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Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood

by George MacDonald · English · Gutenberg #9301 · 397,318 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood

Author: George MacDonald

Illustrator: Arthur Hughes
        M. V. Wheelhouse


        
Release date: August 15, 2004 [eBook #9301]
                Most recently updated: January 2, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9301

Credits: Produced by Jonathan Ingram and PG Distributed Proofreaders.
        Illustrated HTML by David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RANALD BANNERMAN'S BOYHOOD ***




Produced by Jonathan Ingram and PG Distributed Proofreaders.
Illustrated HTML by David Widger






RANALD BANNERMAN’S BOYHOOD

By

George MacDonald



1871


CONTENTS

Chap.

I. INTRODUCTORY

II. THE GLIMMER OF TWILIGHT

III. MY FATHER

IV. KIRSTY

V. I BEGIN LIFE

VI. NO FATHER

VII. MRS. MITCHELL IS DEFEATED

VIII. A NEW SCHOOLMISTRESS

IX. WE LEARN OTHER THINGS

X. SIR WORM WYMBLE

XI. THE KELPIE

XII. ANOTHER KELPIE

XIII. WANDERING WILLIE

XIV. ELSIE DUFF

XV. A NEW COMPANION

XVI. I GO DOWN HILL

XVII. THE TROUBLE GROWS

XVIII. LIGHT OUT OF DARKNESS

XIX. FORGIVENESS

XX. I HAVE A FALL AND A DREAM

XXI. THE BEES’ NEST

XXII. VAIN INTERCESSION

XXIII. KNIGHT-ERRANTRY

XXIV. FAILURE

XXV. TURKEY PLOTS

XXVI. OLD JOHN JAMIESON

XXVII. TURKEY’S TRICK

XXVIII. I SCHEME TOO

XXIX. A DOUBLE EXPOSURE

XXX. TRIBULATION

XXXI. A WINTER’S RIDE

XXXII. THE PEAT-STACK

XXXIII. A SOLITARY CHAPTER

XXXIV. AN EVENING VISIT

XXXV. A BREAK IN MY STORY

XXXVI. I LEARN THAT I AM NOT A MAN



COLOURED PLATES


THE BILBERRY PICKERS

THE BABY BROTHER

THE DRESSING OF LITTLE DAVIE

MY ESCAPE

TURKEY LIGHTS A FIRE

I GO INTO THE FIELDS

MAKING THE SNOWBALL

READING TO ELSIE AND TURKEY

A SUDDEN STOP

HELPING ELSIE

A READING LESSON

I RETURN HOME


_Coloured Illustrations by A.V. Wheelhouse: and Other 36
Black-and-White Illustrations by Arthur Hughes_.




CHAPTER I

Introductory


I do not intend to carry my story one month beyond the hour when I saw
that my boyhood was gone and my youth arrived; a period determined to
some by the first tail-coat, to me by a different sign. My reason for
wishing to tell this first portion of my history is, that when I look
back upon it, it seems to me not only so pleasant, but so full of
meaning, that, if I can only tell it right, it must prove rather
pleasant and not quite unmeaning to those who will read it. It will
prove a very poor story to such as care only for stirring adventures,
and like them all the better for a pretty strong infusion of the
impossible; but those to whom their own history is interesting--to
whom, young as they may be, it is a pleasant thing to be in the
world--will not, I think, find the experience of a boy born in a very
different position from that of most of them, yet as much a boy as any
of them, wearisome because ordinary.

If I did not mention that I, Ranald Bannerman, am a Scotchman, I
should be found out before long by the kind of thing I have to tell;
for although England and Scotland are in all essentials one, there are
such differences between them that one could tell at once, on opening
his eyes, if he had been carried out of the one into the other during
the night. I do not mean he might not be puzzled, but except there was
an intention to puzzle him by a skilful selection of place, the very
air, the very colours would tell him; or if he kept his eyes shut, his
ears would tell him without his eyes. But I will not offend fastidious
ears with any syllable of my rougher tongue. I will tell my story in
English, and neither part of the country will like it the worse for
that.

I will clear the way for it by mentioning that my father was the
clergyman of a country parish in the north of Scotland--a humble
position, involving plain living and plain ways altogether. There was
a glebe or church-farm attached to the manse or clergyman’s house, and
my father rented a small farm besides, for he needed all he could make
by farming to supplement the smallness of the living. My mother was an
invalid as far back as I can remember. We were four boys, and had no
sister. But I must begin at the beginning, that is, as far back as it
is possible for me to begin.



CHAPTER II

The Glimmer of Twilight


I cannot tell any better than most of my readers how and when I began
to come awake, or what it was that wakened me. I mean, I cannot
remember when I began to remember, or what first got set down in my
memory as worth remembering. Sometimes I fancy it must have been a
tremendous flood that first made me wonder, and so made me begin to
remember. At all events, I do remember one flood that seems about as
far off as anything--the rain pouring so thick that I put out my hand
in front of me to try whether I could see it through the veil of the
falling water. The river, which in general was to be seen only in
glimpses from the house--for it ran at the bottom of a hollow--was
outspread like a sea in front, and stretched away far on either
hand. It was a little stream, but it fills so much of my memory with
its regular recurrence of autumnal floods, that I can have no
confidence that one of these is in reality the oldest thing I
remember. Indeed, I have a suspicion that my oldest memories are of
dreams,--where or when dreamed, the good One who made me only knows.
They are very vague to me now, but were almost all made up of bright
things. One only I can recall, and it I will relate, or more properly
describe, for there was hardly anything done in it. I dreamed it
often. It was of the room I slept in, only it was narrower in the
dream, and loftier, and the window was gone. But the ceiling was a
ceiling indeed; for the sun, moon, and stars lived there. The sun was
not a scientific sun at all, but one such as you see in penny
picture-books--a round, jolly, jocund man’s face, with flashes of
yellow frilling it all about, just what a grand sunflower would look
if you set a countenance where the black seeds are. And the moon was
just such a one as you may see the cow jumping over in the pictured
nursery rhyme. She was a crescent, of course, that she might have a
face drawn in the hollow, and turned towards the sun, who seemed to be
her husband. He looked merrily at her, and she looked trustfully at
him, and I knew that they got on very well together. The stars were
their children, of course, and they seemed to run about the ceiling
just as they pleased; but the sun and the moon had regular
motions--rose and set at the proper times, for they were steady old
folks. I do not, however, remember ever seeing them rise or set; they
were always up and near the centre before the dream dawned on me. It
would always come in one way: I thought I awoke in the middle of the
night, and lo! there was the room with the sun and the moon and the
stars at their pranks and revels in the ceiling--Mr. Sun nodding and
smiling across the intervening space to Mrs. Moon, and she nodding
back to him with a knowing look, and the corners of her mouth drawn
down. I have vague memories of having heard them talk. At times I feel
as if I could yet recall something of what they said, but it vanishes
the moment I try to catch it. It was very queer talk, indeed--about
me, I fancied--but a thread of strong sense ran through it all. When
the dream had been very vivid, I would sometimes think of it in the
middle of the next day, and look up to the sun, saying to myself: He’s
up there now, busy enough. I wonder what he is seeing to talk to his
wife about when he comes down at night? I think it sometimes made me a
little more careful of my conduct. When the sun set, I thought he was
going in the back way; and when the moon rose, I thought she was going
out for a little stroll until I should go to sleep, when they might
come and talk about me again. It was odd that, although I never
fancied it of the sun, I thought I could make the moon follow me as I
pleased. I remember once my eldest brother giving me great offence by
bursting into laughter, when I offered, in all seriousness, to bring
her to the other side of the house where they wanted light to go on
with something they were about. But I must return to my dream; for the
most remarkable thing in it I have not yet told you. In one corner of
the ceiling there was a hole, and through that hole came down a ladder
of sun-rays--very bright and lovely. Where it came from I never
thought, but of course it could not come from the sun, because there
he was, with his bright coat off, playing the father of his family in
the most homely Old-English-gentleman fashion possible. That it was a
ladder of rays there could, however, be no doubt: if only I could
climb upon it! I often tried, but fast as I lifted my feet to climb,
down they came again upon the boards of the floor. At length I did
succeed, but this time the dream had a setting.

[Illustration]

I have said that we were four boys; but at this time we were
five--there was a little baby. He was very ill, however, and I knew he
was not expected to live. I remember looking out of my bed one night
and seeing my mother bending over him in her lap;--it is one of the
few things in which I do remember my mother. I fell asleep, but by and
by woke and looked out again. No one was there. Not only were mother
and baby gone, but the cradle was gone too. I knew that my little
brother was dead. I did not cry: I was too young and ignorant to cry
about it. I went to sleep again, and seemed to wake once more; but it
was into my dream this time. There were the sun and the moon and the
stars. But the sun and the moon had got close together and were
talking very earnestly, and all the stars had gathered round them. I
could not hear a word they said, but I concluded that they were
talking about my little brother. “I suppose I ought to be sorry,” I
said to myself; and I tried hard, but I could not feel sorry. Meantime
I observed a curious motion in the heavenly host. They kept looking at
me, and then at the corner where the ladder stood, and talking on, for
I saw their lips moving very fast; and I thought by the motion of them
that they were saying something about the ladder. I got out of bed and
went to it. If I could only get up it! I would try once more. To my
delight I found it would bear me. I climbed and climbed, and the sun
and the moon and the stars looked more and more pleased as I got up
nearer to them, till at last the sun’s face was in a broad smile. But
they did not move from their places, and my head rose above them, and
got out at the hole where the ladder came in. What I saw there, I
cannot tell. I only know that a wind such as had never blown upon me
in my waking hours, blew upon me now. I did not care much for kisses
then, for I had not learned how good they are; but somehow I fancied
afterwards that the wind was made of my baby brother’s kisses, and I
began to love the little man who had lived only long enough to be our
brother and get up above the sun and the moon and the stars by the
ladder of sun-rays. But this, I say, I thought afterwards. Now all
that I can remember of my dream is that I began to weep for very
delight of something I have forgotten, and that I fell down the ladder
into the room again and awoke, as one always does with a fall in a
dream. Sun, moon, and stars were gone; the ladder of light had
vanished; and I lay sobbing on my pillow.

I have taken up a great deal of room with this story of a dream, but
it clung to me, and would often return. And then the time of life to
which this chapter refers is all so like one, that a dream comes in
well enough in it. There is a twilight of the mind, when all things
are strange, and when the memory is only beginning to know that it has
got a notebook, and must put things down in it.

It was not long after this before my mother died, and I was sorrier
for my father than for myself--he looked so sad. I have said that as
far back as I can remember, she was an invalid. Hence she was unable
to be much with us. She is very beautiful in my memory, but during the
last months of her life we seldom saw her, and the desire to keep the
house quiet for her sake must have been the beginning of that freedom
which we enjoyed during the whole of our boyhood. So we were out every
day and all day long, finding our meals when we pleased, and that, as
I shall explain, without going home for them. I remember her death
clearly, but I will not dwell upon that. It is too sad to write much
about, though she was happy, and the least troubled of us all. Her
sole concern was at leaving her husband and children. But the will of
God was a better thing to her than to live with them. My sorrow at
least was soon over, for God makes children so that grief cannot
cleave to them. They must not begin life with a burden of loss. He
knows it is only for a time. When I see my mother again, she will not
reproach me that my tears were so soon dried. “Little one,” I think I
hear her saying, “how could you go on crying for your poor mother when
God was mothering you all the time, and breathing life into you, and
making the world a blessed place for you? You will tell me all about
it some day.” Yes, and we shall tell our mothers--shall we not?--how
sorry we are that we ever gave them any trouble. Sometimes we were
very naughty, and sometimes we did not know better. My mother was very
good, but I cannot remember a single one of the many kisses she must
have given me. I remember her holding my head to her bosom when she
was dying--that is all.



CHAPTER III

My Father


My father was a tall, staid, solemn man, who walked slowly with long
strides. He spoke very little, and generally looked as if he were
pondering next Sunday’s sermon. His head was grey, and a little bent,
as if he were gathering truth from the ground. Once I came upon him in
the garden, standing with his face up to heaven, and I thought he was
seeing something in the clouds; but when I came nearer, I saw that his
eyes were closed, and it made me feel very solemn. I crept away as if
I had been peeping where I ought not. He did not talk much to us. What
he said was very gentle, and it seemed to me it was his solemnity that
made him gentle. I have seen him look very angry. He used to walk much
about his fields, especially of a summer morning before the sun was
up. This was after my mother’s death. I presume he felt nearer to her
in the fields than in the house. There was a kind of grandeur about
him, I am sure; for I never saw one of his parishioners salute him in
the road, without a look of my father himself passing like a solemn
cloud over the face of the man or woman. For us, we feared and loved
him both at once. I do not remember ever being punished by him, but
Kirsty (of whom I shall have to speak by and by) has told me that he
did punish us when we were very small children. Neither did he teach
us much himself, except on the occasions I am about to mention; and I
cannot say that I learned much from his sermons. These gave entire
satisfaction to those of his parishioners whom I happened to hear
speak of them; but, although I loved the sound of his voice, and liked
to look at his face as he stood up there in the ancient pulpit clad in
his gown and bands, I never cared much about what he said. Of course
it was all right, and a better sermon than any other clergyman
whatever could have preached, but what it was all about was of no
consequence to me. I may as well confess at once that I never had the
least doubt that my father was the best man in the world. Nay, to this
very hour I am of the same opinion, notwithstanding that the son of
the village tailor once gave me a tremendous thrashing for saying so,
on the ground that I was altogether wrong, seeing _his_ father was the
best man in the world--at least I have learned to modify the assertion
only to this extent--that my father was the best man I have ever
known.

The church was a very old one--had seen candles burning, heard the
little bell ringing, and smelt the incense of the old Catholic
service. It was so old, that it seemed settling down again into the
earth, especially on one side, where great buttresses had been built
to keep it up. It leaned against them like a weary old thing that
wanted to go to sleep. It had a short square tower, like so many of
the churches in England; and although there was but one old cracked
bell in it, although there was no organ to give out its glorious
sounds, although there was neither chanting nor responses, I assure my
English readers that the awe and reverence which fell upon me as I
crossed its worn threshold were nowise inferior, as far as I can
judge, to the awe and respect they feel when they enter the more
beautiful churches of their country. There was a hush in it which
demanded a refraining of the foot, a treading softly as upon holy
ground; and the church was inseparably associated with my father.

The pew we sat in was a square one, with a table in the middle of it
for our books. My brother David generally used it for laying his head
upon, that he might go to sleep comfortably. My brother Tom put his
feet on the cross-bar of it, leaned back in his corner--for you see we
had a corner apiece--put his hands in his trousers pockets, and stared
hard at my father--for Tom’s corner was well in front of the pulpit.
My brother Allister, whose back was to the pulpit, used to learn the
_paraphrases_ all the time of the sermon. I, happiest of all in my
position, could look up at my father, if I pleased, a little sideways;
or, if I preferred, which I confess I often did, study--a rare sight
in Scotch churches--the figure of an armed knight, carved in stone,
which lay on the top of the tomb of Sir Worm Wymble--at least that is
the nearest I can come to the spelling of the name they gave him. The
tomb was close by the side of the pew, with only a flagged passage
between. It stood in a hollow in the wall, and the knight lay under
the arch of the recess, so silent, so patient, with folded palms, as
if praying for some help which he could not name. From the presence of
this labour of the sculptor came a certain element into the feeling of
the place, which it could not otherwise have possessed: organ and
chant were not altogether needful while that carved knight lay there
with face upturned, as if looking to heaven.

[Illustration]

But from gazing at the knight I began to regard the wall about him,
and the arch over him; and from the arch my eye would seek the roof,
and descending, rest on the pillars, or wander about the windows,
searching the building of the place, discovering the points of its
strength, and how it was upheld. So that while my father was talking
of the church as a company of believers, and describing how it was
held together by faith, I was trying to understand how the stone and
lime of the old place was kept from falling asunder, and thus
beginning to follow what has become my profession since; for I am an
architect.

But the church has led me away from my father. He always spoke in
rather a low voice, but so earnestly that every eye, as it seemed to
me, but mine and those of two of my brothers, was fixed upon him. I
think, however, that it was in part the fault of certain teaching of
his own, better fitted for our understanding, that we paid so little
heed. Even Tom, with all his staring, knew as little about the sermon
as any of us. But my father did not question us much concerning it; he
did what was far better. On Sunday afternoons, in the warm, peaceful
sunlight of summer, with the honeysuckle filling the air of the little
arbour in which we sat, and his one glass of wine set on the table in
the middle, he would sit for an hour talking away to us in his gentle,
slow, deep voice, telling us story after story out of the New
Testament, and explaining them in a way I have seldom heard equalled.
Or, in the cold winter nights, he would come into the room where I and
my two younger brothers slept--the nursery it was--and, sitting down
with Tom by his side before the fire that burned bright in the frosty
air, would open the great family Bible on the table, turn his face
towards the two beds where we three lay wide awake, and tell us story
after story out of the Old Testament, sometimes reading a few verses,
sometimes turning the bare facts into an expanded and illustrated
narrative of his own, which, in Shakspere fashion, he presented after
the modes and ways of our own country and time. I shall never forget
Joseph in Egypt hearing the pattering of the asses’ hoofs in the
street, and throwing up the window, and looking out, and seeing all
his own brothers coming riding towards him; or the grand rush of the
sea waves over the bewildered hosts of the Egyptians. We lay and
listened with all the more enjoyment, that while the fire was burning
so brightly, and the presence of my father filling the room with
safety and peace, the wind was howling outside, and the snow drifting
up against the window. Sometimes I passed into the land of sleep with
his voice in my ears and his love in my heart; perhaps into the land
of visions--once certainly into a dream of the sun and moon and stars
making obeisance to the too-favoured son of Jacob.



CHAPTER IV

Kirsty


My father had a housekeeper, a trusty woman, he considered her. We
thought her _very_ old. I suppose she was about forty. She was not
pleasant, for she was grim-faced and censorious, with a very straight
back, and a very long upper lip. Indeed the distance from her nose to
her mouth was greater than the length of her nose. When I think of her
first, it is always as making some complaint to my father against
us. Perhaps she meant to speak the truth, or rather, perhaps took it
for granted that she always did speak the truth; but certainly she
would exaggerate things, and give them quite another look. The bones
of her story might be true, but she would put a skin over it after her
own fashion, which was not one of mildness and charity. The
consequence was that the older we grew, the more our minds were
alienated from her, and the more we came to regard her as our enemy.
If she really meant to be our friend after the best fashion she knew,
it was at least an uncomely kind of friendship, that showed itself in
constant opposition, fault-finding, and complaint. The real mistake
was that we were boys. There was something in her altogether
antagonistic to the boy-nature. You would have thought that to be a
boy was in her eyes to be something wrong to begin with; that boys
ought never to have been made; that they must always, by their very
nature, be about something amiss. I have occasionally wondered how she
would have behaved to a girl. On reflection, I think a little better;
but the girl would have been worse off, because she could not have
escaped from her as we did. My father would hear her complaints to the
end without putting in a word, except it were to ask her a question,
and when she had finished, would turn again to his book or his sermon,
saying--

“Very well, Mrs. Mitchell; I will speak to them about it.”

My impression is that he did not believe the half she told him. At all
events, when he had sent for us, he would ask our version of the
affair, and listen to that as he had listened to hers. Then he would
set forth to us where we had been wrong, if we were wrong, and send us
away with an injunction not to provoke Mrs. Mitchell, who couldn’t
help being short in her temper, poor thing! Somehow or other we got it
into our heads that the shortness of her temper was mysteriously
associated with the shortness of her nose.

She was saving even to stinginess. She would do her best to provide
what my father liked, but for us she thought almost anything good
enough. She would, for instance, give us the thinnest of milk--we said
she skimmed it three times before she thought it blue enough for us.
My two younger brothers did not mind it so much as I did, for I was
always rather delicate, and if I took a dislike to anything, would
rather go without than eat or drink of it. But I have told you enough
about her to make it plain that she could be no favourite with us; and
enough likewise to serve as a background to my description of Kirsty.

Kirsty was a Highland woman who had the charge of the house in which
the farm servants lived. She was a cheerful, gracious, kind woman--a
woman of God’s making, one would say, were it not that, however
mysterious it may look, we cannot deny that he made Mrs. Mitchell too.
It is very puzzling, I confess. I remember once that my youngest
brother Davie, a very little fellow then, for he could not speak
plainly, came running in great distress to Kirsty, crying, “Fee, fee!”
 by which he meant to indicate that a flea was rendering his life
miserable. Kirsty at once undressed him and entered on the pursuit.
After a successful search, while she was putting on his garments
again, little Davie, who had been looking very solemn and thoughtful
for some time, said, not in a questioning, but in a concluding tone--

“God didn’t make the fees, Kirsty!”

“Oh yes, Davie! God made everything. God did make the fleas,” said
Kirsty.

Davie was silent for a while. Then he opened his mouth and spake like
a discontented prophet of old:

“Why doesn’t he give them something else to eat, then?”

“You must ask himself that,” said Kirsty, with a wisdom I have since
learned to comprehend, though I remember it shocked me a little at the
time.

All this set me thinking. Before the dressing of little Davie was
over, I had _my_ question to put to Kirsty. It was, in fact, the same
question, only with a more important object in the eye of it.

“_Then_ I suppose God made Mrs. Mitchell, as well as you and the rest
of us, Kirsty?” I said.

“Certainly, Ranald,” returned Kirsty.

“Well, I wish he hadn’t,” was my remark, in which I only imitated my
baby brother, who was always much cleverer than I.

“Oh! she’s not a bad sort,” said Kirsty; “though I must say, if I was
her, I would try to be a little more agreeable.”

To return to Kirsty: she was our constant resort. The farmhouse was a
furlong or so from the manse, but with the blood pouring from a cut
finger, the feet would of themselves devour that furlong rather than
apply to Mrs. Mitchell. Oh! she was dear, and good, and kind, our
Kirsty!

In person she was short and slender, with keen blue eyes and dark
hair; an uncommonly small foot, which she claimed for all Highland
folk; a light step, a sweet voice, and a most bounteous hand--but
there I come into the moral nature of her, for it is the mind that
makes the hand bountiful. For her face, I think that was rather queer,
but in truth I can hardly tell, so entirely was it the sign of good to
me and my brothers; in short, I loved her so much that I do not know
now, even as I did not care then, whether she was nice-looking or not.
She was quite as old as Mrs. Mitchell, but we never thought of _her_
being old. She was our refuge in all time of trouble and necessity. It
was she who gave us something to eat as often and as much as we
wanted.  She used to say it was no cheating of the minister to feed
the minister’s boys.

And then her stories! There was nothing like them in all that
countryside. It was rather a dreary country in outward aspect, having
many bleak moorland hills, that lay about like slow-stiffened waves,
of no great height but of much desolation; and as far as the
imagination was concerned, it would seem that the minds of former
generations had been as bleak as the country, they had left such small
store of legends of any sort. But Kirsty had come from a region where
the hills were hills indeed--hills with mighty skeletons of stone
inside them; hills that looked as if they had been heaped over huge
monsters which were ever trying to get up--a country where every
cliff, and rock, and well had its story--and Kirsty’s head was full of
such. It was delight indeed to sit by her fire and listen to them.
That would be after the men had had their supper, early of a winter
night, and had gone, two of them to the village, and the other to
attend to the horses. Then we and the herd, as we called the boy who
attended to the cattle, whose work was over for the night, would sit
by the fire, and Kirsty would tell us stories, and we were in our
heaven.



CHAPTER V

I Begin Life


I began life, and that after no pleasant fashion, as near as I can
guess, about the age of six years. One glorious morning in early
summer I found myself led by the ungentle hand of Mrs. Mitchell
towards a little school on the outside of the village, kept by an old
woman called Mrs. Shand. In an English village I think she would have
been called Dame Shand: we called her Luckie Shand. Half dragged along
the road by Mrs. Mitchell, from whose rough grasp I attempted in vain
to extricate my hand, I looked around at the shining fields and up at
the blue sky, where a lark was singing as if he had just found out
that he could sing, with something like the despair of a man going to
the gallows and bidding farewell to the world. We had to cross a
little stream, and when we reached the middle of the foot-bridge, I
tugged yet again at my imprisoned hand, with a half-formed intention
of throwing myself into the brook. But my efforts were still
unavailing.  Over a half-mile or so, rendered weary by unwillingness,
I was led to the cottage door--no such cottage as some of my readers
will picture, with roses and honeysuckle hiding its walls, but a
dreary little house with nothing green to cover the brown stones of
which it was built, and having an open ditch in front of it with a
stone slab over it for a bridge. Did I say there was nothing on the
walls? This morning there was the loveliest sunshine, and that I was
going to leave behind. It was very bitter, especially as I had
expected to go with my elder brother to spend the day at a
neighbouring farm.

Mrs. Mitchell opened the door, and led me in. It was an awful
experience.  Dame Shand stood at her table ironing. She was as tall as
Mrs. Mitchell, and that was enough to prejudice me against her at
once.  She wore a close-fitting widow’s cap, with a black ribbon round
it. Her hair was grey, and her face was as grey as her hair, and her
skin was gathered in wrinkles about her mouth, where they twitched and
twitched, as if she were constantly meditating something unpleasant.
She looked up inquiringly.

“I’ve brought you a new scholar,” said Mrs. Mitchell.

“Well. Very well,” said the dame, in a dubious tone. “I hope he’s a
good boy, for he must be good if he comes here.”

“Well, he’s just middling. His father spares the rod, Mrs. Shand, and
we know what comes of that.”

They went on with their talk, which, as far as I can recall it, was
complimentary to none but the two women themselves. Meantime I was
making what observations my terror would allow. About a dozen children
were seated on forms along the walls, looking over the tops of their
spelling-books at the newcomer. In the farther corner two were kicking
at each other as opportunity offered, looking very angry, but not
daring to cry. My next discovery was terribly disconcerting. Some
movement drew my eyes to the floor; there I saw a boy of my own age on
all-fours, fastened by a string to a leg of the table at which the
dame was ironing, while--horrible to relate!--a dog, not very big but
very ugly, and big enough to be frightened at, lay under the table
watching him. I gazed in utter dismay.

“Ah, you may look!” said the dame. “If you’re not a good boy, that is
how you shall be served. The dog shall have you to look after.”

I trembled, and was speechless. After some further confabulation,
Mrs. Mitchell took her leave, saying--

“I’ll come back for him at one o’clock, and if I don’t come, just keep
him till I do come.”

The dame accompanied her to the door, and then I discovered that she
was lame, and hobbled very much. A resolution arose full-formed in my
brain.

I sat down on the form near the door, and kept very quiet. Had it not
been for the intention I cherished, I am sure I should have cried.
When the dame returned, she resumed her box-iron, in which the heater
went rattling about, as, standing on one leg--the other was so much
shorter--she moved it to and fro over the garment on the table. Then
she called me to her by name in a would-be pompous manner. I obeyed,
trembling.

“Can you say your letters?” she asked.

Now, although I could not read, I could repeat the alphabet; how I had
learned it I do not know. I did repeat it.

“How many questions of your catechism can you say?” she asked next.

Not knowing with certainty what she meant, I was silent.

“No sulking!” said the dame; and opening a drawer in the table, she
took out a catechism. Turning back the cover she put it in my hand,
and told me to learn the first question. She had not even inquired
whether I could read. I took the catechism, and stood as before.

“Go to your seat,” she said.

I obeyed, and with the book before me pondered my plan.

Everything depended on whether I could open the door before she could
reach me. Once out of the house, I was sure of running faster than she
could follow. And soon I had my first experience of how those are
helped who will help themselves.

The ironing of course required a fire to make the irons hot, and as
the morning went on, the sunshine on the walls, conspiring with the
fire on the hearth, made the place too hot for the comfort of the old
dame. She went and set the door wide open. I was instantly on the
alert, watching for an opportunity. One soon occurred.

A class of some five or six was reading, if reading it could be
called, out of the Bible. At length it came to the turn of one who
blundered dreadfully. It was the same boy who had been tied under the
table, but he had been released for his lesson. The dame hobbled to
him, and found he had his book upside down; whereupon she turned in
wrath to the table, and took from the drawer a long leather strap,
with which she proceeded to chastise him. As his first cry reached my
ears I was halfway to the door. On the threshold I stumbled and fell.

“The new boy’s running away!” shrieked some little sycophant inside.

I heard with horror, but I was up and off in a moment. I had not,
however, got many yards from the cottage before I heard the voice of
the dame screaming after me to return. I took no heed--only sped the
faster. But what was my horror to find her command enforced by the
pursuing bark of her prime minister. This paralysed me. I turned, and
there was the fiendish-looking dog close on my heels. I could run no
longer. For one moment I felt as if I should sink to the earth for
sheer terror. The next moment a wholesome rage sent the blood to my
brain. From abject cowardice to wild attack--I cannot call it
courage--was the change of an instant. I rushed towards the little
wretch. I did not know how to fight him, but in desperation I threw
myself upon him, and dug my nails into him. They had fortunately found
their way to his eyes. He was the veriest coward of his species. He
yelped and howled, and struggling from my grasp ran with his tail
merged in his person back to his mistress, who was hobbling after me.
But with the renewed strength of triumph I turned again for home, and
ran as I had never run before. When or where the dame gave in, I do
not know; I never turned my head until I laid it on Kirsty’s bosom,
and there I burst out sobbing and crying. It was all the utterance I
had left.

As soon as Kirsty had succeeded in calming me, I told her the whole
story. She said very little, but I could see she was very angry. No
doubt she was pondering what could be done. She got me some milk--half
cream I do believe, it was so nice--and some oatcake, and went on with
her work.

While I ate I reflected that any moment Mrs. Mitchell might appear to
drag me back in disgrace to that horrible den. I knew that Kirsty’s
authority was not equal to hers, and that she would be compelled to
give me up. So I watched an opportunity to escape once more and hide
myself, so that Kirsty might be able to say she did not know where I
was.

When I had finished, and Kirsty had left the kitchen for a moment, I
sped noiselessly to the door, and looked out into the farmyard. There
was no one to be seen. Dark and brown and cool the door of the barn
stood open, as if inviting me to shelter and safety; for I knew that
in the darkest end of it lay a great heap of oat-straw. I sped across
the intervening sunshine into the darkness, and began burrowing in the
straw like a wild animal, drawing out handfuls and laying them
carefully aside, so that no disorder should betray my retreat. When I
had made a hole large enough to hold me, I got in, but kept drawing
out the straw behind me, and filling the hole in front. This I
continued until I had not only stopped up the entrance, but placed a
good thickness of straw between me and the outside. By the time I had
burrowed as far as I thought necessary, I was tired, and lay down at
full length in my hole, delighting in such a sense of safety as I had
never before experienced. I was soon fast asleep.



CHAPTER VI

No Father


[Illustration]

I woke, and creeping out of my lair, and peeping from the door of the
barn, which looked into the cornyard, found that the sun was going
down. I had already discovered that I was getting hungry. I went out
at the other door into the close or farmyard, and ran across to the
house. No one was there. Something moved me to climb on the form and
look out of a little window, from which I could see the manse and the
road from it. To my dismay, there was Mrs. Mitchell coming towards the
farm. I possessed my wits sufficiently to run first to Kirsty’s press
and secure a good supply of oatcake, with which I then sped like a
hunted hare to her form. I had soon drawn the stopper of straw into
the mouth of the hole, where, hearing no one approach, I began to eat
my oatcake, and fell asleep again before I had finished.

And as I slept I dreamed my dream. The sun was looking very grave, and
the moon reflected his concern. They were not satisfied with me. At
length the sun shook his head; that is, his whole self oscillated on
an axis, and the moon thereupon shook herself in response. Then they
nodded to each other as much as to say, “That is entirely my own
opinion.” At last they began to talk; not as men converse, but both at
once, yet each listening while each spoke. I heard no word, but their
lips moved most busily; their eyebrows went up and down; their eyelids
winked and winked, and their cheeks puckered and relaxed incessantly.
There was an absolute storm of expression upon their faces; their very
noses twisted and curled. It seemed as if, in the agony of their talk,
their countenances would go to pieces. For the stars, they darted
about hither and thither, gathered into groups, dispersed, and formed
new groups, and having no faces yet, but being a sort of celestial
tadpoles, indicated by their motions alone that they took an active
interest in the questions agitating their parents. Some of them kept
darting up and down the ladder of rays, like phosphorescent sparks in
the sea foam.

I could bear it no longer, and awoke. I was in darkness, but not in my
own bed. When I proceeded to turn, I found myself hemmed in on all
sides. I could not stretch my arms, and there was hardly room for my
body between my feet and my head. I was dreadfully frightened at
first, and felt as if I were being slowly stifled. As my brain awoke,
I recalled the horrible school, the horrible schoolmistress, and the
most horrible dog, over whose defeat, however, I rejoiced with the
pride of a dragon-slayer. Next I thought it would be well to look
abroad and reconnoitre once more. I drew away the straw from the
entrance to my lair; but what was my dismay to find that even when my
hand went out into space no light came through the opening. What could
it mean? Surely I had not grown blind while I lay asleep. Hurriedly I
shot out the remainder of the stopper of straw, and crept from the
hole. In the great barn there was but the dullest glimmer of light; I
had almost said the clumsiest reduction of darkness. I tumbled at one
of the doors rather than ran to it. I found it fast, but this one I
knew was fastened on the inside by a wooden bolt or bar, which I could
draw back. The open door revealed the dark night. Before me was the
cornyard, as we called it, full of ricks. Huge and very positive
although dim, they rose betwixt me and the sky. Between their tops I
saw only stars and darkness. I turned and looked back into the barn.
It appeared a horrible cave filled with darkness. I remembered there
were rats in it. I dared not enter it again, even to go out at the
opposite door: I forgot how soundly and peacefully I had slept in it.
I stepped out into the night with the grass of the corn-yard under my
feet, the awful vault of heaven over my head, and those shadowy ricks
around me. It was a relief to lay my hand on one of them, and feel
that it was solid. I half groped my way through them, and got out into
the open field, by creeping through between the stems of what had once
been a hawthorn hedge, but had in the course of a hundred years grown
into the grimmest, largest, most grotesque trees I have ever seen of
the kind. I had always been a little afraid of them, even in the
daytime, but they did me no hurt, and I stood in the vast hall of the
silent night--alone: there lay the awfulness of it. I had never before
known what the night was. The real sting of its fear lay in this--that
there was nobody else in it. Everybody besides me was asleep all over
the world, and had abandoned me to my fate, whatever might come out of
the darkness to seize me. When I got round the edge of the stone wall,
which on another side bounded the corn-yard, there was the
moon--crescent, as I saw her in my dream, but low down towards the
horizon, and lying almost upon her rounded back. She looked very
disconsolate and dim. Even she would take no heed of me, abandoned
child! The stars were high up, away in the heavens. They did not look
like the children of the sun and moon at all, and _they_ took no heed
of me. Yet there was a grandeur in my desolation that would have
elevated my heart but for the fear. If I had had one living creature
nigh me--if only the stupid calf, whose dull sleepy low startled me so
dreadfully as I stood staring about me! It was not dark out here in
the open field, for at this season of the year it is not dark there
all night long, when the sky is unclouded. Away in the north was the
Great Bear. I knew that constellation, for by it one of the men had
taught me to find the pole-star. Nearly under it was the light of the
sun, creeping round by the north towards the spot in the east where he
would rise again. But I learned only afterwards to understand this. I
gazed at that pale faded light, and all at once I remembered that God
was near me. But I did not know what God is then as I know now, and
when I thought about him then, which was neither much nor often, my
idea of him was not like him; it was merely a confused mixture of
other people’s fancies about him and my own. I had not learned how
beautiful God is; I had only learned that he is strong. I had been
told that he was angry with those that did wrong; I had not understood
that he loved them all the time, although he was displeased with them,
and must punish them to make them good. When I thought of him now in
the silent starry night, a yet greater terror seized me, and I ran
stumbling over the uneven field.

Does my reader wonder whither I fled? Whither should I fly but home?
True, Mrs. Mitchell was there, but there was another there as well.
Even Kirsty would not do in this terror. Home was the only refuge, for
my father was there. I sped for the manse.

But as I approached it a new apprehension laid hold of my trembling
heart. I was not sure, but I thought the door was always locked at
night. I drew nearer. The place of possible refuge rose before me. I
stood on the grass-plot in front of it. There was no light in its
eyes. Its mouth was closed. It was silent as one of the ricks. Above
it shone the speechless stars. Nothing was alive. Nothing would
speak. I went up the few rough-hewn granite steps that led to the
door. I laid my hand on the handle, and gently turned it. Joy of joys!
the door opened. I entered the hall. Ah! it was more silent than the
night. No footsteps echoed; no voices were there. I closed the door
behind me, and, almost sick with the misery of a being where no other
being was to comfort it, I groped my way to my father’s room. When I
once had my hand on his door, the warm tide of courage began again to
flow from my heart. I opened this door too very quietly, for was not
the dragon asleep down below?

“Papa! papa!” I cried, in an eager whisper. “Are you awake, papa?”

No voice came in reply, and the place was yet more silent than the
night or the hall. He must be asleep. I was afraid to call louder. I
crept nearer to the bed. I stretched out my hands to feel for him. He
must be at the farther side. I climbed up on the bed. I felt all
across it. Utter desertion seized my soul--my father was not there!
Was it a horrible dream? Should I ever awake? My heart sank totally
within me. I could bear no more. I fell down on the bed weeping
bitterly, and wept myself asleep.

Years after, when I was a young man, I read Jean Paul’s terrible dream
that there was no God, and the desolation of this night was my key to
that dream.

Once more I awoke to a sense of misery, and stretched out my arms,
crying, “Papa! papa!” The same moment I found my father’s arms around
me; he folded me close to him, and said--

“Hush, Ranald, my boy! Here I am! You are quite safe.”

I nestled as close to him as I could go, and wept for blessedness.

“Oh, papa!” I sobbed, “I thought I had lost you.”

“And I thought I had lost you, my boy. Tell me all about it.”

Between my narrative and my replies to his questionings he had soon
gathered the whole story, and I in my turn learned the dismay of the
household when I did not appear. Kirsty told what she knew. They
searched everywhere, but could not find me; and great as my misery had
been, my father’s had been greater than mine. While I stood forsaken
and desolate in the field, they had been searching along the banks of
the river. But the herd had had an idea, and although they had already
searched the barn and every place they could think of, he left them
and ran back for a further search about the farm. Guided by the
scattered straw, he soon came upon my deserted lair, and sped back to
the riverside with the news, when my father returned, and after
failing to find me in my own bed, to his infinite relief found me fast
asleep on his; so fast, that he undressed me and laid me in the bed
without my once opening my eyes--the more strange, as I had already
slept so long. But sorrow is very sleepy.

Having thus felt the awfulness and majesty of the heavens at night, it
was a very long time before I again dreamed my childish dream.



CHAPTER VII

Mrs. Mitchell is Defeated


After this talk with my father I fell into a sleep of perfect
contentment, and never thought of what might be on the morrow till the
morrow came. Then I grew aware of the danger I was in of being carried
off once more to school. Indeed, except my father interfered, the
thing was almost inevitable. I thought he would protect me, but I had
no assurance. He was gone again, for, as I have mentioned already, he
was given to going out early in the mornings. It was not early now,
however; I had slept much longer than usual. I got up at once,
intending to find him; but, to my horror, before I was half dressed,
my enemy, Mrs. Mitchell, came into the room, looking triumphant and
revengeful.

“I’m glad to see you’re getting up,” she said; “it’s nearly
school-time.”

The tone, and the emphasis she laid on the word _school_, would have
sufficed to reveal the state of her mind, even if her eyes had not
been fierce with suppressed indignation.

“I haven’t had my porridge,” I said.

“Your porridge is waiting you--as cold as a stone,” she answered. “If
boys will lie in bed so late, what can they expect?”

“Nothing from you,” I muttered, with more hardihood than I had yet
shown her.

“What’s that you’re saying?” she asked angrily.

I was silent.

“Make haste,” she went on, “and don’t keep me waiting all day.”

“You needn’t wait, Mrs. Mitchell. I am dressing as fast as I can. Is
papa in his study yet?”

“No. And you needn’t think to see him. He’s angry enough with you,
I’ll warrant”

She little knew what had passed between my father and me already. She
could not imagine what a talk we had had.

“You needn’t think to run away as you did yesterday. I know all about
it Mrs. Shand told me all about it I shouldn’t wonder if your papa’s
gone to see her now, and tell her how sorry he is you were so
naughty.”

“I’m not going, to school.”

“We’ll see about that”

“I tell you I won’t go.”

“And I tell you we’ll see about it”

“I won’t go till I’ve seen papa. If he says I’m to go, I will of
course; but I won’t go for you.”

“You _will_, and you _won’t_!” she repeated, standing staring at me,
as I leisurely, but with hands trembling partly with fear, partly with
rage, was fastening my nether garments to my waistcoat. “That’s all
very fine, but I know something a good deal finer. Now wash your
face.”

“I won’t, so long as you stand there,” I said, and sat down on the
floor. She advanced towards me.

“If you touch me, I’ll scream,” I cried.

She stopped, thought for a moment, and bounced out of the room. But I
heard her turn the key of the door.

I proceeded with my dressing as fast as I could then; and the moment I
was ready, opened the window, which was only a few feet from the
ground, scrambled out, and dropped. I hurt myself a little, but not
much, and fled for the harbour of Kirsty’s arms. But as I turned the
corner of the house I ran right into Mrs. Mitchell’s, who received me
with no soft embrace. In fact I was rather severely scratched with
a. pin in the bosom of her dress.

“There! that serves you right,” she cried. “That’s a judgment on you
for trying to run away again. After all the trouble you gave us
yesterday too! You are a bad boy.”

“Why am I a bad boy?” I retorted.

“It’s bad not to do what you are told.”

“I will do what my papa tells me.”

“Your papa! There are more people than your papa in the world.”

“I’m to be a bad boy if I don’t do what anybody like you chooses to
tell me, am I?”

“None of your impudence!”

This was accompanied by a box on the ear. She was now dragging me into
the kitchen. There she set my porridge before me, which I declined to
eat.

“Well, if you won’t eat good food, you shall go to school without it.”

“I tell you I won’t go to school.”

She caught me up in her arms. She was very strong, and I could not
prevent her carrying me out of the house. If I had been the bad boy
she said I was, I could by biting and scratching have soon compelled
her to set me down; but I felt that I must not do that, for then I
should be ashamed before my father. I therefore yielded for the time,
and fell to planning. Nor was I long in coming to a resolution. I drew
the pin that had scratched me from her dress. I believed she would not
carry me very far; but if she did not set me down soon, I resolved to
make her glad to do so. Further I resolved, that when we came to the
foot-bridge, which had but one rail to it, I would run the pin into
her and make her let me go, when I would instantly throw myself into
the river, for I would run the risk of being drowned rather than go to
that school. Were all my griefs of yesterday, overcome and on the
point of being forgotten, to be frustrated in this fashion? My whole
blood was boiling. I was convinced my father did not want me to go. He
could not have been so kind to me during the night, and then send me
to such a place in the morning. But happily for the general peace,
things did not arrive at such a desperate pass. Before we were out of
the gate, my heart leaped with joy, for I heard my father calling,
“Mrs. Mitchell! Mrs. Mitchell!” I looked round, and seeing him coming
after us with his long slow strides, I fell to struggling so violently
in the strength of hope that she was glad to set me down. I broke from
her, ran to my father, and burst out crying.

“Papa! papa!” I sobbed, “don’t send me to that horrid school. I can
learn to read without that old woman to teach me.”

“Really, Mrs. Mitchell,” said my father, taking me by the hand and
leading me towards her, where she stood visibly flaming with rage and
annoyance, “really, Mrs. Mitchell, you are taking too much upon you! I
never said the child was to go to that woman’s school. In fact I don’t
approve of what I hear of her, and I have thought of consulting some
of my brethren in the presbytery on the matter before taking steps
myself. I won’t have the young people in my parish oppressed in such a
fashion. Terrified with dogs too! It is shameful.”

“She’s a very decent woman, Mistress Shand,” said the housekeeper.

[Illustration]

“I don’t dispute her decency, Mrs. Mitchell; but I doubt very much
whether she is fit to have the charge of children; and as she is a
friend of yours, you will be doing her a kindness to give her a hint
to that effect. It _may_ save the necessity for my taking further and
more unpleasant steps.”

“Indeed, sir, by your leave, it would be hard lines to take the bread
out of the mouth of a lone widow woman, and bring her upon the parish
with a bad name to boot. She’s supported herself for years with her
school, and been a trouble to nobody.”

“Except the lambs of the flock, Mrs. Mitchell.--I like you for
standing up for your friend; but is a woman, because she is lone and a
widow, to make a Moloch of herself, and have the children sacrificed
to her in that way? It’s enough to make idiots of some of them. She
had better see to it. You tell her that--from me, if you like. And
don’t you meddle with school affairs. I’ll take my young men,” he
added with a smile, “to school when I see fit.”

“I’m sure, sir,” said Mrs. Mitchell, putting her blue striped apron to
her eyes, “I asked your opinion before I took him.”

“I believe I did say something about its being time he were able to
read, but I recollect nothing more.--You must have misunderstood me,”
 he added, willing to ease her descent to the valley of her
humiliation.

She walked away without another word, sniffing the air as she went,
and carrying her hands folded under her apron. From that hour I
believe she hated me.

My father looked after her with a smile, and then looked down on me,
saying--

“She’s short in the temper, poor woman! and we mustn’t provoke her.”

I was too well satisfied to urge my victory by further complaint. I
could afford to let well alone, for I had been delivered as from the
fiery furnace, and the earth and the sky were laughing around me. Oh!
what a sunshine filled the world! How glad the larks, which are the
praisers amongst the birds, were that blessed morning! The demon of
oppression had hidden her head ashamed, and fled to her den!



CHAPTER VIII

A New Schoolmistress


“But, Ranald,” my father continued, “what are we to do about the
reading? I fear I have let you go too long. I didn’t want to make
learning a burden to you, and I don’t approve of children learning to
read too soon; but really, at your age, you know, it is time you were
beginning. I have time to teach you some things, but I can’t teach you
everything. I have got to read a great deal and think a great deal,
and go about my parish a good deal. And your brother Tom has heavy
lessons to learn at school, and I have to help him. So what’s to be
done, Ranald, my boy? You can’t go to the parish school before you’ve
learned your letters.”

“There’s Kirsty, papa,” I suggested.

“Yes; there’s Kirsty,” he returned with a sly smile. “Kirsty can do
everything, can’t she?”

“She can speak Gaelic,” I said with a tone of triumph, bringing her
rarest accomplishment to the forefront.

“I wish you could speak Gaelic,” said my father, thinking of his wife,
I believe, whose mother tongue it was. “But that is not what you want
most to learn. Do you think Kirsty could teach you to read English?”

“Yes, I do.”

My father again meditated.

“Let us go and ask her,” he said at length, taking my hand.

I capered with delight, nor ceased my capering till we stood on
Kirsty’s earthen floor. I think I see her now, dusting one of her deal
chairs, as white as soap and sand could make it, for the minister to
sit on. She never called him _the master_, but always _the minister_.
She was a great favourite with my father, and he always behaved as a
visitor in her house.

“Well, Kirsty,” he said, after the first salutations were over, “have
you any objection to turn schoolmistress?”

“I should make a poor hand at that,” she answered, with a smile to me
which showed she guessed what my father wanted. “But if it were to
teach Master Ranald there, I should like dearly to try what I could
do.”

She never omitted the _Master_ to our names; Mrs. Mitchell by no
chance prefixed it. The natural manners of the Celt and Saxon are
almost diametrically opposed in Scotland. And had Kirsty’s speech been
in the coarse dialect of Mrs. Mitchell, I am confident my father would
not have allowed her to teach me. But Kirsty did not speak a word of
Scotch, and although her English was a little broken and odd, being
formed somewhat after Gaelic idioms, her tone was pure and her phrases
were refined. The matter was very speedily settled between them.

“And if you want to beat him, Kirsty, you can beat him in Gaelic, and
then he won’t feel it,” said my father, trying after a joke, which was
no common occurrence with him, whereupon Kirsty and I laughed in great
contentment.

The fact was, Kirsty had come to the manse with my mother, and my
father was attached to her for the sake of his wife as well as for her
own, and Kirsty would have died for the minister or any one of his
boys. All the devotion a Highland woman has for the chief of her clan,
Kirsty had for my father, not to mention the reverence due to the
minister.

After a little chat about the cows and the calves, my father rose,
saying--

“Then I’ll just make him over to you, Kirsty. Do you think you can
manage without letting it interfere with your work, though?”

“Oh yes, sir--well that! I shall soon have him reading to me while I’m
busy about. If he doesn’t know the word, he can spell it, and then I
shall know it--at least if it’s not longer than Hawkie’s tail.”

Hawkie was a fine milker, with a bad temper, and a comically short
tail. It had got chopped off by some accident when she was a calf.

“There’s something else short about Hawkie--isn’t there, Kirsty?” said
my father.

“And Mrs. Mitchell,” I suggested, thinking to help Kirsty to my
father’s meaning.

“Come, come, young gentleman! We don’t want your remarks,” said my
father pleasantly.

“Why, papa, you told me so yourself, just before we came up.”

“Yes, I did; but I did not mean you to repeat it. What if Kirsty were
to go and tell Mrs. Mitchell?”

Kirsty made no attempt at protestation. She knew well enough that my
father knew there was no danger. She only laughed, and I, seeing
Kirsty satisfied, was satisfied also, and joined in the laugh.

The result was that before many weeks were over, Allister and wee
Davie were Kirsty’s pupils also, Allister learning to read, and wee
Davie to sit still, which was the hardest task within his capacity.
They were free to come or keep away, but not to go: if they did come,
Kirsty insisted on their staying out the lesson. It soon became a
regular thing. Every morning in summer we might be seen perched on a
form, under one of the tiny windows, in that delicious brown light
which you seldom find but in an old clay-floored cottage. In a
fir-wood I think you have it; and I have seen it in an old castle; but
best of all in the house of mourning in an Arab cemetery. In the
winter, we seated ourselves round the fire--as near it as Kirsty’s
cooking operations, which were simple enough, admitted. It was
delightful to us boys, and would have been amusing to anyone, to see
how Kirsty behaved when Mrs. Mitchell found occasion to pay her a
visit during lesson hours. She knew her step and darted to the door.
Not once did she permit her to enter. She was like a hen with her
chickens.

“No, you’ll not come in just now, Mrs. Mitchell,” she would say, as
the housekeeper attempted to pass. “You know we’re busy.”

“I want to hear how they’re getting on.”

“You can try them at home,” Kirsty would answer.

We always laughed at the idea of our reading to her. Once I believe
she heard the laugh, for she instantly walked away, and I do not
remember that she ever came again.



CHAPTER IX

We Learn Other Things


We were more than ever at the farm now. During the summer, from the
time we got up till the time we went to bed, we seldom approached the
manse. I have heard it hinted that my father neglected us. But that
can hardly be, seeing that then his word was law to us, and now I
regard his memory as the symbol of the love unspeakable. My elder
brother Tom always had his meals with him, and sat at his lessons in
the study. But my father did not mind the younger ones running wild,
so long as there was a Kirsty for them to run to; and indeed the men
also were not only friendly to us, but careful over us. No doubt we
were rather savage, very different in our appearance from town-bred
children, who are washed and dressed every time they go out for a
walk: that we should have considered not merely a hardship, but an
indignity. To be free was all our notion of a perfect existence. But
my father’s rebuke was awful indeed, if he found even the youngest
guilty of untruth, or cruelty, or injustice. At all kinds of
escapades, not involving disobedience, he smiled, except indeed there
were too much danger, when he would warn and limit.

A town boy may wonder what we could find to amuse us all day long; but
the fact is almost everything was an amusement, seeing that when we
could not take a natural share in what was going on, we generally
managed to invent some collateral employment fictitiously related to
it. But he must not think of our farm as at all like some great farm
he may happen to know in England; for there was nothing done by
machinery on the place. There may be great pleasure in watching
machine-operations, but surely none to equal the pleasure we had. If
there had been a steam engine to plough my father’s fields, how could
we have ridden home on its back in the evening? To ride the
horses home from the plough was a triumph. Had there been a
thrashing-machine, could its pleasures have been comparable to that of
lying in the straw and watching the grain dance from the sheaves under
the skilful flails of the two strong men who belaboured them? There was
a winnowing-machine, but quite a tame one, for its wheel I could drive
myself--the handle now high as my head, now low as my knee--and watch at
the same time the storm of chaff driven like drifting snowflakes from
its wide mouth. Meantime the oat-grain was flowing in a silent slow
stream from the shelving hole in the other side, and the wind, rushing
through the opposite doors, aided the winnower by catching at the
expelled chaff, and carrying it yet farther apart. I think I see old
Eppie now, filling her sack with what the wind blew her; not with the
grain: Eppie did not covet that; she only wanted her bed filled with
fresh springy chaff, on which she would sleep as sound as her rheumatism
would let her, and as warm and dry and comfortable as any duchess in the
land that happened to have the rheumatism too. For comfort is inside
more than outside; and eider down, delicious as it is, has less to do
with it than some people fancy. How I wish all the poor people in the
great cities could have good chaff beds to lie upon! Let me see: what
more machines are there now? More than I can tell. I saw one going in
the fields the other day, at the use of which I could only guess.
Strange, wild-looking, mad-like machines, as the Scotch would call them,
are growling and snapping, and clinking and clattering over our fields,
so that it seems to an old boy as if all the sweet poetic twilight of
things were vanishing from the country; but he reminds himself that God
is not going to sleep, for, as one of the greatest poets that ever lived
says, _he slumbereth not nor sleepeth_; and the children of the earth
are his, and he will see that their imaginations and feelings have food
enough and to spare. It is his business this--not ours. So the work must
be done as well as it can. Then, indeed, there will be no fear of the
poetry.

I have just alluded to the pleasure of riding the horses, that is, the
work-horses: upon them Allister and I began to ride, as far as I can
remember, this same summer--not from the plough, for the ploughing was
in the end of the year and the spring. First of all we were allowed to
take them at watering-time, watched by one of the men, from the stable
to the long trough that stood under the pump. There, going hurriedly
and stopping suddenly, they would drop head and neck and shoulders
like a certain toy-bird, causing the young riders a vague fear of
falling over the height no longer defended by the uplifted crest; and
then drink and drink till the riders’ legs felt the horses’ bodies
swelling under them; then up and away with quick refreshed stride or
trot towards the paradise of their stalls. But for us came first the
somewhat fearful pass of the stable door, for they never stopped, like
better educated horses, to let their riders dismount, but walked right
in, and there was just room, by stooping low, to clear the top of the
door. As we improved in equitation, we would go afield, to ride them
home from the pasture, where they were fastened by chains to short
stakes of iron driven into the earth. There was more of adventure
here, for not only was the ride longer, but the horses were more
frisky, and would sometimes set off at the gallop. Then the chief
danger was again the door, lest they should dash in, and knock knees
against posts and heads against lintels, for we had only halters to
hold them with. But after I had once been thrown from back to neck,
and from neck to ground in a clumsy but wild gallop extemporized by
Dobbin, I was raised to the dignity of a bridle, which I always
carried with me when we went to fetch them. It was my father’s express
desire that until we could sit well on the bare back we should not be
allowed a saddle. It was a whole year before I was permitted to mount
his little black riding mare, called Missy. She was old, it is
true--nobody quite knew how old she was--but if she felt a light
weight on her back, either the spirit of youth was contagious, or she
fancied herself as young as when she thought nothing of twelve stone,
and would dart off like the wind. In after years I got so found of
her, that I would stand by her side flacking the flies from her as she
grazed; and when I tired of that, would clamber upon her back, and lie
there reading my book, while she plucked on and ground and mashed away
at the grass as if nobody were near her.

Then there was the choice, if nothing else were found more attractive,
of going to the field where the cattle were grazing. Oh! the rich hot
summer afternoons among the grass and the clover, the little
lamb-daisies, and the big horse-daisies, with the cattle feeding
solemnly, but one and another straying now to the corn, now to the
turnips, and recalled by stern shouts, or, if that were unavailing, by
vigorous pursuit and even blows! If I had been able to think of a
mother at home, I should have been perfectly happy. Not that I missed
her then; I had lost her too young for that. I mean that the memory of
the time wants but that to render it perfect in bliss. Even in the
cold days of spring, when, after being shut up all the winter, the
cattle were allowed to revel again in the springing grass and the
venturesome daisies, there was pleasure enough in the company and
devices of the cowherd, a freckle-faced, white-haired, weak-eyed boy
of ten, named--I forget his real name: we always called him Turkey,
because his nose was the colour of a turkey’s egg. Who but Turkey knew
mushrooms from toadstools? Who but Turkey could detect earth-nuts--and
that with the certainty of a truffle-hunting dog? Who but Turkey knew
the note and the form and the nest and the eggs of every bird in the
country? Who but Turkey, with his little whip and its lash of brass
wire, would encounter the angriest bull in Christendom, provided he
carried, like the bulls of Scotland, his most sensitive part, the
nose, foremost? In our eyes Turkey was a hero. Who but Turkey could
discover the nests of hens whose maternal anxiety had eluded the
_finesse_ of Kirsty? and who so well as he could roast the egg with
which she always rewarded such a discovery? Words are feeble before
the delight we experienced on such an occasion, when Turkey,
proceeding to light a fire against one of the earthen walls which
divided the fields, would send us abroad to gather sticks and straws
and whatever outcast combustibles we could find, of which there was a
great scarcity, there being no woods or hedges within reach. Who like
Turkey could rob a wild bee’s nest? And who could be more just than he
in distributing the luscious prize? In fine, his accomplishments were
innumerable. Short of flying, we believed him capable of everything
imaginable.

What rendered him yet dearer to us, was that there was enmity between
him and Mrs. Mitchell. It came about in this way. Although a good
milker, and therefore of necessity a good feeder, Hawkie was yet upon
temptation subject to the inroads of an unnatural appetite. When she
found a piece of an old shoe in the field, she would, if not compelled
to drop the delicious mouthful, go on, the whole morning or afternoon,
in the impossibility of a final deglutition, chewing and chewing at
the savoury morsel. Should this have happened, it was in vain for
Turkey to hope escape from the discovery of his inattention, for the
milk-pail would that same evening or next morning reveal the fact to
Kirsty’s watchful eyes. But fortunately for us, in so far as it was
well to have an ally against our only enemy, Hawkie’s morbid craving
was not confined to old shoes. One day when the cattle were feeding
close by the manse, she found on the holly-hedge which surrounded it,
Mrs. Mitchell’s best cap, laid out to bleach in the sun. It was a
tempting morsel--more susceptible of mastication than shoe-leather.
Mrs. Mitchell, who had gone for another freight of the linen with
which she was sprinkling the hedge, arrived only in time to see the
end of one of its long strings gradually disappearing into Hawkie’s
mouth on its way after the rest of the cap, which had gone the length
of the string farther. With a wild cry of despair she flew at Hawkie,
so intent on the stolen delicacy as to be more open to a surprise than
usual, and laying hold of the string, drew from her throat the
deplorable mass of pulp to which she had reduced the valued gaud. The
same moment Turkey, who had come running at her cry, received full in
his face the slimy and sloppy extract. Nor was this all, for Mrs.
Mitchell flew at him in her fury, and with an outburst of abuse boxed
his ears soundly, before he could recover his senses sufficiently to
run for it. The degradation of this treatment had converted Turkey
into an enemy before ever he knew that we also had good grounds for
disliking her. His opinion concerning her was freely expressed to us
if to no one else, generally in the same terms. He said she was as bad
as she was ugly, and always spoke of her as _the old witch_.

But what brought Turkey and us together more than anything else, was
that he was as fond of Kirsty’s stories as we were; and in the winter
especially we would sit together in the evening, as I have already
said, round her fire and the great pot upon it full of the most
delicious potatoes, while Kirsty knitted away vigorously at her blue
broad-ribbed stockings, and kept a sort of time to her story with the
sound of her needles. When the story flagged, the needles went slower;
in the more animated passages they would become invisible for
swiftness, save for a certain shimmering flash that hovered about her
fingers like a dim electric play; but as the story approached some
crisis, their motion would at one time become perfectly frantic, at
another cease altogether, as finding the subject beyond their power of
accompanying expression. When they ceased, we knew that something
awful indeed was at hand.

[Illustration]

In my next chapter I will give a specimen of her stories, choosing one
which bears a little upon an after adventure.



CHAPTER X

Sir Worm Wymble


It was a snowy evening in the depth of winter. Kirsty had promised to
tell us the tale of the armed knight who lay in stone upon the tomb in
the church; but the snow was so deep, that Mrs. Mitchell, always glad
when nature put it in her power to exercise her authority in a way
disagreeable to us, had refused to let the little ones go out all day.
Therefore Turkey and I, when the darkness began to grow thick enough,
went prowling and watching about the manse until we found an
opportunity when she was out of the way. The moment this occurred we
darted into the nursery, which was on the ground floor, and catching
up my two brothers, I wee Davie, he Allister, we hoisted them on our
backs and rushed from the house. It was snowing. It came down in huge
flakes, but although it was only half-past four o’clock, they did not
show any whiteness, for there was no light to shine upon them. You
might have thought there had been mud in the cloud they came from,
which had turned them all a dark grey. How the little ones did enjoy
it, spurring their horses with suppressed laughter, and urging us on
lest the old witch should hear and overtake us! But it was hard work
for one of the horses, and that was myself. Turkey scudded away with
his load, and made nothing of it; but wee Davie pulled so hard with
his little arms round my neck, especially when he was bobbing up and
down to urge me on, half in delight, half in terror, that he nearly
choked me; while if I went one foot off the scarcely beaten path, I
sunk deep in the fresh snow.

“Doe on, doe on, Yanal!” cried Davie; and Yanal did his very best, but
was only halfway to the farm, when Turkey came bounding back to take
Davie from him. In a few moments we had shaken the snow off our shoes
and off Davie’s back, and stood around Kirsty’s “booful baze”, as
Davie called the fire. Kirsty seated herself on one side with Davie on
her lap, and we three got our chairs as near her as we could, with
Turkey, as the valiant man of the party, farthest from the centre of
safety, namely Kirsty, who was at the same time to be the source of
all the delightful horror. I may as well say that I do not believe
Kirsty’s tale had the remotest historical connection with Sir Worm
Wymble, if that was anything like the name of the dead knight. It was
an old Highland legend, which she adorned with the flowers of her own
Celtic fancy, and swathed around the form so familiar to us all.

“There is a pot in the Highlands,” began Kirsty, “not far from our
house, at the bottom of a little glen. It is not very big, but
fearfully deep; so deep that they do say there is no bottom to it.”

“An iron pot, Kirsty?” asked Allister.

“No, goosey,” answered Kirsty. “A pot means a great hole full of
water--black, black, and deep, deep.”

“Oh!” remarked Allister, and was silent.

“Well, in this pot there lived a kelpie.”

“What’s a kelpie, Kirsty?” again interposed Allister, who in general
asked all the necessary questions and at least as many unnecessary.

“A kelpie is an awful creature that eats people.”

“But what is it like, Kirsty?”

“It’s something like a horse, with a head like a cow.”

“How big is it? As big as Hawkie?”

“Bigger than Hawkie; bigger than the biggest ox you ever saw.”

“Has it a great mouth?”

“Yes, a terrible mouth.”

“With teeth?”

“Not many, but dreadfully big ones.”

“Oh!”

“Well, there was a shepherd many years ago, who lived not far from the
pot. He was a knowing man, and understood all about kelpies and
brownies and fairies. And he put a branch of the rowan-tree
(_mountain-ash_), with the red berries in it, over the door of his
cottage, so that the kelpie could never come in.

“Now, the shepherd had a very beautiful daughter--so beautiful that
the kelpie wanted very much to eat her. I suppose he had lifted up his
head out of the pot some day and seen her go past, but he could not
come out of the pot except after the sun was down.”

“Why?” asked Allister.

“I don’t know. It was the nature of the beast. His eyes couldn’t bear
the light, I suppose; but he could see in the dark quite well.--One
night the girl woke suddenly, and saw his great head looking in at her
window.”

“But how could she see him when it was dark?” said Allister.

“His eyes were flashing so that they lighted up all his head,”
 answered Kirsty.

“But he couldn’t get in!”

“No; he couldn’t get in. He was only looking in, and thinking how he
_should_ like to eat her. So in the morning she told her father. And
her father was very frightened, and told her she must never be out one
moment after the sun was down. And for a long time the girl was very
careful. And she had need to be; for the creature never made any
noise, but came up as quiet as a shadow. One afternoon, however, she
had gone to meet her lover a little way down the glen; and they
stopped talking so long, about one thing and another, that the sun was
almost set before she bethought herself. She said good-night at once,
and ran for home. Now she could not reach home without passing the
pot, and just as she passed the pot, she saw the last sparkle of the
sun as he went down.”

“I should think she ran!” remarked our mouthpiece, Allister.

“She did run,” said Kirsty, “and had just got past the awful black
pot, which was terrible enough day or night without such a beast in
it, when--”

“But there _was_ the beast in it,” said Allister.

“When,” Kirsty went on without heeding him, “she heard a great _whish_
of water behind her. That was the water tumbling off the beast’s back
as he came up from the bottom. If she ran before, she flew now. And
the worst of it was that she couldn’t hear him behind her, so as to
tell whereabouts he was. He might be just opening his mouth to take
her every moment. At last she reached the door, which her father, who
had gone out to look for her, had set wide open that she might run in
at once; but all the breath was out of her body, and she fell down
flat just as she got inside.”

[Illustration]

Here Allister jumped from his seat, clapping his hands and crying--

“Then the kelpie didn’t eat her!--Kirsty! Kirsty!”

“No. But as she fell, one foot was left outside the threshold, so that
the rowan branch could not take care of it. And the beast laid hold of
the foot with his great mouth, to drag her out of the cottage and eat
her at his leisure.”

Here Allister’s face was a picture to behold! His hair was almost
standing on end, his mouth was open, and his face as white as my
paper.

“Make haste, Kirsty,” said Turkey, “or Allister will go in a fit.”

“But her shoe came off in his mouth, and she drew in her foot and was
safe.”

Allister’s hair subsided. He drew a deep breath, and sat down
again. But Turkey must have been a very wise or a very unimaginative
Turkey, for here he broke in with--

“I don’t believe a word of it, Kirsty.”

“What!” said Kirsty--“don’t believe it!”

“No. She lost her shoe in the mud. It was some wild duck she heard in
the pot, and there was no beast after her. She never saw it, you
know.”

“She saw it look in at her window.”

“Yes, yes. That was in the middle of the night. I’ve seen as much
myself when I waked up in the middle of the night. I took a rat for a
tiger once.”

Kirsty was looking angry, and her needles were going even faster than
when she approached the climax of the shoe.

“Hold your tongue, Turkey,” I said, “and let us hear the rest of the
story.”

But Kirsty kept her eyes on her knitting, and did not resume.

“Is that all, Kirsty?” said Allister.

Still Kirsty returned no answer. She needed all her force to overcome
the anger she was busy stifling. For it would never do for one in her
position to lose her temper because of the unbelieving criticism of a
herd-boy. It was a curious instance of the electricity flashed out in
the confluence of unlike things--the Celtic faith and the Saxon
works. For anger is just the electric flash of the mind, and requires
to have its conductor of common sense ready at hand. After a few
moments she began again as if she had never stopped and no remarks had
been made, only her voice trembled a little at first.

“Her father came home soon after, in great distress, and there he
found her lying just within the door. He saw at once how it was, and
his anger was kindled against her lover more than the beast. Not that
he had any objection to her going to meet him; for although he was a
gentleman and his daughter only a shepherd’s daughter, they were both
of the blood of the MacLeods.”

This was Kirsty’s own clan. And indeed I have since discovered that
the original legend on which her story was founded belongs to the
island of Rasay, from which she came.

“But why was he angry with the gentleman?” asked Allister.

“Because he liked her company better than he loved herself,” said
Kirsty. “At least that was what the shepherd said, and that he ought
to have seen her safe home. But he didn’t know that MacLeod’s father
had threatened to kill him if ever he spoke to the girl again.”

“But,” said Allister, “I thought it was about Sir Worm Wymble--not
Mr. MacLeod.”

“Sure, boy, and am I not going to tell you how he got the new name of
him?” returned Kirsty, with an eagerness that showed her fear lest the
spirit of inquiry should spread. “He wasn’t Sir Worm Wymble then. His
name was--”

Here she paused a moment, and looked full at Allister.

“His name was Allister--Allister MacLeod.”

“Allister!” exclaimed my brother, repeating the name as an incredible
coincidence.

“Yes, Allister,” said Kirsty. “There’s been many an Allister, and not
all of them MacLeods, that did what they ought to do, and didn’t know
what fear was. And you’ll be another, my bonnie Allister, I hope,” she
added, stroking the boy’s hair.

Allister’s face flushed with pleasure. It was long before he asked
another question.

“Well, as I say,” resumed Kirsty, “the father of her was very angry,
and said she should never go and meet Allister again. But the girl
said she ought to go once and let him know why she could not come any
more; for she had no complaint to make of Allister; and she had agreed
to meet him on a certain day the week after; and there was no
post-office in those parts. And so she did meet him, and told him all
about it. And Allister said nothing much then. But next day he came
striding up to the cottage, at dinner-time, with his claymore
(_gladius major_) at one side, his dirk at the other, and his little
skene dubh (_black knife_) in his stocking. And he was grand to
see--such a big strong gentleman I And he came striding up to the
cottage where the shepherd was sitting at his dinner.

“‘Angus MacQueen,’ says he, ‘I understand the kelpie in the pot has
been rude to your Nellie. I am going to kill him.’ ‘How will you do
that, sir?’ said Angus, quite short, for he was the girl’s father.
‘Here’s a claymore I could put in a peck,’ said Allister, meaning it
was such good steel that he could bend it round till the hilt met the
point without breaking; ‘and here’s a shield made out of the hide of
old Rasay’s black bull; and here’s a dirk made of a foot and a half of
an old Andrew Ferrara; and here’s a skene dubh that I’ll drive through
your door, Mr. Angus. And so we’re fitted, I hope.’ ‘Not at all,’ said
Angus, who as I told you was a wise man and a knowing; ‘not one bit,’
said Angus. ‘The kelpie’s hide is thicker than three bull-hides, and
none of your weapons would do more than mark it.’  ‘What am I to do
then, Angus, for kill him I will somehow?’ ‘I’ll tell you what to do;
but it needs a brave man to do that.’ ‘And do you think I’m not brave
enough for that, Angus?’ ‘I know one thing you are not brave enough
for.’ ‘And what’s that?’ said Allister, and his face grew red, only he
did not want to anger Nelly’s father. ‘You’re not brave enough to
marry my girl in the face of the clan,’ said Angus. ‘But you shan’t go
on this way. If my Nelly’s good enough to talk to in the glen, she’s
good enough to lead into the hall before the ladies and gentlemen.’

“Then Allister’s face grew redder still, but not with anger, and he
held down his head before the old man, but only for a few moments.
When he lifted it again, it was pale, not with fear but with
resolution, for he had made up his mind like a gentleman. ‘Mr. Angus
MacQueen,’ he said, ‘will you give me your daughter to be my wife?’
‘If you kill the kelpie, I will,’ answered Angus; for he knew that the
man who could do that would be worthy of his Nelly.”

“But what if the kelpie ate him?” suggested Allister.

“Then he’d have to go without the girl,” said Kirsty, coolly. “But,”
 she resumed, “there’s always some way of doing a difficult thing; and
Allister, the gentleman, had Angus, the shepherd, to teach him.

“So Angus took Allister down to the pot, and there they began. They
tumbled great stones together, and set them up in two rows at a little
distance from each other, making a lane between the rows big enough
for the kelpie to walk in. If the kelpie heard them, he could not see
them, and they took care to get into the cottage before it was dark,
for they could not finish their preparations in one day. And they sat
up all night, and saw the huge head of the beast looking in now at one
window, now at another, all night long. As soon as the sun was up,
they set to work again, and finished the two rows of stones all the
way from the pot to the top of the little hill on which the cottage
stood. Then they tied a cross of rowan-tree twigs on every stone, so
that once the beast was in the avenue of stones he could only get out
at the end. And this was Nelly’s part of the job. Next they gathered a
quantity of furze and brushwood and peat, and piled it in the end of
the avenue next the cottage. Then Angus went and killed a little pig,
and dressed it ready for cooking.

“‘Now you go down to my brother Hamish,’ he said to Mr. MacLeod; ‘he’s
a carpenter, you know,--and ask him to lend you his longest wimble.’”

“What’s a wimble?” asked little Allister.

[Illustration]

“A wimble is a long tool, like a great gimlet, with a cross handle,
with which you turn it like a screw. And Allister ran and fetched it,
and got back only half an hour before the sun went down. Then they put
Nelly into the cottage, and shut the door. But I ought to have told
you that they had built up a great heap of stones behind the
brushwood, and now they lighted the brushwood, and put down the pig to
roast by the fire, and laid the wimble in the fire halfway up to the
handle. Then they laid themselves down behind the heap of stones and
waited.

“By the time the sun was out of sight, the smell of the roasting pig
had got down the avenue to the side of the pot, just where the kelpie
always got out. He smelt it the moment he put up his head, and he
thought it smelt so nice that he would go and see where it was. The
moment he got out he was between the stones, but he never thought of
that, for it was the straight way to the pig. So up the avenue he
came, and as it was dark, and his big soft web feet made no noise, the
men could not see him until he came into the light of the fire. ‘There
he is!’ said Allister. ‘Hush!’ said Angus, ‘he can hear well enough.’
So the beast came on. Now Angus had meant that he should be busy with
the pig before Allister should attack him; but Allister thought it was
a pity he should have the pig, and he put out his hand and got hold of
the wimble, and drew it gently out of the fire. And the wimble was so
hot that it was as white as the whitest moon you ever saw. The pig was
so hot also that the brute was afraid to touch it, and before ever he
put his nose to it Allister had thrust the wimble into his hide,
behind the left shoulder, and was boring away with all his might. The
kelpie gave a hideous roar, and turned away to run from the wimble.
But he could not get over the row of crossed stones, and he had to
turn right round in the narrow space before he could run.  Allister,
however, could run as well as the kelpie, and he hung on to the handle
of the wimble, giving it another turn at every chance as the beast
went floundering on; so that before he reached his pot the wimble had
reached his heart, and the kelpie fell dead on the edge of the
pot. Then they went home, and when the pig was properly done they had
it for supper. And Angus gave Nelly to Allister, and they were
married, and lived happily ever after.”

“But didn’t Allister’s father kill him?”

“No. He thought better of it, and didn’t. He was very angry for a
while, but he got over it in time. And Allister became a great man,
and because of what he had done, he was called Allister MacLeod no
more, but Sir Worm Wymble. And when he died,” concluded Kirsty, “he
was buried under the tomb in your father’s church. And if you look
close enough, you’ll find a wimble carved on the stone, but I’m afraid
it’s worn out by this time.”



CHAPTER XI

The Kelpie


Silence followed the close of Kirsty’s tale. Wee Davie had taken no
harm, for he was fast asleep with his head on her bosom. Allister was
staring into the fire, fancying he saw the whorls of the wimble
heating in it. Turkey was cutting at his stick with a blunt
pocket-knife, and a silent whistle on his puckered lips. I was sorry
the story was over, and was growing stupid under the reaction from its
excitement. I was, however, meditating a strict search for the wimble
carved on the knight’s tomb. All at once came the sound of a latch
lifted in vain, followed by a thundering at the outer door, which
Kirsty had prudently locked. Allister, Turkey, and I started to our
feet, Allister with a cry of dismay, Turkey grasping his stick.

“It’s the kelpie!” cried Allister.

But the harsh voice of the old witch followed, something deadened by
the intervening door.

“Kirsty! Kirsty!” it cried; “open the door directly.”

“No, no, Kirsty!” I objected. “She’ll shake wee Davie to bits, and
haul Allister through the snow. She’s afraid to touch me.”

Turkey thrust the poker in the fire; but Kirsty snatched it out, threw
it down, and boxed his ears, which rough proceeding he took with the
pleasantest laugh in the world. Kirsty could do what she pleased, for
she was no tyrant. She turned to us.

“Hush!” she said, hurriedly, with a twinkle in her eyes that showed
the spirit of fun was predominant--“Hush!--Don’t speak, wee Davie,”
 she continued, as she rose and carried him from the kitchen into the
passage between it and the outer door. He was scarcely awake.

Now, in that passage, which was wide, and indeed more like a hall in
proportion to the cottage, had stood on its end from time immemorial a
huge barrel, which Kirsty, with some housewifely intent or other, had
lately cleaned out. Setting Davie down, she and Turkey lifted first me
and popped me into it, and then Allister, for we caught the design at
once. Finally she took up wee Davie, and telling him to lie as still
as a mouse, dropped him into our arms. I happened to find the open
bung-hole near my eye, and peeped out. The knocking continued.

“Wait a bit, Mrs. Mitchell,” screamed Kirsty; “wait till I get my
potatoes off the fire.”

As she spoke, she took the great bow-pot in one hand and carried it to
the door, to pour away the water. When she unlocked and opened the
door, I saw through the bung-hole a lovely sight; for the moon was
shining, and the snow was falling thick. In the midst of it stood
Mrs. Mitchell, one mass of whiteness. She would have rushed in, but
Kirsty’s advance with the pot made her give way, and from behind
Kirsty Turkey slipped out and round the corner without being seen.
There he stood watching, but busy at the same time kneading snowballs.

“And what may you please to want to-night, Mrs. Mitchell?” said
Kirsty, with great civility.

“What should I want but my poor children? They ought to have been in
bed an hour ago. Really, Kirsty, you ought to have more sense at your
years than to encourage any such goings on.”

“At my years!” returned Kirsty, and was about to give a sharp retort,
but checked herself, saying, “Aren’t they in bed then, Mrs. Mitchell?”

“You know well enough they are not.”

“Poor things! I would recommend you to put them to bed at once.”

“So I will. Where are they?”

“Find them yourself, Mrs. Mitchell. You had better ask a civil tongue
to help you. I’m not going to do it.”

They were standing just inside the door. Mrs. Mitchell advanced. I
trembled. It seemed impossible she should not see me as well as I saw
her. I had a vague impression that by looking at her I should draw her
eyes upon me; but I could not withdraw mine from the bung-hole. I was
fascinated; and the nearer she came, the less could I keep from
watching her. When she turned into the kitchen, it was a great relief;
but it did not last long, for she came out again in a moment,
searching like a hound. She was taller than Kirsty, and by standing on
her tiptoes could have looked right down into the barrel. She was
approaching it with that intent--those eyes were about to overshadow
us with their baleful light. Already her apron hid all other vision
from my one eye, when a whizz, a dull blow, and a shriek from Mrs.
Mitchell came to my ears together. The next moment, the field of my
vision was open, and I saw Mrs. Mitchell holding her head with both
hands, and the face of Turkey grinning round the corner of the open
door. Evidently he wanted to entice her to follow him; but she had
been too much astonished by the snowball in the back of her neck even
to look in the direction whence the blow had come. So Turkey stepped
out, and was just poising himself in the delivery of a second missile,
when she turned sharp round.

The snowball missed her, and came with a great bang against the
barrel.  Wee Davie gave a cry of alarm, but there was no danger now,
for Mrs. Mitchell was off after Turkey. In a moment, Kirsty lowered
the barrel on its side, and we all crept out. I had wee Davie on my
back instantly, while Kirsty caught up Allister, and we were off for
the manse. As soon as we were out of the yard, however, we met Turkey,
breathless. He had given Mrs. Mitchell the slip, and left her
searching the barn for him. He took Allister from Kirsty, and we sped
away, for it was all downhill now. When Mrs. Mitchell got back to the
farmhouse, Kirsty was busy as if nothing had happened, and when, after
a fruitless search, she returned to the manse, we were all snug in
bed, with the door locked. After what had passed about the school,
Mrs. Mitchell did not dare make any disturbance.

From that night she always went by the name of _the Kelpie_.



CHAPTER XII

Another Kelpie


In the summer we all slept in a large room in the wide sloping roof.
It had a dormer window, at no great distance above the eaves. One day
there was something doing about the ivy, which covered all the gable
and half the front of the house, and the ladder they had been using
was left leaning against the back. It reached a little above the
eaves, right under the dormer window. That night I could not sleep, as
was not unfrequently the case with me. On such occasions I used to go
wandering about the upper part of the house. I believe the servants
thought I walked in my sleep, but it was not so, for I always knew
what I was about well enough. I do not remember whether this began
after that dreadful night when I woke in the barn, but I do think the
enjoyment it gave me was rooted in the starry loneliness in which I
had then found myself. I wonder if I can explain my feelings.  The
pleasure arose from a sort of sense of protected danger. On that
memorable night, I had been as it were naked to all the silence, alone
in the vast universe, which kept looking at me full of something it
knew but would not speak. Now, when wandering about sleepless, I could
gaze as from a nest of safety out upon the beautiful fear. From window
to window I would go in the middle of the night, now staring into a
blank darkness out of which came, the only signs of its being, the
raindrops that bespattered or the hailstones that berattled the panes;
now gazing into the deeps of the blue vault, gold-bespangled with its
worlds; or, again, into the mysteries of soft clouds, all gathered
into an opal tent by the centre-clasp of the moon, thinking out her
light over its shining and shadowy folds.

This, I have said, was one of those nights on which I could not sleep.
It was the summer after the winter-story of the kelpie, I believe; but
the past is confused, and its chronology worthless, to the continuous
_now_ of childhood. The night was hot; my little brothers were
sleeping loud, as wee Davie called _snoring_; and a great moth had got
within my curtains somewhere, and kept on fluttering and whirring. I
got up, and went to the window. It was such a night! The moon was
full, but rather low, and looked just as if she were thinking--“Nobody
is heeding me: I may as well go to bed.” All the top of the sky was
covered with mackerel-backed clouds, lying like milky ripples on a
blue sea, and through them the stars shot, here and there, sharp
little rays like sparkling diamonds. There was no awfulness about it,
as on the night when the gulfy sky stood over me, flashing with the
heavenly host, and nothing was between me and the farthest world. The
clouds were like the veil that hid the terrible light in the Holy of
Holies--a curtain of God’s love, to dim with loveliness the grandeur
of their own being, and make his children able to bear it. My eye fell
upon the top rounds of the ladder, which rose above the edge of the
roof like an invitation. I opened the window, crept through, and,
holding on by the ledge, let myself down over the slates, feeling with
my feet for the top of the ladder. In a moment I was upon it. Down I
went, and oh, how tender to my bare feet was the cool grass on which I
alighted! I looked up. The dark housewall rose above me. I could
ascend again when I pleased. There was no hurry. I would walk about a
little. I would put my place of refuge yet a little farther off,
nibble at the danger, as it were--a danger which existed only in my
imagination. I went outside the high holly hedge, and the house was
hidden. A grassy field was before me, and just beyond the field rose
the farm buildings. Why should not I run across and wake Turkey? I was
off like a shot, the expectation of a companion in my delight
overcoming all the remnants of lingering apprehension. I knew there
was only one bolt, and that a manageable one, between me and Turkey,
for he slept in a little wooden chamber partitioned off from a loft in
the barn, to which he had to climb a ladder. The only fearful part was
the crossing of the barn-floor. But I was man enough for that. I
reached and crossed the yard in safety, searched for and found the key
of the barn, which was always left in a hole in the wall by the
door,--turned it in the lock, and crossed the floor as fast as the
darkness would allow me. With outstretched groping hands I found the
ladder, ascended, and stood by Turkey’s bed.

“Turkey! Turkey! wake up,” I cried. “It’s such a beautiful night! It’s
a shame to lie sleeping that way.”

Turkey’s answer was immediate. He was wide awake and out of bed with
all his wits by him in a moment.

“Sh! sh!” he said, “or you’ll wake Oscar.”

Oscar was a colley (_sheep dog_) which slept in a kennel in the
cornyard. He was not much of a watch-dog, for there was no great
occasion for watching, and he knew it, and slept like a human child;
but he was the most knowing of dogs. Turkey was proceeding to dress.

“Never mind your clothes, Turkey,” I said. “There’s nobody up.”

Willing enough to spare himself trouble, Turkey followed me in his
shirt. But once we were out in the cornyard, instead of finding
contentment in the sky and the moon, as I did, he wanted to know what
we were going to do.

“It’s not a bad sort of night,” he said; “what shall we do with it?”

He was always wanting to do something.

“Oh, nothing,” I answered; “only look about us a bit.”

“You didn’t hear robbers, did you?” he asked.

“Oh dear, no! I couldn’t sleep, and got down the ladder, and came to
wake you--that’s all.”

“Let’s have a walk, then,” he said.

Now that I had Turkey, there was scarcely more terror in the night
than in the day. I consented at once. That we had no shoes on was not
of the least consequence to Scotch boys. I often, and Turkey always,
went barefooted in summer.

As we left the barn, Turkey had caught up his little whip. He was
never to be seen without either that or his club, as we called the
stick he carried when he was herding the cattle. Finding him thus
armed, I begged him to give me his club. He ran and fetched it, and,
thus equipped, we set out for nowhere in the middle of the night. My
fancy was full of fragmentary notions of adventure, in which shadows
from The Pilgrim’s Progress predominated. I shouldered my club, trying
to persuade my imagination that the unchristian weapon had been won
from some pagan giant, and therefore was not unfittingly carried. But
Turkey was far better armed with his lash of wire than I was with the
club. His little whip was like that fearful weapon called the morning
star in the hand of some stalwart knight.

We took our way towards the nearest hills, thinking little of where we
went so that we were in motion. I guess that the story I have just
related must, notwithstanding his unbelief, have been working in
Turkey’s brain that night, for after we had walked for a mile or more
along the road, and had arrived at the foot of a wooded hill, well
known to all the children of the neighbourhood for its bilberries, he
turned into the hollow of a broken track, which lost itself in a field
as yet only half-redeemed from the moorland. It was plain to me now
that Turkey had some goal or other in his view; but I followed his
leading, and asked no questions. All at once he stopped, and said,
pointing a few yards in front of him:

“Look, Ranald!”

I did look, but the moon was behind the hill, and the night was so dim
that I had to keep looking for several moments ere I discovered that
he was pointing to the dull gleam of dark water. Very horrible it
seemed. I felt my flesh creep the instant I saw it. It lay in a hollow
left by the digging out of peats, drained thither from the surrounding
bog. My heart sank with fear. The almost black glimmer of its surface
was bad enough, but who could tell what lay in its unknown depth? But,
as I gazed, almost paralysed, a huge dark figure rose up on the
opposite side of the pool. For one moment the scepticism of Turkey
seemed to fail him, for he cried out, “The kelpie! The kelpie!” and
turned and ran.

I followed as fast as feet utterly unconscious of the ground they trod
upon could bear me. We had not gone many yards before a great roar
filled the silent air. That moment Turkey slackened his pace, and
burst into a fit of laughter.

“It’s nothing but Bogbonny’s bull, Ranald!” he cried.

Kelpies were unknown creatures to Turkey, but a bull was no more than
a dog or a sheep, or any other domestic animal. I, however, did not
share his equanimity, and never slackened my pace till I got up with
him.

“But he’s rather ill-natured,” he went on, the instant I joined him,
“and we had better make for the hill.”

Another roar was a fresh spur to our speed. We could not have been in
better trim for running. But it was all uphill, and had it not been
that the ground for some distance between us and the animal was boggy,
so that he had to go round a good way, one of us at least would have
been in evil case.

“He’s caught sight of our shirts,” said Turkey, panting as he ran,
“and he wants to see what they are. But we’ll be over the fence before
he comes up with us. I wouldn’t mind for myself; I could dodge him
well enough; but he might go after you, Ranald.”

What with fear and exertion I was unable to reply. Another bellow
sounded nearer, and by and by we could hear the dull stroke of his
hoofs on the soft ground as he galloped after us. But the fence of dry
stones, and the larch wood within it, were close at hand.

“Over with you, Ranald!” cried Turkey, as if with his last breath; and
turned at bay, for the brute was close behind him.

But I was so spent, I could not climb the wall; and when I saw Turkey
turn and face the bull, I turned too. We were now in the shadow of the
hill, but I could just see Turkey lift his arm. A short sharp hiss,
and a roar followed. The bull tossed his head as in pain, left Turkey,
and came towards me. He could not charge at any great speed, for the
ground was steep and uneven. I, too, had kept hold of my weapon; and
although I was dreadfully frightened, I felt my courage rise at
Turkey’s success, and lifted my club in the hope that it might prove
as good at need as Turkey’s whip. It was well for me, however, that
Turkey was too quick for the bull. He got between him and me, and a
second stinging cut from the brass wire drew a second roar from his
throat, and no doubt a second red streamlet from his nose, while my
club descended on one of his horns with a bang which jarred my arm to
the elbow, and sent the weapon flying over the fence. The animal
turned tail for a moment--long enough to place us, enlivened by our
success, on the other side of the wall, where we crouched so that he
could not see us. Turkey, however, kept looking up at the line of the
wall against the sky; and as he looked, over came the nose of the
bull, within a yard of his head. Hiss went the little whip, and bellow
went the bull.

“Get up among the trees, Ranald, for fear he come over,” said Turkey,
in a whisper.

I obeyed. But as he could see nothing of his foes, the animal had had
enough of it, and we heard no more of him.

After a while, Turkey left his lair and joined me. We rested for a
little, and would then have clambered to the top of the hill, but we
gave up the attempt as awkward after getting into a furze bush. In our
condition, it was too dark. I began to grow sleepy, also, and thought
I should like to exchange the hillside for my bed. Turkey made no
objection, so we trudged home again; not without sundry starts and
quick glances to make sure that the bull was neither after us on the
road, nor watching us from behind this bush or that hillock. Turkey
never left me till he saw me safe up the ladder; nay, after I was in
bed, I spied his face peeping in at the window from the topmost round
of it. By this time the east had begun to begin to glow, as Allister,
who was painfully exact, would have said; but I was fairly tired now,
and, falling asleep at once, never woke until Mrs. Mitchell pulled the
clothes off me, an indignity which I keenly felt, but did not yet know
how to render impossible for the future.



CHAPTER XIII

Wandering Willie


[illustration]

At that time there were a good many beggars going about the country,
who lived upon the alms of the charitable. Among these were some
half-witted persons, who, although not to be relied upon, were seldom
to any extent mischievous. We were not much afraid of them, for the
home-neighbourhood is a charmed spot round which has been drawn a
magic circle of safety, and we seldom roamed far beyond it. There was,
however, one occasional visitor of this class, of whom we stood in
some degree of awe. He was commonly styled Foolish Willie. His
approach to the manse was always announced by a wailful strain upon
the bagpipes, a set of which he had inherited from his father, who had
been piper to some Highland nobleman: at least so it was said. Willie
never went without his pipes, and was more attached to them than to
any living creature. He played them well, too, though in what corner
he kept the amount of intellect necessary to the mastery of them was a
puzzle. The probability seemed that his wits had not decayed until
after he had become in a measure proficient in the use of the chanter,
as they call that pipe by means of whose perforations the notes are
regulated. However this may be, Willie could certainly play the pipes,
and was a great favourite because of it--with children especially,
notwithstanding the mixture of fear which his presence always
occasioned them. Whether it was from our Highland blood or from
Kirsty’s stories, I do not know, but we were always delighted when the
far-off sound of his pipes reached us: little Davie would dance and
shout with glee. Even the Kelpie, Mrs. Mitchell that is, was
benignantly inclined towards Wandering Willie, as some people called
him after the old song; so much so that Turkey, who always tried to
account for things, declared his conviction that Willie must be Mrs.
Mitchell’s brother, only she was ashamed and wouldn’t own him. I do
not believe he had the smallest atom of corroboration for the
conjecture, which therefore was bold and worthy of the inventor. One
thing we all knew, that she would ostentatiously fill the canvas bag
which he carried by his side, with any broken scraps she could gather,
would give him as much milk to drink as he pleased, and would speak
kind, almost coaxing, words to the poor _natural_--words which sounded
the stranger in our ears, that they were quite unused to like sounds
from the lips of the Kelpie.

It is impossible to describe Willie’s dress: the agglomeration of
ill-supplied necessity and superfluous whim was never exceeded. His
pleasure was to pin on his person whatever gay-coloured cotton
handkerchiefs he could get hold of; so that, with one of these behind
and one before, spread out across back and chest, he always looked
like an ancient herald come with a message from knight or nobleman. So
incongruous was his costume that I could never tell whether kilt or
trousers was the original foundation upon which it had been
constructed. To his tatters add the bits of old ribbon, list, and
coloured rag which he attached to his pipes wherever there was room,
and you will see that he looked all flags and pennons--a moving grove
of raggery, out of which came the screaming chant and drone of his
instrument. When he danced, he was like a whirlwind that had caught up
the contents of an old-clothes-shop. It is no wonder that he should
have produced in our minds an indescribable mixture of awe and
delight--awe, because no one could tell what he might do next, and
delight because of his oddity, agility, and music. The first sensation
was always a slight fear, which gradually wore off as we became anew
accustomed to the strangeness of the apparition. Before the visit was
over, wee Davie would be playing with the dangles of his pipes, and
laying his ear to the bag out of which he thought the music came
ready-made. And Willie was particularly fond of Davie, and tried to
make himself agreeable to him after a hundred grotesque fashions. The
awe, however, was constantly renewed in his absence, partly by the
threats of the Kelpie, that, if so and so, she would give this one or
that to Foolish Willie to take away with him--a threat which now fell
almost powerless upon me, but still told upon Allister and Davie.

One day, in early summer--it was after I had begun to go to school--I
came home as usual at five o’clock, to find the manse in great
commotion. Wee Davie had disappeared. They were looking for him
everywhere without avail. Already all the farmhouses had been
thoroughly searched. An awful horror fell upon me, and the most
frightful ideas of Davie’s fate arose in my mind. I remember giving a
howl of dismay the moment I heard of the catastrophe, for which I
received a sound box on the ear from Mrs. Mitchell. I was too
miserable, however, to show any active resentment, and only sat down
upon the grass and cried. In a few minutes, my father, who had been
away visiting some of his parishioners, rode up on his little black
mare. Mrs. Mitchell hurried to meet him, wringing her hands, and
crying--

“Oh, sir! oh, sir! Davie’s away with Foolish Willie!”

This was the first I had heard of Willie in connection with the
affair. My father turned pale, but kept perfectly quiet.

“Which way did he go?” he asked.

Nobody knew.

“How long is it ago?”

“About an hour and a half, I think,” said Mrs. Mitchell.

To me the news was some relief. Now I could at least do something. I
left the group, and hurried away to find Turkey. Except my father, I
trusted more in Turkey than in anyone. I got on a rising ground near
the manse, and looked all about until I found where the cattle were
feeding that afternoon, and then darted off at full speed. They were
at some distance from home, and I found that Turkey had heard nothing
of the mishap. When I had succeeded in conveying the dreadful news, he
shouldered his club, and said--

“The cows must look after themselves, Ranald!”

With the words he set off at a good swinging trot in the direction of
a little rocky knoll in a hollow about half a mile away, which he knew
to be a favourite haunt of Wandering Willie, as often as he came into
the neighbourhood. On this knoll grew some stunted trees, gnarled and
old, with very mossy stems. There was moss on the stones too, and
between them grew lovely harebells, and at the foot of the knoll there
were always in the season tall foxgloves, which had imparted a certain
fear to the spot in my fancy. For there they call them _Dead Man’s
Bells_, and I thought there was a murdered man buried somewhere
thereabout. I should not have liked to be there alone even in the
broad daylight. But with Turkey I would have gone at any hour, even
without the impulse which now urged me to follow him at my best
speed. There was some marshy ground between us and the knoll, but we
floundered through it; and then Turkey, who was some distance ahead of
me, dropped into a walk, and began to reconnoitre the knoll with some
caution. I soon got up with him.

“He’s there, Ranald!” he said.

“Who? Davie?”

“I don’t know about Davie; but Willie’s there.”

“How do you know?”

“I heard his bagpipes grunt. Perhaps Davie sat down upon them.”

“Oh, run, Turkey!” I said, eagerly.

“No hurry,” he returned. “If Willie has him, he won’t hurt him, but it
mayn’t be easy to get him away. We must creep up and see what can be
done.”

Half dead as some of the trees were, there was foliage enough upon
them to hide Willie, and Turkey hoped it would help to hide our
approach. He went down on his hands and knees, and thus crept towards
the knoll, skirting it partly, because a little way round it was
steeper. I followed his example, and found I was his match at crawling
in four-footed fashion. When we reached the steep side, we lay still
and listened.

“He’s there!” I cried in a whisper.

“Sh!” said Turkey; “I hear him. It’s all right. We’ll soon have a
hold of him.”

A weary whimper as of a child worn out with hopeless crying had
reached our ears. Turkey immediately began to climb the side of the
knoll.

“Stay where you are, Ranald,” he said. “I can go up quieter than you.”

I obeyed. Cautious as a deer-stalker, he ascended, still on his hands
and knees. I strained my eyes after his every motion. But when he was
near the top he lay perfectly quiet, and continued so till I could
bear it no longer, and crept up after him. When I came behind him, he
looked round angrily, and made a most emphatic contortion of his face;
after which I dared not climb to a level with him, but lay trembling
with expectation. The next moment I heard him call in a low whisper:

“Davie! Davie! wee Davie!”

But there was no reply. He called a little louder, evidently trying to
reach by degrees just the pitch that would pierce to Davie’s ears and
not arrive at Wandering Willie’s, who I rightly presumed was farther
off. His tones grew louder and louder--but had not yet risen above a
sharp whisper, when at length a small trembling voice cried “Turkey!
Turkey!” in prolonged accents of mingled hope and pain. There was a
sound in the bushes above me--a louder sound and a rush. Turkey sprang
to his feet and vanished. I followed. Before I reached the top, there
came a despairing cry from Davie, and a shout and a gabble from
Willie.  Then followed a louder shout and a louder gabble, mixed with
a scream from the bagpipes, and an exulting laugh from Turkey. All
this passed in the moment I spent in getting to the top, the last step
of which was difficult. There was Davie alone in the thicket, Turkey
scudding down the opposite slope with the bagpipes under his arm, and
Wandering Willie pursuing him in a foaming fury. I caught Davie in my
arms from where he lay sobbing and crying “Yanal!  Yanal!” and stood
for a moment not knowing what to do, but resolved to fight with teeth
and nails before Willie should take him again. Meantime Turkey led
Willie towards the deepest of the boggy ground, in which both were
very soon floundering, only Turkey, being the lighter, had the
advantage. When I saw that, I resolved to make for home. I got Davie
on my back, and slid down the farther side to skirt the bog, for I
knew I should stick in it with Davie’s weight added to my own. I had
not gone far, however, before a howl from Willie made me aware that he
had caught sight of us; and looking round, I saw him turn from Turkey
and come after us. Presently, however, he hesitated, then stopped, and
began looking this way and that from the one to the other of his
treasures, both in evil hands. Doubtless his indecision would have
been very ludicrous to anyone who had not such a stake in the turn of
the scale. As it was, he made up his mind far too soon, for he chose
to follow Davie. I ran my best in the very strength of despair for
some distance, but, seeing very soon that I had no chance, I set Davie
down, telling him to keep behind me, and prepared, like the Knight of
the Red Cross, “sad battle to darrayne”. Willie came on in fury, his
rags fluttering like ten scarecrows, and he waving his arms in the
air, with wild gestures and grimaces and cries and curses. He was more
terrible than the bull, and Turkey was behind him. I was just, like a
negro, preparing to run my head into the pit of his stomach, and so
upset him if I could, when I saw Turkey running towards us at full
speed, blowing into the bagpipes as he ran. How he found breath for
both I cannot understand. At length, he put the bag under his arm, and
forth issued such a combination of screeching and grunting and
howling, that Wandering Willie, in the full career of his rage, turned
at the cries of his companion. Then came Turkey’s masterpiece. He
dashed the bagpipes on the ground, and commenced kicking them before
him like a football, and the pipes cried out at every kick. If
Turkey’s first object had been their utter demolition, he could not
have treated them more unmercifully. It was no time for gentle
measures: my life hung in the balance. But this was more than Willie
could bear. He turned from us, and once again pursued his pipes. When
he had nearly overtaken him, Turkey gave them a last masterly kick,
which sent them flying through the air, caught them as they fell, and
again sought the bog, while I, hoisting Davie on my back, hurried,
with more haste than speed, towards the manse.

[Illustration]

What took place after I left them, I have only from Turkey’s report,
for I never looked behind me till I reached the little green before
the house, where, setting Davie down, I threw myself on the grass. I
remember nothing more till I came to myself in bed.

When Turkey reached the bog, and had got Wandering Willie well into
the middle of it, he threw the bagpipes as far beyond him as he could,
and then made his way out. Willie followed the pipes, took them, held
them up between him and the sky as if appealing to heaven against the
cruelty, then sat down in the middle of the bog upon a solitary hump,
and cried like a child. Turkey stood and watched him, at first with
feelings of triumph, which by slow degrees cooled down until at length
they passed over into compassion, and he grew heartily sorry for the
poor fellow, although there was no room for repentance. After Willie
had cried for a while, he took the instrument as if it had been the
mangled corpse of his son, and proceeded to examine it. Turkey
declared his certainty that none of the pipes were broken; but when at
length Willie put the mouthpiece to his lips, and began to blow into
the bag, alas! it would hold no wind. He flung it from him in anger
and cried again. Turkey left him crying in the middle of the bog. He
said it was a pitiful sight.

It was long before Willie appeared in that part of the country again;
but, about six months after, some neighbours who had been to a fair
twenty miles off, told my father that they had seen him looking much
as usual, and playing his pipes with more energy than ever. This was a
great relief to my father, who could not bear the idea of the poor
fellow’s loneliness without his pipes, and had wanted very much to get
them repaired for him. But ever after my father showed a great regard
for Turkey. I heard him say once that, if he had had the chance,
Turkey would have made a great general. That he should be judged
capable of so much, was not surprising to me; yet he became in
consequence a still greater being in my eyes.

When I set Davie down, and fell myself on the grass, there was nobody
near. Everyone was engaged in a new search for Davie. My father had
rode off at once without dismounting, to inquire at the neighbouring
toll-gate whether Willie had passed through. It was not very likely,
for such wanderers seldom take to the hard high road; but he could
think of nothing else, and it was better to do something. Having
failed there, he had returned and ridden along the country road which
passed the farm towards the hills, leaving Willie and Davie far behind
him. It was twilight before he returned. How long, therefore, I lay
upon the grass, I do not know. When I came to myself, I found a sharp
pain in my side. Turn how I would, there it was, and I could draw but
a very short breath for it. I was in my father’s bed, and there was no
one in the room. I lay for some time in increasing pain; but in a
little while my father came in, and then I felt that all was as it
should be. Seeing me awake, he approached with an anxious face.

“Is Davie all right, father?” I asked.

“He is quite well, Ranald, my boy. How do you feel yourself now?”

“I’ve been asleep, father?”

“Yes; we found you on the grass, with Davie pulling at you and trying
to wake you, crying, ‘Yanal won’t peak to me. Yanal! Yanal!’ I am
afraid you had a terrible run with him. Turkey, as you call him, told
me all about it. He’s a fine lad Turkey!”

“Indeed he is, father!” I cried with a gasp which betrayed my
suffering.

“What is the matter, my boy?” he asked.

“Lift me up a little, please,” I said, “I have _such_ a pain in my
side!”

“Ah!” he said, “it catches your breath. We must send for the old
doctor.”

The old doctor was a sort of demigod in the place. Everybody believed
and trusted in him; and nobody could die in peace without him any more
than without my father. I was delighted at the thought of being his
patient. I think I see him now standing with his back to the fire, and
taking his lancet from his pocket, while preparations were being made
for bleeding me at the arm, which was a far commoner operation then
than it is now.

That night I was delirious, and haunted with bagpipes. Wandering
Willie was nowhere, but the atmosphere was full of bagpipes. It was an
unremitting storm of bagpipes--silent, but assailing me bodily from
all quarters--now small as motes in the sun, and hailing upon me; now
large as feather-beds, and ready to bang us about, only they never
touched us; now huge as Mount Ætna, and threatening to smother us
beneath their ponderous bulk; for all the time I was toiling on with
little Davie on my back. Next day I was a little better, but very
weak, and it was many days before I was able to get out of bed. My
father soon found that it would not do to let Mrs. Mitchell attend
upon me, for I was always worse after she had been in the room for any
time; so he got another woman to take Kirsty’s duties, and set her to
nurse me, after which illness became almost a luxury. With Kirsty
near, nothing could go wrong. And the growing better was pure
enjoyment.

Once, when Kirsty was absent for a little while, Mrs. Mitchell brought
me some gruel.

“The gruel’s not nice,” I said.

“It’s perfectly good, Ranald, and there’s no merit in complaining when
everybody’s trying to make you as comfortable as they can,” said the
Kelpie.

“Let me taste it,” said Kirsty, who that moment entered the
room.--“It’s not fit for anybody to eat,” she said, and carried it
away, Mrs. Mitchell following her with her nose horizontal.

Kirsty brought the basin back full of delicious gruel, well boiled,
and supplemented with cream. I am sure the way in which she
transformed that basin of gruel has been a lesson to me ever since as
to the quality of the work I did. No boy or girl can have a much
better lesson than--to do what must be done as well as it can be
done. Everything, the commonest, well done, is something for the
progress of the world; that is, lessens, if by the smallest
hair’s-breadth, the distance between it and God.

Oh, what a delight was that first glowing summer afternoon upon which
I was carried out to the field where Turkey was herding the cattle! I
could not yet walk. That very morning, as I was being dressed by
Kirsty, I had insisted that I could walk quite well, and Kirsty had
been over-persuaded into letting me try. Not feeling steady on my
legs, I set off running, but tumbled on my knees by the first chair I
came near. I was so light from the wasting of my illness, that Kirsty
herself, little woman as she was, was able to carry me. I remember
well how I saw everything double that day, and found it at first very
amusing. Kirsty set me down on a plaid in the grass, and the next
moment, Turkey, looking awfully big, and portentously healthy, stood
by my side. I wish I might give the conversation in the dialect of my
native country, for it loses much in translation; but I have promised,
and I will keep my promise.

“Eh, Ranald!” said Turkey, “it’s not yourself?”

“It’s me, Turkey,” I said, nearly crying with pleasure.

“Never mind, Ranald,” he returned, as if consoling me in some
disappointment; “we’ll have rare fun yet.”

“I’m frightened at the cows, Turkey. Don’t let them come near me.”

“No, that I won’t,” answered Turkey, brandishing his club to give me
confidence, “_I_‘ll give it them, if they look at you from between
their ugly horns.”

“Turkey,” I said, for I had often pondered the matter during my
illness, “how did Hawkie behave while you were away with me--that day,
you know?”

“She ate about half a rick of green corn,” answered Turkey, coolly.
“But she had the worst of it. They had to make a hole in her side, or
she would have died. There she is off to the turnips!”

He was after her with shout and flourish. Hawkie heard and obeyed,
turning round on her hind-legs with a sudden start, for she knew from
his voice that he was in a dangerously energetic mood.

“You’ll be all right again soon,” he said, coming quietly back to
me. Kirsty had gone to the farmhouse, leaving me with injunctions to
Turkey concerning me.

“Oh yes, I’m nearly well now; only I can’t walk yet.”

“Will you come on my back?” he said.

When Kirsty returned to take me home, there was I following the cows
on Turkey’s back, riding him about wherever I chose; for my horse was
obedient as only a dog, or a horse, or a servant from love can
be. From that day I recovered very rapidly.



CHAPTER XIV

Elsie Duff


How all the boys and girls stared at me, as timidly, yet with a sense
of importance derived from the distinction of having been so ill, I
entered the parish school one morning, about ten o’clock! For as I
said before, I had gone to school for some months before I was taken
ill. It was a very different affair from Dame Shand’s tyrannical
little kingdom. Here were boys of all ages, and girls likewise, ruled
over by an energetic young man, with a touch of genius, manifested
chiefly in an enthusiasm for teaching. He had spoken to me kindly the
first day I went, and had so secured my attachment that it never
wavered, not even when, once, supposing me guilty of a certain breach
of orders committed by my next neighbour, he called me up, and, with
more severity than usual, ordered me to hold up my hand. The lash
stung me dreadfully, but I was able to smile in his face
notwithstanding. I could not have done that had I been guilty. He
dropped his hand, already lifted for the second blow, and sent me back
to my seat. I suppose either his heart interfered, or he saw that I
was not in need of more punishment. The greatest good he did me, one
for which I shall be ever grateful, was the rousing in me of a love
for English literature, especially poetry. But I cannot linger upon
this at present, tempting although it be. I have led a busy life in
the world since, but it has been one of my greatest comforts when the
work of the day was over--dry work if it had not been that I had it to
do--to return to my books, and live in the company of those who were
greater than myself, and had had a higher work in life than mine. The
master used to say that a man was fit company for any man whom he
could understand, and therefore I hope often that some day, in some
future condition of existence, I may look upon the faces of Milton and
Bacon and Shakspere, whose writings have given me so much strength and
hope throughout my life here.

The moment he saw me, the master came up to me and took me by the
hand, saying he was glad to see me able to come to school again.

“You must not try to do too much at first,” he added.

This set me on my mettle, and I worked hard and with some success. But
before the morning was over I grew very tired, and fell fast asleep
with my head on the desk. I was informed afterwards that the master
had interfered when one of my class-fellows was trying to wake me, and
told him to let me sleep.

When one o’clock came, I was roused by the noise of dismissal for the
two hours for dinner. I staggered out, still stupid with sleep, and
whom should I find watching for me by the door-post but Turkey!

“Turkey!” I exclaimed; “you here!”

“Yes, Ranald,” he said; “I’ve put the cows up for an hour or two, for
it was very hot; and Kirsty said I might come and carry you home.”

So saying he stooped before me, and took me on his strong back. As
soon as I was well settled, he turned his head, and said:

“Ranald, I should like to go and have a look at my mother. Will you
come? There’s plenty of time.”

“Yes, please, Turkey,” I answered. “I’ve never seen your mother.”

He set off at a slow easy trot, and bore me through street and lane
until we arrived at a two-storey house, in the roof of which his
mother lived. She was a widow, and had only Turkey. What a curious
place her little garret was! The roof sloped down on one side to the
very floor, and there was a little window in it, from which I could
see away to the manse, a mile off, and far beyond it. Her bed stood in
one corner, with a check curtain hung from a rafter in front of it. In
another was a chest, which contained all their spare clothes,
including Turkey’s best garments, which he went home to put on every
Sunday morning. In the little grate smouldered a fire of oak-bark,
from which all the astringent virtue had been extracted in the pits at
the lanyard, and which was given to the poor for nothing.

Turkey’s mother was sitting near the little window, spinning. She was
a spare, thin, sad-looking woman, with loving eyes and slow speech.

“Johnnie!” she exclaimed, “what brings you here? and who’s this
you’ve brought with you?”

Instead of stopping her work as she spoke, she made her wheel go
faster than before; and I gazed with admiration at her deft fingering
of the wool, from which the thread flowed in a continuous line, as if
it had been something plastic, towards the revolving spool.

“It’s Ranald Bannerman,” said Turkey quietly. “I’m his horse. I’m
taking him home from the school. This is the first time he’s been
there since he was ill.”

Hearing this, she relaxed her labour, and the hooks which had been
revolving so fast that they were invisible in a mist of motion, began
to dawn into form, until at length they revealed their shape, and at
last stood quite still. She rose, and said:

“Come, Master Ranald, and sit down. You’ll be tired of riding such a
rough horse as that.”

“No, indeed,” I said; “Turkey is not a rough horse; he’s the best
horse in the world.”

“He always calls me Turkey, mother, because of my nose,” said Turkey,
laughing.

“And what brings you here?” asked his mother. “This is not on the road
to the manse.”

“I wanted to see if you were better, mother.”

“But what becomes of the cows?”

“Oh! they’re all safe enough. They know I’m here.”

“Well, sit down and rest you both,” she said, resuming her own place
at the wheel. “I’m glad to see you, Johnnie, so be your work is not
neglected. I must go on with mine.”

Thereupon Turkey, who had stood waiting his mother’s will, deposited
me upon her bed, and sat down beside me.

“And how’s your papa, the good man?” she said to me.

I told her he was quite well.

“All the better that you’re restored from the grave, I don’t doubt,”
 she said.

I had never known before that I had been in any danger.

“It’s been a sore time for him and you too,” she added. “You must be a
good son to him, Ranald, for he was in a great way about you, they
tell me.”

Turkey said nothing, and I was too much surprised to know what to say;
for as often as my father had come into my room, he had always looked
cheerful, and I had had no idea that he was uneasy about me.

After a little more talk, Turkey rose, and said we must be going.

“Well, Ranald,” said his mother, “you must come and see me any time
when you’re tired at the school, and you can lie down and rest
yourself a bit. Be a good lad, Johnnie, and mind your work.”

“Yes, mother, I’ll try,” answered Turkey cheerfully, as he hoisted me
once more upon his back. “Good day, mother,” he added, and left the
room.

I mention this little incident because it led to other things
afterwards. I rode home upon Turkey’s back; and with my father’s
leave, instead of returning to school that day, spent the afternoon in
the fields with Turkey.

In the middle of the field where the cattle were that day, there was a
large circular mound. I have often thought since that it must have
been a barrow, with dead men’s bones in the heart of it, but no such
suspicion had then crossed my mind. Its sides were rather steep, and
covered with lovely grass. On the side farthest from the manse, and
without one human dwelling in sight, Turkey and I lay that afternoon,
in a bliss enhanced to me, I am afraid, by the contrasted thought of
the close, hot, dusty schoolroom, where my class-fellows were talking,
laughing, and wrangling, or perhaps trying to work in spite of the
difficulties of after-dinner disinclination. A fitful little breeze,
as if itself subject to the influence of the heat, would wake up for a
few moments, wave a few heads of horse-daisies, waft a few strains of
odour from the blossoms of the white clover, and then die away
fatigued with the effort. Turkey took out his Jews’ harp, and
discoursed soothing if not eloquent strains.

At our feet, a few yards from the mound, ran a babbling brook, which
divided our farm from the next. Those of my readers whose ears are
open to the music of Nature, must have observed how different are the
songs sung by different brooks. Some are a mere tinkling, others are
sweet as silver bells, with a tone besides which no bell ever had.
Some sing in a careless, defiant tone. This one sung in a veiled
voice, a contralto muffled in the hollows of overhanging banks, with a
low, deep, musical gurgle in some of the stony eddies, in which a
straw would float for days and nights till a flood came, borne round
and round in a funnel-hearted whirlpool. The brook was deep for its
size, and had a good deal to say in a solemn tone for such a small
stream. We lay on the side of the hillock, I say, and Turkey’s Jews’
harp mingled its sounds with those of the brook. After a while he laid
it aside, and we were both silent for a time.

At length Turkey spoke.

“You’ve seen my mother, Ranald.”

“Yes, Turkey.”

“She’s all I’ve got to look after.”

“I haven’t got any mother to look after, Turkey.”

“No. You’ve a father to look after you. I must do it, you know. My
father wasn’t over good to my mother. He used to get drunk sometimes,
and then he was very rough with her. I must make it up to her as well
as I can. She’s not well off, Ranald.”

“Isn’t she, Turkey?”

“No. She works very hard at her spinning, and no one spins better than
my mother. How could they? But it’s very poor pay, you know, and
she’ll be getting old by and by.”

“Not to-morrow, Turkey.”

“No, not to-morrow, nor the day after,” said Turkey, looking up with
some surprise to see what I meant by the remark.

He then discovered that my eyes had led my thoughts astray, and that
what he had been saying about his mother had got no farther than into
my ears. For on the opposite side of the stream, on the grass, like a
shepherdess in an old picture, sat a young girl, about my own age, in
the midst of a crowded colony of daisies and white clover, knitting so
that her needles went as fast as Kirsty’s, and were nearly as
invisible as the thing with the hooked teeth in it that looked so
dangerous and ran itself out of sight upon Turkey’s mother’s
spinning-wheel. A little way from her was a fine cow feeding, with a
long iron chain dragging after her. The girl was too far off for me to
see her face very distinctly; but something in her shape, her posture,
and the hang of her head, I do not know what, had attracted me.

“Oh! there’s Elsie Duff,” said Turkey, himself forgetting his mother
in the sight--“with her granny’s cow! I didn’t know she was coming
here to-day.”

[Illustration]

“How is it,” I asked, “that she is feeding her on old James Joss’s
land?”

“Oh! they’re very good to Elsie, you see. Nobody cares much about her
grandmother; but Elsie’s not her grandmother, and although the cow
belongs to the old woman, yet for Elsie’s sake, this one here and that
one there gives her a bite for it--that’s a day’s feed generally. If
you look at the cow, you’ll see she’s not like one that feeds by the
roadsides. She’s as plump as needful, and has a good udderful of milk
besides.”

“I’ll run down and tell her she may bring the cow into this field
to-morrow,” I said, rising.

“I would if it were _mine_” said Turkey, in a marked tone, which I
understood.

“Oh! I see, Turkey,” I said. “You mean I ought to ask my father.”

“Yes, to be sure, I do mean that,” answered Turkey.

“Then it’s as good as done,” I returned. “I will ask him to-night.”

“She’s a good girl, Elsie,” was all Turkey’s reply.

How it happened I cannot now remember, but I know that, after all, I
did not ask my father, and Granny Gregson’s cow had no bite either off
the glebe or the farm. And Turkey’s reflections concerning the mother
he had to take care of having been interrupted, the end to which they
were moving remained for the present unuttered.

I soon grew quite strong again, and had neither plea nor desire for
exemption from school labours. My father also had begun to take me in
hand as well as my brother Tom; and what with arithmetic and Latin
together, not to mention geography and history, I had quite enough to
do, and quite as much also as was good for me.



CHAPTER XV

A New Companion

[Illustration]

During this summer, I made the acquaintance at school of a boy called
Peter Mason. Peter was a clever boy, from whose merry eye a sparkle
was always ready to break. He seldom knew his lesson well, but, when
_kept in_ for not knowing it, had always learned it before any of the
rest had got more than half through. Amongst those of his own standing
he was the acknowledged leader in the playground, and was besides
often invited to take a share in the amusements of the older boys, by
whom he was petted because of his cleverness and obliging
disposition. Beyond school hours, he spent his time in all manner of
pranks. In the hot summer weather he would bathe twenty times a day,
and was as much at home in the water as any dabchick. And that was how
I came to be more with him than was good for me.

There was a small river not far from my father’s house, which at a
certain point was dammed back by a weir of large stones to turn part
of it aside into a mill-race. The mill stood a little way down, under
a steep bank. It was almost surrounded with trees, willows by the
water’s edge, and birches and larches up the bank. Above the dam was a
fine spot for bathing, for you could get any depth you liked--from two
feet to five or six; and here it was that most of the boys of the
village bathed, and I with them. I cannot recall the memory of those
summer days without a gush of delight gurgling over my heart, just as
the water used to gurgle over the stones of the dam. It was a quiet
place, particularly on the side to which my father’s farm went down,
where it was sheltered by the same little wood which farther on
surrounded the mill. The field which bordered the river was kept in
natural grass, thick and short and fine, for here on the bank it grew
well, although such grass was not at all common in that part of the
country: upon other parts of the same farm, the grass was sown every
year along with the corn. Oh the summer days, with the hot sun drawing
the odours from the feathery larches and the white-stemmed birches,
when, getting out of the water, I would lie in the warm soft grass,
where now and then the tenderest little breeze would creep over my
skin, until the sun baking me more than was pleasant, I would rouse
myself with an effort, and running down to the fringe of rushes that
bordered the full-brimmed river, plunge again headlong into the quiet
brown water, and dabble and swim till I was once more weary! For
innocent animal delight, I know of nothing to match those days--so
warm, yet so pure-aired--so clean, so glad. I often think how God must
love his little children to have invented for them such delights!
For, of course, if he did not love the children and delight in their
pleasure, he would not have invented the two and brought them
together. Yes, my child, I know what you would say,--“How many there
are who have no such pleasures!” I grant it sorrowfully; but you must
remember that God has not done with them yet; and, besides, that there
are more pleasures in the world than you or I know anything about.
And if we had it _all_ pleasure, I know I should not care so much
about what is better, and I would rather be made good than have any
other pleasure in the world; and so would you, though perhaps you do
not know it yet.

One day, a good many of us were at the water together. I was somebody
amongst them in my own estimation because I bathed off my father’s
ground, while they were all on a piece of bank on the other side which
was regarded as common to the village. Suddenly upon the latter spot,
when they were all undressed, and some already in the water, appeared
a man who had lately rented the property of which that was part,
accompanied by a dog, with a flesh-coloured nose and a villainous
look--a mongrel in which the bull predominated. He ordered everyone
off his premises. Invaded with terror, all, except a big boy who
trusted that the dog would be more frightened at his naked figure than
he was at the dog, plunged into the river, and swam or waded from the
inhospitable shore. Once in the embrace of the stream, some of them
thoughtlessly turned and mocked the enemy, forgetting how much they
were still in his power. Indignant at the tyrant, I stood up in the
“limpid wave”, and assured the aquatic company of a welcome to the
opposite bank. So far all was very well. But their clothes! They,
alas! were upon the bank they had left!

The spirit of a host was upon me, for now I regarded them all as my
guests.

“You come ashore when you like,” I said; “I will see what can be done
about your clothes.”

I knew that just below the dam lay a little boat built by the miller’s
sons. It was clumsy enough, but in my eyes a marvel of engineering
art. On the opposite side stood the big boy braving the low-bred cur
which barked and growled at him with its ugly head stretched out like
a serpent’s; while his owner, who was probably not so unkind as we
thought him, stood enjoying the fun of it all. Reckoning upon the big
boy’s assistance, I scrambled out of the water, and sped, like
Achilles of the swift foot, for the boat. I jumped in and seized the
oars, intending to row across, and get the big boy to throw the
clothes of the party into the boat. But I had never handled an oar in
my life, and in the middle passage--how it happened I cannot tell--I
found myself floundering in the water.

Now, although you might expect that the water being dammed back just
here, it would be shallow below the dam, it was just the opposite. Had
the bottom been hard, it would have been shallow; but as the bottom
was soft and muddy, the rush of the water over the dam in the
winter-floods had here made a great hollow. There was besides another
weir a very little way below which again dammed the water back; so
that the depth was greater here than in almost any other part within
the ken of the village boys. Indeed there were horrors afloat
concerning its depth. I was but a poor swimmer, for swimming is a
natural gift, and is not equally distributed to all. I might have done
better, however, but for those stories of the awful gulf beneath me.
I was struggling and floundering, half-blind, and quite deaf, with a
sense of the water constantly getting up and stopping me, whatever I
wanted to do, when I felt myself laid hold of by the leg, dragged
under water, and a moment after landed safe on the bank. Almost the
same moment I heard a plunge, and getting up, staggering and
bewildered, saw, as through the haze of a dream, a boy swimming after
the boat, which had gone down with the slow current. I saw him
overtake it, scramble into it in midstream, and handle the oars as to
the manner born. When he had brought it back to the spot where I
stood, I knew that Peter Mason was my deliverer. Quite recovered by
this time from my slight attack of drowning, I got again into the
boat, and leaving the oars to Peter, was rowed across and landed.
There was no further difficulty. The man, alarmed, I suppose, at the
danger I had run, recalled his dog; we bundled in the clothes; Peter
rowed them across; Rory, the big boy, took the water after the boat,
and I plunged in again above the dam. For the whole of that summer and
part of the following winter, Peter was my hero, to the forgetting
even of my friend Turkey. I took every opportunity of joining him in
his games, partly from gratitude, partly from admiration, but more
than either from the simple human attraction of the boy. It was some
time before he led me into any real mischief, but it came at last.



CHAPTER XVI

I Go Down Hill


It came in the following winter.

My father had now begun to teach me as well as Tom, but I confess I
did not then value the privilege. I had got much too fond of the
society of Peter Mason, and all the time I could command I spent with
him. Always full of questionable frolic, the spirit of mischief
gathered in him as the dark nights drew on. The sun, and the wind, and
the green fields, and the flowing waters of summer kept him within
bounds; but when the ice and the snow came, when the sky was grey with
one cloud, when the wind was full of needle-points of frost and the
ground was hard as a stone, when the evenings were dark, and the sun
at noon shone low down and far away in the south, then the demon of
mischief awoke in the bosom of Peter Mason, and, this winter, I am
ashamed to say, drew me also into the net.

Nothing very bad was the result before the incident I am about to
relate. There must have been, however, a gradual declension towards
it, although the pain which followed upon this has almost obliterated
the recollection of preceding follies. Nobody does anything bad all at
once. Wickedness needs an apprenticeship as well as more difficult
trades.

It was in January, not long after the shortest day, the sun setting
about half-past three o’clock. At three school was over, and just as
we were coming out, Peter whispered to me, with one of his merriest
twinkles in his eyes:

“Come across after dark, Ranald, and we’ll have some fun.”

I promised, and we arranged when and where to meet. It was Friday, and
I had no Latin to prepare for Saturday, therefore my father did not
want me. I remember feeling very jolly as I went home to dinner, and
made the sun set ten times at least, by running up and down the
earthen wall which parted the fields from the road; for as often as I
ran up I saw him again over the shoulder of the hill, behind which he
was going down. When I had had my dinner, I was so impatient to join
Peter Mason that I could not rest, and from very idleness began to
tease wee Davie. A great deal of that nasty teasing, so common among
boys, comes of idleness. Poor Davie began to cry at last, and I,
getting more and more wicked, went on teasing him, until at length he
burst into a howl of wrath and misery, whereupon the Kelpie, who had
some tenderness for him, burst into the room, and boxed my ears
soundly. I was in a fury of rage and revenge, and had I been near
anything I could have caught up, something serious would have been the
result. In spite of my resistance, she pushed me out of the room and
locked the door. I would have complained to my father, but I was
perfectly aware that, although _she_ had no right to strike me, I had
deserved chastisement for my behaviour to my brother. I was still
boiling with anger when I set off for the village to join Mason. I
mention all this to show that I was in a bad state of mind, and thus
prepared for the wickedness which followed. I repeat, a boy never
disgraces himself all at once. He does not tumble from the top to the
bottom of the cellar stair. He goes down the steps himself till he
comes to the broken one, and then he goes to the bottom with a
rush. It will also serve to show that the enmity between Mrs. Mitchell
and me had in nowise abated, and that however excusable she might be
in the case just mentioned, she remained an evil element in the
household.

When I reached the village, I found very few people about. The night
was very cold, for there was a black frost. There had been a thaw the
day before which had carried away the most of the snow, but in the
corners lay remnants of dirty heaps which had been swept up there. I
was waiting near one of these, which happened to be at the spot where
Peter had arranged to meet me, when from a little shop near a girl
came out and walked quickly down the street. I yielded to the
temptation arising in a mind which had grown a darkness with slimy
things crawling in it. I kicked a hole in the frozen crust of the
heap, scraped out a handful of dirty snow, kneaded it into a snowball,
and sent it after the girl. It struck her on the back of the head. She
gave a cry and ran away, with her hand to her forehead.  Brute that I
was, I actually laughed. I think I must have been nearer the devil
then than I have been since. At least I hope so. For you see it was
not with me as with worse-trained boys. I knew quite well that I was
doing wrong, and refused to think about it. I felt bad inside. Peter
might have done the same thing without being half as wicked as I
was. He did not feel the wickedness of that kind of thing as I did. He
would have laughed over it merrily. But the vile dregs of my wrath
with the Kelpie were fermenting in my bosom, and the horrid pleasure I
found in annoying an innocent girl because the wicked Kelpie had made
me angry, could never have been expressed in a merry laugh like
Mason’s. The fact is, I was more displeased with myself than with
anybody else, though I did not allow it, and would not take the
trouble to repent and do the right thing. If I had even said to wee
Davie that I was sorry, I do not think I should have done the other
wicked things that followed; for this was not all by any means. In a
little while Peter joined me. He laughed, of course, when I told him
how the girl had run like a frighted hare, but that was poor fun in
his eyes.

“Look here, Ranald,” he said, holding out something like a piece of
wood.

“What is it, Peter?” I asked.

“It’s the stalk of a cabbage,” he answered. “I’ve scooped out the
inside and filled it with tow. We’ll set fire to one end, and blow the
smoke through the keyhole.”

“Whose keyhole, Peter?”

“An old witch’s that I know of. She’ll be in such a rage! It’ll be fun
to hear her cursing and swearing. We’d serve the same to every house
in the row, but that would be more than we could get off with. Come
along. Here’s a rope to tie her door with first.”

I followed him, not without inward misgivings, which I kept down as
well as I could. I argued with myself, “_I_ am not doing it; I am only
going with Peter: what business is that of anybody’s so long as I
don’t touch the thing myself?” Only a few minutes more, and I was
helping Peter to tie the rope to the latch-handle of a poor little
cottage, saying now to myself, “This doesn’t matter. This won’t do her
any harm. This isn’t smoke. And after all, smoke won’t hurt the nasty
old thing. It’ll only make her angry. It may do her cough good: I dare
say she’s got a cough.” I knew all I was saying was false, and yet I
acted on it. Was not that as wicked as wickedness could be? One moment
more, and Peter was blowing through the hollow cabbage stalk in at the
keyhole with all his might. Catching a breath of the stifling smoke
himself, however, he began to cough violently, and passed the wicked
instrument to me. I put my mouth to it, and blew with all my might. I
believe now that there was some far more objectionable stuff mingled
with the tow. In a few moments we heard the old woman begin to
cough. Peter, who was peeping in at the window, whispered--

“She’s rising. Now we’ll catch it, Ranald!”

Coughing as she came, I heard her with shuffling steps approach the
door, thinking to open it for air. When she failed in opening it, and
found besides where the smoke was coming from, she broke into a
torrent of fierce and vengeful reproaches, mingled with epithets by no
means flattering. She did not curse and swear as Peter had led me to
expect, although her language was certainly far enough from refined;
but therein I, being, in a great measure, the guilty cause, was more
to blame than she. I laughed because I would not be unworthy of my
companion, who was genuinely amused; but I was, in reality, shocked at
the tempest I had raised. I stopped blowing, aghast at what I had
done; but Peter caught the tube from my hand and recommenced the
assault with fresh vigour, whispering through the keyhole, every now
and then between the blasts, provoking, irritating, even insulting
remarks on the old woman’s personal appearance and supposed ways of
living. This threw her into paroxysms of rage and of coughing, both
increasing in violence; and the war of words grew, she tugging at the
door as she screamed, he answering merrily, and with pretended
sympathy for her sufferings, until I lost all remaining delicacy in
the humour of the wicked game, and laughed loud and heartily.

[Illustration]

Of a sudden the scolding and coughing ceased. A strange sound and
again silence followed. Then came a shrill, suppressed scream; and we
heard the voice of a girl, crying:

“Grannie! grannie! What’s the matter with you? Can’t you speak to me,
grannie? They’ve smothered my grannie!”

Sobs and moans were all we heard now. Peter had taken fright at last,
and was busy undoing the rope. Suddenly he flung the door wide and
fled, leaving me exposed to the full gaze of the girl. To my horror it
was Elsie Duff! She was just approaching the door, her eyes streaming
with tears, and her sweet face white with agony. I stood unable to
move or speak. She turned away without a word, and began again to busy
herself with the old woman, who lay on the ground not two yards from
the door. I heard a heavy step approaching. Guilt awoke fear and
restored my powers of motion. I fled at full speed, not to find Mason,
but to leave everything behind me.

When I reached the manse, it stood alone in the starry blue night.
Somehow I could not help thinking of the time when I came home after
waking up in the barn. That, too, was a time of misery, but, oh!  how
different from this! Then I had only been cruelly treated myself; now
I had actually committed cruelty. Then I sought my father’s bosom as
the one refuge; now I dreaded the very sight of my father, for I could
not look him in the face. He was my father, but I was not his son. A
hurried glance at my late life revealed that I had been behaving very
badly, growing worse and worse. I became more and more miserable as I
stood, but what to do I could not tell. The cold at length drove me
into the house. I generally sat with my father in his study of a
winter night now, but I dared not go near it. I crept to the nursery,
where I found a bright fire burning, and Allister reading by the
blaze, while Davie lay in bed at the other side of the room. I sat
down and warmed myself, but the warmth could not reach the lump of ice
at my heart. I sat and stared at the fire. Allister was too much
occupied with his book to take any heed of me. All at once I felt a
pair of little arms about my neck, and Davie was trying to climb upon
my knees. Instead of being comforted, however, I spoke very crossly,
and sent him back to his bed whimpering. You see I was only miserable;
I was not repentant. I was eating the husks with the swine, and did
not relish them; but I had not said, “I will arise and go to my
father”.

How I got through the rest of that evening I hardly know. I tried to
read, but could not. I was rather fond of arithmetic; so I got my
slate and tried to work a sum; but in a few moments I was sick of it.
At family prayers I never lifted my head to look at my father, and
when they were over, and I had said good night to him, I felt that I
was sneaking out of the room. But I had some small sense of protection
and safety when once in bed beside little Davie, who was sound asleep,
and looked as innocent as little Samuel when the voice of God was
going to call him. I put my arm round him, hugged him close to me, and
began to cry, and the crying brought me sleep.

It was a very long time now since I had dreamt my old childish dream;
but this night it returned. The old sunny-faced sun looked down upon
me very solemnly. There was no smile on his big mouth, no twinkle
about the corners of his little eyes. He looked at Mrs. Moon as much
as to say, “What is to be done? The boy has been going the wrong way:
must we disown him?” The moon neither shook her head nor moved her
lips, but turned as on a pivot, and stood with her back to her
husband, looking very miserable. Not one of the star-children moved
from its place. They shone sickly and small. In a little while they
faded out; then the moon paled and paled until she too vanished
without ever turning her face to her husband; and last the sun himself
began to change, only instead of paling he drew in all his beams, and
shrunk smaller and smaller, until no bigger than a candle-flame. Then
I found that I was staring at a candle on the table; and that Tom was
kneeling by the side of the other bed, saying his prayers.



CHAPTER XVII

The Trouble Grows


When I woke in the morning, I tried to persuade myself that I had made
a great deal too much of the whole business; that if not a dignified
thing to do, it was at worst but a boy’s trick; only I would have no
more to say to Peter Mason, who had betrayed me at the last moment
without even the temptation of any benefit to himself. I went to
school as usual. It was the day for the Shorter Catechism. None failed
but Peter and me; and we two were kept in alone, and left in the
schoolroom together. I seated myself as far from him as I could. In
half an hour he had learned his task, while I had not mastered the
half of mine. Thereupon he proceeded, regardless of my entreaties, to
prevent me learning it. I begged, and prayed, and appealed to his
pity, but he would pull the book away from me, gabble bits of ballads
in my ear as I was struggling with _Effectual Calling_, tip up the
form on which I was seated, and, in short, annoy me in twenty
different ways. At last I began to cry, for Mason was a bigger and
stronger boy than I, and I could not help myself against him. Lifting
my head after the first vexation was over, I thought I saw a shadow
pass from the window. Although I could not positively say I saw it, I
had a conviction it was Turkey, and my heart began to turn again
towards him. Emboldened by the fancied proximity, I attempted my
lesson once more, but that moment Peter was down upon me like a
spider. At last, however, growing suddenly weary of the sport, he
desisted, and said:

“Ran, you can stay if you like. I’ve learned my catechism, and I don’t
see why I should wait _his_ time.”

As he spoke he drew a picklock from his pocket--his father was an
ironmonger--deliberately opened the schoolroom door, slipped out, and
locked it behind him. Then he came to one of the windows, and began
making faces at me. But vengeance was nigher than he knew. A deeper
shadow darkened my page, and when I looked up, there was Turkey
towering over Mason, with his hand on his collar, and his whip lifted.
The whip did not look formidable. Mason received the threat as a joke,
and laughed in Turkey’s face. Perceiving, however, that Turkey looked
dangerous, with a sudden wriggle, at which he was an adept, he broke
free, and, trusting to his tried speed of foot, turned his head and
made a grimace as he took to his heels. Before, however, he could
widen the space between them sufficiently, Turkey’s whip came down
upon him. With a howl of pain Peter doubled himself up, and Turkey
fell upon him, and, heedless of his yells and cries, pommelled him
severely. Although they were now at some distance, too great for the
distinguishing of words, I could hear that Turkey mingled admonition
with punishment. A little longer, and Peter crept past the window, a
miserable mass of collapsed and unstrung impudence, his face bleared
with crying, and his knuckles dug into his eyes. And this was the boy
I had chosen for my leader! He had been false to me, I said to myself;
and the noble Turkey, seeing his behaviour through the window, had
watched to give him his deserts. My heart was full of gratitude.

Once more Turkey drew near the window. What was my dismay and
indignation to hear him utter the following words:

“If you weren’t your father’s son, Ranald, and my own old friend, I
would serve you just the same.”

Wrath and pride arose in me at the idea of Turkey, who used to call
himself my horse, behaving to me after this fashion; and, my evil ways
having half made a sneak of me, I cried out:

“I’ll tell my father, Turkey.”

“I only wish you would, and then I should be no tell-tale if he asked
me why, and I told him all about it. You young blackguard! You’re no
gentleman! To sneak about the streets and hit girls with snowballs!  I
scorn you!”

“You must have been watching, then, Turkey, and you had no business to
do that,” I said, plunging at any defence.

“I was not watching you. But if I had been, it would have been just as
right as watching Hawkie. You ill-behaved creature! You’re a true
minister’s son.”

“It’s a mean thing to do, Turkey,” I persisted, seeking to stir up my
own anger and blow up my self-approval.

“I tell you I did not do it. I met Elsie Duff crying in the street
because you had hit her with a dirty snowball. And then to go and
smoke her and her poor grannie, till the old woman fell down in a
faint or a fit, I don’t know which! You deserve a good pommelling
yourself, I can tell you, Ranald. I’m ashamed of you.”

He turned to go away.

“Turkey, Turkey,” I cried, “isn’t the old woman better?”

“I don’t know. I’m going to see,” he answered.

“Come back and tell me, Turkey,” I shouted, as he disappeared from the
field of my vision.

“Indeed I won’t. I don’t choose to keep company with such as you. But
if ever I hear of you touching them again, you shall have more of me
than you’ll like, and you may tell your father so when you please.”

I had indeed sunk low when Turkey, who had been such a friend, would
have nothing to say to me more. In a few minutes the master returned,
and finding me crying, was touched with compassion. He sent me home at
once, which was well for me, as I could not have repeated a single
question. He thought Peter had crept through one of the panes that
opened for ventilation, and did not interrogate me about his
disappearance.

The whole of the rest of that day was miserable enough. I even
hazarded one attempt at making friends with Mrs. Mitchell, but she
repelled me so rudely that I did not try again. I could not bear the
company of either Allister or Davie. I would have gone and told
Kirsty, but I said to myself that Turkey must have already prejudiced
her against me. I went to bed the moment prayers were over, and slept
a troubled sleep. I dreamed that Turkey had gone and told my father,
and that he had turned me out of the house.



CHAPTER XVIII

Light out of Darkness


I woke early on the Sunday morning, and a most dreary morning it
was. I could not lie in bed, and, although no one was up yet, rose and
dressed myself. The house was as waste as a sepulchre. I opened the
front door and went out. The world itself was no better. The day had
hardly begun to dawn. The dark dead frost held it in chains of iron.
The sky was dull and leaden, and cindery flakes of snow were thinly
falling. Everywhere life looked utterly dreary and hopeless. What was
there worth living for? I went out on the road, and the ice in the
ruts crackled under my feet like the bones of dead things. I wandered
away from the house, and the keen wind cut me to the bone, for I had
not put on plaid or cloak. I turned into a field, and stumbled along
over its uneven surface, swollen into hard frozen lumps, so that it
was like walking upon stones. The summer was gone and the winter was
here, and my heart was colder and more miserable than any winter in
the world. I found myself at length at the hillock where Turkey and I
had lain on that lovely afternoon the year before. The stream below
was dumb with frost. The wind blew wearily but sharply across the bare
field. There was no Elsie Duff, with head drooping over her knitting,
seated in the summer grass on the other side of a singing brook. Her
head was aching on her pillow because I had struck her with that vile
lump; and instead of the odour of white clover she was breathing the
dregs of the hateful smoke with which I had filled the cottage. I sat
down, cold as it was, on the frozen hillock, and buried my face in my
hands. Then my dream returned upon me. This was how I sat in my dream
when my father had turned me out-of-doors. Oh how dreadful it would
be! I should just have to lie down and die.

I could not sit long for the cold. Mechanically I rose and paced
about. But I grew so wretched in body that it made me forget for a
while the trouble of my mind, and I wandered home again. The house was
just stirring. I crept to the nursery, undressed, and lay down beside
little Davie, who cried out in his sleep when my cold feet touched
him. But I did not sleep again, although I lay till all the rest had
gone to the parlour. I found them seated round a blazing fire waiting
for my father. He came in soon after, and we had our breakfast, and
Davie gave his crumbs as usual to the robins and sparrows which came
hopping on the window-sill. I fancied my father’s eyes were often
turned in my direction, but I could not lift mine to make sure. I had
never before known what misery was.

Only Tom and I went to church that day: it was so cold. My father
preached from the text, “Be sure your sin shall find you out”. I
thought with myself that he had found out my sin, and was preparing to
punish me for it, and I was filled with terror as well as dismay. I
could scarcely keep my seat, so wretched was I. But when after many
instances in which punishment had come upon evil-doers when they least
expected it, and in spite of every precaution to fortify themselves
against it, he proceeded to say that a man’s sin might find him out
long before the punishment of it overtook him, and drew a picture of
the misery of the wicked man who fled when none pursued him, and
trembled at the rustling of a leaf, then I was certain that he knew
what I had done, or had seen through my face into my conscience. When
at last we went home, I kept waiting the whole of the day for the
storm to break, expecting every moment to be called to his study. I
did not enjoy a mouthful of my food, for I felt his eyes upon me, and
they tortured me. I was like a shy creature of the woods whose hole
had been stopped up: I had no place of refuge--nowhere to hide my
head; and I felt so naked!

My very soul was naked. After tea I slunk away to the nursery, and sat
staring into the fire. Mrs. Mitchell came in several times and scolded
me for sitting there, instead of with Tom and the rest in the parlour,
but I was too miserable even to answer her. At length she brought
Davie, and put him to bed; and a few minutes after, I heard my father
coming down the stair with Allister, who was chatting away to him. I
wondered how he could. My father came in with the big Bible under his
arm, as was his custom on Sunday nights, drew a chair to the table,
rang for candles, and with Allister by his side and me seated opposite
to him, began to find a place from which to read to us. To my yet
stronger conviction, he began and read through without a word of
remark the parable of the Prodigal Son. When he came to the father’s
delight at having him back, the robe, and the shoes, and the ring, I
could not repress my tears. “If I could only go back,” I thought, “and
set it all right! but then I’ve never gone away.” It was a foolish
thought, instantly followed by a longing impulse to tell my father all
about it. How could it be that I had not thought of this before? I had
been waiting all this time for my sin to find me out; why should I not
frustrate my sin, and find my father first?

As soon as he had done reading, and before he had opened his mouth to
make any remark, I crept round the table to his side, and whispered in
his ear,--

“Papa, I want to speak to you.”

“Very well, Ranald,” he said, more solemnly, I thought, than usual;
“come up to the study.”

[Illustration]

He rose and led the way, and I followed. A whimper of disappointment
came from Davie’s bed. My father went and kissed him, and said he
would soon be back, whereupon Davie nestled down satisfied.

When we reached the study, he closed the door, sat down by the fire,
and drew me towards him.

I burst out crying, and could not speak for sobs. He encouraged me
most kindly. He said--

“Have you been doing anything wrong, my boy?”

“Yes, papa, very wrong,” I sobbed. “I’m disgusted with myself.”

“I am glad to hear it, my dear,” he returned. “There is some hope of
you, then.”

“Oh! I don’t know that,” I rejoined. “Even Turkey despises me.”

“That’s very serious,” said my father. “He’s a fine fellow, Turkey. I
should not like him to despise me. But tell me all about it.”

It was with great difficulty I could begin, but with the help of
questioning me, my father at length understood the whole matter. He
paused for a while plunged in thought; then rose, saying,--

“It’s a serious affair, my dear boy; but now you have told me, I shall
be able to help you.”

“But you knew about it before, didn’t you, papa? Surely you did!”

“Not a word of it, Ranald. You fancied so because your sin had found
you out. I must go and see how the poor woman is. I don’t want to
reproach you at all, now you are sorry, but I should like you just to
think that you have been helping to make that poor old woman wicked.
She is naturally of a sour disposition, and you have made it sourer
still, and no doubt made her hate everybody more than she was already
inclined to do. You have been working against God in this parish.”

I burst into fresh tears. It was too dreadful.

“What _am_ I to do?” I cried.

“Of course you must beg Mrs. Gregson’s pardon, and tell her that you
are both sorry and ashamed.”

“Yes, yes, papa. Do let me go with you.”

“It’s too late to find her up, I’m afraid; but we can just go and
see. We’ve done a wrong, a very grievous wrong, my boy, and I cannot
rest till I at least know the consequences of it.”

He put on his long greatcoat and muffler in haste, and having seen
that I too was properly wrapped up, he opened the door and stepped
out. But remembering the promise he had made to Davie, he turned and
went down to the nursery to speak to him again, while I awaited him on
the doorsteps. It would have been quite dark but for the stars, and
there was no snow to give back any of their shine. The earth swallowed
all their rays, and was no brighter for it. But oh, what a change to
me from the frightful morning! When my father returned, I put my hand
in his almost as fearlessly as Allister or wee Davie might have done,
and away we walked together.

“Papa,” I said, “why did you say _we_ have done a wrong? You did not
do it.”

“My dear boy, persons who are so near each other as we are, must not
only bear the consequences together of any wrong done by one of them,
but must, in a sense, bear each other’s iniquities even. If I sin, you
must suffer; if you sin, you being my own boy, I must suffer. But this
is not all: it lies upon both of us to do what we can to get rid of
the wrong done; and thus we have to bear each other’s sin. I am
accountable to make amends as far as I can; and also to do what I can
to get you to be sorry and make amends as far as you can.”

“But, papa, isn’t that hard?” I asked.

“Do you think I should like to leave you to get out of your sin as you
best could, or sink deeper and deeper into it? Should I grudge
anything to take the weight of the sin, or the wrong to others, off
you? Do you think I should want not to be troubled about it? Or if I
were to do anything wrong, would you think it very hard that you had
to help me to be good, and set things right? Even if people looked
down upon you because of me, would you say it was hard? Would you not
rather say, ‘I’m glad to bear anything for my father: I’ll share with
him’?”

“Yes, indeed, papa. I would rather share with you than not, whatever
it was.”

“Then you see, my boy, how kind God is in tying us up in one bundle
that way. It is a grand and beautiful thing that the fathers should
suffer for the children, and the children for the fathers. Come
along. We must step out, or I fear we shall not be able to make our
apology to-night. When we’ve got over this, Ranald, we must be a good
deal more careful what company we keep.”

“Oh, papa,” I answered, “if Turkey would only forgive me!”

“There’s no fear. Turkey is sure to forgive you when you’ve done what
you can to make amends. He’s a fine fellow, Turkey. I have a high
opinion of Turkey--as you call him.”

“If he would, papa, I should not wish for any other company than his.”

“A boy wants various kinds of companions, Ranald, but I fear you have
been neglecting Turkey. You owe him much.”

“Yes, indeed I do, papa,” I answered; “and I have been neglecting
him. If I had kept with Turkey, I should never have got into such a
dreadful scrape as this.”

“That is too light a word to use for it, my boy. Don’t call a
wickedness a scrape; for a wickedness it certainly was, though I am
only too willing to believe you had no adequate idea at the time _how_
wicked it was.”

“I won’t again, papa. But I am so relieved already.”

“Perhaps poor old Mrs. Gregson is not relieved, though. You ought not
to forget her.”

Thus talking, we hurried on until we arrived at the cottage. A dim
light was visible through the window. My father knocked, and Elsie
Duff opened the door.



CHAPTER XIX

Forgiveness


When we entered, there sat the old woman on the farther side of the
hearth, rocking herself to and fro. I hardly dared look up. Elsie’s
face was composed and sweet. She gave me a shy tremulous smile, which
went to my heart and humbled me dreadfully. My father took the stool
on which Elsie had been sitting. When he had lowered himself upon it,
his face was nearly on a level with that of the old woman, who took no
notice of him, but kept rocking herself to and fro and moaning. He
laid his hand on hers, which, old and withered and not very clean, lay
on her knee.

“How do you find yourself to-night, Mrs. Gregson?” he asked.

“I’m an ill-used woman,” she replied with a groan, behaving as if it
was my father who had maltreated her, and whose duty it was to make an
apology for it.

“I am aware of what you mean, Mrs. Gregson. That is what brought me to
inquire after you. I hope you are not seriously the worse for it.”

“I’m an ill-used woman,” she repeated. “Every man’s hand’s against
me.”

“Well, I hardly think that,” said my father in a cheerful tone. “_My_
hand’s not against you now.”

“If you bring up your sons, Mr. Bannerman, to mock at the poor, and
find their amusement in driving the aged and infirm to death’s door,
you can’t say your hand’s not against a poor lone woman like me.”

“But I don’t bring up my sons to do so. If I did I shouldn’t be here
now. I am willing to bear my part of the blame, Mrs. Gregson, but to
say I bring my sons up to that kind of wickedness, is to lay on me
more than my share, a good deal.--Come here, Ranald.”

I obeyed with bowed head and shame-stricken heart, for I saw what
wrong I had done my father, and that although few would be so unjust
to him as this old woman, many would yet blame the best man in the
world for the wrongs of his children. When I stood by my father’s
side, the old woman just lifted her head once to cast on me a scowling
look, and then went on again rocking herself.

“Now, my boy,” said my father, “tell Mrs. Gregson why you have come
here to-night.”

I had to use a dreadful effort to make myself speak. It was like
resisting a dumb spirit and forcing the words from my lips. But I did
not hesitate a moment. In fact, I dared not hesitate, for I felt that
hesitation would be defeat.

“I came, papa----” I began.

“No no, my man,” said my father; “you must speak to Mrs. Gregson, not
to me.”

Thereupon I had to make a fresh effort. When at this day I see a child
who will not say the words required of him, I feel again just as I
felt then, and think how difficult it is for him to do what he is
told; but oh, how I wish he would do it, that he might be a conqueror
I for I know that if he will not make the effort, it will grow more
and more difficult for him to make any effort. I cannot be too
thankful that I was able to overcome now.

“I came, Mrs. Gregson,” I faltered, “to tell you that I am very sorry
I behaved so ill to you.”

“Yes, indeed,” she returned. “How would you like anyone to come and
serve you so in your grand house? But a poor lone widow woman like me
is nothing to be thought of. Oh no! not at all.”

“I am ashamed of myself,” I said, almost forcing my confession upon
her.

“So you ought to be all the days of your life. You deserve to be
drummed out of the town for a minister’s son that you are! Hoo!”

“I’ll never do it again, Mrs. Gregson.”

“You’d better not, or you shall hear of it, if there’s a sheriff in
the county. To insult honest people after that fashion!”

I drew back, more than ever conscious of the wrong I had done in
rousing such unforgiving fierceness in the heart of a woman. My father
spoke now.

“Shall I tell you, Mrs. Gregson, what made the boy sorry, and made him
willing to come and tell you all about it?”

“Oh, I’ve got friends after all. The young prodigal!”

“You are coming pretty near it, Mrs. Gregson,” said my father; “but
you haven’t touched it quite. It was a friend of yours that spoke to
my boy and made him very unhappy about what he had done, telling him
over and over again what a shame it was, and how wicked of him. Do you
know what friend it was?”

“Perhaps I do, and perhaps I don’t. I can guess.”

“I fear you don’t guess quite correctly. It was the best friend you
ever had or ever will have. It was God himself talking in my poor
boy’s heart. He would not heed what he said all day, but in the
evening we were reading how the prodigal son went back to his father,
and how the father forgave him; and he couldn’t stand it any longer,
and came and told me all about it.”

“It wasn’t you he had to go to. It wasn’t you he smoked to death--was
it now? It was easy enough to go to you.”

“Not so easy perhaps. But he has come to you now.”

“Come when you made him!”

“I didn’t make him. He came gladly. He saw it was all he could do to
make up for the wrong he had done.”

“A poor amends!” I heard her grumble; but my father took no notice.

“And you know, Mrs. Gregson,” he went on, “when the prodigal son did
go back to his father, his father forgave him at once.”

“Easy enough! He was his father, and fathers always side with their
sons.”

I saw my father thinking for a moment.

“Yes; that is true,” he said. “And what he does himself, he always
wants his sons and daughters to do. So he tells us that if we don’t
forgive one another, he will not forgive us. And as we all want to be
forgiven, we had better mind what we’re told. If you don’t forgive
this boy, who has done you a great wrong, but is sorry for it, God
will not forgive you--and that’s a serious affair.”

“He’s never begged my pardon yet,” said the old woman, whose dignity
required the utter humiliation of the offender.

“I beg your pardon, Mrs. Gregson,” I said. “I shall never be rude to
you again.”

“Very well,” she answered, a little mollified at last.

“Keep your promise, and we’ll say no more about it. It’s for your
father’s sake, mind, that I forgive you.”

I saw a smile trembling about my father’s lips, but he suppressed it,
saying,

“Won’t you shake hands with him, Mrs. Gregson?”

She held out a poor shrivelled hand, which I took very gladly; but it
felt so strange in mine that I was frightened at it: it was like
something half dead. But at the same moment, from behind me another
hand, a rough little hand, but warm and firm and all alive, slipped
into my left hand. I knew it was Elsie Duff’s, and the thought of how
I had behaved to her rushed in upon me with a cold misery of shame. I
would have knelt at her feet, but I could not speak my sorrow before
witnesses. Therefore I kept hold of her hand and led her by it to the
other end of the cottage, for there was a friendly gloom, the only
light in the place coming from the glow--not flame--of a fire of peat
and bark. She came readily, whispering before I had time to open my
mouth--

I’m sorry grannie’s so hard to make it up.”

“I deserve it,” I said. “Elsie, I’m a brute. I could knock my head on
the wall. Please forgive me.”

“It’s not me,” she answered. “You didn’t hurt me. I didn’t mind it.”

“Oh, Elsie! I struck you with that horrid snowball.”

“It was only on the back of my neck. It didn’t hurt me much. It only
frightened me.”

“I didn’t know it was you. If I had known, I am sure I shouldn’t have
done it. But it was wicked and contemptible anyhow, to any girl.”

I broke down again, half from shame, half from the happiness of having
cast my sin from me by confessing it. Elsie held my hand now.

“Never mind; never mind,” she said; “you won’t do it again.”

“I would rather be hanged,” I sobbed.

That moment a pair of strong hands caught hold of mine, and the next I
found myself being hoisted on somebody’s back, by a succession of
heaves and pitches, which did not cease until I was firmly seated.
Then a voice said--

“I’m his horse again, Elsie, and I’ll carry him home this very night.”

Elsie gave a pleased little laugh; and Turkey bore me to the fireside,
where my father was talking away in a low tone to the old woman. I
believe he had now turned the tables upon her, and was trying to
convince her of her unkind and grumbling ways. But he did not let us
hear a word of the reproof.

“Eh! Turkey, my lad! is that you? I didn’t know you were there,” he
said.

I had never before heard my father address him as Turkey.

“What are you doing with that great boy upon your back?” he continued.

“I’m going to carry him home, sir.”

“Nonsense! He can walk well enough.”

Half ashamed, I began to struggle to get down, but Turkey held me
tight.

“But you see, sir,” said Turkey, “we’re friends now. _He’s_ done what
he could, and _I_ want to do what I can.”

“Very well,” returned my father, rising; “come along; it’s time we
were going.”

When he bade her good night, the old woman actually rose and held out
her hand to both of us.

“Good night, Grannie,” said Turkey. “Good night, Elsie.” And away we
went.

Never conqueror on his triumphal entry was happier than I, as through
the starry night I rode home on Turkey’s back. The very stars seemed
rejoicing over my head. When I think of it now, the words always come
with it, “There is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one
sinner that repenteth,” and I cannot but believe they rejoiced then,
for if ever I repented in my life I repented then. When at length I
was down in bed beside Davie, it seemed as if there could be nobody in
the world so blessed as I was: I had been forgiven. When I woke in the
morning, I was as it were new born into a new world. Before getting up
I had a rare game with Davie, whose shrieks of laughter at length
brought Mrs. Mitchell with angry face; but I found myself kindly
disposed even towards her. The weather was much the same; but its
dreariness had vanished. There was a glowing spot in my heart which
drove out the cold, and glorified the black frost that bound the
earth. When I went out before breakfast, and saw the red face of the
sun looking through the mist like a bright copper kettle, he seemed to
know all about it, and to be friends with me as he had never been
before; and I was quite as well satisfied as if the sun of my dream
had given me a friendly nod of forgiveness.

[Illustration]



CHAPTER XX

I Have a Fall and a Dream


Elsie Duff’s father was a farm-labourer, with a large family. He was
what is called a cottar in Scotland, which name implies that of the
large farm upon which he worked for yearly wages he had a little bit
of land to cultivate for his own use. His wife’s mother was Grannie
Gregson. She was so old that she needed someone to look after her, but
she had a cottage of her own in the village, and would not go and live
with her daughter, and, indeed, they were not anxious to have her, for
she was not by any means a pleasant person. So there was no help for
it: Elsie must go and be her companion. It was a great trial to her at
first, for her home was a happy one, her mother being very unlike her
grandmother; and, besides, she greatly preferred the open fields to
the streets of the village. She did not grumble, however, for where is
the good of grumbling where duty is plain, or even when a thing cannot
be helped? She found it very lonely though, especially when her
grannie was in one of her gloomy moods. Then she would not answer a
question, but leave the poor girl to do what she thought best, and
complain of it afterwards. This was partly the reason why her parents,
towards the close of the spring, sent a little brother, who was too
delicate to be of much use at home, to spend some months with his
grannie, and go to school. The intention had been that Elsie herself
should go to school, but what with the cow and her grandmother
together she had not been able to begin. Of course grannie grumbled at
the proposal, but, as Turkey, my informant on these points, explained,
she was afraid lest, if she objected, they should take Elsie away and
send a younger sister in her place. So little Jamie Duff came to the
school.

He was a poor little white-haired, red-eyed boy, who found himself
very much out of his element there. Some of the bigger boys imagined
it good fun to tease him; but on the whole he was rather a favourite,
for he looked so pitiful, and took everything so patiently. For my
part, I was delighted at the chance of showing Elsie Duff some
kindness through her brother. The girl’s sweetness clung to me, and
not only rendered it impossible for me to be rude to any girl, but
kept me awake to the occurrence of any opportunity of doing something
for her sake. Perceiving one day, before the master arrived, that
Jamie was shivering with cold, I made way for him where I stood by the
fire; and then found that he had next to nothing upon his little body,
and that the soles of his shoes were hanging half off. This in the
month of March in the north of Scotland was bad enough, even if he had
not had a cough. I told my father when I went home, and he sent me to
tell Mrs. Mitchell to look out some old garments of Allister’s for
him; but she declared there were none. When I told Turkey this he
looked very grave, but said nothing. When I told my father, he desired
me to take the boy to the tailor and shoemaker, and get warm and
strong clothes and shoes made for him. I was proud enough of the
commission, and if I did act the grand benefactor a little, I have not
yet finished the penance of it, for it never comes into my mind
without bringing its shame with it. Of how many people shall I not
have to beg the precious forgiveness when I meet them in the other
world! For the sake of this penal shame, I confess I let the little
fellow walk behind me, as I took him through the streets. Perhaps I
may say this for myself, that I never thought of demanding any service
of him in return for mine: I was not so bad as that. And I was true in
heart to him notwithstanding my pride, for I had a real affection for
him. I had not seen his sister--to speak to I mean--since that Sunday
night.

One Saturday afternoon, as we were having a game something like hare
and hounds, I was running very hard through the village, when I set my
foot on a loose stone, and had a violent fall. When I got up, I saw
Jamie Duff standing by my side, with a face of utter consternation. I
discovered afterwards that he was in the way of following me about.
Finding the blood streaming down my face, and remarking when I came to
myself a little that I was very near the house where Turkey’s mother
lived, I crawled thither, and up the stairs to her garret, Jamie
following in silence. I found her busy as usual at her wheel, and
Elsie Duff stood talking to her, as if she had just run in for a
moment and must not sit down. Elsie gave a little cry when she saw the
state I was in, and Turkey’s mother got up and made me take her chair
while she hastened to get some water. I grew faint, and lost my
consciousness. When I came to myself I was leaning against Elsie,
whose face was as white as a sheet with dismay. I took a little water
and soon began to revive.

When Turkey’s mother had tied up my head, I rose to go home, but she
persuaded me to lie down a while. I was not unwilling to comply. What
a sense of blissful repose pervaded me, weary with running, and
perhaps faint with loss of blood, when I stretched myself on the bed,
whose patchwork counterpane, let me say for Turkey’s mother, was as
clean as any down quilt in chambers of the rich. I remember so well
how a single ray of sunlight fell on the floor from the little window
in the roof, just on the foot that kept turning the spinning-wheel.
Its hum sounded sleepy in my ears. I gazed at the sloping ray of
light, in which the ceaseless rotation of the swift wheel kept the
motes dancing most busily, until at length to my half-closed eyes it
became a huge Jacob’s ladder, crowded with an innumerable company of
ascending and descending angels, and I thought it must be the same
ladder I used to see in my dream. The drowsy delight which follows on
the loss of blood possessed me, and the little garret with the
slanting roof, and its sloping sun-ray, and the whirr of the wheel,
and the form of the patient woman that span, had begun to gather about
them the hues of Paradise to my slowly fading senses, when I heard a
voice that sounded miles away, and yet close to my ear:

“Elsie, sing a little song, will you?”

I heard no reply. A pause followed, and then a voice, clear and
melodious as a brook, began to sing, and before it ceased, I was
indeed in a kind of paradise.

[Illustration]

But here I must pause. Shall I be breaking my promise of not a word of
Scotch in my story, if I give the song? True it is not a part of the
story exactly, but it is in it. If my reader would like the song, he
must have it in Scotch or not at all. I am not going to spoil it by
turning it out of its own natural clothes into finer garments to which
it was not born--I mean by translating it from Scotch into English.
The best way will be this: I give the song as something extra--call it
a footnote slipped into the middle of the page. Nobody needs read a
word of it to understand the story; and being in smaller type and a
shape of its own, it can be passed over without the least trouble.

                     SONG

Oh! the bonny, bonny dell, whaur the yorlin[1] sings,
Wi’ a clip o’ the sunshine atween his wings;
Whaur the birks[2] are a’ straikit wi’ fair munelicht,
And the broom hings its lamps by day and by nicht;
Whaur the burnie comes trottin’ ower shingle and stane,
Liltin’ [3] bonny havers[4] til ‘tsel alane;
And the sliddery[5] troot, wi’ ae soop o’ its tail,
Is awa’ ‘neath the green weed’s swingin’ veil!
Oh! the bonny, bonny dell, whaur I sang as I saw
The yorlin, the broom, an’ the burnie, an’ a’!

Oh! the bonny, bonny dell, whaur the primroses wonn,
Luikin’ oot o’ their leaves like wee sons o’ the sun;
Whaur the wild roses hing like flickers o’ flame,
And fa’ at the touch wi’ a dainty shame;
Whaur the bee swings ower the white clovery sod,
And the butterfly flits like a stray thoucht o’ God;
Whaur, like arrow shot frae life’s unseen bow,
The dragon-fly burns the sunlicht throu’!
Oh! the bonny, bonny dell, whaur I sang to see
The rose and the primrose, the draigon and bee!

Oh! the bonny, bonny dell, whaur the mune luiks doon,
As gin she war hearin’ a soundless tune,
Whan the flowers an’ the birds are a’ asleep,
And the verra burnie gangs creepy-creep;
Whaur the corn-craik craiks in the lang lang rye,
And the nicht is the safter for his rouch cry;
Whaur the wind wad fain lie doon on the slope,
And the verra darkness owerflows wi’ hope!
Oh! the bonny, bonny dell, whaur, silent, I felt
The mune an’ the darkness baith into me melt.

Oh! the bonny, bonny dell, whaur the sun luiks in,
Sayin’, Here awa’, there awa’, baud awa’, sin!
Wi’ the licht o’ God in his flashin’ ee,
Sayin’, Darkness and sorrow a’ work for me!
Whaur the lark springs up on his ain sang borne,
Wi’ bird-shout and jubilee hailin’ the morn;
For his hert is fu’ o’ the hert o’ the licht,
An’, come darkness or winter, a’ maun be richt!
Oh! the bonny, bonny dell, whaur the sun luikit in,
Sayin’, Here awa’, there awa’, hand awa’, sin.

Oh! the bonny, bonny dell, whaur I used to lie
Wi’ Jeanie aside me, sae sweet and sae shy!
Whaur the wee white gowan wi’ reid reid tips,
Was as white as her cheek and as reid as her lips.
Oh, her ee had a licht cam frae far ‘yont the sun,
And her tears cam frae deeper than salt seas run!
O’ the sunlicht and munelicht she was the queen,
For baith war but middlin’ withoot my Jean.
Oh! the bonny, bonny dell, whaur I used to lie
Wi’ Jeanie aside me, sae sweet and sae shy!

Oh! the bonny, bonny dell, whaur the kirkyard lies,
A’ day and a’ nicht, luikin’ up to the skies;
Whaur the sheep wauk up i’ the summer nicht,
Tak a bite, and lie doon, and await the licht;
Whaur the psalms roll ower the grassy heaps,
And the wind comes and moans, and the rain comes and
weeps!

But Jeanie, my Jeanie--she’s no lyin’ there,
For she’s up and awa’ up the angels’ stair.
Oh! the bonny, bonny dell, whaur the kirkyard lies,
And the stars luik doon, and the nicht-wind sighs!

[Footnote 1: The Yellow-hammer.]

[Footnote 2: Birch-trees.]

[Footnote 3: Singing.]

[Footnote 4: Nonsense.]

[Footnote 5: Slippery.]

Elsie’s voice went through every corner of my brain: there was singing
in all its chambers. I could not hear the words of the song well
enough to understand them quite; but Turkey gave me a copy of them
afterwards. They were the schoolmaster’s work. All the winter, Turkey
had been going to the evening school, and the master had been greatly
pleased with him, and had done his best to get him on in various ways.
A friendship sprung up between them; and one night he showed Turkey
these verses. Where the air came from, I do not know: Elsie’s brain
was full of tunes. I repeated them to my father once, and he was
greatly pleased with them.

On this first acquaintance, however, they put me to sleep; and little
Jamie Duff was sent over to tell my father what had happened. Jamie
gave the message to Mrs. Mitchell, and she, full of her own
importance, must needs set out to see how much was the matter.

I was dreaming an unutterably delicious dream. It was a summer
evening. The sun was of a tremendous size, and of a splendid
rose-colour. He was resting with his lower edge on the horizon, and
dared go no farther, because all the flowers would sing instead of
giving out their proper scents, and if he left them, he feared utter
anarchy in his kingdom before he got back in the morning. I woke and
saw the ugly face of Mrs. Mitchell bending over me. She was pushing
me, and calling to me to wake up. The moment I saw her I shut my eyes
tight, turned away, and pretended to be fast asleep again, in the hope
that she would go away and leave me with my friends.

“Do let him have his sleep out, Mrs. Mitchell,” said Turkey’s mother.

“You’ve let him sleep too long already,” she returned, ungraciously.
“He’ll do all he can, waking or sleeping, to make himself troublesome.
He’s a ne’er-do-well, Ranald. Little good’ll ever come of him. It’s a
mercy his mother is under the mould, for he would have broke

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