Warlock o' Glenwarlock: A Homely Romance
by George MacDonald · English · Gutenberg #6364 · 981,223 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Warlock o' Glenwarlock: A Homely Romance
Author: George MacDonald
Release date: August 1, 2004 [eBook #6364]
Most recently updated: September 8, 2022
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6364
Credits: Robert Prince, Juliet Sutherland, Charles
Aldarondo, Charles Franks, and Lisa Wadsworth
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WARLOCK O' GLENWARLOCK: A HOMELY ROMANCE ***
[Illustration: “COSMO CONDUCTED HER TO THE STABLE”]
WARLOCK O’GLENWARLOCK
A HOMELY ROMANCE
BY
GEORGE MACDONALD
AUTHOR OF “ANNALS OF A QUIET NEIGHBORHOOD,” “A SEABOARD PARISH,”
ETC.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER.
1. Castle Warlock
2. The Kitchen
3. The Drawing-room
4. An Afternoon Sleep
5. The School
6. Grannie’s Cottage
7. Dreams
8. Home
9. The Student
10. Peter Simon
11. The new Schooling
12. Grannie’s Ghost Story
13. The Storm-Guest
14. The Castle Inn
15. That Night
16. Through the Day
17. That same Night
18. A Winter Idyl
19. An “Interlunar Cave”
20. Catch yer Naig
21. The Watchmaker
22. That Luminous Night
23. At College
24. A Tutorship
25. The Gardener
26. Lost and Found
27. A Transformation
28. The Story of the Knight who spoke the Truth
29. New Experience
30. Charles Jermyn, M. D.
31. Cosmo and the Doctor
32. The Naiad
33. The Garden-House
34. Catch your Horse
35. Pull his Tail
36. The thick Darkness
37. The Dawn
38. The Shadow of Death
39. The Labourer
40. The Schoolmaster
41 Grannie and the Stick
42. Obstruction
43. Grizzie’s Rights
44. Another Harvest
45. The final Conflict
46. A Rest
47. Help
48. A common Miracle
49. Defiance
50. Discovery and Confession
51. It is Naught saith the Buyer
52. An old Story
53. A small Discovery
54. A greater Discovery
55. A great Discovery
56. Mr. Burns
57. Too Sure comes too late
58. A little Life well rounded
59. A Breaking Up
60. Repose
61. The third Harvest
62. A duet, Trio, and Quartette
Transcriber’s Note
In the original text, there are two chapters numbered 37 (XXXVII) - “The
Dawn” and “Home Again”. The latter was left out of the table of contents
and that has been replicated here.
CHAPTER I.
CASTLE WARLOCK.
A rough, wild glen it was, to which, far back in times unknown to
its annals, the family had given its name, taking in return no
small portion of its history, and a good deal of the character of
its individuals. It lay in the debatable land between highlands and
lowlands; most of its inhabitants spoke both Scotch and Gaelic; and
there was often to be found in them a notable mingling of the chief
characteristics of the widely differing Celt and Teuton. The
country produced more barley than wheat, more oats than barley,
more heather than oats, more boulders than trees, and more snow
than anything. It was a solitary, thinly peopled region, mostly of
bare hills, and partially cultivated glens, each with its small
stream, on the banks of which grew here and there a silver birch, a
mountain ash, or an alder tree, but with nothing capable of giving
much shade or shelter, save cliffy banks and big stones. From many
a spot you might look in all directions and not see a sign of human
or any other habitation. Even then however, you might, to be sure,
most likely smell the perfume--to some nostrils it is nothing less
than perfume--of a peat fire, although you might be long in finding
out whence it came; for the houses, if indeed the dwellings could
be called houses, were often so hard to be distinguished from the
ground on which they were built, that except the smoke of fresh
peats were coming pretty freely from the wide-mouthed chimney, it
required an experienced eye to discover the human nest. The valleys
that opened northward produced little; there the snow might some
years be seen lying on patches of oats yet green, destined now only
for fodder; but where the valley ran east and west, and any
tolerable ground looked to the south, there things put on a
different aspect. There the graceful oats would wave and rustle in
the ripening wind, and in the small gardens would lurk a few
cherished strawberries, while potatoes and peas would be tolerably
plentiful in their season.
Upon a natural terrace in such a slope to the south, stood Castle
Warlock. But it turned no smiling face to the region whence came
the warmth and the growth. A more grim, repellant, unlovely
building would be hard to find; and yet, from its extreme
simplicity, its utter indifference to its own looks, its repose,
its weight, and its gray historical consciousness, no one who loved
houses would have thought of calling it ugly. It was like the
hard-featured face of a Scotch matron, suggesting no end of story,
of life, of character: she holds a defensive if not defiant face to
the world, but within she is warm, tending carefully the fires of
life. Summer and winter the chimneys of that desolate-looking house
smoked; for though the country was inclement, and the people that
lived in it were poor, the great, sullen, almost unhappy-looking
hills held clasped to their bare cold bosoms, exposed to all the
bitterness of freezing winds and summer hail, the warmth of
household centuries: their peat-bogs were the store-closets and
wine-cellars of the sun, for the hoarded elixir of physical life.
And although the walls of the castle, as it was called, were so
thick that in winter they kept the warmth generated within them
from wandering out and being lost on the awful wastes of homeless
hillside and moor, they also prevented the brief summer heat of the
wayfaring sun from entering with freedom, and hence the fires were
needful in the summer days as well--at least at the time my story
commences, for then, as generally, there were elderly and aged
people in the house, who had to help their souls to keep their
bodies warm.
The house was very old. It had been built for more kinds of shelter
than need to be thought of in our days. For the enemies of our
ancestors were not only the cold, and the fierce wind, and the
rain, and the snow; they were men also--enemies harder to keep out
than the raging storm or the creeping frost. Hence the more
hospitable a house could be, the less must it look what it was: it
must wear its face haughty, and turn its smiles inward. The house
of Glenwarlock, as it was also sometimes called, consisted of three
massive, narrow, tall blocks of building, which showed little
connection with each other beyond juxtaposition, two of them
standing end to end, with but a few feet of space between, and the
third at right angles to the two. In the two which stood end to
end, and were originally the principal parts, hardly any windows
were to be seen on the side that looked out into the valley; while
in the third, which, though looking much of the same age, was of
later build, were more windows, but none in the lowest story.
Narrow as were these buildings, and four stories high, they had a
solid, ponderous look, suggesting a thickness of the walls such as
to leave little of a hollow within for the indwellers--like great
marine shells for a small mollusk. On the other side was a kind of
a court, completed by the stables and cowhouses, and towards this
court were most of the windows--many of them for size more like
those in the cottages around, than suggestive of a house built by
the lords of the soil. The court was now merely that of a farmyard.
There must have been at one time outer defences to the castle, but
they were no longer to be distinguished by the inexperienced eye;
and indeed the windowless walls of the house itself seemed strong
enough to repel any attack without artillery--except indeed the
assailants had got into the court. There were however some signs of
the windows there having been enlarged if not increased at a later
period.
In the block that stood angle-wise to the rest, was the kitchen,
the door of which opened immediately on the court; and behind the
kitchen, in that part which had no windows to the valley, was the
milk-cellar, as they called the dairy, and places for household
storage. A rough causeway ran along the foot of the walls,
connecting the doors in the different blocks. Of these, the kitchen
door for the most part stood open: sometimes the snow would be
coming fast down the wide chimney, with little soft hisses in the
fire, and the business of the house going on without a thought of
closing it, though from it you could not have seen across the yard
for the falling flakes.
But when my story opens, the summer held the old house and the
older hills in its embrace. The sun was pouring torrents of light
and heat into the valley, and the slopes of it were covered with
green. The bees were about, contenting themselves with the flowers,
while the heather was getting ready its bloom for them, and a boy
of fourteen was sitting in a little garden that lay like a dropped
belt of beauty about the feet of the grim old walls. This was on
the other side--that to the south, parting the house from the slope
where the corn began--now with the ear half-formed. The boy sat on
a big stone, which once must have had some part in the house
itself, or its defences, but which he had never known except as a
seat for himself. His back leaned against the hoary wall, and he
was in truth meditating, although he did not look as if he were. He
was already more than an incipient philosopher, though he could not
yet have put into recognizable shape the thought that was now
passing through his mind. The bees were the primary but not the
main subject of it. It came thus: he thought how glad the bees
would be when their crop of heather was ripe; then he thought how
they preferred the heather to the flowers; then, that the one must
taste nicer to them than the other; and last awoke the question
whether their taste of sweet was the same as his. “For,” said he,
“if their honey is sweet to them with the same sweetness with which
it is sweet to me, then there is something in the make of the bee
that’s the same with the make of me; and perhaps then a man might
some day, if he wanted, try the taste of being a bee all out for a
little while.” But to see him, nobody would have thought he was
doing anything but basking in the sun. The scents of the flowers
all about his feet came and went on the eddies of the air, paying
my lord many a visit in his antechamber, his brain; the windy
noises of the insects, the watery noises of the pigeons, the noises
from the poultry yard, the song of the mountain river, visited him
also through the portals of his ears; but at the moment, the boy
seemed lost in the mere fundamental satisfaction of existence.
Neither, although broad summer was on the earth, and all the
hill-tops, and as much of the valleys as their shadows did not
hide, were bathed in sunlight, although the country was his native
land, and he loved it with the love of his country’s poets, was the
consciousness of the boy free from a certain strange kind of
trouble connected with, if not resulting from the landscape before
him. A Celt through many of his ancestors, and his mother in
particular, his soul, full of undefined emotion, was aware of an
ever recurring impulse to song, ever checked and broken, ever
thrown back upon itself. There were a few books in the house,
amongst them certain volumes of verse--a copy of Cowly, whose
notable invocation of Light he had instinctively blundered upon;
one of Milton; the translated Ossian; Thomson’s Seasons--with a few
more; and from the reading of these, among other results, had
arisen this--that, in the midst of his enjoyment of the world
around him, he found himself every now and then sighing after a
lovelier nature than that before his eyes. There he read of
mountains, if not wilder, yet loftier and more savage than his own,
of skies more glorious, of forests of such trees as he knew only
from one or two old engravings in the house, on which he looked
with a strange, inexplicable reverence: he would sometimes wake
weeping from a dream of mountains, or of tossing waters. Once with
his waking eyes he saw a mist afar off, between the hills that
ramparted the horizon, grow rosy after the sun was down, and his
heart filled as with the joy of a new discovery. Around him, it is
true, the waters rushed well from their hills, but their banks had
little beauty. Not merely did the want of trees distress him, but
the nature of their channel; most of them, instead of rushing
through rocks, cut their way only through beds of rough gravel, and
their bare surroundings were desolate without grandeur--almost mean
to eyes that had not yet pierced to the soul of them. Nor had he
yet learned to admire the lucent brown of the bog waters. There
seemed to be in the boy a strain of some race used to a richer
home; and yet all the time the frozen regions of the north drew his
fancy tenfold more than Italy or Egypt.
His name was Cosmo, a name brought from Italy by one of the line
who had sold his sword and fought for strangers. Not a few of the
younger branches of the family had followed the same evil
profession, and taken foreign pay--chiefly from poverty and
prejudice combined, but not a little in some cases from the inborn
love of fighting that seems to characterize the Celt. The last
soldier of them had served the East India Company both by sea and
land: tradition more than hinted that he had chiefly served
himself. Since then the heads of the house had been peaceful
farmers of their own land, contriving to draw what to many farmers
nowadays would seem but a scanty subsistence from an estate which
had dwindled to the twentieth part of what it had been a few
centuries before, though even then it could never have made its
proprietor rich in anything but the devotion of his retainers.
Growing too hot between the sun and the wall, Cosmo rose, and
passing to the other side of the house beyond the court-yard, and
crossing a certain heave of grass, came upon one unfailing delight
in his lot--a preacher whose voice, inarticulate, it is true, had,
ever since he was born, been at most times louder in his ear than
any other. It was a mountain stream, which, through a channel of
rock, such as nearly satisfied his most fastidious fancy, went
roaring, rushing, and sometimes thundering, with an arrow-like,
foamy swiftness, down to the river in the glen below. The rocks
were very dark, and the foam stood out brilliant against them. From
the hill-top above, it came, sloping steep from far. When you
looked up, it seemed to come flowing from the horizon itself, and
when you looked down, it seemed to have suddenly found it could no
more return to the upper regions it had left too high behind it,
and in disgust to shoot headlong to the abyss. There was not much
water in it now, but plenty to make a joyous white rush through the
deep-worn brown of the rock: in the autumn and spring it came down
gloriously, dark and fierce, as if it sought the very centre, wild
with greed after an absolute rest.
The boy stood and gazed, as was his custom. Always he would seek
this endless water when he grew weary, when the things about him
put on their too ordinary look. Let the aspect of this be what it
might, it seemed still inspired and sent forth by some essence of
mystery and endless possibility. There was in him an unusual
combination of the power to read the hieroglyphic internal aspect
of things, and the scientific nature that bows before fact. He knew
that the stream was in its second stage when it rose from the earth
and rushed past the house, that it was gathered first from the
great ocean, through millions of smallest ducts, up to the
reservoirs of the sky, thence to descend in snows and rains, and
wander down and up through the veins of the earth; but the sense of
its mystery had not hitherto begun to withdraw. Happily for him,
the poetic nature was not merely predominant in him, but dominant,
sending itself, a pervading spirit, through the science that else
would have stifled him. Accepting fact, he found nothing in its
outward relations by which a man can live, any more than by bread;
but this poetic nature, illuminating it as with the polarized ray,
revealed therein more life and richer hope. All this was as yet
however as indefinite as it was operative in him, and I am telling
of him what he could not have told of himself.
He stood gazing now in a different mood from any that had come to
him before: he had begun to find out something fresh about this
same stream, and the life in his own heart to which it served as a
revealing phantasm. He recognized that what in the stream had drawn
him from earliest childhood, with an infinite pleasure, was the
vague sense, for a long time an ever growing one, of its
_mystery_--the form the infinite first takes to the simplest and
liveliest hearts. It was because it was _always_ flowing that he
loved it, because it could not stop: whence it came was utterly
unknown to him, and he did not care to know. And when at length he
learned that it came flowing out of the dark hard earth, the
mystery only grew. He imagined a wondrous cavity below in black
rock, where it gathered and gathered, nobody could think how--not
coming from anywhere else, but beginning just there, and nowhere
beyond. When, later on, he had to shift its source, and carry it
back to the great sky, it was no less marvellous, and more lovely;
it was a closer binding together of the gentle earth and the awful
withdrawing heavens. These were a region of endless hopes, and ever
recurrent despairs: that his beloved, an earthly finite thing,
should rise there, was added joy, and gave a mighty hope with
respect to the unknown and appalling. But from the sky, he was sent
back to the earth in further pursuit; for, whence came the rain,
his books told him, but from the sea? That sea he had read of,
though never yet beheld, and he knew it was magnificent in its
might; gladly would he have hailed it as an intermediate betwixt
the sky and the earth--so to have the sky come first! but, alas!
the ocean came first in order. And then, worse and worse! how was
the ocean fed but from his loved torrent? How was the sky fed but
from the sea? How was the dark fountain fed but from the sky? How
was the torrent fed but from the fountain? As he sat in the hot
garden, with his back against the old gray wall, the nest of his
family for countless generations, with the scent of the flowers in
his nostrils, and the sound of the bees in his ears, it had begun
to dawn upon him that he had lost the stream of his childhood, the
mysterious, infinite idea of endless, inexplicable, original birth,
of outflowing because of essential existence within! There was no
production any more, nothing but a mere rushing around, like the
ring-sea of Saturn, in a never ending circle of formal change! Like
a great dish, the mighty ocean was skimmed in particles invisible,
which were gathered aloft into sponges all water and no sponge; and
from this, through many an airy, many an earthy channel, deflowered
of its mystery, his ancient, self-producing fountain to a holy
merry river, was _fed_--only _fed_! He grew very sad, and well he
might. Moved by the spring eternal in himself, of which the love in
his heart was but a river-shape, he turned away from the deathened
stream, and without knowing why, sought the human elements about
the place.
CHAPTER II.
THE KITCHEN.
He entered the wide kitchen, paved with large slabs of slate. One
brilliant gray-blue spot of sunlight lay on the floor. It came
through a small window to the east, and made the peat-fire glow red
by the contrast. Over the fire, from a great chain, hung a
three-legged pot, in which something was slowly cooking. Between
the fire and the sun-spot lay a cat, content with fate and the
world. At the corner of the fire sat an old lady, in a chair
high-backed, thick-padded, and covered with striped stuff. She had
her back to the window that looked into the court, and was knitting
without regarding her needles. This was Cosmo’s grandmother. The
daughter of a small laird in the next parish, she had started in
life with an overweening sense of her own importance through that
of her family, nor had she lived long enough to get rid of it. I
fancy she had clung to it the more that from the time of her
marriage nothing had seemed to go well with the family into which
she had married. She and her husband had struggled and striven, but
to no seeming purpose; poverty had drawn its meshes closer and
closer around them. They had but one son, the present laird, and he
had succeeded to an estate yet smaller and more heavily encumbered.
To all appearance he must leave it to Cosmo, if indeed he left it,
in no better condition. From the growing fear of its final loss, he
loved the place more than any of his ancestors had loved it, and
his attachment to it had descended yet stronger to his son.
But although Cosmo the elder wrestled and fought against encroaching
poverty, and with little success, he had never forgot small rights
in anxiety to be rid of large claims. What man could he did to keep
his poverty from bearing hard on his dependents, and never master or
landlord was more beloved. Such being his character and the condition
of his affairs, it is not very surprising that he should have passed
middle age before thinking seriously of marriage. Nor did he then fall
in love, in the ordinary sense of the phrase; he reflected with himself
that it would be cowardice so far to fear poverty as to run the boat
of the Warlocks aground, and leave the scrag end of a property and a
history without a man to take them up, and possibly bear them on to
redemption; for who could tell what life might be in the stock yet!
Anyhow, it would be better to leave an heir to take the remnant in
charge, and at least carry the name a generation farther, even should
it be into yet deeper poverty than hitherto. A Warlock could face his
fate. Thereupon, with a sense of the fitness of things not always
manifested on such occasions, he had paid his addresses to a woman of
five and thirty, the daughter of the last clergyman of the parish, and
had by her been accepted with little hesitation. She was a capable and
brave woman, and, fully informed of the state of his affairs, married
him in the hope of doing something to help him out of his difficulties.
A few pounds she had saved up, and a trifle her mother had left her,
she placed unreservedly at his disposal, and he in his abounding
honesty spent it on his creditors, bettering things for a time, and,
which was of much more consequence, greatly relieving his mind, and
giving the life in him a fresh start. His marriage was of infinitely
more salvation to the laird than if it had set him free from all his
worldly embarrassments, for it set him growing again--and that is the
only final path out of oppression.
Whatever were the feelings with which he took his wife home, they were
at least those of a gentleman; and it were a good thing indeed, if, at
the end of five years, the love of most pairs who marry for love were
equal to that of Cosmo Warlock to his middle-aged wife; and now that
she was gone, his reverence for her memory was something surpassing.
From the day almost of his marriage the miseries of life lost half
their bitterness, nor had it returned at her death. Instinctively he
felt that outsiders, those even who respected him as an honest man,
believed that, somehow or other, they could only conjecture how, he
must be to blame for the circumstances he was in--either this, or
providence did not take care of the just man. Such was virtually the
unuttered conclusion of many, who nevertheless imagined they understood
the Book of Job, and who would have counted Warlock’s rare honesty,
pride or fastidiousness or unjustifiable free-handedness. Hence they
came to think and speak of him as a poor creature, and soon the man,
through the keen sensitiveness of his nature, became aware of the fact.
But to his sense of the misprision of neighbours and friends, came the
faith and indignant confidence of his wife like the closing and binding
up and mollifying of a wound with ointment. The man was of a far finer
nature than any of those who thus judged him, of whom some would
doubtless have got out of their difficulties sooner than he--only he
was more honorable in debt than they were out of it. A woman of strong
sense, with an undeveloped stratum of poetry in the heart of it, his
wife was able to appreciate the finer elements of his nature; and she
let him see very plainly that she did. This was strength and a lifting
up of the head to the husband, who in his youth had been oppressed by
the positiveness, and in his manhood by the opposition, of his mother,
whom the neighbours regarded as a woman of strength and faculty. And
now, although, all his life since, he had had to fight the wolf as
constantly as ever, things, even after his wife’s death, continued very
different from what they had been before he married her; his existence
looked a far more acceptable thing seen through the regard of his wife
than through that of his neighbours. They had been five years married
before she brought him an heir to his poverty, and she lived five years
more to train him--then, after a short illness, departed, and left the
now aging man virtually alone with his little child, coruscating spark
of fresh vitality amidst the ancient surroundings. This was the Cosmo
who now, somewhat sore at heart from the result of his cogitations,
entered the kitchen in search of his kind.
Another woman was sitting on a three-legged stool, just inside the
door, paring potatoes--throwing each, as she cut off what the old lady,
watching, judged a paring far too thick, into a bowl of water. She
looked nearly as old as her mistress, though she was really ten years
younger. She had come with the late mistress from her father’s house,
and had always taken, and still took her part against the opposing
faction--namely the grandmother.
A second seat--not over easy, but comfortable enough, being simply a
wide arm-chair of elm, with a cushion covered in horse-hair, stood
at the opposite corner of the fire. This was the laird’s seat, at
the moment, as generally all the morning till dinner-time, empty:
Cosmo, not once looking up, walked straight to it, diagonally across
the floor, and seated himself like one verily lost in thought. Now
and then, as she peeled, Grizzie would cast a keen glance at him out
of her bright blue eyes, round whose fire the wrinkles had gathered
like ashes: those eyes were sweet and pleasant, and the expression of
her face was one of lovely devotion; but otherwise she was far from
beautiful. She gave a grim smile to herself every time she glanced up
at him from her potatoes, as much as to say she knew well enough what
he was thinking, though no one else did. “He’ll be a man yet!” she said
to herself.
The old lady also now and then looked over her stocking at the boy,
where he sat with his back to the white deal dresser, ornate with
homeliest dishes.
“It’ll be lang or ye fill that chair, Cossie, my man!” she said at
length,--but not with the smile of play, rather with the look of
admonition, as if it was the boy’s first duty to grow in breadth in
order to fill the chair, and restore the symmetry of the world.
Cosmo glanced up, but did not speak, and presently was lost again in
the thoughts from which his grandmother had roused him as one is roused
by a jolt on the road.
“What are you dreaming about, Cossie?” she said again, in a tone
wavering but imperative.
Her speech was that of a gentlewoman of the old time, when the highest
born in Scotland spoke Scotch.
Not yet did Cosmo reply. Reverie does not agree well with manners,
but it would besides have been hard for him to answer the old lady’s
question--not that he did not know something at least of what was going
on in his mind, but that, he knew instinctively, it would have sounded
in her ears no hair better than the jabber of Jule Sandy.
“Mph!” she said, offended at his silence; “Ye’ll hae to learn manners
afore ye’re laird o’ Glenwarlock, young Cosmo!”
A shadow of indignation passed over Grizzie’s rippled, rather than
wrinkled face, but she said nothing. There was a time to speak and a
time to be silent; nor was Grizzie indebted to Solomon, but to her own
experience and practice, for the wisdom of the saw. Only the pared
potatoes splashed louder in the water as they fell. And the old lady
knew as well what that meant, as if the splashes had been articulate
sounds from the mouth of the old partisan.
The boy rose, and coming forward, rather like one walking in his sleep,
stood up before his grandmother, and said,
“What was ye sayin’, gran’mamma?”
“I was sayin’ what ye wadna hearken till, an that’s enouch,” she
answered, willing to show offence.
“Say ’t again, gran’mamma, if you please. I wasna noticin’.”
“Na! I s’ warran’ ye frae noticin’! There ye winna gang, whaur yer ain
fule fancy does na lead the w’y. Cosmo, by gie ower muckle tether to
wull thoucht, an’ someday ye’ll be laid i’ the dub, followin’ what has
naither sense intil ’t, nor this warl’s gude. --What was ye thinkin’
aboot the noo?--Tell me that, an’ I s’ lat ye gang.”
“I was thinkin’ aboot the burnie, gran’mamma.”
“It wad be tellin’ ye to lat the burnie rin, an’ stick to yer buik,
laddie!”
“The burnie wull rin, gran’mamma, and the buik ’ill bide,” said Cosmo,
perhaps not very clearly understanding himself.
“Ye’re gettin’ on to be a man, noo,” said his grandmother, heedless of
the word of his defence, “an’ ye maun learn to put awa’ bairnly things.
There’s a heap depen’in’ upo’ ye, Cosmo. Ye’ll be the fift o’ the name
i’ the family, an’ I’m feart ye may be the last. It’s but sma’ honour,
laddie, to ony man to be the last; an’ gien ye dinna gaither the wit
ye hae, and du the best ye can, ye winna lang be laird o’ Glenwarlock.
Gien it wasna for Grizzie there, wha has no richt to owerhear the
affairs o’ the family, I micht think the time had come for enlichtenin’
ye upo’ things it’s no shuitable ye should gang ignorant o’. But we’ll
put it aff till a mair convenient sizzon, atween oor ain twa lanes.”
“An’ a mair convanient spokesman, I houp, my leddy,” said Grizzie,
deeply offended.
“An’ wha sud that be?” rejoined her mistress.
“Ow, wha but the laird himsel’?” answered Grizzie, “Wha’s to come
atween father an’ son wi’ licht upo’ family-affairs? No even the
mistress hersel’ wad hae prezhunt upo’ that!”
“Keep your own place, Grizzie,” said the old lady with dignity.
And Grizzie, who, had gone farther in the cause of propriety, than
propriety itself could justify, held her peace. Only the potatoes
splashed yet louder in the bowl. Her mistress sat grimly silent, for
though she had had the last word and had been obeyed, she was rebuked
in herself. Cosmo, judging the specialty of the interview over, turned
and went back to his father’s chair; but just as he was seating himself
in it, his father appeared in the doorway.
The form was that of a tall, thin man, a little bent at the knees and
bowed in the back, who yet carried himself with no small dignity,
cloaked in an air of general apology--as if he would have said, “I
am sorry my way is not yours, for I see very well how wrong you must
think it.” He wore large strong shoes--I think a description should
begin with the feet rather than the head--fit for boggy land; blue,
ribbed, woollen stockings; knee-breeches of some home-made stuff: all
the coarser cloth they wore, and they wore little else, was shorn from
their own sheep, and spun, woven, and made at home; an old blue dress
coat with bright buttons; a drab waistcoat which had once been yellow;
and to crown all, a red woollen nightcap, hanging down on one side with
a tassel.
“Weel, Grizzie!” he said, in a gentle, rather sad voice, as if the days
of his mourning were not yet ended, “I’m ower sune the day!”
He never passed Grizzie without greeting her, and Grizzie’s devotion to
him was like that of slave and sister mingled.
“Na, laird,” she answered, “ye can never be ower sune for yer ain fowk,
though ye may be for yer ain stamack. The taties winna be lang bilin’
the day. They’re some sma’.”
“That’s because you pare them so much, Grizzie,” said the grandmother.
Grizzie vouchsafed no reply.
The moment young Cosmo saw whose shadow darkened the doorway, he rose
in haste, and standing with his hand upon the arm of the chair, waited
for his father to seat himself in it. The laird acknowledged his
attention with a smile, sat down, and looked like the last sitter grown
suddenly old. He put out his hand to the boy across the low arm of the
chair, and the boy laid his hand in his father’s, and so they remained,
neither saying a word. The laird leaned back, and sat resting. All were
silent.
Notwithstanding the oddity of his dress, no one who had any knowledge
of humanity could have failed to see in Cosmo Warlock, the elder,
a high bred gentleman. His face was small, and the skin of it was
puckered into wrinkles innumerable; his mouth was sweet, but he had
lost his teeth, and the lips had fallen in; his chin, however, was
large and strong; while his blue eyes looked out from under his narrow
high forehead with a softly piercing glance of great gentleness and
benignity. A little gray hair clustered about his temples and the back
of his head--the red nightcap hid the rest. There was three days’
growth of gray beard on his chin, for _now that he had nobody_, he
would say, he had not the heart to shave every morning.
For some time he sat looking straight before him, smiling to his
mother’s hands as they knitted, she casting on him now and then a look
that seemed to express the consciousness of blame for not having made a
better job of him, or for having given him too much to do in the care
of himself. For neither did his mother believe in him farther than that
he had the best possible intentions in what he did, or did not do. At
the same time she never doubted he was more of a man than ever his son
would be, seeing they had such different mothers.
“Grizzie,” said the laird, “hae ye a drappy o’ soor milk? I’m some dry.”
“Ay, that hae I, sir!” answered Grizzie with alacrity, and rising
went into the darker region behind the kitchen, whence presently she
emerged with a white basin full of rich milk--half cream, it was
indeed. Without explanation or apology she handed it to her master, who
received and drank it off.
“Hoots, woman!” he said, “ye wad hae me a shargar (_a skin-and-bone
calf_)! That’s no soor milk!”
“I’m vexed it’s no to yer taste, laird!” returned Grizzie coolly, “but
I hae nane better.”
“Ye tellt me ye had soor milk,” said the laird--without a particle of
offence, rather in the tone of apology for having by mistake made away
with something too good for him.
“Weel, laird,” replied Grizzie, “it’s naething but the guidman’s milk;
an’ gien ye dinna ken what’s guid for ye at your time o’ life, it’s
weel there sud be anither ’at does. What has a man o’ your ’ears to du
drinkin’ soor milk--eneuch to turn a’ soor thegither i’ the inside o’
ye! It’s true I win’ ye weel a sma’ bairn i’ my leddy’s airms--
“Ye may weel du that!” interrupted her mistress.
“I wasna weel intil my teens, though, my leddy!” returned Grizzie. “An’
I’m sure,” she added, in revenge for the insinuation as to her age, “it
wad ill become ony wuman to grudge a man o’ the laird’s stan’in a drap
o’ the best milk in ’s ain cellar!”
“Who spoke of refusing it to him?” said his mother.
“Ye spak yersel’ sic an’ siclike,” answered Grizzie.
“Hoots, Grizzie! haud yer tongue, my wuman,” said the laird, in the
gentlest tone, yet with reproof in it. “Ye ken weel it’s no my mother
wad grudge me the milk ye wad gie me. It was but mysel’ ’at didna think
mysel’ worthy o’ that same, seein’ it’s no a week yet sin’ bonny Hawkie
dee’d!”
“An’ wad ye hae the Lord’s anintit depen’ upo’ Hawkie?” cried Grizzie
with indignation.
The contest went no farther, and Grizzie had had the best of it, as
none knew better than she. In a minute or two the laird rose and went
out, and Cosmo went with him.
Before Cosmo’s mother died, old Mrs. Warlock would have been indignant
at the idea of sitting in the kitchen, but things had combined to
bring her to it. She found herself very lonely seated in state in the
drawing-room, where, as there was no longer a daughter-in-law to go and
come, she learned little or nothing of what was doing about the place,
and where few that called cared to seek her out, for she had never been
a favourite with the humbler neighbours. Also, as time went on, and
the sight of money grew rarer and rarer, it became more desirable to
economize light in the winter. They had not come to that with firing,
for, as long as there were horses and intervals of less labour on
the farm, peats were always to be had--though at the same time, the
drawing-room could not be made so warm as the kitchen. But for light,
even for train-oil to be burned in the simplest of lamps, money had to
be paid--and money was of all ordinary things the seldomest seen at
Castle Warlock. From these operative causes it came by degrees, that
one winter, for the sake of company, of warmth, of economy, Mistress
Warlock had her chair carried to the kitchen; and the thing once
done, it easily and naturally grew to a custom, and extended itself
to the summer as well; for she who had ceased to stand on ceremony in
the winter, could hardly without additional loss of dignity reascend
her pedestal only because it was summer again. To the laird it was a
matter of no consequence where he sat, ate, or slept. When his wife
was alive, wherever she was, that was the place for him; when she was
gone, all places were the same to him. There was, besides, that in
the disposition of the man which tended to the homely:--any one who
imagines that in the least synonymous with the coarse, or discourteous,
or unrefined, has yet to understand the essentials of good breeding.
Hence it came that the other rooms of the house were by degrees almost
neglected. Both the dining-room and drawing-room grew very cold,
cold as with the coldness of what is dead; and though he slept in
the same part of the house by choice, not often did the young laird
enter either. But he had concerning them, the latter in particular, a
notion of vastness and grandeur; and along with that, a vague sense
of sanctity, which it is not quite easy to define or account for. It
seems however to have the same root with all veneration for place--for
if there were not a natural inclination to venerate place, would any
external reason make men capable of it? I think we shall come at length
to feel all places, as all times and all spaces, venerable, because
they are the outcome of the eternal nature and the eternal thought.
When we have God, all is holy, and we are at home.
CHAPTER III.
THE DRAWING-ROOM.
As soon as they were out of the kitchen-door, the boy pushed his hand
into his father’s; the father grasped it, and without a word spoken,
they walked on together. They would often be half a day together
without a word passing between them. To be near, each to the other,
seemed enough for each.
Cosmo had thought his father was going somewhere about the farm, to see
how things were getting on; but, instead of crossing to the other side
of the court, where lay the sheds and stables, etc., or leaving it by
the gate, the laird turned to the left, and led the way to the next
block of building, where he stopped at a door at the farther end of the
front of it. It was a heavy oak door, studded with great broad iron
knobs, arranged in angular patterns. It was set deep in the thick wall,
but there were signs of there having been a second, doubtless still
stronger, flush with the external surface, for the great hooks of the
hinges remained, with the deep hole in the stone on the opposite side
for the bolt. The key was in the lock, for, except to open the windows,
and do other necessary pieces of occasional tendance, it was seldom
anybody entered the place, and Grizzie generally turned the key, and
left it in the lock. She would have been indignant at the assertion,
but I am positive it was not _always_ taken out at night. In this part
of the castle were the dining and drawing rooms, and immediately over
the latter, a state bedroom in which nobody had slept for many years.
It was into a narrow passage, no wider than itself, the door led.
From this passage a good-sized hall opened to the left--very barely
furnished, but with a huge fireplace, and a great old table, that
often had feasted jubilant companies. The walls were only plastered,
and were stained with damp. Against them were fixed a few mouldering
heads of wild animals--the stag and the fox and the otter--one ancient
wolf’s-head also, wherever that had been killed. But it was not into
this room the laird led his son. The passage ended in a stone stair
that went up between containing walls. It was much worn, and had so
little head-room that the laird could not ascend without stooping.
Cosmo was short enough as yet to go erect, but it gave him always a
feeling of imprisonment and choking, a brief agony of the imagination,
to pass through the narrow curve, though he did so at least twice every
day. It was the oldest-looking thing about the place--that staircase.
At the top of it, the laird turned to the right, and lifted the
latch--all the doors were latched--of a dark-looking door. It screaked
dismally as it opened. He entered and undid a shutter, letting an
abiding flash of the ever young light of the summer day into the
ancient room. It was long since Cosmo had been in it before. The aspect
of it affected him like a withered wall-flower.
It was a well-furnished room. A lady with taste must at one time
at least have presided in it--but then withering does so much for
beauty--and that not of stuffs and _things_ only! The furniture of
it was very modern compared with the house, but not much of it was
younger than the last James, or Queen Anne, and it had all a stately
old-maidish look. Such venerable rooms have been described, and
painted, and put on the stage, and dreamed about, tens of thousands
of times, yet they always draw me afresh as if they were as young as
the new children who keep the world from growing old. They haunt me,
and if I miss them in heaven, I shall have one given me. On the floor
was an old, old carpet, wondrously darned and skilfully patched, with
all its colours faded into a sweet faint ghost-like harmony. Several
spider-legged, inlaid tables stood about the room, but most of the
chairs were of a sturdier make, one or two of rich carved work of
India, no doubt a great rarity when first brought to Glenwarlock. The
walls had once had colour, but it was so retiring and indistinct in
the little light that came through the one small deep-set window whose
shutter had been opened, that you could not have said what it was.
There were three or four cabinets--one of them old Japanese; and on a
table a case of gorgeous humming birds. The scarlet cloth that covered
the table was faded to a dirty orange, but the birds were almost as
bright as when they darted like live jewels through the tropical
sunlight. Exquisite as they were however, they had not for the boy half
the interest of a faded old fire-screen, lovelily worked in silks, by
hands to him unknown, long ago returned to the earth of which they were
fashioned. A variety of nick-nacks and ornaments, not a few of which
would have been of value in the eyes of a connoisseur, crowded the
chimney-piece--which stood over an iron grate with bulging bars, and a
tall brass fender. How still and solemn-quiet it all was in the middle
of the great triumphant sunny day--like some far-down hollow in a rock,
the matrix of a gem! It looked as if it had done with life--as much
done with life as if it were a room in Egyptian rock, yet was it full
of the memories of keenest life, and Cosmo knew there was treasure upon
treasure of wonder and curiosity hid in those cabinets, some of which
he had seen, and more he would like to see. But it was not to show him
any of these that his father had now brought him to the room.
Not once yielding the right hand of the boy which was clasped to and
in his own, the laird closed the door of the room, and advancing the
whole length of it, stopped at a sofa covered with a rich brocade, and
seating himself thereon, slowly, and with a kind of care, drew him
between his thin knees, and began to talk to him. Now there was this
difference between the relation of these two and that of most fathers
and sons, that, thus taken into solemn solitude by his old father,
the boy felt no dismay, no sense of fault to be found, no troubled
expectation of admonition. Reverence and love held about equal sway in
his feeling towards his father. And while the grandmother looked down
on Cosmo as the son of his mother, for that very reason his father in a
strange lovely way reverenced his boy: the reaction was utter devotion.
Cosmo stood and looked in his father’s eyes--their eyes were of the
same colour--that bright sweet soft Norwegian blue--his right hand
still clasped in his father’s left, and his left hand leaning gently
on his father’s knee. Then, as I say, the old man began to talk to the
young one. A silent man ordinarily, it was from no lack of the power of
speech, for he had a Celtic gift of simple eloquence.
“This is your birthday, my son.”
“Yes, papa.”
“You are now fourteen.”
“Yes, papa.”
“You are growing quite a man.”
“I don’t know, papa.”
“So much of a man, at least, my Cosmo, that I am going to treat you
like a man this day, and tell you some things that I have never talked
about to any one since your mother’s death.--You remember your mother,
Cosmo?”
This question he was scarcely ever alone with the boy without
asking--not from forgetfulness, but from the desire to keep the boy’s
remembrance of her fresh, and for the pure pleasure of talking of
her to the only one with whom it did not seem profane to converse
concerning his worshipped wife.
“Yes, papa, I do.”
The laird always spoke Scotch to his mother, and to Grizzie also,
who would have thought him seriously offended had he addressed her
in book-English; but to his Marion’s son he always spoke in the best
English he had, and Cosmo did his best in the same way in return.
“Tell me what you remember about her,” said the old man.
He had heard the same thing again and again from the boy, yet every
time it was as if he hoped and watched for some fresh revelation
from the lips of the lad--as if, truth being one, memory might go on
recalling, as imagination goes on foreseeing.
“I remember,” said the boy, “a tall beautiful woman, with long hair,
which she brushed before a big, big looking-glass.”
The love of the son, kept alive by the love of the husband, glorifying
through the mists of his memory the earthly appearance of the mother,
gave to her the form in which he would see her again, rather than that
in which he had actually beheld her. And indeed the father saw her
after the same fashion in the memory of his love. Tall to the boy of
five, she was little above the middle height, yet the husband saw her
stately in his dreams; there was nothing remarkable in her face except
the expression, which after her marriage had continually gathered
tenderness and grace, but the husband as well as the child called her
absolutely beautiful.
“What colour were her eyes, Cosmo?”
“I don’t know; I never saw the colour of them; but I remember they
looked at me as if I should run into them.”
“She would have died for you, my boy. We must be very good that we may
see her again some day.”
“I will try. I do try, papa.”
“You see, Cosmo, when a woman like that condescends to be wife to one
of us and mother to the other, the least we can do, when she is taken
from us, is to give her the same love and the same obedience after
she is gone as when she was with us. She is with her own kind up in
heaven now, but she may be looking down and watching us. It may be God
lets her do that, that she may see of the travail of her soul and be
satisfied--who can tell? She can’t be very anxious about me now, for I
am getting old, and my warfare is nearly over; but she may be getting
things ready to rest me a bit. She knows I have for a long time now
been trying to keep the straight path, as far as I could see it, though
sometimes the grass and heather has got the better of it, so that it
was hard to find. But _you_ must remember, Cosmo, that it is not enough
to be a good boy, as I shall tell her you have always been: you’ve got
to be a good man, and that is a rather different and sometimes a harder
thing. For, as soon as a man has to do with other men, he finds they
expect him to do things they ought to be ashamed of doing themselves;
and then he has got to stand on his own honest legs, and not move an
inch for all their pushing and pulling; and especially where a man
loves his fellow man and likes to be on good terms with him, that is
not easy. The thing is just this, Cosmo--when you are a full-grown
man, you must be a good boy still--that’s the difficulty. For a man
to be a boy, and a good boy still, he must be a thorough man. The man
that’s not manly can never be a good boy to his mother. And you can’t
keep true to your mother, except you remember Him who is father and
mother both to all of us. I wish my Marion were here to teach you as
she taught me. She taught me to pray, Cosmo, as I have tried to teach
you--when I was in any trouble, just to go into my closet, and shut
to the door, and pray to my Father who is in secret--the same Father
who loved you so much as to give you my Marion for a mother. But I am
getting old and tired, and shall soon go where I hope to learn faster.
Oh, my boy! hear your father who loves you, and never do the thing
you would be ashamed for your mother or me to know. Remember, nothing
drops out; everything hid shall be revealed. But of all things, if ever
you should fail or fall, don’t lie still because you are down: get up
again--for God’s sake, for your mother’s sake, for my sake--get up and
try again.
“And now it is time you should know a little about the family of which
you come. I don’t doubt there have been some in it who would count me a
foolish man for bringing you up as I have done, but those of them who
are up there don’t. They see that the business of life is not to get
as much as you can, but to do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly
with your God--with your mother’s God, my son. They may say I have made
a poor thing of it, but I shall not hang my head before the public of
that country, because I’ve let the land slip from me that I couldn’t
keep any more than this weary old carcase that’s now crumbling away
from about me. Some would tell me I ought to shudder at the thought
of leaving you to such poverty, but I am too anxious about yourself,
my boy, to think much about the hardships that may be waiting you.
I should be far more afraid about you if I were leaving you rich. I
have seen rich people do things I never knew a poor gentleman do. I
don’t mean to say anything against the rich--there’s good and bad of
all sorts; but I just can’t be so very sorry that I am leaving you to
poverty, though, if I might have had my way, it wouldn’t have been so
bad. But he knows best who loves best. I have struggled hard to keep
the old place for you; but there’s hardly an acre outside the garden
and close but was mortgaged before I came into the property. I’ve been
all my life trying to pay off, but have made little progress. The house
is free, however, and the garden; and don’t you part with the old
place, my boy, except you see you _ought_. But rather than anything not
out and out honest, anything the least doubtful, sell every stone. Let
all go, if you should have to beg your way home to us. Come clean, my
son, as my Marion bore you.”
Here Cosmo interrupted his father to ask what _mortgaged_ meant. This
led to an attempt on the part of the laird to instruct him in the
whole state of the affairs of the property. He showed him where all
the papers were kept, and directed him to whom to go for any requisite
legal advise. Weary then of business, of which he had all his life had
more than enough, he turned to pleasanter matters, and began to tell
him anecdotes of the family.
“What in mercy can hae come o’ the laird, think ye, my leddy?” said
Grizzie to her mistress. “It’s the yoong laird’s birthday, ye see, an’
they aye haud a colloguin’ thegither upo’ that same, an’ I kenna whaur
to gang to cry them till their denner.”
“Run an’ ring the great bell,” said the grandmother, mindful of old
glories.
“’Deed, I s’ du naething o’ the kin’,” said Grizzie to herself; “it’s
eneuch to raise a regiment--gien it camna doon upo’ my heid.”
But she had her suspicion, and finding the great door open, ascended
the stair.
The two were sitting at a table, with the genealogical tree of the
family spread out before them, the father telling tale after tale, the
son listening in delight. I must confess, however--let it tell against
the laird’s honesty as it may--that, his design being neither to
glorify his family, nor to teach records, but to impress all he could
find of ancestral nobility upon his boy, he made a choice, and both
communicated and withheld. So absorbed were they, that Grizzie’s knock
startled them both a good deal.
“Yer denners is ready, laird,” she said, standing erect in the doorway.
“Verra weel, Grizzie, I thank ye,” returned the laird.--“Cosmo, we’ll
take a walk together this evening, and then I’ll tell you more about
that brother of my grandfather’s. Come along to dinner now.--I houp
ye hae something in honour o’ the occasion, Grizzie,” he added in a
whisper when he reached the door, where the old woman waited to follow
them.
“I teuk it upo’ me, laird,” answered Grizzie in the same tone, while
Cosmo was going down the stair, “to put a cock an’ a leek thegither,
an’ they’ll be nane the waur that ye hae keepit them i’ the pot a
whilie langer.--Cosmo,” she went on when they had descended, and
overtaken the boy, who was waiting for them at the foot, “the Lord
bless ye upo’ this bonnie day! An’ may ye be aye a comfort to them ’at
awes ye, as ye hae been up to this present.”
“I houp sae, Grizzie,” responded Cosmo humbly; and all went together to
the kitchen.
There the table was covered with a clean cloth of the finest of
homespun, and everything set out with the same nicety as if the meal
had been spread in the dining-room. The old lady, who had sought to
please her son by putting on her best cap for the occasion, but who
had in truth forgot what day it was until reminded by Grizzie, sat
already at the head of the table, waiting their arrival. She made a
kind speech to the boy, hoping he would be master of the place for many
years after his father and she had left him. Then the meal commenced.
It did not last long. They had the soup first, and then the fowl that
had been boiled in it, with a small second dish of potatoes--the year’s
baby Kidneys, besides those Grizzie had pared. Delicate pancakes
followed--and dinner was over--except for the laird, who had a little
toddy after. But as yet Cosmo had never even tasted strong drink--and
of course he never desired it. Leaving the table, he wandered out,
pondering some of the things his father had been telling him.
CHAPTER IV.
AN AFTERNOON SLEEP.
Presently, without having thought whither he meant to go, he found
himself out of sight of the house--in a favourite haunt, but one in
which he always had a peculiar feeling of strangeness and even
expatriation. He had descended the stream that rushed past the end
of the house, till it joined the valley river, and followed the
latter up, to where it took a sudden sharp turn, and a little
farther. Then he crossed it, and was in a lonely nook of the glen,
with steep _braes_ about him on all sides, some of them covered with
grass, others rugged and unproductive. He threw himself down in the
clover, a short distance from the stream, and straightway felt as
if he were miles from home. No shadow of life was to be seen.
Cottage-chimney nor any smoke was visible--no human being, no work
of human hands, no sign of cultivation except the grass and clover.
Now whether it was that in childhood he had learned that here he
was beyond his father’s land, or that some early sense of
loneliness in the place had been developed by a brooding fancy into
a fixed feeling, I cannot well say; but certainly, as often as he
came--and he liked to visit the spot, and would sometimes spend
hours in it--he felt like a hermit of the wilderness cut off from
human society, and was haunted with a vague sense of neighbouring
hostility. Probably it came of an historical fancy that the nook
ought to be theirs, combined with the sense that it was not. But
there had been no injury done _ab extra_: the family had suffered
from the inherent moral lack of certain of its individuals.
This sense of _away-from-homeness_, however, was not strong enough to
keep Cosmo from falling into such a dreamful reverie as by degrees
naturally terminated in slumber. Seldom is sleep far from one who
lies on his back in the grass, with the sound of waters in his
ears. And indeed a sleep in the open air was almost an essential
ingredient of a holiday such as Cosmo had been accustomed to make
of his birthday: constantly active as his mind was, perhaps in part
because of that activity, he was ready to fall asleep any moment
when warm and supine.
When he woke from what seemed a dreamless sleep, his half roused
senses were the same moment called upon to render him account of
something very extraordinary which they could not themselves
immediately lay hold of. Though the sun was yet some distance above
the horizon, it was to him behind one of the hills, as he lay with
his head low in the grass; and what could the strange thing be
which he saw on the crest of the height before him, on the other
side of the water? Was it a fire in a grate, thinned away by the
sunlight? How could there be a grate where there was neither house
nor wall? Even in heraldry the combination he beheld would have
been a strange one. There stood in fact a frightful-looking
creature half consumed in light--yet a pale light, seemingly not
strong enough to burn. It could not be a phoenix, for he saw no
wings, and thought he saw four legs. Suddenly he burst out
laughing, and laughed that the hills echoed. His sleep-blinded eyes
had at length found their focus and clarity.
“I see!” he said, “I see what it is! It’s Jeames Gracie’s coo ’at’s
been loupin’ ower the mune, an’s stucken upo’ ’t!”
In very truth there was the moon between the legs of the cow! She
did not remain there long however, but was soon on the cow’s back,
as she crept up and up in the face of the sun. He bethought him of
a couplet that Grizzie had taught him when he was a child:
Whan the coo loups ower the mune,
The reid gowd rains intil men’s shune.
And in after-life he thought not unfrequently of this odd vision he
had had. Often, when, having imagined he had solved some difficulty
of faith or action, presently the same would return in a new shape,
as if it had but taken the time necessary to change its garment, he
would say to himself with a sigh, “The coo’s no ower the mune yet!”
and set himself afresh to the task of shaping a handle on the
infinite small enough for a finite to lay hold of. Grizzie, who was
out looking for him, heard the roar of his laughter, and, guided by
the sound, spied him where he lay. He heard her footsteps, but
never stirred till he saw her looking down upon him like a
benevolent gnome that had found a friendless mortal asleep on
ground of danger.
“Eh, Cosmo, laddie, ye’ll get yer deid o’ caul’!” she cried. “An’
preserve ’s a’! what set ye lauchin’ in sic a fearsome fashion as
yon? Ye’re surely no fey!”
“Na, I’m no fey, Grizzie! Ye wad hae lauchen yersel’ to see Jeames
Gracie’s coo wi’ the mune atween the hin’ an’ the fore legs o’ her.
It was terrible funny.”
“Hoots! I see naething to lauch at i’ that. The puir coo cudna help
whaur the mune wad gang. The haivenly boadies is no to be
restricket.”
Again Cosmo burst into a great laugh, and this time Grizzie,
seriously alarmed lest he should be in reality _fey_, grew angry, and
seizing hold of him by the arm, pulled lustily.
“Get up, I tell ye!” she cried. “Here’s the laird speirin’ what’s
come o’ ye, ’at ye come na hame to yer tay.”
But Cosmo instead of rising only laughed the more, and went on
until at length Grizzie made use of a terrible threat.
“As sure ’s sowens!” she said, “gien ye dinna haud yer tongue wi’
that menseless-like lauchin’, I’ll no tell ye anither auld-warld
tale afore Marti’mas.”
“Will ye tell me ane the nicht gien I haud my tongue an’ gang hame
wi’ ye?”
“Ay, that wull I--that’s gien I can min’ upo’ ane.”
He rose at once, and laughed no more. They walked home together in
the utmost peace.
After tea, his father went out with him for a stroll, and to call
on Jeames Gracie, the owner of the cow whose _inconstellation_ had so
much amused him. He was an old man, with an elderly wife, and a
grand-daughter--a weaver to trade, whose father and grandfather
before him had for many a decade done the weaving work, both in
linen and wool, required by “them at the castle.” He had been on
the land, in the person of his ancestors, from time almost
immemorial, though he had only a small cottage, and a little bit of
land, barely enough to feed the translunar cow. But poor little
place as Jeames’s was, if the laird would have sold it, the price
would have gone a good way towards clearing the rest of his
property of its encumbrances. For the situation of the little spot
was such as to make it specially desirable in the eyes of the next
proprietor, on the border of whose land it lay. He was a lord of
session, and had taken his title from the place, which he inherited
from his father; who, although a laird, had been so little of a
gentleman, that the lordship had not been enough to make one of his
son. He was yet another of those trim, orderly men, who will
sacrifice anything--not to beauty--of that they have in general no
sense--but to tidiness: tidiness in law, in divinity, in morals, in
estate, in garden, in house, in person--tidiness is in their eyes
the first thing--seemingly because it is the highest creative
energy of which they are capable. Naturally the dwelling of James
Gracie was an eyesore to this man, being visible from not a few of
his windows, and from almost anywhere on the private road to his
house; for decidedly it was not tidy. Neither in truth was it
dirty, while to any life-loving nature it was as pleasant to know,
as it was picturesque to look at. But the very appearance of
poverty seems to act as a reproach on some of the rich--at least
why else are they so anxious to get it out of their sight?--and
Lord Lickmyloof--that was not his real title, but he was better
known by it than by the name of his land: it came of a nasty habit
he had, which I need not at present indicate farther--Lord
Lickmyloof could not bear the sight of the cottage which no painter
would have consented to omit from the landscape. It haunted him
like an evil thing.
[Illustration: COSMO ON HIS WAY TO SCHOOL.]
CHAPTER V.
THE SCHOOL.
The next morning, by the steep farm road, and the parish road,
which ran along the border of the river and followed it downward,
Cosmo, on his way to school, with his books in a green baize bag,
hung by the strings over his shoulder, came out from among the
hills upon a comparative plain. But there were hills on all sides
round him yet--not very high--few of them more than a couple of
thousand feet--but bleak and bare, even under the glow of the
summer sun, for the time of heather was not yet, when they would
show warm and rich to the eye of poet and painter. Most of the
farmers there, however, would have felt a little insulted by being
asked to admire them at any time: whatever their colour or shape or
product, they were incapable of yielding crops and money! In truth
many a man who now admires, would be unable to do so, if, like
those farmers, he had to struggle with nature for little more than
a bare living. The struggle there, what with early, long-lasting,
and bitter winters, and the barrenness of the soil in many parts,
was a severe one.
Leaving the river, the road ascended a little, and joined the
highway, which kept along a level, consisting mostly of land lately
redeemed from the peat-moss. It went straight for two miles, fenced
from the fields in many parts by low stone walls without mortar,
abhorrent to the eye of Cosmo; in other parts by walls of earth,
called dykes, which delighted his very soul. These were covered
with grass for the vagrant cow, sprinkled with loveliest little
wild flowers for the poet-peasant, burrowed in by wild bees for the
adventurous delight of the honey-drawn school-boy. Glad I am they
had not quite vanished from Scotland before I was sent thither, but
remained to help me get ready for the kingdom of heaven: those
dykes must still be dear to my brothers who have gone up before me.
Some of the fields had only a small ditch between them and the
road, and some of them had no kind of fence at all. It was a dreary
road even in summer, though not therefore without its loveable
features--amongst which the dykes; and wherever there is anything
to love, there is beauty in some form.
A short way past the second milestone, he came to the first straggling
houses of the village. It was called Muir of Warlock, after the moor
on which it stood, as the moor was called after the river that ran
through it, and that named after the glen, which took its name from the
family--so that the Warlocks had scattered their cognomen all around
them. A somewhat dismal-looking village it was--except to those that
knew its people: to some of such it was beautiful--as the plainest face
is beautiful to him who knows a sweet soul inside it. The highway ran
through it--a broad fine road, fit for the richest country under the
sun; but the causeway along its edges, making of it for the space a
street, was of the poorest and narrowest. Some of the cottages stood
immediately upon the path, some of them receded a little. They were
almost all of one story, built of stone, and rough-cast--_harled_,
they called it there, with roofs of thick thatch, in which a half
smothered pane of glass might hint at some sort of room beneath. As
Cosmo walked along, he saw all the trades at work; from blacksmith to
tailor, everybody was busy. Now and then he was met by a strong scent,
as of burning leather, from the oak-bark which some of the housewives
used for fuel, after its essence had been exhausted in the tan-pit,
but mostly the air was filled with the odour of burning peat. Cosmo
knew almost everybody, and was kindly greeted as he went along--none
the less that some of them, hearing from their children that he had
not been to school the day before, had remarked that his birthday
hardly brought him enough to keep it with. The vulgarity belonging
to the worship of Mammon, is by no means confined to the rich; many
of these, having next to nothing, yet thought possession the one
thing, money, houses, lands the only inheritances. It is a marvel
that even world-loving people should never see with what a load they
oppress the lives of the children to whom, instead of bringing them
up to earn their own living, and thus enjoy at least _the game_ of
life, they leave a fortune enough to sink a devil yet deeper in hell.
Was it nothing to Cosmo to inherit a long line of ancestors whose
story he knew--their virtues, their faults, their wickedness, their
humiliation?--to inherit the nobility of a father such as his? the
graciousness of a mother such as that father caused him to remember
her? Was there no occasion for the laird to rejoice in the birth of a
boy whom he believed to have inherited all the virtues of his race,
and left all their vices behind? But none of the villagers forgot,
however they might regard the holiday, that Cosmo was the “yoong laird”
notwithstanding the poverty of his house; and they all knew that in old
time the birthday of the heir had been a holiday to the school as well
as to himself, and remembered the introduction of the change by the
present master. Indeed, throughout the village, although there were not
a few landed proprietors in the neighbourhood whose lands came nearer,
all of whom of course were lairds, and although the village itself had
ceased to belong to the family, Glenwarlock was always called _the_
laird; and the better part in the hearts of even the money-loving and
money-trusting among its inhabitants, honoured him as the best man in
the country, “thof he hed sae little skeel at haudin’ his ain nest
thegither;” and though, besides, there is scarce a money-making man
who does not believe poverty the cousin, if not the child of fault;
and the more unscrupulous, _within the law_, a man has been in making
his money, the more he regards the man who seems to have lost the race
he has won, as somehow or other to blame: “People with naught are
naughty.” Nor is this judgment confined to the morally unscrupulous.
Few who are themselves permitted to be successful, care to conjecture
that it may be the will of the power, that in part through their
affairs, rules men, that some should be, in that way, unsuccessful:
better can be made of them by preventing the so-called success. Some
men rise with the treatment under which others would sink. But of the
inhabitants of Muir of Warlock, only a rather larger proportion than of
the inhabitants of Mayfair would have taken interest in such a theory
of results.
They all liked, and those who knew him best, loved the young laird;
for if he had no lands, neither had he any pride, they said, and was
as happy sitting with any old woman, and sharing her tea, as at a
lord’s table. Nor was he less of a favourite at school, though, being
incapable of self-assertion, his inborn consciousness of essential
humanity rendering it next to impossible for him to _claim_ anything,
some of the bigger boys were less than friendly with him. One point in
his conduct was in particular distasteful to them: he seemed to scorn
even an honest advantage. For in truth he never could bring himself,
in the small matters of dealing that pass between boys at school, to
make the least profit. He had a passion for fair play, which, combined
with love to his neighbour, made of an advantage, though perfectly
understood and recognized, almost a physical pain: he shrank from it
with something like disgust. I may not, however, conceal my belief,
that there was in it a rudimentary tinge of the pride of those of his
ancestors who looked down upon commerce, though not upon oppression,
or even on robbery. But the true man will change to nobility even the
instincts derived from strains of inferior moral development in his
race--as the oyster makes, they say, of the sand-grain a pearl.
Greeting the tailor through his open window, where he sat cross-legged
on his table, the shoemaker on his stool, which, this lovely summer
morning, he had brought to the door of his cottage, and the smith
in his nimbus of sparks, through the half-door of his smithy, and
receiving from each a kindly response, the boy walked steadily on till
he came to the school. There, on the heels of the master, the boys
and girls were already crowding in, and he entered along with them.
The religious preliminaries over, consisting in a dry and apparently
grudging recognition of a sovereignty that required the homage, and
the reading of a chapter of the Bible in class, the _secular_ business
was proceeded with; and Cosmo was sitting with his books before him,
occupied with a hard passage in _Cæsar_, when the master left his desk
and came to him.
“You’ll have to make up for lost time to-day, Cosmo,” he said.
Now if anything was certain to make Cosmo angry, it was the appearance,
however slight, or however merely implied, of disapproval of anything
his father thought, or did, or sanctioned. His face flushed, and he
answered quickly,
“The time wasn’t lost, sir.”
This reply made the master in his turn angry, but he restrained himself.
“I’m glad of that! I may then expect to find you prepared with your
lessons for to-day.”
“I learned my lessons for yesterday,” Cosmo answered; “but my father
says it’s no play to learn lessons.”
“Your father’s not master of this school.”
“He’s maister o’ me,” returned the boy, relapsing into the
mother-tongue, which, except it be spoken in good humour, always sounds
rude.
The master took the youth’s devotion to his father for insolence to
himself.
“I shall say no more,” he rejoined, still using the self-command which
of all men an autocrat requires, “till I find how you do in your class.
That you are the best scholar in it, is no reason why you should be
allowed to idle away hours in which you might have been laying up store
for the time to come.”--It was a phrase much favoured by the master--in
present application foolish.--“But perhaps your father does not mean to
send you to college?”
“My father hasna said, an’ I haena speirt,” answered Cosmo, with his
eyes on his book.
Still misinterpreting the boy, the conceit and ill-temper of the master
now overcame him, and caused him to forget the proprieties altogether.
“Haud on that gait, laddie, an’ ye’ll be as great a fule as yer father
himsel’,” he said.
Cosmo rose from his seat, white as the wall behind him, looked in the
master’s eyes, caught up his _Cæsar_, and dashed the book in his face.
Most boys would then have made for the door, but that was not Cosmo’s
idea of bearing witness. The moment the book left his hand, he drew
himself up, stood still as a statue, looked full at the master, and
waited. Not by a motion would he avoid any consequence of his act.
He had not long to wait. A corner of the book had gone into the
master’s eye; he clapped his hand to it, and for a moment seemed lost
in suffering. The next, he clenched for the boy a man’s fist, and
knocked him down. Cosmo fell backward over the form, struck his head
hard on the foot of the next desk, and lay where he fell.
A shriek arose, and a girl about sixteen came rushing up. She was the
grand-daughter of James Gracie, befriended of the laird.
“Go to your seat, Agnes!” shouted the master, and turning from her,
stood, with his handkerchief to one eye, looking down on the boy. So
little did he know him, he suspected him of pretending to be more hurt
than he was.
“Touch me gien ye daur,” cried Agnes, as she stooped to remove his legs
from the form.
“Leave him alone,” shouted the master, and seizing her, pulled her
away, and flung her from him that she almost fell.
But by this time the pain in his eye had subsided a little, and
he began to doubt whether indeed the boy was pretending as he had
imagined. He began also to feel not a little uneasy as to the possible
consequences of his hasty act--not half so uneasy, however, as he
would have felt, had the laird been as well-to-do as his neighbour,
Lord Lickmyloof--who would be rather pleased than otherwise, the
master thought, at any grief that might befall either Cosmo or the
lass Gracie. Therefore, although he would have been ready to sink had
the door then opened and the laird entered, he did not much fear any
consequences to be counted serious from the unexpected failure of his
self-command. He dragged the boy up by the arm, and set him on his
seat, before Agnes could return; but his face was as that of one dead,
and he fell forward on the desk. With a second great cry, Agnes again
sprang forward. She was a strong girl, accustomed to all kinds of work,
out-door and in-door. She caught Cosmo round the waist from behind,
pulled him from the seat, and drew him to the door, which because of
the heat stood open. The master had had enough of it, and did not
attempt to hinder her. There she took him in her arms, and literally
ran with him along the street.
CHAPTER VI.
GRANNIE’S COTTAGE.
But she had not to pass many houses before she came to that of her
grandfather’s mother, an aged woman, I need not say, but in very
tolerable health and strength nevertheless. She sat at her spinning
wheel, with her door wide open. Suddenly, and, to her dulled sense,
noiselessly, Aggie came staggering in with her burden. She dropped him
on the old woman’s bed, and herself on the floor, her heart and lungs
going wildly.
“I’ the name o’ a’!” cried her great-grandmother, stopping her wheel,
breaking her thread, and letting the end twist madly up amongst the
revolving iron teeth, emerging from the mist of their own speed, in
which a moment before they had looked ethereal as the vibration-film of
an insect’s wings.
She rose with a haste marvellous for her years, and approaching, looked
down on the prostrate form of the girl.
“It can never be my ain Aggie,” she faltered, “to rush intil my quaiet
hoose that gait, fling a man upo’ my bed, an’ fa’ her len’th upo’ my
flure!”
But Agnes was not yet able to reply. She could only sign with
her hand to the bed, which she did with such energy that her
great-grandmother--_Grannie_, she called her, as did the whole of the
village--turned at once thitherward. She could not see well, and the
box-bed was dark, so she did not at first recognize Cosmo, but the
moment she suspected who it was, she too uttered a cry--the cry of old
age, feeble and wailful.
“The michty be ower ’s! what’s come to my bairn?” she said.
“The maister knockit him doon,” gasped Agnes.
“Eh, lassie! rin for the doctor.”
“No,” came feebly from the bed. “I dinna want ony notice ta’en o’ the
business.”
“Are ye sair hurtit, my bairn?” asked the old woman.
“My heid’s some sair an’ throughither-like; but I’ll jist lie still a
wee, and syne I’ll be able to gang hame. I’m some sick. I winna gang
back to the school the day.”
“Na, my bonnie man, that ye sanna!” cried Grannie, in a tone mingled of
pity and indignation.
A moment more, and Agnes rose from the earth, for earth it was, quite
fresh; and the two did all they could to make him comfortable. Aggie
would have gone at once to let his father know; she was perfectly
able, she said, and in truth seemed nothing the worse for her fierce
exertion. But Cosmo said, “Bide a wee, Aggie, an’ we’ll gang hame
thegither. I’ll be better in twa or three minutes.” But he did not get
better so fast as he expected, and the only condition on which Grannie
would consent not to send for the doctor, was, that Agnes should go and
tell his father.
“But eh, Aggie!” said Cosmo, “dinna lat him think there’s onything to
be fleyt aboot. It’s naething but a gey knap o’ the heid; an’ I’m sure
the maister didna inten’ duin me ony sarious hurt.--But my father’s
sure to gie him fair play!--he gies a’ body fair play.”
Agnes set out, and Cosmo fell asleep.
He slept a long time, and woke better. She hurried to Glenwarlock, and
in the yard found the laird.
“Weel, lassie!” he said, “what brings ye here this time o’ day? What
for are ye no at the school? Ye’ll hae little eneuch o’ ’t by an’ by,
whan the hairst’s come.”
“It’s the yoong laird!” said Aggie, and stopped.
“What’s come till ’im?” asked the laird, in the sharpened tone of
anxiety.
“It’s no muckle, he says himsel’. But his heid’s some sair yet.”
“What maks his heid sair? He was weel eneuch whan he gaed this mornin’.”
“The maister knockit ’im doon.”
The laird started as if one had struck him in the face. The blood
reddened his forehead, and his old eyes flashed like two stars. All
the battle-fury of the old fighting race seemed to swell up from
ancient fountains amongst the unnumbered roots of his being, and rush
to his throbbing brain. He clenched his withered fist, drew himself up
straight, and made his knees strong. For a moment he felt as in the
prime of life and its pride. The next his fist relaxed, his hand fell
by his side, and he bowed his head.
“The Lord hae mercy upo’ me!” he murmured. “I was near takin’ the
affairs o’ ane o’ his into _my_ han’s!”
He covered his face with his wrinkled hands, and the girl stood beside
him in awe-filled silence. But she did not quite comprehend, and was
troubled at seeing him stand thus motionless. In the trembling voice of
one who would comfort her superior, she said,
“Dinna greit, laird. He’ll be better, I’m thinkin’, afore ye win till
’im. It was Grannie gart me come--no him.”
Speechless the laird turned, and without even entering the house,
walked away to go to the village. He had reached the valley-road before
he discovered that Agnes was behind him.
“Dinna ye come, Aggie,” he said; “ye may be wantit at hame.”
“Ye dinna think I wad ley ye, laird!--’cep’ ye was to think fit to
sen’ me frae ye. I’m maist as guid ’s a man to gang wi’ ye--wi’ the
advantage o’ bein’ a wuman, as my mither tells me:”--She called her
grandmother, _mother_.--“ye see we can daur mair nor ony man--but,
Guid forgie me!--no mair nor the yoong laird whan he flang his _Cæsar_
straucht i’ the maister’s face this verra mornin’.”
The laird stopped, turned sharply round, and looked at her.
“What did he that for?” he said.
“’Cause he ca’d yersel’ a fule,” answered the girl, with the utmost
simplicity, and no less reverence.
The laird drew himself up once more, and looked twenty years younger.
But it was not pride that inspired him, nor indignation, but the
father’s joy at finding in his son his champion.
“Mony ane’s ca’d me that, I weel believe, lassie, though no to my ain
face or that o’ my bairn. But whether I deserve ’t or no, nane but
ane kens. It’s no by the word o’ man I stan’ or fa’; but it’s hoo my
maister luiks upo’ my puir endeevour to gang by the thing he says. Min’
this, lassie--lat fowk say as they like, but du ye as _he_ likes, an’,
or a’ be dune, they’ll be upo’ their k-nees to ye. An’ sae they’ll
be yet to my bairn--though I’m some tribbled he sud hae saired the
maister--e’en as he deserved.”
“What cud he du, sir? It was na for himsel’ he strack! An’ syne he
never muved an inch, but stud there like a rock, an’ liftit no a han’
to defen’ himsel’, but jist loot the maister tak his wull o’ ’im.”
The pair tramped swiftly along the road, heeding nothing on either
hand as they went, Aggie lithe and active, the laird stooping greatly
in his forward anxiety to see his injured boy, but walking much faster
“than his age afforded.” Before they reached the village, the mid-day
recess had come, and everybody knew what had happened. Loud were most
in praise of the boy’s behaviour, and many were the eyes that from
window and door watched the laird, as he hurried down the street to
“Grannie’s,” where all had learned the young laird was lying. But no
one spoke, or showed that he was looking, and the laird walked straight
on with his eyes to the ground, glancing neither to the right hand nor
the left; and as did the laird, so did Aggie.
The door of the cottage stood open. There was a step down, but the
laird knew it well. Turning to the left through a short passage, in
the window of which stood a large hydrangea, over two wooden pails of
water, he lifted the latch of the inner door, bowed his tall head, and
entered the room where lay his darling. With a bow to Grannie, he went
straight up to the bed, speedily discovered that Cosmo slept, and stood
regarding him with a full heart. Who can tell but him who knows it, how
much more it is to be understood by one’s own, than by all the world
beside! By one’s own one learns to love all God’s creatures, and from
one’s own one gets strength to meet the misprision of the world.
The room was dark though it was summer, and although it had two
windows, one to the street, and one to the garden behind: both
ceiling and floor were of a dark brown, for the beams and boards of
the one were old and interpenetrated with smoke, and the other was
of hard-beaten clay, into which also was wrought much smoke and an
undefinable blackness, while the windows were occupied with different
plants favoured of Grannie, so that little light could get in, and that
little was half-swallowed by the general brownness. A tall eight-day
clock stood in one corner, up to which, whoever would learn from it
the time, had to advance confidentially, and consult its face on
tip-toe, with peering eyes. Beside it was a beautifully polished chest
of drawers; a nice tea-table stood in the centre, and some dark-shiny
wooden chairs against the walls. A closet opened at the head of the
bed, and at the foot of it was the door of the room and the passage, so
that it stood in a recess, to which were wooden doors, seldom closed. A
fire partly of peat, partly of tan, burned on the little hearth.
Cosmo opened his eyes, and saw those of his father looking down upon
him. He stretched out his arms, and drew the aged head upon his bosom.
His heart was too full to speak.
“How do you find yourself, my boy?” said the father, gently releasing
himself. “I know all about it; you need not trouble yourself to tell me
more than just how you are.”
“Better, father, much better,” answered Cosmo. “But there is one
thing I must tell you. Just before it happened we were reading in the
Bible-class about Samson--how the spirit of the Lord came upon him, and
with the jaw-bone of an ass he slew ever so many of the Philistines;
and when the master said that bad word about you, it seemed as if the
spirit of the Lord came upon me; for I was not in a rage, but filled
with what seemed a holy indignation; and as I had no ass’s jaw-bone
handy, I took my _Cæsar_, and flung it as hard and as straight, as I
could in the master’s face. But I am not so sure about it now.”
“Tak ye nae thoucht anent it, Cosmo, my bairn,” said the old woman,
taking up the word; “it’s no a hair ayont what he deserved ’at daured
put sic a word to the best man in a’ the country. By the han’ o’ a
babe, as he did Goliah o’ Gath, heth the Lord rebuked the enemy.--The
Lord himsel’ ’s upo’ your side, laird, to gie ye siccan a brave son.”
“I never kent him lift his han’ afore,” said the laird, as if he would
fain mitigate judgment on youthful indiscretion,--“excep’ it was to the
Kirkmalloch bull, when he ran at him an’ me as gien he wad hae pitcht
’s ower the wa’ o’ the warl’.”
“The mair like it _was_ the speerit o’ the Lord, as the bairn himsel’
was jaloosin,” remarked Grannie, in a tone of confidence to which the
laird was ready enough to yield;--“an’ whaur the speerit o’ the Lord
is, there’s leeberty,” she added, thinking less of the suitableness
of the quotation, than of the aptness of words in it. Glenwarlock
stooped and kissed the face of his son, and went to fetch the doctor.
Before he returned, Cosmo was asleep again. The doctor would not have
him waked. From his pulse and the character of his sleep he judged he
was doing well. He had heard all about the affair before, but heard
all now as for the first time, assured the laird there was no danger,
said he would call again, and recommended him to go home. The boy must
remain where he was for the night, he said, and if the least ground for
uneasiness should show itself, he would ride over, and make his report.
“I don’t know what to think,” returned the laird: “it would be trouble
and inconvenience to Grannie.”
“’Deed, laird, ye sud be ashamt to say sic a thing: it’ll be naething
o’ the kin’!” cried the old woman. “Here he s’ bide--wi’ yer leave,
sir, an’ no muv frae whaur he lies! There’s anither bed i’ the cloaset
there. But, troth, what wi’ the rheumatics, an’--an’--the din o’ the
rottans, we s’ ca’ ’t, mony’s the nicht I gang to nae bed ava’; an’
to hae the yoong laird sleepin’ i’ my bed, an’ me keepin’ watch ower
’im, ’ill be jist like haein’ an angel i’ the hoose to luik efter. I’ll
be somebody again for ae nicht, I can tell ye! An’ oh! it’s a lang
time, sir, sin’ I was onybody i’ this warl’! I houp sair they’ll hae
something for auld fowk to du i’ the neist.”
“Hoots, mistress Forsyth,” returned the laird, “the’ ’ll be naebody
auld there!”
“Hoo am I to win in than, sir? I’m auld, gien onybody ever was auld!
An’ hoo’s yersel’ to win in, sir--for ye maun be some auld yersel’ by
this time, thof I min’ weel yer father a bit loonie in a tartan kilt.”
“What wad ye say to be made yoong again, auld frien’?” suggested the
laird, with a smile of wonderful sweetness.
“Eh, sir! there’s naething to that effec’ i’ the word.”
“Hoot!” rejoined the laird, “wad ye hae me plaguit to tell the laddie
there a’ thing I wad du for him, as gien he hadna a hert o’ his ain to
tell ’im a score o’ things--ay, hun’ers o’ things? Dinna ye ken ’at the
speerit o’ man’s the can’le o’ the Lord?”
“But sae mony for a’ that follows but their ain fancies!--That ye maun
alloo, laird; an’ what comes o’ yer can’le than?”
“That’s sic as never luik whaur the licht fa’s, but aye some ither
gait, for they carena to walk by the same. But them ’at orders their
wy’s by what licht they hae, there’s no fear o’ them. Even sud they
stummle, they sanna fa’.”
“’Deed, laird, I’m thinkin’ ye may be richt. I hae stummlet mony’s
the time, but I’m no doon yet; an’ I hae a guid houp ’at maybe, puir
dissiple as I am, the Maister may lat on ’at he kens me, whan that
great and terrible day o’ the Lord comes.”
Cosmo began to stir. His father went to the bed-side, and saw at
a glance that the boy was better. He told him what the doctor had
decreed. Cosmo said he was quite able to get up and go home that
minute. But his father would not hear of it.
“I can’t bear to think of you walking back all that way alone, papa,”
objected Cosmo.
“Ye dinna think, Cosmo,” interposed Aggie, “’at I’m gauin to lat the
laird gang hame himlane, an’ me here to be his body-gaird! I ken my
duty better nor that.”
But the laird did not go till they had all had tea together, and the
doctor had again come and gone, and given his decided opinion that all
Cosmo needed was a little rest, and that he would be quite well in a
day or two. Then at length his father left him, and, comforted, set out
with Aggie for Glenwarlock.
CHAPTER VII.
DREAMS.
The gloamin’ came down much sooner in Grannie’s cottage than on the
sides of the eastward hills, but the old woman made up her little fire,
and it glowed a bright heart to the shadowy place. Though the room was
always dusky, it was never at this season quite dark any time of the
night. It was not absolutely needful, except for the little cooking
required by the invalid--for as such, in her pride of being his nurse,
Grannie regarded him--but she welcomed the excuse for a little extra
warmth to her old limbs during the night watches. Then she sat down in
her great chair, and all was still.
“What for arena ye spinnin’, Grannie?” said Cosmo. “I like fine to hear
the wheel singin’ like a muckle flee upo’ the winnock. It spins i’
my heid lang lingles o’ thouchts, an’ dreams, an’ wad-be’s. Neist to
hearin’ yersel’ tell a tale, I like to hear yer wheel gauin’. It has a
w’y o’ ’ts ain wi’ me!”
“I was feart it micht vex ye wi’ the soomin’ o’ ’t,” answered Grannie,
and as she spoke she rose, and lighted her little lamp, though she
scarcely needed light for her spinning, and sat down to her wheel.
For a long unweary time Cosmo lay and listened, an aerial Amphion,
building castles in the air to its music, which was so monotonous that,
like the drone of the bag-pipes, he could use it for accompaniment to
any dream-time of his own.
When a man comes to trust in God thoroughly, he shrinks from
castle-building, lest his faintest fancy should run counter to that
loveliest Will; but a boy’s dreams are nevertheless a part of his
education. And the true heart will not leave the blessed conscience
out, even in its dreams.
Those of Cosmo were mostly of a lovely woman, much older than himself,
who was kind to him, and whom he obeyed and was ready to serve like
a slave. These came, of course, first of all, from the heart that
needed and delighted in the thought of a mother, but they were bodied
out from the memory, faint, far-off, and dim, of his own mother, and
the imaginations of her roused by his father’s many talks with him
concerning her. He dreamed now of one, now of another beneficent power,
of the fire, the air, the earth, or the water--each of them a gracious
woman, who favoured, helped, and protected him, through dangers and
trials innumerable. Such imaginings may be--nay must be unhealthy for
those who will not attempt the right in the face of loss and pain and
shame; but to those who labour in the direction of their own ideal,
dreams will do no hurt, but foster rather the ideal.
When at length the spinning-wheel ceased with its hum, the silence was
to Cosmo like the silence after a song, and his thoughts refused to do
their humming alone. The same moment he fell--from a wondrous region
where he dwelt with sylphs in a great palace, built on the tree-tops
of a forest ages old; where the buxom air bathed every limb, and was
to his ethereal body as water--sensible as a liquid; whose every room
rocked like the baby’s cradle of the nursery rime, but equilibrium was
the merest motion of the will; where the birds nested in its cellars,
and the squirrels ran up and down its stairs, and the woodpeckers
pulled themselves along its columns and rails by their beaks; where the
winds swung the whole city with a rhythmic roll, and the sway as of
tempest waves, music-ruled to ordered cadences; where, far below, lower
than the cellars, the deer, and the mice, and the dormice, and the
foxes, and all the wild things of the forest, ran in its caves--from
this high city of the sylphs, watched and loved and taught by the most
gracious and graceful and tenderly ethereal and powerful of beings, he
fell supine into Grannie’s box-bed, with the departed hum of her wheel
spinning out its last thread of sound in his disappointed brain.
In after years when he remembered the enchanting dreams of his boyhood,
instead of sighing after them as something gone for ever, he would say
to himself, “What matter they are gone? In the heavenly kingdom my own
mother is waiting me, fairer and stronger and real. I imagined the
elves; God imagined my mother.”
The unconscious magician of the whole mystery, who had seemed to the
boy to be spinning his very brain into dreams, rose, and, drawing near
the bed, as if to finish the ruthless destruction, and with her long
witch-broom sweep down the very cobwebs of his airy phantasy, said,
“Is ye waukin’, Cosmo my bairn?”
“Ay am I,” answered Cosmo, with a faint pang, and a strange sense of
loss: when should he dream its like again!
“Soon, soon, Cosmo,” he might have heard, could he have interpreted
the telephonic signals from the depths of his own being; “wherever the
creative pneuma can enter, there it enters, and no door stands so wide
to it as that of the obedient heart.”
“Weel, ye maun hae yer supper, an’ syne ye maun say yer prayers, an’
hae dune wi’ Tyseday, an’ gang on til’ Wudens-day.”
“I’m nae wantin’ ony supper, thank ye,” said the boy.
“Ye maun hae something, my bonny man; for them ’at aits ower little,
as weel ’s them ’at aits ower muckle, the night-mear rides--an’ she’s
a fearsome horse. Ye can never win upo’ the back o’ her, for as guid
a rider as ye’re weel kent to be, my bairn. Sae wull ye hae a drappy
parritch an’ ream? or wad ye prefar a sup of fine gruel, sic as yer
mother used to like weel frae my han’, whan it sae happent I was i’ the
hoose?” The offer seemed to the boy to bring him a little nearer the
mother whose memory he worshipped, and on the point of saying, for the
sake of saving her trouble, that he would have the porridge, he chose
the gruel.
He watched from his nest the whole process of its making. It took
a time of its own, for one of the secrets of good gruel is a long
acquaintance with the fire.--Many a time the picture of that room
returned to him in far different circumstances, like a dream of quiet
and self-sustained delight--though his one companion was an aged woman.
When he had taken it, he fell asleep once more, and when he woke again,
it was in the middle of the night. The lamp was nearly burned out: it
had a long, red, disreputable nose, that spoke of midnight hours and
exhausted oil. The old lady was dozing in her chair. The clock had just
struck something, for the sound of its bell was yet faintly pulsing
in the air. He sat up, and looked out into the room. Something seemed
upon him--he could not tell what. He felt as if something had been
going on besides the striking of the clock, and were not yet over--as
if something was even now being done in the room. But there the old
woman slept, motionless, and apparently in perfect calm! It could not,
however, have been perfect as it seemed, for presently she began to
talk. At first came only broken sentences, occasionally with a long
pause; and just as he had concluded she would say nothing more, she
would begin again. There was something awful to the fancy of the youth
in the issuing of words from the lips of one apparently unconscious
of surrounding things; her voice was like the voice of one speaking
from another world. Cosmo was a brave boy where duty was concerned,
but conscience and imagination were each able to make him tremble. To
tremble, and to turn the back, are, however, very different things:
of the latter, the thing deserving to be called cowardice, Cosmo knew
nothing; his hair began to rise upon his head, but that head he never
hid beneath the bed-clothes. He sat and stared into the gloom, where
the old woman lay in her huge chair, muttering at irregular intervals.
Presently she began to talk a little more continuously. And now also
Cosmo’s heart had got a little quieter, and, no longer making such
a noise in his ears, allowed him to hear better. After a few words
seemingly unconnected, though probably with a perfect dependence of
their own, she began to murmur something that sounded like verses.
Cosmo soon perceived that she was saying the same thing over and over,
and at length he had not only made out every word of the few lines, but
was able to remember them. This was what he afterwards recalled--by
that time uncertain whether the whole thing had not been a dream:
Catch yer naig an’ pu’ his tail:
In his hin’ heel ca’ a nail;
Rug his lugs frae ane anither--
Stan’ up, an’ ca’ the king yer brither.
When first he repeated them entire to himself, the old woman still
muttering them, he could not help laughing, and the noise, though
repressed, yet roused her. She woke, not, like most young people, with
slow gradation of consciousness, but all at once was wide awake. She
sat up in her chair.
“Was I snorin’, laddie, ’at ye leuch?” she asked, in a tone of slight
offence.
“Eh, na!” replied Cosmo. “It was only ’at ye was sayin’ something rale
funny--i’ yer sleep, ye ken--a queer jingle o’ poetry it was.”
Therewith he repeated the rime, and Grannie burst into a merry
laugh--which however sobered rather suddenly.
“I dinna won’er I was sayin’ ower thae fule words,” she said, “for
’deed I was dreamin’ o’ the only ane I ever h’ard say them, an’ that
was whan I was a lass--maybe aboot thirty. Onybody micht hae h’ard
him sayin’ them--ower and ower til himsel’, as gien he cudna weary o’
them, but naebody but mysel’ seemed to hae ta’en ony notice o’ the
same. I used whiles to won’er whether he fully un’erstude what he was
sayin’--but troth! hoo cud there be ony sense in sic havers?”
“Was there ony mair o’ the ballant?” asked Cosmo.
“Gien there was mair; I h’ard na ’t,” replied Grannie. “An’ weel I wat!
he was na ane to sing, the auld captain.--Did ye never hear tell o’
’im, laddie?”
“Gien ye mean the auld brither o’ the laird o’ that time, him ’at cam
hame frae his sea-farin’ to the East Indies--”
“Ay, ay; that’s him! Ye hae h’ard tell o’ ’im! He hed a ship o’ ’s
ain, an’ made mony a voyage afore ony o’ ’s was born, an’ was an auld
man whan at len’th hame cam he, as the sang says--ower auld to haud
by the sea ony more. I’ll never forget the luik o’ the man whan first
I saw him, nor the hurry an’ the scurry, the rinnin’ here, an’ the
routin’ there, ’at there was whan the face o’ ’m cam in at the yett!
Ye see they a’ thoucht he was hame wi’ a walth ayont figures--stowed
awa’ somewhaur--naebody kent whaur. Eh, but he was no a bonny man, an’
fowk said he dee’d na a fairstrae deith: hoo that may be, I dinna weel
ken: there _war_ unco things aboot the affair--things ’at winna weel
bide speykin’ o’. Ae thing’s certain, an’ that is, ’at the place has
never thriven sin syne. But, for that maitter, it hedna thriven for
mony a lang afore. An’ there was a fowth o’ awfu’ stories reengin’ the
country, like ghaists ’at naebody cud get a grip o’--as to hoo he had
gotten the said siller, an’ sic like--the siller ’at naebody ever saw;
for upo’ that siller, as I tell ye, naebody ever cuist an e’e. Some
said he had been a pirate upo’ the hie seas, an’ had ta’en the siller
in lumps o’ gowd frae puir ships ’at hadna men eneuch to haud the grip
o’ ’t; some said he had been a privateer; an’ ither some said there was
sma’ differ atween the twa. An’ some wad hae ’t he was ane o’ them ’at
tuik an’ sauld the puir black fowk, ’at cudna help bein’ black, for as
ootlandish as it maun luik--I never saw nane o’ the nation mysel’--ony
mair nor a corbie can help his feathers no bein’ like a doo’s; an’ gien
they turnt black for ony deevilry o’ them ’at was their forbeirs, I
kenna, an’ it maks naething to me or mine, --I wad fain an’ far raither
du them a guid turn nor tak an’ sell them; for gien their parents had
sinned, the mair war they to be pitied. But as I was sayin’, naebody
kent hoo he had gethert his siller, the mair by token ’at maybe there
was nane, for naebody, as I was tellin’ ye, ever had the sma’est glimp
o’ siller aboot ’im. For a close-loofed near kin’ o’ man he was, gien
ever ony! Aye ready was he to borrow a shillin’ frae ony fule ’at wad
len’ him ane, an’ lang had him ’at len’ ’t forgotten to luik for ’t,
er’ he thoucht o’ peyin’ the same. It was mair nor ae year or twa ’at
he leeved aboot the place, an’ naebody cared muckle for his company,
though a’ body was ower feart to lat him ken he was na welcome here or
there; for wha cud tell he micht oot wi’ the swoord he aye carriet, an’
mak an’ en’ o’ ’im! For ’deed he fearna God nor man, ony mair nor the
jeedge i’ the Scriptur’. He drank a heap--as for a’ body at he ca’d
upo’ aye hed oot the whisky-bottle well willun’ to please the man they
war feart at.”
The voice of the old woman went sounding in the ears of the boy, on
and on in the gloom, and through it, possibly from the still confused
condition of his head, he kept constantly hearing the rimes she had
repeated to him. They seemed to have laid hold of him as of her,
perhaps from their very foolishness, in an odd inexplicable way:--
Catch yer naig an’ pu’ his tail;
In his hin’ heel ca’ a nail;
Rug his lugs frae ane anither--
Stan’ up, an’ ca’ the king yer brither.
On and on went the rime, and on and on went the old woman’s voice.
“Weel, there cam’ a time whan an English lord begud to be seen aboot
the place, an’ that was nae comon sicht i’ oor puir country. He was a
frien’, fowk said, o’ the yoong Markis o’ Lossie, an’ that was hoo he
cam to sicht. He gaed fleein’ aboot, luikin’ at this, an’ luikin’ at
that; an’ whaur or hoo he fell in wi’ _him_, I dinna ken, but or lang
the twa o’ them was a heap thegither. They playt cairts thegither,
they drank thegither, they drave oot thegither--for the auld captain
never crossed beast’s back--an’ what made sic frien’s o’ them nobody
could imaigine. For the tane was a rouch sailor chield, an’ the tither
was a yoong lad, little mair, an’ a fine gentleman as weel ’s a bonny
man. But the upshot o’ ’t a’ was an ill ane; for, efter maybe aboot a
month or sae o’ sic friendship as was atween them, there cam a nicht
’at brouchtna the captain hame; for ye maun un’erstan’, wi’ a’ his
rouch w’ys, an’ his drinkin’, an’ his cairt-playin’, he was aye hame
at nicht, an’ safe intil ’s bed, whaur he sleepit i’ the best chaumer
i’ the castle. Ay, he wad come hame, aften as drunk as man cud be, but
hame he cam. Sleep intil the efternune o’ the neist day he wad, but
never oot o’ ’s nain bed--or if no aye in his ain nakit _bed_, for I
fan’ him ance mysel’ lyin’ snorin’ upo’ the flure, it was aye intil ’s
ain room, as I say, an’ no in ony strange place drunk or sober. Sae
there was some surprise at his no appearin’, an’ fowk spak o’ ’t, but
no that muckle, for naebody cared i’ their hert what cam o’ the man.
Still whan the men gaed oot to their wark, they bude to gie a luik
gien there was ony sign o’ ’m. It was easy to think ’at he micht hae
been at last ower sair owertaen to be able to win hame. But that wasna
it, though whan they cam upo’ ’m lyin’ on ’s back i’ the howe yon’er
’at luiks up to my daughter’s bit gerse for her coo’, they thoucht he
bude to hae sleepit there a’ nicht. Sae he had, but it was the sleep
’at kens no waukin--at least no the kin’ o’ waukin’ ’at comes wi’ the
mornin’!”
Cosmo recognized with a shudder his favourite spot, where on his
birthday, as on many a day before, he had fallen asleep. But the old
woman went on with her story.
“Deid was the auld captain--as deid as ever was man ’at had nane
left to greit for him. But thof there was nae greitin’, no but sic a
hullabaloo as rase upo’ the discovery! They rade an’ they ran; the
doctor cam’, an’ the minister, an’ the lawyer, an’ the grave-digger.
But whan a man’s deid, what can a’ the warl’ du for ’im but berry ’im?
puir hin’er en’ thof it be to him’ at draws himsel’ up, an’ blaws
himsel’ oot! There was mony a conjectur as to hoo he cam by his deith,
an’ mony a doobt it wasna by fair play. Some said he dee’d by his ain
han’, driven on til ’t by the enemy; an’ it was true the blade he
cairriet was lyin’ upo’ the grass aside ’im; but ither some ’at exem’t
him, said the hole i’ the side o’ ’im was na made wi’ that. But o’ a’
’at cam to speir efter ’im, the English lord was nane. He hed vainished
the country. The general opinyon sattled doon to this, ’at they twa
bude till hae fa’en oot at cairts, an’ fouchten it oot, an’ the auld
captain, for a’ his skeel an’ exparience, had had the warst o’ ’t, an’
so there they faun’ ’im.--But I reckon, Cosmo, yer father ’ill hae
tellt ye a’ aboot the thing, mony’s the time, or noo, an’ I’m jist
deivin’ ye wi’ my clavers, an haudin ye ohn sleepit!”
“Na, Grannie,” answered Cosmo, “he never tellt me what ye hae tellt me
noo. He did tell me ’at there was sic a man, an’ the ill en’ he cam
til; an’ I think he was jist gaein’ on to tell me mair, whan Grizzie
cam to say the denner was ready. That was only yesterday--or the day
afore, I’m thinkin’, by this time.--But what think ye could hae been in
’s heid wi’ yon jingle aboot the horsie?”
“Ow! what wad be intil ’t but jist fulish nonsense? Ye ken some
fowk has a queer trick o’ sayin’ the same thing ower an’ ower again
to themsel’s, wi’oot ony sense intil ’t. There was the auld laird
himsel’; he was ane o’ sic. Aye an’ ower again he wad be sayin’ til
himsel’, ‘A hun’er poun’! Ay, a hun’er poun’!’ It maittered na what
he wad be speikin’ aboot, or wha til, in it wad come!--i’ the middle
o’ onything, ye cudna tell whan or whaur,--‘A hun’er poun’!’ says he;
‘Ay, a hun’er poun’!’ Fowk leuch at the first, but sune gat used til
’t, an’ cam hardly to ken ’at he said it, for what has nae sense has
little hearin’. An’ I doobtna thae rimes wasna even a verse o’ an auld
ballant, but jist a cletter o’ clinkin’ styte (_nonsense_) ’at he had
learnt frae some blackamore bairn, maybe, an’ cudna get oot o’ ’s heid
ony ither gait, but bude to say ’t to hae dune wi’ ’t--jist like a cat
whan it gangs scrattin’ at the door, ye hae to get up, whether ye wull
or no, an’ lat the cratur oot.”
Cosmo did not feel quite satisfied with the explanation, but he made no
objection to it.
“I maun alloo, hooever,” the old woman went on, “’at ance ye get a haud
o’ _them_, they tak a grip o’ _you_, an’ hae a queer w’y o’ hauntin’ ye
like, as they did the man himsel’, sae ’at ye canna get rid o’ them. It
comes only at noos an’ thans, but whan the fit’s upo’ me, I canna get
them oot o’ my heid. The verse gangs on tum’lin’ ower an’ ower intil
’t, till I’m jist scunnert wi’ ’t. Awa’ it wanna gang, maybe for a
haill day, an’ syne it mayna come again for months.”
True enough, the rime was already running about in Cosmo’s head like a
mouse, and he fell asleep with it ringing in the ears of his mind.
Before he woke again, which was in the broad daylight, he had a curious
dream.
He dreamed that he was out in the moonlight. It was a summer
night--late. But there was something very strange about the night:
right up in the top of it was the moon, looking down as if she knew
all about it, and something was going to happen. He did not like the
look of her--he had never seen her look like that before! and he went
home just to get away from her. As he was going up the stairs to his
chamber, something moved him--he could not tell what--to stop at the
door of the drawing-room, and go in. It was flooded with moonlight, but
he did not mind that, so long as he could keep out of her sight. Still
it had a strange, eerie look, with its various pieces of furniture
casting different shadows from those that by rights belonged to them.
He gazed at this thing and that, as if he had never seen it before. The
place seemed to cast a spell over him, so that he could not leave it.
He seated himself on the ancient brocaded couch, and sat staring, with
a sense, which by degrees grew dreadful, that he was where he would not
be, and that if he did not get up and go, something would happen. But
he could not rise--not that he felt any physical impediment, but that
he could not make a resolve strong enough--like one in irksome company,
who wants to leave, but waits in vain a fit opportunity. Delay grew to
agony, but still he sat.
He became aware that he was not alone. His whole skin seemed to
contract with a shuddering sense of presence. Gradually, as he gazed
straight in front of him, slowly, in the chair on the opposite side
of the fire-place, grew visible the form of a man, until he saw it
quite plainly--that of a seafaring man, in a blue coat, with a red
sash round his waist, in which were pistols, and a dagger. He too sat
motionless, fixing on him the stare of fierce eyes, black, yet glowing,
as if set on fire of hell. They filled him with fear, but something
seemed to sustain him under it. He almost fancied, when first on waking
he thought over it, that a third must have been in the room--for
his protection. The face that stared at him was a brown and red and
weather-beaten face, cut across with a great scar, and wearing an
expression of horror trying not to look horrible. His fear threatened
to turn him into clay, but he met it with scorn, strove against it,
would not and did not yield. Still the figure stared, as if it would
fascinate him into limpest submission. Slowly at length it rose, and
with a look that seemed meant to rivet the foregone stare--a look of
mingled pain and fierceness, turned, and led the way from the room,
whereupon the spell was so far broken or changed, that he was able
to rise and follow him: even in his dreams he was a boy of courage,
and feared nothing so much as yielding to fear. The figure went on,
nor ever turned its head, up the stair to the room over that they had
left--the best bedroom, the guest-chamber of the house--not often
visited, and there it entered. Still following, Cosmo entered also. The
figure walked across the room, as if making for the bed, but in the
middle of the floor suddenly turned, and went round by the foot of the
bed to the other side of it, where the curtains hid it. Cosmo followed,
but when he reached the other side, the shade was nowhere to be seen,
and he woke, his heart beating terribly.
By this time Grannie was snoring in her chair, or very likely, in his
desire to emerge from its atmosphere, he would have told her his dream.
For a while he lay looking at the dying fire, and the streak from the
setting moon, that stole in at the window, and lay weary at the foot of
the wall. Slowly he fell fast asleep, and slept far into the morning:
long after lessons were begun in the school, and village-affairs were
in the full swing of their daily routine, he slept; nor had he finished
his breakfast, when his father entered.
“I’m quite well, papa,” answered the boy to his gentle yet eager
inquiry;--“perfectly able to go to school in the afternoon.”
“I don’t mean you to go again, Cosmo,” replied his father gravely. “It
could not be pleasant either for yourself or for the master. The proper
relation between you is destroyed.”
[Illustration: COSMO’S DREAM.]
“If you think I was wrong, papa, I will make an apology.”
“If you had done it for yourself, I should unhesitatingly say you must.
But as it was, I am not prepared to say so.”
“What am I to do then? How am I to get ready for college?”
The laird gave a sigh, and made no answer. Alas! there were more
difficulties than that in the path to college.
He turned away, and went to call on the minister, while Cosmo got up
and dressed: except a little singing in his head when he stooped, he
was aware of no consequences of the double blow.
Grannie was again at her wheel, and Cosmo sat down in her chair to
await his father’s return.
“Whaur said ye the captain sleepit whan he was at the castle?” he
inquired across the buzz and whiz and hum of the wheel. Through the low
window, betwixt the leaves of the many plants that shaded it, he could
see the sun shining hot upon the bare street; but inside was soft gloom
filled with murmurous sound.
“Whaur but i’ the best bedroom?” answered Grannie. “Naething less wad
hae pleased _him_, I can assure ye. For ance ’at there cam the markis
to the hoose--whan things warna freely sae scant aboot the place as
they hae been sin’ yer father cam to the throne--there cam at his back
a fearsome storm, sic as comes but seldom in a life lang as mine, an’
sic ’at his lordship cudna win awa’. Thereupon yer father, that is,
yer gran’father,--or it wad be yer grit-gran’father--I’m turnin’ some
confused amo’ ye: ye aye keep comin’!--onyhoo, he gae the captain a
kent like, ’at he wad du weel to offer his room til ’s lordship. But
wad he, think ye? Na, no him! He grew reid, an’ syne as white ’s the
aisse, an’ luikit to be i’ the awfu’est inside rage ’at mortal wessel
cud weel haud. Sae yer gran’father, no ’at he was feart at ’im, for
I s’ be bun’ he never was feart afore the face o’ man, but jest no
wullin’ to anger his ain kin, an’ maybe no willin’ onybody sud say he
was a respecter o’ persons, heeld his tongue an’ said nae mair, an’ the
markis hed the second best bed, for he sleepit in Glenwarlock’s ain.”
Cosmo then told her the dream he had had in the night, describing the
person he had seen in it as closely as he could. Now all the time
Grannie had been speaking, it was to the accompaniment of her wheel,
but Cosmo had not got far with his narrative when she ceased spinning,
and sat absorbed--listening as to a real occurrence, not the feverish
dream of a boy. When he ended,
“It maun hae been the auld captain himsel’!” she said under her breath,
and with a sigh; then shut up her mouth, and remained silent, leaving
Cosmo in doubt whether it was that she would take no interest in such
a foolish thing, or found in it something to set her thinking; but
he could not help noting that there seemed a strangeness about her
silence; nor did she break it until his father returned.
CHAPTER VIII.
HOME.
Cosmo was not particularly fond of school, and he was particularly
fond of holidays; hence his father’s resolve that he should go to
school no more, seemed to him the promise of an endless joy. The
very sun seemed swelling in his heart as he walked home with his
father. A whole day of home and its pleasures was before him--only
the more welcome that he had had a holiday so lately, and that so
many more lay behind it. Every shadow about the old place was a
delight to him. Never human being loved more the things into which
he had been born than did Cosmo. The whole surrounding had to him a
sacred look, such as Jerusalem, the temple, and its vessels, bore
to the Jews, even those of them who were capable of loving little
else. There was hardly anything that could be called beauty about
the building--strength and gloom were its main characteristics--but
its very stones were dear to the boy. There never were such bees,
there never were such thick walls, there never were such storms,
never such a rushing river, as those about his beloved home! And
this although, all the time, as I have said, he longed for more
beauty of mountain and wood than the country around could afford
him. Then there were the books belonging to the house!--was there
any such a collection in the world besides! They were in truth very
few--all contained in a closet opening out of his father’s bedroom;
but Cosmo had a feeling of inexhaustible wealth in them--partly
because his father had not yet allowed him to read everything
there, but restricted him to certain of the shelves--as much to
cultivate self-restraint in him as to keep one or two of the books
from him,--partly because he read books so that they remained books
to him, and he believed in them after he had read them, nor
imagined himself capable of exhausting them. But the range of his
taste was certainly not a limited one. While he revelled in _The
Arabian Nights_, he read also, and with no small enjoyment, the
_Night Thoughts_--books, it will be confessed, considerably apart
both in scope and in style. But while thus, for purest pleasure,
fond of reading, to enjoy life, it was to him enough to lie in the
grass; in certain moods, the smell of the commonest flower would
drive him half crazy with delight. On a holiday his head would be
haunted with old ballads like a sunflower with bees: on other days
they would only come and go. He rejoiced even in nursery rimes,
only in his head somehow or other they got glorified. The swing and
hum and _bizz_ of a line, one that might have to him no discoverable
meaning, would play its tune in him as well as any mountain-stream
its infinite water-jumble melody. One of those that this day
kept--not coming and going, but coming and coming, just as Grannie
said his foolish rime haunted the old captain, was that which two
days before came into his head when first he caught sight of the
moon playing bo-peep with him betwixt the cows legs:
Whan the coo loups ower the mune,
The reid gowd rains intil men’s shune.
I think there must at one time have been a poet in the Glenwarlock
nursery, for there were rimes, and modifications of rimes, floating
about the family, for which nobody could account. Cosmo’s mother
too had been, in a fragmentary way, fond of verse; and although he
could not remember many of her favourite rimes, his father did, and
delighted in saying them over and over to her child--and that long
before he was capable of understanding them. Here is one:
Make not of thy heart a casket,
Opening seldom, quick to close;
But of bread a wide-mouthed basket,
And a cup that overflows.
Here is another:
The gadfly makes the horse run swift:
“Speed,” quoth the gadfly, “is my gift.”
One more, and it shall be the last for the present: They serve as
dim lights on the all but vanished mother, of whom the boy himself
knew so little.
In God alone, the perfect end,
Wilt thou find thyself or friend.
Cosmo’s dream of life was, to live all his days in the house of his
forefathers--or at least and worst, to return to it at last, how
long soever he might have been compelled to be away from it. In his
castle-building, next to that of the fairy-mother-lady, his
fondest fancy was--not the making of a fortune, but the returning
home with one, to make the house of his fathers beautiful, and the
heart of his father glad. About the land he did not think so much
yet: the country was open to him as if it had been all his own.
Still, he had quite a different feeling for that portion which yet
lay within the sorely contracted marches; to have seen any smallest
nook of that sold, would have been like to break his heart. In him
the love of place was in danger of becoming a disease. There was in
it something, I fear, of the nature, if not of the avarice that
grasps, yet of the avarice that clings. He was generous as few in
the matter of money, but then he had had so little--not half enough
to learn to love it! Nor had he the slightest idea of any mode in
which to make it. Most of the methods he had come in contact with,
except that of manual labour, in which work was done and money paid
immediately for it, repelled him, as having elements of the
unhandsome where not the dishonest: he was not yet able to
distinguish between substance and mode in such matters. The only
way in which he ever dreamed of coming into possession of money--it
was another of his favourite castles--was finding in the old house
a room he had never seen or heard of before, and therein a hoard of
riches incredible. Such things had been--why might it not be?
As they walked, his father told him he had been thinking all night
what it would be best to do with him, now that the school was
closed against him; and that he had come to the conclusion to ask
his friend Peter Simon--the wits of the neighbourhood called him
Simon Peter--to take charge of his education.
“He is a man of peculiar opinions,” he said, “as I daresay you may
have heard; but everything in him is, practice and theory, on a
scale so grand, that to fear harm from him would be to sin against
the truth. A man must learn to judge for himself, and he will teach
you that. I have seen in him so much that I recognize as good and
great, that I am compelled to believe in him where the things he
believes appear to me out of the way, or even extravagant.”
“I have heard that he believes in ghosts, papa!” said Cosmo.
His father smiled, and made him no answer. He had been born into an
age whose incredulity, taking active form, was now fast approaching
its extreme, and becoming superstition; and the denial of many
things that had long been believed in the country had penetrated at
last even to the remote region where his property lay: like that
property, his mind, because of the age, lay also in a sort of
border-land. An active believer in the care and providence of God,
with no conscious difficulty in accepting any miracle recorded in
the Bible, he was, where the oracles were dumb, in a measure
inclined to a scepticism, which yet was limited to the region of
his intellect;--his imagination turned from its conclusions, and
cherished not a little so-called weakness for the so-called
supernatural--so far as any glimmer of sense or meaning or reason
would show itself therein. And in the history of the world, the
imagination has, I fancy, been quite as often right as the
intellect, and the things in which it has been right, have been of
much the greater importance. Only, unhappily, wherever Pegasus has
shown the way through a bog, the pack-horse which follows gets the
praise of crossing it; while the blunders with which the pack-horse
is burdened, are, the moment each is discovered, by the plodding
leaders of the pair transferred to the space betwixt the wings of
Pegasus, without regard to the beauty of his feathers. The laird
was therefore unable to speak with authority respecting such
things, and was not particularly anxious to influence the mind of
his son concerning them. Happily, in those days the platitudes and
weary vulgarities of what they call _spiritualism_, had not been
heard of in those quarters, and the soft light of imagination yet
lingered about the borders of that wide region of mingled false and
true, commonly called Superstition. It seems to me the most killing
poison to the imagination must be a strong course of “spiritualism.”
For myself, I am not so set upon entering the unknown, as,
instead of encouraging what holy visitations faith, not in the
spiritual or the immortal, but in the living God, may bring, to
creep through the sewers of it to get in. I care not to encounter
its mud-larkes, and lovers of garbage, its thieves, impostors,
liars, and canaille, in general. That they are on the other side,
that they are what men call dead, does not seem to me sufficient
reason for taking them into my confidence, courting their company,
asking their advice. A well-attested old-fashion ghost story, where
such is to be had, is worth a thousand seances.
“Do _you_ believe in ghosts, papa?” resumed Cosmo, noting his
father’s silence, and remembering that he had never heard him utter
an opinion on the subject. “The master says none but fools believe in
them now; and he makes such a face at anything he calls superstition,
that you would think it must be somewhere in the commandments.”
“Mr. Simon remarked the other day in my hearing,” answered his father,
“that the dread of superstition might amount to superstition, and
become the most dangerous superstition of all.”
“Do you think so, papa?”
“I could well believe it. Besides, I have always found Mr. Simon so
reasonable, even where I could not follow him, that I am prejudiced in
favor of anything he thinks.”
The boy rejoiced to hear his father talk thus, for he had a strong
leaning to the marvellous, and hitherto, from the schoolmaster’s
assertion and his father’s silence, had supposed nothing was to be
accepted for belief but what was scientifically probable, or was told
in the Bible. That we live in a universe of marvels of which we know
only the outsides,--and which we turn into the incredible by taking
the mere outsides for all, even while we know the roots of the seen
remain unseen--these spiritual facts now began to dawn upon him, and
fell in most naturally with those his mind had already conceived and
entertained. He was therefore delighted at the thought of making
the closer acquaintance of a man like Mr. Simon--a man of whose
peculiarities even, his father could speak in such terms. All day long
he brooded on the prospect, and in the twilight went out wandering over
the hills.
There was no night there at this season, any more than all the year
through in heaven. Indeed we have seldom real positive night in this
world--so many provisions have been made against it. Every time we
say, “What a lovely night!” we speak of a breach, a rift in the old
night. There is light more or less, positive light, else were there no
beauty. Many a night is but a low starry day, a day with a softened
background against which the far-off suns of millions of other days
show themselves: when the near vision vanishes the farther hope awakes.
It is nowhere said of heaven, there shall be no twilight there.
CHAPTER IX.
THE STUDENT.
The twilight had not yet reached the depth of its mysteriousness, when
Cosmo, returning home from casting a large loop of wandering over
several hills, walked up to James Gracie’s cottage, thinking whether
they would not all be in bed.
But as he passed the window, he saw a little light, and went on to the
door and knocked: had it been the daytime, he would have gone straight
in. Agnes came, and opened cautiously, for there were occasionally such
beings as tramps about.
“Eh! it’s you?” she cried with a glad voice, when she saw the shape
of Cosmo in the dimness. “There’s naething wrang I houp,” she added,
changing her tone.
“Na, naething,” answered Cosmo. “I only wantit to lat ye ken ’at I
wasna gaein’ back to the schuil ony mair.”
“Weel, I dinna won’er at that!” returned Agnes with a little sigh.
“Efter the w’y the maister behaved til ye, the laird cud ill lat ye
gang there again. But what’s he gaein’ to du wi’ ye, Maister Cosmo,
gien a body micht speir ’at has nae richt to be keerious?”
“He’s sen’in’ me to maister Simon,” answered Cosmo.
“I wuss I was gaein’ tu,” sighed Aggie. “I’m jist feart ’at I’ll come
to hate the maister efter ye’re no to be seen there, Cosmo. An’ we
maunna hate, for that, ye ken, ’s the hin ’er en’ o’ a’ thing. But it
wad be a heap easier no to hate him, gien I had naething tu du wi’ him.”
“That maun be confest,” answered Cosmo.--“But,” he added, “the
hairst-play ’ill be here sune, an’ syne the hairst itsel’; an’ whan ye
gang back ye’ll hae won ower ’t.”
“Na, I doobt no, Cosmo; for, ye see, as I hae h’ard my father say,
the Gracies are a’ terrible for min’in’. Na, there’s no forgettin’ o’
naething. What for sud onything be forgotten? It’s a cooardly kin’ o’
a’ w’y, to forget.”
“Some things, I doobt, hae to be forgotten,” returned Cosmo,
thoughtfully. “Gien ye forgie a body for enstance, ye maun forget
tu--no sae muckle, I’m thinkin’, for the sake o’ them ’at did ye the
wrang, for wha wad tak up again a fool (_foul_) thing ance it was
drappit?--but for yer ain sake; for what ye hae dune richt, my father
says, maun be forgotten oot ’o sicht for fear o’ corruption, for
naething comes to stink waur nor a guid deed hung up i’ the munelicht
o’ the memory.”
“Eh!” exclaimed Aggie, “but ye’re unco wice for a lad o’ yer ’ears.”
“I wad be an unco gowk,” remarked Cosmo, “gien I kent naething, wi’ sic
a father as yon o’ mine. What wad ye think o’ yersel’ gien the dochter
o’ Jeames Gracie war nae mair wice-like nor Meg Scroggie?”
Agnes laughed, but made no reply, for the voice of her mother came out
of the dark:
“Wha’s that, Aggie, ye’re haudin’ sic a confab wi’ in the middle o’ the
nicht? Ye tellt me ye had to sit up to yer lessons!”
“I was busy at them, mither, whan Maister Cosmo chappit at the door.”
“Weel, what for lat ye him stan’ there? Ye may hae yer crack wi’ _him_
as lang ’s ye like--in rizzon, that is. Gar him come in.”
“Na, na, mistress Gracie,” answered Cosmo; “I maun awa’ hame; I hae had
a gey lang walk. It’s no ’at I’m tired, but I’m gey and sleepy. Only I
was sae pleased ’at I was gaein’ to learn my lessons wi’ Maister Simon,
’at I bude to tell Aggie. She micht ha’ been won’erin’, an’ thinkin’ I
wasna better, gien she hadna seen me at the schuil the morn.”
“I s’ warran’ her ohn gane to the schuil ohn speirt in at the Castle
the first thing i’ the mornin’, an’ seein’ gien the laird had ony
eeran’ to the toon. Little cares she for the maister, gien onybody at
the Hoose be in want o’ her!”
“Is there naething I cud help ye wi’, Aggie, afore I gang?” asked
Cosmo. “Somebody tellt me ye was tryin’ yer han’ at algebra.”
“Naebody had ony business to tell ye ony sic a thing,” returned
Aggie, rather angrily. “It’s no at the schuil I wad think o’ sic
a ploy. They wad a’ lauch fine! But I _wad_ fain ken what’s intil
the thing. I can_not_ un’erstan’ hoo fowk can coont wi’ letters an’
crosses an’ strokes in place o’ figgers. I hae been at it a haill ook
noo--by mysel’, ye ken--an’ I’m nane nearer til ’t yet. I can add an’
subtrac’, accordin’ to the rules gien, but that’s no un’erstan’in’, an’
un’erstan’ I canna.”
“I’m thinkin’ it’s something as gien _x_ was a horse, an’ _y_ was a
coo, an’ _z_ was a cairt, or onything ither ye micht hae to ca’ ’t;
an’ ye bargain awa’ aboot the _x_ an’ the _y_ and the _z_, an’ ley the
horse i’ the stable, the coo i’ the byre, an’ the cairt i’ the shed,
till ye hae sattlet a’.”
“But ye ken aboot algebra”--she pronounced the word with the accent on
the second syllable--“divna ye, maister Cosmo?”
“Na, no the haif, nor the hun’ert pairt. I only ken eneuch to haud me
gaein’ on to mair. A body maun hae learnt a heap o’ onything afore the
licht breaks oot o’ ’t. Ye maun win throu’ the wa’ first. I doobt gien
onybody un’erstan’s a thing oot an’ oot, sae lang ’s he’s no ready at
a moment’s notice to gar anither see intil the hert o’ ’t; an’ I canna
gar ye see what’s intil ’t the minute ye speir ’t at me!”
“I’m thinkin’, hooever, Cosmo, a body maun be nearhan’ seein’ o’
himsel’ afore anither can lat him see onything.”
“Ye may be richt there,” yielded Cosmo. “--But jist lat me see whaur ye
are,” he went on. “I may be able to help ye, though I canna lat ye see
a’ at once. It wad be an ill job for them ’at needs help, gien naebody
could help them but them ’at kent a’ aboot a thing.”
[Illustration: ALGEBRA.]
Without a word, Aggie turned and led the way to the “but-end.” An iron
lamp, burning the coarsest of train oil, hung against the wall, and
under that she had placed the one movable table in the kitchen, which
was white as scouring could make it. Upon it lay a slate and a book of
algebra.
“My cousin Willie lent me the buik,” said Aggie.
“What for didna ye come to me to len’ ye ane? I could hae gien ye a
better nor that,” expostulated Cosmo.
Aggie hesitated, but, open as the day, she did not hesitate long. She
turned her face from him, and answered,
“I wantit to gie ye a surprise, Maister Cosmo. Divna ye min’ tellin’ me
ance ’at ye saw no rizzon hoo a lassie sudna un’erstan’ jist as weel ’s
a laddie? I wantit to see whether ye was richt or wrang; an’ as algebra
luiket the maist oonlikly thing, I thoucht I wad taikle that, an’ sae
sattle the queston at ance. But, eh me! I’m sair feart ye was i’ the
wrang, Cosmo!”
“I maun du my best to pruv mysel’ i’ the richt,” returned Cosmo. “I
never said onybody cud learn a’ o’ themsel’s, wantin’ help, ye ken.
There’s nae mony laddies cud du that, an’ feower still wad try.”
They sat down together at the table, and in half an hour or so, Aggie
had begun to see the faint light of at least the false dawn, as they
call it, through the thickets of algebra. It was nearly midnight when
Cosmo rose, and then Aggie would not let him go alone, but insisted on
accompanying him to the gate of the court.
It was a curious relation between the two. While Agnes looked up to
Cosmo, about two years her junior, as immeasurably her superior in
all that pertained to the intellect and its range, she assumed over
him a sort of general human superiority, something like that a mother
will assert over the most gifted of sons. One has seen, with a kind
of sacred amusement, the high priest of many literary and artistic
circles, set down with rebuke by his mother, as if he had been still
a boy! And I have heard the children of this world speak with like
superiority of the child of light whom they loved--allowing him
wondrous good, but regarding him as a kind of God’s chicken: nothing
is so mysterious to the children of this world as the ways of the
children of light, though to themselves they seem simple enough. That
Agnes never treated Cosmo with this degree of protective condescension,
arose from the fact that she was very nearly as much a child of light
as he; only, being a woman, she was keener of perception, and being
older, felt the more of the mother that every woman feels, and made the
most of it. It was to her therefore a merely natural thing to act his
protector. Indeed with respect to the Warlock family in general, she
counted herself possessed of the right to serve any one of them to the
last drop of her blood. From infancy she had heard the laird spoken
of--without definite distinction between the present and the last--as
the noblest, best, and kindest of men, as the power which had been for
generations over the family of the Gracies, for their help and healing;
and hence it was impressed upon her deepest consciousness, that one of
the main reasons of her existence was her relation to the family of
Glenwarlock.
Notwithstanding the familiarity I have shown between them--Agnes had
but lately begun to put the _Master_ before Cosmo’s name, and as often
forgot it--the girl, as they went towards the castle, although they
were walking in deep dusk, and entirely alone, kept a little behind
the boy--not behind his back, but on his left hand in the next rank.
No spy most curious could have detected the least love-making between
them, and their talk, in the still, dark air, sounded loud all the way
as they went. Strange talk it would have been counted by many, and
indeed unintelligible, for it ranged over a vast surface, and was the
talk of two wise children, wise not above their own years only, but
immeasurably above those of the prudent. Riches indubitably favour
stupidity; poverty, where the heart is right, favours mental and moral
development. They parted at the gate, and Cosmo went to bed.
But, although his father allowed him such plentiful liberty, and would
fain have the boy feel the night holy as the day--so that no one ever
asked where he had been, or at what hour he had come home--a question
which, having no watch, he would have found it hard to answer--not an
eye was closed in the house until his entering footsteps were heard.
The grandmother lay angry at the unheard of liberty her son gave his
son; it was neither decent nor in order; it was against all ancient
rule of family life; she must speak about it! But she never did speak
about it, for she was now in her turn afraid of the son who, without a
particle of obstinacy in his composition, yet took what she called his
own way. Grizzie kept grumbling to herself that the laddie was sure
to come to “mischief;” but the main forms of “mischief” that ruled in
her imagination were tramps, precipices, and spates. The laird, for
his part, spent most of the time his son’s absence kept him awake, in
praying for him--not that he might be the restorer of the family, but
that he might be able to accept the will of God as the best thing for
family as for individual. If his boy might but reach the spirit-land
unsoiled and noble, his prayers were ended.
In such experiences, the laird learned to understand how the catholics
come to pray to their saints, and the Chinese to their parents and
ancestors; for he frequently found himself, more especially as
drowsiness began to steal upon his praying soul, seeming to hold
council with his wife concerning their boy, and asking her help towards
such strength for him as human beings may minister to each other.
But Cosmo went up to bed without a suspicion that the air around him
was full of such holy messengers heavenward for his sake. He imagined
none anxious about him--either with the anxiety of grandmother or of
servant-friend or of great-hearted father.
As he passed the door of the spare room, immediately above which was
his own, his dream, preceded by a cold shiver, came to his memory. But
he scorned to quicken his pace, or to glance over his shoulder, as he
ascended the second stair. Without any need of a candle, in the still
faint twilight which is the ghosts’ day, he threw off his clothes, and
was presently buried in the grave of his bed, under the sod of the
blankets, lapt in the death of sleep.
The moment he woke, he jumped out of bed: a new era in his life was
at hand, the thought of which had been subjacently present in his
dreams, and was operative the instant he became conscious of waking
life. He hurried on his clothes without care, for this dressing was but
temporary. Going down the stairs like a cataract, for not a soul slept
in that part but himself, and there was no fear of waking any one,
then in like manner down the hill, he reached the place where, with a
final dart, the torrent shot into the quiet stream of the valley, in
whose channel of rock and gravel it had hollowed a deep basin. This
was Cosmo’s bath--and a splendid one. His clothes were off again more
quickly than he put them on, and head foremost he shot like the torrent
into the boiling mass, where for a few moments he yielded himself the
sport of the frothy water, and was tossed and tumbled about like a dead
thing. Soon however, down in the heart of the boil, he struck out, and
shooting from under the fall, rose to the surface beyond it, panting
and blowing. To get out on the bank was then the work of one moment,
and to plunge in again that of the next. Half a dozen times, with
scarce a pause between, he thus plunged, was tossed and overwhelmed,
struggled, escaped, and plunged again. Then he ran for a few moments
up and down the bank to dry himself--he counted the use of a towel
effeminacy, and dressing again, ran home to finish his simple toilet.
If after that he read a chapter of his Bible, it was no more than was
required by many a parent of many a boy who got little good of the
task; but Cosmo’s father had never enjoined it on him; and when next he
knelt down at his bedside, he did not merely “say his prayers.” Then
he took his slate, to try after something Aggie had made him know he
did not understand:--for the finding of our own intellectual defects,
nothing is like trying to teach another. But before long, certain
sensations began to warn him there was an invention in the world called
breakfast, and laying his slate aside, he went to the kitchen, where he
found Grizzie making the porridge.
“Min’ ye pit saut eneuch in ’t the day, Grizzie,” he said. “It was unco
wersh yesterday.”
“An’ what was ’t like thestreen (_yestere’en_), Cosmo?” asked the old
woman, irritated at being found fault with in a matter wherein she
counted herself as near perfection as ever mortal could come.
“I had nane last nicht, ye min’,” answered Cosmo, “I was oot a’ the
evenin’.”
“An’ whaur got ye yer supper?”
“Ow, I didna want nane. Hoot! I’m forgettin’! Aggie gied me a quarter
o’ breid as I cam by, or rather as I cam awa’, efter giein’ her a han’
wi’ her algebra.”
“What ca’ ye that for a lass bairn to be takin’ up her time wi’! I
never h’ard o’ sic a thing! What’s the natur’ o’ ’t, Cosmo?”
He tried to give her some far-off idea of the sort of thing algebra
was, but apparently without success, for she cried at length,
“Na, sirs! I hae h’ard o’ cairts, an’ bogles, an’ witchcraft, an’
astronomy, but sic a thing as this ye bring me noo, I never did hear
tell o’! What can the warl’ be comin’ till!--An’ dis the father o’ ye,
laddie, ken what ye spen’ yer midnicht hoors gangin’ teachin’ to the
lass-bairns o’ the country roon’?”
She was interrupted by the entrance of the laird, and they sat down to
breakfast. The grandmother within the last year had begun to take hers
in her own room.
Grizzie was full of anxiety to know what the laird would say to the
discovery she had just made, but she dared not hazard allusion to
the _conduct_ of his son, and must therefore be content to lead the
conversation in the direction of it, hoping it might naturally appear.
So, about the middle of Cosmo’s breakfast, that is, about two minutes
after he had attacked his porridge, she approached her design, if not
exactly the object she desired, with the remark,
“Did ye never hear the auld saw, sir--
Whaur’s neither sun nor mune,
Laich things come abune--?”
“I ’maist think I have, Grizzie,” answered the laird. “But what gars
ye come ower ’t noo?”
“I canna but think, sir,” returned Grizzie, “as I lie i’ the mirk,
o’ the heap o’ things ’at gang to nae kirk, oot an’ aboot as sharp
as a gled, whan the yoong laird is no in his bed--oot wi’ ’s
algibbry an’ astronomy, an’ a’ that kin’ o’ thing! ’Deed, sir, it
wadna be canny gien they cam to ken o’ ’t.”
“Wha come to ken o’ what, Grizzie?” asked the laird with a twinkle
in his eye, and a glance at Cosmo, who sat gazing curiously at the
old woman.
“Them ’at the saw speyks o’, sir,” said Grizzie, answering the
first part of the double question, as she placed two boiled eggs
before her master.
The laird smiled: he was too kind to laugh. Not a few laughed at
old Grizzie, but never the laird.
“Did _ye_ never hear the auld saw, Grizzie,” he said:
“Throu’ the heather an’ how gaed the creepin’ thing,
But abune was the waught o’ an angel’s wing--?”
“Ay, I hae h’ard it--naegait ’cep’ here i’ this hoose,” answered
Grizzie: she would disparage the authority of the saying by a doubt
as to its genuineness. “But, sir, ye sud never temp’ providence.
Wha kens what may be oot i’ the nicht?”
“To _him_, Grizzie, the nicht shineth as the day.”
“Weel, sir,” cried Grizzie, “Ye jist pit me ’at I dinna ken mysel’!
Is ’t poassible ye hae forgotten what’s sae weel kent to a’ the
cuintry roon’?--the auld captain, ’at canna lie still in ’s grave,
because o’--because o’ whatever the rizzon may be? Onygait he’s no
laid yet; an’ some thinks he’s doomed to haunt the hoose till the
day o’ jeedgment.”
“I suspec’ there winna be muckle o’ the hoose left for him to haunt
’gen that time, Grizzie,” said the laird. “But what for sud ye put
sic fule things intil the bairn’s heid? An’ gien the ghaist haunt
the hoose, isna he better oot o’ ’t? Wad ye hae him come hame to
sic company?”
This posed Grizzie, and she held her peace for the time.
“Come, Cosmo,” said the laird rising; and they set out together for
Mr. Simon’s cottage.
CHAPTER X.
PETER SIMON.
This man was not a native of the district, but had for some two
years now been a dweller in it. Report said he was the son of a
small tradesman in a city at no great distance, but, to those who
knew him, he made no secret of the fact, that he had been found by
such a man, a child of a few months, lying on a pavement of that
city, one stormy, desolate Christmas-eve, when it was now dark,
with the wind blowing bitterly from the north, and the said
tradesman seemingly the one inhabitant of the coldest city in
Scotland who dared face it. He had just closed his shop, had
carried home to one of his customers a forgotten order, and was
returning to his wife and a childless hearth, when he all but
stumbled over the infant. Before stooping to lift him, he looked
all about to see if there was nobody to do it instead. There was
not a human being, or even what comes next to one, a dog in sight,
and the wind was blowing like a blast from a frozen hell. There was
no help for it: he must take up the child! He did, and carried it
home, grumbling all the way. What right had the morsel to be lying
there, a trap and a gin for his character, in the dark and the
cold? What would his wife say? And what would the neighbours think?
All the way home he grumbled.
[Illustration: HE CARRIED IT HOME.]
What happened there, how his wife received him with his burden, how
she scolded and he grumbled, how it needed but the one day--the
Christmas Day, in which nothing could well be done--to reconcile
them to the gift, and how they brought him up, blessing the day
when they found him, would be a story fit to make the truehearted
of my readers both laugh and cry; but I have not room or time for
it.
Of course, as they were in poor circumstances, hardly able indeed,
not merely to make both ends meet, but to bring them far enough
round the parcel of their necessities to let them see each other,
their friends called their behaviour in refusing to hand over the
brat to the parish authorities--which they felt as a reflection
upon all who in similar circumstances would have done so--utter
folly. But when the moon-struck pair was foolish enough to say they
did not know that he might not have been sent them instead of the
still-born child that had hitherto been all their offspring, this
was entirely too much for the nerves of the neighbours in
general--that peculiar people always better acquainted with one’s
affairs, down to his faults and up to his duties, than he is
himself. It was rank superstition! It was a flying in the face of
Providence! How could they expect to prosper, when they acted with
so little foresight, rendering the struggle for existence severer
still! They did not reckon what strength the additional motive,
what heart the new love, what uplifting the hope of help from on
high, kindled by their righteous deed, might give them--for God
likes far better to help people from the inside than from the
outside. They did not think that this might be just the fresh sting
of life that the fainting pair required. To mark their disapproval,
some of them immediately withdrew what little custom they had given
them: one who had given them none, promised them the whole of hers,
the moment they sent the child away; while others, with equal
inconsistency, doubled theirs, and did what they could to send them
fresh customers: they were a pair of good-natured fools, but they
ought not to be let starve! From that time they began to get on a
little better. And still as the boy grew, and wanted more, they had
the little more. For it so happened that the boy turned out to be
one of God’s creatures, and it looked as if the Maker of him, who
happened also to be the ruler of the world, was not altogether
displeased with those who had taken him to their hearts, instead of
leaving him to the parish. The child was the light of the house and
of the shop, a beauty to the eyes, and a joy in the heart of both.
But perhaps the best proof that they had done right, lay in the
fact that they began to love each other better from the very next
day after they took him in, for, to tell the truth, one cause of
their not getting on well, had been that they did not pull well
together. Thus we can explain the improvement in their
circumstances by reference to merest “natural causes,” without
having recourse to the distasteful idea that a power in the land of
superstition, with a weakness called a special providence, was
interested in the matter.
But foolishness such as theirs is apt to increase with years; and
so they sent the foundling to the grammar-school, and thence to
college--not a very difficult affair in that city. At college he
did not greatly distinguish himself, for his special gifts, though
peculiar enough, were not of a kind to _distinguish_ a man much,
either in that city or in this world. But he grew and prospered
nevertheless, and became a master in one of the schools. His father
and mother, as he called them, would gladly have made a minister of
him, but of that he would never hear. He lived with them till they
died, always bringing home to them his salary, minus only the
little that he spent on books. His life, his devotion and loving
gratitude, so wrought upon them, that the kingdom of heaven opened
its doors to them, and they were the happiest old couple in that
city. Of course this was all an accident, for the kingdom of heaven
being but a dream, the dignity of natural cause can scarcely
consent to work to the end of delusion; but the good natured pair
were foolish enough to look upon their miserable foundling as a
divine messenger, an angel entertained not for long unawares, and
the cause of all the good luck that followed his entrance. They
never spent a penny of his salary, but added to it, and saved it
up, and when they went, very strangely left all they had to this
same angel of a beggar, instead of to their own relations, who
would have been very glad of it, for they had a good deal more of
their own.
The foundling did not care to live longer in any city, but sought a
place as librarian, and was successful. In the family of an English
lord he lived many years, and when time’s changes rendered it
necessary he should depart, he retired to the cottage on the
Warlock. There he was now living the quietest of quiet lives,
cultivating the acquaintance of but a few--chiefly that of the
laird, James Gracie, and the minister of the parish. Among the
people of the neighbourhood he was regarded as “no a’ thegither
there.” This judgment possibly arose in part from the fact that he
not unfrequently wandered about the fields from morning to night,
and sometimes from night to morning. Then he never drank anything
worthy of the name of drink--seldom anything but water or milk!
That he never ate animal food was not so notable where many never
did so from one year’s end to another’s. As he was no propagandist,
few had any notion of his opinions, beyond a general impression
that they were unsound.
Cosmo had heard some of the peculiarities attributed to him, and
was filled with curious expectation as to the manner of man he was
about to meet, for, oddly enough, he had never yet seen him except
at a distance; but anxiety, not untinged with awe, was mingled with
his curiosity.
Mr. Simon’s cottage was some distance up the valley, at an angle
where it turned westward. It stood on the left bank of the Warlock,
at the foot of a small cliff that sheltered it from the north,
while in front the stream came galloping down to it from the
sunset. The immediate bank between the cottage and the water was
rocky and dry, but the ground on which the cottage stood was soil
washed from the hills. There Mr. Simon had a little garden for
flowers and vegetables, with a summer seat in which he smoked his
pipe of an evening--for, however inconsistent the habit may seem
with the rest of the man, smoke he did: slowly and gently and
broodingly did the man smoke, thinking a great deal more than he
smoked, and making his one pipe last a long time. His garden was
full of flowers, but of the most ordinary kinds; rarity was no
recommendation to him. Some may think that herein he was unlike
himself, seeing his opinions were of the rarest; but in truth never
once did Peter Simon, all his life, adopt an opinion because of its
strangeness. He never _adopted_ an opinion at all; he believed--he
loved what seemed to him true: how it looked to others he concerned
himself little.
The cottage was of stone and lime, nowise the less thoroughly built
that the stones were unhewn. It was _harled_, that is rough-cast, and
shone very white both in sun and moon. It contained but two rooms
and a closet between, with one under the thatch for the old woman
who kept house for him. Altogether it was a very ordinary, and not
very promising abode.
But when they were shown _ben_ to the parlour, Cosmo was struck with
nothing less than astonishment: the walls from floor to ceiling
were covered with books. Not a square foot all over was vacant.
Even the chimney-piece was absorbed, assimilated, turned into a
book-shelf, and so obliterated. Mr. Simon’s pipe lay on the hob;
and there was not another spot where it could have lain. There was
not a shelf, a cupboard to be seen. Books, books everywhere, and
nothing but books! Even the door that led to the closet where he
slept, was covered over, and, like the mantleshelf, obliterated
with books. They were but about twelve hundred in all; to the eyes
of Cosmo it seemed a mighty library--a treasure-house for a royal
sage.
There was no one in the room when they entered, and Cosmo was yet
staring in mute astonishment, when suddenly Mr. Simon was
addressing his father. But the door had not opened, and how he came
in seemed inexplicable. To the eyes of the boy the small man before
him assumed gigantic proportions.
But he was in truth below the middle height, somewhat
round-shouldered, with long arms, and small, well-shaped hands. His
hair was plentiful, grizzled, and cut short. His head was large and
his forehead wide, with overhanging brows; his eyes were small,
dark, and brilliant; his nose had a certain look of decision--but a
nose is a creature beyond description; his mouth was large, and his
chin strong; his complexion dark, and his skin rugged. The only
_fine_ features about him were his two ears, which were delicate
enough for a lady. His face was not at first sight particularly
attractive; indeed it was rather gloomy--till he smiled, not a
moment after; for that smile was the true interpreter of the mouth,
and, through the mouth, of the face, which was never the same as
before to one that had seen it. After a word or two about the book
he had borrowed, the laird took his departure, saying the sooner he
left master and pupil to themselves the better. Mr. Simon
acquiesced with a smile, and presently Cosmo was facing his near
future, not without some anxiety.
CHAPTER XI.
THE NEW SCHOOLING.
Without a word, Mr. Simon opened a drawer, and taking from it about
a score of leaves of paper, handed one of them to Cosmo. Upon it,
in print, was a stanza--one, and no more.
“Read that,” he said, with a glance that showed through his eyes
the light burning inside him, “and tell me if you understand it. I
don’t want you to ponder over it, but to say at a reading whether
you know what it means.”
Cosmo obeyed and read.
“I dinna mak heid nor tail o’ ’t, sir,” he answered, looking over
the top of the paper like a prisoned sheep.
Mr. Simon took it from him, and handed him another.
“Try that,” he said.
Cosmo read, put his hand to his head, and looked troubled.
“Don’t distress yourself,” said Mr. Simon. “The thing is of no
consequence for judgment; it is only for discovery.”
The remark conveyed but little consolation to the pupil, who would
gladly have stood well in his own eyes before his new master.
One after another Mr. Simon handed him the papers he held. About
the fifth or sixth, Cosmo exclaimed,
“I do understand that, sir.”
“Very well,” returned Mr. Simon, without showing any special
satisfaction, and immediately handed him another.
This was again a non-luminous body, and indeed cast a shadow over
the face of the embryo student. One by one Mr. Simon handed him all
he held. Out of the score there were three Cosmo said he
understood, and four he thought he should understand if he were
allowed to read them over two or three times. But Mr. Simon laid
them all together again, and back into the drawer.
“Now I shall know what I am about,” he said. “Tell me what you have
been doing at school.”
Were my book a treatise on education, it might be worth while to
give some account of Peter Simon’s ways of furthering human growth.
But intellectual development is not my main business or interest,
and I mean to say little more concerning Cosmo’s than that, after
about six weeks’ work, the boy one day begged Mr. Simon to let him
look at those papers again, and found to his delight that he
understood all but three or four of them.
That first day, Mr. Simon gave him an ode of Horace, and a poem by
Wordsworth to copy--telling him to put in every point as it was in
the book exactly, but to note any improvement he thought might be
made in the pointing. He told him also to look whether he could see
any resemblance between the two poems.
As he sat surrounded by the many books, Cosmo felt as if he were in
the heart of a cloud of witnesses.
That first day was sufficient to make the heart of the boy cleave
to his new master. For one thing Mr. Simon always, in anything
done, took note first of the things that pleased him, and only
after that proceeded to remark on the faults--most of which he
treated as imperfections, letting Cosmo see plainly that he
understood how he had come to go wrong.
Such an education as Mr. Simon was thus attempting with Cosmo, is
hardly to be given to more than one at a time; and indeed there are
not a great many boys on whom it would be much better than lost
labour. Cosmo, however, was now almost as eager to go to his
lessons, as before to spend a holiday. Mr. Simon never gave him
anything to do at home, heartily believing it the imperative duty
of a teacher to leave room for the scholar to grow after the
fashion in which he is made, and that what a boy does by himself is
of greater import than what he does with any master. Such leisure
may indeed be of comparatively small consequence with regard to the
multitude of boys, but it is absolutely necessary wherever one is
born with his individuality so far determined, as to be on the
point of beginning to develop itself. When Cosmo therefore went
home, he read or wrote what he pleased, wandered about at his will,
and dreamed to his heart’s content. Nor was it long before he
discovered that his dreams themselves were becoming of greater
import to him--that they also were being influenced by Mr. Simon.
And there were other witnesses there, quite as silent as those
around him in the library, and more unseen, who would not remain
speechless or invisible always.
One day Cosmo came late, and to say there were traces of tears on
his cheeks would hardly be correct, for his eyes were swollen with
weeping. His master looked at him almost wistfully, but said
nothing until he had settled for a while to his work, and was a
little composed. He asked him then what was amiss, and the boy told
him. To most boys it would have seemed small ground for such
heart-breaking sorrow.
Amongst the horses on the farm, was a certain small mare, which,
although she worked as hard as any, was yet an excellent one to
ride, and Cosmo, as often as there was not much work doing, rode
her where he would, and boy and mare were much attached to each
other. Sometimes he would have her every day for several weeks, and
that would be in the prime of the summer weather, when the harvest
was drawing nigh, and the school had its long yearly holiday.
Summer, the harvest--“play,” and Linty!--oh, large bliss! my heart
swells at the thought. They would be out for hours together,
perhaps not far from home all the time--on the top of a hill it
might be, whence Cosmo could see when he would the castle below.
There, the whole sleepy afternoon, he would lie in the heather,
with Linty, the mare, feeding amongst it, ready to come at his
call, receive him on her back, and carry him where he would!
But alas! though supple and active, Linty was old, and the day
could not be distant when they must part company: she was then nine
and twenty. And now--the night before, she had been taken ill:
there was a disease about amongst the horses. The men had been up
with her all night, and Grizzie too: she had fetched her own pillow
to put under her head, then sat by her for hours. When Cosmo left,
she was a little better, but great fears were entertained as to the
possibility of her recovery.
“She’s sae terrible aul’! ye see, sir,” said Cosmo, as he ended his
tale of woe, and burst out crying afresh.
“Cosmo,” said Mr. Simon,--and to a southern ear the issuing of such
sweet solemn thoughts in such rough northern speech, might have
seemed strange, though, to be sure, the vowels were finely sonorous
if the consonants were harsh,--“Cosmo, your heart is faithful to
your mare, but is it equally faithful to him that made your mare?”
“I ken it’s his wull,” answered Cosmo:--his master never took
notice whether he spoke in broad Scotch or bastard English--“I ken
mears maun dee, but eh! _she_ was sic a guid ane!--Sir! I canna bide
it.”
“Ye ken wha sits by the deein’ sparrow?” said Mr. Simon, himself
taking to the dialect. “Cosmo there was a better nor Grizzie, an’
nearer to Linty a’ the lang nicht. Things warna gangin’ sae ill wi’
her as ye thoucht. Life’s an awfu’ mystery, Cosmo, but it’s jist
the ae thing the maker o’ ’t can haud nearest til, for it’s nearest
til himsel’ i’ the mak o’ ’t.--Fowk may tell me,” he went on, more
now as if he were talking to himself than to the boy, “’at I sud
content mysel’ wi’ what I see an’ hear, an’ lat alane sic eeseless
speculations! wi’ deein’ men an’ mears a’ aboot me, hoo can I!
They’re onything but eeseless to me, for gien I had naething but
what I see an’ hear, gran’ an’ bonny as a heap o’ ’t is, I wad jist
smore for want o’ room.”
“But what’s the guid o’ ’t a’, whan I’ll never see her again?”
sobbed Cosmo.
“Wha says sic a thing, laddie?”
“A’ body,” answered Cosmo, a good deal astonished at the question.
“Maister A’ body has a heap o’ the gawk in him yet, Cosmo,” replied
his master. “In fac’ he’s scarce mair nor an infant yet, though he
wull speyk as gien the haill universe o’ wisdom an’ knowledge war
open til ’im! There’s no a word o’ the kin’ i’ the haill Bible, nor
i’ the hert o’ man--nor i’ the hert o’ the Maker, do I, i’ the hert
o’ me, believe it. Cosmo, can _ye_ believe ’at that wee bit foal o’ an
ass ’at carriet the maister o’ ’s a’, alang yon hill-road frae
Bethany to Jerus’lem, cam to sic an ill hin ’er en’ as to be
forgotten by him he cairriet? No more can I believe that jist
’cause it carriet him it was ae hair better luiket efter nor ony
ither bit assie foalt i’ the lan’ o’ Isr’el.”
“The disciples micht hae min’t it til the cratur, an’ liukit efter
’t for him,” suggested Cosmo.
His master looked pleased.
“They could but work the will o’ him that made the ass,” he said,
“an does the best for a’ thing an’ a’ body. Na, na, my son! gien I
hae ony pooer to read the trowth o’ things, the life ’at’s gien is
no taen; an’ whatever come o’ the cratur, the love it waukent in a
human breist ’ill no more be lost than the objec’ o’ the same. That
a thing can love an’ be loved--an’ that’s yer bonnie mearie,
Cosmo--is jist a’ ane to sayin’ ’at it’s immortal, for God is love,
an’ whatever partakes o’ the essence o’ God canna dee, but maun
gang on livin’ till it please him to say haud, an’ that he’ll never
say.”
By this time the face of the man was glowing like an altar on which
had descended the fire of the highest heaven. His confidence
entered the heart of Cosmo, and when the master ceased, he turned,
with a sigh of gladness and relief, to his work, and wept no more.
The possible entrance of Linty to an enlarged existence, widened
the whole heaven of his conscious being; the well-spring of
personal life within him seemed to rush forth in mighty volume; and
through that grief and its consolation, the boy made a great stride
towards manhood.
One day in the first week of his new schooling, Cosmo took occasion
to mention Aggie’s difficulty with her algebra, and her anxiety to
find whether it was true that a girl could do as well as a boy. Mr.
Simon was much interested, and with the instinct of the true hunter,
whose business it is to hunt death for the sake of life,
began to think whether here might not be another prepared to
receive. He knew her father well, but had made no acquaintance with
Agnes yet, who indeed was not a little afraid of him, for he looked
as if he were always thinking about things nobody else knew of,
although, in common with every woman who saw it, she did find his
smile reassuring. No doubt the peculiar feeling of the neighbours
concerning him had caused her involuntarily to associate with him
the idea of something “no canny.” Not the less, when she heard from
Cosmo what sort of man his new master was, would she have given all
she possessed to learn of him. And before long, she had her chance.
Old Dorothy, Mr. Simon’s servant and housekeeper, was one day taken
ill, and Cosmo mentioning the fact in Aggie’s hearing, she ran,
with a mere word to her mother, and not a moments’ cogitation, to
offer her assistance till she was better.
It turned out that “auld Dorty,” as the neighbours called her, not
without some hint askance at the quality of her temper, was not
very seriously ailing, yet sufficiently so to accept a little help
for the rougher work of the house; and while Aggie was on her knees
washing the slabs of the passage that led through to the back door,
the master, as she always called him now that Cosmo was his pupil,
happened to come from his room, and saw and addressed her. She rose
in haste, mechanically drying her hands in her apron.
“How’s the algebra getting on, Agnes?” he said.
“Naething’s gettin’ on verra weel sin’ maister Cosmo gaed frae the
schuil, sir. I dinna seem to hae the hert for the learnin’ ’at I
had sae lang as he was there, sae far aheid o’ me, but no
a’ thegither oot ’o my sicht, like.--It soon’s a conceitit kin’ o’ a
thing to say, but I’m no meanin’ onything o’ that natur’, sir.”
“I understand you very well, Agnes,” returned the master. “Would
you like to have some lessons with me? I don’t say along with
Cosmo; you would hardly be able for that at present, I fancy--but
at such times as you could manage to come--odd times, when you were
not wanted.”
“There’s naething upo’ the airth, sir,” said Aggie, “’at I wad like
half sae weel. Thae jist a kin’ o’ a hoonger upo’ me for un’erstan’in’
things. Its frae bein’ sae muckle wi’ Maister Cosmo, I’m
thinkin’--ever sin’ he was a bairn, ye ken, sir; for bein’ twa
year aul’er nor him, I was a kin’ o’ a wee nursie til him; an’ ever
sin’ syne we hae had nae secrets frae ane anither; an’ ye ken what
he’s like--aye wantin’ to win at the boddom o’ things, an’ that’s
infeckit me, sae ’at I canna rist whan I see onybody un’erstan’in’
a thing, till I set aboot gettin’ a grip o’ ’t mysel’.”
“A very good infection to take, Agnes,” replied the master, with a
smile of thorough pleasure, “and one that will do more for you than
the cow-pox. Come to me as often as you can--and as you like. I
think I shall be able to tell you some things to make you happier.”
“’Deed, sir. I’m in no want o’ happiness! O’ that I hae full mair
nor I deserve; but I want a heap for a’ that. I canna say what it
is, for the hoonger is for what I haena.”
“Another of God’s children!” said the master to himself, “and full
of the groanings of the spirit! The wilderness and the solitary
place shall be glad for them.”
He often quoted scripture as the people of the New Testament
did--not much minding the original application of the words. Those
that are filled with the spirit, have always taken liberties with
the letter.
That very evening before she went home, they had a talk about
algebra, and several other things. Agnes went no more to school,
but almost every day to see the master, avoiding the hours when
Cosmo would be there.
CHAPTER XII.
GRANNIE’S GHOST STORY.
Things went on very quietly. The glorious days of harvest came and
went, and left the fields bare for the wintry revelling of great
blasts. The potatoes were all dug up, and again buried--deeper than
before, in pits, with sheets of straw and blankets of earth to
protect them from the biting of the frost. Their stalks and many
weeds with them were burned, and their ashes scattered. Some of the
land was ploughed, and some left till the spring. Before the autumn
rains the stock of peats was brought from the hill, where they had
been drying through the hot weather, and a splendid stack they
made. Coal was carted from the nearest sea-port, though not in such
quantity as the laird would have liked, for money was as scarce as
ever, and that is to put its lack pretty strongly. Everything
available for firewood was collected, and, if of any size, put
under saw and axe, then stored in the house. Good preparation was
thus made for the siege of the winter.
In their poverty, partly no doubt from consideration, they seemed
to be much forgotten. The family was like an old thistle-head,
withering on its wintry stalk, alone in a wind-swept field. All the
summer through not a single visitor, friend or stranger, had slept
in the house. A fresh face was more of a wonder to Cosmo than to
desert-haunting Abraham. The human heart, like the human body, can
live without much variety to feed on, but its house is built on a
lordly scale for hospitality, and is capable of welcoming every new
face as a new revelation. Steadily Cosmo went to his day’s work
with the master, steadily returned to his home; saw nothing new,
yet learned day by day, as he went and came, to love yet more, not
the faces of the men and women only, but the aspects of the country
in which he was born, to read the lines and shades of its varying
beauty: if it was not luxuriant enough to satisfy his ideal, it had
yet endless loveliness to disclose to him who already loved enough
to care to understand it. When the autumn came, it made him sad,
for it was not in harmony with the forward look of his young life,
which, though not ambitious, was vaguely expectant. But when the
hoar frosts appeared, when the clouds gathered, when the winds
began to wail, and the snows to fall, then his spirits rose to meet
the invading death. The old castle grew grayer and grayer outside,
but ruddier and merrier within. Oh, that awful gray and white
Scottish winter--dear to my heart as I sit and write with window
wide open to the blue skies of Italy’s December!
Cosmo kept up his morning bath in “the pot” as long as he could,
but when sleet and rain came, and he could no longer dry himself by
running about, he did not care for it longer, but waited for the
snow to come in plenty, which was a sure thing, for then he had a
substitute. It came of the ambition of hardy endurance, and will
scarcely seem credible to some of my readers. In the depth of the
winter, when the cold was at its strongest, provided only the snow
lay pretty deep, he would jump from his warm bed with the first
glimmer of the morning, and running out, in a light gray with the
grayness of what is frozen, to a hollow on the hillside a few yards
from the house, there pull off his night-garment, and roll in the
snow, kneading handfuls of it, and rubbing himself with it all
over. Thus he believed he strengthened himself to stand the cold of
the day; and happily he was strong enough to stand the
strengthening, and so increased his hardihood: what would have been
death to many was to him invigoration. He knew nothing of boxing,
or rowing, or billiards, but he could run and jump well, and ride
very fairly, and, above all, he could endure. In the last harvest
he had for the first time wielded a scythe, and had held his own
with the rest, though, it must be allowed, with a fierce struggle.
The next spring--I may mention it here--he not only held the
plough, but by patient persistence and fearless compulsion trained
two young bulls to go in it, saving many weeks’ labour of a pair of
horses. It filled his father with pride, and hope for his boy’s
coming fight with the world. Even the eyes of his grandmother would
after that brighten at mention of him; she began to feel proud that
she had a share in the existence of the lad: if he did so well when
a hobbledehoy, he might be something by the time he was a man! But
one thing troubled her: he was no sportsman; he never went out to
hunt the otter, or to shoot hares or rabbits or grouse or
partridges! and that was unnatural! The fact was, ever since that
talk with the master about Linty, he could not bear to kill
anything, and was now and then haunted by the dying eyes of the
pigeon he shot the first time he handled a gun. The grandmother
thought it a defect in his manhood that he did not like shooting;
but, woman, and old woman as she was, his heart was larger and
tenderer than hers, and got in the way of the killing.
His father had never troubled his young life with details
concerning the family affairs; he had only let him know that, for
many years, through extravagance and carelessness in those who
preceded his father, things had been going from bad to worse. But
this was enough to wake in the boy the desire, and it grew in him
as he grew, to rescue what was left of the estate from its burdens,
and restore it to independence and so to honour. He said nothing of
it, however, to his father, feeling the presumption of proposing to
himself what his father had been unable to effect.
He went oftener to the village this winter than before, and rarely
without going to see Mistress Forsyth, whom he, like the rest,
always called Grannie. She suffered much from rheumatism, which she
described as a sorrow in her bones. But she never lost her
patience, and so got the good of a trouble which would seem
specially sent as the concluding discipline of old people for this
world, that they may start well in the next. Before the winter set
in, the laird had seen that she was provided with peats--that much
he could do, because it cost him nothing but labour; and indeed
each of the several cart-loads Cosmo himself had taken, with mare
Linty between the shafts. But no amount of fire could keep the
frost out of the old woman’s body, or the sorrow out of her bones.
Hence she had to be a good deal in bed, and needed her
great-grandchild, Agnes, to help her to bear her burden. When the
bitter weather came, soon after Christmas, Agnes had to be with her
almost constantly. She had grown a little graver, but was always
cheerful, and, except for anxiety lest her mother should be
overworked, or her father take cold, seemed as happy with her
grandmother as at home.
One afternoon, when the clouds were rising, and the wind blew keen
from the north, Cosmo left Glenwarlock to go to the village--mainly
to see Grannie. He tramped the two miles and a half in all the joy
of youthful conflict with wind and weather, and reached the old
woman’s cottage radiant. The snow lay deep and powdery with frost,
and the struggle with space from a bad footing on the world had
brought the blood to his cheeks and the sparkle to his eyes. He
found Grannie sitting up in bed, and Aggie getting her tea--to
which Cosmo contributed a bottle of milk he had carried her--an
article rare enough in the winter when there was so little grass
for the cows. Aggie drew the old woman’s chair to the fire for him,
and he sat down and ate barley-meal scons, and drank tea with them.
Grannie was a little better than usual, for every disease has its
inconsistencies, and pain will abate before an access; and so, with
storm at hand, threaded with fiery flying serpents for her bones,
she was talking more than for days previous. Her voice came feebly
from the bed to Cosmo’s ears, while he leaned back in her great
chair, and Aggie was removing the tea-things.
“Did ye ever dream ony mair aboot the auld captain, Cosmo?” she
asked: from her tone he could not tell whether she spoke seriously,
or was amusing herself with the idea.
“No ance,” he answered. “What gars ye speir, Grannie?”
She said nothing for a few minutes, and Cosmo thought she had
dismissed the subject. Aggie had returned to her seat, and he was
talking with her about Euclid, when she began again; and this time
her voice revealed that she was quite in earnest.
“Ye’re weel nigh a man noo, Cosmo,” she said. “A body may daur
speyk to ye aboot things a body wadna be wullin’ to say till a
bairn for fear o’ frichtin’ o’ ’im mair nor the bit hert o’ ’m cud
stan’. Whan a lad can warstle wi’ a pair o’ bills, an’ get the
upper han’ o’ them, an’ gar them du his biddin’, he wadna need to
tak fricht at--” There she paused.
This preamble was enough in itself--not exactly to bring Cosmo’s
heart into his mouth, but to send a little more of his blood from
his brain to his heart than was altogether welcome there. His
imagination, however, was more eager than apprehensive, and his
desire to hear far greater than his dread of the possible
disclosure. Neither would he have turned his back on any terror,
though he knew well enough what fear was. He looked at Aggie as
much as to say, “What can be coming?” and she stared at him in turn
with dilated pupils, as if something dreadful were about to be
evoked by the threatened narrative. Neither spoke a word, but their
souls got into their ears, and there sat listening. The hearing was
likely to be frightful when so prefaced by Grannie.
“There’s no guid ever cam’ o’ ca’in’ things oot o’ their ain
names,” she began, “an’ it’s my min’ ’at gien ever ae man was a
willain, an’ gien ever ae man had rizzon no to lie quaiet whan he
was doon, that man was your father’s uncle--his gran’ uncle, that
is, the auld captain, as we ca’d him. Fowk said he saul’ his sowl
to the ill ane: hoo that may be, I wadna care to be able to tell;
but sure I am ’at his was a sowl ill at ease,--baith here an’
herefter. Them ’at sleepit aneth me, for there was twa men-servan’s
aboot the hoose that time--an’ troth there was need o’ them an’
mair, sic war the gangin’s on! an’ they sleepit whaur I’m tauld ye
sleep noo, Cosmo--them ’at sleepit there tellt me ’at never a nicht
passed ’at they h’ardna soons ’aneth them ’at there was no mainner
o’ accoontin’ for nor explainin’, as fowks sae set upo’ duin’
nooadays wi’ a’ thing. That explainin’ I canna bide: it’s jist a
love o’ leasin’, an’ taks the bluid oot o’ a’ thing, lea’in’ life as
wersh an’ fusionless as kail wantin’ saut. Them ’at h’ard it, tellt
me ’at there was _no_ accoontin’, as I tell you, for the reemish they
baith h’ard--whiles douf-like dunts, an’ whiles speech o’ mou’,
beggin’ an’ groanin’ as gien the enemy war bodily present to the
puir sinner.”
“He micht hae been but jabberin’ in ’s sleep,” Cosmo, with his love
of truth, ventured to suggest: Aggie gave him a nudge of warning.
“Ay micht it,” returned the old woman with calm scorn; “an’ it
micht nae doobt hae been snorin’, or a cat speykin’ wi’ man’s
tongue, or ony ane o’ mony things ’cep’ the trowth ’at ye’re no
wullin’ to hear.”
“I _am_ wullin’--to hear the warst trowth ye daur tell me, Grannie,”
cried Cosmo, terrified lest he had choked the fountain. He was more
afraid of losing the story than of hearing the worst tale that
could be told even about the room he slept in last night, and must
go back to sleep in again to-night.
Grannie was mollified, and went on.
“As I was sayin’, he micht weel be ill at ease, the auld captain,
gien ae half was true ’at was said o’ ’im; but I ’maist think yer
father coontit it priven ’at he had led a deevilich life amo’ the
pirates. Only, gien he did, whaur was the wauges o’ his ineequity?
Nae doobt he got the wauges ’at the apostle speyks o’, whilk is, as
ye well ken, deith--‘the wauges o’ sin is deith.’ But, maistly,
sic-like sinners get first wauges o’ anither speckle frae the
maister o’ them. For troth! he has no need to be near in ’s dealin’s
wi’ them, seein’ there’s nae buyin’ nor sellin’ whaur he is, an’ a’
the gowd he has doon yon’er i’ the booels o’ the yird, wad jist lie
there duin’ naething, gien he sent na ’t up abune, whaur maist
pairt it works his wull. Na, he seldom scrimps ’t to them ’at
follows his biddin’. But i’ this case, whaur, I say, was the
wauges? Natheless, he aye carriet himsel’ like ane ’at cud lay doon
the law o’ this warl’, an cleemt no sma’ consideration; yet was
there never sign or mark o’ the proper fundation for sic assumption
o’ the richt to respec’.
“It turnt oot, or cam to be said, ’at the Englishman ’at fowk
believed to hae killt him, was far-awa’ sib to the faimily, an’ the
twa had come thegither afore, somewhaur i’ foreign pairts. But
that’s naither here nor there, nor what for he killed him, or wha’s
faut was that same: aboot a’ that, naething was ever kent for
certain.
“Weel, it was an awfu’ like thing, ye may be sure, to quaiet fowk,
sic as we was a’--’cep’ for the drinkin’ an’ sic like, sin’ ever
the auld captain cam, wi’ his reprobat w’ys--it was a sair thing,
I’m sayin’, to hae a deid man a’ at ance upo’ oor han’s; for, lat
the men du ’at they like, the warst o’ ’t aye comes upo’ the women.
Lat a bairn come to mischance, or the guidman turn ower the kettle,
an’ it’s aye, ‘Rin for Jean this, or Bauby that,’ to set richt what
they hae set wrang. Even whan a man kills a body, it’s the women
hae to mak the best o’ ’t, an’ the corp luik dacent. An’ there’s
some o’ them no that easy to mak luik dacent! Troth, there’s mony
ane luiks bonnier deid nor alive, but that wasna the case wi’ the
auld captain, for he luikit as gien he had dee’d cursin’, as he
bude to du, gien he dee’d as he lived. His moo’ was drawn fearfu’,
as gien his last aith had chokit him. Nae doobt they said ’at wad
hae ’t they kent, ’at hoo that’s the w’y wi’ deith frae slayin’ wi’
the swoord; but I wadna hear o’ ’t; I kenned better. An’ whether he
had fair play or no, the deith he dee’d was a just ane; for them
’at draws the swoord maun periss by the swoord. Whan they faun’
’im, the richt han’ o’ the corp was streekit oot, as gien he was
cryin’ to somebody rinnin’ awa’ to bide an’ tak ’im wi’ ’im. But
there was anither at han’ to tak ’im wi’ ’im. Only, gien he tuik
’im that same nicht, he cudna hae carried him far. ’Deed, maybe, the
auld sinner was ower muckle aven for _him_.
“They brocht him hame, an’ laid the corp o’ him upo’ his ain bed,
whaur, I reckon, up til this nicht, he had tried mair nor he had
sleepit. An’ that verra nicht, wha sud I see--but I’m jist gaein’
to tell ye a’ aboot it, an’ hoo it was, an’ syne ye can say
yersel’s. Sin’ my ain auld mither dee’d, I haena opent my moo’ to
mortal upo’ the subjec’.”
The eyes of the two listeners were fixed upon the narrator in the
acme of expectation. A real ghost-story, from the lips of one they
knew, and must believe in, was a thing of dread delight. Like
ghosts themselves, they were all-unconscious of body, rapt in
listening.
“Ye may weel believe,” resumed the old woman after a short pause,
“at nane o’ ’s was ower wullin’ to sit wi’ the corp oor lane, for,
as I say, he wasna a comely corp to be a body’s lane wi’. Sae auld
auntie Jean an’ mysel’, we agreed ’at we wad tak the thing upo’
oorsel’s, for, huz twa, we cud lippen til ane anither no to be ower
feart to min’ ’at there was twa o’ ’s. There hadna been time yet
for the corp to be laid intil the coffin, though, i’ the quaiet o’
the mirk, we thoucht, as we sat, we cud hear the tap-tappin’ as
they cawed the braiss nails intil ’t, awa’ ower in Geordie Lumsden’s
chop, at the Muir o’ Warlock, a twa mile, it wad be. We war
sittin’, auntie Jean an’ mysel’, i’ the mids o’ the room, no wi’
oor backs til the bed, nor yet wi’ oor faces, for we daurna turn
aither o’ them til ’t. I’ the ae case, wha cud tell what we micht
see, an’ i’ the ither, wha cud tell what micht be luikin’ at hiz!
We war sittin’, I say, wi’ oor faces to the door o’ the room, an’
auntie was noddin’ a wee, for she was turnin’ gey an’ auld, but _I_
was as wide waukin’ an ony baudrins by a moose-hole, whan suddent
there cam a kin’ o’ a dirlin’ at the sneck, ’at sent the verra sowl
o’ me up intil the garret o’ my heid; an’ afore I had time to ken
hoo sair frichtit I was, the door begud to open; an’, glower as I
wad, no believin’ my ain e’en, open that door did, langsome,
langsome, quaiet, quaiet, jist as my auld Grannie used to tell o’
the deid man comin’ doon the lum, bit an’ bit, an’ jinin’ thegither
upo’ the flure. I was turnt to stane, like, ’at I didna believe I
cud hae fa’en frae the cheir gien I had swarfed clean awa’. An’ eh
but it tuik a time to open that door! But at last, as sure as ye
sit there, you twa, an’ no anither,--”--At the word, Cosmo’s heart
came swelling up into his throat, but he dared not look round to
assure himself that they were indeed two sitting there and not
another--“in cam the auld captain, ae fit efter anither! Speir
gien I was sure o’ ’im! Didna I ken him as weel as my ain
father--as weel ’s my ain minister--as weel as my ain man? He cam
in, I say, the auld captain himsel’--an’ eh, sic an evil luik!--the
verra luik deith-frozen upo’ the face o’ the corp! The live bluid
turned to dubs i’ my inside. He cam on an’ on, but no straucht for
whaur we sat, or I dinna think the sma’ rizzon I had left wad hae
bidden wi’ me, but as gien he war haudin’ for ’s bed. To tell God’s
trowth, for I daurna lee, for fear o’ haein’ to luik upo’ ’s like
again, my auld auntie declaret efterhin ’at she saw naething. She
bude til hae been asleep, an’ a mercifu’ thing it was for her, puir
body! but she didna live lang efter. He made straucht for the bed,
as I thoucht. ‘The Lord preserve ’s!’ thoucht I, ‘is he gaein to lie
doon wi’ ’s ain corp?’ but he turnt awa’, an’ roon’ the fit o’ the
bed to the ither side o’ ’t, an’ I saw nae mair; an’ for a while,
auntie Jean sat her lane wi’ the deid, for I lay upo’ the flure,
an’ naither h’ard nor saw. But whan I cam to mysel’, wasna I
thankfu’ ’at I wasna deid, for he micht hae gotten me than, an’
there was nae sayin’ what he micht hae dune til me! But, think ye,
wad auntie Jean believe ’at I had seen him, or that it was onything
but a dream ’at had come ower me, atween waukin’ an’ sleepin’? Na,
no she! for she had sleepit throu’ ’t hersel’!”
For some time silence reigned, as befitted the close of such a
story. Nothing but the solemn tick of the tall clock was to be
heard. On and on it went, as steady as before. Ghosts were nothing
special to the clock: it had to measure out the time both for
ghosts and unghosts.
“But what cud the ghaist hae been wantin’? No the corp, for he
turnt awa’, ye tell me, frae hit,” Cosmo ventured at length to
remark.
“Wha can say what ghaists may be efter, laddie! But, troth to tell,
whan ye see live fowk sae gien ower to the boady, ’at they’re never
happy but whan they’re aitin’ or drinkin’ or sic like--an’ the auld
captain was seldom throu’ wi’ his glaiss, ’at he wasna cryin’ for
the whisky or the het watter for the neist--whan the boady’s the
best half o’ them, like, an’ they maun aye be duin’ something wi’
’t, ye needna won’er ’at the ghaist o’ ane sic like sud fin’
himsel’ gey an’ eerie an’ lonesome like, wantin’ his seck to fill,
an’ sae try to win back to hae a luik hoo it was weirin’.”
“But he gaed na to the corp,” Cosmo insisted.
“’Cause he wasna alloot,” said Grannie. “He wad hae been intil ’t
again in a moment, ye may be certain, gien it had been in his
pooer. But the deevils cudna gang intil the swine wantin’ leave.”
“Ay, I see,” said Cosmo.
“But jist ye speir at yer new maister,” Grannie went on, “what he
thinks aboot it, for I ance h’ard him speyk richt wise words to my
gudeson, James Gracie, anent sic things. I min’ weel ’at he said
the only thing ’at made agen the viouw I tiuk--though I spakna o’
the partic’lar occasion--was, ’at naebody ever h’ard tell o’ the
ghaist o’ an alderman, wha they say’s some grit Lon’on man, sair
gien to the fillin’ o’ the seck.”
CHAPTER XIII.
THE STORM-GUEST.
Again a deep silence descended on the room. The twilight had long
fallen, and settled down into the dark. The only thing that
acknowledged and answered the clock was the red glow of the peats
on the hearth. To Cosmo, as he sat sunk in thought, the clock and
the fire seemed to be holding a silent talk. Presently came a great
and sudden blast of wind, which roused Cosmo, and made him bethink
himself that it was time to be going home. And for this there was
another reason besides the threatening storm: he had the night
before begun to read aloud one of Sir Walter’s novels to the
assembled family, and Grizzie would be getting anxious for another
portion of it before she went to bed.
“I’m glaid to see ye sae muckle better, Grannie,” he said. “I’ll
say gude nicht noo, an’ luik in again the morn.”
“Weel, I’m obleeged to ye,” replied the old woman. “There’s been
but feow o’ yer kin, be their fau’ts what they micht, wad forget
ony ’at luikit for a kin’ word or a kin’ deed!--Aggie, lass, ye’ll
convoy him a bittock, willna ye?”
All the few in whom yet lingered any shadow of retainership towards
the fast-fading chieftainship of Glenwarlock, seemed to cherish the
notion that the heir of the house had to be tended and cared for
like a child--that was what they were in the world for. Doubtless a
pitying sense of the misfortunes of the family had much to do with
the feeling.
“There’s nae occasion,” and “I’ll du that,” said the two young
people in a breath.
Cosmo rose, and began to put on his plaid, crossing it over back
and chest to leave his arms free: that way the wind would get least
hold on him. Agnes went to the closet for her plaid also--of the
same tartan, and drawing it over her head and pinning it under her
chin, was presently ready for the stormy way. Then she turned to
Cosmo, and was pinning his plaid together at the throat, when the
wind came with a sudden howl, rushed down the chimney, and drove
the level smoke into the middle of the room. It could not shake the
cottage--it was too lowly: neither could it rattle its windows--
they were not made to open; but it bellowed over it like a
wave over a rock, and as in contempt blew its smoke back into its
throat.
“It’ll be a wull nicht, I’m doobtin’, Cosmo,” said Agnes; “an’ I
wuss ye safe i’ the ingle-neak wi’ yer fowk.”
Cosmo laughed. “The win’ kens me,” he said.
“Guid farbid!” cried the old woman from the bed. “Kenna ye wha’s
the prence o’ ’t, laddie? Makna a jeist o’ the pooers ’at be.”
[Illustration: THE CLOCK AND THE PIPE SEEMED TO BE HOLDING A SILENT
TALK.]
“Gien they binna ordeent o’ God, what are they but a jeist?”
returned Cosmo. “Eh, but ye wad mak a bonny munsie o’ me, Grannie,
to hae me feart at the deil an’ a’! I canna a’ thegither help it
wi’ the ghaists, an’ I’m ashamed o’ mysel’ for that; but I _am not_
gaein to heed the deil. I defy him an’ a’ his works. He’s but a
cooerd, ye ken, Grannie, for whan ye resist him, he rins.”
She made no answer. Cosmo shook hands with her, and went, followed
by Agnes, who locked the door behind her, and put the key in her
pocket.
It was indeed a wild night. The wind was rushing from the north,
full of sharp stinging pellicles, something between snow-flakes and
hail-stones. Down the wide village street it came right in their
faces. Through it, as through a thin shifting sheet, they saw on
both sides the flickering lights of the many homes, but before them
lay darkness, and the moor, a chaos, a carnival of wind and snow.
Worst of all the snow on the road was not _binding_, and their feet
felt as if walking on sand. As long as the footing is good, one can
get on even in the face of a northerly storm; but to heave with a
shifting fulcrum is hard. Nevertheless Cosmo, beholding with his
mind’s eye the wide waste around him, rejoiced; invisible through
the snow, it was not the less a presence, and his young heart
rushed to the contest. There was no fear of ghosts in such a storm!
The ghosts might be there, but there was no time to heed them, and
that was as good as their absence--perhaps better, if we knew all.
“Bide a wee, Cosmo,” cried Agnes, and leaving him in the middle of
the street where they were walking, she ran across to one of the
houses, and entered--lifting the latch without ceremony. No
neighbour troubled another to come and open the door; if there was
no one at home, the key in the lock outside showed it.
Cosmo turned his back to the wind, and stood waiting. From the door
which Aggie opened, came through the wind and snow the sound of the
shoemaker’s hammer on his lapstone.
“Cud ye spare the mistress for an hoor, or maybe twa an’ a half, to
haud Grannie company, John Nauchty?” said Agnes.
“Weel that,” answered the _sutor_, hammering away. He intended no
reflection on the bond that bound the mistress and himself.
“I dinna see her,” said Aggie.
“She’ll be in in a minute. She’s run ower the ro’d to get a doup o’
a can’le,” returned the man.
“Gien she dinna gae speedier, she’ll hae to licht it to fin’ her
ain door,” said Agnes merrily, to whom the approaching fight with
the elements was as welcome as to Cosmo. She had made up her mind
to go with him all the way, let him protest as he might.
“Ow na! she’ll hearken, an’ hear the hemmer,” replied the
shoemaker.
“Weel, tak the key, an’ ye winna forget, John?” said Aggie, laying
the key amongst his tools. “Grannie’s lyin’ there her lee-lane, an’
gien the hoose was to tak fire, what wad come o’ her?”
“Guid forbid onybody sud forget Grannie!” rejoined the man
heartily; “but fire wad hae a sma’ chance the nicht.”
Agnes thanked and left him. All the time he had not missed a single
stroke of his hammer on the ben-leather between it and his lapstone.
When she rejoined Cosmo, where he stood leaning his back against
the wind in the middle of the road,
“Come nae farther, Aggie,” he said. “It’s an ill nicht, an’ grows
waur. There’s nae guid in ’t naither, for we winna hear ane anither
speyk ohn stoppit, an’ turnt oor backs til ’t. Gang to yer Grannie;
she’ll be feart aboot ye.”
“Nae a bit. I maun see ye oot o’ the toon.”
They fought their way along the street, and out on the open moor,
the greater part of which was still heather and swamp. Peat-bog and
ploughed land was all one waste of snow. Creation seemed but the
snow that had fallen, the snow that was falling, and the snow that
had yet to fall; or, to put it otherwise, a fall of snow between
two outspread worlds of snow.
“Gang back, noo, Aggie,” said Cosmo again. “What’s the guid o’ twa
whaur ane only need be, an’ baith hae to fecht for themsel’s?”
“I’m no gaein’ back yet,” persisted Aggie. “Twa’s better at
onything nor ane himblane. The sutor’s wife’s gaein’ in to see
Grannie, an’ Grannie ’ll like her cracks a heap better nor mine.
She thinks I hae nae mair brains nor a hen, ’cause I canna min’ upo’
things at war nearhan’ forgotten or I was born.”
Cosmo desisted from useless persuasion, and they struggled on
together, through the snow above and the snow beneath. At this
Aggie was more than a match for Cosmo. Lighter and smaller, and
perhaps with larger lungs in proportion, she bored her way through
the blast better than he, and the moment he began to expostulate,
would increase the distance between them, and go on in front where
he knew she could not hear a word he said.
At last, being then a little ahead, she turned her back to the
wind, and waited for him to come up.
“Noo, ye’ve had eneuch o’ ’t!” he said. “An’ I maun turn an’ gang
back wi’ ye, or ye’ll never win hame.”
Aggie broke into a loud laugh that rang like music through the
storm.
“A likly thing!” she cried; “an’ me wi’ my back a’ the ro’d to the
win’! Gang back yersel’, Cosmo, an’ sit by Grannie’s fire, an’ I’ll
gang on to the castle, an’ lat them ken whaur ye are. Gien ye dinna
that, I tell ye ance for a’, I’m no gaein’ to lea’ ye till I see ye
safe inside yer ain wa’s.”
“But Aggie,” reasoned Cosmo, with yet greater earnestness, “what’ll
ye gar fowk think o’ me, ’at wad hae a lassie to gang hame wi’ me,
for fear the win’ micht blaw me intil the sea? Ye’ll bring me to
shame, Aggie.”
“A lassie! say ye?” cried Aggie,--“I think I hear ye!--an’ me auld
eneuch to be yer mither! I s’ tak guid care there s’ be nae affront
intil ’t. Haud yer hert quaiet, Cosmo; ye’ll hae need o’ a’ yer
breath afore ye win to yer ain fireside.”
As she spoke, the wind pounced upon them with a fiercer gust than
any that had preceded. Instinctively they grasped each other, as if
from the wish, if they should be blown away, to be blown away
together.
“Eh, that’s a rouch ane!” said Cosmo, and again Aggie laughed
merrily.
While they stood thus, with their backs to the wind, the moon rose.
Far indeed from being visible, she yet shed a little glimmer of
light over the plain, revealing a world as wild as ever the frozen
north outspread--as wild as ever poet’s despairing vision of
desolation. I see it! I see it! but how shall I make my reader see
it with me? It was ghastly. The only similitude of life was the
perplexed and multitudinous motion of the drifting, falling flakes.
No shape was to be seen, no sound but that of the wind to be heard.
It was like the dream of a delirious child after reading the
ancient theory of the existence of the world by the rushing
together of fortuitous atoms. Wan and thick, tumultuous,
innumerable to millions of angels, an interminable tempest of
intermingling and indistinguishable vortices, it stretched on and
on, a boundless hell of cold and shapelessness--white thinned with
gray, and fading into gray blackness, into tangible darkness.
The moment the fury of the blast abated, Agnes turned, and without
a word, began again her boring march, forcing her way through the
palpable obstructions of wind and snow. Unable to prevent her,
Cosmo followed. B
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