;
Blows the wind on the moors to-day, and now,
Where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying--
My heart remembers how!
Grey recumbent tombs of the dead in desert places,
Standing Stones on the vacant, wine-red moor;
Hills of sheep, and the howes of the silent vanished races,
And winds austere and pure!
Be it granted me to behold you again in dying,
Hills of home! and to hear again the call--
Hear about the graves of the martyrs the pee-wees crying,
And hear no more at all."
To me, in the all too brief days that remained to him, he wrote letter
after letter of criticism, encouragement, and praise (in which last, as
was his wont, he let his kind heart run far ahead of his judgment). It
goes to my heart now not to quote from these, for they are in some wise
my poor patent of nobility. But, perhaps with more wisdom, I keep them
by me, to hearten myself withal when the days of darkness grow too many
and too dark.
So much for bush to this second draught of countryside vintage--the more
easily forgiven that it tells of the generosity of a dead man whom I
loved. But and if in any fields Elysian or grey twilight of shades, I
chance to meet with Robert Louis Stevenson, I know that I shall find him
in act to help over some ghostly stile, the halt, the maimed, and the
faint of heart---even as in these late earthly years he did for me--and
for many another.
S. R. CROCKETT.
*CONTENTS*
I. THE STICKIT MINISTER'S WOOING
II. THE STICKIT MINISTER WINS THROUGH
III. GIBBY THE EEL, STUDENT IN DIVINITY
IV. DR. GIRNIGO'S ASSISTANT
V. THE GATE OF THE UPPER GARDEN
VI. THE TROUBLER OF ISRAEL
VII. CARNATION'S MORNING JOY
VIII. JAIMSIE
IX. BEADLE AND MARTYR
X. THE BLUE EYES OF AILIE
XI. LOWE'S SEAT
XII. THE SUIT OF BOTTLE GREEN
XIII. A SCIENTIFIC SYMPOSIUM
XIV. THE HEMPIE'S LOVE STORY
XV. THE LITTLE FAIR MAN--
I.--SEED SOWN BY THE WAYSIDE
II.--THE HUMBLING OF STRENGTH-O'-AIRM
III.--THE CURATE OF KIRKCHRIST
XVI. MY FATHER'S LOVE STORY
XVII. THE MAN OF WRATH
XVIII. THE LASS IN THE SHOP
XIX. THE RESPECT OF DROWDLE
XX. TADMOR IN THE WILDERNESS
XXI. PETERSON'S PATIENT
XXII. TWO HUMOURISTS
*THE STICKIT MINISTER'S WOOING[#]*
[#] These stories have been edited chiefly from manuscripts supplied to
me by my friend Mr. Alexander McQuhirr, M.D., of Cairn Edward in
Galloway, of whose personal adventures I treated in the volume called
"Lad's Love," I have let my friend tell his tale in his own way in
almost every case.
It was in the second year of my college life thai I came home to find
Robert Fraser, whom a whole country-side called the "Stickit Minister,"
distinctly worse, and indeed, set down upon his great chair in the
corner as on a place from which he would never rise.
A dour, grippy back-end it was, the soil stubborn and untoward with
early frost. And a strange sound it was to hear as I (Alexander
McQuhirr) came down the Lang Brae, the channel stones droning and
dinnelling on the ice by the third of November; a thing which had not
happened in our parts since that fell year of the Sixteen Drifty Days,
which has been so greatly talked about.
I walked over to the Dullarg the very night I arrived from Edinburgh. I
had a new volume of Tennyson with me, which I had bought with the
thought that he would be pleased with it. For I loved Robert Fraser, and
I will not deny that my heart beat with expectation as I went up the
little loaning with the rough stone dyke upon either side--aye, as if it
had been the way to Nether Neuk, and I going to see my sweetheart.
"Come your ways in, Alec, man," his voice came from the inner room, as
he heard me pause to exchange banter of a rural sort with the servant
lasses in the kitchen; "I have been waitin' for ye. I kenned ye wad
come the nicht!"
I went in. And there by the little peat fire, drowsing red and looking
strangely out of place behind the ribs of the black-leaded "register"
grate, I saw the Stickit Minister with a black-and-white check plaid
about his knees. He smiled a strange sweet smile, at once wistful and
distant, as I entered--like one who waves farewell through a mist of
tears as the pier slides back and the sundering water seethes and widens
about the ship.
"You are better, Robert!" I said, smiling too. Dully, and yet with
dogged cheerfulness, I said it, as men lie to the dying--and are not
believed.
He stretched out his thin hand, the ploughman's horn clean gone from it,
and the veins blue and convex upon the shrunk wrist.
"_Ave atque vale_, Alec, lad!" he answered. "That is what it has come to
with Robert Fraser. But how are all at Drumquhat? Ye will be on your
road ower to the Nether Neuk?"
This he said, though he knew different.
"I have brought you this from Edinburgh," I said, giving him the little,
thin, green volume of Tennyson. I had cut it to save him trouble, and
written his name on the blank page before the title.
I shall never forget the way he looked at it. He opened it as a woman
unfolds a new and costly garment, with a lingering caress of the wasted
finger-tips through which I could almost see the white of the paper, and
a slow soft intake of the breath, like a lover's sigh.
His eyes, of old blue and clear, had now a kind of glaze over them, a
veiling Indian summer mist through which, however, still shone, all
undimmed and fearless, the light of the simplest and manfulest spirit I
have ever known. He turned the leaves and read a verse here and there
with evident pleasure. He had a way of reading anything he loved as it
listening inly to the cadences--a little half-turn of the head aside,
and a still contented smile hovering about the lips, like one who
catches the first returning fall of beloved footsteps.
But all at once Robert Fraser shut the book and let his hands sink
wearily down upon his knee. He did not look at me, but kept his eyes on
the red peat ash in the "register" grate.
"It's bonnie," he murmured softly; "and it was a kind thing for you to
think on me. But it's gane frae me, Alec--it's a' clean gane. Tak' you
the book, Alec. The birdies will never sing again in ony spring for me
to hear. I'm back upon the Word, Alec. There's nocht but That for me
noo!"
He laid his hand on a Bible that was open beside him on the stand which
held his medicine bottles, and a stocking at which his wearied fingers
occasionally knitted for a moment or two at a time.
Then he gave the little green-clad Tennyson back to me with so motherly
and lingering a regard that, had I not turned away, I declare I know not
but that I had been clean done for.
"Yet for a' that, Alec," he said, "do you take the book for my sake.
And see--cut out the leaf ye hae written on and let me keep it here
beside me."
I did as he asked me, and with the leaf in his hand he turned over the
pages of his Bible carefully, like a minister looking for a text. He
stopped at a yellowing envelope, as if uncertain whether to deposit the
inscription in it. Then he lifted the stamped oblong and handed it to
me with a kind of smile.
"There, Alec," he said, "you that has (so they tell me) a sweetheart o'
your ain, ye will like to see that. This is the envelope that held the
letter I gat frae Jessie Loudon--the nicht Sir James telled me at the
Infirmary that my days were numbered!"
"Oh, Robert!" I cried, all ashamed that he should speak thus to a young
man like me, "dinna think o' that. You will excite yourself--you may do
yourself a hurt----"
But he waved me away, still smiling that slow misty smile, in which,
strangely enough, there was yet some of the humoursomeness of one who
sees a situation from the outside.
"Na, Alec, lad," he said, softly, "that's gane too. Upon a dark day I
made a pact wi' my Maker, and now the covenanted price is nearly paid.
_His_ messenger wi' the discharge is already on the road. I never hear a
hand on the latch, but I look up to see Him enter--aye, and He shall be
welcome, welcome as the bridegroom that enters into the Beloved's
chamber!"
I covered my brows with my palm, and pretended to look at the
handwriting on the envelope, which was delicate and feminine. The
Stickit Minister went on.
"Aye, Alec," he said, meditatively, with his eyes still on the red glow,
"ye think that ye love the lass ye hae set your heart on; and doubtless
ye do love her truly. But I pray God that there may never come a day
when ye shall have spoken the last sundering word, and returned her the
written sheets faithfully every one. Ye hae heard the story, Alec. I
will not hurt your young heart by telling it again. But I spared Jessie
Loudon all I could, and showed her that she must not mate her young life
with one no better than dead!"
The Stickit Minister was silent a long time here. Doubtless old faces
looked at him clear out of the red spaces of the fire. And when he
began to speak again, it was in an altered voice.
"Nevertheless, because power was given me, I pled with, and in some
measure comforted her. For though the lassie's heart was set on me, it
was as a bairn's heart is set, not like the heart of a woman; and for
that I praise the Lord--yes, I give thanks to His name!
"Then after that I came back to an empty house--and this!"
He caressed the faded envelope lovingly, as a miser his intimatest
treasure.
"I did not mean to keep it, Alec," he went on presently, "but I am glad
I did. It has been a comfort to me; and through all these years it has
rested there where ye see it--upon the chapter where God answers Job out
of the whirlwind. Ye ken yon great words."
We heard a slight noise in the yard, the wheels of some light vehicle
driven quickly. The Stickit Minister started a little, and when I
looked at him again I saw that the red spot, the size of a crown-piece,
which burned so steadfastly on his check-bone had spread till now it
covered his brow.
Then we listened, breathless, like men that wait for a marvel, and
through the hush the peats on the grate suddenly fell inward with a
startling sound, bringing my heart into my mouth. Next we heard a voice
without, loud and a little thick, in heated debate.
"Thank God!" cried the Stickit Minister, fervently. "It's Henry--my
dear brother! For a moment I feared it had been Lawyer Johnston from
Cairn Edward. You know," he added, smiling with all his old swift
gladsomeness, "I am now but a tenant at will. I sit here in the Dullarg
on sufferance--that once was the laird of acre and onstead!"
He raised his voice to carry through the door into the kitchen.
"Henry, Henry, this is kind--kind of you--to come so far to see me on
such a night!"
The Stickit Minister was on his feet by this time, and if I had thought
that his glance had been warm and motherly for me, it was fairly on fire
with affection now. I believe that Robert Fraser once loved his
betrothed faithfully and well; but never will I believe that he loved
woman born of woman as he loved his younger brother.
And that is, perhaps, why these things fell out so.
* * * * *
I had not seen Henry Fraser since the first year he had come to Cairn
Edward. A handsome young man he was then, with a short, supercilious
upper lip, and crisply curling hair of a fair colour disposed in masses
about his brow.
He entered, and at the first glimpse of him I stood astonished. His
pale student's face had grown red and a trifle mottled. The lids of his
blue eyes (the blue of his brother's) were injected. His mouth was
loose and restless under a heavy moustache, and when he began to speak
his voice came from him thick and throaty.
"I wonder you do not keep your people in better order, Robert," he said,
before he was fairly within the door of the little sitting-room. "First
I drove right into a farm-cart that had been left in the middle of the
yard, and then nearly broke my shins over a pail some careless slut of a
byre-lass had thrown down at the kitchen-door."
Robert Fraser had been standing up with the glad and eager look on his
face. I think he had half stretched out his hand; but at his brother's
querulous words he sank slowly back into his chair, and the grey
tiredness slipped into his face almost as quickly as it had disappeared.
"I am sorry, Henry," he said, simply. "Somehow I do not seem to get
about so readily as I did, and I daresay the lads and lasses take some
advantage."
"They would not take advantage with me, I can tell you!" cried the young
doctor, throwing down his driving-cape on the corner of the old sofa,
and pulling a chair in to the fire. He bent forward and chafed his
hands before the glowing peats, and as he did so I could see by a slight
lurch and quick recovery that he had been drinking. I wondered if
Robert Fraser noticed.
Then he leaned back and looked at the Stickit Minister.
"Well, Robert, how do you find yourself to-night? Better, eh?" he said,
speaking in his professional voice.
His brother's face flushed again with the same swift pleasure, very
pitiful to see.
"It is kind of you to ask," he said; "I think I do feel a betterness,
Henry. The cough has certainly been less troublesome this last day or
two."
"I suppose there are no better prospects about the property," said Dr.
Fraser, passing from the medical question with no more than the words I
have written down. I had already risen, and, with a muttered excuse,
was passing into the outer kitchen, that I might leave the brothers
alone.
So I did not hear Robert Fraser's reply, but as I closed the door I
caught the younger's loud retort: "I tell you what it is, Robert--say
what you will--I have not been fairly dealt with in this matter--I have
been swindled!"
So I went out with my heart heavy within me for my friend, and though
Bell Gregory, the bonniest of the farm lasses, ostentatiously drew her
skirts aside and left a vacant place beside her in the ingle-nook, I
shook my head and kept on my way to the door with rib more than a smile
and "Anither nicht, Bell."
"Gie my love to Nance ower at the Nether Neuk," she cried back, with
challenge in her tone, as I went out.
But even Nance Chrystie was not in my thoughts that night. I stepped
out, passing in front of the straw-thatched bee-hives which, with the
indrawing days, had lost their sour-sweet summer smell, and so on into
the loaning. From the foot of the little brae I looked back at the
lights burning so warmly and steadily from the low windows of the
Dullarg, and my mind went over all my father had told me of what the
Stickit Minister had done for his brother: how he had broken off his own
college career that Henry might go through his medical classes with ease
and credit; and how, in spite of his brother's rank ingratitude, he had
bonded his little property in order to buy him old Dr. Aitkin's practice
in Cairn Edward.
Standing thus and thinking under the beeches at the foot of the dark
loaning, it gave me quite a start to find a figure close beside me. It
was a woman with a shawl over her head, as is the habit of the cotters'
wives in our parish.
"Tell me," a voice, eager and hurried, panted almost in my ear, "is Dr.
Fraser of Cairn Edward up there?"
"Yes," I said in reply, involuntarily drawing back a step--the woman was
so near me--"he is this moment with his brother."
"Then for God's sake will ye gang up and tell him to come this instant
to the Earmark cothouses. There are twa bairns there that are no like to
see the mornin' licht if he doesna!"
"But who may you be?" I said, for I did not want to return to the
Dullarg. "And why do you not go in and tell him for yourself? You can
give him the particulars of the case better than I!"
She gave a little shivering moan.
"I canna gang in there!" she said, clasping her hands piteously; "I
darena. Not though I am Gilbert Harbour's wife--and the bairns' mither.
Oh, sir, rin!"
And I ran.
But when I had knocked and delivered my message, to my great surprise
Dr. Henry Fraser received it very coolly.
"They are only some cotter people," he said, "they must just wait till I
am on my way back from the village. I will look in then. Robert, it is
a cold night, let me have some whisky before I get into that ice-box of
a gig again."
The Stickit Minister turned towards the wall-press where ever since his
mother's day the "guardevin," or little rack of cut-glass decanters, had
stood, always hospitably full but quite untouched by the master of the
house.
I was still standing uncertainly by the door-cheek, and as Robert Fraser
stepped across the little room I saw him stagger; and rushed forward to
catch him. But ere I could reach him he had commanded himself, and
turned to me with a smile on his lips. Yet even his brother was struck
by the ashen look on his face.
"Sit down, Robert," he said, "I will help myself."
But with a great effort the Stickit Minister set the tall narrow
dram-glass on the table and ceremoniously filled out to his brother the
stranger's "portion," as was once the duty of country hospitality in
Scotland.
But the Doctor interrupted.
"Oh, I say!" he exclaimed, when he saw what his brother was doing, "for
heaven's sake not that thing--give me a tumbler."
And without further ceremony he went to the cupboard; then he cried to
Bell Gregory to fetch him some hot water, and mixed himself a steaming
glass.
But the Stickit Minister did not sit down. He stood up by the
mantelpiece all trembling. I noted particularly that his fingers
spilled half the contents of the dram-glass as he tried to pour them
back into the decanter.
"Oh, haste ye, Henry!" he said, with a pleading anxiety in his voice I
had never heard there in any trouble of his own; "take up your drink and
drive as fast as ye can to succour the poor woman's bairns. It is not
for nothing that she would come here seeking you at this time of night!"
His brother laughed easily as he reseated himself and drew the tumbler
nearer to his elbow.
"That's all you know, Robert," he said; "why, they come all the way to
Cairn Edward after me if their little finger aches, let alone over here.
I daresay some of the brats have got the mumps, and the mother saw me as
I drove past. No, indeed--she and they must just wait till I get
through my business at Whinnyliggate!"
"I ask you, Henry," said his brother eagerly, "do this for my sake; it
is not often that I ask you anything--nor will I have long time now
wherein to ask!"
"Well," grumbled the young doctor, rising and finishing the toddy as he
stood, "I suppose I must, if you make a point of it. But I will just
look in at Whinnyliggate on my way across. Earmark is a good two miles
on my way home!"
"Thank you, Henry," said Robert Fraser, "I will not forget this kindness
to me!"
With a brusque nod Dr. Henry Fraser strode out through the kitchen,
among whose merry groups his comings and goings always created a certain
hush of awe. In a few minutes more we could hear the clear clatter of
the horse's shod feet on the hard "macadam" as he turned out of the soft
sandy loaning into the main road.
The Stickit Minister sank back into his chair.
"Thank God!" he said, with a quick intake of breath almost like a sob.
I looked down at him in surprise.
"Robert, why are you so troubled about this woman's bairns?" I asked.
He did not answer for a while, lying fallen in upon himself in his great
armchair of worn horse-hair, as if the strain had been too great for his
weak body. When he did reply it was in a curiously far-away voice like
a man speaking in a dream.
"They are Jessie Loudon's bairns," he said, "and a' the comfort she has
in life!"
I sat down on the hearthrug beside him--a habit I had when we were alone
together. It was thus that I used to read Homer and Horace to him in
the long winter forenights, and wrangle for happy hours over a
construction or the turning of a phrase in the translation. So now I
simply sat and was silent, touching his knee lightly with my shoulder.
I knew that in time he would tell me all he wished me to hear. The old
eight-day clock in the corner (with "_John Grey, Kilmaurs, 1791_" in
italics across the brass face of it), ticked on interminably through ten
minutes, and I heard the feet of the men come in from suppering the
horse, before Robert said another word. Then he spoke: "Alec," he said,
very quietly--he could hardly say or do anything otherwise (or rather I
thought so before that night). "I have this on my spirit--it is heavy
like a load. When I broke it to Jessie Loudon that I could never marry
her, as I told you, I did not tell you that she took it hard and high,
speaking bitter words that are best forgotten. And then in a week or
two she married Gib Barbour, a good-for-nothing, good-looking young
ploughman, a great don at parish dances--no meet mate for her. And that
I count the heaviest part of my punishment.
"And since that day I have not passed word or salutation with Jessie
Loudon--that is, with Jessie Barbour. But on a Sabbath day, just before
I was laid down last year--a bonnie day in June--I met her as I passed
though a bourock fresh with the gowden broom, and the 'shilfies' and
Jennie Wrens singing on every brier. I had been lookin' for a sheep
that had broken bounds. And there she sat wi' a youngling on ilka knee.
There passed but ae blink o' the e'en between us--ane and nae mair. But
oh, Alec, as I am a sinful man--married wife though she was, I kenned
that she loved me, and she kenned that I loved her wi' the love that has
nae ending!"
There was a long pause here, and the clock struck with a long
preparatory _g-r-r-r_, as if it were clearing its throat in order to
apologise for the coming interruption.
"And that," said Robert Fraser, "was the reason why Jessie Loudon would
not come up to the Dullarg this nicht--no, not even for her bairns'
sake!"
*THE STICKIT MINISTER WINS THROUGH*
Yet Jessie Loudon did come to the Dullarg that night--and that for her
children's sake.
Strangely enough, in writing of an evening so fruitful in incident, I
cannot for the life of me remember what happened during the next two
hours. The lads and lasses came in for the "Taking of the Book." So
much I do recall. But that was an exercise never omitted on any pretext
in the house of the ex-divinity student. I remember this also, because
after the brief prelude of the psalm-singing (it was the 103rd), the
Stickit Minister pushed the Bible across to me, open at the
thirty-eighth chapter of Job. The envelope was still there. Though it
was turned sideways I could see the faintly written address:
_MR. ROBERT FRASER,_
_Student in Divinity,_
_50, St. Leonard's Street,_
_Edinburgh._
Even as I looked I seemed to hear again the woman's voice in the dark
loaning--"I canna gang in _there_!" And in a lightning flash of
illumination it came to me what the answer to that letter had meant to
Jessie Loudon, and the knowledge somehow made me older and sadder.
Then with a shaking voice I read the mighty words before me: "When the
morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy"....
But when I came to the verse which says: "Have the gates of death been
opened unto thee? Or hast thou seen the doors of the shadow of death?"
I saw the Stickit Minister nod his head three times very slightly, and a
strange subtle smile came over his face as though he could have
answered: "Yea, Lord, verily I have seen them--they have been opened to
me!"
And as the lads and lasses filed out in a kind of wondering silence
after Robert Fraser had prayed--not kneeling down, but sitting erect in
his chair and looking out before him with wide-open eyes--we in the
little sitting-room became conscious of a low knocking, persistent and
remote, somewhere about the house of Dullarg. We could hear Bell
Gregory open and then immediately close the kitchen door, having
evidently found no one there. The knocking still continued.
"I believe it is somebody at the front door," I said, turning in that
direction.
And then the Stickit Minister cried out in a curious excited voice:
"Open to them--open, Alec! Quick, man!"
And his voice went through me with a kind of thrill, for I knew not who
it was he expected to enter, whether sheriff's officer or angry
creditor--or as it might be the Angel of the Presence Himself come to
summon his soul to follow.
Nevertheless, with quaking heart enough, and resolving in future to be a
more religious man, I made bold to undo the door.
The woman I had seen in the lane stood before me, as it were, projected
out of the dense darkness behind, her shawl fallen back from her face,
and her features all pale and changeful in the flicker of the candle I
had snatched up to take with me into the little hall. For the front
door was only used on state occasions, as when the parish minister came
to call, and at funerals.
"He has not come--and the bairns are dying! So I had to come back!" she
cried, more hoarsely and breathlessly than I had ever heard woman speak.
But her eyes fairly blazed and her lips were parted wide for my answer.
"Dr. Fraser left here more than an hour ago," I stammered. "Has he not
been to see the children?"
"No--no, I tell you, no. And they are choking--dying--it is the trouble
in the throat. They will die if he does not come----"
I heard a noise behind me, and the next moment I found myself put aside
like a child, and Robert Fraser stood face to face with her that had
been Jessie Loudon.
"Come in," he said. And when she drew back from him with a kind of
shudder, and felt uncertainly for her shawl, he stepped aside and
motioned her to enter with a certain large and commanding gesture I had
never seen him use before. And as if accustomed to obey, the woman came
slowly within the lighted room. Even then, however, she would not sit
down, but stood facing us both, a girl prematurely old, her lips nearly
as pale as her worn cheeks, her blown hair disordered and wispy about
her forehead, and only the dark and tragic flashing of her splendid eyes
telling of a bygone beauty.
The Stickit Minister stood up also, and as he leaned his hand upon the
table, I noticed that he gently shut the Bible which I had left open,
that the woman's eye might not fall upon the faded envelope which marked
the thirty-eighth of Job.
"Do I understand you to say," he began, in a voice clear, resonant, and
full, not at all the voice of a stricken man, "that my brother has not
yet visited your children?"
"He had not come when I ran out--they are much worse--dying, I think!"
she answered, also in another voice and another mode of speech--yet a
little stiffly, as if the more correct method had grown unfamiliar by
disuse.
For almost the only time in his life I saw a look, stern and hard, come
over the countenance of the Stickit Minister.
"Go home, Jessie," he said; "I will see that he is there as fast as
horses can bring him!"
She hesitated a moment.
"Is he not here?" she faltered. "Oh, tell me if he is--I meant to fetch
him back. I dare not go back without him!"
The Stickit Minister went to the door with firm step, the woman
following without question or argument.
"Fear not, but go, Jessie," he said; "my brother is not here, but he
will be at the bairns' bedside almost as soon as you. I promise you."
"Thank you, Robin," she stammered, adjusting the shawl over her head and
instantly disappearing into the darkness. The old sweethearting name
had risen unconsciously to her lips in the hour of her utmost need. I
think neither of them noticed it.
"And now help me on with my coat," said Robert Fraser, turning to me.
"I am going over to the village."
"You must not," I cried, taking him by the arm; "let _me_ go--let me put
in the pony; I will be there in ten minutes!"
"I have no pony now," he said gently and a little sadly, "I have no need
of one. And besides, the quickest way is across the fields."
It was true. The nearest way to the village, by a great deal, was by a
narrow foot-track that wound across the meadows. But, fearing for his
life, I still tried to prevent him.
"It will be your death!" I said, endeavouring to keep him back. "Let me
go alone!"
"If Henry is where I fear he is," he answered, calmly, "he would not
stir for you. But he will for me. And besides, I have passed my word
to--to Jessie!"
The details of that terrible night journey I will not enter upon. It is
sufficient to say that I bade him lean on me, and go slowly, but do what
I would I could not keep him back. Indeed, he went faster than I could
accompany him--for, in order to support him a little, I had to walk
unevenly along the ragged edges of the little field-path. All was dark
gray above, beneath, and to the right of us. Only on the left hand a
rough whinstone dyke stood up solidly black against the monotone of the
sky. The wind came in cold swirls, with now and then a fleck of snow
that stung the face like hail. I had insisted on the Stickit Minister
taking his plaid about him in addition to his overcoat, and the ends of
it flicking into my eyes increased the difficulty.
I have hardly ever been so thankful in my life, as when at last I saw
the lights of the village gleam across the little bridge, as we emerged
from the water-meadows and felt our feet firm themselves on the turnpike
road.
From that point the Stickit Minister went faster than ever. Indeed, he
rushed forward, in spite of my restraining arm, with some remaining
flicker of the vigour which in youth had made him first on the hillside
at the fox-hunt and first on the haystacks upon the great day of the
inbringing of the winter's fodder.
It seemed hardly a moment before we were at the door of the inn--the Red
Lion the name of it, at that time in the possession of one "Jeems"
Carter. Yes, Henry Fraser was there. His horse was tethered to an iron
ring which was fixed in the whitewashed wall, and his voice could be
heard at that very moment leading a rollicking chorus. Then I
remembered. It was a "Cronies'" night. This was a kind of informal club
recruited from the more jovial of the younger horsebreeding farmers of
the neighbourhood. It included the local "vet.," a bonnet laird or two
grown lonesome and thirsty by prolonged residence upon the edges of the
hills, and was on all occasions proud and glad to welcome a guest so
distinguished and popular as the young doctor of Cairn Edward.
"Loose the beast and be ready to hand me the reins when I come out!"
commanded the Stickit Minister, squaring his stooped shoulders like the
leader of a forlorn hope.
So thus it happened that I did not see with my own eyes what happened
when Robert Fraser opened the door of the "Cronies'" club-room. But I
have heard it so often recounted that I know as well as if I had seen.
It was the Laird of Butterhole who told me, and he always said that it
made a sober man of him from that day forth. It was (he said) like
Lazarus looking out of the sepulchre after they had rolled away the
stone.
Suddenly in the midst of their jovial chorus some one said
"_Hush_!"--some one of themselves--and instinctively all turned towards
the door.
And lo! there in the doorway, framed in the outer dark, his broad blue
bonnet in his hand, his checked plaid waving back from his shoulders,
stood a man, pale as if he had come to them up through the Valley of the
Shadow of Death. With a hand white as bone, he beckoned to his brother,
who stood with his hands on the table smiling and swaying a little with
tipsy gravity.
"Why, Robert, what are you doing here----?" he was beginning. But the
Stickit Minister broke in.
"Come!" he said, sternly and coldly, "the children you have neglected
are dying--if they die through your carelessness you will be their
murderer!"
And to the surprise of all, the tall and florid younger brother quailed
before the eye of this austere shade.
"Yes, I will come, Robert--I was coming in a moment anyway!"
And so the Stickit Minister led him out. There was no great merriment
after that in the "Cronies'" club that night. The members conferred
chiefly in whispers, and presently emptying their glasses, they stole
away home.
But no mortal knows what Robert Fraser said to his brother during that
drive--something mightily sobering at all events. For when the two
reached the small cluster of cothouses lying under the lee of Earmark
wood, the young man, though not trusting himself to articulate speech,
and somewhat over-tremulous of hand, was yet in other respects
completely master of himself. I was not present at the arrival, just as
I had not seen the startling apparition which broke up the "Cronies'"
club. The doctor's gig held only two, and as soon as I handed Robert
Fraser the reins, the beast sprang forward. But I was limber and a good
runner in those days, and though the gray did his best I was not far
behind.
There is no ceremony at such a house in time of sickness. The door
stood open to the wall. A bright light streamed through and revealed
the inequalities of the little apron of causewayed cobblestones. I
entered and saw Henry Fraser bending over a bed on which a bairn was
lying. Robert held a candle at his elbow. The mother paced restlessly
to and fro with another child in her arms. I could see the doctor touch
again and again the back of the little girl's throat with a brush which
he continually replenished from a phial in his left hand.
Upon the other side of the hearthstone from the child's bed a strong
country lout sat, sullenly "becking" his darned stocking feet at the
clear embers of the fire. Then the mother laid the first child on the
opposite bed, and turned to where the doctor was still operating.
Suddenly Henry Fraser stood erect. There was not a trace of dissipation
about him now. The tradition of his guild was as a mantle of dignity
about him.
"It is all right," he said as he took his brother's hand in a long
clasp. "Thank you, Robert, thank you a thousand times--that you brought
me here in time!"
"Nay, rather, thank God!" said Robert Fraser, solemnly.
And even as he stood there the Stickit Minister swayed sidelong, but the
next moment he had recovered himself with a hand on the bed-post. Then
very swiftly he drew a handkerchief from his pocket and set it to his
lips.
His brother and I went towards him with a quick apprehension. But the
Stickit Minister turned from us both to the woman, who took two swift
steps towards him with her arms outstretched, and such a yearning of
love on her face as I never saw before or since. The sullen lout by the
fire, drowsed on unheeding.
"_Jessie!_" cried the Stickit Minister, and with that fell into her
arms. She held him there a long moment as it had been jealously, her
head bent down upon his. Then she delivered him up to me, slowly and
reluctantly.
Henry Fraser put his hand on his heart and gave a great sob.
"My brother is dead!" he said.
But Jessie Loudon did not utter a word.
*GIBBY THE EEL, STUDENT IN DIVINITY*
Naturalists have often remarked how little resemblance there is between
the young of certain animals and the adult specimen. Yonder tottering
quadrangular arrangement of chewed string, remotely and inadequately
connected at the upper corners, is certainly the young of the horse.
But it does not even remotely suggest the war-horse sniffing up the
battle from afar. This irregular yellow ball of feathers, with the
steel-blue mask set beneath its half-opened eyelids, is most
ridiculously unlike the magnificent eagle, which (in books) stares
unblinded into the very eye of the noonday sun.
In like manner the young of the learned professions are by no means like
the full-fledged expert of the mysteries. If in such cases the child is
the father of the man, the parentage is by no means apparent.
To how many medical students would you willingly entrust the application
of one square inch of sticking-plaster to a cut finger, or the care of a
half-guinea umbrella? What surgeon would you not, in an emergency,
trust with all you hold dear? You may cherish preferences and even
prejudices, but as a whole the repute of the profession is above cavil.
There is, perhaps, more continuity above the legal profession, but even
there it is a notable fact that the older and more successful a lawyer
is, the more modest you find him, and the more diffident of his own
infallibility. Indeed, several of the most eminent judges are in this
matter quite as other men.
But of all others, the divinity student is perhaps the most
misunderstood. He is wilfully misrepresented by those who ought to know
him best. Nay, he misrepresents himself, and when he doffs tweeds and
takes to collars which fasten behind and a long-skirted clerical coat,
he is apt to disown his past self; and often succeeds in persuading
himself that as he is now, diligent, sedate, zealous of good works, so
was he ever.
Only sometimes, when he has got his Sunday sermons off his mind and two
or three of the augurs are gathered together, will the adult clerk in
holy orders venture to lift the veil and chew the cud of ancient jest
and prank not wholly sanctified.
Now there ought to be room, in a gallery which contains so many
portraits of ministers, for one or two Students of Divinity, faithfully
portrayed.[#]
[#] These studies I wrote down during certain winters, when, to please
my mother, I made a futile attempt to prepare myself "to wag my head in
a pulpit." Saving a certain prolixity of statement (which the
ill-affected call long-windedness), they were all I carried away with me
when I resolved to devote myself to the medical profession.--A. McQ.
And of these the first and chief is Mr. Gilbert Denholm, Master of Arts,
Scholar in Theology--to his class-fellows more colloquially and
generally known as "Gibby the Eel."
At college we all loved Gilbert. He was a merry-hearted youth, and his
mere bodily presence was enough to make glad the countenances of his
friends. His father was a minister in the West with a large family to
bring up, which he effected with success upon a stipend of surprising
tenuity. So it behoved Gilbert to keep himself at college by means of
scholarships and private tuition. His pupils had a lively time of it.
Yet his only fault obvious to the world was a certain light-headed but
winsome gaiety, and a tendency to jokes of the practical kind. I used
often to restrain Gilbert's ardour by telling him that if he did not
behave himself and walk more seemly, he would get his bursary taken from
him by the Senatus.
This would recall Gilbert to himself when almost everything else had
failed.
Part of Gilbert's personal equipment was the certain lithe slimness of
figure which gained him the title of "Gibby the Eel," and enabled him to
practise many amusing pranks in the class-room. He would have made an
exceptionally fine burglar, for few holes were too small and no window
too secure for Gilbert to make his exits and entrances by. Without
going so far as to say that he could wriggle himself through an ordinary
keyhole, I will affirm that if anybody ever could, that person was
Gilbert Denholm.
One of the most ordinary of his habits was that of wandering here and
there throughout the classroom during the hour of lecture, presuming
upon the professor's purblindness or lack of attention. You would be
sitting calmly writing a letter, drawing caricatures in your note-book,
or otherwise improving your mind with the most laudable imitation of
attention, when suddenly, out of the black and dusty depths about your
feet would arise the startling apparition of Gibby the Eel. He would
nod, casually inquire how you found yourself this morning, and inform
you that he only dropped in on his way up to Bench Seventeen to see
Balhaldie, who owed him a shilling.
"Well, so long!" Again he would nod pleasantly, and sink into the
unknown abyss beneath the benches as noiselessly and unobtrusively as a
smile fades from a face.
Sometimes, however, when in wanton mood, his progress Balhaldie-wards
could be guessed at by the chain of "_Ouchs_" and "_Ohs_" which
indicated his subterranean career. The suddenness with which Gilbert
could awaken to lively interest the most somnolent and indifferent
student, by means of a long brass pin in the calf of the leg, had to be
felt to be appreciated. Thereupon ensued the sound of vigorous kicking,
but generally by the time the injured got the range of his unseen foe,
Gilbert could be observed two or three forms above intently studying a
Greek Testament wrong side up, and looking the picture of meek
reproachful innocence.
In no class could Gilbert use so much freedom of errancy as in that of
the venerable Professor Galbraith. Every afternoon this fine old
gentleman undertook to direct our studies in New Testament exegesis, and
incidentally afforded his students an hour of undisturbed repose after
the more exciting labours of the day.
No one who ever studied under Dr. Simeon Galbraith will forget that
gentle droning voice overhead, that full-orbed moon-like countenance,
over which two smaller moons of beamy spectacle seemed to be in
perpetual transit, and in especial he will remember that blessed word
"Hermeneutics," of which (it is said) there was once one student who
could remember the meaning. He died young, much respected by all who
knew him. Dreamily the great word came to you, soothing and grateful as
mother's lullaby, recurrent as the wash of a quiet sea upon a beach of
softest sand. "Gentlemen, I will now proceed to call your attention ...
to the study of Hermeneutics ... Hermeneut ... Gegenbauer has affirmed
... but in my opeenion, gentlemen ... Hermeneutics...!" (Here you
passed from the subconscious state into Nirvana.)
And so on, and so on, till the college bell clanged in the quadrangle,
and it was time to file out for a wash and brush-up before dinner in
hall.
Upon one afternoon every week, Professor Galbraith read with his
students the "Greek Oreeginal." He prescribed half-a-dozen chapters of
"Romans" or "Hebrews," and expected us to prepare them carefully. I
verily believe that he imagined we did. This shows what a sanguine and
amiable old gentlemen he was. The beamy spectacle belied him not.
The fact was that we stumbled through our portions by the light of
nature, aided considerably by a class copy of an ingenious work known by
the name of "Bagster," in which every Greek word had the English
equivalent marked in plain figures underneath, and all the verbs fully
parsed at the foot of the page.
The use of this was not considered wicked, because, like the early
Christians, in Professor Galbraith's class we had all things common.
This was our one point of resemblance to the primitive Church.
One day the Doctor, peering over his brown leather folio, discerned the
meek face and beaming smile of Gilbert the Eel in the centre of Bench
One, immediately beneath him.
"Ah! Mr. Denholm, will you read for us this morning--beginning at the
29th verse--of the chapter under consideration?"
And he subsided expectantly into his lecture.
Up rose Gilbert, signalling wildly with one hand for the class "Bagster"
to be passed to him, and meantime grasping at the first Testament he
could see about him. By the time he had read the Greek of half-a-dozen
verses, the sharpness of the trouble was overpast. He held in his hands
the Key of Knowledge, and translated and parsed like a Cunningham
Fellow--or any other fellow.
"Vairy well, Mr. Denholm; vairy well indeed. You may now sit down while
I proceed to expound the passage!"
Whereupon Gibby the Eel ungratefully pitched the faithful "Bagster" on
the bench and disappeared under the same himself on a visit to Nicholson
McFeat, who sat in the middle of the class-room.
For five minutes--ten--fifteen, the gentle voice droned on from the
rostrum, the word "Hermeneutics" discharging itself at intervals with
the pleasing gurgle of an intermittent spring. Then the Professor
returned suddenly to his Greek Testament.
"Mr. Denholm, you construed _vairy_ well last time. Be good enough to
continue at the place you left off. Mr. Denholm--where is
Mister--Mister Den--holm?"
And the moon-like countenance rose from its eclipse behind six volumes
of Owen (folio edition), while the two smaller moons in permanent
transit directed themselves upon the vacant place in Bench One, from
which Gibby the Eel had construed so glibly with the efficient aid of
"Bagster."
"Mister--Mist--er Denholm?"
The Professor knew that he was absent-minded, but (if the expression be
allowable) he could have sworn----.
"I am here, sir!"
Gibby the Eel, a little shame-faced and rumpled as to hair, was standing
plump in the very middle of the class-room, in the place where he had
been endeavouring to persuade Nick McFeat to lend him his dress clothes
"to go to a conversazione in," which request Nick cruelly persisted in
refusing, alleging first, that he needed the garments himself, and
secondly, that the Eel desired to go to no "conversazione," but
contrariwise to take a certain Madge Robertson to the theatre.
At this moment the fateful voice of the Professor broke in upon them
just as they were rising to the height of their great argument.
"Mister--Den--holm, will you go on where you left off?"
Gibby rose, signalling wildly for "Bagster," and endeavouring to look as
if he had been a plant of grace rooted and grounded on that very spot.
Professor Galbraith gazed at Gibby _in situ_, then at the place formerly
occupied by him, tried hard to orient the matter in his head, gave it
up, and bade the translation proceed.
But "Bagster" came not, and Gilbert did not distinguish himself this
time. Indeed, far from it.
"Will you parse the first verb, Mr. Denholm--no, not that word! That
has usually been considered a substantive, Mr. Denholm--the next word,
ah, yes!"
"The first aorist, active of--_confound you fellows, where's that
'Bagster'? I call it dashed mean--*yes, sir, it is connected with the
former clause by the particle--*have you not found that book yet? Oh,
you beasts!_"
(The italics, it is hardly necessary to say, were also spoken in
italics, and were not an integral part of Gibby's examination as it
reached the ear of Professor Galbraith.)
"Ah, that will do, Mr. Denholm--not so well--not quite so well,
sir--yet" (kindly) "not so vairy ill either."
And Gilbert sat down to resume the discussion of the dress clothes. By
this time, of course, he considered himself quite safe from further
molestation. The Professor had never been known to call up a man thrice
in one day. So, finding Nick McFeat obdurate in the matter of the dress
suit, Gilbert announced his intention of visiting Kenneth Kennedy, who,
he said pointedly, was not a selfish and unclean animal of the kind
abhorred by Jews, but, contrariwise, a gentleman--one who would lend
dress clothes for the asking. And Kennedy's were better clothes, any
way, and had silk linings. Furthermore, Nick need not think it, he (Mr.
Gilbert Denholm) would not demean himself to put on his (Mr. McFeat's)
dirty "blacks," which had been feloniously filched from a last year's
scarecrow that had been left out all the winter. And furthermore, he
(the said Gilbert) would take Madge Robertson to the theatre in spite of
him, and what was more, cut Nick McFeat out as clean as a leek.
At this the latter laughed scornfully, affirming that the grapes had a
faintly sub-acid flavour, and bade Gibby go his way.
Gibby went, tortuously and subterraneously worming his way to the
highest seats in the synagogue, where Kenneth Kennedy, M.A., reposed at
full length upon a vacant seat, having artistically bent a Highland
cloak over a walking-stick to represent scholastic meditation, if
perchance the kindly spectacle of the Professor should turn in his
direction. Gibby gazed rapturously on his friend's sleep, contemplating
him, as once in the Latmian cave Diana gazed upon Endymion. He was
proceeding to ink his friend's face preparatory to upsetting him on the
floor, when he remembered the dress suit just in time to desist.
"Eel, you are a most infamous pest--can't you let a fellow alone? What
in the world do you want now?"
Whereupon, with countenance of triple brass, Gibby entered into the
question of the dress suit with subtlety and tact. There never was so
good a chap as Kennedy, never one so generous. He (G.D.) would do as
much for him again, and he would bring it back the next day, pressed by
a tailor.
Kennedy, however, was not quite so enthusiastic. There are several
points of view in matters of this kind. Kenneth Kennedy did not, of
course, care "a dump" about Madge Robertson, but he had the best
interests of his silk-lined dress coat at heart.
"That's all very well, Eel," he said, raising himself reluctantly to the
perpendicular; "but you know as well as I do that the last time I lent
it to you, you let some wax drop on the waistcoat, right on the pocket,
and I have never been able to get it out since----"
Suddenly the pair became conscious that the gentle hum of exegetical
divinity from the rostrum had ceased. The word "Hermeneutics" no longer
soothed and punctuated their converse at intervals of five minutes, like
the look-out's "All's well" on a ship at sea.
"Ah, Mis--ter Den--holm, perhaps you have recovered yourself by this
time. Be good enough to continue where you left off--Mis--ter
Den--holm--Mister Denholm--where in the world is Mr. Denholm?"
The spectacles were hardly beaming now. A certain shrewd suspicion
mixed with the wonder in their expression, as Dr. Galbraith gazed from
the Eel's position One to position Two, and back again to position One.
Both were empty as the cloudless empyrean. His wonder culminated when
Gilbert was finally discovered in position Three, high on the sky-line
of Bench Twenty-four!
How Gilbert acquitted himself on this occasion it is perhaps better not
to relate. I will draw a kindly veil over the lamentable tragedy. It
is sufficient to say that he lost his head completely--as completely
even as the aforesaid Miss Madge Robertson could have wished.
And all though the disastrous exhibition the Professor did not withdraw
his gaze from the wretched Eel, but continued to rebuke him, as it
seemed, for the astral and insubstantial nature of his body.
No better proof can be adduced that the Eel had become temporarily
deranged, than the fact that even now, when it was obvious that the long
latent suspicions of the Gentle Hermeneut were at last aroused, he
refused to abide in his breaches; but, scorning all entreaty, and even
Kennedy's unconditioned promise of the dress suit, he proceeded to crawl
down the gallery steps, in order to regain position Number One, in the
front seat under the Professor's very nose.
_Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat._
Meanwhile the class, at first raised to a state of ecstatic enjoyment by
the Eel's misfortunes, then growing a little anxious lest he should go
too far, was again subsiding to its wonted peaceful hum, like that of a
vast and well-contented bumble-bee.
Suddenly we became aware that the Professor was on his feet in the midst
of a stern and awful silence.
"My eye has fallen," he began solemnly, "on what I do not expect to see.
I hope the--gentleman will remember where he is--and who I am!"
During the pronouncement of this awful allocution the professorial arm
was extended, and a finger, steady as the finger of Fate, pointed
directly at the unhappy Gibby, who, prone in the dust, appeared to be
meditating a discourse upon the text, "I am a worm and no man!"
His head was almost on the level of the floor and his limbs extended far
up the gallery stairs. To say that his face was fiery-red gives but a
faint idea of its colour, while a black streak upon his nose proved that
the charwomen of the college were not a whit more diligent than the
students thereof.
What happened after this is a kind of maze. I suppose that Gibby
regained a seat somewhere, and that the lecture proceeded after a
fashion; but I do not know for certain. Bursts of unholy mirth forced
their way through the best linen handkerchiefs, rolled hard and used as
gags.
But there grew up a feeling among many that though doubtless there was
humour in the case, the Eel had gone a little too far, and if Professor
Galbraith were genuinely angered he might bring the matter before the
Senatus, with the result that Gilbert would not only lose his bursary,
but be sent down as well, to his father's sorrow and his own loss.
So when the class was at last over, half-a-dozen of us gathered round
Gibby and represented to him that he must go at once to the
retiring-room and ask the Professor's pardon.
At first and for long the Eel was recalcitrant. He would not go. What
was he to say? We instructed him. We used argument, appeal,
persuasion. We threatened torture. Finally, yielding to those heavier
battalions on the side of which Providence is said to fight, Gibby was
led to the door with a captor at each elbow. We knocked; he entered.
The door was shut behind him, but not wholly. Half-a-dozen ears lined
the crack at intervals, like limpets clinging to a smooth streak on a
tidal rock. We could not hear the Eel's words. Only a vague murmur
reached us, and I doubt if much more reached Professor Galbraith. The
Eel stopped and there was a pause. We feared its ill omen.
"Poor Eel, the old man's going to report him!" we whispered to each
other.
And then we heard the words of the Angelical Scholiast.
"Shake hands, Mr. Denholm. If, as ye say, this has been a lesson to
you, it has been no less a lesson to me. Let us both endeavour to
profit by it, unto greater diligence and seemliness in our walk and
conversation. We will say no more about the matter, if you please, Mr.
Denholm."
* * * * *
We cheered the old man as he went out, till he waved a kindly and
tolerant hand back at us, and there was more than a gleam of humour in
the kindly spectacles, as if our gentle Hermeneut were neither so blind
nor yet so dull in the uptake as we had been accustomed to think him.
As for the Eel, he became a man from that day, and, to a limited extent,
put away childish things--though his heart will remain ever young and
fresh. His story is another story, and so far as this little study goes
it is enough to say that when at last the aged Professor of Hermeneutics
passed to the region where all things are to be finally explicated, it
was Gilbert Denholm who got up the memorial to his memory, which was
subscribed to by every student without exception he had ever had. And
it was he who wrote Dr. Galbraith's epitaph, of which the last line
runs:
"GENTLE, A PEACE-MAKER, A LOVER OF GOOD AND OF GOD."
*DOCTOR GIRNIGO'S ASSISTANT*
"Off, ye lendings!" said Gibby the Eel to his heather-mixture
knicker-bocker suit, on the day when his Presbytery of Muirlands
licensed him to preach the gospel.
And within the self-same hour the Reverend Gilbert Denholm, M.A.,
Probationer, in correct ministerial garb, had the honour of dining with
the Presbytery, and of witnessing the remarkable transformation which
overtakes that august body as soon as it dips its collective spoon in
the official soup.
I knew a Presbytery once which tried to lunch on cold coffee and new
bread. The survivors unanimously took to drink.
But the Presbytery of Muirlands were sage fathers and brethren, and they
knew better than that. They dined together in a reasonable manner at
the principal inn of the place. An enthusiast, who suggested that they
should transfer their custom to the new Temperance Hotel up near the
railway station, was asked if he had sent in his returns on Life and
Work--and otherwise severely dealt with.
Gilbert had been remitted to the Presbytery of Muirlands from his own
West Country one of Burnestown, because he had been appointed assistant
to the Reverend Doctor Girnigo of Rescobie; and it was considered more
satisfactory that the Presbytery within whose bounds he was to labour,
should examine him concerning his diligence and zeal.
So they asked him all the old posers which had made the teeth of former
examinees of the Presbytery of Muirlands chatter in their heads. But the
Eel's teeth did not chatter. He had got a rough list from a friend who
had been that way before, and so passed the bar with flying colours. The
modest way in which the new brother (unattached) behaved himself at
dinner completed Gibby's conquest of the Brethren--with the single but
somewhat important exception of the Reverend Doctor Joseph Girnigo of
Rescobie, Gilbert's future chief.
It was the cross of Dr. Girnigo's life that his session compelled him to
engage an assistant. Dr. Girnigo felt that here were three hundred
pieces of silver (or more accurately, L60 sterling) which ought to have
been given to the poor--that is, to the right breeches' pocket of Joseph
Girnigo--instead of being squandered in providing such a thorn in the
flesh within the parish as a licensed assistant.
Dr. Girnigo was in the habit of saying, whenever he had made it too hot
for his acting assistant, that he would rather look after three parishes
than one probationer. At first the engaging and dismission of these
unfortunate young men had been placed unreservedly in the Doctor's
hands; but as the affair assumed more and more the appearance and
proportions of a mere procession to and from the railway station, the
members of Session were compelled to assume the responsibility
themselves. So long as the Doctor's sway continued unchallenged, the new
assistant usually arrived in Nether Balhaldie's "machine" on Saturday
night, and departed on Tuesday morning very early in the gig belonging
to Upper Balhaldie. He preached on Sabbath, and Monday was spent in Dr.
Girnigo's study, where it was explained to him: first, that he knew
nothing; secondly, that what he thought he knew was worse than nothing;
thirdly, that there is nothing more hateful than a vain pretence of
earthly learning; and fourthly, that Paul and Silas knew nothing of
"Creeticism." No, they were better employed--aye, and it would be
telling the young men of the day--the conclusion of the whole matter
being that the present victim would never do at all for the parish of
Rescobie and had better go.
He went, in Upper Balhaldie's gig, and Watty Learmont, the tenant
thereof, who could be trusted to know, said that the rejected
probationers very seldom engaged in prayer (to call prayer) on the road
to the station. I do not know what Watty meant to insinuate, but that
is what he said. He had that mode of speech to perfection which
consists in saying one thing and giving the impression that the speaker
means another.
But it was felt that this was a state of affairs which could not
continue. It amounted, indeed, to nothing less than a scandal that the
Session should be paying L60 for an assistant, and that at the end of
the year eight of these should only have spent exactly twenty-seven days
in the parish, while the remaining three hundred and thirty-eight days
had been occupied by the Doctor in filling the vacancies he had himself
created. Besides, since he always insisted on a week's trial without
salary when he engaged his man (in order, as he said, to discover where
there was a likelihood of the parties being mutually satisfied), the
shrewd business men of the Session saw more than a probability of their
good and hardly gathered sixty "notes" still remaining intact in the
possession of their minister.
It was, however, the affair of the prayer-meeting which brought the
matter to a head. For after all, such hard-headed bargain-makers as
Learmont, Senior of Balhaldie, and his coadjutors on the Session, could
not help having a sort of respect for the Doctor's business qualities.
But they could not bear to be made a laughing stock of in the market of
Drumfern.
"What's this I hear aboot your new helper's prayer-meetin' up at
Rescobie?" Cochrane of Tatierigs cried one Wednesday across the mart
ring to Upper Balhaldie. "Is't true that that minister o' yours broke
it up wi' a horse-whup?"
No, it was not true. But there was enough of truth in it to make the
members of Rescobie Session nervous of public appearances for a long
time, indeed till the affair was forgotten.
The truth was that during the Doctor's absence at the house of his
married son in Drumfern, Mr. Killigrew, a soft-voiced young man, who,
being exceedingly meek, had been left in charge of the parish, thought
it would be a surprise for his chief if he started a prayer-meeting on
Wednesday evenings in the village schoolhouse. He pictured to himself
his principal's delight when he should hand over the new departure as a
going concern. So he made a house-to-house visitation of Rescobie
village and neighbourhood, this young man with the soft voice. The
popular appeal was favourable. He went round and saw the
school-mistress. She was fond of young men with soft voices (and hats).
She readily consented to lend her harmonium, and to lead the singing
from a certain popular hymn-book.
The first meeting was an unqualified success, and the young man promptly
began a series of rousing addresses on the "Pilgrim's Progress." There
were to be thirty in all. But alas, for the vanity of human schemes,
the second address (on the Slough of Despond) was scarcely under weigh
when, like an avenging host, or Cromwell entering the Long Parliament,
the Doctor strode into the midst, booted and spurred, as he had ridden
over all the way from Drumfern. He had a riding-whip in his hand, which
was the foundation of the Tatierigs story, but there is no record that
he used it on any in the meeting.
The services closed without the benediction, and as the Doctor wrath
fully clicked the key in the lock, he said that he would see the
school-mistress in the morning.
Then he turned to the young man in the soft hat. The remains left
Rescobie early next morning in Upper Balhaldie's gig.
Since this date it was enough to call out to a Rescobie man, "Ony mair
Pilgrims up your way?" in order to have him set his dogs on you or
wrathfully bring down his herd's crook upon your crown.
Being thus stirred to action, the Session wrestled with Dr. Girnigo, and
prevailing by the unanswerable argument of the purse-strings, it took
the appointment and dismission of the "helpers" into its own hands.
So Dr. Girnigo had to try other tactics. Usually he gave the
unfortunate "helper" delivered into his hands no peace night nor day,
till in despair he threw up his appointment, and shook the Rescobie dust
off the soles of his feet.
First (under the new regime) came Alexander Fairbody, a thoughtful,
studious lad, whom the Doctor set to digging top-dressing into his
garden till his hands were blistered. He would not allow him to preach,
and as to praying, if he wanted to do that he could go to his bedroom.
So Mr. Fairbody endured hardness for ten days, and then resigned in a
written communication, alleging as a reason that he had come to Rescobie
as to work in a spiritual and not in a material vineyard. The Doctor
burked the document, and the Reverend Robert Begg reigned in the stead
of Alexander Fairbody, resigned for cause.
Mr. Begg was athletic. Him Dr. Girnigo set to the work of arranging his
old sermons, seven barrels full. He was to catalogue them under
eighteen heads, and be prepared to give his reasons in every case. The
first three classes were--"Sermons Enforcing the Duty of Respect for
Ecclesiastical Superiors," "Sermons upon Christian Giving," and "Sermons
Inculcating Humility in the Young." The Reverend Robert Begg would have
enjoyed the digging of the garden. He stood just one full week of the
sermon-arranging. He declared that sixteen of the eighteen classes were
cross divisions, and that the task of looking through the written matter
permanently enfeebled his intellect. Sympathetic friends consoled him
with the reflection that nobody would ever find out.
On the second Wednesday after his appointment he departed, uttering
sentiments which were a perfect guarantee of good faith (but which were
manifestly not for publication) to Watty Learmont as he journeyed to the
railway station in the Upper Balhaldie gig.
A new sun rose upon Rescobie with the coming of Gibby the Eel. He had
known both of his predecessors at college, and he had pumped them
thoroughly upon the life and doctrine of their former chief. In
addition to which Gilbert had taken to him a suit of tweeds and a
fishing-rod, and with a piece of bread and cheese in his pocket, and
guile in his heart, he had gone up the Rescobie water, asking for drinks
at the farmhouses on the way, much as he used to perambulate Professor
Galbraith's class-room in his old, abandoned, unregenerate,
sans-dog-collar days.
Hitherto the helper, a mere transient bird-of-passage, had lodged with
Mistress Honeytongue, the wife of Hosea Honeytongue, the beadle and
minister's man of Rescobie. This brought the youth, as it were, under
the shadow of the manse, and what was more to the point, under the eye
of the minister. But Gilbert Denholm had other aims.
He took rooms in the village, quite three-quarters of a mile from the
manse, with one Mrs. Tennant, the widow of a medical man in the
neighbourhood who had died without making adequate provision for his
family. She had never taken a lodger before, but since his investiture
in clericals the Eel had filled out to a handsome figure, and he
certainly smiled a most irresistible smile as he stood on the doorstep.
Gilbert arrived late one Friday night in Rescobie, and speculation was
rife in the parish as to whether he would preach on Sabbath or not.
Most were of the negative opinion, but Watty Learmont, for reasons of
his own, offered to wager a new hat that he would.
On Saturday morning Gilbert put on his longest tails and his doggiest
collar and marched boldly up to the front door of the manse, with the
general air of playing himself along the road upon war pipes. Perhaps,
however, he was only whistling silently to keep his courage up.
"Is Miss Girnigo at home?" said he to the somewhat stern-visaged
personage who opened the door.
"_I_ am Miss Girnigo," said a sepulchral voice. (Miss Girnigo was
suffering from the summer cold which used to be called a "hay fever.")
"Indeed--I might have known; how delightful!" said the Eel, now, alas!
transformed into an old serpent; "I am so glad to find you at home!"
"I am always at home!" returned Miss Girnigo, keeping up a semblance of
severity, but secretly mollified by the homage of Gibby's smile.
"Then I hope you will let me come here very often. I shall find it
lonely in the village, but I thought it better to be near my work," said
Gilbert; "I am staying with Mrs. Tennant, the doctor's widow. Do you
know Mrs. Tennant?"
"Oh, yes," said Miss Girnigo, smiling for the first time; "she is one of
my dearest friends. I often go there to tea."
"I love tea," said Gilbert, with enthusiasm; "Mrs. Tennant has invited
me to take tea in her parlour in the afternoon as often as I like, but I
was not expecting such a reward as this!"
Miss Girnigo was considerably over forty, but she was even more than
youthfully amenable to flattery and to the Eel's beaming and boyish
face.
"You are the new assistant," she said, "Mister--ah----!"
"Denholm!" said Gilbert, smiling; "it is a nice name. Don't you think
so?"
"I have not thought anything about the matter," said Miss Girnigo,
bridling, yet with the ghost of a blush. "I do not charge my mind with
such things. Have you come to see my father?"
"Yes, after a while. But just at present I would rather see your
plants!" said the Serpent, who had been well coached. (No wonder Watty
Learmont smiled when he asserted that the New Man would preach on
Sunday.)
Now Miss Girnigo lived chiefly for her flowers. The Serpent had a list
of them, roughly but accurately compiled from the lady's seed-merchant's
ledger by a friend in the business. He had also a fund of information
respecting "plants," very recently acquired, on his mind.
"How did you know I was fond of flowers?" asked Miss Girnigo.
"Could any one doubt it?" cried Gilbert, with enthusiasm. "Who was the
Jo----" (he was on the brink of saying "Johnny") "g--gentleman of whom
it was said: 'If you want to see his monument, look around'--Sir
Christopher Wren, wasn't it? Well, I looked around as I came up the
street!"
And Gilbert took in the whole front of the manse with his glance. It
certainly was very pretty, covered from top to bottom with rambler roses
and Virginia cress.
Gilbert entered, and as they passed in front of the minister's study
door Miss Girnigo almost skittishly made a sign for silence, and Gilbert
tip-toed past with an exaggeration of caution which made his companion
laugh. They found themselves presently in the drawing-room, where again
the flower-pots were everywhere, but specially banked round the oriel
window. Gilbert named them one after the other like children at a
baptism, with a sort of easy certainty and familiarity. His friend the
nurseryman's clerk had not failed him. Miss Girnigo was delighted.
"Well," she said, "it _is_ pleasant to have some one who knows Ceterach
Officinarum from a kail-stock. We shall go botanising together!"
"Ye-es," said Gilbert, a little uncertainly, and with less enthusiasm
than might have been expected.
"Good heavens," he was saying, "how shall I grind up the beastly thing
if I have to live up to all this?"
But Miss Girnigo was in high good-humour, though her pleasure was sadly
marred by the incipient cold in her head, which she was conscious
prevented her from doing herself justice. At forty, eyes that water and
a nose tipped with pink do not make for maiden beauty.
"I have a dreadful cold coming on, Mr. Denholm," she said; "I really am
not fit to be seen. I wonder what I was thinking of to ask you in!"
"Try this," said Gilbert, pulling a kind of india-rubber puff-ball out
of his pocket; "it is quite good. It makes you sneeze like the
very--ahem--like anything. Stops a cold in no time--won't be happy till
you get it!"
"I don't dare to--how does it work?" demurred Miss Girnigo.
Gilbert illustrated, and began to sneeze promptly, as the snuff
titillated his air passages.
"Now you try!" he said, and smiled.
Gilbert held it insinuatingly to the lady's nostrils and pumped
vigorously.
"_A-tish--shoo!_" remarked the lady, as if he had touched a spring.
"_A-tish--shoo-oo-ooh!_" replied Gilbert.
After that they responded antiphonally, like Alp answering Alp, till the
door opened and Dr. Girnigo appeared with a half-written sheet of sermon
paper in his hand.
The guilty pair stood rooted to the ground--at least, spasmodically so,
for every other moment a sneeze lifted one of them upon tiptoe.
"What is this, Arabella, what is this? What is this young man doing
here?"
"Don't be--_a-tish--oo_--stupid, papa! You know very well--_shoo_--it
is Mr. Denholm, the new Assist--_aroo_!"
"Sir!" said Dr. Girnigo, turning upon his junior and angrily stamping
his foot.
Gilbert held out his hand, and as the Doctor did not take it he waggled
it feebly in the air with a sort of impotent good-fellowship.
"All right," he said; "better presently--only c-curing Miss--Miss
Girni--_goo-ahoo--arish-chee-hoo_--of a cold!"
"I do not know any one of that name, sir!" thundered the Doctor, not
wholly unreasonably.
"No?" said Gilbert, anxiously; "I understood that this--_a-tishoo_--lady
was Miss Girnigo, though I thought she was too young for a
daughter--your granddaughter, perhaps, Doctor?"
And the smile once more took in Miss Girnigo as if she had been a
beautiful picture.
By this time Miss Girnigo had somewhat recovered.
"Papa," she said, sharply, "Mr. Denholm is going to be such an
acquisition. He is a botanist--a Fellow of the Linnaean Society, I
understand----"
"Of Pittenweem," muttered Gilbert between his teeth.
"And he is going to preach on Sunday. You have had a lot to worry you
this week and need a rest. Besides, your best shirts are not
ironed---not dry indeed. The weather has been so bad!"
"I had made up my mind to preach on Sabbath myself," said Dr. Girnigo,
who, though a tyrant untamed without, was held in considerable
subjection to the higher power within the bounds of his own house.
"Nonsense, papa--I will not allow you to think of such a thing!" cried
Miss Girnigo. "Besides, Mr. Denholm is coming to supper to-night, and
we will talk botany all the time!"
* * * * *
Which was why the Eel, falling off his bicycle at 1.45 p.m. that same
day in front of my house in Cairn Edward (sixteen miles away), burst
into my consulting-room with the following demand, proclaimed in
frenzied accents: "Lend me your Bentley's Botany, or something--not that
beastly jaw-breaking German thing you are so fond of, but something
plain and easy, with the names of all the plants in. I have the whole
thing to get up by eight o'clock to-night, and I'll eat my head if I can
remember what a cotyledon is!"
It is believed that on the way back the Eel studied Bentley, cunningly
adjusted on the handlebar, with loops of string to keep the pages from
fluttering. (He was a trick-rider of repute.) At any rate, he did not
waste his time, and arrived at the manse so full of botanical terms that
he had considerable difficulty in making himself intelligible to the
maid, who on this occasion, being cleaned up, opened the door to him in
state.
This was the beginning of the taming of the tiger. Gilbert preached the
next forenoon, and pleased the Doctor greatly by the excellent taste of
his opening remarks upon his text, which was, "To preach the gospel ...
and not to boast in another man's line of things made ready to our
hand."
The preacher, as a new and original departure, divided his subject into
three heads, as followeth: First, "The Duty of Respect for
Ecclesiastical Superiors"; second, "The Duty of Christian Liberality"
(he had to drag this in neck and crop); and thirdly, "The Supreme Duty
of Humility in the Young with respect to their Elders."
While he was looking it over on Sunday morning Gilbert heartily
confounded his friend Begg for forgetting the other fifteen divisions of
Dr. Girnigo's sermons.
"I could have made a much better appearance if that fellow Begg had had
any sense!" he said to himself. "But" (with a sigh) "I must just do the
best I can with these."
Nevertheless, Dr. Girnigo considered that Gibby had surpassed himself in
his application. He showed how any good that he might do in the parish
must not be set down to his credit, but to that of Another who had so
long laboured among them; and how that he (the preacher), being but "as
one entering upon another man's line of things," it behoved him above
all things not to be boastful.
"A very sound address--quite remarkable in one so young!" was the
Doctor's verdict as he met the Session after the close of Gilbert's
first service.
The Session and congregation, however, did not approve quite so highly,
having had a surfeit of similar teaching during the past forty years.
But Walter Learmont, senior (sad to tell it of an Elder), winked the
sober eye and remarked to his intimates: "Bide a wee--he kens his way
aboot, thon yin. He wad juist be drawin' the auld man's leg!"
At any rate, certain it is that after this auspicious beginning Gibby
the Eel (M.A.) remained longer in Rescobie than all his predecessors put
together.
But it was to Jemima Girnigo that he owed this.
*THE GATE OF THE UPPER GARDEN*
For the first six months that Gibby the Eel, otherwise the Reverend
Gilbert Denholm, M.A., acted as "helper" to Dr. Joseph Girnigo in the
parish of Rescobie, he was much pleased with himself. He laughed with
his friend and classmate, Robertland, over the infatuation of the
doctor's old maid daughter. The parish, reading the situation like a
book, smiled broadly when the "helper" and Miss Jemima Girnigo were
discerned on an opposite braeface, botanising together, or, with heads
bent over some doubtful bloom, stood silhouetted against the sunlit
green of some glade in Knockandrews wood.
During this period Gibby hugged himself upon his cleverness, but the
time came when he began to have his doubts. What to him was a
lightheart prank, an "Eel's trick," like his college jest of squirming
secretly under class-room benches, was obviously no jest to this
pale-eyed, sharp-featured maiden of one-and-forty.
Jemima Girnigo had never been truly young. Repressed and domineered over
as a child, she had been suddenly promoted by her mother's death to the
care of a household and the responsibility of training a bevy of younger
brothers, all now out in the world and doing for themselves. Her life
had grown more and more arid and self-contained. She had nourished her
soul on secret penances, setting herself hard household tasks, and doing
with only one small, untaught, slatternly maid from the village, in
order that her father might be able to assist his sons into careers.
She read dry theology to mortify a liking for novels, and shut up her
soul from intercourse with her equals, conscious, perhaps, that visitors
would infallibly discover and laugh at her father's meannesses and
peculiarities.
Only her flowers kept her soul sweet and a human heart beating within
that buckram-and-whalebone-fenced bosom.
Then, all suddenly came Gilbert Denholm with his merry laugh, his
light-heart ways (which she openly reproved, but secretly loved), his
fair curls clustering about his brow, and his way of throwing back his
head as if to shake them into place. Nothing so young, so winsome, or so
gay had ever set foot within that solemn dreich old manse. It was like a
light-heart city beauty coming to change the life and disturb the
melancholy of some stern woman-despising hermit. But Jemima Girnigo's
case was infinitely worse, in that she was a woman and the disturber of
her peace little better than a foolish boy.
But Gilbert Denholm, kindly lad though he was, saw no harm. He was
only, he thought, impressing himself upon the parish. He saw himself
daily becoming more popular. No farmer's party was considered to be
anything which wanted his ready wit and contagious merriment. Already
there was talk among the Session of securing him as permanent assistant
and successor. There were fairways and clear sunlit vistas before
Gilbert Denholm; and he liked his professional prospects all the better
that he owed them to his own wit and knowledge of the world. He was a
good preacher. He made what is called an excellent appearance in the
pulpit. He did not "read." His fluency of utterance held sleepy
ploughmen in a state of blinking attention for the better part of an
hour. Even Dr. Girnigo commended, and Gibby who had no more abundant or
direct "spiritual gifts" than are the portion of most kind-hearted,
well-brought-up Scottish youths, was unconscious of his lack of any
higher qualifications for the Christian ministry.
But Gibby was like hundreds, aye, thousands more, who break the bread
and open unto men the Scriptures in all the churches. His office meant
to him a career, not a call. His work was the expression of hearty
human goodwill to all men--and so far helpful and godlike; but he had
never tasted sorrow, never drunken of the cup of remorse as a daily
beverage, never "dreed" the common weird of humanity. Sorely he needed
a downsetting. He must endure hardness, be driven out of self to the
knowledge that self is nowise sufficient for a sinful man.
Even Jemima Girnigo was a far better servant of God than the man who had
spent seven years in preparation for that service. In the shut deeps of
her heart there were locked up infinite treasures of self-sacrifice.
Love was pitifully ready to look forth from those pale eyes at whose
corners the crow's feet were already clutching. And so it came to pass
that, knowing her folly (and yet, in a way, defying it), this old maid
of forty-one loved the handsome youth of four-and-twenty, the only human
love-compelling thing that had ever come into her sombre life.
Yet there were times when Jemima Girnigo's heart was bitter within her,
even as there were seasons when the crowding years fell away and she
seemed almost young and fair. Jemima had never been either very pretty
or remarkably attractive, but now when the starved instincts of her lost
youth awoke untimeously within her, she unconsciously smiled and tossed
her head, to the full as coquettishly as a youthful beauty just becoming
conscious of her own power.
It was all very pitiful. But Gibby passed on his heedless way and saw
not, neither recked of his going.
* * * * *
Yet a time came when his eyes were opened. A new paper-mill had come to
Rescobie, migrating from somewhere in the East country, where the
Messrs. Coxon had had a serious quarrel with their ground landlord.
From being a quiet hamlet the village of Rescobie began rapidly to put
on the airs of a growing town. Tall houses of three storeys, with many
windows and outside stairs, usurped the place of little old-fashioned
"but-and-bens." Red brick oblongs of mill frontage rose along the
valley of the Rescobie Water, which, dammed and weired and carried along
countless lades, changed the cheerful brown limpidity of its youthful
stream for a frothy mud colour below the mills.
The new immigrants were mostly a sedate and sober folk, as indeed,
nearly all paper-makers are. To the easy-going villagers their diligence
seemed phenomenal. They were flocking into the mill gates by six in the
morning. It was well nigh six in the evening before the tide flowed
back toward the village. Among the youths and men there was night-shift
and day-shift, and a new and strange pallor began to pervade the street
and show itself, carefully washed, in the gallery of Rescobie Kirk. The
village girls, finding that they could make themselves early
independent, took their places in the long "finishing saal," while
elderly women, for whom there had been no outlook except the poorhouse,
found easy work and a living wage in Coxon's rag-house.
The increase of the congregation in the second year of Gilbert Denholm's
assistantship compelled the Session to bethink themselves of some more
permanent and satisfactory arrangement. Finally, after many private
meetings they resolved to beard the lion in his den and lay before Dr.
Girnigo the proposal that Gilbert should be officially called and
ordained as the old man's "colleague and successor."
It was the ruling elder, called, after the name of his farm, Upper
Balhaldie, who belled the cat and made the fateful proposition. In so
doing that shrewd and cautious man was considered to have excelled
himself. But Dr. Girnigo was far from being appeased.
"Sirs," he said, "I have been sole minister of the parish of Rescobie
for forty years, and sole minister of it I shall die!"
"Mr. Denholm will be to you as a son!" suggested Balhaldie.
"I have sons of my body," said the old minister, looking full at the
quiet men before him, who sat on the edges of their several chairs
fingering the brims of their hats; "did I make any of them a minister?
Nay, sirs, and for this reason: because the parish of Rescobie has been
so near my heart that I would not risk even the fruit of my body coming
between me and it!"
"We have sounded Mr. Denholm," said Balhaldie, quietly ignoring the
sentimental, "and you may rest assured that you will not be disturbed in
your tenancy of the manse. Mr. Denholm has no thought at present of
changing his condition, and is quite content with his lodging--and an
eident carfu' woman is his landlady the doctor's weedow!"
"Aye, she is that!" concurred several of the Session, speaking for the
first time. It was a relief to have something concrete to which they
could assent.
Dr. Girnigo looked at his Session. They seemed to shrink before him.
Nervousness quivered on their countenances. They tucked their
heavily-booted feet beneath the chairs on which they sat, to be out of
the way. The brims of their hats were rapidly wearing out. Surely such
men could never oppose him.
But Dr. Girnigo knew better. Underneath that awkward exterior, in spite
of those embarrassed manners, that air of anxious self-effacement, Dr.
Girnigo was well aware that there abode inflexible determination, shrewd
common sense and abounding humour--chiefly, however, of the ironic sort.
"Are ye all agreed on this?" he asked.
"I speak in name of the Session!" said Upper Balhaldie succinctly,
looking around the circle. And as he looked each man nodded slightly,
without, however, raising his eyes from the pattern on the worn study
carpet.
The Doctor sighed a long sigh. He knew that at last his trial was come
upon him, and nerved himself to meet it like a man.
"It is well," he said; "I shall offer no objection to the congregation
calling Mr. Denholm, and I can only hope that he will serve you as
faithfully as I have done! I wish you a very good day, gentlemen!"
And with these words the old minister went out, leaving the Session to
find their way into the cold air as best they might.
The day after the interview between the Session and the Doctor, Gilbert
Denholm called at the manse. He came bounding up the little avenue
between the lilac and rhododendron bushes. Jemima Girnigo heard his foot
long ere he had reached the porch. Nay, before he had set foot on the
gravel she caught the click of the gate latch, which was loose and would
only open one way. This Gibby always forgot and rattled it fiercely
till he remembered the trick of it.
Then when she heard the _rat-tat-tat_ of Gibby's ash-plant on the panels
of the door, she caught her hand to her heart and stood still among her
plants.
There was a bell, but Gibby was always in too great a hurry to ring it.
"Perhaps he has come to----" She did not finish the sentence, but the
blood, rising hotly to her poor withered cheeks, finished it for her.
"Oh, Miss Jemima!" cried Gibby, bursting in; "I came up to tell you
first. I owe it all to you--every bit of it. They are going to call me
to be colleague--and--and--we can botanise any amount. Isn't it
glorious?"
He held her hand while he was speaking; and Jemima had been looking with
hope into his frank, enkindled, boyish eyes. Her eyelids fell at his
announcement.
"Yes," she faltered after a pause, "we can botanise!"
"And they wanted to know if I would like to have the manse--as if I
would turn you out, who have been my best friend here ever since I came
to Rescobie! Not very likely!"
Gilbert had an honest liking for Jemima Girnigo, a feeling, however,
which was not in the least akin to love. Indeed, he would as soon have
thought of marrying his grandmother or any other of the relationships in
the table of prohibited degrees printed at the beginning of the
Authorised Version, which he sometimes looked at furtively when Dr.
Girnigo was developing his "fourteenthly."
"You are happy where you are?" said Jemima, smiling a little wistfully.
"Oh, yes," cried Gibby enthusiastically; "my landlady makes me perfectly
comfortable. She thinks I am a lost soul, I am afraid, but in the
meantime she comforts me with apples--first-rate they are in dumplings,
too, I can tell you!"
While he spoke Jemima Girnigo was much absorbed over a plant in a remote
corner, and more than one drop of an alien dew glistened upon its leaves
ere she turned again to the window. Gibby's enthusiasm was a little
damped by her seeming indifference.
"Are you not glad?" he asked anxiously; "I came to tell you first. I
thought what good times we should have. We must go up Barstobrick Hill
for the parsley fern before it gets too late."
"Oh, yes," said Jemima Girnigo, holding out her hand, "I am very glad.
No one is as glad as I--I want you to believe that!"
"Of course I do!" cried Gibby; "you always were a good fellow, Jemima!
We'll go up to Barstobrick to-morrow. Mind you are ready by nine. I
have to be back for a meeting in the afternoon early. It is a hungry
place. Put some 'prog' in the _vasculum_!"
And as from the parlour window she watched him down the gravel, he
turned around and wrote "9 A.M." in large letters on the gravel with his
ash-plant, tossed his hand up at her in a gay salute, and was gone.
* * * * *
But Gilbert Denholm and Jemima Girnigo did not climb Barstobrick for
parsley fern on the morrow, and the "9 A.M." stood long plain upon the
gravel as a monument of the frail and futile intents of man.
For before the morrow's morn had dawned there had fallen upon Rescobie
the dreaded scourge of all paper-making villages. Virulent small-pox
had broken out. There were already four undoubted cases, all emanating
from the rag-house of Coxon's mills.
About the streets and close-mouths stood awe-struck groups of girls,
uncertain whether to go on with their work or return home. There was
none of the usual horse-play among the lads of the day-shift as they
went soberly mill-ward with their cans. Grave elders, machinemen and
engineers, shook their heads and recalled the date at which (a fortnight
before) a large consignment of Russian rags had been received and
immediately put in hand.
It was whispered, on what authority did not appear, that the disease was
of the malignant "black" variety, and that all smitten must surely die.
Fear ran swift and chilly up each outside staircase and entered unbidden
every "land" in Rescobie. It was the first time such a terror had been
in the village, and those who had opposed the settlement of the mills,
staid praisers of ancient quiet, lifted their hands with something of
jubilation mixed with their fear. "Verily, the judgment of God has
fallen," they said, "even as in a night it fell on Babylon--as in fire
and brimstone it came upon the Cities of the Plain."
Dr. Girnigo retired to his study, feeling that if the Session had
allowed him his own way, things would not have been as they were. He
had a sermon to write. So he mended a quill pen, took out his
sermon-paper (small quarto ruled in blue), and set to work to improve
the occasion. He said to himself that since the parish had now a young
and active minister, it was good for Gilbert Denholm to bear the yoke in
his youth.
And, indeed, none was readier for the work than that same Gilbert. He
was shaving when his landlady, the doctor's widow, cried in the
information through the panels of his closed door.
"Thank God," murmured Gibby, "that I have none to mourn for me if I
don't get through this!"
Then he thought of his father, but, as he well knew, that fine old
Spartan was too staunch a fighter in the wars of grace to discourage his
son from any duty, however dangerous. He thought next of--well, one or
two girls he had known--and was glad now that it had gone no further.
He did not know yet what was involved in the outbreak or what might be
demanded of him. Gilbert Denholm may have had few of the peculiar graces
of spiritual religion, but he was a fine, manly, upstanding young
fellow, and he resolved that he would do his duty as if he had been
heading a rush of boarders or standing in the deadly imminent breach.
More exactly, perhaps, he did not resolve at all. It never occurred to
him that he could do anything else.
As soon as he had snatched a hasty breakfast and thrown on his coat, he
hurried up to the house of Dr. Durie. A plain blunt man was John
Durie--slim, pale, with keen dark eyes, and a pointed black beard
slightly touched with gray. The doctor was not at home. He had not been
in all night and the maid did not know where he was to be found.
To the right-about went Gilbert, asking all and sundry as he went where
and when they had seen the doctor. Thomas Kyle, with his back against
the angle of the Railway Inn, averred that he had seen him "an 'oor syne
gangin' gye fast into Betty McGrath's--but they say Betty is deid or
this!" he added, somewhat irrelevantly. Chairles Simson, tilting his
bonnet over his brows in order to scratch his head in a new and
attractive spot, deponed that about ten minutes before he had noticed
"the tails o' the doctor's coat gaun roond the Mill-lands' corner like
stoor on a windy day."
Gibby tried Betty McGrath's first. Yes, Dr. Durie had ordered everybody
out except the sick woman, who was tossing on her truckle bed, calling
on the Virgin and all the saints in a shrill Galway dialect, and her
daughter Bridget, a heavy-featured girl of twenty, who stood
disconsolately looking out at the window as if hope had wholly forsaken
her heart.
Gibby inquired if the doctor had been there recently.
"Oh, yes," said Bridget; "as ye may see if ye'll be troubled lookin' in
the corner. He tore down all thim curtains off the box-bed. It'll
break the ould woman's heart, that it will, if ever the craitur gets
over this."
At the door Gibby met Father Phil Kavannah, a tall young man with honest
peasant's eyes and a humorous mouth.
"You and I, surr, will have to see this through between us," said Father
Phil, grasping his hand.
"It is a bad business," responded Gilbert; "I fear it will run through
the mills."
"Worse than ye think," said the priest very gravely, "ten times
worse--three-fourths of the workers have no relatives here, and there
will be no one to nurse them. They've talked lashin's about the new
village hospital, and raised all Tipperary about where it is to stand
and what it is to cost, but that's all that's done about it yet."
Gilbert whistled a bar of "Annie Laurie," which he kept for emergencies.
"Well," he said slowly, "it will be like serving a Sunday-school picnic
with half a loaf and one jar of marmalade--but we'll just need to see
how far we can make ourselves go round!"
"Right!" said Father Phil with a wave of his hand as he stood with his
fingers on the latch of Betty McGrath's door.
Gilbert found the doctor in the great "saal" at the mills. He had his
coat off and was scraping at bared arms for dear life. At each door
stood a pair of stalwart sentinels, and several hundred mill workers
were grouped about talking in low-voiced clusters. Only here and there
one more diligent than the rest, or with quieter nerves, deftly passed
sheets of white paper from hand to hand as if performing a conjuring
trick.
The doctor spied Gilbert as he entered. They were excellent friends.
"Man," he cried across the great room, looking down again instantly to
his work, "run up to the surgery for another tube of vaccine like this.
It is in B cabinet, shelf 6. And as you come back, wire for
half-a-dozen more. You know where I get them!"
And Gilbert sped upon his first errand. After that he deserted his own
lodgings, and he and Dr. Durie took hasty and informal meals when they
could snatch a moment from work. Sundry cold edibles stood permanently
on the doctor's oaken sideboard, and of these Gilbert and his host
partook without sitting down. Then on a couch, or more often on a few
rugs thrown on the floor, one or the other would snatch a hurried sleep.
There were twenty-six cases on Saturday--fifty-eight by the middle of
the following week. Within the same period nine had terminated fatally,
and there were others who could not possibly recover. Nurses came in
from the great city hospitals, as they could be spared, but the demand
far exceeded the supply, and Gilbert was indefatigable. Yet his laugh
was cheery as ever, and even the delirious would start into some faint
consciousness of pleasure at the sound of his voice.
But one day the young minister awoke with a racking head, a burning
body, a dry throat, and the chill of ice in his bones.
"This is nothing--I will work it off," said Gibby; and, getting up, he
dressed with haste and went out without touching food. The thought of
eating was abhorrent to him. Nevertheless, he did his work all the
forenoon, and went here and there with medicine and necessaries. He
relieved a nurse who had been two nights on duty, while she slept for
six hours. Then after that he set off home to catch Dr. Durie before he
could be out again. For he had heard his host come in and throw himself
down on the couch while he was dressing.
As he passed the front of Rescobie Manse, he looked up to wave a hand to
Jemima, as he never forgot to do. Her father was still "indisposed,"
and Miss Girnigo was understood to be taking care of him. Yes, there
she was among her flowers, and Gibby, hardly knowing what he did--being
light-headed and racked with pain--openly kissed his hand to her within
sight of half-a-score of Rescobie windows.
Then, his feet somehow tangling themselves and his knees failing him, he
fell all his length in the hot dust of the highway.
* * * * *
When Gilbert Denholm came to himself he found a white-capped nurse
sitting by the window of a room he had never before seen. There was a
smell of disinfectants all about, which somehow seemed to have followed
him through all the boundless interstellar spaces across which he had
been wandering.
"Where am I?" said Gibby, as the nurse came toward the bed. "I have not
seen Betty McGrath this morning, and I promised Father Phil that I
would."
"You must not ask questions," said the nurse quietly. "Dr. Durie will
soon be here."
And after that with a curious readiness Gibby slipped back into a drowsy
dream of gathering flowers with Jemima Girnigo; but somehow it was
another Jemima--so young she seemed, so fair. Crisp curls glanced
beneath her hat brim. Young blood mantled in changeful blushes on her
cheeks. Her pale eyes, which had always been a little watery, were now
blue and bright as a mountain tarn on a day without clouds. He had
never seen so fair and joyous a thing.
"Jemima," he said, or seemed to himself to say, "what is the matter with
you? You are different somehow."
"It is all because you love me, Gilbert," she answered, and smiled up at
him. "Ever since you told me that, I have grown younger every hour;
and, do you know, I have found the Grass of Parnassus at last. It grows
by the Gate into the Upper Garden?"
* * * * *
"Hello, Denholm, clothed and in your right mind, eh? That's right!"
It was the cheerful voice of his friend, Dr. Durie, as he stood by
Gibby's bedside.
"What has been the matter with me, Durie?" said Gilbert, though in his
heart he knew.
"You have had bad small-pox, my boy; and have had a hot chance to find
out whether you have been speaking the truth in your sermons."
Gibby could hardly bring his lips to frame the next question. He was
far from vain, but to a young man the thought was a terrible one.
"Shall I be much disfigured?"
"Oh, a dimple or two--nothing to mar you on your marriage day. You have
been well looked after."
"You have saved my life, doctor."
And Gibby strove to reach a feeble hand outward, which, however, the
doctor did not seem to see.
"Not I--you owe that to some one else."
"The nurse who went out just now?" queried Gibby.
"No, she has just been here a few clays, after all danger had passed."
Gilbert strove to rise on his elbow and the red flushed his poor face.
The doctor restrained him with a strong and gentle hand.
"Lie back," he said, "or I will go away and tell you nothing."
He sat down by the bedside, and with a soft sponge touched the
convalescent's brow. As he did so he spoke in a low and meditative tone
as though he had been talking to himself.
"There was once a foolish young man who thought that he could take
twenty shillings out of a purse into which he had only put half a
sovereign. He fell down one day on the street. A woman carried him in
and nursed him through a fortnight's delirium. A woman caught him as he
ran, with only a blanket about him, to drown himself in the Black Pool
of Rescobie Water. Night and day she watched him, sleepless, without
weariness, without murmuring----"
"And this woman--who saved my life--what was--her name?"
Gibby's voice was very hoarse.
"Jemima Girnigo!" said the doctor, sinking his voice also to a whisper.
"Where is she--I want to see her--I want to thank her?" cried Gibby. He
was actually upon his elbow now.
Dr. Dune forced him gently back upon the pillows.
"Yes, yes," he said soothingly, "so you shall--if all tales be true; but
for that you must wait."
"Why--why?" cried impatient Gibby. "Why cannot I see her now? She has
done more for me than ever I deserved----"
"That is the way of women," said the doctor, "but you cannot thank her
now. She is dead."
"Dead--dead!" gasped Gilbert, stricken to the heart; "then she gave her
life for me!"
"Something like it," said the doctor, a trifle grimly. For though he
was a wise man, the ways of women were dark to him. He thought that
Gilbert, though a fine lad, was not worth all this.
"Dead," muttered Gibby, "and I cannot even tell her--make it up to
her----"
"She left you a message," said the doctor very quietly.
"What was it?" cried Gibby, eagerly.
"Oh, nothing much," said Dr. Durie; "there was no hope from the first,
and she knew it. Her mind was clear all the three days, almost to the
last. She may have wandered a little then, for she told me to tell
you----"
"What--what--oh, what? Tell me quickly. I cannot wait."
"That the flowers were blooming in the Upper Garden, and that she would
meet you at the Gate!"
* * * * *
The Reverend Gilbert Denholm never married. He bears a scar or two on
his open face--a face well beloved among his people. There is a grave
in Rescobie kirkyard that he tends with his own hands. None else must
touch it.
It is the resting-place of a woman whom love made young and beautiful,
and about whose feet the flowers of Paradise are blooming, as, alone but
not impatient, she waits his coming by the Gate.
*THE TROUBLER OF ISRAEL*
Unless you happen to have made one of a group of five or six young men
who every Sunday morning turned their steps towards the little
meeting-house in Lady Nixon's Wynd, it is safe to say that you did not
know either it or the Doctor of Divinity. That is to say, not unless
you were born in the Purple and expert of the mysteries of the Kirk of
the Covenants.
The denomination was a small one, smaller even and poorer than is the
wont of Scottish sects. By the eternal process of splitting off,
produced by the very faithfulness of the faithful, and the remorseless
way in which they carried out their own logic, by individual pretestings
and testifyings, by the yet sadder losses inflicted by the mammon of
unrighteousness, when some, allured by social wealth and position,
turned aside to worship in some richer or more popular Zion, the Kirk of
the Covenants worshipping in Lady Nixon's Wynd had become but the shadow
of its former self.
Still, however, by two infallible signs you might know the faithful.
They spoke of the "Boady" and of the "Coavenants" with a lengthening of
that _O_ which in itself constituted a shibboleth, and their faces--grim
and set mostly--lit up when you spoke of the "Doctor."
But one--they had but one--Dr. Marcus Lawton of Lady Nixon's Wynd. He
was their joy, their pride, their poetry; the kitchen to their sour
controversial bread, the mellow glory of their denomination. (Again you
must broaden the _a_ indefinitely.) He had once been a professor, but
by the noblest of self-denying ordinances he had extruded himself from
his post for conscience sake.
There was but one fly in their apothecary's ointment-pot when my father
grew too stiff to attend the Kirk of the Covenants even once a year, and
that was that the Doctor, unable to live and bring up a family on a
sadly dwindling stipend (though every man and woman in the little kirk
did almost beyond their possible to increase it), had been compelled to
bind himself to spend part of the day in a secular pursuit.
At least to the average mind his employment could hardly be called
"secular," being nothing more than the Secretaryship of the Association
for the Propagation of Gospel Literature; but to the true covenant man
this sonorous society was composed of mere Erastians, or what was little
better, ex-Erastians and common Voluntaries. They all dated from 1689,
and the mark of the beast was on their forehead--that is to say, the
seal of the third William, the Dutchman, the revolutionary Gallio. Yet
their Doctor, with his silver hair, his faithful tongue, his reverence,
wisdom, and weight of indubitable learning, had to sit silent in the
company of such men, to take his orders from them, and even to record
their profane inanities in black and white. The Doctor's office was at
the corner of Victoria Street as you turn down towards the Grassmarket.
And when any of his flock met him coming or going thither, they turned
away their heads--that is, if he had passed the entrance to Lady Nixon's
Wynd when they met him. So far it was understood that he _might_ be
going to write his sermon in the quiet of the vestry. After that, there
was no escape from the damning conclusion that he was on his way to the
shrine of Baal--and other Erastian divinities. So upon George Fourth
Bridge the Covenant folk turned away their heads and did not see their
minister.
Now this is hardly a story--certainly not a tale. Only my heart being
heavy, I knew it would do me good to turn it upon the Doctor. Dr. Marcus
Lawton was the son of Dr. Marcus Lawton. When first he succeeded his
father, which happened when he was little more than a boy, and long
before I was born, he was called "young Maister Lawton." Then it was
that he lectured on "The Revelation" on Sabbath evenings, his father
sitting proudly behind him. Then the guttering candles of Lady Nixon's
looked down on such an array as had never been seen before within her
borders. College professors were there, ministers whose day's work was
over--as it had been, Cretes and Arabians, heathen men and publicans.
Edward Irving himself came once, in the weariful days before the great
darkness. The little kirk was packed every night, floor and loft, aisle
and pulpit stairs, entrance hall and window-sill, with such a crowd of
stern, grave-visaged men as had never been gathered into any kirk in the
town of Edinburgh, since a certain little fair man called Rutherford
preached there on his way to his place of exile in Aberdeen.
So my father has often told me, and you may be sure he was there more
than once, having made it a duty to do his business with my lord's
factor at a time when his soul also might have dealings with the most
approven factors of Another Lord.
These were great days, and my father (Alexander McQuhirr of Drumwhat),
still kindles when he tells of them. No need of dubious secretaryships
then, or of the turning away of faithful heads at the angle of the
Candlemaker-row. No young family to be provided for, Doctorate coming
at the Session's close from his own university, Professorship on the
horizon, a united Body of the devout to minister to! And up there in
the pulpit a slim young man with drawing power in the eyes of him, and a
voice which even then was mellow as a blackbird's flute, laying down the
law of his Master like unto the great of old who testified from
Cairntable even unto Pentland, and from the Session Stane at
Shalloch-on-Minnoch to where the lion of Loudon Hill looks defiant
across the green flowe of Drumclog.
But when I began to attend Lady Nixon's regularly, things were sorely
otherwise. The kirk was dwindled and dwindling---in membership, in
influence, most of all in finance. But not at all in devotion, not in
enthusiasm, not in the sense of privilege that those who remained were
thought worthy to sit under such faithful ministrations as those of the
Doctor. There was no more any "young Maister Lawton." Nor was a
comparison pointed disparagingly by a reference to "the Auld Doctor,
young Dr. Marcus's faither, ye ken."
From the alert, keen-faced, loyal-hearted precentor (no hireling he) to
the grave and dignified "kirk-officer" there were not two minds in all
that little body of the faithful.
You remember MacHaffie-a steadfast man Haffie--no more of his name ever
used. Indeed, it was but lately that I even knew he owned the prefatory
Mac. He would give you a helpful hint oftentimes (after you had passed
the plate), "It's no himsel' the day!" Or more warningly and
particularly, "It's a student." Then Haffie would cover your retreat,
sometimes going the length of making a pretence of conversation with you
as far as the door, or on urgent occasions (as when the Doctor was so
far left to himself as to exchange with a certain "popular preacher")
even taking you downstairs and letting you out secretly by a postern
door which led, in the approven manner of romances, into a side street
down which, all unseen, you could escape from your fate. But Haffie
always kept an eye on you to see that you did not abstract your penny
from the plate. That was the payment he exacted for his good offices;
and as I could not afford two pennies on one Sunday morning, Haffie's
"private information" usually drove me to Arthur's Seat, or down to
Granton for a smell of the salt water; and I can only hope that this is
set down to Haffie's account in the books of the recording angel.
But all this was before the advent of Gullibrand. You have heard of him,
I doubt not--Gullibrand of Barker, Barker, & Gullibrand, provision
merchants, with branches all over the three kingdoms. His name is on
every blank wall.
Gullibrand was not an Edinburgh man. He came, they say, from Leicester
or some Midland English town, and brought a great reputation with him.
He had been Mayor of his own city, a philanthropist almost by
profession, and the light and law-giver of his own particular sect
always. I have often wondered what brought him to Lady Nixon's Wynd.
Perhaps he was attracted by the smallness of our numbers, and by the
thought that, in default of any congregation of his own peculiar sect in
the northern metropolis, he could "boss" the Kirk of the Covenants as he
had of a long season "bossed" the Company of Apocalyptic Believers.
It was said, with I know not what truth, that the first time Mr.
Gullibrand came to the Kirk of the Covenants, the Doctor was lecturing
in his ordinary way upon Daniel's Beast with Ten Horns. And, if that be
so, our angelical Doctor had reason to rue to the end of his life that
the discourse had been so faithful and soul-searching. Though
Gullibrand thought his interpretation of the ninth horn very deficient,
and told him so. But he was so far satisfied that he intimated his
intention of "sending in his lines" next week.
At first it was thought to be a great thing that the Kirk of the
Covenants in Lady Nixon's Wynd should receive so wealthy and
distinguished an adherent.
"Quite an acquisition, my dear," said the hard-pressed treasurer,
thinking of the ever increasing difficulty of collecting the stipend,
and of the church expenses, which had a way of totalling up beyond all
expectation.
"Bide a wee, Henry," said his more cautious wife; "to see the colour o'
the man's siller is no to ken the colour o' his heart."
And to this she added a thoughtful rider.
"And after a', what does a bursen Englishy craitur like yon ken aboot
the Kirk o' the Co-a-venants?"
And as good Mistress Walker prophesied as she took her douce way
homeward with her husband (honorary treasurer and unpaid precentor) down
the Middle Meadow Walk, even so in the fulness of time it fell out.
Mr. Jacob Gullibrand gave liberally, at which the kindly heart of the
treasurer was elate within him. Mr. Jacob Gullibrand got a vacant seat
in the front of the gallery which had once belonged to a great family
from which, the faithful dying out, the refuse had declined upon a
certain Sadducean opinon calling itself Episcopacy; and from this
highest seat in the synagogue Mr. Jacob blinked with a pair of fishy
eyes at the Doctor.
Then in the fulness of time Mr. Jacob became a "manager," because it was
considered right that he should have a say in the disposition of the
temporalities of which he provided so great a part. Entry to the Session
was more difficult. For the Session is a select and conservative
body--an inner court, a defenced place set about with thorns and not to
be lightly approached; but to such a man as Gullibrand all doors in the
religious world open too easily. Whence cometh upon the Church of God
mockings and scorn, the strife of tongues--and after the vials have been
poured out, at the door One with the sharp sword in His hand, the sword
that hath two edges.
So after presiding at many Revival meetings and heading the lists of
many subscriptions, Jacob Gullibrand became an elder in the Kirk of the
Covenants and a power in Lady Nixon's Wynd.
He had for some time been a leading Director of the Association for the
Propagation of Gospel Literature; and so in both capacities he was the
Doctor's master. Then, having gathered to him a party, recruited
chiefly from the busybodies in other men's matters and other women's
characters, Jacob Gullibrand turned him about, and set himself to drive
the minister and folk of the Kirk of the Covenant as he had been wont to
drive his clerks and shop-assistants.
He went every Sabbath into the vestry after service to reprove and
instruct Dr. Marcus Lawton. His sermons (so he told him) were too
old-fashioned. They did not "grip the people." They did not "take hold
of the man on the street." They were not "in line with the present
great movement." In short, they "lacked modernity."
Dr. Marcus answered meekly. Man more modest than our dear Doctor there
was not in all the churches--no, nor outside of them.
"I am conscious of my many imperfections," he said; "my heart is heavy
for the weakness and unworthiness of the messenger in presence of the
greatness of the message; but, sir, I do the best I can, and I can only
ask Him who hath the power, to give the increase."
"But how," asked Jacob Gullibrand, "can you expect any increase when I
never see you preaching in the market-place, proclaiming at the
street-corners, denouncing upon a hundred platforms the sins of the
times? You should speak to the times, my good sir, you should speak to
the times."
"As worthy Dr. Leighton, that root out of a dry ground, sayeth,"
murmured our Doctor with a sweet smile, "there be so many that are
speaking to the times, you might surely allow one poor man to speak for
eternity."
But the quotation was thrown away upon Jacob Gullibrand.
"I do not know this Leighton--and I think I am acquainted with all the
ministers who have the root of the matter in them in this and in other
cities of the kingdom. And I call upon you, sir, to stir us up with
rousing evangelical addresses instead of set sermons. We are asleep,
and we need awakening."
"I am all too conscious of it," said the Doctor; "but it is not my
talent."
"Then if you do know it, if your conscience tells you of your failure,
why not get in some such preachers as Boanerges Simpson of Maitland, or
even throw open your pulpit to some earnest merchant-evangelist such
as--well, as myself?"
But Mr. Gullibrand had gone a step too far. The Doctor could be a
Boanerges also upon occasion, though he walked always in quiet ways and
preferred the howe of life to the mountain tops.
"No, sir," he said firmly; "no unqualified or unlicensed man shall ever
preach in my pulpit so long as I am minister and teaching elder of a
Covenant-keeping Kirk!"
"We'll see about that!" said Jacob Gullibrand, thrusting out his under
lip over his upper half-way to his nose. Then, seizing his tall hat and
unrolled umbrella, he stalked angrily out.
* * * * *
And he kept his word. He did see about it. In Lady Nixon's Wynd there
was division. On the one side were ranged the heads of families
generally, the folk staid and set in the old ways--"gospel-hardened" the
Gullibrandites called them. With the Doctor were the old standards of
the Kirk, getting a little dried, maybe, with standing so long in their
post-holes, but, so far as in them lay, faithful unto death.
But the younger folk mostly followed the new light. There were any
number of Societies, Gospel Bands, Armies of the Blue Ribbon, and of the
White--all well and better than well in their places. But being mostly
imported wholesale from England, and all without exception begun,
carried on, and ended in Gullibrand, they were out of keeping with the
plain-song psalms of the Kirk of the Martyrs. There were teas also at
"Mount Delectable," the residence of Gullibrand, where, after the
singing of many hymns and the superior blandishments of the Misses
Gullibrand, it was openly said that if the Kirk in Lady Nixon's Wynd was
to be preserved, the Doctor must "go." He was in the way. He was a
fossil. He had no modern light. He took no interest in the "Work." He
would neither conduct a campaign of street-preaching nor allow an
unordained evangelist into his pulpit. The Doctor must go. Mr.
Gullibrand was sure that a majority of the congregation was with him.
But there were qualms in many hearts which even three cups of
Gullibrand's Coffee Essence warm could not cure.
After all, the Doctor was the Doctor--and he had baptised the most part
of those present. Besides, they minded that time when Death came into
their houses--and also that Noble Presence, that saintly prayer, that
uplifted hand of blessing; but in the psychological moment, with meet
introduction from the host, uprose the persecuted evangelist.
"If he was unworthy to enter the pulpits of Laodicean ministers, men
neither cold nor hot, whom every earnest evangelist should" (here he
continued the quotation and illustrated it with an appropriate gesture)
"he at least thanked God that he was no Doctor of Divinity. Nor yet of
those who would permit themselves to be dictated to by self-appointed
and self-styled ministers."
And so on, and so on. The type does not vary.
The petition or declaration already in Gullibrand's breast pocket was
then produced, adopted, and many signatures of members and adherents
were appended under the influence of that stirring appeal. Great was
Gullibrand. The morning light brought counsel--but it was too late.
Gullibrand would erase no name.
"You signed the document, did you not? Of your own free will? That is
your handwriting? Very well then!"
* * * * *
The blow fell on the Sabbath before the summer communion, always a great
time in the little Zion in Lady Nixon's Wynd.
A deputation of two, one being Jacob Gullibrand, elder, waited on Dr.
Marcus Lawton after the first diet of worship. They gave him a paper to
read in which he was tepidly complimented upon his long and faithful
services, and informed that the undersigned felt so great an anxiety for
his health that they besought him to retire to a well-earned leisure,
and to permit a younger and more vigorous man to bear the burden and the
heat of the day. (The choice of language was Gullibrand's.) No mention
was made of any retiring allowance, nor yet of the manse, in which his
father before him had lived all his life, and in which he himself had
been born. But these things were clearly enough understood.
"What need has he of a manse or of an allowance either?" said
Gullibrand. "His family are mostly doing for themselves, and he has no
doubt made considerable savings. Besides which, he holds a comfortable
appointment with a large salary, as I have good reason to know."
"But," he added to himself, "he may not hold that very long either. I
will teach any man living to cross Jacob Gullibrand!"
* * * * *
The Doctor sat in the little vestry with the tall blue scroll spread out
before him. The light of the day suddenly seemed to have grown dim, and
somehow he could hardly see to smooth out the curled edges.
"It is surely raining without," said the Doctor, and lighted the gas
with a shaking hand. He looked down the list of names of members and
adherents appended to the request that he should retire. The written
letters danced a little before his eyes, and he adjusted his glasses
more firmly.
"William Gilmour, elder," he murmured; "ah, his father was at school
with me; I mind that I baptised William the year I was ordained. He was
a boy at my Bible-class, a clever boy, too. I married him; and he came
in here and grat like a bairn when his first wife died, sitting on that
chair. I called on the Lord to help William Gilmour--and now--he wants
me away."
"Jacob Gullibrand, elder."
The Doctor passed the name of his persecutor without a comment.
"Christopher Begbie, manager. He was kind to me the year the bairns
died."
(Such was Christopher's testimony. The year before I went to Edinburgh
the Doctor had lost a well-beloved wife and two children, within a week
of each other. He preached the Sabbath after on the text, "All thy
waves have gone over me!" Christopher Begbie, manager, had been kind
then. Pass, Christopher!)
"Robert Armstrong, manager. Mine own familiar friend in whom I
trusted," said the Doctor, and stared at the lozenges of the window till
coloured spots danced before his kind old eyes. "Robert Armstrong, for
whose soul I wrestled even as Jacob with his Maker; Robert Armstrong
that walked with me through the years together, and with whom I have had
so much sweet communion, even Robert also does not think me longer fit
to break the bread of life among these people!"
Pass, Robert! There is that on the blue foolscap which the Doctor
hastened to wipe away with his sleeve. But it is doubtful if such drops
are ever wholly wiped away.
"John Malcolm--ah, John, I do not wonder. Perhaps I was over faithful
with thee, John. But it was for thy soul's good. Yet I did not think
that the son of thy father would bear malice!"
"Margaret Fountainhall, Elizabeth Fountainhall--the children of many
prayers. Their mother was a godly woman indeed; and you, too, Margaret
and Elizabeth, would sit under a younger man. I mind when I prepared
you together for your first communion!"
The Doctor sighed and bent his head lower upon the paper. "Ebenezer
Redpath, James Bannatyne, Samuel Gardiner"--he passed the names rapidly,
till he came to one--"Isobel Swan."
The Doctor smiled at the woman's name. It was the first time he had
smiled since they gave him the paper and he realised what was written
there.
"Ah, Isobel," he murmured, "once in a far-off day you did not think as
now you think!"
And he saw himself, a slim stripling in his father's pew, and across the
aisle a girl who worshipped him with her eyes. And so the Doctor passed
from the name of Isobel Swan, still smiling--but kindly and graciously,
for our Doctor had it not in him to be anything else.
He glanced his eye up and down the list. He seemed to miss something.
"Henry Walker, treasurer--I do not see thy name, Henry. Many is the
hard battle I have had with thee in the Session, Henry. Dost thou not
want thine old adversary out of thy path once and for all? And Mary,
thy wife? Tart is thy tongue, Mary, but sweet as a hazel-nut in the
front of October thy true heart!"
"Thomas Baillie--where art thou, true Thomas? I crossed thee in the
matter of the giving out of the eleventh paraphrase, Thomas. Yet I do
not see thy name. Is it possible that thou hast forgotten the nearer
ill and looked back on the days of old when Allan Symington with Gilbert
his brother, and thou and I, Thomas Baillie, went to the house of God in
company? No, these things are not forgotten. I thank God for that.
The name of Thomas Baillie is not here."
And the Doctor folded up the blue crackling paper and placed it
carefully between the "leds" of the great pulpit Bible.
"It is the beginning of the week of Communion," he said; "it is not meet
that I should mingle secular thoughts with the memory of the broken body
and the shed blood. On your knees, Marcus Lawton, and ask forgiveness
for your repining and discriminating among the sheep of the flock whom
it is yours to feed on a coming Lord's day; and are they not all
yours--your responsibility, your care, aye, Marcus--even--even Jacob
Gullibrand?"
* * * * *
It was the Sabbath of High Communion in the Kirk of the Covenants.
Nixon's Wynd, ordinarily so grim and bare, so gritty underfoot and so
narrow overhead, now seemed to many a spacious way to heaven, down which
walked the elect of the Lord in a way literally narrow, and literally
steep, and literally closed with a gate at which few, very few, went in.
A full hour too soon they began to arrive, strange quaint figures some
of them, gathered from the nooks and corners of the old town. They
arrived in twos and threes--the children's children of the young plants
of grace who saw Claverhouse ride down the West Bow on his way to
Killiecrankie. As far as Leith walk you might know them, bent a little,
mostly coopers in the Trongate, wrights in the Kirk Wynd, ships'
carpenters at the Port. They had their little "King's Printer" Bibles
in the long tails of their blue coats--for black had not yet come in to
make uniform all the congregations of every creed. But the mistress,
walking a little behind, carried her Bible decently wrapped in a white
napkin along with a sprig of southern-wood.
All that Sabbath day there hung, palpable and almost visible, about
Nixon's Wynd a sweet savour as of "Naphtali," and the Persecutions, and
Last Testimonies in the Grassmarket; but in the shrine itself there was
nothing grim, but only graciousness and consolation and the sense of the
living presence of the Hope of Israel. For our Doctor was there sitting
throned among his elders. The sun shone through the narrow windows, and
just over the wall, it it were your good fortune to be near those on the
left-hand side, you could see the top of the Martyrs' monument in the
kirkyard of Old Greyfriars.
It was great to see the Doctor on such days, great to hear him.
Beneath, the white cloths glimmered fair on the scarred bookboards,
bleached clean in honour of the breaking of holy bread. The silver cups,
ancient as Drumclog and Shalloch, so they said, shone on the table of
communion, and we all looked at them when the Doctor said the solemn and
mysterious words, "wine on the lees well refined."
For there are no High Churchmen so truly high as the men of the little
protesting covenanting remnants of the Reformation Kirk of Scotland;
none so jealous in guarding the sacraments; none that can weave about
them such a mantle of awe and reverence.
The Doctor was concluding his after-table address. Very reverend and
noble he looked, his white hair falling down on his shoulders, his hands
ever and anon wavering to a blessing, his voice now rising sonorous as a
trumpet, but mostly of flute-like sweetness, in keeping with his words.
He never spoke of any subject but one on such a day. That was, the love
of Christ.
"Fifty-one summer communions have I been with you in this place," so he
concluded, "breaking the bread and speaking the word. Fifty-one years
to-day is it since my father took me by the hand and led me up yonder to
sit by his side. Few there be here in the flesh this day who saw that.
But there are some. Of such I see around me three--Henry Walker, and
Robert Armstrong, and John Malcolm. It is fitting that those who saw
the beginning should see the end."
At these words a kind of sough passed over the folk. You have seen the
wind passing over a field of ripe barley. Well, it was like that. From
my place in the gallery I could see set faces whiten, shoulders suddenly
stoop, as the whole congregation bent forward to catch every word. A
woman sobbed. It was Isobel Swan. The white faces turned angrily as if
to chide a troublesome child.
"It has come upon me suddenly, dear friends," the Doctor went on, "even
as I hope that Death itself will. Sudden as any death it hath been, and
more bitter. For myself I was not conscious of failing energies, of
natural strength abated. But you, dear friends, have seen clearer than
I the needs of the Kirk of the Covenants. One hundred and six years
Marcus Lawtons have ministered in this place. From to-day they shall
serve tables no more. Once--and not so long ago, it seems, looking
back--I had a son of my body, a plant reared amid hopes and prayers and
watered with tears. The Lord gave. The Lord took. Blessed be the name
of the Lord."
There ensued a silence, deep, still--yet somehow also throbbing,
expectant. Isobel Swan did not sob again. She had hidden her face.
"And now my last word. After fifty-one years of service in this place,
it is hard to come to the end of the hindmost furrow, to drop the hand
from the plough, never more to go forth in the morning as the sower
sowing precious seed."
"_No--no--no!_"
It was not only Isobel Swan now, but the whole congregation. Here and
there, back and forth subdued, repressed, ashamed, but irresistible, the
murmur ran; but the doctor's voice did not shake.
"Fifty-one years of unworthy service, my friends--what of that?--a
moment in the eternity of God. Never again shall I meet you here as
your minister; but I charge you that when we meet in That Day you will
bear me witness whe her I have loved houses or lands, or father or
mother or wife or children better than you! And now, fare you well.
The memory of bygone communions, of hours of refreshment and prayer in
this sacred place, of death-beds blessed and unforgotten in your homes
shall abide with me as they shall abide with you. The Lord send among
you a worthier servant than Marcus Lawton, your fellow-labourer and
sometime minister. Again, and for the last time, fare you well!"
* * * * *
It was a strange communion. The silver cups still stood on the table,
battered, but glistening. The plates of bread that had been blessed were
beside them. The elders sat around. A low inarticulate murmur of agony
travelled about the little kirk as the Doctor sat down and covered his
face with his hands, as was his custom after pronouncing the
benediction.
Then in the strange hush uprose the tall angular form of William Gilmour
from the midst of the Session, his bushy eye-brows working and
twitching.
"Oh, sir," he said, in forceful jerks of speech, "dinna leave us. I
signed the paper under a misapprehension. The Lord forgive me! I
withdraw my name. Jacob Gullibrand may dischairge me if he likes!"
He sat down as abruptly as he had risen.
Then there was a kind of commotion all over the congregation. One after
another rose and spoke after their kind, some vehemently, some with
shamed faces.
"And I!" "And I!" "And I!" cried a dozen at a time. "Bide with us,
Doctor! We cannot want you! Pray for us!"
Then Henry Walker, the white-haired, sharp-featured treasurer and
precentor of Nixon's Wynd, stretched out his hand. The Doctor had been
speaking, as is the custom, not from the pulpit, but from the communion
table about which the elders sat. He had held the Gullibrand manifesto
in his hand; but ere he lifted them up in his final blessing he had
dropped it.
Henry Walker took it and stood up.
"Is it your will that I tear this paper? Those contrary keep their
seats--those agreeable STAND UP!"
As one man the whole congregation stood up.
All, that is, save Jacob Gullibrand. He sat a moment, and then amid a
silence which could be felt, he rose and staggered out like a man
suddenly smitten with sore sickness. He never set foot in Nixon's Wynd
again.
Henry Walker waited till the door had closed upon the Troubler of
Israel, the paper still in his hand. Then very solemnly he tore it into
shreds and trampled them under foot.
He waited a moment for the Doctor to speak, but he did not.
"And you, also, will withdraw your resignation and stay with us?" he
said.
The Doctor could not answer in words; but he nodded his head. It was,
indeed, the desire of his heart. Then in a loud and surprising
voice--jubilant, and yet with a kind of godly anger in it, Henry Walker
gave out the closing psalm.
"All people that on earth do dwell,
Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice;
Him serve with mirth, His praise forthtell,
Come ye before Him and rejoice!"
*CARNATION'S MORNING JOY*
This is the story of the little white-washed cottage at the top of the
brae a mile or so before you come into Cairn Edward. It is a love
story, a simple and uneventful one, quickly told.
The cottage is not now what it was--I fear to say how many years
ago--when I was wont to drive in to the Cameronian Kirk on summer
Sabbaths in the red farm cart. Then not only I, but every one used to
watch from far for the blue waft of reek going up as we sighted the
white gable-end far away.
"Carnation's Cottage!" we used to call it, and even my father,
Cameronian elder as he was, smiled when he passed it.
It was so named because a girl once lived there whose fame for worth and
beauty had travelled very far. Her name was Carnation Maybold, a
combination which at once tells its tale of no countryside origin.
Carnation's father was a railroad engineer who had come from England and
married a farmer's daughter in a neighbouring parish. Then when
Carnation's mother died in childbirth, he had called his one daughter by
the name of his wife's favourite flower.
"What for do ye no caa' her Jessie like her mither?" said the ancient
dame who had come to keep his house.
"Because I never want to hear that name again!" Engineer Maybold had
said. For he had been wrapped up in his wife.
Carnation Maybold lost her father, the imaginative man and second-rate
engineer, when she was thirteen, a tall slim slip of a girl, with a face
like a flower and a cheek that already had upon it the blush of her
name. Old Tibbie Lockhart dwelt with her, and defenced the orphan maid
about more securely than a city set with walls. The girl went a mile to
the Cairn Edward Academy, where she was already in the first girls'
class, and John Charles Morrison carried the green bag which held her
books. In addition to this, being strongly built, he thrashed any boy
who laughed at him for doing so. John Charles was three years older
than his girl friend, and had the distinct beginnings of a moustache in
days when Carnation still wore her hair in a long plaited tail down her
back--for in those days Gretchen braids were the fashion.
It is curious to remember that, while all the other girls were Megs and
Katies, Madges and Jennies, Carnation Maybold's first name knew no
diminutive. She was, and has remained, just Carnation. That is enough.
She was fifteen when John Charles was sent to college. After that she
carried her own books both ways. She had offers from several would-be
successors to the honourable service, but she accepted none. Besides,
she was thinking of putting her hair up.
When John Charles came home in the windy close of the following March,
the first thing he did was to put the little box which contained his
class medal into his vest pocket, and hasten down the road to meet
Carnation. His father was at market. His mother (a peevish,
complaining, prettyish woman) was in bed with sick headache, and not to
be disturbed. But there remained Carnation. The returned scholar asked
no better.
The heart of John Charles beat as he kept the wider side of the turns of
the road that he might the sooner spy her in front of him. She was only
a slip of a school girl and he a penniless student--but nevertheless his
heart beat.
Did he love her? No, he knew that he had never uttered the word in her
hearing, and that if he had, she was too young to know its meaning. She
was just Carnation--and--and, how his heart beat!
But still the wintry trees stood gaunt and spectral on either hand. He
passed them as in a dream, his soul bent on the next twist of the
red-gray sandy ribbon of road, that was flung so unscientifically about
among the copses and pastures.
There she was at last--taller, lissomer than ever, her green bag
swinging in her hand and a gay lilt of a tune upon her lips.
"Carnation!"
She did not answer him by any word. Instead, she stood silent with the
song stilled mid-flight upon her lips. She smiled happily, however, as
he came near.
"Carnation!" he cried again. And there was something shining in the
lad's eyes which she had never seen there before.
She held out the green bag. Then she turned her elbow towards him with
a certain defensive instinct.
"Here, take my books, John Charles!" she said, as if he had never been
away; and with no more than that they began to walk homeward together.
"Are you not glad to see me?" he asked presently.
"Oh, yes, indeed--very glad!" she answered, looking at the ground; "you
will be able to carry my books again, you see!"
"Who has carried them while I have been away?"
"Carried them myself!"
"For true?"
"Honour!"
John Charles breathed so long a breath that it was almost a sigh.
Carnation looked at him curiously.
"Why, you have grown a moustache," she said, smiling a quick, radiant
smile.
"And you--you are different too. What is it?" he returned, gazing
openly at her, as indeed he had been doing ever since they met. She
turned her face piquantly towards him. It was like a flower. A faint
perfume seemed to breathe about the boy, making his brain whirl.
"Not grown a moustache, anyway," Carnation said, tauntingly.
And she roguishly twirled imaginary tips between her finger and thumb.
"Let me see!" said John Charles, drawing nearer as if to examine into
the facts.
"Oh, no," said Carnation hastily, fending him off with a glance, "I'm
grown up now, and it's different! Besides----"
And she glanced behind her along the red-gray ribbon of dusty road,
along which for lack of company the March dust was dancing little jigs
of its own.
"Why different?" began John Charles, thrusting his hands deep into his
pockets.
"Well, don't you see, stupid?" she gave her head a pretty coquettish
turn, "I've got my hair up!"
* * * * *
After this they walked somewhat moodily along a while. Or, at least the
young man was moody and silent, while Carnation only smiled sedately,
and something, perhaps a certain bitter easting in the wind, made her
cheeks more fiowerlike and reminiscent of her name than ever.
"Carnation," he said at last, "why are we not to be friends any more?
Why have you grown away from me? You are three years younger--and
yet--you seem older somehow to-day--years and years older."
"Well, what more do you want--aren't you carrying my bag?"
"Tell me about yourself--what have you been doing?" He changed the
subject.
"Going to school--let me see, six twenties are a hundred and twenty.
Coming back another hundred and twenty times. Two hundred and forty
trudges, and the bag growing heavier all the time! It is quite time you
came back, John Charles!"
"Carnation, dear," with trepidation he ventured the adjective, "I have
something to show you that nobody has seen--what will you give me if I
show it you?"
"I shan't give you anything; but you can show me and see," was the
somewhat inconsequent reply.
"Come here then, by the end of the house."
They had arrived at Carnation's cottage, and the consciousness of the
eye of Tibbie Lockhart out of the kitchen window was upon the youth.
"I shan't--show it to me here!" said Carnation, swinging the bag of
books through the open front door in a casual and school-girlish manner.
"I can't. I don't want Tibbie to know about it--nobody but you must see
it!"
"Are you sure nobody has seen it--no girl in Edinburgh--nobody in Cairn
Edward?"
"No one at all--not even my mother, not since I got it. I kept it for
you, Carnation."
"Is it _very_ pretty?"
"Yes, very pretty! Come in here; you will be sorry if you don't!"
"Well, I will come--just for a moment!"
They went round to the gable of the cottage where, being sheltered from
the wind, a couple of sentinel Irish yews grew tall and erect. Between
them there was a little bower. John Charles took the little flat box
out of his pocket and opened it.
A gold class medal lay within, not fitting very well on account of a
thin blue ribbon which the proprietor had strung through a clasp at the
top.
"Oh," said Carnation with a gasp, "it _is_ lovely. Is it gold? Why, it
has your name on. It is the medal of the class. How proud your father
and mother will be!"
And she clasped her hands and gazed, but did not offer to take it in her
fingers.
"No, indeed, that they won't," said John Charles grimly; "they won't
ever know, and if they did they wouldn't care. I am not going to tell
them or any one. I won it for you. All the time I was working I kept
saying to myself, 'If I win the medal I shall give it to Carnation to
wear round her neck on a blue ribbon--because blue is her colour----'"
"Oh, but I could not!" cried the girl, going back a step or two, "I dare
not! Any one might see and read--what is written on it."
"You needn't wear it outside, Carnation," he pleaded, in a low tone;
"see, I put the ribbon through it that you might."
"It _is_ pretty"--her face had a kind of inner shining upon it, and her
eyes glittered darkly--"it was very nice of you to think about me--not
that I believe for a moment you really did. But, indeed, indeed, I
can't take it----"
The face of John Charles Morrison fell. His jaw, a singularly
determined one, began to square itself.
"Very well," he said, flirting the ribbon out of the clasp and throwing
the box on the ground, "do you see that pond down there? As sure as
daith" (he used the old school-boy oath of asseveration) "I'll throw it
in that pond if ye dinna tak' it!"
Something very like a sob came into the lad's throat.
"And I worked so hard for it. And I thought you would have liked it!"
"I do like it--I do--I do!" cried Carnation, agonised and affrayed.
"No, you don't!"
"Give it me, then--don't look!"
She turned her back upon him, and for a long moment her fingers were
busy about her neck.
"_Now!_"
She faced about, the light of a showery April in her eyes. She was
smiling and blushing at the same time. There was just a faint gleam of
blue ribbon where the division of the white collar came in front of her
throat.
John Charles recognised that the moment for which he had striven all
through the winter had come. He stooped and kissed her where she stood.
Then he turned on his heel and walked silently away, leaving her three
times Carnation and a school-girl no more.
She watched him out of sight, the vivid blush slowly fading from her
face, and then went demurely within.
"Where gat ye that ribbon wi' the wee guinea piece at the end o't?" said
guardian Tibbie that night, suggestively.
"I know; but I promised not to tell!" quoth the witch, who indeed,
twisted the shrewish-tongued old woman round her finger.
"But I think I can guess," said Tibbie shrewdly; "gin that blue ribbon
wasna coft in Edinbra toon, I'se string anither gowden guinea upon it!"
But Carnation Maybold only smiled and pouted her lips, as if at a
pleasant memory.
* * * * *
From sixteen to twenty-six is more than a full half of the period of
life to which we give the name of girlhood. But at twenty-six Carnation
Maybold was Carnation Maybold still. Yet there had been no breaking
off, no failure in the steadfastness of that early affection which had
sent John Charles along the dusty road to carry the school-bag of green
baize.
But the medallist never returned to college. During the early falling
twilight of the next Hint-o'-Hairst (or end of harvest), his father,
Gawain Morrison, driving homeward from market all too mellow, brake
neck-bone over the crags of the Witch's pool.
So, his mother being a feeble woman, though still young and buxom, John
Charles had perforce to bide at home and shoulder the responsibilities
of a farm of two thousand pastoral acres and a rent of L800, payable
twice a year in Cairn Edward town.
It was a sore burden for such young shoulders, but John Charles had grit
in him, and, what made his heart glad, he could do most of his work, by
lea rig and pasturage, within sight of a certain cottage where dwelt the
maid with a ribbon of blue about her neck.
There was no possibility of any marriage, nor, indeed, talk of any
between them, and that for two good reasons: Gawain Morrison had died in
debt. He was "behindhand at the Bank," and his farm and stock were left
to his widow at her own disposition, unless she should marry again, in
which case they were willed to his son John Charles Morrison, presently
student of arts in the University of Edinburgh. The will had been made
during the one winter that son had spent away from home.
John Charles' bitter hour in the bank at Cairn Edward was sweetened by
the sympathy and kindliness of Henry Marchbanks, who, being one of the
best judges of character in Scotland, saw cause to give this young man a
chance to discharge his father's liabilities.
At twenty-five John Charles was once more a free man, and there was a
substantial balance to his mother's credit in the bank of Cairn Edward.
Penny of his own he had not received one for all his five years' work.
But Mrs. Morrison was that most foolish of womankind--an old woman
striving to appear young. She had taken a strong dislike to the girl
mistress of the white cottage at her gates, and was never tired of
railing at her pretensions to beauty, at her lightheadedness, and at the
suitors who stayed their horses for a word or a flower from across the
cropped yew hedge of Carnation Maybold's cottage.
But John Charles, steadfast in all things, was particularly admirable in
his silences. He let his mother rail on, and then, at the quiet hour of
e'en stole down to the dyke-side for a "word." He never entered
Carnation's dwelling, nor did he even pass the girdling hedge of yew and
privet. But there was one place where the defences were worn low.
Behind the well curb occurred this breach of continuity in the dead
engineer's hedges, and to this place night after night through the
years, that quiet steadfast lover, John Charles Morrison, came to touch
the hand of his mistress.
She did not always meet him. Sometimes she had girl friends with her in
the cottage, sometimes she had been carried off to a merry-making in
Cairn Edward, to return under suitable escort in the evening.
But even then Carnation had a comfortable sense of safety, for ever
since one unforgotten night, Carnation knew that in any danger she had
only to raise her voice to bring to her rescue a certain tall
broad-shouldered ghost, which with attendant collies haunted the gray
hillsides.
That night was one on which a tramp, denied an alms, had seized the girl
by the arm within half a mile of her home. And at the voice of her
sharp crying, a different John Charles from any she had ever seen had
swung himself over the hillside dyke, and descended like an avenging
whirlwind upon the assailant.
Yet so secretive is the country lover, that few save an odd shepherd or
two of his own suspected the comradeship which existed between these
two. Carnation was in great request at concerts and church bazaars in
the little neighbouring town; she even went to a local "assembly" or two
every winter, under the sheltering wing of a school friend who had
married early.
John Charles did not dance, so he was not asked to these. He was
thought, indeed, to be rather a grave young fellow, busied with his farm
and his books. No one connected his name with that of his fair and
sprightly neighbour.
Yet somehow, in spite of many opportunities, Carnation Maybold did not
marry. She was bright, cultivated, winsome, and certainly the prettiest
girl for miles around.
"Are you waiting for a prince?" little Mrs. George Walter, her friend of
the assemblies, had said to her more than once.
"Yes," smiled Carnation, "the true Prince!"
"I suppose that is why you always wear a ribbon of true blue?" retorted
her friend. "Do let me see what is at the end of it--ah, you will not.
I think you are very mean, Carnation. All is over between us from this
moment. I'm sure I came and told _you_ as soon as ever George spoke!"
"But perhaps," said Carnation quietly, "_my_ George has not yet spoken!"
"Well, if he hasn't, why don't you make him," said her friend with
vehemence, "or else why have eyes like those been thrown away upon you?"
"I have worn this nearly ten years!" said Carnation, a little wistfully.
"Carnation Maybold," said her friend indignantly, "you ought to be
ashamed! And so it was for the sake of that school-girl's split
sixpence that you refused Harry Foster, whose father has an estate of
his own, and Kenneth Walker, the surveyor, as well as--oh, I have no
patience with such silly sentiment!"
Carnation smiled even more quietly than usual.
"Gracie," she said, "if I am content, I don't see what difference it can
make to you."
"You ought to be married--you oughtn't to live alone with only an old
woman to look after you. You are wasting the best years of your
life----"
"Gracie, dear," said Carnation, "you mean to be kind; but I ask you not
to say any more about this. There are worse things that may happen to a
woman, than that she should wait and wait--aye, even if she should die
waiting!"
* * * * *
It was the evening of the August day on which Mrs. Walter had spoken
thus to Carnation that John Charles came cottagewards slowly and
gloomily. He had been thinking bitter thoughts, and at last had taken a
resolve that was likely to cost him dear.
In the warm light of evening the girl, who stood at the farther side of
the gap, seemed wondrously beautiful. The school-girl look had long
since passed away. Only the fresh rose on the cheeks, the depths in the
eyes (as if a cloud shadowed them), the lissom bend of the young body
towards him were the same. But the hair was waved and plaited about the
head in a larger and nobler fashion. The contours were a little fuller,
and the lips, perfect as ever in shape, were stiller, and the smile on
them at once more assured and more sedate.
"Carnation, I cannot hold you any longer to your promise!"
"And why not, John; are you tired of me?"
"I am not one of those who grow tired, dear," the young man's voice was
so low none could hear it but the one listener. "I will never grow
tired--you know that. But I waste the best years of your life. You are
beautiful, and the time is passing. You might marry any one----"
"Have you any particular one in your mind?"
The question at once spurred and startled him. He moved his feet on the
soft grass of the meadow with a certain embarrassment.
"Yes, Carnation; my mother was speaking to me to-night of Harry Foster
of Carnsalloch. His father has told her of his love for you. She says I
am keeping you from accepting him. I have come to release you from any
promise, Carnation, spoken or implied."
"There is no promise, John--save that I love you, and will never marry
any one else."
"But if I went away you might--you might change your mind. I am
thinking of West Australia! I am making nothing of it here. All is as
much my mother's as it was the day my father died! I can get her a good
'grieve' to take charge, and go in the spring!"
The girl winced a little, but did not speak for a while.
"Well," she said at last, "you must do as you think best. I shall wait
all the same. Thank God, there is no law against a woman waiting."
"Carnation, do you mean it?"
The gap was a gap still; but both the lovers were on one side of it, and
the night was dark about them. Indeed, they were so close each to the
other that there was no need of light.
"If I go, I shall make a home for you!"
"However long it is, I shall be ready when you want me!"
"Carnation!"
"John!"
And so, as it was in the beginning, the old, old tale was retold beneath
the breathing rustle of the orchard trees.
Yet their hearts were sore when they parted, because the springtime was
so near, and the home they longed for seemed so very far.
* * * * *
Carnation slept in a little garret room with a gable window. She had
chosen it, because she liked to look down on John Charles' fields and on
the low place in the hedge where he always stood waiting for her.
The waning moon had risen late, and Carnation undressed without a
candle. Having said her prayers, she stole into bed. But sleep would
not come, and, her heart being right sore within her, the tears forced
up her eyelids instead, as it is woman's safety that they should.
She lay and sobbed her heart out because John was going away. But
through the tears that wet her pillow certain words she had been singing
in the choir on Sunday forced themselves:--
"Weeping may endure for a night,
But joy cometh in the morning."
Nevertheless, Carnation must have sobbed herself to sleep, for it was
nigh the dawn when she was awakened by something that flicked her
lattice at regular intervals. It could not be a bird. It was too sharp
and regular for that.
Could it be----?
Impossible!
He had never come before at such a time! If it were indeed he, there
must be some terrible news to tell.
Carnation rose hastily, and threw a loose cloak about her shoulders.
Then she went and opened the little French lattice with the criss-cross
diamond panes. The dawn was coming slowly up out of the east, and the
gray fields were turning rosy beneath her.
A dark figure filled up the low place in the hedge.
"Carnation, I had something to tell you!"
"Is it bad news? I cannot bear it, if it is."
"No, the best of news! I am not going at Whitsunday to Australia. My
mother told me last night that she is to be married at the New Year. He
is a rich man--Harry Foster's father. She is going to live at
Carnsalloch."
"Well?" said Carnation, doubtfully, not seeing all that this sudden
change meant to them both.
"Why, then, dearest," the voice of John Charles Morrison shook with
emotion, "we can be married as soon as we like after that. The farm and
everything on it is ours--yours and mine!"
Carnation's brain reeled, and she found herself without a word to say.
Only the sound of the happy singing ran in her head:
"_Joy cometh in the morning--joy cometh in the morning!_"
"Why don't you speak, Carnation? Are you not glad?"
The voice down at the gap was anxious now.
"I am too far away from you to say anything, but I am glad, very glad,
dear John!"
"You will be ready by Whitsunday?"
"I shall be ready by Whitsunday!"
There was a pause. The light came clearer in the east. John Charles
could see the girl's fresh complexion thrown up by the dark cloak, an
edging of lace, white and dainty, just showing beneath.
"Carnation, I wish I could kiss you!" he said.
"Will this do instead?" she answered him, smiling through the wetness of
her eyes.
And she lifted up the old worn class medal she had carried so long on
its blue ribbon, and kissed it openly.
And that had perforce to "do" John Charles--at least, for that time of
asking.
*JAIMSIE*
As I drove home the other day I saw that old lazybones Jacob Irving
seated in the sun with a whole covey of boys round him. He had his
pocket-knife in his hand, and was busy mending a "gird." The "gird," or
wooden hoop, belonged to Will Bodden, and its precedence in medical
treatment had been secured by Will's fists. There was quite a little
hospital ward behind, of toys all awaiting diagnosis in strict order of
primacy.
Here was Dick Dobie with a new blade to put into his shilling knife. A
shilling knife, Jacob assured him, is not fitted for cutting down
fishing rods. It is however, excellent as a saw when used on smaller
timber. Next came Peter Cheesemonger, who was in waiting with a model
schooner, the rising of which had met with an accident. And there
hurrying down from the cottage on the Brae, was one of the younger Allan
lasses with her mother's "wag-at-the-wa'" clock. The pendulum had
wagged to such purpose that it had swung itself out of its right mind.
After I had left behind me this vision of old Jacob Irving seated on the
wall of the boys' playground at the village school, I fell into a muse
upon the narrowness of the line which in our Scottish parishes, divides
the "Do-Everythings" from the "Do-Nothings."
I could give myself the more completely to this train of thought that I
had finished my rounds for the day, and had now nothing to do except to
look forward to seeing Nance, and to the excellent dinner for which the
shrewd airs of the moorland were providing internal accommodation of
quite a superior character.
The conditions of Scottish life are generally so strenuous, and the
compulsions of "He that will not work, neither shall he eat" so absolute
that we cannot afford more than one local Do-Nothing in a village or
rural community. Equally certainly, however, one is necessary. The
business of the commonwealth could not be carried on without him.
Besides, he is needed to point the indispensable moral.
"There's that guid-for-naething Jacob Irvin' sittin' wi' a' the
misleared boys o' the neighbourhood aboot him!" I can hear a douce
goodwife say to her gossip. "Guid peety his puir wife and bairns!
Guidman, lay ye doon that paper an awa' to your wark, or ye'll sune be
nae better--wi' your Gledstane and your speeches and your smokin'!
Think shame o' yersel', guidman."
As the community grows larger, however, there is less and less room for
the amiable Do-Nothing. He is, indeed, only seen to perfection in a
village or rural parish. In Cairn Edward, for instance which thinks
itself quite a town, he does not attain the general esteem and almost
affectionate reprobation which, in my native Whinnyliggate, follow Jacob
Irving about like his shadow.
In a town like Cairn Edward a local Do-Nothing is apt to attach himself
to a livery stable, and there to acquire a fine coppery nose and a
permanent "dither" about the knees. He is spoken of curtly and even
disrespectfully as "that waister Jock Bell." In cities he becomes a
mere matter for the police, and the facetious reporter chronicles his
two-hundredth appearance before the magistrate.
But in Whinnyliggate, in Dullarg, in Crosspatrick, and in the
surrounding parishes, the conditions for the growth of the Do-Nothing
approach as near perfection as anything merely mundane can be expected
to do. Jacob Irving is hardly a typical specimen, for he has a trade.
The genuine Do-Nothing should have none. It is true that Jacob's
children might reply, like the boy when asked if his father were a
Christian, "Yes, but he does not work at it much!"
Jacob is a shoe-maker--or rather shoe-mender. For I have never yet been
able to trace an entire pair of Jacob's foot-gear on any human
extremities. It does not fit his humour to be so utilitarian. He has,
however, made an excellent toy pair for the feet of little Jessie
Lockhart's doll, with soles, heels, uppers, tongues, and lacing gear all
complete. He spent, to my personal knowledge, an entire morning in
showing her (on the front step of her father's manse) how to take them
off and put them on again. And in the future he will never meet Jessie
on the King's highway without stopping and gravely asking her if any
repairs are yet requisite. When such are necessary they will, without
doubt, receive his best attention.
I had not, however, made a study of Jacob Irving for any considerable
period without exploding the vulgar opinion that the parish Do-Nothing
is an idle or a lazy man. Nay, to repeat my initial paradox, the
Do-Nothing is the only genuine Do-Everything.
When on a recent occasion I gave Jacob, in return for the pleasure of
his conversation, a "lift" in my doctor's gig, he talked to me very
confidentially of his "rounds." At first I imagined in my ignorance
that, like the tailors of the parishes round about, he went from farm to
farm prosecuting his calling and cobbling the shoes of half the
countryside. I was buttressed in this opinion by his expressed pity or
contempt for wearers of "clogs."
"Here's anither puir body wi' a pair o' clogs on his feet," Jacob would
say; "and to think that for verra little mair than the craitur paid for
them, I wad fit him wi' as soond a pair o' leather-soled shoon as were
ever ta'en frae amang tanners' bark!"
I had also seen him start out with a thin-bladed cobbler's knife and the
statutory piece of "roset" or resin wrapped in a palm's-breadth of soft
leather. But, alas, all was a vain show. The knife was to be used in
delicate surgical work upon the deceased at a pig-killing, and the resin
was for splicing fishing-rods.
After a while I began by severe study to get to the bottom of a
Do-Nothing's philosophy. To do the appointed task for the performance
of which duty calls, man waits, and money will be paid, that is work to
be avoided by every means--by procrastination, by fallacious promise, by
prevarication, and (sad to have to say it) by the plainest of plain
lying.
Whatever brings in money in the exercise of a trade, whatever must be
finished within a given time, that needs the co-operation of others or
prolonged and consecutive effort on his own part, is merely anathema to
the Do-Nothing.
On the other hand, no house in the parish is too distant for him to
attend at the "settin' o' the yaird" (the delving must, however, be done
previously). On such occasions the Do-Nothing revels in long wooden
pins with string wrapped mysteriously about them. He can turn you out
the neatest shaped bed of "onions" and "syboes," the straightest rows of
cabbages, and potato drills so level that the whole household feels that
it must walk the straight path in order not to shame them. The wayfaring
man though a fool, looks over the dyke, and says: "Thae dreels are
Jacob's--there's nane like them in the countryside!"
This at least is Jacob's way of it.
But though all this is by the way of introduction to the particular
Do-Nothing I have in my eye, it is not of Jacob that I am going to
write. Jacob is indeed an enticing subject, and from the point of view
of his wife, might be treated very racily. But, though I afterwards
made Margate Irving's acquaintance (and may one day put her opinions on
record), I have other and higher game in my mind.
This is none other than the Reverend James Tacksman, B.A., licentiate of
the Original Marrow Kirk of Scotland. In fact, a clerical Do-Nothing of
the highest class.
Now, to begin with, I will aver that there is no scorn in all this.
"Jaimsie" is more to me than many worthy religious publicists,
beneficed, parished, churched, stipended, and sustentationed to the
eyes. He was not a very great man. He was in no sense a successful
man, but--he was "Jaimsie."
I admit that my zeal is that of the pervert. It was not always thus
with me when "Jaimsie" was alive, and perhaps my enthusiasm is so
full-bodied from a sense that it is impossible for the gentle
probationer to come and quarter himself upon Nance and myself for (say)
a period of three months in the winter season, a thing he was quite
capable of doing when in the flesh.
In the days before I was converted to higher views of human nature as
represented in the person of "Jaimsie," I was even as the vulgar with
regard to him. I admit it. I even openly scoffed, and retailed to many
the story of Jamie and my father, Saunders McQuhirr of Drumquhat, with
which I shall conclude. I used to tell it rather well at college, the
men said. At least they laughed sufficiently. But now I shall not try
to add, alter, amend, or extenuate, as is the story-teller's wont with
his favourites. For in sackcloth and ashes I have repented me, and am
at present engaged in making my honourable amend to "Jaimsie."
For almost as long as I can remember the Reverend James Tacksman, B.A.,
was in the habit of coming to my father's house, and the news that he
was in view on the "far brae-face" used to put my mother into such a
temper that "dauded" heads and cuffed ears were the order of the day.
The larger fry of us cleared out promptly to the barn and stack-yard
till the first burst of the storm was over. Even my father, accustomed
as he was to carry all matters ecclesiastical with a high hand, found it
convenient to have some harness to clean in the stable, or the lynch-pin
of a cart to replace in the little joiner's shop where he passed so much
of his time.
"I'll no hae the craitur aboot the hoose," my mother would cry; "I
telled ye sae the last time he was here--sax weeks in harvest it
was--and then had maist to be shown the door. (Haud oot o' my road,
weans! Can ye no keep frae rinnin' amang my feet like sae mony collie
whaulps? Tak' ye that!) Hear ye this, guidman, if ye willna speak to
the man, by my faith I wull. Mary McQuhirr is no gaun to hae the bread
ta'en oot o' the mooths o' her innocent bairns----(Where in the name o'
fortune, Alec, are ye gaun wi' that soda bannock? Pit it doon this
meenit, or I'll tak' the tings to ye!). Na, nor I will be run aff my
feet to pleesure ony sic useless, guid-for-naething seefer as Jaimsie
Tacksman!"
At this moment a faint rapping made itself audible at the front door,
never opened except on the highest state occasions, as when the minister
called, and at funerals.
My mother (I can see her now) gave a hasty "tidy" to her gray hair and
adjusted her white-frilled "mutch" about her still winsome brow.
"_And hoo are ye the day, Maister Tacksman, an' it's a lang, lang season
since we've had the pleasure o' a veesit frae you!_"
Could that indeed be my mother's voice, so lately upraised in
denunciation over a stricken and cowering world? I could not understand
it then, and to tell the truth I don't quite yet. I have, however,
asked her to explain, and this is what she says:
"Weel, ye see, Alec, it was this way" (she is pleased when I require any
points for my "scribin'," though publicly she scoffs at them and
declares it will ruin my practice if the thing becomes known), "ye see I
had it in my mind to the last minute to deny the craitur. But when I
gaed to open the door, there stood Jaimsie wi' his wee bit shakin' hand
oot an' his threadbare coatie hingin' laich aboot his peetifu' spindle
shanks, and his weel-brushit hat, an' the white neck-claith that wanted
doin' up. And I kenned that naebody could laundry it as weel as me. My
fingers juist fair yeukit (itched) to be at the starchin' o't. And
faith, maybes there was something aboot the craitur too--he was sae
cruppen in upon himsel', sae wee-bookit, sae waesome and yet kindly
aboot the e'en, that I juist couldna say him nay."
That is my mother's report of her feelings in the matter. She does not
add that the ten minutes or quarter of an hour in which she had been
able to give the fullest and most public expression to her feelings had
allowed most of the steam of indignation to blow itself off. My father,
who was a good judge, gave me, early in my married life, some excellent
advice on this very point, which I subjoin for the edification of the
general public.
"Never bottle a woman up, Alec," he said, meditatively. "What Vesuvius
and Etna and thae ither volcanoes are to this worl', the legeetimate
exercise o' her tongue is to a woman. It's a naitural function, Alec.
Ye may bridle the ass or the mule, but--gie the tongue o' a woman (as it
were) plenty o' elbow-room! Gang oot o' the hoose--like Moses to the
backside o' the wilderness gin ye like, and when ye come in she will be
as quaite as pussy; and if ever ye hae to contradick your mairried wife,
Alec, let it be in deeds, no in words. Gang your road gin ye hae made
up your mind, immovable like the sun, the mune, and the stars o' heeven
in their courses--but, as ye value peace dinna be aye crying' 'Aye,'
when your wife cries 'No'!"
Which things may be wisdom. But to the tale of our Jaimsie.
Sometimes, moreover, even the natural man in my kindly and
long-suffering father uprose against the preacher. Jaimsie knew when he
was comfortable, and no mere hint of any delicate sort would make him
curtail his visit by one day. I can remember him creeping about the farm
of Drumquhat all that summer, a book in his hand, contemplating the
works of God as witnessed chiefly in the growth of the "grosarts." (We
always blamed him--quite unjustly, I believe--for eating the
"silver-gray" gooseberries on the sly.) Now he would stand half an hour
and gaze up among the branches of an elm, where a cushat was tirelessly
_coorooring_ to his mate. Anon you would see him apparently deeply
engaged in counting the sugar-plums in the orchard. After a little he
would be found seated on the red shaft of a cart in the stackyard,
jotting down in a shabby notebook ideas for the illustrations of sermons
never to be written; or if written, doomed never to be preached. His
hat was always curled up at the back and pulled down at the front, and
till my mother made down an old pair of my father's Sunday trousers for
him (and put them beside his bed while he slept), you could see in a
good light the reflection of your hand on the knees of his "blacks." It
is scarcely necessary to say that Jaimsie never referred to the
transposition, nor, indeed, in all probability, so much as discovered
it.
Jaimsie was used to conduct family worship morning and evening in the
house of his sojourn, as a kind of quit-rent for his meal of meat and
his prophet's chamber. To the ordinary reading of the Word he was wont
to subjoin an "exposeetion" of some disputed or prophetical passage. The
whole exercises never took less than an hour, if Jaimsie were left to
the freedom of his own will--which, as may be inferred, was extremely
awkward in a busy season when the corn was dry in the stock or when the
scythes flashed rhythmically like level silver flames among the lush
meadow grass.
Finally, therefore, a compromise had to be effected. My father took the
morning diet of worship, but Jaimsie had his will of us in the evening.
I can see them yet--those weariful sederunts, when even my father
wrestled with sleep like Samson with the Philistines, while my mother
periodically nodded forward with a lurch, and, recovering herself with a
start, the next moment looked round haughtily to see which of us was
misbehaving. Meanwhile the kitchen was all dark, save where before
Jaimsie the great Bible lay open between two candles, and on the hearth
the last peat of the evening glowed red.
Many is the fine game of draughts I have had with my brother Rob and
Christie Wilson our herd lad, by putting the "dam-brod" behind the
chimney jamb where my father and mother could not see it, and moving the
pieces by the light of the red peat ash. I am ashamed to think on it
now, but then it seemed the only thing to do which would keep us from
sleep.
And meantime Jaimsie prosed on, his gentle sing-song working its wicked
work on mother like a lullaby, and my father sending his nails into the
palms of his hands that he might not be shamed before us all.
I remember particularly how Jaimsie addressed us for a whole week on his
favourite text in he Psalms, "The hill of God is as the hill of
Bashan--an high hill, as the hill of Bashan."
And in the pauses of crowning our men and scuffling for the next place
at the draught board, we could catch strange words and phrases which
come to me yet with a curious wistful thrilling of the heart. Such are
"White as snow on Salmon"--"That mount Sinai in Arabia"--"Ye mountains
of Gilboa, let there be no dew, neither let there be rain upon you, nor
fields of offering."
And as a concluding of the whole matter we sang this verse out of
Francis Roos's psalter:
"Ye mountains great, wherefore was it
That ye did skip like rams?
And wherefore was it, little hills,
That ye did leap like lambs?"
It was all double-Dutch to me then, but now I can see that Jaimsie must
have been marshalling the mountains of Scripture to bear solemn witness
against an evil and exceedingly somnolent generation.
Once when my mother snored audibly Jaimsie looked up, but at that very
moment she awoke, and with great and remarkable presence of mind
promptly cuffed Rob, who in his turn knocked the draught-board endways,
just as I had his last man cornered, to our everlasting disgrace.
My mother asked us next day pointedly where we thought we were going to,
and if we were of opinion that there would be any dam-brods in hell. I
offered no remarks, but Rob--who was always an impudent boy--got on the
other side of the dyke from my mother and answered that there would be
no snorers there either.
From an early age he was a lad of singularly sound judgments, my brother
Rob. He stayed out in the barn till after my mother was asleep that
night.
At last, however, even my father grew tired of Jaimsie. He stayed full
three months on this occasion. Autumnal harvest fields were bared of
stooks, the frost began to glisten on the stiff turnip shaws, the
wreathed nets were put up for the wintering sheep, and still the
indefatigable Jaimsie stayed on.
I remember yet the particular morning when, at long and last, Jaimsie
left us. All night almost there had been in the house the noise as of a
burn running over hollow stones, with short solid interruptions like the
sound of a distant mallet stricken on wood. It came from my father's
and mother's room. I knew well what it meant. The sound like running
water was my mother trying to persuade my father to something against
his will, and the far-away mallet thuds were his mono-syllabic replies.
This time it was my mother who won.
After the harvest bustle was over, Jaimsie had resumed his practice of
taking worship in the mornings, but any of us who had urgent work on
hand could obtain, by proper representation, a dispensing ordinance.
These were much sought after, especially when Jaimsie started to tackle
the Book of Daniel "in his ordinary," as he phrased it.
But this Monday morning, to the general surprise, my father sat down in
the chair of state himself and reached the Bible from the shelf.
"I will take family worship this morning, Mr. Tacksman," he said, with
great sobriety.
Then we knew that something extraordinary was coming, and I was glad I
had not "threeped" to my mother that I had seen some of the Nether Neuk
sheep in our High Park--which would have been quite true, for I had put
them there myself on purpose the night before.
It was during the prayer that the blow fell. My father had a peculiarly
distinct and solemn way with him in supplication; and now the words fell
distinct as hammer strokes on our ear.
He prayed for the Church of God in all covenanted lands; for all
Christian peoples of every creed (here Jaimsie, faithful Abdiel, always
said "Humph"); for the heathen without God and without hope; for the
family now present and for those of the family afar off. Then, as was
his custom, he approached the stranger (who was no stranger) within our
gates.
"And do Thou, Lord, this day vouchsafe journeying mercies to Thy servant
who is about to leave us. Grant him favourable weather for his
departure, good speed on his way, and a safe return to his own country!"
A kind of gasping sigh went all about the kitchen. I knew that my
mother had her eye on my father to keep him to his pledged word of the
night season. So I dared not look round.
But we all ached to know how Jaimsie would take it, and we all joined
fervently in the supplication which promised us a couple of hours more
added to our day.
Then came the Amen, and all rose to their feet. Jaimsie seemed a little
dazed, but took the matter like a scholar and a gentleman.
He held out his hand to my father with his usual benevolent smile.
"I did not know that I had mentioned it," he said, "but I was thinking
of leaving you to-day."
And that was all he said, but forthwith went upstairs to pack his shabby
little black bag.
My father stood a while as if shamed; then, when we heard Jaimsie's feet
trotting overhead, he turned somewhat grimly to my mother. On his face
was an expression as if he had just taken physic.
"Well," he said, "you will be easier in your mind now, Mary." This he
said, well knowing that the rat of remorse was already getting his
incisors to work upon his wife's conscience. She stamped her foot.
"Saunders McQuhirr," she said in suppressed tones, "to be a Christian
man, ye are the maist aggrevatin'----"
But at that moment my father went out through the door, saying no
further word.
My mother shooed us all out of the house like intrusive chickens, and I
do not know for certain what she did next. But Rob, looking through the
blind of the little room where she kept her house-money, saw her
fumbling with her purse. And when at last Jaimsie, having addressed his
bag to be sent with the Carsphairn carrier into Ayrshire (where dwelt
the friends next on his visiting list), came out with his staff in one
hand, he was dabbing his eyes with a clean handkerchief.
Then, after that, all that I remember is the pathetic figure of the
little probationer lifting up a hand in silent blessing upon the house
which had sheltered him so long; and so taking his lonely way over the
hillside towards the northern coach road.
When my father came in from the sheep at mid-day, he waited till grace
was over, and then, looking directly at my mother, he said: "Weel, Mary,
how mony o' your pound notes did he carry away in his briest-pocket this
time?"
I shall never forget the return and counter retort which followed. My
mother was vexed--one of the few times that I can remember seeing her
truly angered with her husband.
"I would give you one advice, Saunders McQuhirr," she said, "and that
is, from this forth, to be mindful of your own business."
"I will tak' that advice, Mary," he answered slowly; "but my heart is
still sore within me this day because I took the last advice you gied
me!"
* * * * *
And it was destined to be yet sorer for that same cause. Jaimsie never
was within our doors again. He abode in Ayrshire and the Upper Ward all
that winter and spring, and it was not till the following back-end, and
in reply to a letter and direct invitation from my conscience-stricken
father, that he announced that, all being well and the Lord gracious, he
would be with us the following Friday.
But on the Thursday night a great snow storm came on, and the drift
continued long unabated. We all said that Jaimsie would doubtless be
safely housed, and we did not look for him to arrive upon the day of his
promise. However, by Monday, when the coach was again running, my
mother began to be anxious, and all the younger of us went forth to try
and get news of him. We heard that he had left Carsphairn late on the
Thursday forenoon, meaning to stop overnight at the shepherd's shieling
at the southern end of Loch Dee. But equally certainly he had never
reached it.
It was not till Tuesday morning early that Jaimsie was found under a
rock near the very summit of the Dungeon hill, his plaid about him and
his frozen hand clasping his pocket Bible. It was open, and his
favourite text was thrice underscored.
"_The hill of God is as the hill of Bashan; an high hill, as the hill of
Bashan._"
Well, there is no doubt that the little forlorn "servant of God" has
indeed gotten some new light shed upon the text, since the dark hour
when he sat down to rest his weary limbs upon the snow-clad summit of
the Dungeon of Buchan.
*BEADLE AND MARTYR*
I sometimes give it as a reason for a certain lack of uniformity in
church attendance, that I cannot away with the new-fangled organs,
hymns, and chaunts one meets with there. I love them not, in
comparison, that is, with the old psalm tunes. They do not make the
heart beat quicker and more proudly, like Kilmarnock and Coleshill, Duke
Street and Old 124th.
Nance, however, is so far left to herself as to say that this is only an
excuse, and that my real reason is the pleasure I have in thinking that
all the people must perforce listen to a sermon, while I can put my feet
upon another chair and read anything I like. This, however, is rank
insult, such as only wives long wedded dare to indulge in. Besides, it
shows, by its imputation of motives, to what lengths a sordid and
ill-regulated imagination will go.
Moreover, I have never grown accustomed to the hours of town churches,
and I consider, both from a medical and from a spiritual point of view,
that afternoon services in town churches are directly responsible for
the spread of indigestion, as well as of a spirit of religious
infidelity throughout our beloved land.
(Nance is properly scandalised at this last remark, and says that she
hopes people will understand that I only believe about half of what I
put down on paper when I get a pen in my hand. She complains that she
is often asked to explain some of my positions at afternoon teas. I say
it serves her right for attending such gatherings of irresponsible
gossip, tempered with boiled tannin. It is easy to have the last word
with Nance--here.)
But after all the chief thing that I miss when I go to church is just
Willie McNair.
The sermon is nowadays both shorter and better. The singing is good of
its kind, and I can always read a psalm or a paraphrase if the hymn
prove too long, or, as is often the case, rather washy in sentiment.
The children's address is really designed for children, and the prayers
do not exceed five minutes in length. But--I look in vain for Willie
McNair.
Alas! Willie lies out yonder on the green knowe, his wife Betty by his
side, and four feet of good black mould over his coffin-lid.
Willie was just our beadle, and he had a story. When I am setting down
so many old things, if I forget thee, Willie McNair, may my right hand
forget his cunning.
Ah, Willie, though you never were a "church-officer," though you never
heard the Word, it is you, you alone that I miss. I just cannot think
of the kirk without you. Grizzled, gnarled, bow-shouldered of
week-days, what a dignity of port, what a solemnising awe, what a
processional tread was thine on Sabbaths! We had only one service in
the Kirk on the Hill in my youth. But, speaking in the vulgar tongue,
that one was a "starcher."
It included the "prefacing" of a psalm, often extending over quite as
long a period of time as an ordinary modern sermon, a "lecture," which
as a rule (if "himsel'" was in fettle) lasted about three quarters of an
hour. Then after that the sermon proper was begun without loss of time.
Now I cannot say, speaking "from the heart to the heart" (a favourite
expression of Willie's), that I regret the loss of all this. I was but
a boy, and the torment of having to sit still for from two hours and a
half to three hours on a hard seat, close-packed and well-watched to
keep me out of mischief, has made even matrimony seem light and easy.
How mere Episcopalians and other untrained persons get through the
sorrows and disappointments incident to human life I do not know.
It was not till the opening of the Sabbath-school by Mr. Osbourne,
however, that I came to know Willie well. Hitherto he had been as
inaccessible and awestriking as the minister's neckcloth. And of that I
have a story to tell. I think what made me a sort of advanced thinker
in these early days, was once being sent by my father to the lodgings of
the minister who was to "supply" on a certain Sabbath morning. The
manse must have been shut for repairs and "himsel'" on his holidays. At
any rate, the minister was stopping with Miss Bella McBriar in the
little white house below the Calmstone Brig. Miss Bella showed me in
with my missive, and there, on the morning of the Holy Day, before a
common unsanctified glass tacked to a wall, with a lathery razor in his
hand, in profane shirt-sleeves, stood the minister, shaving himself!
His neckcloth, that was to appear and shine so glorious above the
cushions of the pulpit, hung limp and ignominious over the back of a
chair. A clay pipe lay across the ends of it.
This was the beginning of the mischief, and if I ever take to a criminal
career, here was the first and primal cause.
Shortly after I went to Sabbath-school, and having been well trained by
my father in controversial divinity, and drilled by my mother in the
Catechism, I found myself in a fair way of distinguishing myself; but
for all that, I cannot truly say that I ever got over the neckcloth on
the back of Miss McBriar's chair. When I aired my free-thinking
opinions before my father, and he shut me off by an appeal to authority,
I kept silence and hugged myself.
"That may be a good enough argument," I said to myself, "but--I have
seen a minister's neckcloth hung over the back of a chair, and
shaving-soap on his chafts on Sabbath morning. How can you believe in
revealed religion after that?"
But I had so much of solid common-sense, even in these my salad days,
that I refrained from saying these things to my father. Indeed, I would
not dare to say them now, even if I believed them, Willie McNair
regarded the Sabbath-school much as I did. To both of us it was simply
an imposition.
Willie thought so for two reasons--first and generally, because it was
an innovation; and secondly, because he had to clean up the kirk after
it. I agreed with him, because I was compelled to attend--the farm cert
being delayed a whole hour in order that I might have the privilege of
religious instruction by the senior licensed grocer of the little town.
This gentleman had only one way of imparting knowledge. That was with
the brass-edged binding of his pocket Bible. Even at that time I
preferred the limp Oxford morocco. And so would you, if something so
unsympathetic as brass corners were applied to the sides of your head
two or three times every Sunday afternoon.
After several years of this experience, I passed into Henry Marchbank's
class and was happy. But that is quite another chapter, and has nothing
to do with Willie McNair.
Now, Sabbath-school was over about three o'clock, and our conveyance did
not start till four. That is the way I became attached to Willie. I
used to stay and help him to clean the kirk. This is the way he did it.
First, he unfrocked himself of his broadcloth dignity by hanging his
coat upon a nail in the vestry. Then he put on an apron which covered
him from gray chin-beard to the cracks in the uppers of his shining
shoes. Into the breast of this envelope he thrust a duster large enough
for a sheet. It was, in fact, a section of a departed pulpit swathing.
Then, muttering quite scriptural maledictions, and couching them in
language entirely Biblical, Willie proceeded to visit the pews occupied
by each class, restoring the "buiks" he had previously piled at the head
of each seat to their proper places on the book-board in front, and
scrutinising the woodwork for inscriptions in lead-pencil. Then he
swept the crumbs and apple-cores carefully off the floor and delivered
judgment at large.
"I dinna ken what Maister Osbourne was thinkin' on to begin sic a Popish
whigmaleery as this Sabbath-schule! A disgrace an' a mockin' in the
hoose o' God! What kens the like o' Sammle Borthwick aboot the divine
decrees? When I, mysel', that has heard them treated on for forty year
under a' the Elect Ministers o' the Land, can do no more than barely
understand them to this day! And a wheen silly lasses, wi' gum-floo'ers
in their bonnets to listen to bairns hummerin' ower 'Man's Chief End'!
It's eneuch to gar decent Doctor Syminton turn in his grave! 'Man's
Chief End'--faith--it's wumman's chief end that they're thinkin' on, the
madams; they think I dinna see them shakin' their gum-floo'ers and
glancing their e'en in the direction o' the onmarriet teacher
bodies----"
"And such are all they that put their trust in them!" concluded Willie,
somewhat irrelevantly.
"Laddie, come doon out o' the pulpit. I canna lippen (trust) ony body
to dust that, bena mysel'! Gang and pick up the conversation lozengers
aff the floor o' the Young Weemen's Bible Cless!"
Printed words can give small indication of the intense bitterness and
mordant satire of Willie's speech as he uttered these last words.
Yet Willie was far from being a hater of women kind. Indeed, the end of
all his moralising was ever the same.
"There's my ain guid wife--was there ever a woman like her? Snod as a
new preen, yet nocht gaudy, naething ken-speckle. If only the young
weemen nooadays were like Betty, they wad hae nae need o' gum-floo'ers
an' ither abominations. Na, nor yet Bible clesses! Faith, set them up!
It wad better become them to sit them doon wi' their Bibles in their
laps and the grace o' God in their hearts, an' tak' a lesson to
themsel's oot o' Paaal!"
Here Willie dusted the pulpit cushions, vigorously shaking them as a
terrier does a rat, and then carefully brushing them all in one
direction, in order that, as he said, "the fell may a' lie the yae way."
Willie was no eye servant. No spider took hold with her hands and was
in the Palace of Willie's King. Dust had no habitation there, and if a
man did not clean his boots on the mat before entering, Willie went to
him personally and told him his probable chances of a happy hereafter.
These were but few and evil.
Then having got the "shine" to fall as he wanted it, and the dark purple
velvet overhang, pride of his heart, to sit to a nicety, Willie lifted
up the heavy tassels, and at the same time resumed the thread of his
discourse, standing there in the pulpit with the very port of a
minister, and in his speech a point and pith that was all his own.
"Aye, Paul," (he always pronounced it _Paaal_)--"aye, Paaal, it's a
peety ye never marriet and left nae faim'ly that we ken o'. For we hae
sair need o' ye in thae days. But ye kenned better than to taigle
yersel' wi' silly lasses. It was you that bade the young weemen to be
keepers at hame--nae Bible clesses for Paaal--na, na!
"And you mind Peter--oh, Peter was juist as soond on gum-floo'ers an'
weemen's falderals as Paaal, 'Whose adorning, let it not be the outward
adorning of plaiting the hair, and wearing of gold, and putting on of
apparel, but the ornament of a meek and quiet speerit----'"
He stopped in the height of his discourse and waggled his hand down at
me.
"Here, boy!" he cried, "what did ye do wi' thae conversation lozengers?"
I indicated that I had them still in my pocket, for I had meant to
solace the long road home with the cleaner of them.
"Let me see them!"
Somewhat unwillingly I handed them up to Willie as he stood in the
pulpit, a different Willie, an accusing Willie, Nathan the Prophet with
a large cloth-brush under his arm.
"When this you see, remember me!"
He read the printed words through his glasses deliberately.
"Aye," he sneered, "that wad be Mag Kinstrey. I saw Rob Cuthbert
smirkin' ower at her when the minister was lookin' up yon reference to
Melchisadek. Aye, Meg, I'll remember ye--I'll no forgot ye. And if ye
mend not your ways----"
Willie did not conclude the sentence, but instead, he shook his head in
the direction of the door of the Session house.
He picked out another.
"The rose is red--the violet's blue,
But fairer far, my love, are you!"
Willie opened the door of the pulpit.
"Preserve me, what am I doin'? It's fair profanation to be readin' sic
balderdash in a place like this. Laddie, hear ye this, whatever ye hae
to say to a lass, gang ye and say it to hersel', by yoursel'. For
valenteens are a vain thing, and conversation lozengers a mock and an
abomination."
Willie threatened me a moment with uplifted finger, and then added his
stereotyped conclusion: "And so are all such as put their trust in
them!"
And through life I have acted strictly on Willie's advice, and I am
bound to admit that I have found it good.
About this perio
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/49342