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

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


SIR GIBBIE.


BY

GEORGE MACDONALD, LL.D.




CONTENTS

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




CHAPTER I.

THE EARRING.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER II.

SIR GEORGE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER III.

MISTRESS CROALE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“My good woman,--”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER IV.

THE PARLOUR.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER V.

GIBBIE’S CALLING.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER VI.

A SUNDAY AT HOME.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gibbie shook his head with positive repudiation.

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

Here followed another gulp from the mug.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER VII.

THE TOWN-SPARROW.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER VIII.

SAMBO.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER IX.

ADRIFT.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER X.

THE BARN.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER XI.

JANET.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Come yer wa’s in, whae’er ye be.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER XII.

GLASHGAR.

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER XIII.

THE CEILING.

He might have slept longer the next morning, for there was no threshing
to wake him, in spite of the cocks in the yard that made it their
business to rouse sleepers to their work, had it not been for another
kind of cock inside him, which bore the same relation to food that the
others bore to light. He peeped first, then crept out. All was still
except the voices of those same prophet cocks, crying in the wilderness
of the yet sunless world; a moo now and then from the byres; and the
occasional stamp of a great hoof in the stable. Gibbie clambered up
into the loft, and turning the cheeses about until he came upon the one
he had gnawed before, again attacked it, and enlarged considerably the
hole he had already made in it. Rather dangerous food it was, perhaps,
eaten in that unmitigated way, for it was made of skimmed milk, and was
very dry and hard; but Gibbie was a powerful little animal, all bones
and sinews, small hard muscle, and faultless digestion. The next idea
naturally rising was the burn; he tumbled down over the straw heap to
the floor of the barn, and made for the cat-hole. But the moment he
put his head out, he saw the legs of a man: the farmer was walking
through his ricks, speculating on the money they held. He drew back,
and looked round to see where best he could betake himself should he
come in. He spied thereupon a ladder leaning against the end-wall
of the barn, opposite the loft and the stables, and near it in the
wall a wooden shutter, like the door of a little cupboard. He got up
the ladder, and opening the shutter, which was fastened only with a
button, found a hole in the wall, through which popping his head too
carelessly, he knocked from a shelf some piece of pottery, which fell
with a great crash on a paved floor. Looking after it, Gibbie beheld
below him a rich prospect of yellow-white pools ranged in order on
shelves. They reminded him of milk, but were of a different colour. As
he gazed, a door opened hastily, with sharp clicking latch, and a woman
entered, ejaculating, “Care what set that cat!” Gibbie drew back, lest
in her search for the cat she might find the culprit. She looked all
round, muttering such truncated imprecations as befitted the mouth of a
Scotchwoman; but as none of her milk was touched, her wrath gradually
abated: she picked up the fragments and withdrew.

Thereupon Gibbie ventured to reconnoitre a little farther, and popping
in his head again, saw that the dairy was open to the roof, but the
door was in a partition which did not run so high. The place from which
the woman entered, was ceiled, and the ceiling rested on the partition
between it and the dairy; so that, from a shelf level with the hole, he
could easily enough get on the top of the ceiling. This, urged by the
instinct of the homeless to understand their surroundings, he presently
effected, by creeping like a cat along the top shelf.

The ceiling was that of the kitchen, and was merely of boards, which,
being old and shrunken, had here and there a considerable crack
between two, and Gibbie, peeping through one after another of these
cracks, soon saw several things he did not understand. Of such was a
barrel-churn, which he took for a barrel-organ, and welcomed as a sign
of civilization. The woman was sweeping the room towards the hearth,
where the peat fire was already burning, with a great pot hanging over
it, covered with a wooden lid. When the water in it was hot, she poured
it into a large wooden dish, in which she began to wash other dishes,
thus giving the observant Gibbie his first notion of housekeeping. Then
she scoured the deal table, dusted the bench and the chairs, arranged
the dishes on shelves and rack, except a few which she placed on the
table, put more water on the fire, and disappeared in the dairy. Thence
presently she returned, carrying a great jar, which, to Gibbie’s
astonishment, having lifted a lid in the top of the churn, she emptied
into it; he was not, therefore, any farther astonished, when she began
to turn the handle vigorously, that no music issued. As to what else
might be expected, Gibbie had not even a mistaken idea. But the butter
_came_ quickly that morning, and then he did have another astonishment,
for he saw a great mass of something half-solid tumbled out where he
had seen a liquid poured in--nor that alone, for the liquid came out
again too! But when at length he saw the mass, after being well washed,
moulded into certain shapes, he recognized it as butter, such as he had
seen in the shops, and had now and then tasted on the _piece_ given
him by some more than usually generous housekeeper. Surely he had
wandered into a region of plenty! Only now, when he saw the woman busy
and careful, the idea of things in the country being a sort of common
property began to fade from his mind, and the perception to wake that
they were as the things in the shops, which must not be touched without
first paying money for them over a counter.

The butter-making, brought to a successful close, the woman proceeded
to make porridge for the men’s breakfast, and with hungry eyes Gibbie
watched that process next. The water in the great pot boiling like
a wild volcano, she took handful after handful of meal from a great
wooden dish, called a _bossie_, and threw it into the pot, stirring as
she threw, until the mess was presently so thick that she could no more
move the _spurtle_ in it; and scarcely had she emptied it into another
great wooden bowl, called a _bicker_, when Gibbie heard the heavy tramp
of the men crossing the yard to consume it.

For the last few minutes, Gibbie’s nostrils--alas! not Gibbie--had been
regaled with the delicious odour of the boiling meal; and now his eyes
had their turn--but still, alas, not Gibbie! Prostrate on the ceiling
he lay and watched the splendid spoonfuls tumble out of sight into the
capacious throats of four men; all took their spoonfuls from the same
dish, but each dipped his spoonful into his private _caup_ of milk,
ere he carried it to his mouth. A little apart sat a boy, whom the
woman seemed to favour, having provided him with a plateful of porridge
by himself, but the fact was, four were as many as could _bicker_
comfortably, or with any chance of fair play. The boy’s countenance
greatly attracted Gibbie. It was a long, solemn face, but the eyes
were bright-blue and sparkling; and when he smiled, which was not very
often, it was a good and meaningful smile.

When the meal was over, and he saw the little that was left, with all
the drops of milk from the _caups_, tumbled into a common receptacle,
to be kept, he thought, for the next meal, poor Gibbie felt very empty
and forsaken. He crawled away sad at heart, with nothing before him
except a drink of water at the burn. He might have gone to the door
of the house, in the hope of a bit of cake, but now that he had seen
something of the doings in the house and of the people who lived in
it--as soon, that is, as he had looked embodied ownership in the
face--he began to be aware of its claims, and the cheese he had eaten
to lie heavy upon his spiritual stomach; he had done that which he
would not have done before leaving the city. Carefully he crept across
the ceiling, his head hanging, like a dog scolded of his master,
carefully along the shelf of the dairy, and through the opening in
the wall, quickly down the ladder, and through the cat-hole in the
barn door. There was no one in the corn-yard now, and he wandered
about among the ricks looking, with little hope, for something to eat.
Turning a corner he came upon a hen-house--and there was a crowd of
hens and half-grown chickens about the very dish into which he had seen
the remnants of the breakfast thrown, all pecking billfuls out of it.
As I may have said before, he always felt at liberty to share with the
animals, partly, I suppose, because he saw they had no scrupulosity
or ceremony amongst themselves; so he dipped his hand into the dish:
why should not the bird of the air now and then peck with the more
respectable of the barn-door, if only to learn his inferiority? Greatly
refreshed, he got up from among the hens, scrambled over the dry
stone-wall, and trotted away to the burn.




CHAPTER XIV.

HORNIE.

It was now time he should resume his journey up Daurside, and he set
out to follow the burn that he might regain the river. It led him into
a fine meadow, where a number of cattle were feeding. The meadow was
not fenced--little more than marked off, indeed, upon one side, from a
field of growing corn, by a low wall of earth, covered with moss and
grass and flowers. The cattle were therefore herded by a boy, whom
Gibbie recognized even in the distance as him by whose countenance
he had been so much attracted when, like an old deity on a cloud,
he lay spying through the crack in the ceiling. The boy was reading
a book, from which every now and then he lifted his eyes to glance
around him, and see whether any of the cows or heifers or stirks were
wandering beyond their pasture of rye-grass and clover. Having them
all before him, therefore no occasion to look behind, he did not see
Gibbie approaching. But as soon as he seemed thoroughly occupied, a
certain black cow, with short sharp horns and a wicked look, which had
been gradually, as was her wont, edging nearer and nearer to the corn,
turned suddenly and ran for it, jumped the dyke, and plunging into a
mad revelry of greed, tore and devoured with all the haste not merely
of one insecure, but of one that knew she was stealing. Now Gibbie had
been observant enough during his travels to learn that this was against
the law and custom of the country--that it was not permitted to a cow
to go into a field where there were no others--and like a shot he was
after the black marauder. The same instant the herd boy too, lifting
his eyes from his book, saw her, and springing to his feet, caught up
his great stick, and ran also: he had more than one reason to run, for
he understood only too well the dangerous temper of the cow, and saw
that Gibbie was a mere child, and unarmed--an object most provocative
of attack to Hornie--so named, indeed, because of her readiness to
use the weapons with which Nature had provided her. She was in fact a
malicious cow, and but that she was a splendid milker, would have been
long ago fatted up and sent to the butcher. The boy as he ran full
speed to the rescue, kept shouting to warn Gibbie from his purpose, but
Gibbie was too intent to understand the sounds he uttered, and supposed
them addressed to the cow. With the fearless service that belonged
to his very being, he ran straight at Hornie, and, having nothing to
strike her with, flung himself against her with a great shove towards
the dyke. Hornie, absorbed in her delicious robbery, neither heard nor
saw before she felt him, and, startled by the sudden attack, turned
tail. It was but for a moment. In turning, she caught sight of her
ruler, sceptre in hand, at some little distance, and turned again,
either to have another mouthful, or in the mere instinct to escape
him. Then she caught sight of the insignificant object that had scared
her, and in contemptuous indignation lowered her head between her
forefeet, and was just making a rush at Gibbie, when a stone struck
her on a horn, and the next moment the herd came up, and with a storm
of fiercest blows, delivered with the full might of his arm, drove
her in absolute rout back into the meadow. Drawing himself up in the
unconscious majesty of success, Donal Grant looked down upon Gibbie,
but with eyes of admiration.

“Haith, cratur!” he said, “ye’re mair o’ a man nor ye’ll luik this
saven year! What garred ye rin upo’ the deevil’s verra horns that gait?”

Gibbie stood smiling.

“Gien ’t hadna been for my club we wad baith be ower the mune ’gain
this time. What ca’ they ye, man?”

Still Gibbie only smiled.

“Whaur come ye frae?--Wha’s yer fowk?--Whaur div ye bide?--Haena ye a
tongue i’ yer heid, ye rascal?”

Gibbie burst out laughing, and his eyes sparkled and shone: he was
delighted with the herd-boy, and it was so long since he had heard
human speech addressed to himself!

“The cratur’s feel (_foolish_)!” concluded Donal to himself pityingly.
“Puir thing! puir thing!” he added aloud, and laid his hand on Gibbie’s
head.

It was but the second _touch_ of kindness Gibbie had received since he
was the dog’s guest: had he been acquainted with the bastard emotion
of self-pity, he would have wept; as he was unaware of hardship in his
lot, discontent in his heart, or discord in his feeling, his emotion
was one of unmingled delight, and embodied itself in a perfect smile.

“Come, cratur, an’ I’ll gie ye a piece: ye’ll aiblins un’erstan’ that!”
said Donal, as he turned to leave the corn for the grass, where Hornie
was eating with the rest like the most innocent of hum’le (_hornless_)
animals. Gibbie obeyed, and followed, as, with slow step and downbent
face, Donal led the way. For he had tucked his club under his arm, and
already his greedy eyes were fixed on the book he had carried all the
time, nor did he take them from it until, followed in full and patient
content by Gibbie, he had almost reached the middle of the field, some
distance from Hornie and her companions, when, stopping abruptly short,
he began without lifting his head to cast glances on this side and that.

“I houp nane o’ them’s swallowed my nepkin!” he said musingly. “I’m no
sure whaur I was sittin’. I hae my place i’ the beuk, but I doobt I hae
tint my place i’ the gerse.”

Long before he had ended, for he spoke with utter deliberation, Gibbie
was yards away, flitting hither and thither like a butterfly. A minute
more and Donal saw him pounce upon his bundle, which he brought to him
in triumph.

“Fegs! ye’re no the gowk I took ye for,” said Donal meditatively.

Whether Gibbie took the remark for a compliment, or merely was
gratified that Donal was pleased, the result was a merry laugh.

The bundle had in it a piece of hard cheese, such as Gibbie had
already made acquaintance with, and a few _quarters of cakes_. One of
these Donal broke into two, gave Gibbie the half, replaced the other,
and sat down again to his book--this time with his back against the
_fell-dyke_ dividing the grass from the corn. Gibbie seated himself,
like a Turk, with his bare legs crossed under him, a few yards off,
where, in silence and absolute content, he ate his _piece_, and gravely
regarded him. His human soul had of late been starved, even more than
his body--and that from no fastidiousness; and it was paradise again
to be in such company. Never since his father’s death had he looked on
a face that drew him as Donal’s. It was fair of complexion by nature,
but the sun had burned it brown, and it was covered with freckles.
Its forehead was high, with a mass of foxy hair over it, and under it
two keen hazel eyes, in which the green predominated over the brown.
Its nose was long and solemn, over his well-made mouth, which rarely
smiled, but not unfrequently trembled with emotion--over his book. For
age, Donal was getting towards fifteen, and was strongly built and
well grown. A general look of honesty, and an attractive expression of
reposeful friendliness pervaded his whole appearance. Conscientious in
regard to his work, he was yet in danger of forgetting his duty for
minutes together in his book. The chief evil that resulted from it was
such an occasional inroad on the corn as had that morning taken place;
and many were Donal’s self-reproaches ere he got to sleep when that had
fallen out during the day. He knew his master would threaten him with
dismissal if he came upon him reading in the field, but he knew also
his master was well aware that he did read, and that it was possible to
read and yet herd well. It was easy enough in this same meadow: on one
side ran the Lorrie; on another was a stone wall; and on the third a
ditch; only the cornfield lay virtually unprotected, and there he had
to be himself the boundary. And now he sat leaning against the dyke, as
if he held so a position of special defence; but he knew well enough
that the dullest calf could outflank him, and invade, for a few moments
at the least, the forbidden pleasure-ground. He had gained an ally,
however, whose faculty and faithfulness he little knew yet. For Gibbie
had begun to comprehend the situation. He could not comprehend why or
how anyone should be absorbed in a book, for all he knew of books was
from his one morning of dame-schooling; but he could comprehend that,
if one’s attention _were_ so occupied, it must be a great _vex_ to be
interrupted continually by the ever-waking desires of his charge after
dainties. Therefore, as Donal watched his book, Gibbie for Donal’s
sake watched the herd, and, as he did so, gently possessed himself of
Donal’s club. Nor had many minutes passed, before Donal, raising his
head to look, saw the curst cow again in the green corn, and Gibbie
manfully encountering her with the club, hitting her hard upon head and
horns, and deftly avoiding every rush she made at him.

“Gie her ’t upo’ the nose,” Donal shouted in terror, as he ran full
speed to his aid, abusing Hornie in terms of fiercest vituperation.

But he needed not have been so apprehensive. Gibbie heard and obeyed,
and the next moment Hornie had turned tail and was fleeing back to the
safety of the lawful meadow.

“Hech, cratur! but ye maun be come o’ fechtin’ fowk!” said Donal,
regarding him with fresh admiration.

Gibbie laughed; but he had been sorely put to it, and the big drops
were coursing fast down his sweet face. Donal took the club from him,
and rushing at Hornie, belaboured her well, and drove her quite to
the other side of the field. He then returned and resumed his book,
while Gibbie again sat down near by, and watched both Donal and his
charge--the keeper of both herd and cattle. Surely Gibbie had at last
found his vocation on Daurside, with both man and beast for his special
care!

By and by Donal raised his head once more, but this time it was to
regard Gibbie and not the _nowt_. It had gradually sunk into him that
the appearance and character of the _cratur_ were peculiar. He had
regarded him as a little tramp, whose people were not far off, and who
would soon get tired of herding and rejoin his companions; but while
he read, a strange feeling of the presence of the boy had, in spite
of the witchery of his book, been growing upon him. He seemed to feel
his eyes without seeing them; and when Gibbie rose to look how the
cattle were distributed, he became vaguely uneasy lest the boy should
be going away. For already he had begun to feel him a humble kind of
guardian angel. He had already that day, through him, enjoyed a longer
spell of his book, than any day since he had been herd at the Mains of
Glashruach. And now the desire had come to regard him more closely.

For a minute or two he sat and gazed at him. Gibbie gazed at him
in return, and in his eyes the herd-boy looked the very type of
power and gentleness. How he admired even his suit of small-ribbed,
greenish-coloured corduroy, the ribs much rubbed and obliterated! Then
his jacket had round brass buttons! his trousers had patches instead of
holes at the knees! their short legs revealed warm woollen stockings!
and his shoes had their soles full of great broad-headed iron tacks!
while on his head he had a small round blue bonnet with a red tuft!
The little outcast, on the other hand, with his loving face and pure
clear eyes, bidding fair to be naked altogether before long, woke in
Donal a divine pity, a tenderness like that nestling at the heart of
womanhood. The neglected creature could surely have no mother to shield
him from frost and wind and rain. But a strange thing was, that out
of this pitiful tenderness seemed to grow, like its blossom, another
unlike feeling--namely, that he was in the presence of a being of some
order superior to his own, one to whom he would have to listen if he
spoke, who knew more than he would tell. But then Donal was a Celt, and
might be a poet, and the sweet stillness of the child’s atmosphere made
things bud in his imagination.

My reader must think how vastly, in all his poverty, Donal was Gibbie’s
superior in the social scale. He earned his own food and shelter, and
nearly four pounds a year besides; lived as well as he could wish,
dressed warm, was able for his work, and imagined it no hardship. Then
he had a father and mother whom he went to see every Saturday, and of
whom he was as proud as son could be--a father who was the priest of
the family, and fed sheep; a mother who was the prophetess, and kept
the house ever an open refuge for her children. Poor Gibbie earned
nothing--never had earned more than a penny at a time in his life, and
had never dreamed of having a claim to such penny. Nobody seemed to
care for him, give him anything, do anything for him. Yet there he sat
before Donal’s eyes, full of service, of smiles, of contentment.

Donal took up his book, but laid it down again and gazed at Gibbie.
Several times he tried to return to his reading, but as often resumed
his contemplation of the boy. At length it struck him as something more
than shyness would account for, that he had not yet heard a word from
the lips of the child, even when running after the cows. He must watch
him more closely.

By this it was his dinner time. Again he untied his handkerchief, and
gave Gibbie what he judged a fair share for his bulk--namely about a
third of the whole. Philosopher as he was, however, he could not help
sighing a little when he got to the end of his diminished portion.
But he was better than comforted when Gibbie offered him all that yet
remained to him; and the smile with which he refused it made Gibbie as
happy as a prince would like to be. What a day it had been for Gibbie!
A whole human being, and some five and twenty four-legged creatures
besides, to take care of!

After their dinner, Donal gravitated to his book, and Gibbie resumed
the executive. Some time had passed when Donal, glancing up, saw Gibbie
lying flat on his chest, staring at something in the grass. He slid
himself quietly nearer, and discovered it was a daisy--one by itself
alone; there were not many in the field. Like a mother leaning over her
child, he was gazing at it. The daisy was not a cold white one, neither
was it a red one; it was just a perfect daisy: it looked as if some
gentle hand had taken it, while it slept and its star points were all
folded together, and dipped them--just a tiny touchy dip, in a molten
ruby, so that, when it opened again, there was its crown of silver
pointed with rubies all about its golden sun-heart.

“He’s been readin’ Burns!” said Donal. He forgot that the daisies were
before Burns, and that he himself had loved them before ever he heard
of him. Now, he had not heard of Chaucer, who made love to the daisies
four hundred years before Burns.--God only knows what gospellers they
have been on his middle-earth. All its days his daisies have been
coming and going, and they are not old yet, nor have worn out yet their
lovely garments, though they patch and darn just as little as they toil
and spin.

“Can ye read, cratur?” asked Donal.

Gibbie shook his head.

“Canna ye speyk, man?”

Again Gibbie shook his head.

“Can ye hear?”

Gibbie burst out laughing. He knew that he heard better than other
people.

“Hearken till this than,” said Donal.

He took his book from the grass, and read, in a chant, or rather in a
lilt, the Danish ballad of Chyld Dyring, as translated by Sir Walter
Scott. Gibbie’s eyes grew wider and wider as he listened; their pupils
dilated, and his lips parted: it seemed as if his soul were looking out
of door and windows at once--but a puzzled soul that understood nothing
of what it saw. Yet plainly, either the sounds, or the thought-matter
vaguely operative beyond the line where intelligence begins, or, it
may be, the sparkle of individual word or phrase islanded in a chaos
of rhythmic motion, wrought somehow upon him, for his attention was
fixed as by a spell. When Donal ceased, he remained open-mouthed and
motionless for a time; then, drawing himself slidingly over the grass
to Donal’s feet, he raised his head and peeped above his knees at the
book. A moment only he gazed, and drew back with a hungry sigh: he had
seen nothing in the book like what Donal had been drawing from it--as
if one should look into the well of which he had just drunk, and see
there nothing but dry pebbles and sand! The wind blew gentle, the sun
shone bright, all nature closed softly round the two, and the soul
whose children they were was nearer than the one to the other, nearer
than sun or wind or daisy or Chyld Dyring. To his amazement, Donal saw
the tears gathering in Gibbie’s eyes. He was as one who gazes into the
abyss of God’s will--sees only the abyss, cannot see the will, and
weeps. The child in whom neither cold nor hunger nor nakedness nor
loneliness could move a throb of self-pity, was moved to tears that a
loveliness, to him strange and unintelligible, had passed away, and he
had no power to call it back.

“Wad ye like to hear ’t again?” asked Donal, more than half
understanding him instinctively.

Gibbie’s face answered with a flash, and Donal read the poem again, and
Gibbie’s delight returned greater than before, for now something like
a dawn began to appear among the cloudy words. Donal read it a third
time, and closed the book, for it was almost the hour for driving the
cattle home. He had never yet seen, and perhaps never again did see,
such a look of thankful devotion on human countenance as met his lifted
eyes.

How much Gibbie even then understood of the lovely eerie old ballad,
it is impossible for me to say. Had he a glimmer of the return of the
buried mother? Did he think of his own? I doubt if he had ever thought
that he had a mother; but he may have associated the tale with his
father, and the boots he was always making for him. Certainly it was
the beginning of much. But the waking up of a human soul to know itself
in the mirror of its thoughts and feelings, its loves and delights,
oppresses me with so heavy a sense of marvel and inexplicable mystery,
that when I imagine myself such as Gibbie then was, I cannot imagine
myself coming awake. I can hardly believe that, from being such as
Gibbie was the hour before he heard the ballad, I should _ever_ have
come awake. Yet here I am, capable of pleasure unspeakable from
that and many another ballad, old and new! somehow, at one time or
another, or at many times in one, I have at last come awake! When, by
slow filmy unveilings, life grew clearer to Gibbie, and he not only
knew, but knew that he knew, his thoughts always went back to that
day in the meadow with Donal Grant as the beginning of his knowledge
of beautiful things in the world of man. Then first he saw nature
reflected, Narcissus-like, in the mirror of her humanity, her highest
self. But when or how the change in him began, the turn of the balance,
the first push towards life of the evermore invisible germ--of that he
remained, much as he wondered, often as he searched his consciousness,
as ignorant to the last as I am now. Sometimes he was inclined to think
the glory of the new experience must have struck him dazed, and that
was why he could not recall what went on in him at the time.

Donal rose and went driving the cattle home, and Gibbie lay where he
had again thrown himself upon the grass. When he lifted his head, Donal
and the cows had vanished.

Donal had looked all round as he left the meadow, and seeing the boy
nowhere, had concluded he had gone to his people. The impression he had
made upon him faded a little during the evening. For when he reached
home, and had watered them, he had to tie up the animals, each in its
stall, and make it comfortable for the night; next, eat his own supper;
then learn a proposition of Euclid, and go to bed.




CHAPTER XV.

DONAL GRANT.

Hungering minds come of peasant people as often as of any, and have
appeared in Scotland as often, I fancy, as in any nation; not every
Scotsman, therefore, who may not himself have known one like Donal,
will refuse to believe in such a herd-laddie. Besides, there are still
those in Scotland, as well as in other nations, to whom the simple and
noble, not the commonplace and selfish, is the true type of humanity.
Of such as Donal, whether English or Scotch, is the class coming up to
preserve the honour and truth of our Britain, to be the oil of the lamp
of her life, when those who place her glory in knowledge, or in riches,
shall have passed from her history as the smoke from her chimneys.

Cheap as education then was in Scotland, the parents of Donal Grant
had never dreamed of sending a son to college. It was difficult for
them to save even the few quarterly shillings that paid the fees of the
parish schoolmaster: for Donal, indeed, they would have failed even in
this, but for the help his brothers and sisters afforded. After he left
school, however, and got a place as herd, he fared better than any of
the rest, for at the Mains he found a friend and helper in Fergus Duff,
his master’s second son, who was then at home from college, which he
had now attended two winters. Partly that he was delicate in health,
partly that he was something of a fine gentleman, he took no share with
his father and elder brother in the work of the farm, although he was
at the Mains from the beginning of April to the end of October. He was
a human kind of soul notwithstanding, and would have been much more
of a man if he had thought less of being a gentleman. He had taken a
liking to Donal, and having found in him a strong desire after every
kind of knowledge of which he himself had any share, had sought to
enliven the tedium of an existence rendered not a little flabby from
want of sufficient work, by imparting to him of the treasures he had
gathered. They were not great, and he could never have carried him far,
for he was himself only a respectable student, not a little lacking in
perseverance, and given to dreaming dreams of which he was himself the
hero. Happily, however, Donal was of another sort, and from the first
needed but to have the outermost shell of a thing broken for him, and
that Fergus could do: by and by Donal would break a shell for himself.

But perhaps the best thing Fergus did for him was the lending him
books. Donal had an altogether unappeasable hunger after every form of
literature with which he had as yet made acquaintance, and this hunger
Fergus fed with the books of the house, and many besides of such as he
purchased or borrowed for his own reading--these last chiefly poetry.
But Fergus Duff, while he revelled in the writings of certain of the
poets of the age, was incapable of finding poetry for himself in the
things around him: Donal Grant, on the other hand, while he seized
on the poems Fergus lent him, with an avidity even greater than his,
received from the nature around him influences similar to those which
exhaled from the words of the poet. In some sense, then, Donal was
original; that is, he received at first hand what Fergus required to
have “put on” him, to quote Celia, in _As you like it_, “as pigeons
feed their young.” Therefore, fiercely as it would have harrowed the
pride of Fergus to be informed of the fact, he was in the kingdom of
art only as one who ate of what fell from the table, while his father’s
herd-boy was one of the family. This was as far from Donal’s thought,
however, as from that of Fergus; the condescension, therefore, of the
latter did not impair the gratitude for which the former had such large
reason; and Donal looked up to Fergus as to one of the lords of the
world.

To find himself now in the reversed relation of superior and teacher to
the little outcast, whose whole worldly having might be summed in the
statement that he was not absolutely naked, woke in Donal an altogether
new and strange feeling; yet gratitude to his master had but turned
itself round, and become tenderness to his pupil.

After Donal left him in the field, and while he was ministering, first
to his beasts and then to himself, Gibbie lay on the grass, as happy
as child could well be. A loving hand laid on his feet or legs would
have found them like ice; but where was the matter so long as he never
thought of them? He could have supped a huge bicker of sowens, and
eaten a dozen potatoes; but of what mighty consequence is hunger, so
long as it neither absorbs the thought, nor causes faintness? The sun,
however, was going down behind a great mountain, and its huge shadow,
made of darkness, and haunted with cold, came sliding across the river,
and over valley and field, nothing staying its silent wave, until it
covered Gibbie with the blanket of the dark, under which he could
not long forget that he was in a body to which cold is unfriendly.
At the first breath of the night-wind that came after the shadow, he
shivered, and starting to his feet, began to trot, increasing his
speed until he was scudding up and down the field like a wild thing
of the night, whose time was at hand, waiting until the world should
lie open to him. Suddenly he perceived that the daisies, which all day
long had been full-facing the sun, like true souls confessing to the
father of them, had folded their petals together to points, and held
them like spear-heads tipped with threatening crimson, against the
onset of the night and her shadows, while within its white cone each
folded in the golden heart of its life, until the great father should
return, and, shaking the wicked out of the folds of the night, render
the world once more safe with another glorious day. Gibbie gazed and
wondered; and while he gazed--slowly, glidingly, back to his mind came
the ghost-mother of the ballad, and in every daisy he saw her folding
her neglected orphans to her bosom, while the darkness and the misery
rolled by defeated. He wished he knew a ghost that would put her arms
round him. He must have had a mother once, he supposed, but he could
not remember her, and of course she must have forgotten him. He did
not know that about him were folded the everlasting arms of the great,
the one Ghost, which is the Death of death--the life and soul of all
things and all thoughts. The Presence, indeed, was with him, and he
felt it, but he knew it only as the wind and shadow, the sky and closed
daisies: in all these things and the rest it took shape that it might
come near him. Yea, the Presence was in his very soul, else he could
never have rejoiced in friend, or desired ghost to mother him: still
he knew not the Presence. But it was drawing nearer and nearer to his
knowledge--even in sun and air and night and cloud, in beast and flower
and herd-boy, until at last it would reveal itself to him, in him,
as Life Himself. Then the man would know that in which the child had
rejoiced. The stars came out, to Gibbie the heavenly herd, feeding at
night, and gathering gold in the blue pastures. He saw them, looking up
from the grass where he had thrown himself to gaze more closely at the
daisies; and the sleep that pressed down his eyelids seemed to descend
from the spaces between the stars. But it was too cold that night to
sleep in the fields, when he knew where to find warmth. Like a fox into
his hole, the child would creep into the corner where God had stored
sleep for him: back he went to the barn, gently trotting, and wormed
himself through the cat-hole.

The straw was gone! But he remembered the hay. And happily, for he was
tired, there stood the ladder against the loft. Up he went, nor turned
aside to the cheese; but sleep was common property still. He groped
his way forward through the dark loft until he found the hay, when at
once he burrowed into it like a sand-fish into the wet sand. All night
the white horse, a glory vanished in the dark, would be close to him,
behind the thin partition of boards. He could hear his very breath as
he slept, and to the music of it, audible sign of companionship, he
fell fast asleep, and slept until the waking horses woke him.




CHAPTER XVI.

APPRENTICESHIP.

He scrambled out on the top of the hay, and looked down on the
beautiful creature below him, dawning radiant again with the morning,
as it issued undimmed from the black bosom of the night. He was not,
perhaps, just so well groomed as white steed might be; it was not
a stable where they kept a blue-bag for their grey horses; but to
Gibbie’s eyes he was so pure, that he began, for the first time in his
life, to doubt whether he was himself quite as clean as he ought to
be. He did not know, but he would make an experiment for information
when he got down to the burn. Meantime was there nothing he could do
for the splendid creature? From above, leaning over, he filled his rack
with hay; but he had eaten so much grass the night before, that he
would not look at it, and Gibbie was disappointed. What should he do
next? The thing he would like best would be to look through the ceiling
again, and watch the woman at her work. Then, too, he would again
smell the boiling porridge, and the burning of the little sprinkles
of meal that fell into the fire. He dragged, therefore, the ladder to
the opposite end of the barn, and gradually, with no little effort,
raised it against the wall. Carefully he crept through the hole, and
softly round the shelf, the dangerous part of the pass, and so on to
the ceiling, whence he peeped once more down into the kitchen. His
precautions had been so far unnecessary, for as yet it lay unvisited,
as witnessed by its disorder. Suddenly came to Gibbie the thought that
here was a chance for him--here a path back to the world. Rendered
daring by the eagerness of his hope, he got again upon the shelf, and
with every precaution lest he should even touch a milkpan, descended by
the lower shelves to the floor. There finding the door only latched,
he entered the kitchen, and proceeded to do everything he had seen the
woman do, as nearly in her style as he could. He swept the floor, and
dusted the seats, the window sill, the table, with an apron he found
left on a chair, then arranged everything tidily, roused the rested
fire, and had just concluded that the only way to get the great pot
full of water upon it, would be to hang first the pot on the chain,
and then fill it with the water, when his sharp ears caught sounds and
then heard approaching feet. He darted into the dairy, and in a few
seconds, for he was getting used to the thing now, had clambered upon
the ceiling, and was lying flat across the joists, with his eyes to the
most commanding crack he had discovered: he was anxious to know how
his service would be received. When Jean Mavor--she was the farmer’s
half-sister--opened the door, she stopped short and stared; the kitchen
was not as she had left it the night before! She concluded she must be
mistaken, for who could have touched it? and entered. Then it became
plain beyond dispute that the floor had been swept, the table wiped,
the place _redd up_, and the fire roused.

“Hoots! I maun hae been walkin’ i’ my sleep!” said Jean to herself
aloud. “Or maybe that guid laddie Donal Grant’s been wullin’ to gie me
a helpin’ han’ for ’s mither’s sake, honest wuman! The laddie’s guid
eneuch for onything!--ay, gien ’twar to mak a minister o’!”

Eagerly, greedily, Gibbie now watched her every motion, and, bent
upon learning, nothing escaped him: he would do much better next
morning!--At length the men came in to breakfast, and he thought to
enjoy the sight; but, alas! it wrought so with his hunger as to make
him feel sick, and he crept away to the barn. He would gladly have
lain down in the hay for a while, but that would require the ladder,
and he did not now feel able to move it. On the floor of the barn he
was not safe, and he got out of it into the cornyard, where he sought
the henhouse. But there was no food there yet, and he must not linger
near; for, if he were discovered, they would drive him away, and he
would lose Donal Grant. He had not seen him at breakfast, for indeed
he seldom, during the summer, had a meal except supper in the house.
Gibbie, therefore, as he could not eat, ran to the burn and drank--but
had no heart that morning for his projected inquiry into the state of
his person. He must go to Donal. The sight of him would help him to
bear his hunger.

The first indication Donal had of his proximity was the rush of Hornie
past him in flight out of the corn. Gibbie was pursuing her with stones
for lack of a stick. Thoroughly ashamed of himself, Donal threw his
book from him, and ran to meet Gibbie.

“Ye maunna fling stanes, cratur,” he said. “Haith! it’s no for me to
fin’ fau’t, though,” he added, “sittin’ readin’ buiks like a gowk ’at I
am, an’ lattin’ the beasts rin wull amo’ the corn, ’at’s weel peyed to
haud them oot o’ ’t! I’m clean affrontit wi’ mysel’, cratur.”

Gibbie’s response was to set off at full speed for the place where
Donal had been sitting. He was back in a moment with the book, which he
pressed into Donal’s hand, while from the other he withdrew his club.
This he brandished aloft once or twice, then starting at a steady trot,
speedily circled the herd, and returned to his adopted master--only
to start again, however, and attack Hornie, whom he drove from the
corn-side of the meadow right over to the other: she was already afraid
of him. After watching him for a time, Donal came to the conclusion
that he could not do more than _the cratur_ if he had as many eyes as
Argus, and gave not even one of them to his book. He therefore left
all to Gibbie, and did not once look up for a whole hour. Everything
went just as it should; and not once, all that day, did Hornie again
get a mouthful of the grain. It was rather a heavy morning for Gibbie,
though, who had eaten nothing, and every time he came near Donal, saw
the handkerchief bulging in the grass, which a little girl had brought
and left for him. But he was a rare one both at waiting and at going
without.

At last, however, Donal either grew hungry of himself, or was moved
by certain understood relations between the sun and the necessities
of his mortal frame; for he laid down his book, called out to Gibbie,
“Cratur, it’s denner-time,” and took his bundle. Gibbie drew near with
sparkling eyes. There was no selfishness in his hunger, for, at the
worst pass he had ever reached, he would have shared what he had with
another, but he looked so eager, that Donal, who himself knew nothing
of want, perceived that he was ravenous, and made haste to undo the
knots of the handkerchief, which Mistress Jean appeared that day to
have tied with more than ordinary vigour, ere she intrusted the bundle
to the foreman’s daughter. When the last knot yielded, he gazed with
astonishment at the amount and variety of provision disclosed.

“Losh!” he exclaimed, “the mistress maun hae kenned there was two o’
’s.”

He little thought that what she had given him beyond the usual supply
was an acknowledgment of services rendered by those same hands into
which he now delivered a share, on the ground of other service
altogether. It is not always, even where there is no mistake as to
the person who has deserved it, that the reward reaches the doer so
directly.

Before the day was over, Donal gave his helper more and other pay for
his service. Choosing a fit time, when the cattle were well together
and in good position, Hornie away at the stone dyke, he took from his
pocket a somewhat wasted volume of ballads--_ballants_, he called
them--and said, “Sit ye doon, cratur. Never min’ the nowt. I’m gaein’
to read till ye.”

Gibbie dropped on his crossed legs like a lark to the ground, and sat
motionless. Donal, after deliberate search, began to read, and Gibbie
to listen; and it would be hard to determine which found the more
pleasure in his part. For Donal had seldom had a listener--and never
one so utterly absorbed.

When the hour came for the cattle to go home, Gibbie again remained
behind, waiting until all should be still at the farm. He lay on the
dyke, brooding over what he had heard, and wondering how it was that
Donal got all those strange beautiful words and sounds and stories out
of the book.




CHAPTER XVII.

SECRET SERVICE.

I must not linger over degrees and phases. Every morning, Gibbie
got into the kitchen in good time; and not only did more and more
of the work, but did it more and more to the satisfaction of Jean,
until, short of the actual making of the porridge, he did everything
antecedent to the men’s breakfast. When Jean came in, she had but to
take the lid from the pot, put in the salt, assume the spurtle, and,
grasping the first handful of the meal, which stood ready waiting in
the bossie on the stone cheek of the fire, throw it in, thus commencing
the simple cookery of the best of all dishes to a true-hearted and
healthy Scotsman. Without further question she attributed all the aid
she received to the goodness, “enough for anything,” of Donal Grant,
and continued to make acknowledgment of the same in both sort and
quantity of victuals, whence, as has been shown, the real labourer
received his due reward.

Until he had thoroughly mastered his work, Gibbie persisted in
regarding matters economic “from his loophole in the _ceiling_;” and
having at length learned the art of making butter, soon arrived at some
degree of perfection in it. But when at last one morning he not only
churned, but washed and made it up entirely to Jean’s satisfaction, she
did begin to wonder how a mere boy could both have such perseverance,
and be so clever at a woman’s work. For now she entered the kitchen
every morning without a question of finding the fire burning, the water
boiling, the place clean and tidy, the supper dishes well washed and
disposed on shelf and rack: her own part was merely to see that proper
cloths were handy to so thorough a user of them. She took no one into
her confidence on the matter: it was enough, she judged, that she and
Donal understood each other.

And now if Gibbie had contented himself with rendering this
house-service in return for the shelter of the barn and its hay,
he might have enjoyed both longer; but from the position of his
night-quarters, he came gradually to understand the work of the stable
also; and before long, the men, who were quite ignorant of anything
similar taking place in the house, began to observe, more to their
wonder than satisfaction, that one or other of their horses was
generally groomed before his man came to him; that often there was hay
in their racks which they had not given them; and that the master’s
white horse every morning showed signs of having had some attention
paid him that could not be accounted for. The result was much talk
and speculation, suspicion and offence; for all were jealous of their
rights, their duty, and their dignity, in relation to their horses:
no man was at liberty to do a thing to or for any but his own pair.
Even the brightening of the harness-brass, in which Gibbie sometimes
indulged, was an offence; for did it not imply a reproach? Many were
the useless traps laid for the offender, many the futile attempts to
surprise him: as Gibbie never did anything except for half an hour
or so while the men were sound asleep or at breakfast, he escaped
discovery.

But he could not hold continued intercourse with the splendour of the
white horse, and neglect carrying out the experiment on which he had
resolved with regard to the effect of water upon his own skin; and
having found the result a little surprising, he soon got into the habit
of daily and thorough ablution. But many animals that never wash are
yet cleaner than some that do; and, what with the scantiness of his
clothing, his constant exposure to the atmosphere, and his generally
lying in a fresh lair, Gibbie had always been comparatively clean.
Besides, being nice in his mind, he was naturally nice in his body.

The new personal regard thus roused by the presence of Snowball, had
its development greatly assisted by the scrupulosity with which most
things in the kitchen, and chief of all in this respect, the churn,
were kept. It required much effort to come up to the nicety considered
by Jean indispensable in the churn; and the croucher on the ceiling,
when he saw the long nose advance to prosecute inquiry into its
condition, mentally trembled lest the next movement should condemn his
endeavour as a failure. With his clothes he could do nothing, alas! but
he bathed every night in the Lorrie as soon as Donal had gone home with
the cattle. Once he got into a deep hole, but managed to get out again,
and so learned that he could swim.

All day he was with Donal, and took from him by much the greater part
of his labour: Donal had never had such time for reading. In return
he gave him his dinner, and Gibbie could do very well upon one meal a
day. He paid him also in poetry. It never came into his head, seeing
he never spoke, to teach him to read. He soon gave up attempting to
learn anything from him as to his place or people or history, for to
all questions in that direction Gibbie only looked grave and shook his
head. As often, on the other hand, as he tried to learn where he spent
the night, he received for answer only one of his merriest laughs.

Nor was larger time for reading the sole benefit Gibbie conferred upon
Donal. Such was the avidity and growing intelligence with which the
little naked town-savage listened to what Donal read to him, that his
presence was just so much added to Donal’s own live soul of thought and
feeling. From listening to his own lips through Gibbie’s ears, he not
only understood many things better, but, perceiving what things must
puzzle Gibbie, came sometimes, rather to his astonishment, to see that
in fact he did not understand them himself. Thus the bond between the
boy and the child grew closer--far closer, indeed than Donal imagined;
for, although still, now and then, he had a return of the fancy that
Gibbie might be a creature of some speechless race other than human,
of whom he was never to know whence he came or whither he went--a
messenger, perhaps, come to unveil to him the depths of his own spirit,
and make up for the human teaching denied him, this was only in his
more poetic moods, and his ordinary mental position towards him was one
of kind condescension.

It was not all fine weather up there among the mountains in the
beginning of summer. In the first week of June even, there was sleet
and snow in the wind--the tears of the vanquished Winter, blown, as
he fled, across the sea, from Norway or Iceland. Then would Donal’s
heart be sore for Gibbie, when he saw his poor rags blown about like
streamers in the wind, and the white spots melting on his bare skin.
His own condition would then to many have appeared pitiful enough,
but such an idea Donal would have laughed to scorn, and justly. Then
most, perhaps then only, does the truly generous nature feel poverty,
when he sees another in need and can do little or nothing to help him.
Donal had neither greatcoat, plaid, nor umbrella, wherewith to shield
Gibbie’s looped and windowed raggedness. Once, in great pity, he pulled
off his jacket, and threw it on Gibbie’s shoulders. But the shout of
laughter that burst from the boy, as he flung the jacket from him, and
rushed away into the middle of the feeding herd, a shout that came from
no cave of rudeness, but from the very depths of delight, stirred by
the loving kindness of the act, startled Donal out of his pity into
brief anger, and he rushed after him in indignation, with full purpose
to teach him proper behaviour by a box on each ear. But Gibbie dived
under the belly of a favourite cow, and peering out sideways from
under her neck and between her forelegs, his arms grasping each a leg,
while the cow went on twisting her long tongue round the grass and
plucking it undisturbed, showed such an innocent countenance of holy
merriment, that the pride of Donal’s hurt benevolence melted away, and
his laughter emulated Gibbie’s. That sort of day was in truth drearier
for Donal than for Gibbie, for the books he had were not his own, and
he dared not expose them to the rain; some of them indeed came from
Glashruach--_the Muckle Hoose_, they generally called it! When he left
him, it was to wander disconsolately about the field; while Gibbie,
sheltered under a whole cow, defied the chill and the sleet, and had no
books of which to miss the use. He could not, it is true, shield his
legs from the insidious attacks of such sneaking blasts as will always
find out the undefended spots; but his great heart was so well-to-do
in the inside of him, that, unlike Touchstone, his spirits not being
weary, he cared not for his legs. The worst storm in the world could
not have made that heart quail. For, think! there had just been the
strong, the well-dressed, the learned, the wise, the altogether mighty
and considerable Donal, the cowherd, actually desiring him, wee Sir
Gibbie Galbraith, the cinder of the city furnace, the naked, and
generally the hungry little tramp, to wear his jacket to cover him from
the storm! The idea was one of eternal triumph; and Gibbie, exulting
in the unheard-of devotion and condescension of the thing, kept on
laughing like a blessed cherub under the cow’s belly. Nor was there in
his delight the smallest admixture of pride that _he_ should have drawn
forth such kindness; it was simple glorying in the beauteous fact. As
to the cold and the sleet, so far as he knew they never hurt anybody.
They were not altogether pleasant creatures, but they could not help
themselves, and would soon give over their teasing. By to-morrow they
would have wandered away into other fields, and left the sun free to
come back to Donal and the cattle, when Gibbie, at present shielded
like any lord by the friendliest of cows, would come in for a share of
the light and the warmth. Gibbie was so confident with the animals,
that they were already even more friendly with him than with Donal--all
except Hornie, who, being of a low spirit, therefore incapable of
obedience, was friendliest with the one who gave her the hardest blows.




CHAPTER XVIII.

THE BROONIE.

Things had gone on in this way for several weeks--if Gibbie had
not been such a small creature, I hardly see how they could for so
long--when one morning the men came in to breakfast all out of temper
together, complaining loudly of the person unknown who would persist
in interfering with their work. They were the louder that their
suspicions fluttered about Fergus, who was rather overbearing with
them, and therefore not a favourite. He was in reality not at all a
likely person to bend back or defile hands over such labour, and their
pitching upon him for the object of their suspicion, showed how much
at a loss they were. Their only ground for suspecting him, beyond the
fact that there was no other whom by any violence of imagination they
could suspect, was, that, whatever else was done or left undone in
the stable, Snowball, whom Fergus was fond of, and rode almost every
day, was, as already mentioned, sure to have something done for him.
Had he been in good odour with them, they would have thought no harm
of most of the things they thought he did, especially as they eased
their work; but he carried himself high, they said, doing nothing but
ride over the farm and pick out every fault he could find--to show how
sharp he was, and look as if he could do better than any of them; and
they fancied that he carried their evil report to his father, and that
this underhand work in the stable must be part of some sly scheme for
bringing them into disgrace. And now at last had come the worst thing
of all: Gibbie had discovered the corn-bin, and having no notion but
that everything in the stable was for the delectation of the horses,
had been feeding them largely with oats--a delicacy with which, in the
plenty of other provisions, they were very sparingly supplied; and the
consequences had begun to show themselves in the increased unruliness
of the more wayward amongst them. Gibbie had long given up resorting
to the ceiling, and remained in utter ignorance of the storm that was
brewing because of him.

The same day brought things nearly to a crisis; for the overfed
Snowball, proving too much for Fergus’s horsemanship, came rushing
home at a fierce gallop without him, having indeed left him in a ditch
by the roadside. The remark thereupon made by the men in his hearing,
that it was his own fault, led him to ask questions, when he came
gradually to know what they attributed to him, and was indignant at the
imputation of such an employment of his mornings to one who had his
studies to attend to--scarcely a wise line of defence where the truth
would have been more credible as well as convincing--namely, that at
the time when those works of supererogation could alone be effected, he
lay as lost a creature as ever sleep could make of a man.

In the evening, Jean sought a word with Donal, and expressed her
surprise that he should be able to do everybody’s work about the
place, warning him it would be said he did it at the expense of his
own. But what could he mean, she said, by wasting the good corn to put
devilry into the horses? Donal stared in utter bewilderment. He knew
perfectly that to the men suspicion of him was as impossible as of one
of themselves. Did he not sleep in the same chamber with them? Could it
be allusion to the way he spent his time when out with the cattle that
Mistress Jean intended? He was so confused, looked so guilty as well as
astray, and answered so far from any point in Jean’s mind, that she at
last became altogether bewildered also, out of which chaos of common
void gradually dawned on her mind the conviction that she had been
wasting both thanks and material recognition of service, where she was
under no obligation. Her first feeling thereupon was, not unnaturally
however unreasonably, one of resentment--as if Donal, in not doing her
the kindness her fancy had been attributing to him, had all the time
been doing her an injury; but the boy’s honest bearing and her own good
sense made her, almost at once, dismiss the absurdity.

Then came anew the question, utterly unanswerable now--who could it
be that did not only all her morning work, but, with a passion for
labour insatiable, part of that of the men also? She knew her nephew
better than to imagine for a moment, with the men, it could be he. A
good enough lad she judged him, but not good enough for that. He was
too fond of his own comfort to dream of helping other people! But now,
having betrayed herself to Donal, she wisely went farther, and secured
herself by placing full confidence in him. She laid open the whole
matter, confessing that she had imagined her ministering angel to be
Donal himself: now she had not even a conjecture to throw at random
after the person of her secret servant. Donal, being a Celt, and a
poet, would have been a brute if he had failed of being a gentleman,
and answered that he was ashamed it should be another and not himself
who had been her servant and gained her commendation; but he feared, if
he had made any such attempt, he would but have fared like the husband
in the old ballad who insisted that his wife’s work was much easier
to do than his own. But as he spoke, he saw a sudden change come over
Jean’s countenance. Was it fear? or what was it? She gazed with big
eyes fixed on his face, heeding neither him nor his words, and Donal,
struck silent, gazed in return. At length, after a pause of strange
import, her soul seemed to return into her deep-set grey eyes, and in a
broken voice, low, and solemn, and fraught with mystery, she said,

“Donal, it’s the broonie!”

Donal’s mouth opened wide at the word, but the tenor of his thought
it would have been hard for him to determine. Celtic in kindred and
education, he had listened in his time to a multitude of strange tales,
both indigenous and exotic, and, Celtic in blood, had been inclined to
believe every one of them for which he could find the least _raison
d’être_. But at school he had been taught that such stories deserved
nothing better than mockery, that to believe them was contrary to
religion, and a mark of such weakness as involved blame. Nevertheless,
when he heard the word _broonie_ issue from a face with such an
expression as Jean’s then wore, his heart seemed to give a gape in his
bosom, and it rushed back upon his memory how he had heard certain
old people talk of the brownie that used, when their mothers and
grandmothers were young, to haunt the Mains of Glashruach. His mother
did not believe such things, but she believed nothing but her New
Testament!--and what if there should be something in them? The idea of
service rendered by the hand of a being too clumsy, awkward, ugly, to
consent to be seen by the more finished race of his fellow-creatures,
whom yet he surpassed in strength and endurance and longevity, had
at least in it for Donal the attraction of a certain grotesque yet
homely poetic element. He remembered too the honour such a type of
creature had had in being lapt around for ever in the airy folds of
L’Allegro. And to think that Mistress Jean, for whom everybody had
such a respect, should speak of the creature in such a tone!--it sent
a thrill of horrific wonder and delight through the whole frame of
the boy: might, could there be such creatures? And thereupon began to
open to his imagination vista after vista into the realms of might-be
possibility--where dwelt whole clans and kins of creatures, differing
from us and our kin, yet occasionally, at the cross-roads of creation,
coming into contact with us, and influencing us not greatly, perhaps,
yet strangely and notably. Not once did the real brownie occur to
him--the small, naked Gibbie, far more marvellous and admirable than
any brownie of legendary fable or fact, whether celebrated in rude old
Scots ballad for his _taeless_ feet, or designated in noble English
poem of perfect art, as lubber fiend of hairy length.

Jean Mavor came from a valley far withdrawn in the folds of the
Gormgarnet mountains, where in her youth she had heard yet stranger
tales than had ever come to Donal’s ears, of which some had perhaps
kept their hold the more firmly that she had never heard them even
alluded to since she left her home. Her brother, a hard-headed
highlander, as canny as any lowland Scot, would have laughed to
scorn the most passing reference to such an existence; and Fergus,
who had had a lowland mother--and nowhere is there less of so-called
superstition than in most parts of the lowlands of Scotland--would have
joined heartily in his mockery. For the cowherd, however, as I say,
the idea had no small attraction, and his stare was the reflection of
Mistress Jean’s own--for the soul is a live mirror, at once receiving
into its centre, and reflecting from its surface.

“Div ye railly think it, mem?” said Donal at last.

“Think what?” retorted Jean, sharply, jealous instantly of being
compromised, and perhaps not certain that she had spoken aloud.

“Div ye railly think ’at there _is_ sic craturs as broonies, Mistress
Jean?” said Donal.

“Wha kens what there is an’ what there isna?” returned Jean: she was
not going to commit herself either way. Even had she imagined herself
above believing such things, she would not have dared to say so; for
there was a time still near in her memory, though unknown to any now
upon the farm except her brother, when the Mains of Glashruach was the
talk of Daurside because of certain inexplicable nightly disorders
that fell out there; the slang _rows_, or the Scotch _remishs_ (a form
of the English _romage_), would perhaps come nearest to a designation
of them, consisting as they did of confused noises, rumblings,
ejaculations; and the fact itself was a reason for silence, seeing a
word might bring the place again into men’s mouths in like fashion, and
seriously affect the service of the farm; such a rumour would certainly
be made in the market a ground for demanding more wages to fee to the
Mains. “Ye haud yer tongue, laddie,” she went on; “it’s the least ye
can efter a’ ’at’s come an’ gane; an’ least said’s sunest mendit. Gang
to yer wark.”

But either Mistress Jean’s influx of caution came too late, and someone
had overheard her suggestion, or the idea was already abroad in the
mind bucolic and georgic, for that very night it began to be reported
upon the nearer farms, that the Mains of Glashruach was haunted by a
brownie who did all the work for both men and maids--a circumstance
productive of different opinions with regard to the desirableness of a
situation there, some asserting they would not fee to it for any amount
of wages, and others averring they could desire nothing better than a
place where the work was all done for them.

Quick at disappearing as Gibbie was, a very little cunning on the part
of Jean might soon have entrapped the brownie; but a considerable touch
of fear was now added to her other motives for continuing to spend
a couple of hours longer in bed than had formerly been her custom.
So that for yet a few days things went on much as usual; Gibbie saw
no sign that his presence was suspected, or that his doings were
offensive; and life being to him a constant present, he never troubled
himself about anything before it was there to answer for itself.

One morning the long thick mane of Snowball was found carefully plaited
up in innumerable locks. This was properly elf-work, but no fairies
had been heard of on Daurside for many a long year. The brownie, on
the other hand, was already in every one’s mouth--only a stray one,
probably, that had wandered from some old valley away in the mountains,
where they were still believed in--but not the less a brownie; and if
it was not the brownie who plaited Snowball’s mane, who or what was it?
A phenomenon must be accounted for, and he who will not accept a theory
offered, or even a word applied, is indebted in a full explanation. The
rumour spread in long slow ripples, till at last one of them struck the
_membrana tympani_ of the laird, where he sat at luncheon in the House
of Glashruach.




CHAPTER XIX.

THE LAIRD.

Thomas Galbraith was by birth Thomas Durrant, but had married an
heiress by whom he came into possession of Glashruach, and had,
according to previous agreement, taken her name. When she died he
mourned her loss as well as he could, but was consoled by feeling
himself now first master of both position and possession, when the
ladder by which he had attained them was removed. It was not that she
had ever given him occasion to feel that marriage and not inheritance
was the source of his distinction in the land, but that having a soul
as keenly sensitive to small material rights as it was obtuse to great
spiritual ones, he never felt the property quite his own until his wife
was no longer within sight. Had he been a little more sensitive still,
he would have felt that the property was then his daughter’s, and his
only through her; but this he failed to consider.

Mrs. Galbraith was a gentle sweet woman, who loved her husband,
but was capable of loving a greater man better. Had she lived long
enough to allow of their opinions confronting in the matter of their
child’s education, serious differences would probably have arisen
between them; as it was, they had never quarrelled except about the
name she should bear. The father, having for her sake--so he said to
himself--sacrificed his patronymic, was anxious that in order to her
retaining some rudimentary trace of himself in the ears of men, she
should be overshadowed with his Christian name, and called Thomasina.
But the mother was herein all the mother, and obdurate for her
daughter’s future; and, as was right between the two, she had her way,
and her child a pretty name. Being more sentimental than artistic,
however, she did not perceive how imperfectly the sweet Italian
_Ginevra_ concorded with the strong Scotch _Galbraith_. Her father
hated the name, therefore invariably abbreviated it after such fashion
as rendered it inoffensive to the most conservative of Scotish ears;
and for his own part, at length, never said _Ginny_, without seeing and
hearing and meaning _Jenny_. As _Jenny_, indeed, he addressed her in
the one or two letters which were all he ever wrote to her; and thus he
perpetuated the one matrimonial difference across the grave.

Having no natural bent to literature, but having in his youth studied
for and practised at the Scotish bar, he had brought with him into the
country a taste for certain kinds of dry reading, judged pre-eminently
respectable, and for its indulgence had brought also a not insufficient
store of such provender as his soul mildly hungered after, in the
shape of books bound mostly in yellow-calf--books of law, history, and
divinity. What the books of law were, I would not foolhardily add to
my many risks of blundering by presuming to recall; the history was
mostly Scotish, or connected with Scotish affairs; the theology was
entirely of the New England type of corrupted Calvinism, with which in
Scotland they saddle the memory of great-souled, hard-hearted Calvin
himself. Thoroughly respectable, and a little devout, Mr. Galbraith was
a good deal more of a Scotchman than a Christian; growth was a doctrine
unembodied in his creed; he turned from everything new, no matter how
harmonious with the old, in freezing disapprobation; he recognized no
element in God or nature which could not be reasoned about after the
forms of the Scotch philosophy. He would not have said an Episcopalian
could not be saved, for at the bar he had known more than one good
lawyer of the episcopal party; but to say a Roman Catholic would not
necessarily be damned, would to his judgment have revealed at once the
impending fate of the rash asserter. In religion he regarded everything
not only as settled but as understood; but seemed aware of no call in
relation to truth, but to bark at anyone who showed the least anxiety
to discover it. What truth he held himself, he held as a sack holds
corn--not even as a worm holds earth.

To his servants and tenants he was what he thought _just_--never
condescending to talk over a thing with any of the former but the
game-keeper, and never making any allowance to the latter for
misfortune. In general expression he looked displeased, but meant to
look dignified. No one had ever seen him wrathful; nor did he care
enough for his fellow-mortals ever to be greatly vexed--at least he
never manifested vexation otherwise than by a silence that showed more
of contempt than suffering.

In person, he was very tall and very thin, with a head much too small
for his height; a narrow forehead, above which the brown hair looked
like a wig; pale-blue, ill-set eyes, that seemed too large for their
sockets, consequently tumbled about a little, and were never at once
brought to focus; a large, but soft-looking nose; a loose-lipped mouth,
and very little chin. He always looked as if consciously trying to keep
himself together. He wore his shirt-collar unusually high, yet out of
it far shot his long neck, notwithstanding the smallness of which, his
words always seemed to come from a throat much too big for them. He
had greatly the look of a hen, proud of her maternal experiences, and
silent from conceit of what she could say if she would. So much better
would he have done as an underling than as a ruler--as a journeyman
even, than a master, that to know him was almost to disbelieve in
the good of what is generally called education. His learning seemed
to have taken the wrong fermentation, and turned to folly instead
of wisdom. But he did not do much harm, for he had a great respect
for his respectability. Perhaps if he had been a craftsman, he might
even have done more harm--making rickety wheelbarrows, asthmatic
pumps, ill-fitting window-frames, or boots with a lurking divorce
in each welt. He had no turn for farming, and therefore let all his
land, yet liked to interfere, and as much as possible kept a personal
jurisdiction.

There was one thing, however, which, if it did not throw the laird
into a passion--nothing, as I have said, did that--brought him nearer
to the outer verge of displeasure than any other, and that was,
anything whatever to which he could affix the name of superstition.
The indignation of better men than the laird with even a confessedly
harmless superstition, is sometimes very amusing; and it was a
point of Mr. Galbraith’s poverty-stricken religion to denounce all
superstitions, however diverse in character, with equal severity. To
believe in the second sight, for instance, or in any form of life as
having the slightest relation to this world, except that of men, that
of animals, and that of vegetables, was with him wicked, antagonistic
to the Church of Scotland, and inconsistent with her perfect doctrine.
The very word _ghost_ would bring upon his face an expression he meant
for withering scorn, and indeed it withered his face, rendering it
yet more unpleasant to behold. Coming to the benighted country, then,
with all the gathered wisdom of Edinburgh in his gallinaceous cranium,
and what he counted a vast experience of worldly affairs besides, he
brought with him also the firm resolve to be the death of superstition,
at least upon his own property. He was not only unaware, but incapable
of becoming aware, that he professed to believe a number of things,
any one of which was infinitely more hostile to the truth of the
universe, than all the fancies and fables of a countryside, handed down
from grandmother to grandchild. When, therefore, within a year of his
settling at Glashruach, there arose a loud talk of the Mains, his best
farm, as haunted by presences making all kinds of tumultuous noises,
and even throwing utensils bodily about, he was nearer the borders
of a rage, although he kept, as became a gentleman, a calm exterior,
than ever he had been in his life. For were not ignorant clodhoppers
asserting as facts what he knew never could take place! At once he set
himself, with all his experience as a lawyer to aid him, to discover
the buffooning authors of the mischief; where there were deeds there
were doers, and where there were doers they were discoverable. But his
endeavours, uninterrmitted for the space of three weeks, after which
the disturbances ceased, proved so utterly without result, that he
could never bear the smallest allusion to the hateful business. For he
had not only been unhorsed, but by his dearest hobby.

He was seated with a game pie in front of him, over the top of which
Ginevra was visible. The girl never sat nearer her father at meals than
the whole length of the table, where she occupied her mother’s place.
She was a solemn-looking child, of eight or nine, dressed in a brown
merino frock of the plainest description. Her hair, which was nearly of
the same colour as her frock, was done up in two triple plaits, which
hung down her back, and were tied at the tips with black ribbon. To the
first glance she did not look a very interesting or attractive child;
but looked at twice, she was sure to draw the eyes a third time. She
was undeniably like her father, and that was much against her at first
sight; but it required only a little acquaintance with her face to
remove the prejudice; for in its composed, almost resigned expression,
every feature of her father’s seemed comparatively finished, and
settled into harmony with the rest; its chaos was subdued, and not a
little of the original underlying design brought out. The nose was
firm, the mouth modelled, the chin larger, the eyes a little smaller,
and full of life and feeling. The longer it was regarded by any seeing
eye, the child’s countenance showed fuller of promise, or at least
of hope. Gradually the look would appear in it of a latent sensitive
anxiety--then would dawn a glimmer of longing question; and then, all
at once, it would slip back into the original ordinary look, which,
without seeming attractive, had yet attracted. Her father was never
harsh to her, yet she looked rather frightened at him; but then he was
cold, very cold, and most children would rather be struck and kissed
alternately than neither. And the bond cannot be very close between
father and child, when the father has forsaken his childhood. The bond
between any two is the one in the other; it is the father in the child,
and the child in the father, that reach to each other eternal hands. It
troubled Ginevra greatly that, when she asked herself whether she loved
her father better than anybody else, as she believed she ought, she
became immediately doubtful whether she loved him at all.

She was eating porridge and milk: with spoon arrested in mid-passage,
she stopped suddenly, and said:--

“Papa, what’s a broonie?”

“I have told you, Jenny, that you are never to talk broad Scotch in my
presence,” returned her father. “I would lay severer commands upon you,
were it not that I fear tempting you to disobey me, but I will have no
vulgarity in the dining-room.”

His words came out slowly, and sounded as if each was a bullet wrapped
round with cotton wool to make it fit the barrel. Ginevra looked
perplexed for a moment.

“Should I say _brownie_, papa?” she asked.

“How can I tell you what you should call a creature that has no
existence?” rejoined her father.

“If it be a creature, papa, it must have a name!” retorted the little
logician, with great solemnity.

Mr. Galbraith was not pleased, for although the logic was good, it was
against him.

“What foolish person has been insinuating such contemptible
superstition into your silly head?” he asked. “Tell me, child,” he
continued, “that I may put a stop to it at once.”

He was rising to ring the bell, that he might give the orders
consequent on the information he expected: he would have asked Mammon
to dinner in black clothes and a white tie, but on Superstition in the
loveliest garb would have loosed all the dogs of Glashruach, to hunt
her from the property. Her next words, however, arrested him, and just
as she ended, the butler came in with fresh toast.

“They say,” said Ginevra, anxious to avoid the forbidden
Scotch, therefore stumbling sadly in her utterance, “there’s a
broonie--brownie--at the Mains, who dis a’--does all the work.”

“What is the meaning of this, Joseph?” said Mr. Galbraith, turning from
her to the butler, with the air of rebuke, which was almost habitual to
him, a good deal heightened.

“The meanin’ o’ what, sir?” returned Joseph, nowise abashed, for to
him his master was not the greatest man in the world, or even in the
highlands. “He’s no a Galbraith,” he used to say, when more than
commonly provoked with him.

“I ask you, Joseph,” answered the laird, “what this--this outbreak
of superstition imports? You must be aware that nothing in the world
could annoy me more than that Miss Galbraith should learn folly in her
father’s house. That staid servants, such as I had supposed mine to be,
should use their tongues as if their heads had no more in them than so
many bells hung in a steeple, is to me a mortifying reflection.”

“Tongues as weel ’s clappers was made to wag, sir; an, wag they wull,
sir, sae lang ’s the tow (_string_) hings oot at baith lugs,” answered
Joseph. The forms of speech he employed were not unfrequently obscure
to his master, and in that obscurity lay more of Joseph’s impunity than
he knew. “Forby (_besides_), sir,” he went on, “gien tongues didna wag,
what w’y wad you, ’at has to set a’ thing richt, come to ken what was
wrang?”

“That is not a bad remark, Joseph,” replied the laird, with woolly
condescension. “Pray acquaint me with the whole matter.”

“I hae naething till acquaint yer honour wi’, sir, but the ting-a-ling
o’ tongues,” replied Joseph; “an’ ye’ll hae till arreenge ’t like, till
yer ain settisfaction.”

Therewith he proceeded to report what he had heard reported, which
was in the main the truth, considerably exaggerated--that the work of
the house was done over night by invisible hands--and the work of the
stables, too; but that in the latter, cantrips were played as well;
that some of the men talked of leaving the place; and that Mr. Duff’s
own horse, Snowball, was nearly out of his mind with fear.

The laird clenched his teeth, and for a whole minute said nothing. Here
were either his old enemies again, or some who had heard the old story,
and in their turn were beating the drum of consternation in the ears of
superstition.

“It is one of the men themselves,” he said at last, with outward
frigidity. “Or some ill-designed neighbour,” he added. “But I shall
soon be at the bottom of it. Go to the Mains at once, Joseph, and
ask young Fergus Duff to be so good as step over, as soon as he
conveniently can.”

Fergus was pleased enough to be sent for by the laird, and soon told
him all he knew from his aunt and the men, confessing that he had
himself been too lazy of a morning to take any steps towards personal
acquaintance with the facts, but adding that, as Mr. Galbraith took an
interest in the matter, he would be only too happy to carry out any
suggestion he might think proper to make on the subject.

“Fergus,” returned the laird, “do you imagine things inanimate can
of themselves change their relations in space? In other words, are
the utensils in your kitchen endowed with powers of locomotion? Can
they take to themselves wings and fly? Or to use a figure more to the
point, are they provided with members necessary to the washing of their
own--_persons_, shall I say? Answer me those points, Fergus.”

“Certainly not, sir,” answered Fergus solemnly, for the laird’s face
was solemn, and his speech was very solemn.

“Then, Fergus, let me assure you, that to discover by what agency these
apparent wonders are effected, you have merely to watch. If you fail,
I will myself come to your assistance. Depend upon it, the thing when
explained will prove simplicity itself.”

Fergus at once undertook to watch, but went home not quite so
comfortable as he had gone; for he did not altogether, notwithstanding
his unbelief in the so-called supernatural, relish the approaching
situation. Belief and unbelief are not always quite plainly
distinguishable from each other, and Fear is not always certain which
of them is his mother. He was not the less resolved, however, to
carry out what he had undertaken--that was, to sit up all night, if
necessary, in order to have an interview with the extravagant and
erring--spirit, surely, whether embodied or not, that dared thus wrong
“domestic awe, night-rest, and neighbourhood,” by doing people’s work
for them unbidden. Not even to himself did he confess that he felt
frightened, for he was a youth of nearly eighteen; but he could not
quite hide from himself the fact that he anticipated no pleasure in the
duty which lay before him.




CHAPTER XX.

THE AMBUSH.

For more reasons than one, Fergus judged it prudent to tell not even
auntie Jean of his intention; but, waiting until the house was quiet,
stole softly from his room and repaired to the kitchen--at the other
end of the long straggling house, where he sat down, and taking his
book, an annual of the beginning of the century, began to read the
story of _Kathed and Eurelia_. Having finished it, he read another. He
read and read, but no brownie came. His candle burned into the socket.
He lighted another, and read again. Still no brownie appeared, and,
hard and straight as was the wooden chair on which he sat, he began
to doze. Presently he started wide awake, fancying he heard a noise;
but nothing was there. He raised his book once more, and read until he
had finished the stories in it: for the verse he had no inclination
that night. As soon as they were all consumed, he began to feel very
_eerie_: his courage had been sheltering itself behind his thoughts,
which the tales he had been reading had kept turned away from the
object of dread. Still deeper and deeper grew the night around him,
until the bare, soulless waste of it came at last, when a brave man
might welcome any ghost for the life it would bring. And ever as it
came, the tide of fear flowed more rapidly, until at last it rose over
his heart, and threatened to stifle him. The direst foe of courage is
the fear itself, not the object of it; and the man who can overcome
his own terror is a hero and more. In this Fergus had not yet deserved
to be successful. That kind of victory comes only of faith. Still, he
did not fly the field; he was no coward. At the same time, prizing
courage, scorning fear, and indeed disbelieving in every nocturnal
object of terror except robbers, he came at last to such an all but
abandonment of dread, that he dared not look over his shoulder, lest he
should see the brownie standing at his back; he would rather be seized
from behind and strangled in his hairy grasp, than turn and die of the
seeing. The night was dark--no moon and many clouds. Not a sound came
from the close. The cattle, the horses, the pigs, the cocks and hens,
the very cats and rats seemed asleep. There was not a rustle in the
thatch, a creak in the couples. It was well, for the slightest noise
would have brought his heart into his mouth, and he would have been in
great danger of scaring the household, and for ever disgracing himself,
with a shriek. Yet he longed to hear something stir. Oh! for the stamp
of a horse from the stable or the low of a cow from the byre! But they
were all under the brownie’s spell, and he was coming--toeless feet,
and thumbed but fingerless hands! as if he was made with stockings,
and _hum’le mittens_! Was it the want of toes that made him able to
come and go so quietly?--Another hour crept by; when lo, a mighty
sun-trumpet blew in the throat of the black cock! Fergus sprang to his
feet with the start it gave him--but the next moment gladness rushed
up in his heart: the morning was on its way! and, foe to superstition
as he was, and much as he had mocked at Donal for what he counted some
of his tendencies in that direction, he began instantly to comfort
himself with the old belief that all things of the darkness flee from
the crowing of the cock. The same moment his courage began to return,
and the next he was laughing at his terrors, more foolish than when he
felt them, seeing he was the same man of fear as before, and the same
circumstances would wrap him in the same garment of dire apprehension.
In his folly he imagined himself quite ready to watch the next night
without even repugnance--for it was the morning, not the night, that
came first!

When the grey of the dawn appeared, he said to himself he would lie
down on the bench a while, he was so tired of sitting; he would not
sleep. He lay down, and in a moment was asleep. The light grew and
grew, and the brownie came--a different brownie indeed from the one he
had pictured--with the daintiest-shaped hands and feet coming out of
the midst of rags, and with no hair except roughly parted curls over
the face of a cherub--for the combing of Snowball’s mane and tail had
taught Gibbie to use the same comb upon his own thatch. But as soon as
he opened the door of the dairy, he was warned by the loud breathing
of the sleeper, and looking about, espied him on the bench behind the
table, and swiftly retreated. The same instant Fergus woke, stretched
himself, saw it was broad daylight, and, with his brain muddled by
fatigue and sleep combined, crawled shivering to bed. Then in came the
brownie again; and when Jean Mavor entered, there was her work done as
usual.

Fergus was hours late for breakfast, and when he went into the common
room, found his aunt alone there.

“Weel, auntie,” he said, “I think I fleggit yer broonie!”

“Did ye that, man? Aye!--An’ syne ye set tee, an’ did the wark yersel
to save yer auntie Jean’s auld banes?”

“Na, na! I was o’er tiret for that. Sae wad ye hae been yersel’, gien
ye had sitten up a’ nicht.”

“Wha did it, than?”

“Ow, jist yersel’, I’m thinkin’, auntie.”

“Never a finger o’ mine was laid till ’t, Fergus. Gien ye fleggit ae
broonie, anither cam; for there’s the wark done, the same ’s ever.”

“Damn the cratur!” cried Fergus.

“Whisht, whisht, laddie! he’s maybe hearin’ ye this meenute. An’ gien
he binna, there’s ane ’at is, an’ likesna sweirin’.”

“I beg yer pardon, auntie, but it’s jist provokin’!” returned Fergus,
and therewith recounted the tale of his night’s watch, omitting mention
only of his feelings throughout the vigil.

As soon as he had had his breakfast, he went to carry his report to
Glashruach.

The laird was vexed, and told him he must sleep well before night, and
watch to better purpose.

The next night, Fergus’s terror returned in full force; but he watched
thoroughly notwithstanding, and when his aunt entered, she found him
there, and her kitchen in a mess. He had caught no brownie, it was
true, but neither had a stroke of her work been done. The floor was
unswept; not a dish had been washed; it was churning-day, but the
cream stood in the jar in the dairy, not the butter in the pan on the
kitchen-dresser. Jean could not quite see the good or the gain of it.
She had begun to feel like a lady, she said to herself, and now she
must tuck up her sleeves and set to work as before. It was a come-down
in the world, and she did not like it. She conned her nephew little
thanks, and not being in the habit of dissembling, let him feel the
same. He crept to bed rather mortified. When he woke from a long sleep,
he found no meal waiting him, and had to content himself with cakes[1]
and milk before setting out for “the Muckle Hoose.”

[1] It amuses a Scotchman to find that the word _cakes_, as in “_The
Land of Cakes_,” is taken, not only by foreigners, but by some English
people--as how, indeed, should it be otherwise?--to mean compositions
of flour, more or less enriched, and generally appreciable; whereas,
in fact, it stands for the dryest, simplest preparation in the world.
The genuine cakes is--(My grammar follows usage: cakes _is_; broth
_are_.)--literally nothing but oatmeal made into a dough with cold
water and dried over the fire--sometimes then in front of it as well.

“You must add cunning to courage, my young friend,” said Mr. Galbraith;
and the result of their conference was that Fergus went home resolved
on yet another attempt.

He felt much inclined to associate Donal with him in his watch this
time, but was too desirous of proving his courage both to himself and
to the world, to yield to the suggestion of his fear. He went to bed
with a book immediately after the noon-day meal and rose in time for
supper.

There was a large wooden press in the kitchen, standing out from the
wall; this with the next wall made a little recess, in which there was
just room for a chair; and in that recess Fergus seated himself, in the
easiest chair he could get into it. He then opened wide the door of the
press, and it covered him entirely.

This night would have been the dreariest of all for him, the laird
having insisted that he should watch in the dark, had he not speedily
fallen fast asleep, and slept all night--so well that he woke at the
first noise Gibbie made.

It was broad clear morning, but his heart beat so loud and fast with
apprehension and curiosity mingled, that for a few moments Fergus dare
not stir, but sat listening breathless to the movement beside him, none
the less appalling that it was so quiet. Recovering himself a little he
cautiously moved the door of the press, and peeped out.

He saw nothing so frightful as he had, in spite of himself,
anticipated, but was not therefore, perhaps, the less astonished.
The dread brownie of his idea shrunk to a tiny ragged urchin, with
a wonderful head of hair, azure eyes, and deft hands, noiselessly
bustling about on bare feet. He watched him at his leisure, watched him
keenly, assured that any moment he could spring upon him.

As he watched, his wonder sank, and he grew disappointed at the
collapsing of the lubber-fiend into a poor half-naked child upon
whom both his courage and his fear had been wasted. As he continued
to watch, an evil cloud of anger at the presumption of the unknown
minimus began to gather in his mental atmosphere, and was probably the
cause of some movement by which his chair gave a loud creak. Without
even looking round, Gibbie darted into the dairy, and shut the door.
Instantly Fergus was after him, but only in time to see the vanishing
of his last heel through the hole in the wall, and that way Fergus was
much too large to follow him. He rushed from the house, and across the
corner of the yard to the barn-door. Gibbie, who did not believe he had
been seen, stood laughing on the floor, when suddenly he heard the key
entering the lock. He bolted through the cat-hole--but again just one
moment too late, leaving behind him on Fergus’s retina the light from
the soles of two bare feet. The key of the door to the rick-yard was
inside, and Fergus was after him in a moment, but the ricks came close
to the barn-door, and the next he saw of him was the fluttering of his
rags in the wind, and the flashing of his white skin in the sun, as
he fled across the clover field; and before Fergus was over the wall,
Gibbie was a good way ahead towards the Lorrie. Gibbie was a better
runner for his size than Fergus, and in better training too; but, alas!
Fergus’s legs were nearly twice as long as Gibbie’s. The little one
reached the Lorrie first, and dashing across it, ran up the side of the
Glashburn, with a vague idea of Glashgar in his head. Fergus behind
him was growing more and more angry as he gained upon him but felt his
breath failing him. Just at the bridge to the iron gate to Glashruach,
he caught him at last, and sunk on the parapet exhausted. The smile
with which Gibbie, too much out of breath to laugh, confessed himself
vanquished, would have disarmed one harder-hearted than Fergus, had he
not lost his temper in the dread of losing his labour; and the answer
Gibbie received to his smile was a box on the ear that bewildered him.
He looked pitifully in his captor’s face, the smile not yet faded from
his, only to receive a box on the other ear, which, though a contrary
and similar both at once, was not a cure, and the water gathered in his
eyes. Fergus, a little eased in his temper by the infliction, and in
his breath by the wall of the bridge, began to ply him with questions;
but no answer following, his wrath rose again, and again he boxed both
his ears--without better result.

Then came the question what was he to do with the redoubted brownie,
now that he had him. He was ashamed to show himself as the captor of
such a miserable culprit, but the little rascal deserved punishment,
and the laird would require him at his hands. He turned upon his
prisoner and told him he was an impudent rascal. Gibbie had recovered
again, and was able once more to smile a little. He had been guilty of
burglary, said Fergus; and Gibbie smiled. He could be sent to prison
for it, said Fergus; and Gibbie smiled--but this time a very grave
smile. Fergus took him by the collar, which amounted to nearly a third
part of the jacket, and shook him till he had half torn that third
from the other two; then opened the gate, and, holding him by the back
of the neck, walked him up the drive, every now and then giving him a
fierce shake that jarred his teeth. Thus, over the old gravel, mossy
and damp and grassy, and cool to his little bare feet, between rowan
and birk and pine and larch, like a malefactor, and looking every
inch the outcast he was, did Sir Gilbert Galbraith approach the house
of his ancestors for the first time. Individually, wee Gibbie was
anything but a prodigal; it had never been possible to him to be one;
but none the less was he the type and result and representative of his
prodigal race, in him now once more looking upon the house they had
lost by their vices and weaknesses, and in him now beginning to reap
the benefits of punishment. But of vice and loss, of house and fathers
and punishment, Gibbie had no smallest cognition. His history was about
him and in him, yet of it all he suspected nothing. It would have made
little difference to him if he had known it all; he would none the less
have accepted everything that came, just as part of the story in which
he found himself.




CHAPTER XXI.

THE PUNISHMENT.

The house he was approaching had a little the look of a prison. Of the
more ancient portion the windows were very small, and every corner
had a turret with a conical cap-roof. That part was all rough-cast,
therefore grey, as if with age. The more modern part was built of all
kinds of hard stone, roughly cloven or blasted from the mountain and
its boulders. Granite red and grey, blue whinstone, yellow ironstone,
were all mingled anyhow, fitness of size and shape alone regarded in
their conjunctions; but the result as to colour was rather pleasing
than otherwise, and Gibbie regarded it with some admiration. Nor,
although he had received from Fergus such convincing proof that he
was regarded as a culprit, had he any dread of evil awaiting him. The
highest embodiment of the law with which he had acquaintance was the
police, and from not one of them in all the city had he ever had a
harsh word; his conscience was as void of offence as ever it had been,
and the law consequently, notwithstanding the threats of Fergus, had
for him no terrors.

The laird was an early riser, and therefore regarded the mere getting
up early as a virtue, altogether irrespective of how the time, thus
redeemed, as he called it, was spent. This morning, as it turned
out, it would have been better spent in sleep. He was talking to his
gamekeeper, a heavy-browed man, by the coach-house door, when Fergus
appeared holding the dwindled brownie by the huge collar of his
tatters. A more innocent-looking malefactor sure never appeared before
awful Justice! Only he was in rags, and there are others besides dogs
whose judgments go by appearance. Mr. Galbraith was one of them, and
smiled a grim, an ugly smile.

“So this is your vaunted brownie, Mr. Duff!” he said, and stood looking
down upon Gibbie, as if in his small person he saw superstition at the
point of death, mocked thither by the arrows of his contemptuous wit.

“It’s all the brownie I could lay hands on, sir,” answered Fergus. “I
took him in the act.”

“Boy,” said the laird, rolling his eyes, more unsteady than usual with
indignation, in the direction of Gibbie, “what have you to say for
yourself?”

Gibbie had no say--and nothing to say that his questioner could either
have understood or believed; the truth from his lips would but have
presented him a lying hypocrite to the wisdom of his judge. As it was,
he smiled, looking up fearless in the face of the magistrate, so awful
in his own esteem.

“What is your name?” asked the laird, speaking yet more sternly.

Gibbie still smiled and was silent, looking straight in his
questioner’s eyes. He dreaded nothing from the laird. Fergus had beaten
him, but Fergus he classed with the bigger boys who had occasionally
treated him roughly; this was a man, and men, except they were foreign
sailors, or drunk, were never unkind. He had no idea of his silence
causing annoyance. Everybody in the city had known he could not answer;
and now when Fergus and the laird persisted in questioning him, he
thought they were making kindly game of him, and smiled the more.
Nor was there much about Mr. Galbraith to rouse a suspicion of the
contrary; for he made a great virtue of keeping his temper when most he
caused other people to lose theirs.

“I see the young vagabond is as impertinent as he is vicious,” he
said at last, finding that to no interrogation could he draw forth
any other response than a smile. “Here Angus,”--and he turned to the
gamekeeper--“take him into the coach-house, and teach him a little
behaviour. A touch or two of the whip will find his tongue for him.”

Angus seized the little gentleman by the neck, as if he had been
a polecat, and at arm’s length walked him unresistingly into the
coach-house. There, with one vigorous tug, he tore the jacket from
his back, and his only other garment, dependent thereupon by some
device known only to Gibbie, fell from him, and he stood in helpless
nakedness, smiling still: he had never done anything shameful,
therefore had no acquaintance with shame. But when the scowling keeper,
to whom poverty was first cousin to poaching, and who hated tramps as
he hated vermin, approached him with a heavy cart whip in his hand, he
cast his eyes down at his white sides, very white between his brown
arms and brown legs, and then lifted them in a mute appeal, which
somehow looked as if it were for somebody else, against what he could
no longer fail to perceive the man’s intent. But he had no notion of
what the thing threatened amounted to. He had had few hard blows in his
time, and had never felt a whip.

“Ye deil’s glaur!” cried the fellow, clenching the cruel teeth of one
who loved not his brother, “I s’ lat ye ken what comes o’ brakin’ into
honest hooses, an’ takin’ what’s no yer ain!”

A vision of the gnawed cheese, which he had never touched since the
idea of its being property awoke in him, rose before Gibbie’s mental
eyes, and inwardly he bowed to the punishment. But the look he had
fixed on Angus was not without effect, for the man was a father, though
a severe one, and was not all a brute: he turned and changed the cart
whip for a gig one with a broken shaft, which lay near. It was well
for himself that he did so, for the other would probably have killed
Gibbie. When the blow fell the child shivered all over, his face turned
white, and without uttering even a moan, he doubled up and dropped
senseless. A swollen cincture, like a red snake, had risen all round
his waist, and from one spot in it the blood was oozing. It looked as
if the lash had cut him in two.

The blow had stung his heart and it had ceased to beat. But the
gamekeeper understood vagrants! the young blackguard was only shamming!

“Up wi’ ye, ye deevil! or I s’ gar ye,” he said from between his teeth,
lifting the whip for a second blow.

Just as the stroke fell, marking him from the nape all down the spine,
so that he now bore upon his back in red the sign the ass carries in
black, a piercing shriek assailed Angus’s ears, and his arm, which had
mechanically raised itself for a third blow, hung arrested.

The same moment, in at the coach-house door shot Ginevra, as white as
Gibbie. She darted to where he lay, and there stood over him, arms
rigid and hands clenched hard, shivering as he had shivered, and
sending from her body shriek after shriek, as if her very soul were
the breath of which her cries were fashioned. It was as if the woman’s
heart in her felt its roots torn from their home in the bosom of God,
and quivering in agony, and confronted by the stare of an eternal
impossibility, shrieked against Satan.

“Gang awa, missie,” cried Angus, who had respect to this child, though
he had not yet learned to respect childhood; “he’s a coorse cratur, an’
maun hae ’s whups.”

But Ginevra was deaf to his evil charming. She stopped her cries,
however, to help Gibbie up, and took one of his hands to raise him.
But his arm hung limp and motionless; she let it go; it dropped like
a stick, and again she began to shriek. Angus laid his hand on her
shoulder. She turned on him, and opening her mouth wide, screamed
at him like a wild animal, with all the hatred of mingled love and
fear; then threw herself on the boy, and covered his body with her
own. Angus, stooping to remove her, saw Gibbie’s face, and became
uncomfortable.

“He’s deid! he’s deid! Ye’ve killt him, Angus! Ye’re an ill man!” she
cried fiercely. “I hate ye. I’ll tell on ye. I’ll tell my papa.”

“Hoots! whisht, missie!” said Angus. “It was by yer papa’s ain orders I
gae him the whup, an’ he weel deserved it forby. An’ gien ye dinna gang
awa, an’ be a guid yoong leddy, I’ll gie ’im mair yet.”

“I’ll tell God,” shrieked Ginevra with fresh energy of defensive love
and wrath.

Again he sought to remove her, but she clung so, with both legs and
arms, to the insensible Gibbie, that he could but lift both together,
and had to leave her alone.

“Gien ye daur to touch ’im again, Angus, I’ll bite ye--_bite ye_--BITE
YE,” she screamed, in a passage wildly crescendo.

The laird and Fergus had walked away together, perhaps neither of them
quite comfortable at the orders given, but the one too self-sufficient
to recall them, and the other too submissive to interfere. They heard
the cries, nevertheless, and had they known them for Ginevra’s, would
have rushed to the spot; but fierce emotion had so utterly changed her
voice--and indeed she had never in her life cried out before--that they
took them for Gibbie’s and supposed the whip had had the desired effect
and loosed his tongue. As to the rest of the household, which would
by this time have been all gathered in the coach-house, the laird had
taken his stand where he could intercept them: he would not have the
execution of the decrees of justice interfered with.

But Ginevra’s shrieks brought Gibbie to himself. Faintly he opened
his eyes, and stared, stupid with growing pain, at the tear-blurred
face beside him. In the confusion of his thoughts he fancied the pain
he felt was Ginevra’s, not his, and sought to comfort her, stroking
her cheek with feeble hand, and putting up his mouth to kiss her. But
Angus, utterly scandalized at the proceeding, and restored to energy
by seeing that the boy was alive, caught her up suddenly and carried
her off--struggling, writhing, and scratching like a cat. Indeed she
bit his arm, and that severely, but the man never even told his wife.
Little Missie was a queen, and little Gibbie was a vermin, but he was
ashamed to let the mother of his children know that the former had
bitten him for the sake of the latter.

The moment she thus disappeared, Gibbie began to apprehend that she
was suffering for him, not he for her. His whole body bore testimony
to frightful abuse. This was some horrible place inhabited by men
such as those that killed Sambo! He must fly. But would they hurt
the little girl? He thought not--she was at home. He started to
spring to his feet, but fell back almost powerless; then tried more
cautiously and got up wearily, for the pain and the terrible shock
seemed to have taken the strength out of every limb. Once on his feet,
he could scarcely stoop to pick up his remnant of trowsers without
again falling, and the effort made him groan with distress. He was
in the act of trying in vain to stand on one foot, so as to get the
other into the garment, when he fancied he heard the step of his
executioner, returning doubtless to resume his torture. He dropped the
rag, and darted out of the door, forgetting aches and stiffness and
agony. All naked as he was, he fled like the wind, unseen, or at least
unrecognized, of any eye. Fergus did catch a glimpse of something white
that flashed across a vista through the neighbouring wood, but he took
it for a white peacock, of which there were two or three about the
place. The three men were disgusted with the little wretch when they
found that he had actually fled into the open day without his clothes.
Poor Gibbie! it was such a small difference! It needed as little change
to make a savage as an angel of him. All depended on the eyes that saw
him.

He ran he knew not whither, feeling nothing but the desire first to
get into some covert, and then to run farther. His first rush was for
the shubbery, his next across the little park to the wood beyond. He
did not feel the wind of his running on his bare skin. He did not feel
the hunger that had made him so unable to bear the lash. On and on he
ran, fancying ever he heard the cruel Angus behind him. If a dry twig
snapped, he thought it was the crack of the whip; and a small wind
that rose suddenly in the top of a pine, seemed the hiss with which it
was about to descend upon him. He ran and ran, but still there seemed
nothing between him and his persecutors. He felt no safety. At length
he came where a high wall joining some water formed a boundary. The
water was a brook from the mountain, here widened and deepened into a
still pool. He had been once out of his depth before: he threw himself
in, and swam straight across: ever after that, swimming seemed to him
as natural as walking.

Then first awoke a faint sense of safety; for on the other side he was
knee deep in heather. He was on the wild hill, with miles on miles of
cover! Here the unman could not catch him. It must be the same that
Donal pointed out to him one day at a distance; he had a gun, and Donal
said he had once shot a poacher and killed him. He did not know what
a poacher was: perhaps he was one himself, and the man would shoot
him. They could see him quite well from the other side! he must cross
the knoll first, and then he might lie down and rest. He would get
right into the heather, and lie with it all around and over him till
the night came. Where he would go then, he did not know. But it was
all one; he could go anywhere. Donal must mind his cows, and the men
must mind the horses, and Mistress Jean must mind her kitchen, but Sir
Gibbie could go where he pleased. He would go up Daurside; but he would
not go just at once; that man might be on the outlook for him, and he
wouldn’t like to be shot. People who were shot lay still, and were put
into holes in the earth, and covered up, and he would not like that.

Thus he communed with himself as he went over the knoll. On the other
side he chose a tall patch of heather, and crept under. How nice and
warm and kind the heather felt, though it did hurt the weals dreadfully
sometimes. If he only had something to cover just them! There seemed to
be one down his back as well as round his waist!

And now Sir Gibbie, though not much poorer than he had been, really
possessed nothing separable, except his hair and his nails--nothing
therefore that he could call _his_, as distinguished from _him_. His
sole other possession was a negative quantity--his hunger, namely,
for he had not even a meal in his body: he had eaten nothing since
the preceding noon. I am wrong--he had one possession besides, though
hardly a separable one--a ballad about a fair lady and her page, which
Donal had taught him. That he now began to repeat to himself, but was
disappointed to find it a good deal withered. He was not nearly reduced
to extremity yet though--this little heir of the world: in his body he
had splendid health, in his heart a great courage, and in his soul an
ever-throbbing love. It was his love to the very image of man, that
made the horror of the treatment he had received. Angus was and was not
a man! After all, Gibbie was still one to be regarded with holy envy.

Poor Ginny was sent to bed for interfering with her father’s orders;
and what with rage and horror and pity, an inexplicable feeling of
hopelessness took possession of her, while her affection for her father
was greatly, perhaps for this world irretrievably, injured by that
morning’s experience; a something remained that never passed from her,
and that something, as often as it stirred, rose between him and her.

Fergus told his aunt what had taken place, and made much game of her
brownie. But the more Jean thought about the affair, the less she liked
it. It was she upon whom it all came! What did it matter who or what
her brownie was? And what had they whipped the creature for? What harm
had he done? If indeed he was a little ragged urchin, the thing was
only the more inexplicable! He had taken nothing! She had never missed
so much as a barley scon! The cream had always brought her the right
quantity of butter! Not even a bannock, so far as she knew, was ever
gone from the press, or an egg from the bossie where they lay heaped!
There was more in it than she could understand! Her nephew’s mighty
feat, so far from explaining anything, had only sealed up the mystery.
She could not help cherishing a shadowy hope that, when things had
grown quiet, he would again reveal his presence by his work, if not
by his visible person. It was mortifying to think that he had gone as
he came, and she had never set eyes upon him. But Fergus’s account
of his disappearance had also, in her judgment, a decided element
of the marvellous in it. She was strongly inclined to believe that
the brownie had cast a glamour over him and the laird and Angus, all
three, and had been making game of them for his own amusement. Indeed
Daurside generally refused the explanation of the brownie presented for
its acceptance, and the laird scored nothing against the arch-enemy
Superstition.

Donal Grant, missing his “cratur” that day for the first time, heard
enough when he came home to satisfy him that he had been acting the
brownie in the house and the stable as well as in the field, incredible
as it might well appear that such a child should have had even mere
strength for what he did. Then first also, after he had thus lost him,
he began to understand his worth, and to see how much he owed him.
While he had imagined himself kind to the urchin, the urchin had been
laying him under endless obligation. For he left him with ever so much
more in his brains than when he came. This book and that, through his
aid, he had read thoroughly; and a score or so of propositions had been
added to his stock in Euclid. His first feeling about the child revived
as he pondered--namely, that he was not of this world. But even then
Donal did not know the best Gibbie had done for him. He did not know
of what far deeper and better things he had, through his gentleness,
his trust, his loving service, his absolute unselfishness, sown the
seeds in his mind. On the other hand, Donal had in return done more
for Gibbie than he knew, though what he had done for him, namely,
shared his dinners with him, had been less of a gift than he thought,
and Donal had rather been sharing in Gibbie’s dinner, than Gibbie in
Donal’s.




CHAPTER XXII.

REFUGE.

It was a lovely Saturday evening on Glashgar. The few flowers about
the small turf cottage scented the air in the hot western sun. The
heather was not in bloom yet, and there were no trees; but there were
rocks, and stones, and a brawling burn that half surrounded a little
field of oats, one of potatoes, and a small spot with a few stocks of
cabbage and kail, on the borders of which grew some bushes of double
daisies, and primroses, and carnations. These Janet tended as part
of her household, while her husband saw to the oats and potatoes.
Robert had charge of the few sheep on the mountain which belonged to
the farmer at the Mains, and for his trouble had the cottage and the
land, most of which he had himself reclaimed. He had also a certain
allowance of meal, which was paid in portions, as corn went from the
farm to the mill. If they happened to fall short, the miller would
always advance them as much as they needed, repaying himself--and not
very strictly--the next time the corn was sent from the Mains. They
were never in any want, and never had any money, except what their
children brought them out of their small wages. But that was plenty
for their every need, nor had they the faintest feeling that they were
persons to be pitied. It was very cold up there in winter, to be sure,
and they both suffered from rheumatism; but they had no debt, no fear,
much love, and between them, this being mostly Janet’s, a large hope
for what lay on the other side of death: as to the rheumatism, that was
necessary, Janet said, to teach them patience, for they had no other
trouble. They were indeed growing old, but neither had begun to feel
age a burden yet, and when it should prove such, they had a daughter
prepared to give up service and go home to help them. Their thoughts
about themselves were nearly lost in their thoughts about each other,
their children, and their friends. Janet’s main care was her old man,
and Robert turned to Janet as the one stay of his life, next to the
God in whom he trusted. He did not think so much about God as she:
he was not able; nor did he read so much of his Bible; but she often
read to him; and when any of his children were there of an evening, he
always “took the book.” While Janet prayed at home, his closet was the
mountain-side, where he would kneel in the heather, and pray to Him
who saw unseen, the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise
God. The sheep took no heed of him, but sometimes when he rose from
his knees and saw Oscar gazing at him with deepest regard, he would
feel a little as if he had not quite entered enough into his closet,
and would wonder what the dog was thinking. All day, from the mountain
and sky and preaching burns, from the sheep and his dog, from winter
storms, spring sun and winds, or summer warmth and glow, but more than
all, when he went home, from the presence and influence of his wife,
came to him somehow--who can explain how!--spiritual nourishment and
vital growth. One great thing in it was, that he kept growing wiser and
better without knowing it. If St. Paul had to give up judging his own
self, perhaps Robert Grant might get through without ever beginning it.
He loved life, but if he had been asked why, he might not have found a
ready answer. He loved his wife--just because she was Janet. Blithely
he left his cottage in the morning, deep breathing the mountain air, as
if it were his first in the blissful world; and all day the essential
bliss of being was his; but the immediate hope of his heart was not
the heavenly city; it was his home and his old woman, and her talk of
what she had found in her Bible that day. Strangely mingled--mingled
even to confusion with his faith in God, was his absolute trust in his
wife--a confidence not very different in kind from the faith which so
many Christians place in the mother of our Lord. To Robert, Janet was
one who knew--one who was far _ben_ with the Father of lights. She
perceived his intentions, understood his words, did his will, dwelt in
the secret place of the Most High. When Janet entered into the kingdom
of her Father, she would see that he was not left outside. He was as
sure of her love to himself, as he was of God’s love to her, and was
certain she could never be content without her old man. He was himself
a dull soul, he thought, and could not expect the great God to take
much notice of him, but he would allow Janet to look after him. He had
a vague conviction that he would not be very hard to save, for he knew
himself ready to do whatever was required of him. None of all this was
plain to his consciousness, however, or I daresay he would have begun
at once to combat the feeling.

His sole anxiety, on the other hand, was neither about life nor
death, about this world nor the next, but that his children should
be honest and honourable, fear God and keep his commandments. Around
them, all and each, the thoughts of father and mother were constantly
hovering--as if to watch them, and ward off evil.

Almost from the day, now many years ago, when, because of distance and
difficulty, she ceased to go to church, Janet had taken to her New
Testament in a new fashion.

She possessed an instinctive power of discriminating character, which
had its root and growth in the simplicity of her own; she had always
been a student of those phases of humanity that came within her ken;
she had a large share of that interest in her fellows and their affairs
which is the very bloom upon ripe humanity: with these qualifications,
and the interpretative light afforded by her own calm practical way of
living, she came to understand men and their actions, especially where
the latter differed from what might ordinarily have been expected, in
a marvellous way: her faculty amounted almost to sympathetic contact
with the very humanity. When, therefore, she found herself in this
remote spot, where she could see so little of her kind, she began, she
hardly knew by what initiation, to turn her study upon the story of
our Lord’s life. Nor was it long before it possessed her utterly, so
that she concentrated upon it all the light and power of vision she had
gathered from her experience of humanity. It ought not therefore to be
wonderful how much she now understood of the true humanity--with what
simple directness she knew what many of the words of the Son of Man
meant, and perceived many of the germs of his individual actions. Hence
it followed naturally that the thought of him, and the hope of one day
seeing him, became her one informing idea. She was now such another as
those women who ministered to him on the earth.

A certain gentle indifference she allowed to things considered
important, the neighbours attributed to weakness of character, and
called _softness_; while the honesty, energy, and directness with
which she acted upon insights they did not possess, they attributed to
intellectual derangement. She was “ower easy,” they said, when the talk
had been of prudence or worldly prospect; she was “ower hard,” they
said, when the question had been of right and wrong.

The same afternoon, a neighbour, on her way over the shoulder of the
hill to the next village, had called upon her and found her brushing
the rafters of her cottage with a broom at the end of a long stick.

“Save ’s a’, Janet! what are ye efter? I never saw sic a thing!” she
exclaimed.

“I kenna hoo I never thoucht o’ sic a thing afore,” answered Janet,
leaning her broom against the wall, and dusting a chair for her
visitor; “but this mornin’, whan my man an’ me was sittin’ at oor
brakfast, there cam sic a clap o’ thunner, ’at it jist garred the bit
hoosie trim’le; an’ doon fell a snot o’ soot intil the very spune ’at
my man was cairryin’ till ’s honest moo’. That cudna be as things war
inten’it, ye ken; sae what was to be said but set them richt?”

“Ow, weel! but ye micht hae waitit till Donal cam hame; he wad hae dune
’t in half the time, an’ no raxed his jints.”

“I cudna pit it aff,” answered Janet. “Wha kenned whan the Lord micht
come?--He canna come at cock-crawin’ the day, but he may be here afore
nicht.”

“Weel, I s’ awa,” said her visitor rising. “I’m gauin’ ower to the toon
to buy a feow hanks o’ worset to weyve a pair o’ stockins to my man.
Guid day to ye, Janet.--What neist, I won’er?” she added to herself as
she left the house. “The wuman’s clean dementit!”

The moment she was gone, Janet caught up her broom again, and went
spying about over the roof--ceiling there was none--after long
_tangles_ of agglomerated cobweb and smoke.

“Ay!” she said to herself, “wha kens whan he may be at the door? an’ I
wadna like to hear him say--‘Janet, ye micht hae had yer hoose a bit
cleaner, whan ye kenned I micht be at han’!’”

With all the cleaning she could give it, her cottage would have looked
but a place of misery to many a benevolent woman, who, if she had lived
there, would not have been so benevolent as Janet, or have kept the
place half so clean. For her soul was alive and rich, and out of her
soul, not education or habit, came the smallest of her virtues.--Having
finished at last, she took her besom to the door, and beat it against
a stone. That done, she stood looking along the path down the hill.
It was that by which her sons and daughters, every Saturday, came
climbing, one after the other, to her bosom, from their various labours
in the valley below, through the sunset, through the long twilight,
through the moonlight, each urged by a heart eager to look again upon
father and mother.

The sun was now far down his western arc, and nearly on a level with
her eyes; and as she gazed into the darkness of the too much light,
suddenly emerged from it, rose upward, staggered towards her--was
it an angel? was it a spectre? Did her old eyes deceive her? or was
the second sight born in her now first in her old age?--It seemed a
child--reeling, and spreading out hands that groped. She covered her
eyes for a moment, for it might be a vision in the sun, not on the
earth--and looked again. It was indeed a naked child! and--was she
still so dazzled by the red sun as to see red where red was none?--or
were those indeed blood-red streaks on his white skin? Straight now,
though slow, he came towards her. It was the same child who had come
and gone so strangely before! He held out his hands to her, and fell
on his face at her feet like one dead. Then, with a horror of pitiful
amazement, she saw a great cross marked in two cruel stripes on his
back; and the thoughts that thereupon went coursing through her loving
imagination, it would be hard to set forth. Could it be that the Lord
was still, child and man, suffering for his race, to deliver his
brothers and sisters from their sins?--wandering, enduring, beaten,
blessing still? accepting the evil, slaying it, and returning none?
his patience the one rock where the evil word finds no echo; his heart
the one gulf into which the dead-sea wave rushes with no recoil--from
which ever flows back only purest water, sweet and cool; the one
abyss of destroying love, into which all wrong tumbles, and finding
no reaction, is lost, ceases for evermore? there, in its own cradle,
the primal order is still nursed, still restored; thence is still sent
forth afresh, to leaven with new life the world ever ageing! Shadowy
and vague they were--but vaguely shadowed were thoughts like these
in Janet’s mind, as she stood half-stunned, regarding for one moment
motionless the prostrate child and his wrongs. The next she lifted him
in her arms, and holding him tenderly to her mother-heart, carried
him into the house, murmuring over him dove-like sounds of pity and
endearment mingled with indignation. There she laid him on his side in
her bed, covered him gently over, and hastened to the little byre at
the end of the cottage, to get him some warm milk. When she returned,
he had already lifted his heavy eyelids, and was looking wearily about
the place. But when he saw her--did ever so bright a sun shine as that
smile of his? Eyes and mouth and whole face flashed upon Janet! She set
down the milk, and went to the bedside. Gibbie put up his arms, threw
them round her neck, and clung to her as if she had been his mother.
And from that moment she _was_ his mother: her heart was big enough to
mother all the children of humanity. She was like Charity herself, with
her babes innumerable.

“What hae they dune to ye, my bairn?” she said, in tones pitiful with
the pity of the Shepherd of the sheep himself.

No reply came back--only another heavenly smile, a smile of absolute
content. For what were stripes and nakedness and hunger to Gibbie,
now that he had a woman to love! Gibbie’s necessity was to love; but
here was more; here was Love offering herself to him! Except in black
Sambo he had scarcely caught a good sight of her before. He had never
before been kissed by that might of God’s grace, a true woman. She was
an old woman who kissed him; but none who have drunk of the old wine
of love, straightway desire the new, for they know that the old is
better. Match such as hers with thy love, maiden of twenty, and where
wilt thou find the man I say, not worthy, but fit to mate with thee?
For hers was love indeed--not the love of love--but the love of Life.
Already Gibbie’s faintness was gone--and all his ills with it. She
raised him with one arm, and held the bowl to his mouth, and he drank;
but all the time he drank, his eyes were fixed upon hers. When she laid
him down again, he turned on his side, off his scored back, and in a
moment was fast asleep. She stood gazing at him. So still was he, that
she began to fear he was dead, and laid her hand on his heart. It was
beating steadily, and she left him, to make some gruel for him against
his waking. Her soul was glad, for she was ministering to her Master,
not the less in his own self, that it was in the person of one of his
little ones. Gruel, as such a one makes it, is no common fare, but
delicate enough for a queen. She set it down by the fire, and proceeded
to lay the supper for her expected children. The clean yellow-white
table of soft smooth fir needed no cloth--only horn spoons and wooden
caups.

At length a hand came to the latch, and mother and daughter greeted
as mother and daughter only can; then came a son, and mother and son
greeted as mother and son only can. They kept on arriving singly to the
number of six--two daughters and four sons, the youngest some little
time after the rest. Each, as he or she came, Janet took to the bed,
and showed her seventh child where he slept. Each time she showed him,
to secure like pity with her own, she turned down the bedclothes, and
revealed the little back, smitten with the eternal memorial of the
divine perfection. The women wept. The young men were furious, each
after his fashion.

“God damn the rascal ’at did it!” cried one of them, clenching his
teeth, and forgetting himself quite in the rage of the moment.

“Laddie, tak back the word,” said his mother calmly. “Gien ye dinna
forgie yer enemies, ye’ll no be forgi’en yersel’.”

“That’s some hard, mither,” answered the offender, with an attempted
smile.

“Hard!” she echoed; “it may weel be hard, for it canna be helpit. What
wad be the use o’ forgiein’ ye, or hoo cud it win at ye, or what wad
ye care for ’t, or mak o’ ’t, cairryin’ a hell o’ hate i’ yer verra
hert? For gien God be love, hell maun be hate. My bairn, them ’at winna
forgie their enemies, cairries sic a nest o’ deevilry i’ their ain
boasoms, ’at the verra speerit o’ God himsel’ canna win in till ’t for
bein’ scomfished wi’ smell an’ reik. Muckle guid wad ony pardon dee to
sic! But ance lat them un’erstan’ ’at he canna forgie them, an’ maybe
they’ll be fleyt, an’ turn again’ the Sawtan ’at’s i’ them.”

“Weel, but he’s no _my_ enemy,” said the youth.

“No your enemy!” returned his mother; “--no your enemy, an’ sair
(_serve_) a bairn like that! My certie! but he’s the enemy o’ the
haill race o’ mankin’. He trespasses unco sair again’ _me_, I’m weel
sure o’ that! An’ I’m glaid o’ ’t. I’m glaid ’at he has me for ane o’
’s enemies, for I forgie him for ane; an’ wuss him sae affrontit wi’
himsel’ er a’ be dune, ’at he wad fain hide his heid in a midden.”

“Noo, noo, mither!” said the eldest son, who had not yet spoken, but
whose countenance had been showing a mighty indignation, “that’s surely
as sair a bannin’ as yon ’at Jock said.”

“What, laddie! Wad ye hae a fellow-cratur live to a’ eternity ohn bein
ashamed o’ sic a thing ’s that? Wad that be to wuss him weel? Kenna ye
’at the mair shame the mair grace? My word was the best beginnin’ o’
better ’at I cud wuss him. Na, na, laddie! frae my verra hert, I wuss
he may be that affrontit wi’ himsel’ ’at he canna sae muckle as lift
up ’s een to haiven, but maun smite upo’ ’s breist an’ say, ‘God be
mercifu’ to me, a sinner!’ That’s my curse upo’ _him_, for I wadna hae
’im a deevil. Whan he comes to think that shame o’ himsel’, I’ll tak
him to my hert, as I tak the bairn he misguidit. Only I doobt I’ll be
lang awa afore that, for it taks time to fess a man like that till ’s
holy senses.”

The sixth of the family now entered, and his mother led him up to the
bed.

“The Lord preserve ’s!” cried Donal Grant, “it’s the cratur!--An’
is that the gait they hae guidit him! The quaietest cratur an’ the
willin’est!”

Donal began to choke.

“Ye ken him than, laddie?” said his mother.

“Weel that,” answered Donal. “He’s been wi’ me an’ the nowt ilka day
for weeks till the day.”

With that he hurried into the story of his acquaintance with Gibbie;
and the fable of the brownie would soon have disappeared from Daurside,
had it not been that Janet desired them to say nothing about the boy,
but let him be forgotten by his enemies, till he grew able to take care
of himself. Besides, she said, their father might get into trouble with
the master and the laird, if it were known they had him.

Donal vowed to himself, that, if Fergus had had a hand in the abuse, he
would never speak civil word to him again.

He turned towards the bed, and there were Gibbie’s azure eyes wide open
and fixed upon him.

“Eh, ye cratur!” he cried; and darting to the bed, he took Gibbie’s
face between his hands, and said, in a voice to which pity and sympathy
gave a tone like his mother’s,

“Whaten a deevil was ’t ’at lickit ye like that? Eh! I wuss I had the
trimmin’ o’ him!”

Gibbie smiled.

“Has the ill-guideship ta’en the tongue frae ’im, think ye?” asked the
mother.

“Na, na,” answered Donal; “he’s been like that sin ever I kenned him. I
never h’ard word frae the moo’ o’ ’im.”

“He’ll be ane o’ the deif an’ dumb,” said Janet.

“He’s no deif, mither; that I ken weel; but dumb he maun be, I’m
thinkin’.--Cratur,” he continued, stooping over the boy, “gien ye hear
what I’m sayin’, tak haud o’ my nose.”

Thereupon, with a laugh like that of an amused infant, Gibbie raised
his hand, and with thumb and forefinger gently pinched Donal’s large
nose, at which they all burst out laughing with joy. It was as if
they had found an angel’s baby in the bushes, and been afraid he was
an idiot, but were now relieved. Away went Janet, and brought him his
gruel. It was with no small difficulty and not without a moan or two,
that Gibbie sat up in the bed to take it. There was something very
pathetic in the full content with which he sat there in his nakedness,
and looked smiling at them all. It was more than content--it was bliss
that shone in his countenance. He took the wooden bowl, and began to
eat; and the look he cast on Janet seemed to say he had never tasted
such delicious food. Indeed he never had; and the poor cottage, where
once more he was a stranger and taken in, appeared to Gibbie a place of
wondrous wealth. And so it was--not only in the best treasures, those
of loving kindness, but in all homely plenty as well for the needs of
the body--a very temple of the God of simplicity and comfort--rich in
warmth and rest and food.

Janet went to her _kist_, whence she brought out a garment of her own,
and aired it at the fire. It had no lace at the neck or cuffs, no
embroidery down the front; but when she put it on him, amid the tearful
laughter of the women, and had tied it round his waist with a piece
of list that had served as a garter, it made a dress most becoming in
their eyes, and gave Gibbie indescribable pleasure from its whiteness,
and its coolness to his inflamed skin.

They had just finished clothing him thus, when the goodman came home,
and the mother’s narration had to be given afresh, with Donal’s notes
explanatory and completive. As the latter reported the doings of the
imagined brownie, and the commotion they had caused at the Mains and
along Daurside, Gibbie’s countenance flashed with pleasure and fun;
and at last he broke into such a peal of laughter as had never, for
pure merriment, been heard before so high on Glashgar. All joined
involuntarily in the laugh--even the old man, who had been listening
with his grey eyebrows knit, and hanging like bosky precipices over the
tarns of his deepset eyes, taking in every word, but uttering not one.
When at last his wife showed him the child’s back, he lifted his two
hands, and moved them slowly up and down, as in pitiful appeal for man
against man to the sire of the race. But still he said not a word. As
to utterance of what lay in the deep soul of him, the old man, except
sometimes to his wife, was nearly as dumb as Gibbie himself.

They sat down to their homely meal. Simplest things will carry the
result of honest attention as plainly as more elaborate dishes; and,
which it might be well to consider, they will carry no more than they
are worth: of Janet’s supper it is enough to say that it was such as
became her heart. In the judgment of all her guests, the porridge was
such as none could make but mother, the milk such as none but mother’s
cow could yield, the cakes such as she only could bake.

Gibbie sat in the bed like a king on his throne, gazing on his kingdom.
For he that loves has, as no one else has. It is the divine possession.
Picture the delight of the child, in his passion for his kind, looking
out upon this company of true hearts, honest faces, human forms--all
strong and healthy, loving each other and generous to the taking in of
the world’s outcast! Gibbie could not, at that period of his history,
have invented a heaven more to his mind, and as often as one of them
turned eyes towards the bed, his face shone up with love and merry
gratitude, like a better sun.

It was now almost time for the sons and daughters to go down the hill
again, and leave the cottage and the blessed old parents and the
harboured child to the night, the mountain-silence, and the living God.
The sun had long been down; but far away in the north, the faint thin
fringe of his light-garment was still visible, moving with the unseen
body of his glory softly eastward, dreaming along the horizon, growing
fainter and fainter as it went, but at the faintest then beginning to
revive and grow. Of the northern lands in summer, it may be said, as of
the heaven of heavens, that there is no night there. And by and by the
moon also would attend the steps of the returning children of labour.

“Noo, lads an’ lasses, afore we hae worship, rin, ilk ane o’ ye,” said
the mother, “an’ pu’ heather to mak a bed to the wee man--i’ the neuk
there, at the heid o’ oors. He’ll sleep there bonnie, an’ no ill ’ill
come near ’im.”

She was obeyed instantly. The heather was pulled, and set together
upright as it grew, only much closer, so that the tops made a dense
surface, and the many stalks, each weak, a strong upbearing whole. They
boxed them in below with a board or two for the purpose, and bound them
together above with a blanket over the top, and a white sheet over
that--a linen sheet it was, and large enough to be doubled, and receive
Gibbie between its folds. Then another blanket was added, and the bed,
a perfect one, was ready. The eldest of the daughters took Gibbie in
her arms, and, tenderly careful over his hurts, lifted him from the old
folks’ bed, and placed him in his own--one more luxurious, for heather
makes a still better stratum for repose than oat-chaff--and Gibbie sank
into it with a sigh that was but a smile grown vocal.

Then Donal, as the youngest, got down the big Bible, and having laid it
before his father, lighted the rush-pith-wick projecting from the beak
of the little iron lamp that hung against the wall, its shape descended
from Roman times. The old man put on his spectacles, took the book, and
found the passage that fell, in continuous process, to that evening.

Now he was not a very good reader, and, what with blindness and
spectacles, and poor light, would sometimes lose his place. But it
never troubled him, for he always knew the sense of what was coming,
and being no idolater of the letter, used the word that first suggested
itself, and so recovered his place without pausing. It reminded his
sons and daughters of the time when he used to tell them Bible stories
as they crowded about his knees; and sounding therefore merely like the
substitution of a more familiar word to assist their comprehension,
woke no surprise. And even now, the word supplied, being in the
vernacular, was rather to the benefit than the disadvantage of his
hearers. The word of Christ is spirit and life, and where the heart is
aglow, the tongue will follow that spirit and life fearlessly, and will
not err.

On this occasion he was reading of our Lord’s cure of the leper; and
having read, “_put forth his hand_,” lost his place, and went straight
on without it, from his memory of the facts.

“He put forth his han’--an’ grippit him, and said, Aw wull--be clean.”

After the reading followed a prayer, very solemn and devout. It was
then only, when before God, with his wife by his side, and his family
around him, that the old man became articulate. He would scarcely have
been so then, and would have floundered greatly in the marshes of his
mental chaos, but for the stepping-stones of certain theological forms
and phrases, which were of endless service to him in that they helped
him to utter what in him was far better, and so realise more to himself
his own feelings. Those forms and phrases would have shocked any devout
Christian who had not been brought up in the same school; but they did
him little harm, for he saw only the good that was in them, and indeed
did not understand them save in so far as they worded that lifting up
of the heart after which he was ever striving.

By the time the prayer was over, Gibbie was fast asleep again. What
it all meant he had not an idea; and the sound lulled him--a service
often so rendered in lieu of that intended. When he woke next, from the
aching of his stripes, the cottage was dark. The old people were fast
asleep. A hairy thing lay by his side, which, without the least fear,
he examined by palpation, and found to be a dog, whereupon he fell fast
asleep again, if possible happier than ever. And while the cottage was
thus quiet, the brothers and sisters were still tramping along the
moonlight paths of Daurside. They had all set out together, but at one
point after another there had been a parting, and now they were on six
different roads, each drawing nearer to the labour of the new week.




CHAPTER XXIII.

MORE SCHOOLING.

The first opportunity Donal had, he questioned Fergus as to his
share in the ill-usage of Gibbie. Fergus treated the inquiry as an
impertinent interference, and mounted his high horse at once. What
right had his father’s herd-boy to question him as to his conduct? He
put it so to him and in nearly just as many words. Thereupon answered
Donal--

“It’s this, ye see, Fergus: ye hae been unco guid to me, an’ I’m mair
obligatit till ye nor I can say. But it wad be a scunnerfu’ thing to
tak the len’ o’ buiks frae ye, an’ speir quest’ons at ye ’at I canna
mak oot mysel’, an’ syne gang awa despisin’ ye i’ my hert for cruelty
an’ wrang. What was the cratur punished for? Tell me that. Accordin’
till yer aunt’s ain accoont, he had ta’en naething, an’ had dune
naething but guid.”

“Why didn’t he speak up then, and defend himself, and not be so damned
obstinate?” returned Fergus. “He wouldn’t open his mouth to tell his
name, or where he came from even. I couldn’t get him to utter a single
word. As for his punishment, it was by the laird’s orders that Angus
MacPholp took the whip to him. I had nothing to do with it.--” Fergus
did not consider the punishment he had himself given him as worth
mentioning--as indeed, except for honesty’s sake, it was not, beside
the other.

“Weel, I’ll be a man some day, an’ Angus ’ll hae to sattle wi’ me!”
said Donal through his clenched teeth. “Man, Fergus! the cratur’s as
dumb ’s a worum. I dinna believe ’at ever he spak a word in ’s life.”

This cut Fergus to the heart, for he was far from being without
generosity or pity. How many things a man who is not awake to side
strenuously with the good in him against the evil, who is not on his
guard lest himself should mislead himself, may do, of which he will
one day be bitterly ashamed!--a trite remark, it may be, but, reader,
_that_ will make the thing itself no easier to bear, should you ever
come to know you have done a thing of the sort. I fear, however, from
what I know of Fergus afterwards, that he now, instead of seeking
about to make some amends, turned the strength that should have gone
in that direction, to the justifying of himself to himself in what he
had done. Anyhow, he was far too proud to confess to Donal that he had
done wrong--too much offended at being rebuked by one he counted so
immeasurably his inferior, to do the right thing his rebuke set before
him. What did the mighty business matter! The little rascal was nothing
but a tramp; and if he didn’t deserve his punishment this time, he had
deserved it a hundred times without having it, and would ten thousand
times again. So reasoned Fergus, while the feeling grew upon Donal
that _the cratur_ was of some superior race--came from some other and
nobler world. I would remind my reader that Donal was a Celt, with a
nature open to every fancy of love or awe--one of the same breed with
the foolish Galatians, and like them ready to be bewitched; but bearing
a heart that welcomed the light with glad rebound--loved the lovely,
nor loved it only, but turned towards it with desire to become like
it. Fergus too was a Celt in the main, but was spoiled by the paltry
ambition of being distinguished. He was not in love with loveliness,
but in love with praise. He saw not a little of what was good and
noble, and would fain be such, but mainly that men might regard him for
his goodness and nobility; hence his practical notion of the good was
weak, and of the noble, paltry. His one desire in doing anything, was
to be approved of or admired in the same--approved of in the opinions
he held, in the plans he pursued, in the doctrines he taught; admired
in the poems in which he went halting after Byron, and in the eloquence
with which he meant one day to astonish great congregations. There was
nothing original as yet discoverable in him; nothing to deliver him
from the poor imitative apery in which he imagined himself a poet. He
did possess one invaluable gift--that of perceiving and admiring more
than a little, certain forms of the beautiful; but it was rendered
merely ridiculous by being conjoined with the miserable ambition--poor
as that of any mountebank emperor--to be himself admired for that
admiration. He mistook also sensibility for faculty, nor perceived
that it was at best but a probable sign that he might be able to do
something or other with pleasure, perhaps with success. If any one
judge it hard that men should be made with ambitions to whose objects
they can never attain, I answer, ambition is but the evil shadow of
aspiration; and no man ever followed the truth, which is the one path
of aspiration, and in the end complained that he had been made this
way or that. Man is made to be that which he is made most capable of
desiring--but it goes without saying that he must desire the thing
itself and not its shadow. Man is of the truth, and while he follows a
lie, no indication his nature yields will hold, except the fear, the
discontent, the sickness of soul, that tell him he is wrong. If he say,
“I care not for what you call the substance--it is to me the shadow;
I want what you call the shadow,” the only answer is, that, to all
eternity, he can never have it: a shadow can never be had.

Ginevra was hardly the same child after the experience of that terrible
morning. At no time very much at home with her father, something had
now come between them, to remove which all her struggles to love him as
before were unavailing. The father was too stupid, too unsympathetic,
to take note of the look of fear that crossed her face if ever he
addressed her suddenly; and when she was absorbed in fighting the
thoughts that _would_ come, he took her constraint for sullenness.

With a cold spot in his heart where once had dwelt some genuine
regard for Donal, Fergus went back to college. Donal went on herding
the cattle, cudgeling Hornie, and reading what books he could lay
his hands on: there was no supply through Fergus any more, alas! The
year before, ere he took his leave, he had been careful to see Donal
provided with at least books for study; but this time he left him
to shift for himself. He was small because he was proud, spiteful
because he was conceited. He would let Donal know what it was to have
lost his favour! But Donal did not suffer much, except in the loss
of the friendship itself. He managed to get the loan of a copy of
Burns--better meat for a strong spirit than the poetry of Byron or even
Scott. An innate cleanliness of soul rendered the occasional coarseness
to him harmless, and the mighty torrent of the man’s life, broken by
occasional pools reflecting the stars; its headlong hatred of hypocrisy
and false religion; its generosity, and struggling conscientiousness;
its failures and its repentances, roused much in the heart of Donal.
Happily the copy he had borrowed, had in it a tolerable biography; and
that, read along with the man’s work, enabled him, young as he was,
to see something of where and how he had failed, and to shadow out to
himself, not altogether vaguely, the perils to which the greatest must
be exposed who cannot rule his own spirit, but, like a mere child,
reels from one mood into another--at the will of--what?

From reading Burns, Donal learned also not a little of the capabilities
of his own language; for, Celt as he was by birth and country and
mental character, he could not speak the Gaelic: that language, soft
as the speech of streams from rugged mountains, and wild as that of
the wind in the tops of fir-trees, the language at once of bards and
fighting men, had so far ebbed from the region, lingering only here
and there in the hollow pools of old memories, that Donal had never
learned it; and the lowland Scotch, an ancient branch of English, dry
and gnarled, but still flourishing in its old age, had become instead,
his mother-tongue; and the man who loves the antique speech, or even
the mere patois, of his childhood, and knows how to use it, possesses
therein a certain kind of power over the hearts of men, which the
most refined and perfect of languages cannot give, inasmuch as it has
travelled farther from the original sources of laughter and tears.
But the old Scotish itself is, alas! rapidly vanishing before a poor,
shabby imitation of modern English--itself a weaker language in sound,
however enriched in words, since the days of Shakspere, when it was far
more like Scotch in its utterance than it is now.

  My mother-tongue, how sweet thy tone!
    How near to good allied!
  Were even my heart of steel or stone,
    Thou wouldst drive out the pride.

So sings Klaus Groth, in and concerning his own Plattdeutsch--so nearly
akin to the English.

To a poet especially is it an inestimable advantage to be able to
employ such a language for his purposes. Not only was it the speech of
his childhood, when he saw everything with fresh, true eyes, but it
is itself a child-speech; and the child way of saying must always lie
nearer the child way of seeing, which is the poetic way. Therefore, as
the poetic faculty was now slowly asserting itself in Donal, it was of
vast importance that he should know what _the_ genius of Scotland had
been able to do with his homely mother-tongue, for through that tongue
alone, could what poetry he had in him have thoroughly fair play, and
in turn do its best towards his development--which is the first and
greatest use of poetry. It is a ruinous misjudgment--too contemptible
to be asserted, but not too contemptible to be acted upon, that the end
of poetry is publication. Its true end is to help first the man who
makes it along the path to the truth: help for other people may or may
not be in it; that, if it become a question at all, must be an after
one. To the man who has it, the gift is invaluable; and, in proportion
as it helps him to be a better man, it is of value to the whole world;
but it may, in itself, be so nearly worthless, that the publishing of
it would be more for harm than good. Ask any one who has had to perform
the unenviable duty of editor to a magazine: he will corroborate what I
say--that the quantity of verse good enough to be its own reward, but
without the smallest claim to be uttered to the world, is enormous.

Not yet, however, had Donal written a single stanza. A line, or at
most two, would now and then come into his head with a buzz, like a
wandering honey-bee that had mistaken its hive--generally in the shape
of a humorous malediction on Hornie--but that was all.

In the mean time Gibbie slept and waked and slept again, night after
night--with the loveliest days between, at the cottage on Glashgar. The
morning after his arrival, the first thing he was aware of was Janet’s
face beaming over him, with a look in its eyes more like worship then
benevolence. Her husband was gone, and she was about to milk the cow,
and was anxious lest, while she was away, he should disappear as
before. But the light that rushed into his eyes was in full response to
that which kindled the light in hers, and her misgiving vanished; he
could not love her like that and leave her. She gave him his breakfast
of porridge and milk, and went to her cow.

When she came back, she found everything tidy in the cottage, the floor
swept, every dish washed and set aside; and Gibbie was examining an old
shoe of Robert’s, to see whether he could not mend it. Janet, having
therefore leisure, proceeded at once with joy to the construction of
a garment she had been devising for him. The design was simple, and
its execution easy. Taking a blue winsey petticoat of her own, drawing
it in round his waist, and tying it over the chemise which was his
only garment, she found, as she had expected, that its hem reached his
feet: she partly divided it up the middle, before and behind, and had
but to backstitch two short seams, and there was a pair of sailor-like
trousers, as tidy as comfortable! Gibbie was delighted with them. True,
they had no pockets, but then he had nothing to put in pockets, and one
might come to think of that as an advantage. Gibbie indeed had never
had pockets, for the pockets of the garments he had had were always
worn out before they reached him. Then Janet thought about a cap; but
considering him a moment critically, and seeing how his hair stood out
like thatch-eaves round his head, she concluded with herself “There
maun be some men as weel ’s women fowk, I’m thinkin’, whause hair’s
gi’en them for a coverin’,” and betook herself instead to her New
Testament.

Gibbie stood by as she read in silence, gazing with delight, for he
thought it must be a book of ballads like Donal’s that she was reading.
But Janet found his presence, his unresting attitude, and his gaze,
discomposing. To worship freely, one must be alone, or else with
fellow-worshippers. And reading and worshipping were often so mingled
with Janet, as to form but one mental consciousness. She looked up
therefore from her book, and said--

“Can ye read, laddie?”

Gibbie shook his head.

“Sit ye doon than, an’ I s’ read till ye.”

Gibbie obeyed more than willingly, expecting to hear some ancient Scots
tale of love or chivalry. Instead, it was one of those love-awful,
glory-sad chapters in the end of the Gospel of John, over which hangs
the darkest cloud of human sorrow, shot through and through with the
radiance of light eternal, essential, invincible. Whether it was the
uncertain response to Janet’s tone merely, or to truth too loud to be
heard, save as a thrill, of some chord in his own spirit, having its
one end indeed twisted around an earthly peg, but the other looped to
a tail-piece far in the unknown--I cannot tell; it may have been that
the name now and then recurring brought to his mind the last words of
poor Sambo; anyhow, when Janet looked up, she saw the tears rolling
down the child’s face. At the same time, from the expression of his
countenance, she judged that his understanding had grasped nothing.
She turned therefore to the parable of the prodigal son, and read it.
Even that had not a few words and phrases unknown to Gibbie, but he did
not fail to catch the drift of the perfect story. For had not Gibbie
himself had a father, to whose bosom he went home every night? Let but
love be the interpreter, and what most wretched type will not serve
the turn for the carriage of profoundest truth! The prodigal’s lowest
degradation, Gibbie did not understand; but Janet saw the expression of
the boy’s face alter with every tone of the tale, through all the gamut
between the swine’s trough and the arms of the father. Then at last he
burst--not into tears--Gibbie was not much acquainted with weeping--but
into a laugh of loud triumph. He clapped his hands, and in a shiver of
ecstasy, stood like a stork upon one leg, as if so much of him was all
that could be spared for this lower world, and screwed himself together.

Janet was well satisfied with her experiment. Most Scotch women, and
more than most Scotch men, would have rebuked him for laughing, but
Janet knew in herself a certain tension of delight which nothing served
to relieve but a wild laughter of holiest gladness; and never in tears
of deepest emotion did her heart appeal more directly to its God. It is
the heart that is not yet sure of its God, that is afraid to laugh in
his presence.

Thus had Gibbie his first lesson in the only thing worth learning, in
that which, to be learned at all, demands the united energy of heart
and soul and strength and mind; and from that day he went on learning
it. I cannot tell how, or what were the slow stages by which his
mind budded and swelled until it burst into the flower of humanity,
the knowledge of God. I cannot tell the shape of the door by which
the Lord entered into that house, and took everlasting possession of
it. I cannot even tell in what shape he appeared himself in Gibbie’s
thoughts--for the Lord can take any shape that is human. I only know it
was not any unhuman shape of earthly theology that he bore to Gibbie,
when he saw him with “that inward eye, which is the bliss of solitude.”
For happily Janet never suspected how utter was Gibbie’s ignorance.
She never dreamed that he did not know what was generally said about
Jesus Christ. She thought he must know as well as she the outlines of
his story, and the purpose of his life and death, as commonly taught,
and therefore never attempted explanations for the sake of which she
would probably have found herself driven to use terms and phrases which
merely substitute that which is intelligible because it appeals to what
in us is low, and is itself both low and false, for that which, if
unintelligible, is so because of its grandeur and truth. Gibbie’s ideas
of God he got all from the mouth of Theology himself, the Word of God;
and to the theologian who will not be content with his teaching, the
disciple of Jesus must just turn his back, that his face may be to his
Master.

So, teaching him only that which she loved, not that which she had been
taught, Janet read to Gibbie of Jesus, talked to him of Jesus, dreamed
to him about Jesus; until at length--Gibbie did not think to watch, and
knew nothing of the process by which it came about--his whole soul was
full of the man, of his doings, of his words, of his thoughts, of his
life. Jesus Christ was in him--he was possessed by him. Almost before
he knew, he was trying to fashion his life after that of his Master.

Between the two, it was a sweet teaching, a sweet learning. Under
Janet, Gibbie was saved the thousand agonies that befall the
conscientious disciple, from the forcing upon him, as the thoughts
and will of the eternal Father of our spirits, of the ill expressed
and worse understood experiences, the crude conjectures, the vulgar
imaginations of would-be teachers of the multitude. Containing truth
enough to save those of sufficiently low development to receive such
teaching without disgust, it contains falsehood enough, but for the
Spirit of God, to ruin all nobler--I mean all childlike natures,
utterly; and many such it has gone far to ruin, driving them even to a
madness in which they have died. Jesus alone knows the Father, and can
reveal him. Janet studied only Jesus, and as a man knows his friend,
so she, only infinitely better, knew her more than friend--her Lord
and her God. Do I speak of a poor Scotch peasant woman too largely for
the reader whose test of truth is the notion of probability he draws
from his own experience? Let me put one question to make the real
probability clearer. Should it be any wonder, if Christ be indeed the
natural Lord of every man, woman, and child, that a simple, capable
nature, laying itself entirely open to him and his influences, should
understand him? How should he be the Lord of that nature if such a
thing were not possible, or were at all improbable--nay, if such a
thing did not necessarily follow? Among women, was it not always to
peasant women that heavenly messages came? See revelation culminate in
Elizabeth and Mary, the mothers of John the Baptist and Jesus. Think
how much fitter that it should be so;--that they to whom the word of
God comes should be women bred in the dignity of a natural life, and
familiarity with the large ways of the earth; women of simple and few
wants, without distraction, and with time for reflection--compelled
to reflection, indeed, from the enduring presence of an unsullied
consciousness: for wherever there is a humble, thoughtful nature, into
that nature the divine consciousness, that is, the Spirit of God,
presses as into its own place. Holy women are to be found everywhere,
but the prophetess is not so likely to be found in the city as in the
hill-country.

Whatever Janet, then, might, perhaps--I do not know--have imagined it
her duty to say to Gibbie had she surmised his ignorance, having long
ceased to trouble her own head, she had now no inclination to trouble
Gibbie’s heart with what men call the plan of salvation. It was enough
to her to find that he followed her Master. Being in the light she
understood the light, and had no need of system, either true or false,
to explain it to her. She lived by the word proceeding out of the mouth
of God. When life begins to speculate upon itself, I suspect it has
begun to die. And seldom has there been a fitter soul, one clearer from
evil, from folly, from human device--a purer cistern for such water
of life as rose in the heart of Janet Grant to pour itself into, than
the soul of Sir Gibbie. But I must not call any true soul a cistern:
wherever the water of life is received, it sinks and softens and
hollows, until it reaches, far down, the springs of life there also,
that come straight from the eternal hills, and thenceforth there is in
that soul a well of water springing up into everlasting life.




CHAPTER XXIV.

THE SLATE.

From that very next day, then, after he was received into the cottage
on Glashgar, Gibbie, as a matter of course, took upon him the work his
hand could find to do, and Janet averred to her husband that never
had any of her daughters been more useful to her. At the same time,
however, she insisted that Robert should take the boy out with him. She
would not have him do woman’s work, especially work for which she was
herself perfectly able. She had not come to her years, she said, to
learn _idleset_; and the boy would save Robert many a weary step among
the hills.

“He canna speyk to the dog,” objected Robert, giving utterance to the
first difficulty that suggested itself.

“The dog canna speyk himsel’,” returned Janet, “an’ the won’er is
he can un’erstan’: wha kens but he may come full nigher ane ’at’s
speechless like himsel’! Ye gie the cratur the chance, an’ I s’ warran’
he’ll mak himsel’ plain to the dog. Ye jist try ’im. Tell ye him to
tell the dog sae and sae, an’ see what ’ll come o’ ’t.”

Robert made the experiment, and it proved satisfactory. As soon as he
had received Robert’s orders, Gibbie claimed Oscar’s attention. The
dog looked up in his face, noted every glance and gesture, and, partly
from sympathetic instinct, that gift lying so near the very essence of
life, partly from observation of the state of affairs in respect of the
sheep, divined with certainty what the duty required of him was, and
was off like a shot.

“The twa dumb craturs un’erstan’ ane anither better nor I un’erstan’
aither o’ them,” said Robert to his wife when they came home.

And now indeed it was a blessed time for Gibbie. It had been pleasant
down in the valley, with the cattle and Donal, and foul weather
sometimes; but now it was the full glow of summer; the sweet keen air
of the mountain bathed him as he ran, entered into him, filled him with
life like the new wine of the kingdom of God, and the whole world rose
in its glory around him. Surely it is not the outspread sea, however
the sight of its storms and its labouring ships may enhance the sense
of safety to the onlooker, but the outspread land of peace and plenty,
with its nestling houses, its well-stocked yards, its cattle feeding in
the meadows, and its men and horses at labour in the fields, that gives
the deepest delight to the heart of the poet! Gibbie was one of the
meek, and inherited the earth. Throned on the mountain, he beheld the
multiform “goings on of life,” and in love possessed the whole. He was
of the poet-kind also, and now that he was a shepherd, saw everything
with shepherd-eyes. One moment, to his fancy, the great sun above
played the shepherd to the world, the winds were the dogs, and the men
and women the sheep. The next, in higher mood, he would remember the
good shepherd of whom Janet had read to him, and pat the head of the
collie that lay beside him: Oscar too was a shepherd and no hireling;
he fed the sheep; he turned them from danger and barrenness; and he
barked well.

“I’m the dumb dog!” said Gibbie to himself, not knowing that he was
really a copy in small of the good shepherd; “but maybe there may be
mair nor ae gait o’ barkin’.”

Then what a joy it was to the heaven-born obedience of the child, to
hearken to every word, watch every look, divine every wish of the
old man! Child Hercules could not have waited on mighty old Saturn
as Gibbie waited on Robert. For he was to him the embodiment of all
that was reverend and worthy, a very gulf of wisdom, a mountain of
rectitude. Gibbie was one of those few elect natures to whom obedience
is a delight--a creature so different from the vulgar that they have
but one tentacle they can reach such with--that of contempt.

“I jist lo’e the bairn as the verra aipple o’ my ee,” said Robert. “I
can scarce consaive a wuss, but there’s the cratur wi’ a grip o’ ’t! He
seems to ken what’s risin’ i’ my min’, an’ in a moment he’s up like the
dog to be ready, an’ luiks at me waitin’.”

Nor was it long before the town-bred child grew to love the heavens
almost as dearly as the earth. He would gaze and gaze at the clouds
as they came and went, and watching them and the wind, weighing the
heat and the cold, and marking many indications, known some of them
perhaps only to himself, understood the signs of the earthly times at
length nearly as well as an insect or a swallow, and far better than
long-experienced old Robert. The mountain was Gibbie’s very home; yet
to see him far up on it, in the red glow of the setting sun, with his
dog, as obedient as himself, hanging upon his every signal, one could
have fancied him a shepherd boy come down from the plains of heaven
to look after a lost lamb. Often, when the two old people were in bed
and asleep, Gibbie would be out watching the moon rise--seated, still
as ruined god of Egypt, on a stone of the mountain-side, islanded in
space, nothing alive and visible near him, perhaps not even a solitary
night-wind blowing and ceasing like the breath of a man’s life, and
the awfully silent moon sliding up from the hollow of a valley below.
If there be indeed a one spirit, ever awake and aware, should it be
hard to believe that that spirit should then hold common thought with a
little spirit of its own? If the nightly mountain was the prayer-closet
of him who said he would be with his disciples to the end of the world,
can it be folly to think he would hold talk with such a child, alone
under the heaven, in the presence of the father of both? Gibbie never
thought about himself, therefore was there wide room for the entrance
of the spirit. Does the questioning thought arise to my reader: How
could a man be conscious of bliss without the thought of himself? I
answer the doubt: When a man turns to look at himself, that moment
the glow of the loftiest bliss begins to fade; the pulsing fire-flies
throb paler in the passionate night; an unseen vapour steams up from
the marsh and dims the star-crowded sky and the azure sea; and the next
moment the very bliss itself looks as if it had never been more than a
phosphorescent gleam--the summer lightning of the brain. For then the
man sees himself but in his own dim mirror, whereas ere he turned to
look in that, he knew himself in the absolute clarity of God’s present
thought out-bodying him. The shoots of glad consciousness that come to
the obedient man, surpass in bliss whole days and years of such ravined
rapture as he gains whose weariness is ever spurring the sides of his
intent towards the ever retreating goal of his desires. I am a traitor
even to myself if I would live without my life.

But I withhold my pen; for vain were the fancy, by treatise or sermon
or poem or tale, to persuade a man to forget himself. He cannot if he
would. Sooner will he forget the presence of a raging tooth. There is
no forgetting of ourselves but in the finding of our deeper, our true
self--God’s idea of us when he devised us--the Christ in us. Nothing
but that self can displace the false, greedy, whining self, of which,
most of us are so fond and proud. And that self no man can find for
himself; seeing of himself he does not even know what to search for.
“But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons
of God.”

Then there was the delight, fresh every week, of the Saturday gathering
of the brothers and sisters, whom Gibbie could hardly have loved more,
had they been of his own immediate kin. Dearest of all was Donal,
whose greeting--“Weel, cratur,” was heavenly in Gibbie’s ears. Donal
would have had him go down and spend a day, every now and then, with
him and the _nowt_, as in old times--so soon the times grow old to the
young!--but Janet would not hear of it, until the foolish tale of the
brownie should have quite blown over.

“Eh, but I wuss,” she added, as she said so, “I cud win at something
aboot his fowk, or aiven whaur he cam frae, or what they ca’d him!
Never ae word has the cratur spoken!”

“Ye sud learn him to read, mither,” said Donal.

“Hoo wad I du that, laddie? I wad hae to learn him to speyk first,”
returned Janet.

“Lat him come doon to me, an’ I’ll try my han’,” said Donal.

Janet, notwithstanding, persisted in her refusal--for the present. By
Donal’s words set thinking of the matter, however, she now pondered the
question day after day, how she might teach him to read; and at last
the idea dawned upon her to substitute writing for speech.

She took the Shorter Catechism, which, in those days, had always an
alphabet as janitor to the gates of its mysteries--who, with the
catechism as a consequence even dimly foreboded, would even have
learned it?--and showed Gibbie the letters, naming each several times,
and going over them repeatedly. Then she gave him Donal’s school-slate,
with a _sklet-pike_, and said, “Noo, mak a muckle A, cratur.”

Gibbie did so, and well too: she found that already he knew about half
the letters.

“_He’s_ no fule!” she said to herself in triumph.

The other half soon followed; and she then began to show him words--not
in the Catechism, but in the New Testament. Having told him what any
word was, and led him to consider the letters composing it, she would
desire him to make it on the slate, and he would do so with tolerable
accuracy: she was not very severe about the spelling, if only it
was plain he knew the word. Ere long he began to devise short ways
of making the letters, and soon wrote with remarkable facility in a
character modified from the printed letters. When at length Janet saw
him take the book by himself, and sit pondering over it, she had not a
doubt he was understanding it, and her heart leapt for joy. He had to
ask her a good many words at first, and often the meaning of one and
another; but he seldom asked a question twice; and as his understanding
was far ahead of his reading, he was able to test a conjectured meaning
by the sense or nonsense it made of the passage.

One day she turned him to the paraphrases.[2] At once, to his
astonishment, he found there, all silent, yet still the same delight
which Donal used to divide to him from the book of _ballants_. His joy
was unbounded. He jumped from his seat; he danced, and laughed, and
finally stood upon one leg: no other mode of expression but this, the
expression of utter failure to express, was of avail to the relief of
his feeling.

[2] Metrical paraphrases of passages of Scripture, always to be found
at the end of the Bibles printed for Scotland.

One day, a few weeks after Gibbie had begun to read by himself, Janet
became aware that he was sitting on his stool, in what had come to
be called _the cratur’s corner_, more than usually absorbed in some
attempt with slate and pencil--now ceasing, lost in thought, and now
commencing anew. She went near and peeped over his shoulder. At the top
of the slate he had written the word _give_, then the word _giving_,
and below them, _gib_, then _gibing_; upon these followed _gib_ again,
and he was now plainly meditating something further. Suddenly he seemed
to find what he wanted, for in haste, almost as if he feared it might
escape him, he added a _y_, making the word _giby_--then first lifted
his head, and looked round, evidently seeking her. She laid her hand
on his head. He jumped up with one of his most radiant smiles, and
holding out the slate to her, pointed with his pencil to the word he
had just completed. She did not know it for a word, but sounded it
as it seemed to stand, making the _g_ soft, as I daresay some of my
readers, not recognizing in _Gibbie_ the diminutive of _Gilbert_,
may have treated its more accurate form. He shook his head sharply,
and laid the point of his pencil upon the _g_ of the _give_ written
above. Janet had been his teacher too long not to see what he meant,
and immediately pronounced the word as he would have it. Upon this he
began a wild dance, but sobering suddenly, sat down, and was instantly
again absorbed in further attempt. It lasted so long that Janet
resumed her previous household occupation. At length he rose, and with
thoughtful, doubtful contemplation of what he had done, brought her the
slate. There, under the fore-gone success, he had written the words
_galatians_ and _breath_, and under them, _galbreath_. She read them
all, and at the last, which, witnessing to his success, she pronounced
to his satisfaction, he began another dance, which again he ended
abruptly, to draw her attention once more to the slate. He pointed to
the _giby_ first, and the _galbreath_ next, and she read them together.
This time he did not dance, but seemed waiting some result. Upon Janet
the idea was dawning that he meant himself, but she was thrown out by
the cognomen’s correspondence with that of the laird, which suggested
that the boy had been merely attempting the name of the great man of
the district. With this in her mind, and doubtfully feeling her way,
she essayed the tentative of setting him right in the Christian name,
and said: “_Thomas--Thomas_ Galbraith.” Gibbie shook his head as
before, and again resumed his seat. Presently he brought her the slate,
with all the rest rubbed out, and these words standing alone--_sir giby
galbreath_. Janet read them aloud, whereupon Gibbie began stabbing his
forehead with the point of his slate-pencil, and dancing once more in
triumph: he had, he hoped, for the first time in his life, conveyed a
fact through words.

“That’s what they ca’ ye, is ’t?” said Janet, looking motherly at him:
“--Sir Gibbie Galbraith?”

Gibbie nodded vehemently.

“It’ll be some nickname the bairns hae gi’en him,” said Janet to
herself, but continued to gaze at him, in questioning doubt of her
own solution. She could not recall having ever heard of a _Sir_ in
the family; but ghosts of things forgotten kept rising formless and
thin in the sky of her memory: _had_ she never heard of a Sir Somebody
Galbraith somewhere? And still she stared at the child, trying to grasp
what she could not even see. By this time Gibbie was standing quite
still, staring at her in return: he could not think what made her stare
so at him.

“Wha ca’d ye that?” said Janet at length, pointing to the slate.

Gibbie took the slate, dropped upon his seat, and after considerable
cogitation and effort, brought her the words, _gibyse fapher_. Janet
for a moment was puzzled, but when she thought of correcting the _p_
with a _t_, Gibbie entirely approved.

“What was yer father, cratur?” she asked.

Gibbie, after a longer pause, and more evident labour than hitherto,
brought her the enigmatical word, _asootr_, which, the _Sir_ running
about in her head, quite defeated Janet. Perceiving his failure, he
jumped upon a chair, and reaching after one of Robert’s Sunday shoes on
the _crap o’ the wa’_, the natural shelf running all round the cottage,
formed by the top of the wall where the rafters rested, caught hold
of it, tumbled with it upon his creepie, took it between his knees,
and began a pantomime of the making or mending of the same with such
verisimilitude of imitation, that it was clear to Janet he must have
been familiar with the processes collectively called shoemaking; and
therewith she recognized the word on the slate--_a sutor_. She smiled
to herself at the association of name and trade, and concluded that
the _Sir_ at least was a nickname. And yet--and yet--whether from the
presence of some rudiment of an old memory, or from something about the
boy that belonged to a higher style than his present showing, her mind
kept swaying in an uncertainty whose very object eluded her.

“What is ’t yer wull ’at we ca’ ye, than, cratur?” she asked, anxious
to meet the child’s own idea of himself.

He pointed to the _giby_.

“Weel, Gibbie,” responded Janet,--and at the word, now for the first
time addressed by her to himself, he began dancing more wildly than
ever, and ended with standing motionless on one leg: now first and at
last he was fully recognized for what he was!--“Weel, Gibbie, I s’ ca’
ye what ye think fit,” said Janet. “An’ noo gang yer wa’s, Gibbie, an’
see ’at Crummie’s no ower far oot o’ sicht.”

From that hour Gibbie had his name from the whole family--his Christian
name only, however, Robert and Janet having agreed it would be wise
to avoid whatever might possibly bring the boy again under the notice
of the laird. The latter half of his name they laid aside for him, as
parents do a dangerous or over-valuable gift to a child.




CHAPTER XXV.

RUMOURS.

Almost from the first moment of his being domiciled on Glashgar, what
with the good food, the fine exercise, the exquisite air, and his great
happiness, Gibbie began to grow; and he took to growing so fast that
his legs soon shot far out of his winsey garment. But, of all places,
that was a small matter in Gormgarnet, where the kilt was as common
as trowsers. His wiry limbs grew larger without losing their firmness
or elasticity; his chest, the effort in running up hill constantly
alternated with the relief of running down, rapidly expanded, and his
lungs grew hardy as well as powerful; till he became at length such in
wind and muscle, that he could run down a wayward sheep almost as well
as Oscar. And his nerve grew also with his body and strength, till his
coolness and courage were splendid. Never, when the tide of his affairs
ran most in the shallows, had Gibbie had much acquaintance with fears,
but now he had forgotten the taste of them, and would have encountered
a wild highland bull alone on the mountain, as readily as tie Crummie
up in her byre.

One afternoon, Donal, having got a half-holiday, by the help of a
friend and the favour of Mistress Jean, came home to see his mother,
and having greeted her, set out to find Gibbie. He had gone a long
way, looking and calling without success, and had come in sight of a
certain tiny loch, or tarn, that filled a hollow of the mountain. It
was called the Deid Pot; and the old awe, amounting nearly to terror,
with which in his childhood he had regarded it, returned upon him, the
moment he saw the dark gleam of it, nearly as strong as ever--an awe
indescribable, arising from mingled feelings of depth, and darkness,
and lateral recesses, and unknown serpent-like fishes. The pot, though
small in surface, was truly of unknown depth, and had elements of dread
about it telling upon far less active imaginations than Donal’s. While
he stood gazing at it, almost afraid to go nearer, a great splash
that echoed from the steep rocks surrounding it, brought his heart
into his mouth, and immediately followed a loud barking, in which he
recognized the voice of Oscar. Before he had well begun to think what
it could mean, Gibbie appeared on the opposite side of the loch, high
above its level, on the top of the rocks forming its basin. He began
instantly a rapid descent towards the water, where the rocks were
so steep, and the footing so precarious, that Oscar wisely remained
at the top, nor attempted to follow him. Presently the dog caught
sight of Donal, where he stood on a lower level, whence the water was
comparatively easy of access, and starting off at full speed, joined
him, with much demonstration of welcome. But he received little notice
from Donal, whose gaze was fixed, with much wonder and more fear, on
the descending Gibbie. Some twenty feet from the surface of the loch,
he reached a point whence clearly, in Donal’s judgment, there was no
possibility of farther descent. But Donal was never more mistaken; for
that instant Gibbie flashed from the face of the rock head foremost,
like a fishing bird, into the lake. Donal gave a cry, and ran to the
edge of the water, accompanied by Oscar, who, all the time, had showed
no anxiety, but had stood wagging his tail, and uttering now and then
a little half-disappointed whine; neither now were his motions as he
ran other than those of frolic and expectancy. When they reached the
loch, there was Gibbie already but a few yards from the only possible
landing-place, swimming with one hand, while in the other arm he held
a baby lamb, its head lying quite still on his shoulder: it had been
stunned by the fall, but might come round again. Then first Donal began
to perceive that _the cratur_ was growing an athlete. When he landed,
he gave Donal a merry laugh of welcome, but without stopping flew up
the hill to take the lamb to its mother. Fresh from the icy water, he
ran so fast that it was all Donal could do to keep up with him.

The Deid Pot, then, taught Gibbie what swimming it could, which was not
much, and what diving it could, which was more; but the nights of the
following summer, when everybody on mountain and valley were asleep,
and the moon shone, he would often go down to the Daur, and throwing
himself into its deepest reaches, spend hours in lonely sport with
water and wind and moon. He had by that time learned things knowing
which a man can never be lonesome.

The few goats on the mountain were for a time very inimical to him. So
often did they butt him over, causing him sometimes severe bruises,
that at last he resolved to try conclusions with them; and when next
a goat made a rush at him, he seized him by the horns and wrestled
with him mightily. This exercise once begun, he provoked engagements,
until his strength and aptitude were such and so well known, that not a
billy-goat on Glashgar would have to do with him. But when he saw that
every one of them ran at his approach, Gibbie, who could not bear to
be in discord with any creature, changed his behaviour towards them,
and took equal pains to reconcile them to him--nor rested before he had
entirely succeeded.

Every time Donal came home, he would bring some book of verse with him,
and, leading Gibbie to some hollow, shady or sheltered as the time
required, would there read to him ballads, or songs, or verse more
stately, as mood or provision might suggest. The music, the melody
and the cadence and the harmony, the tone and the rhythm and the time
and the rhyme, instead of growing common to him, rejoiced Gibbie more
and more every feast, and with ever-growing reverence he looked up to
Donal as a mighty master-magician. But if Donal could have looked down
into Gibbie’s bosom, he would have seen something there beyond his
comprehension. For Gibbie was already in the kingdom of heaven, and
Donal would have to suffer, before he would begin even to look about
for the door by which a man may enter into it.

I wonder how much Gibbie was indebted to his constrained silence during
all these years. That he lost by it, no one will doubt; that he gained
also, a few will admit: though I should find it hard to say what and
how great, I cannot doubt it bore an important part in the fostering
of such thoughts and feelings and actions as were beyond the vision of
Donal, poet as he was growing to be. While Donal read, rejoicing in
the music both of sound and sense, Gibbie was doing something besides:
he was listening with the same ears, and trying to see with the same
eyes, which he brought to bear upon the things Janet taught him out of
the book. Already those first weekly issues, lately commenced, of a
popular literature had penetrated into the mountains of Gormgarnet; but
whether Donal read Blind Harry from a thumbed old modern edition, or
some new tale or neat poem from the Edinburgh press, Gibbie was always
placing what he heard by the side, as it were, of what he knew; asking
himself, in this case and that, what Jesus Christ would have done, or
what he would require of a disciple. There must be one right way, he
argued. Sometimes his innocence failed to see that no disciple of the
Son of Man could, save by fearful failure, be in such circumstances
as the tale or ballad represented. But, whether successful or not
in the individual inquiry, the boy’s mind and heart and spirit, in
this silent, unembarrassed brooding, as energetic as it was peaceful,
expanded upwards when it failed to widen, and the widening would come
after. Gifted, from the first of his being, with such a rare drawing
to his kind, he saw his utmost affection dwarfed by the words and
deeds of Jesus--beheld more and more grand the requirements made of
a man who would love his fellows as Christ loved them. When he sank
foiled from any endeavour to understand how a man was to behave in
certain circumstances, these or those, he always took refuge in _doing_
something--and doing it better than before; leaped the more eagerly if
Robert called him, spoke the more gently to Oscar, turned the sheep
more careful not to scare them--as if by instinct he perceived that
the only hope of understanding lies in doing. He would cleave to the
skirt when the hand seemed withdrawn; he would run to do the thing
he had learned yesterday, when as yet he could find no answer to the
question of to-day. Thus, as the weeks of solitude and love and thought
and obedience glided by, the reality of Christ grew upon him, till he
saw the very rocks and heather and the faces of the sheep like him,
and felt his presence everywhere, and ever coming nearer. Nor did his
imagination aid only a little in the growth of his being. He would
dream waking dreams about Jesus, gloriously childlike. He fancied
he came down every now and then to see how things were going in the
lower part of his kingdom; and that when he did so, he made use of
Glashgar and its rocks for his stair, coming down its granite scale in
the morning, and again, when he had ended his visit, going up in the
evening by the same steps. Then high and fast would his heart beat at
the thought that some day he might come upon his path just when he had
passed, see the heather lifting its head from the trail of his garment,
or more slowly out of the prints left by his feet, as he walked up the
stairs of heaven, going back to his Father. Sometimes, when a sheep
stopped feeding and looked up suddenly, he would fancy that Jesus had
laid his hand on its head, and was now telling it that it must not mind
being killed; for he had been killed, and it was all right.

Although he could read the New Testament for himself now, he always
preferred making acquaintance with any new portion of it first from
the mouth of Janet. Her voice made the word more of a word to him.
But the next time he read, it was sure to be what she had then read.
She was his priestess; the opening of her Bible was the opening of a
window in heaven; her cottage was the porter’s lodge to the temple; his
very sheep were feeding on the temple-stairs. Smile at such fancies
if you will, but think also whether they may not be within sight of
the greatest of facts. Of all teachings that which presents a far
distant God is the nearest to absurdity. Either there is none, or he is
nearer to every one of us than our nearest consciousness of self. An
unapproachable divinity is the veriest of monsters, the most horrible
of human imaginations.

When the winter came, with its frost and snow, Gibbie saved Robert
much suffering. At first Robert was unwilling to let him go out alone
in stormy weather; but Janet believed that the child doing the old
man’s work would be specially protected. All through the hard time,
therefore, Gibbie went and came, and no evil befell him. Neither did he
suffer from the cold; for, a sheep having died towards the end of the
first autumn, Robert, in view of Gibbie’s coming necessity, had begged
of his master the skin, and dressed it with the wool upon it; and of
this, between the three of them, they made a coat for him; so that he
roamed the hill like a savage, in a garment of skin.

It became, of course, before very long, well known about the country
that Mr. Duff’s crofters upon Glashgar had taken in and were bringing
up a foundling--some said an innocent, some said a wild boy--who helped
Robert with his sheep, and Janet with her cow, but could not speak a
word of either Gaelic or English. By and by, strange stories came to
be told of his exploits, representing him as gifted with bodily powers
as much surpassing the common, as his mental faculties were assumed
to be under the ordinary standard. The rumour concerning him swelled
as well as spread, mainly from the love of the marvellous common in
the region, I suppose, until, towards the end of his second year on
Glashgar, the notion of Gibbie in the imaginations of the children of
Daurside, was that of an almost supernatural being, who had dwelt upon,
or rather who had haunted, Glashgar from time immemorial, and of whom
they had been hearing all their lives; and, although they had never
heard anything bad of him--that he was _wild_, that he wore a hairy
skin, that he could do more than any other boy dared attempt, that he
was dumb, and that yet (for this also was said) sheep and dogs and
cattle, and even the wild creatures of the mountain, could understand
him perfectly--these statements were more than enough, acting on the
suspicion and fear belonging to the savage in their own bosoms, to
envelope the idea of him in a mist of dread, deepening to such horror
in the case of the more timid and imaginative of them, that when the
twilight began to gather about the cottages and farmhouses, the very
mention of “the beast-loon o’ Glashgar” was enough, and that for miles
up and down the river, to send many of the children scouring like
startled hares into the house. Gibbie, in his atmosphere of human grace
and tenderness, little thought what clouds of foolish fancies, rising
from the valleys below, had, by their distorting vapours, made of him
an object of terror to those whom at the very first sight he would have
loved and served. Amongst these, perhaps the most afraid of him were
the children of the gamekeeper, for they lived on the very foot of the
haunted hill, near the bridge and gate of Glashruach; and the laird
himself happened one day to be witness of their fear. He inquired the
cause, and yet again was his enlightened soul vexed by the persistency
with which the shadows of superstition still hung about his lands. Had
he been half as philosophical as he fancied himself, he might have
seen that there was not necessarily a single film of superstition
involved in the belief that a savage roamed a mountain--which was all
that Mistress MacPholp, depriving the rumour of its richer colouring,
ventured to impart as the cause of her children’s perturbation; but
anything a hair’s-breadth out of the common, was a thing hated of
Thomas Galbraith’s soul, and whatever another believed which he did
not choose to believe, he set down at once as superstition. He held
therefore immediate communication with his gamekeeper on the subject,
who in his turn was scandalized that _his_ children should have thus
proved themselves unworthy of the privileges of their position, and
given annoyance to the liberal soul of their master, and took care that
both they and his wife should suffer in consequence. The expression
of the man’s face as he listened to the laird’s complaint, would
not have been a pleasant sight to any lover of Gibbie; but it had
not occurred either to master or man that the offensive being whose
doubtful existence caused the scandal, was the same towards whom they
had once been guilty of such brutality; nor would their knowledge of
the fact have been favourable to Gibbie. The same afternoon, the laird
questioned his tenant of the Mains concerning his cottars; and was
assured that better or more respectable people were not in all the
region of Gormgarnet.

When Robert became aware, chiefly through the representations of his
wife and Donal, of Gibbie’s gifts of other kinds than those revealed
to himself by his good shepherding, he began to turn it over in his
mind, and by and by referred the question to his wife whether they
ought not to send the boy to school, that he might learn the things
he was so much more than ordinarily capable of learning. Janet would
give no immediate opinion. She must think, she said; and she took three
days to turn the matter over in her mind. Her questioning cogitation
was to this effect: “What need has a man to know anything but what the
New Testament teaches him? Life was little to me before I began to
understand its good news; now it is more than good--it is grand. But
then, man is to live by _every_ word that proceedeth out of the mouth
of God; and everything came out of his mouth, when he said, _Let there
be this_, and _Let there be that_. Whatever is true is _his_ making,
and the more we know of it the better. Besides, how much less of the
New Testament would I understand now, if it were not for things I had
gone through and learned before!”

“Ay, Robert,” she answered, without preface, the third day, “I’m
thinkin’ there’s a heap o’ things, gien I hed them, ’at wad help me to
ken what the Maister spak till. It wad be a sin no to lat the laddie
learn. But wha’ll tak the trible needfu’ to the learnin’ o’ a puir
dummie?”

“Lat him gang doon to the Mains, an’ herd wi’ Donal,” answered Robert.
“He kens a hantle mair nor you or me or Gibbie aither; an’ whan he’s
learnt a’ ’at Donal can shaw him it’ll be time to think what neist.”

“Weel,” answered Janet, “nane can say but that’s sense, Robert; an’
though I’m laith, for your sake mair nor my ain, to lat the laddie
gang, lat him gang to Donal. I houp, atween the twa, they winna lat the
nowt amo’ the corn.”

“The corn’s ’maist cuttit noo,” replied Robert; “an’ for the maitter o’
that, twa guid consciences winna blaw ane anither oot.--But he needna
gang ilka day. He can gie ae day to the learnin’, an’ the neist to
thinkin’ aboot it amo’ the sheep. An’ ony day ’at ye want to keep him,
ye can keep him; for it winna be as gien he gaed to the schuil.”

Gibbie was delighted with the proposal.

“Only,” said Robert, in final warning, “dinna ye lat them tak ye,
Gibbie, an’ score yer back again, my cratur; an’ dinna ye answer
naebody, whan they speir what ye’re ca’d, onything mair nor jist
_Gibbie_.”

The boy laughed and nodded, and, as Janet said, the bairn’s nick was
guid ’s the best man’s word.

Now came a happy time for the two boys. Donal began at once to teach
Gibbie Euclid and arithmetic. When they had had enough of that for a
day, he read Scotish history to him; and when they had done what seemed
their duty by that, then came the best of the feast--whatever tales or
poetry Donal had laid his hands upon.

Somewhere about this time it was that he first got hold of a copy of
the Paradise Lost. He found that he could not make much of it. But
he found also that, as before with the ballads, when he read from it
aloud to Gibbie, his mere listening presence sent back a spiritual echo
that helped him to the meaning; and when neither of them understood
it, the grand organ roll of it, losing nothing in the Scotch voweling,
delighted them both.

Once they were startled by seeing the gamekeeper enter the field. The
moment he saw him, Gibbie laid himself flat on the ground, but ready to
spring to his feet and run. The man, however, did not come near them.




CHAPTER XXVI.

THE GAMEKEEPER.

The second winter came, and with the first frost Gibbie resumed
his sheepskin coat and the brogues and leggings which he had made
for himself of deer-hide tanned with the hair. It pleased the two
old people to see him so warmly clad. It pleased them also that,
thus dressed, he always reminded them of some sacred personage
undetermined--Jacob, or John the Baptist, or the man who went to meet
the lion and be killed by him--in Robert’s big Bible, that is, in one
or other of the woodcuts of the same. Very soon the stories about him
were all stirred up afresh, and new rumours added. This one and that of
the children declared they had caught sight of the beast-loon, running
about the rocks like a goat; and one day a boy of Angus’s own, who had
been a good way up the mountain, came home nearly dead with terror,
saying the beast-loon had chased him a long way. He did not add that he
had been throwing stones at the sheep, not perceiving any one in charge
of them. So, one fine morning in December, having nothing particular
to attend to, Angus shouldered his double-barrelled gun, and set out
for a walk over Glashgar, in the hope of coming upon the savage that
terrified the children. He must be off. That was settled. Where Angus
was in authority, the outlandish was not to be suffered. The sun shone
bright, and a keen wind was blowing.

About noon he came in sight of a few sheep, in a sheltered spot, where
were little patches of coarse grass among the heather. On a stone, a
few yards above them, sat Gibbie, not reading, as he would be half
the time now, but busied with a Pan’s-pipes--which, under Donal’s
direction, he had made for himself--drawing from them experimental
sounds, and feeling after the possibility of a melody. He was so much
occupied that he did not see Angus approach, who now stood for a moment
or two regarding him. He was hirsute as Esau, his head crowned with its
own plentiful crop--even in winter he wore no cap--his body covered
with the wool of the sheep, and his legs and feet with the hide of the
deer--the hair, as in nature, outward. The deer-skin Angus knew for
what it was from afar, and concluding it the spoil of the only crime
of which he recognized the enormity, whereas it was in truth part of
a skin he had himself sold to a saddler in the next village, to make
sporrans of, boiled over with wrath, and strode nearer, grinding his
teeth. Gibbie looked up, knew him, and starting to his feet, turned
to the hill. Angus, levelling his gun, shouted to him to stop, but
Gibbie only ran the harder, nor once looked round. Idiotic with rage,
Angus fired. One of his barrels was loaded with shot, the other with
ball: meaning to use the shot barrel, he pulled the wrong trigger,
and liberated the bullet. It went through the calf of Gibbie’s right
leg, and he fell. It had, however, passed between two muscles without
injuring either greatly, and had severed no artery. The next moment
he was on his feet again and running, nor did he yet feel pain.
Happily he was not very far from home, and he made for it as fast as
he could--preceded by Oscar, who, having once by accident been shot
himself, had a mortal terror of guns. Maimed as Gibbie was, he could
yet run a good deal faster up hill than the rascal who followed him.
But long before he reached the cottage, the pain had arrived, and
the nearer he got to it the worse it grew. In spite of the anguish,
however, he held on with determination; to be seized by Angus and
dragged down to Glashruach, would be far worse.

Robert Grant was at home that day, suffering from rheumatism. He was
seated in the _ingle-neuk_, with his pipe in his mouth, and Janet was
just taking the potatoes for their dinner off the fire, when the door
flew open, and in stumbled Gibbie, and fell on the floor. The old man
threw his pipe from him, and rose trembling, but Janet was before him.
She dropt down on her knees beside the boy, and put her arm under his
head. He was white and motionless.

“Eh, Robert Grant!” she cried, “he’s bleedin’.”

The same moment they heard quick yet heavy steps approaching. At once
Robert divined the truth, and a great wrath banished rheumatism and age
together. Like a boy he sprang to the _crap o’ the wa’_, whence his
yet powerful hand came back armed with a huge rusty old broad-sword
that had seen service in its day. Two or three fierce tugs at the hilt
proving the blade immovable in the sheath, and the steps being now
almost at the door, he clubbed the weapon, grasping it by the sheathed
blade, and holding it with the edge downward, so that the blow he meant
to deal should fall from the round of the basket hilt. As he heaved it
aloft, the gray old shepherd seemed inspired by the god of battles; the
rage of a hundred ancestors was welling up in his peaceful breast. His
red eye flashed, and the few hairs that were left him stood erect on
his head like the mane of a roused lion. Ere Angus had his second foot
over the threshold, down came the helmet-like hilt with a dull crash on
his head, and he staggered against the wall.

“Tak ye that, Angus MacPholp!” panted Robert through his clenched
teeth, following the blow with another from his fist, that prostrated
the enemy. Again he heaved his weapon, and standing over him where he
lay, more than half-stunned, said in a hoarse voice,

“By the great God my maker, Angus MacPholp, gien ye seek to rise, I’ll
come doon on ye again as ye lie!--Here, Oscar!--He’s no ane to haud ony
fair play wi’, mair nor a brute beast.--Watch him, Oscar, and tak him
by the thro’t gien he muv a finger.”

The gun had dropped from Angus’s hand, and Robert, keeping his eye on
him, secured it.

“She’s lodd,” muttered Angus.

“Lie still than,” returned Robert, pointing the weapon at his head.

“It’ll be murder,” said Angus, and made a movement to lay hold of the
barrel.

“Haud him doon, Oscar,” cried Robert. The dog’s paws were instantly on
his chest, and his teeth grinning within an inch of his face. Angus
vowed in his heart he would kill the beast on the first chance. “It wad
be but blude for blude, Angus MacPholp,” he went on. “Yer hoor’s come,
my man. That bairn’s is no the first blude o’ man ye hae shed, an’ it’s
time the Scripture was fulfillt, an’ the han’ o’ man shed yours.”

“Ye’re no gauin’ to kill me, Rob Grant?” growled the fellow in growing
fright.

“I’m gauin’ to see whether the shirra’ winna be perswaudit to hang ye,”
answered the shepherd. “This maun be putten a stap till.--Quaiet! or
I’ll brain ye, an’ save him the trouble.--Here, Janet, fess yer pot o’
pitawtas. I’m gauin’ to toom the man’s gun. Gien he daur to muv, jist
gie him the haill bilin’, bree an a’, i’ the ill face o’ ’im; gien ye
lat him up he’ll kill ’s a’; only tak care an’ haud aff o’ the dog,
puir fallow!--I wad lay the stock o’ yer murderin’ gun i’ the fire gien
’twarna ’at I reckon it’s the laird’s an’ no yours. Ye’re no fit to be
trustit wi’ a gun. Ye’re waur nor a weyver.”

So saying he carried the weapon to the door, and, in terror lest he
might, through wrath or the pressure of dire necessity, use it against
his foe, emptied its second barrel into the earth, and leaned it up
against the wall outside.

Janet obeyed her husband so far as to stand over Angus with the
potato-pot: how far she would have carried her obedience had he
attempted to rise may remain a question. Doubtless a brave man doing
his duty would have scorned to yield himself thus; but right and wrong
had met face to face, and the wrong had a righteous traitor in his
citadel.

When Robert returned and relieved her guard, Janet went back to Gibbie,
whom she had drawn towards the fire. He lay almost insensible, but in
vain Janet attempted to get a teaspoonful of whisky between his lips.
For as he grew older, his horror of it increased; and now, even when he
was faint and but half conscious, his physical nature seemed to recoil
from contact with it. It was with signs of disgust, rubbing his mouth
with the back of each hand alternately, that he first showed returning
vitality. In a minute or two more he was able to crawl to his bed in
the corner, and then Janet proceeded to examine his wound.

By this time his leg was much swollen, but the wound had almost stopped
bleeding, and it was plain there was no bullet in it, for there were
the two orifices. She washed it carefully and bound it up. Then Gibbie
raised his head and looked somewhat anxiously round the room.

“Ye’re luikin’ efter Angus?” said Janet; “he’s yon’er upo’ the flure, a
twa yairds frae ye. Dinna be fleyt; yer father an’ Oscar hae him safe
eneuch, I s’ warran’.”

“Here, Janet!” cried her husband; “gien ye be throu’ wi’ the bairn, I
maun be gauin’.”

“Hoots, Robert! ye’re no surely gauin’ to lea’ me an’ puir Gibbie, ’at
maunna stir, i’ the hoose oor lanes wi’ the murderin’ man!” returned
Janet.

“’Deed am I, lass! Jist rin and fess the bit tow ’at ye hing yer duds
upo’ at the washin’, an’ we’ll bin’ the feet an’ the han’s o’ ’im.”

Janet obeyed and went. Angus, who had been quiet enough for the last
ten minutes, meditating and watching, began to swear furiously, but
Robert paid no more heed than if he had not heard him--stood calm and
grim at his head, with the clubbed sword heaved over his shoulder.
When she came back, by her husband’s directions, she passed the rope
repeatedly round the keeper’s ankles, then several times between them,
drawing the bouts tightly together, so that, instead of the two sharing
one ring, each ankle had now, as it were, a close-fitting one for
itself. Again and again, as she tied it, did Angus meditate a sudden
spring, but the determined look of Robert, and his feeling memory of
the blows he had so unsparingly delivered upon him, as well as the
weakening effect of that he had received on his head, caused him to
hesitate until it was altogether too late. When they began to bind his
hands, however, he turned desperate, and struck at both, cursing and
raging.

“Gien ye binna quaiet, ye s’ taste the dog’s teeth,” said
Robert.--Angus reflected that he would have a better chance when he
was left alone with Janet, and yielded.--“Troth!” Robert went on, as
he continued his task, “I hae no pity left for ye, Angus MacPholp; an’
gien ye tyauve ony mair, I’ll lat at ye. I wad care no more to caw oot
yer harns nor I wad to kill a tod (_fox_). To be hangt for ’t, I wad be
but prood. It’s a fine thing to be hangt for a guid cause, but ye’ll
be hangt for an ill ane.--Noo, Janet, fess a bun’le o’ brackens frae
the byre, an’ lay aneth ’s heid. We maunna be sairer upo’ him, nor the
needcessity laid upo’ his. I s’ jist trail him aff o’ the door, an’
a bit on to the fire, for he’ll be caul’ whan he’s quaitet doon, an’
syne I’ll awa an’ get word o’ the shirra’. Scotlan’s come till a pretty
pass, whan they shot men wi’ guns, as gien they war wull craturs to be
peelt an’ aiten. Care what set him! He may weel be a keeper o’ ghem,
for he’s as ill a keeper o’ ’s brither as auld Cain himsel’. But,” he
concluded, tying the last knot hard, “we’ll e’en dee what we can to
keep the keeper.”

It was seldom Robert spoke at such length, but the provocation, the
wrath, the conflict, and the victory, had sent the blood rushing
through his brain, and loosed his tongue like strong drink.

“Ye’ll tak yer denner afore ye gang, Robert,” said his wife.

“Na, I can ait naething; I’ll tak a bannock i’ my pooch. Ye can gie my
denner to Angus: he’ll want hertenin’ for the wuddie (_gallows_).”

So saying he put the bannock in his pocket, flung his broad blue bonnet
upon his head, took his stick, and ordering Oscar to remain at home
and watch the prisoner, set out for a walk of five miles, as if he had
never known such a thing as rheumatism. He must find another magistrate
than the laird; he would not trust him where his own gamekeeper, Angus
MacPholp, was concerned.

“Keep yer ee upo’ him, Janet,” he said, turning in the doorway. “Dinna
lowse sicht o’ him afore I come back wi’ the constable. Dinna lippen. I
s’ be back in three hoors like.”

With these words he turned finally, and disappeared.

The mortification of Angus as he lay thus trapped in the den of the
beast-loon, at being taken and bound by an old man, a woman, and a
collie dog, was extreme. He went over the whole affair again and
again in his mind, ever with a fresh burst of fury. It was in vain
he excused himself on the ground that the attack had been so sudden
and treacherous, and the precautions taken so complete. He had proved
himself an ass, and the whole country would ring with mockery of him!
He had sense enough, too, to know that he was in a serious as well as
ludicrous predicament: he had scarcely courage enough to contemplate
the possible result. If he could but get his hands free, it would be
easy to kill Oscar and disable Janet. For the idiot, he counted him
nothing. He had better wait, however, until there should be no boiling
liquid ready to her hand.

Janet set out the dinner, peeled some potatoes, and approaching Angus,
would have fed him. In place of accepting her ministration, he fell to
abusing her with the worst language he could find. She withdrew without
a word, and sat down to her own dinner; but, finding the torrent of
vituperation kept flowing, rose again, and going to the door, fetched
a great jug of cold water from the pail that always stood there, and
coming behind her prisoner, emptied it over his face. He gave a horrid
yell taking the douche for a boiling one.

“Ye needna cry oot like that at guid caul’ watter,” said Janet. “But
ye’ll jist absteen frae ony mair sic words i’ my hearin’, or ye s’ get
the like ilka time ye brak oot.” As she spoke, she knelt, and wiped his
face and head with her apron.

A fresh oath rushed to Angus’s lips, but the fear of a second jugful
made him suppress it, and Janet sat down again to her dinner. She could
scarcely eat a mouthful, however, for pity of the rascal beside her,
at whom she kept looking wistfully without daring again to offer him
anything.

While she sat thus, she caught a swift investigating look he cast on
the cords that bound his hands, and then at the fire. She perceived
at once what was passing in his mind. Rising, she went quickly to the
byre, and returned immediately with a chain they used for tethering the
cow. The end of it she slipt deftly round his neck, and made it fast,
putting the little bar through a link.

“Ir ye gauin’ to hang me, ye she-deevil?” he cried, making a futile
attempt to grasp the chain with his bound hands.

“Ye’ll be wantin’ a drappy mair caul’ watter, I’m thinkin’,” said Janet.

She stretched the chain to its length, and with a great stone drove the
sharp iron stake at the other end of it, into the clay-floor. Fearing
next that, bound as his hands were, he might get a hold of the chain
and drag out the stake, or might even contrive to remove the rope from
his feet with them, or that he might indeed with his teeth undo the
knot that confined his hands themselves--she got a piece of rope, and
made a loop at the end of it, then watching her opportunity passed the
loop between his hands, noosed the other end through it, and drew the
noose tight. The free end of the rope she put through the staple that
received the bolt of the cottage-door, and gradually, as he grew weary
in pulling against her, tightened the rope until she had his arms at
their stretch beyond his head. Not quite satisfied yet, she lastly
contrived, in part by setting Oscar to occupy his attention, to do
the same with his feet, securing them to a heavy chest in the corner
opposite the door, upon which chest she heaped a pile of stones. If
it pleased the Lord to deliver them from this man, she would have her
honest part in the salvation! And now at last she believed she had him
safe.

Gibbie had fallen asleep, but he now woke and she gave him his dinner;
then _redd up_, and took her Bible. Gibbie had lain down again, and she
thought he was asleep.

Angus grew more and more uncomfortable, both in body and in mind. He
knew he was hated throughout the country, and had hitherto rather
enjoyed the knowledge; but now he judged that the popular feeling, by
no means a mere prejudice, would tell against him committed for trial.
He knew also that the magistrate to whom Robert had betaken himself,
was not over friendly with his master, and certainly would not listen
to any intercession from him. At length, what with pain, hunger, and
fear, his pride began to yield, and, after an hour had passed in utter
silence, he condescended to parley.

“Janet Grant,” he said, “lat me gang, an’ I’ll trouble you or yours no
more.”

“Wadna ye think me some fule to hearken till ye?” suggested Janet.

“I’ll sweir ony lawfu’ aith ’at ye like to lay upo’ me,” protested
Angus, “’at I’ll dee whatever ye please to require o’ me.”

“I dinna doobt ye wad sweir; but what neist?” said Janet.

“What neist but ye’ll lowse my han’s?” rejoined Angus.

“It’s no mainner o’ use mentionin’ ’t,” replied Janet; “for, as ye
ken, I’m un’er authority, an’ yersel’ h’ard my man tell me to tak unco
percaution no to lat ye gang; for verily, Angus, ye hae conduckit
yersel’ this day more like ane possessed wi’ a legion, than the douce
faimily man ’at ye’re supposit by the laird, yer maister, to be.”

“Was ever man,” protested Angus “made sic a fule o’, an’ sae misguidit,
by a pair o’ auld cottars like you an’ Robert Grant!”

“Wi’ the help o’ the Lord, by means o’ the dog,” supplemented Janet. “I
wuss frae my hert I hed the great reid draigon i’ yer place, an’ I wad
watch him bonnie, I can tell ye, Angus MacPholp. I wadna be clear aboot
giein’ _him_ his denner, Angus.”

“Lat me gang, wuman, wi’ yer reid draigons! I’ll hairm naebody. The
puir idiot’s no muckle the waur, an’ I’ll tak mair tent whan I fire
anither time.”

“Wiser fowk nor me maun see to that,” answered Janet.

“Hoots, wuman! it was naething but an accident.”

“I kenna; but it’ll be seen what Gibbie says.”

“Awva! his word’s guid for naething.”

“For a penny, or a thoosan’ poun’.”

“My wife ’ll be oot o’ her wuts,” pleaded Angus.

“Wad ye like a drink o’ milk?” asked Janet, rising.

“I wad that,” he answered.

She filled her little teapot with milk, and he drank it from the spout,
hoping she was on the point of giving way.

“Noo,” she said, when he had finished his draught, “ye maun jist mak
the best o’ it, Angus. Ony gait, it’s a guid lesson in patience to ye,
an’ that ye haena had ower aften, I’m thinkin’--Robert’ll be here er
lang.”

With these words she set down the teapot, and went out: it was time to
milk her cow.

In a little while Gibbie rose, tried to walk, but failed, and getting
down on his hands and knees, crawled out after her. Angus caught a
glimpse of his face as he crept past him, and then first recognized
the boy he had lashed. Not compunction, but an occasional pang of
dread lest he should have been the cause of his death, and might come
upon his body in one of his walks, had served so to fix his face in
his memory, that, now he had a near view of him, pale with suffering
and loss of blood and therefore more like his former self, he knew him
beyond a doubt. With a great shoot of terror he concluded that the
idiot had been lying there silently gloating over his revenge, waiting
only till Janet should be out of sight, and was now gone after some
instrument wherewith to take it. He pulled and tugged at his bonds, but
only to find escape absolutely hopeless. In gathering horror, he lay
moveless at last, but strained his hearing towards every sound.

Not only did Janet often pray with Gibbie, but sometimes as she
read, her heart would grow so full, her soul be so pervaded with the
conviction, perhaps the consciousness, of the presence of the man who
had said he would be always with his friends, that, sitting there on
her stool, she would begin talking to him out of the very depth of
her life, just as if she saw him in Robert’s chair in the ingle-neuk,
at home in her cottage as in the house where Mary sat at his feet and
heard his word. Then would Gibbie listen indeed, awed by very gladness.
He never doubted that Jesus was there, or that Janet saw him all the
time although he could not.

This custom of praying aloud, she had grown into so long before Gibbie
came to her, and he was so much and such a child, that his presence
was no check upon the habit. It came in part from the intense reality
of her belief, and was in part a willed fostering of its intensity.
She never imagined that words were necessary; she believed that God
knew her every thought, and that the moment she lifted up her heart,
it entered into communion with him; but the very sound of the words
she spoke seemed to make her feel nearer to the man who, being the
eternal Son of the Father, yet had ears to hear and lips to speak, like
herself. To talk to him aloud, also kept her thoughts together, helped
her to feel the fact of the things she contemplated, as well as the
reality of his presence.

Now the byre was just on the other side of the turf wall against which
was the head of Gibbie’s bed, and through the wall Gibbie had heard her
voice, with that something in the tone of it which let him understand
she was not talking to Crummie, but to Crummie’s maker; and it was
therefore he had got up and gone after her. For there was no reason, so
far as he knew or imagined, why he should not hear, as so many times
before, what she was saying to the Master. He supposed that as she
could not well speak to him in the presence of a man like Angus, she
had gone out to the byre to have her talk with him there. He crawled
to the end of the cottage so silently that she heard no sound of his
approach. He would not go into the byre, for that might disturb her,
for she would have to look up to know that it was only Gibbie; he
would listen at the door. He found it wide open, and peeping in, saw
Crummie chewing away, and Janet on her knees with her forehead leaning
against the cow and her hands thrown up over her shoulder. She spoke
in such a voice of troubled entreaty as he had never heard from her
before, but which yet woke a strange vibration of memory in his deepest
heart.--Yes, it was his father’s voice it reminded him of! So had he
cried in prayer the last time he ever heard him speak. What she said
was nearly this:

“O Lord, gien ye wad but say what ye wad hae deen! Whan a body disna
ken yer wull, she’s jist driven to distraction. Thoo knows, my Maister,
as weel ’s I can tell ye, ’at gien ye said till me, ‘That man’s gauin’
to cut yer thro’t: tak the tows frae him, an’ lat him up,’ I wad rin
to dee ’t. It’s no revenge, Lord; it’s jist ’at I dinna ken. The man’s
dune me no ill, ’cep as he’s sair hurtit yer bonnie Gibbie. It’s Gibbie
’at has to forgie ’im, an’ syne me. But my man tellt me no to lat him
up, an’ hoo am I to be a wife sic as ye wad hae, O Lord, gien I dinna
dee as my man tellt me! It wad ill befit me to lat my auld Robert gang
sae far wantin’ his denner, a’ for naething. What wad he think whan
he cam hame! Of coorse, Lord, gien ye tellt me, that wad mak a’ the
differ, for ye’re Robert’s maister as weel ’s mine, an’ your wull wad
saitisfee him jist as weel ’s me. I wad fain lat him gang, puir chiel!
but I daurna. Lord, convert him to the trowth. Lord, lat him ken what
hate is.--But eh, Lord! I wuss ye wad tell me what to du. Thy wull’s
the beginnin’ an’ mids an’ en’ o’ a’ thing to me. I’m wullin’ eneuch
to lat him gang, but he’s Robert’s pris’ner an’ Gibbie’s enemy; he’s
no my pris’ner an’ no my enemy, an’ I dinna think I hae the richt. An’
wha kens but he micht gang shottin’ mair fowk yet, ’cause I loot him
gang!--But he canna shot a hare wantin’ thy wull, O Jesus, the Saviour
o’ man an’ beast; an’ ill wad I like to hae a han’ i’ the hangin’ o’
’im. He may deserve ’t, Lord, I dinna ken; but I’m thinkin’ ye made him
no sae weel tempered--as my Robert, for enstance.”

Here her voice ceased, and she fell a moaning.

Her trouble was echoed in dim pain from Gibbie’s soul. That the
prophetess who knew everything, the priestess who was at home in the
very treasure-house of the great king, should be thus abandoned to
dire perplexity, was a dreadful, a bewildering fact. But now first he
understood the real state of the affair in the purport of the old man’s
absence; also how he was himself potently concerned in the business:
if the offence had been committed against Gibbie, then with Gibbie lay
the power, therefore the duty of forgiveness. But verily Gibbie’s merit
and his grace were in inverse ratio. Few things were easier to him
than to love his enemies, and his merit in obeying the commandment was
small indeed. No enemy had as yet done him, in his immediate person,
the wrong he could even imagine it hard to forgive. No sooner had Janet
ceased than he was on his way back to the cottage: on its floor lay one
who had to be waited upon with forgiveness.

Wearied with futile struggles, Angus found himself compelled to abide
his fate, and was lying quite still when Gibbie re-entered. The boy
thought he was asleep, but on the contrary he was watching his every
motion, full of dread. Gibbie went hopping upon one foot to the hole
in the wall where Janet kept the only knife she had. It was not there.
He glanced round, but could not see it. There was no time to lose.
Robert’s returning steps might be heard any moment, and poor Angus
might be hanged--only for shooting Gibbie! He hopped up to him and
examined the knots that tied his hands: they were drawn so tight--in
great measure by his own struggles--and so difficult to reach from
their position, that he saw it would take him a long time to undo them.
Angus thought, with fresh horror, he was examining them to make sure
they would hold, and was so absorbed in watching his movements that
he even forgot to curse, which was the only thing left him. Gibbie
looked round again for a moment, as if in doubt, then darted upon the
tongs--there was no poker--and thrust them into the fire, caught up the
asthmatic old bellows, and began to blow the peats. Angus saw the first
action, heard the second, and a hideous dismay clutched his very heart:
the savage fool was about to take his revenge in pinches with the
red hot tongs! He looked for no mercy--perhaps felt that he deserved
none. Manhood held him silent until he saw him take the implement of
torture from the fire, glowing, not red but white hot, when he uttered
such a terrific yell, that Gibbie dropped the tongs--happily not the
hot ends--on his own bare foot, but caught them up again instantly,
and made a great hop to Angus: if Janet had heard that yell and came
in, all would be spoilt. But the faithless keeper began to struggle
so fiercely, writhing with every contortion, and kicking with every
inch, left possible to him, that Gibbie hardly dared attempt anything
for dread of burning him, while he sent yell after yell “as fast as
mill-wheels strike.” With a sudden thought Gibbie sprang to the door
and locked it, so that Janet should not get in, and Angus, hearing the
bolt, was the more convinced that his purpose was cruel, and struggled
and yelled, with his eyes fixed on the glowing tongs, now fast cooling
in Gibbie’s hand. If instead of glowering at the tongs, he had but
lent one steadfast regard to the face of the boy whom he took for a
demoniacal idiot, he would have seen his supposed devil smile the
sweetest of human, troubled, pitiful smiles. Even then, I suspect,
however, his eye being evil, he would have beheld in the smile only the
joy of malice in the near prospect of a glut of revenge.

In the mean time Janet, in her perplexity, had, quite forgetful of the
poor cow’s necessities, abandoned Crummie, and wandered down the path
as far as the shoulder her husband must cross ascending from the other
side: thither, a great rock intervening, so little of Angus’s cries
reached, that she heard nothing through the deafness of her absorbing
appeal for direction to her shepherd, the master of men.

Gibbie thrust the tongs again into the fire, and while blowing it,
bethought him that it might give Angus confidence if he removed the
chain from his neck. He laid down the bellows, and did so. But to Angus
the action seemed only preparatory to taking him by the throat with
the horrible implement. In his agony and wild endeavour to frustrate
the supposed intent, he struggled harder than ever. But now Gibbie was
undoing the rope fastened round the chest. This Angus did not perceive,
and when it came suddenly loose in the midst of one of his fierce
straining contortions, the result was that he threw his body right over
his head, and lay on his face for a moment confused. Gibbie saw his
advantage. He snatched his clumsy tool out of the fire, seated himself
on the corresponding part of Angus’s person, and seizing with the tongs
the rope between his feet, held on to both, in spite of his heaves and
kicks. In the few moments that passed while Gibbie burned through a
round of the rope, Angus imagined a considerable number of pangs; but
when Gibbie rose and hopped away, he discovered that his feet were at
liberty, and scrambled up, his head dizzy, and his body reeling. But
such was then the sunshine of delight in Gibbie’s countenance that
even Angus stared at him for a moment--only, however, with a vague
reflection on the inconsequentiality of idiots, to which succeeded the
impulse to take vengeance upon him for his sufferings. But Gibbie still
had the tongs, and Angus’s hands were still tied. He held them out to
him. Gibbie pounced upon the knots with hands and teeth. They occupied
him some little time, during which Angus was almost compelled to take
better cognizance of the face of the savage; and dull as he was to the
good things of human nature, he was yet in a measure subdued by what
he there looked upon rather than perceived; while he could scarcely
mistake the hearty ministration of his teeth and nails! The moment his
hands were free, Gibbie looked up at him with a smile, and Angus did
not even box his ears. Holding by the wall, Gibbie limped to the door
and opened it. With a nod meant for thanks, the gamekeeper stepped out,
took up his gun from where it leaned against the wall, and hurried away
down the hill. A moment sooner and he would have met Janet; but she had
just entered the byre again to milk poor Crummie.

When she came into the cottage, she stared with astonishment to see
no Angus on the floor. Gibbie, who had lain down again in much pain,
made signs that he had let him go: whereupon such a look of relief came
over her countenance that he was filled with fresh gladness, and was if
possible more satisfied still with what he had done.

It was late before Robert returned--alone, weary, and disappointed. The
magistrate was from home; he had waited for him as long as he dared;
but at length, both because of his wife’s unpleasant position, and the
danger to himself if he longer delayed his journey across the mountain,
seeing it threatened a storm, and there was no moon, he set out. That
he too was relieved to find no Angus there, he did not attempt to
conceal. The next day he went to see him, and told him that, to please
Gibbie, he had consented to say nothing more about the affair. Angus
could not help being sullen, but he judged it wise to behave as well as
he could, kept his temper therefore, and said he was sorry he had been
so hasty, but that Robert had punished him pretty well, for it would
be weeks before he recovered the blow on the head he had given him. So
they parted on tolerable terms, and there was no further persecution of
Gibbie from that quarter.

It was some time before he was able to be out again, but no hour spent
with Janet was lost.




CHAPTER XXVII.

A VOICE.

That winter the old people were greatly tried with rheumatism; for not
only were the frosts severe, but there was much rain between. Their
children did all in their power to minister to their wants, and Gibbie
was nurse as well as shepherd. He who when a child had sought his
place in the live universe by attending on drunk people and helping
them home through the midnight streets, might have felt himself
promoted considerably in having the necessities of such as Robert
and Janet to minister to, but he never thought of that. It made him
a little mournful sometimes to think that he could not read to them.
Janet, however, was generally able to read aloud. Robert, being also
asthmatic, suffered more than she, and was at times a little impatient.

Gibbie still occupied his heather-bed on the floor, and it was part of
his business, as nurse, to keep up a good fire on the hearth: peats,
happily, were plentiful. Awake for this cause, he heard in the middle
of one night, the following dialogue between the husband and wife.

“I’m growin’ terrible auld, Janet,” said Robert. “It’s a sair thing,
this auld age, an’ I canna bring mysel’ content wi’ ’t. Ye see I haena
been used till ’t.”

“That’s true, Robert,” answered Janet. “Gien we had been born auld, we
micht by this time hae been at hame wi’ ’t. But syne what wad hae come
o’ the gran’ delicht o’ seein’ auld age rin hirplin awa frae the face
o’ the Auncient o’ Days?”

“I wad fain be contentit wi’ my lot, thouch,” persisted Robert; “but
whan I fin’ mysel’ sae helpless like, I canna get it oot o’ my heid ’at
the Lord has forsaken me, an’ left me to mak an ill best o’ ’t wantin’
him.”

“I wadna lat sic a thoucht come intil my heid, Robert, sae lang as I
kenned I cudna draw breath nor wag tongue wantin’ him, for in him we
leeve an’ muv an’ hae oor bein’. Gien he be the life o’ me, what for
sud I trible mysel’ aboot that life?”

“Ay, lass! but gien ye hed this ashmy, makin’ a’ yer breist as gien
’twar lined wi’ the san’ paper ’at they hed been lichtin’ a thoosan’
or twa lucifer spunks upo’--ye micht be driven to forget ’at the Lord
was yer life--for I can tell ye it’s no like haein _his_ breith i’ yer
nostrils.”

“Eh, my bonnie laad!” returned Janet with infinite tenderness, “I
micht weel forget it! I doobt I wadna be half sae patient as yersel’;
but jist to help to haud ye up, I s’ tell ye what I think I wad
ettle efter. I wad say to mysel’, Gien he be the life o’ me, I hae
no business wi’ ony mair o’ ’t nor he gies me. I hae but to tak ae
breath, be ’t hard, be ’t easy, ane at a time, an’ lat him see to the
neist himsel’. Here I am, an’ here’s him; an’ ’at he winna lat ’s ain
wark come to ill, that I’m weel sure o’. An’ ye micht jist think to
yersel’, Robert, ’at as ye _are_ born intil the warl’, an’ here ye are
auld intil ’t--ye may jist think, I say, ’at hoo ye’re jist new-born
an auld man, an’ beginnin’ to grow yoong, an’ ’at that’s yer business.
For naither you nor me can be that far frae hame, Robert, an’ whan we
win there, we’ll be yoong eneuch, I’m thinkin’; an’ no ower yoong, for
we’ll hae what they say ye canna get doon here--a pair o’ auld heids
upo’ yoong shoothers.”

“Eh! but I wuss I may hae ye there, Janet, for I kenna what I wad do
wantin’ ye. I wad be unco stray up yon’er, gien I had to gang my lane,
an’ no you to refar till, ’at kens the w’ys o’ the place.”

“I ken no more aboot the w’ys o’ the place nor yersel’, Robert, though
I’m thinkin’ they’ll be unco quaiet an’ sensible, seein’ ’at a’ there
maun be gentle fowk. It’s eneuch to me ’at I’ll be i’ the hoose o’
my Maister’s father; an’ my Maister was weel content to gang to that
hoose; an’ it maun be somethin’ by ordinar’ ’at was fit for _him_. But
puir simple fowk like oorsel’s ’ill hae no need to hing doon the heid
an’ luik like gowks ’at disna ken mainners. Bairns are no expeckit to
ken a’ the w’ys o’ a muckle hoose ’at they hae never been intil i’
their lives afore.”

“It’s no that a’thegither ’at tribles me, Janet; it’s mair ’at I’ll be
expeckit to sing an’ luik pleased-like, an’ I div not ken hoo it’ll be
poassible, an’ you naegait ’ithin my sicht or my cry, or the hearin’ o’
my ears.”

“Div ye believe this, Robert--’at we’re a’ ane, jist ane, in Christ
Jesus?”

“I canna weel say. I’m no denyin’ naething ’at the buik tells me; ye
ken me better nor that, Janet; but there’s mony a thing it says ’at I
dinna ken whether I believe ’t ’at my ain han’, or whether it be only
at a’ thing ’at ye believe, Janet, ’s jist to me as gien I believet it
mysel’; an’ that’s a sair thoucht, for a man canna be savet e’en by the
proxy o’ ’s ain wife.”

“Weel, ye’re jist muckle whaur I fin’ mysel’ whiles, Robert; an’ I
comfort mysel’ wi’ the houp ’at we’ll _ken_ the thing there, ’at maybe
we’re but tryin’ to believe here. But ony gait, ye hae pruv’t weel ’at
you an’ me’s ane, Robert. Noo we ken frae Scriptur’ ’at the Maister cam
to mak aye ane o’ them ’at was at twa; an’ we ken also ’at he conquered
Deith; sae he wad never lat Deith mak the ane ’at he had made ane intil
twa again: it’s no rizon to think it. For oucht I ken, what luiks like
a gangin’ awa may be a comin’ nearer. An’ there may be w’ys o’ comin’
nearer till ane anither up yon’er ’at we ken naething aboot doon here.
There’s that laddie, Gibbie: I canna but think ’at gien he hed the
tongue to speyk, or aiven gien he cud mak ony soon’ wi’ sense intil ’t,
like singin’, say, he wad fin’ himsel’ nearer till ’s nor he can i’ the
noo. Wha kens but them ’at’s singin’ up there afore the throne, may
sing so bonnie, ’at, i’ the pooer o’ their braw thouchts, their verra
sangs may be like laidders for them to come doon upo’, an’ hing aboot
them ’at they hae left ahin’ them, till the time comes for them to gang
an’ jine them i’ the green pasturs aboot the tree o’ life.”

More of like talk followed, but these words concerning appropinquation
in song, although their meaning was not very clear, took such a hold of
Gibbie that he heard nothing after, but fell asleep thinking about them.

In the middle of the following night, Janet woke her husband.

“Robert! Robert!” she whispered in his ear, “hearken. I’m thinkin’ yon
maun be some wee angel come doon to say, ‘I ken ye, puir fowk.’”

Robert, scarce daring to draw his breath, listened with his heart in
his mouth. From somewhere, apparently within the four walls of the
cottage, came a low lovely sweet song--something like the piping of a
big bird, something like a small human voice.

“It canna be an angel,” said Robert at length, “for it’s singin’ ‘My
Nannie’s Awa.’”

“An’ what for no an angel?” returned Janet. “Isna that jist what ye
micht be singin’ yersel’, efter what ye was sayin’ last nicht? I’m
thinkin’ there maun be a heap o’ yoong angels up there, new deid,
singin’, ‘My Nannie’s Awa.’”

“Hoots, Janet! ye ken there’s naither merryin’ nor giein’ in merriage
there.”

“Wha was sayin’ onything aboot merryin’ or giein’ in merriage, Robert?
Is that to say ’at you an’ me’s to be no more to ane anither nor ither
fowk? Nor it’s no to say ’at, ’cause merriage is no the w’y o’ the
country, ’at there’s to be naething better i’ the place o’ ’t.”

“What garred the Maister say onything aboot it than?”

“Jist ’cause they plaguit him wi’ speirin’. He wad never hae opened
his moo’ anent it--it wasna ane o’ his subjec’s--gien it hadna been
’at a wheen pride-prankit beuk-fowk ’at didna believe there was ony
angels, or speerits o’ ony kin’, but said ’at a man ance deid was aye
an’ a’thegither deid, an’ yet preten’it to believe in God himsel’ for
a’ that, thoucht to bleck (_nonplus_) the Maister wi’ speirin’ whilk o’
saiven a puir body ’at had been garred merry them a’, wad be the wife
o’ whan they gat up again.”

“A body micht think it wad be left to hersel’ to say,” suggested
Robert. “She had come throu’ eneuch to hae some claim to be considert.”

“She maun hae been a richt guid ane,” said Janet, “gien ilk ane o’
the saiven wad be wantin’ her again. But I s’ warran’ she kenned weel
eneuch whilk o’ them was her ain. But, Robert, man, this is jokin’--no
’at it’s your wyte (_blame_)--an’ it’s no becomin’, I doobt, upo’ sic a
sarious subjec’. An’ I’m feart--ay! there!--I thoucht as muckle!--the
wee sangie’s drappit itsel’ a’thegither, jist as gien the laverock had
fa’ntit intil ’ts nest. I doobt we’ll hear nae mair o’ ’t.”

As soon as he could hear what they were saying, Gibbie had stopped to
listen; and now they had stopped also, and there was an end.

For weeks he had been picking out tunes on his Pan’s-pipes, also, he
had lately discovered that, although he could not articulate, he could
produce tones, and had taught himself to imitate the pipes. Now, to his
delight, he had found that the noises he made were recognized as song
by his father and mother. From that time he was often heard crooning to
himself. Before long he began to look about the heavens for airs--to
suit this or that song he came upon, or heard from Donal.




CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE WISDOM OF THE WISE.

Change, meantime, was in progress elsewhere, and as well upon the foot
as high on the side of Glashgar--change which seemed all important
to those who felt the grind of the glacier as it slipped. Thomas
Galbraith, of Glashruach, Esquire, whom no more than any other could
negation save, was not enfranchised from folly, or lifted above belief
in a lie, by his hatred to what he called superstition: he had long
fallen into what will ultimately prove the most degrading superstition
of all--the worship of Mammon, and was rapidly sinking from deep to
lower deep. First of all, this was the superstition of placing hope
and trust in that which, from age to age, and on the testimony of all
sorts of persons who have tried it, has been proved to fail utterly;
next, such was the folly of the man whose wisdom was indignant with the
harmless imagination of simple people for daring flutter its wings upon
his land, that he risked what he loved best in the world, even better
than Mammon, the approbation of fellow worshippers, by investing in
Welsh gold mines.

The property of Glashruach was a good one, but not nearly so large as
it had been, and he was anxious to restore it to its former dimensions.
The rents were low, and it could but tardily widen its own borders,
while of money he had little and no will to mortgage. To increase his
money, that he might increase his property, he took to speculation, but
had never had much success until that same year, when he disposed of
certain shares at a large profit--nothing troubled by the conviction
that the man who bought them--in ignorance of many a fact which the
laird knew--must in all probability be ruined by them. He counted this
success, and it gave him confidence to speculate further. In the mean
time, with what he had thus secured, he reannexed to the property a
small farm which had been for some time in the market, but whose sale
he had managed to delay. The purchase gave him particular pleasure,
because the farm not only marched with his home-grounds, but filled up
a great notch in the map of the property between Glashruach and the
Mains, with which also it marched. It was good land, and he let it at
once, on his own terms, to Mr. Duff.

In the spring, affairs looked rather bad for him, and in the month of
May, he considered himself compelled to go to London: he had a faith
in his own business-faculty quite as foolish as any superstition in
Gormgarnet. There he fell into the hands of a certain man, whose
true place would have been in the swell mob, and not in the House of
Commons--a fellow who used his influence and facilities as member of
Parliament in promoting bubble companies. He was intimate with an elder
brother of the laird, himself member for a not unimportant borough--a
man, likewise, of principles that love the shade; and between them they
had no difficulty in making a tool of Thomas Galbraith, as chairman
of a certain aggregate of iniquity, whose designation will not, in
some families, be forgotten for a century or so. During the summer,
therefore, the laird was from home, working up the company, hoping
much from it, and trying hard to believe in it--whipping up its cream,
and perhaps himself taking the froth, certainly doing his best to make
others take it, for an increase of genuine substance. He devoted the
chamber of his imagination to the service of Mammon, and the brownie he
kept there played him fine pranks.

A smaller change, though of really greater importance in the end,
was, that in the course of the winter, one of Donal’s sisters was
engaged by the housekeeper at Glashruach, chiefly to wait upon Miss
Galbraith. Ginevra was still a silent, simple, unconsciously retiring,
and therewith dignified girl, in whom childhood and womanhood had begun
to interchange hues, as it were with the play of colours in a dove’s
neck. Happy they in whom neither has a final victory! Happy also all
who have such women to love! At one moment Ginevra would draw herself
up--_bridle_ her grandmother would have called it--with involuntary
recoil from doubtful approach; the next, Ginny would burst out in a
merry laugh at something in which only a child could have perceived
the mirth-causing element; then again the woman would seem suddenly
to re-enter and rebuke the child, for the sparkle would fade from her
eyes, and she would look solemn, and even a little sad. The people
about the place loved her, but from the stillness on the general
surface of her behaviour, the far away feeling she gave them, and the
impossibility of divining how she was thinking except she chose to
unbosom herself, they were all a little afraid of her as well. They did
not acknowledge, even to themselves, that her evident conscientiousness
bore no small part in causing that slight uneasiness of which they
were aware in her presence. Possibly it roused in some of them such a
dissatisfaction with themselves as gave the initiative to dislike of
her.

In the mind of her new maid, however, there was no strife, therefore
no tendency to dislike. She was thoroughly well-meaning, like the
rest of her family, and finding her little mistress dwell in the same
atmosphere, the desire to be acceptable to her awoke at once, and grew
rapidly in her heart. She was the youngest of Janet’s girls, about four
years older than Donal, not clever, but as sweet as honest, and full
of divine service. Always ready to think others better than herself,
the moment she saw the still face of Ginevra, she took her for a little
saint, and accepted her as a queen, whose will to her should be law.
Ginevra, on her part, was taken with the healthy hue and honest eyes of
the girl, and neither felt any dislike to her touching her hair, nor
lost her temper when she was awkward and pulled it. Before the winter
was over, the bond between them was strong.

One principal duty required of Nicie--her parents had named her after
the mother of St. Paul’s Timothy--was to accompany her mistress every
fine day to the manse, a mile and a half from Glashruach. For some time
Ginevra had been under the care of Miss Machar, the daughter of the
parish clergyman, an old gentleman of sober aspirations, to whom the
last century was the Augustan age of English literature. He was genial,
gentle, and a lover of his race, with much reverence for, and some
faith in, a Scotch God, whose nature was summed up in a series of words
beginning with _omni_. Partly that the living was a poor one, and her
father old and infirm, Miss Machar, herself middle-aged, had undertaken
the instruction of the little heiress, never doubting herself mistress
of all it was necessary a lady should know. By nature she was romantic,
but her romance had faded a good deal. Possibly had she read the new
poets of her age, the vital flame of wonder and hope might have kept
not a little of its original brightness in her heart; but under her
father’s guidance, she had never got beyond the Night Thoughts, and the
Course of Time. Both intellectually and emotionally, therefore, Miss
Machar had withered instead of ripening. As to her spiritual carriage,
she thought too much about being a lady to be thoroughly one. The
utter graciousness of the ideal lady would blush to regard itself. She
was both gentle and dignified; but would have done a nature inferior
to Ginevra’s injury by the way she talked of things right and wrong
as becoming or not becoming in a lady of position such as Ginevra
would one day find herself. What lessons she taught her she taught
her well. Her music was old-fashioned, of course; but I have a fancy
that perhaps the older the music one learns first, the better; for the
deeper is thereby the rooting of that which will have the atmosphere
of the age to blossom in. But then to every lover of the truth, a true
thing is dearer because it is old-fashioned, and dearer because it is
new-fashioned: and true music, like true love, like all truth, laughs
at the god Fashion, because it knows him to be but an ape.

Every day, then, except Saturday and Sunday, Miss Machar had for two
years been in the habit of walking or driving to Glashruach, and there
spending the morning hours; but of late her father had been ailing,
and as he was so old that she could not without anxiety leave him
when suffering from the smallest indisposition, she had found herself
compelled either to give up teaching Ginevra, or to ask Mr. Galbraith
to allow her to go, when such occasion should render it necessary, to
the manse. She did the latter; the laird had consented; and thence
arose the duty required of Nicie. Mr. Machar’s health did not improve
as the spring advanced, and by the time Mr. Galbraith left for London,
he was confined to his room, and Ginevra’s walk to the manse for
lessons had settled into a custom.




CHAPTER XXIX.

THE BEAST-BOY.

One morning they found, on reaching the manse, that the minister was
very unwell, and that in consequence Miss Machar could not attend to
Ginevra; they turned, therefore, to walk home again. Now the manse,
upon another root of Glashgar, was nearer than Glashruach to Nicie’s
home, and many a time as she went and came, did she lift longing
eyes to the ridge that hid it from her view. This morning, Ginevra
observed that, every other moment, Nicie was looking up the side of
the mountain, as if she saw something unusual upon it--occasionally,
indeed, when the winding of the road turned their backs to it, stopping
and turning round to gaze.

“What is the matter with you, Nicie?” she asked. “What are you looking
at up there?”

“I’m won’erin’ what my mother’ll be deein’,” answered Nicie: “she’s up
there.”

“Up there!” exclaimed Ginny, and, turning, stared at the mountain too,
expecting to perceive Nicie’s mother somewhere upon the face of it.

“Na, na, missie! ye canna see her,” said the girl; “she’s no in sicht.
She’s ower ayont there. Only gien we war up whaur ye see yon twa three
sheep again’ the lift (_sky_), we cud see the bit hoosie whaur her an’
my father bides.”

“How I _should_ like to see your father and mother, Nicie!” exclaimed
Ginevra.

“Weel, I’m sure they wad be richt glaid to see yersel’, missie, ony
time ’at ye likit to gang an’ see them.”

“Why shouldn’t we go now, Nicie? It’s not a dangerous place, is it?”

“No, missie. Glashgar’s as quaiet an’ weel-behaved a hill as ony in a’
the cweentry,” answered Nicie, laughing. “She’s some puir, like the
lave o’ ’s, an’ hasna muckle to spare, but the sheep get a feow nibbles
upon her, here an’ there; an’ my mither manages to keep a coo, an’ get
plenty o’ milk frae her tee.”

“Come, then, Nicie. We have plenty of time. Nobody wants either you or
me, and we shall get home before any one misses us.”

Nicie was glad enough to consent; they turned at once to the hill, and
began climbing. But Nicie did not know this part of it nearly so well
as that which lay between Glashruach and the cottage, and after they
had climbed some distance, often stopping and turning to look down on
the valley below, the prospect of which, with its streams and river,
kept still widening and changing as they ascended, they arrived at a
place where the path grew very doubtful, and she could not tell in
which of two directions they ought to go.

“I’ll take this way, and you take that, Nicie,” said Ginevra, “and if
I find there is no path my way, I will come back to yours; and if you
find there is no path your way, you will come back to mine.”

It was a childish proposal, and one to which Nicie should not have
consented, but she was little more than a child herself. Advancing a
short distance in doubt, and the path re-appearing quite plainly, she
sat down, expecting her little mistress to return directly. No thought
of anxiety crossed her mind: how should one, in broad sunlight, on a
mountain-side, in the first of summer, and with the long day before
them? So, there sitting in peace, Nicie fell into a maidenly reverie,
and so there Nicie sat for a long time, half dreaming in the great
light, without once really thinking about anything. All at once she
came to herself: some latent fear had exploded in her heart: yes! what
could have become of her little mistress? She jumped to her feet, and
shouted “Missie! Missie Galbraith! Ginny!” but no answer came back. The
mountain was as still as at midnight. She ran to the spot where they
had parted, and along the other path: it was plainer than that where
she had been so idly forgetting herself. She hurried on, wildly calling
as she ran.

In the mean time Ginevra, having found the path indubitable, and
imagining it led straight to the door of Nicie’s mother’s cottage,
and that Nicie would be after her in a moment, thinking also to have
a bit of fun with her, set off dancing and running so fast, that by
the time Nicie came to herself, she was a good mile from her. What a
delight it was to be thus alone upon the grand mountain! with the earth
banished so far below, and the great rocky heap climbing and leading
and climbing up and up towards the sky!

Ginny was not in the way of thinking much about God. Little had been
taught her concerning him, and nothing almost that was pleasant to
meditate upon--nothing that she could hide in her heart, and be
dreadfully glad about when she lay alone in her little bed, listening
to the sound of the burn that ran under her window. But there was in
her soul a large wilderness ready for the voice that should come crying
to prepare the way of the king.

The path was after all a mere sheep-track, and led her at length into
a lonely hollow in the hill-side, with a swampy peat-bog at the bottom
of it. She stopped. The place looked unpleasant, reminding her of how
she always felt when she came unexpectedly upon Angus MacPholp. She
would go no further alone; she would wait till Nicie overtook her.
It must have been just in such places that the people possessed with
devils--only Miss Machar always made her read the word, _demons_--ran
about! As she thought thus, a lone-hearted bird uttered a single,
wailing cry, strange to her ear. The cry remained solitary, unanswered,
and then first suddenly she felt that there was nobody there but
herself, and the feeling had in it a pang of uneasiness. But she was a
brave child; nothing frightened her much except her father; she turned
and went slowly back to the edge of the hollow: Nicie must by this time
be visible.

In her haste and anxiety, however, Nicie had struck into another
sheep-track, and was now higher up the hill; so that Ginny could see no
living thing nearer than in the valley below: far down there--and it
was some comfort, in the desolation that now began to invade her--she
saw upon the road, so distant that it seemed motionless, a cart with
a man in it, drawn by a white horse. Never in her life before had she
felt that she was alone. She had often felt lonely, but she had always
known where to find the bodily presence of somebody. Now she might cry
and scream the whole day, and nobody answer! Her heart swelled into her
throat, then sank away, leaving a wide hollow. It was so eerie! But
Nicie would soon come, and then all would be well.

She sat down on a stone, where she could see the path she had come a
long way back. But “_never and never_” did any Nicie appear. At last
she began to cry. This process with Ginny was a very slow one, and
never brought her much relief. The tears would mount into her eyes,
and remain there, little pools of Baca, a long time before the crying
went any further. But with time the pools would grow deeper, and swell
larger, and at last, when they had become two huge little lakes, the
larger from the slowness of their gathering, two mighty tears would
tumble over the edges of their embankments, and roll down her white
mournful cheeks. This time many more followed, and her eyes were fast
becoming fountains, when all at once a verse she had heard the Sunday
before at church seemed to come of itself into her head: “Call upon me
in the time of trouble and I will answer thee.” It must mean that she
was to ask God to help her: was that the same as saying prayers? But
she wasn’t good, and he wouldn’t hear anybody that wasn’t good. Then,
if he was only the God of the good people, what was to become of the
rest when they were lost on mountains? She had better try; it could
not do much harm. Even if he would not hear her, he would not surely
be angry with her for calling upon him when she was in such trouble.
So thinking, she began to pray to what dim distorted reflection of God
there was in her mind. They alone pray to the real God, the maker of
the heart that prays, who know his son Jesus. If our prayers were heard
only in accordance with the idea of God to which we seem to ourselves
to pray, how miserably would our infinite wants be met! But every
honest cry, even if sent into the deaf ear of an idol, passes on to the
ears of the unknown God, the heart of the unknown Father.

“O God, help me home again,” cried Ginevra, and stood up in her great
loneliness to return.

The same instant she spied, seated upon a stone, a little way off, but
close to her path, the beast-boy. There could be no mistake. He was
just as she had heard him described by the children at the gamekeeper’s
cottage. That was his hair sticking all out from his head, though the
sun in it made it look like a crown of gold or a shining mist. Those
were his bare arms, and that was dreadful indeed! Bare legs and feet
she was used to; but bare arms! Worst of all, making it absolutely
certain he was the beast-boy, he was playing upon a curious kind of
whistling thing, making dreadfully sweet music to entice her nearer
that he might catch her and tear her to pieces! Was this the answer God
sent to the prayer she had offered in her sore need--the beast-boy? She
asked him for protection and deliverance, and here was the beast-boy!
She asked him to help her home, and there, right in the middle of her
path, sat the beast-boy, waiting for her! Well, it was just like what
they said about him on Sundays in the churches, and in the books Miss
Machar made her read! But the horrid creature’s music should not have
any power over her! She would rather run down to the black water,
glooming in those holes, and be drowned, than the beast-boy should have
her to eat!

Most girls would have screamed, but such was not Ginny’s natural mode
of meeting a difficulty. With fear, she was far more likely to choke
than to cry out. So she sat down again and stared at him. Perhaps he
would go away when he found he could not entice her. He did not move,
but kept playing on his curious instrument. Perhaps, by returning into
the hollow, she could make a circuit, and so pass him, lower down the
hill. She rose at once and ran.

Now Gibbie had seen her long before she saw him, but, from experience,
was afraid of frightening her. He had therefore drawn gradually near,
and sat as if unaware of her presence. Treating her as he would a bird
with which he wanted to make better acquaintance, he would have her
get accustomed to the look of him before he made advances. But when he
saw her run in the direction of the swamp, knowing what a dangerous
place it was, he was terrified, sprung to his feet, and darted off to
get between her and the danger. She heard him coming like the wind
at her back, and, whether from bewilderment, or that she did intend
throwing herself into the water to escape him, instead of pursuing her
former design, she made straight for the swamp. But was the beast-boy
ubiquitous? As she approached the place, there he was, on the edge of
a great hole half full of water, as if he had been sitting there for
an hour! Was he going to drown her in that hole? She turned again,
and ran towards the descent of the mountain. But there Gibbie feared
a certain precipitous spot; and, besides, there was no path in that
direction. So Ginevra had not run far before again she saw him right in
her way. She threw herself on the ground in despair, and hid her face.
After thus hunting her as a cat might a mouse, or a lion a man, what
could she look for but that he would pounce upon her, and tear her to
pieces? Fearfully expectant of the horrible grasp, she lay breathless.
But nothing came. Still she lay, and still nothing came. Could it be
that she was dreaming? In dreams generally the hideous thing never
arrived. But she dared not look up. She lay and lay, weary and still,
with the terror slowly ebbing away out of her. At length to her ears
came a strange sweet voice of singing--such a sound as she had never
heard before. It seemed to come from far away: what if it should be an
angel God was sending, in answer after all to her prayer, to deliver
her from the beast-boy! He would of course want some time to come, and
certainly no harm had happened to her yet. The sound grew and grew, and
came nearer and nearer. But although it was song, she could distinguish
no vowel-melody in it, nothing but a tone-melody, a crooning, as it
were, ever upon one vowel in a minor key. It came quite near at length,
and yet even then had something of the far away sound left in it. It
was like the wind of a summer night inside a great church bell in a
deserted tower. It came close, and ceased suddenly, as if, like a
lark, the angel ceased to sing the moment he lighted. She opened her
eyes and looked up. Over her stood the beast-boy, gazing down upon
her! Could it really be the beast-boy? If so, then he was fascinating
her, to devour her the more easily, as she had read of snakes doing to
birds; but she could not believe it. Still--she could not take her eyes
off him--that was certain. But no marvel! From under a great crown of
reddish gold, looked out two eyes of heaven’s own blue, and through the
eyes looked out something that dwells behind the sky and every blue
thing. What if the angel, to try her, had taken to himself the form
of the beast-boy? No beast-boy could sing like what she had heard, or
look like what she now saw! She lay motionless, flat on the ground, her
face turned sideways upon her hands, and her eyes fixed on the heavenly
vision. Then a curious feeling began to wake in her of having seen him
before--somewhere, ever so long ago--and that sight of him as well
as this had to do with misery--with something that made a stain that
would not come out. Yes--it was the very face, only larger, and still
sweeter, of the little naked child whom Angus had so cruelly lashed!
That was ages ago, but she had not forgotten, and never could forget
either the child’s back, or the lovely innocent white face that he
turned round upon her. If it was indeed he, perhaps he would remember
her. In any case, she was now certain he would not hurt her.

While she looked at him thus, Gibbie’s face grew grave: seldom was his
grave when fronting the face of a fellow-creature, but now he too was
remembering, and trying to recollect; as through a dream of sickness
and pain he saw a face like the one before him, yet not the same.

Ginevra recollected first, and a sweet slow diffident smile crept like
a dawn up from the depth of her under-world to the sky of her face, but
settled in her eyes, and made two stars of them. Then rose the very sun
himself in Gibbie’s, and flashed a full response of daylight--a smile
that no woman, girl, or matron, could mistrust.

From brow to chin his face was radiant. The sun of this world had made
his nest in his hair, but the smile below it seemed to dim the aureole
he wore. Timidly yet trustingly Ginevra took one hand from under her
cheek, and stretched it up to him. He clasped it gently. She moved, and
he helped her to rise.

“I’ve lost Nicie,” she said.

Gibbie nodded, but did not look concerned.

“Nicie is my maid,” said Ginevra.

Gibbie nodded several times. He knew who Nicie was rather better than
her mistress.

“I left her away back there, a long, long time ago, and she has never
come to me,” she said.

Gibbie gave a shrill loud whistle that startled her. In a few seconds,
from somewhere unseen, a dog came bounding to him over stones and
heather. How he spoke to the dog, or what he told him to do, she had
not an idea; but the next instant Oscar was rushing along the path she
had come, and was presently out of sight. So full of life was Gibbie,
so quick and decided was his every motion, so full of expression his
every glance and smile, that she had not yet begun to wonder he had
not spoken; indeed she was hardly yet aware of the fact. She knew him
now for a mortal, but, just as it had been with Donal and his mother,
he continued to affect her as a creature of some higher world, come
down on a mission of good-will to men. At the same time she had, oddly
enough, a feeling as if the beast-boy were still somewhere not far off,
held aloof only by the presence of the angel who had assumed his shape.

Gibbie took her hand, and led her towards the path she had left; she
yielded without a movement of question. But he did not lead her far
in that direction; he turned to the left up the mountain. It grew
wilder as they ascended. But the air was so thin and invigorating, the
changes so curious and interesting, as now they skirted the edge of a
precipitous rock, now scrambled up the steepest of paths by the help of
the heather that nearly closed over it, and the reaction of relief from
the terror she had suffered so exciting, that she never for a moment
felt tired. Then they went down the side of a little burn--a torrent
when the snow was dissolving, and even now a good stream, whose dance
and song delighted her: it was the same, as she learned afterwards, to
whose song under her window she listened every night in bed, trying in
vain to make out the melted tune. Ever after she knew this, it seemed,
as she listened, to come straight from the mountain to her window,
with news of the stars and the heather and the sheep. They crossed the
burn and climbed the opposite bank. Then Gibbie pointed, and there was
the cottage, and there was Nicie coming up the path to it, with Oscar
bounding before her! The dog was merry, but Nicie was weeping bitterly.
They were a good way off, with another larger burn between; but Gibbie
whistled, and Oscar came flying to him. Nicie looked up, gave a cry,
and like a sheep to her lost lamb came running.

“Oh, missie!” she said, breathless, as she reached the opposite bank of
the burn, and her tone had more than a touch of sorrowful reproach in
it, “what garred ye rin awa?”

“There _was_ a road, Nicie, and I thought you would come after me.”

“I was a muckle geese, missie; but eh! I’m glaid I hae gotten ye. Come
awa an’ see my mither.”

“Yes, Nicie. We’ll tell her all about it. You see I haven’t got a
mother to tell, so I will tell yours.”

From that hour Nicie’s mother was a mother to Ginny as well.

“Anither o’ ’s lambs to feed!” she said to herself.

If a woman be a mother she may have plenty of children.

Never before had Ginny spent such a happy day, drunk such milk as
Crummie’s, or eaten such cakes as Janet’s. She saw no more of Gibbie:
the moment she was safe, he and Oscar were off again to the sheep, for
Robert was busy cutting peats that day, and Gibbie was in sole charge.
Eager to know about him, Ginevra gathered all that Janet could tell of
his story, and in return told the little she had seen of it, which was
the one dreadful point.

“Is he a good boy, Mistress Grant?” she asked.

“The best boy ever I kenned--better nor my ain Donal, an’ he was the
best afore him,” answered Janet.

Ginny gave a little sigh, and wished she were good.

“Whan saw ye Donal?” asked Janet of Nicie.

“No this lang time--no sin I was here last,” answered Nicie, who did
not now get home so often as the rest.

“I was thinkin’,” returned her mother, “ye sud ’maist see him noo frae
the back o’ the muckle hoose; for he was tellin’ me he was wi’ the
nowt’ i’ the new meadow upo’ the Lorrie bank, ’at missie’s papa boucht
frae Jeames Glass.”

“Ow, is he there?” said Nicie. “I’ll maybe get sicht, gien I dinna get
word o’ him. He cam ance to the kitchie-door to see me, but Mistress
MacFarlane wadna lat him in. She wad hae nae loons comin’ aboot the
place she said. I said ’at hoo he was my brither. She said, says she,
that was naething to her, an’ she wad hae no brithers. My sister micht
come whiles, she said, gien she camna ower aften; but lasses had
naething to dee wi’ brithers. Wha was to tell wha was or wha wasna
my brither? I tellt her ’at a’ my brithers was weel kenned for douce
laads; an’ she tellt me to haud my tongue, an’ no speyk up; an’ I cud
hae jist gi’en her a guid cloot o’ the lug--I was that angert wi’ her.”

“She’ll be soary for ’t some day,” said Janet, with a quiet smile; “an’
what a body’s sure to be soary for, ye may as weel forgie them at ance.”

“Hoo ken ye, mither, she’ll be soary for ’t?” asked Nicie, not very
willing to forgive Mistress MacFarlane.

“’Cause the Maister says ’at we’ll hae to pey the uttermost fardin’.
There’s naebody ’ill be latten aff. We maun dee oor neeper richt.”

“But michtna the Maister himsel’ forgie her?” suggested Nicie, a little
puzzled.

“Lassie,” said her mother solemnly, “ye dinna surely think ’at the
Lord’s forgifness is to lat fowk aff ohn repentit? That wad be a
strange fawvour to grant them! He winna hurt mair nor he can help; but
the grue (_horror_) maun mak w’y for the grace. I’m sure it was sae
whan I gied you yer whups, lass. I’ll no say aboot some o’ the first
o’ ye, for at that time I didna ken sae weel what I was aboot, an’ was
mair angert whiles nor there was ony occasion for--tuik my beam to dang
their motes. I hae been sair tribled aboot it, mony’s the time.”

“Eh, mither!” said Nicie, shocked at the idea of her reproaching
herself about anything concerning her children, “I’m weel sure there’s
no ane o’ them wad think, no to say _say_, sic a thing.”

“I daursay ye’re richt there, lass. I think whiles a woman’s bairns are
like the God they cam frae--aye ready to forgie her onything.”

Ginevra went home with a good many things to think about.




CHAPTER XXX.

THE LORRIE MEADOW.

It was high time, according to agricultural economics, that Donal Grant
should be promoted a step in the ranks of labour. A youth like him was
fit for horses and their work, and looked idle in a field with cattle.
But Donal was not ambitious, at least in that direction. He was more
and more in love with books, and learning and the music of thought
and word; and he knew well that no one doing a man’s work upon a farm
could have much time left for study--certainly not a quarter of what
the herd-boy could command. Therefore, with his parents’ approval, he
continued to fill the humbler office, and receive the scantier wages
belonging to it.

The day following their adventure on Glashgar, in the afternoon, Nicie
being in the grounds with her little mistress, proposed that they
should look whether they could see her brother down in the meadow of
which her mother had spoken. Ginevra willingly agreed, and they took
their way through the shrubbery to a certain tall hedge which divided
the grounds from a little grove of larches on the slope of a steep bank
descending to the Lorrie, on the other side of which lay the meadow. It
was a hawthorn hedge, very old, and near the ground very thin, so that
they easily found a place to creep through. But they were no better on
the other side, for the larches hid the meadow. They went down through
them, therefore, to the bank of the little river--the largest tributary
of the Daur from the roots of Glashgar.

“There he is!” cried Nicie.

“I see him,” responded Ginny, “--with his cows all about the meadow.”

Donal sat a little way from the river, reading.

“He’s aye at ’s buik!” said Nicie.

“I wonder what book it is,” said Ginny.

“That wad be ill to say,” answered Nicie. “Donal reads a hantle o’
buiks--mair, his mither says, nor she doobts he can weel get the guid
o’.”

“Do you think it’s Latin, Nicie?”

“Ow! I daursay. But no; it canna be Laitin--for, leuk! he’s lauchin’,
an’ he cudna dee that gien ’twar Laitin. I’m thinkin’ it’ll be a story:
there’s a heap o’ them prentit noo, they tell me. Or ’deed maybe it
may be a sang. He thinks a heap o’ sangs. I h’ard my mither ance say
she was some feart Donal micht hae ta’en to makin’ sangs himsel’; no
’at there was ony ill i’ that, she said, gien there wasna ony ill i’
the sangs themsel’s; but it was jist some trifflin’ like, she said,
an’ they luikit for better frae Donal, wi’ a’ his buik lear, an’ his
Euclid--or what ca’ they ’t?--nor makin’ sangs.”

“What’s Euclid, Nicie?”

“Ye may weel speir, missie! but I hae ill tellin’ ye. It’s a keerious
name till a buik, an’ min’s me o’ naething but whan the lid o’ yer e’e
yeuks (_itches_); an’ as to what lies atween the twa brods o’ ’t, I ken
no more nor the man i’ the meen.”

“I should like to ask Donal what book he has got,” said Ginny.

“I’ll cry till ’im, an’ ye can speir,” said Nicie.--“Donal!--Donal!”

Donal looked up, and seeing his sister, came running to the bank of the
stream.

“Canna ye come ower, Donal?” said Nicie. “Here’s Miss Galbraith wants
to speir ye a quest’on.”

Donal was across in a moment, for here the water was nowhere over a
foot or two in depth.

“Oh, Donal! you’ve wet your feet!” cried Ginevra.

Donal laughed.

“What ill ’ill that dee me, mem?”

“None, I hope,” said Ginny; “but it might, you know.”

“I micht hae been droont,” said Donal.

“Nicie,” said Ginny, with dignity, “your brother is laughing at me.”

“Na, na, mem,” said Donal, apologetically. “I was only so glaid to see
you an’ Nicie ’at I forgot my mainners.”

“Then,” returned Ginny, quite satisfied, “would you mind telling me
what book you were reading?”

“It’s a buik o’ ballants,” answered Donal. “I’ll read ane o’ them till
ye, gien ye like, mem.”

“I should like very much,” responded Ginny. “I’ve read all my own books
till I’m tired of them, and I don’t like papa’s books.--And, do you
know, Donal!”--Here the child-woman’s voice grew solemn sad--“--I’m
very sorry, and I’m frightened to say it; and if you weren’t Nicie’s
brother, I couldn’t say it to you;--but I am very tired of the Bible
too.”

“That’s a peety, mem,” replied Donal. “I wad hae ye no tell onybody
that; for them ’at likes ’t no a hair better themsel’s, ’ill tak ye for
waur nor a haithen for sayin’ ’t. Jist gang ye up to my mither, an’
tell _her_ a’ aboot it. She’s aye fair to a’ body, an’ never thinks ill
o’ onybody ’at says the trowth--whan it’s no for contrariness. She says
’at a heap o’ ill comes o’ fowk no speykin’ oot what they ken, or what
they’re thinkin’, but aye guissin’ at what they dinna ken, an’ what
ither fowk’s thinkin’.”

“Ay!” said Nicie, “it wad be a gey cheenged warl’ gien fowk gaed to my
mither, an’ did as she wad hae them. She says fowk sud never tell but
the ill they ken o’ themsel’s, an’ the guid they ken o’ ither fowk; an’
that’s jist the contrar’, ye ken, missie, to what fowk maist dis dee.”

A pause naturally followed, which Ginny broke.

“I don’t think you told me the _name_ of the book you were reading,
Donal,” she said.

“Gien ye wad sit doon a meenute, mem,” returned Donal, “--here’s a
bonnie gowany spot--I wad read a bit till ye, an’ see gien ye likit it,
afore I tellt ye the name o’ ’t.”

She dropped at once on the little gowany bed, gathered her frock about
her ankles, and said,

“Sit down, Nicie. It’s so kind of Donal to read something to us! I
wonder what it’s going to be.”

She uttered everything in a deliberate, old-fashioned way, with precise
articulation, and a certain manner that an English mother would have
called priggish, but which was only the outcome of Scotch stiffness,
her father’s rebukes, and her own sense of propriety.

Donal read the ballad of _Kemp Owen_.

“I think--I think--I don’t think I understand it,” said Ginevra. “It is
very dreadful, and--and--I don’t know what to think. Tell me about it,
Donal.--Do _you_ know what it means, Nicie?”

“No ae glimp, missie,” answered Nicie.

Donal proceeded at once to an exposition. He told them that the serpent
was a lady, enchanted by a wicked witch, who, after she had changed
her, twisted her three times round the tree, so that she could not undo
herself, and laid the spell upon her that she should never have the
shape of a woman, until a knight kissed her as often as she was twisted
round the tree. Then, when the knight did come, at every kiss a coil of
her body unwound itself, until, at the last kiss, she stood before him
the beautiful lady she really was.

“What a good, kind, brave knight!” said Ginevra.

“But it’s no true, ye ken, missie,” said Nicie, anxious that she should
not be misled. “It’s naething but Donal’s nonsense.”

“Nonsense here, nonsense there!” said Donal, “I see a heap o’ sense
intil ’t. But nonsense or no, Nicie, its nane o’ _my_ nonsense: I wuss
it war. It’s hun’ers o’ years auld, that ballant, I s’ warran’.”

“It’s _beautiful_,” said Ginevra, with decision and dignity. “I hope he
married the lady, and they lived happy ever after.”

“I dinna ken, mem. The man ’at made the ballant, I daursay, thoucht him
weel payed gien the bonnie leddy said _thank ye_ till him.”

“Oh! but, Donal, that wouldn’t be enough!--Would it, Nicie?”

“Weel, ye see, missie,” answered Nicie, “he but gae her three
kisses--that wasna sae muckle to wur (_lay out_) upon a body.”

“But a serpent!--a serpent’s mouth, Nicie!”

Here, unhappily, Donal had to rush through the burn without
leave-taking, for Hornie was attempting a trespass; and the two girls,
thinking it was time to go home, rose, and climbed to the house at
their leisure.

The rest of the day Ginevra talked of little else than the serpent lady
and the brave knight, saying now and then what a nice boy that Donal
of Nicie’s was. Nor was more than the gentlest hint necessary to make
Nicie remark, the next morning, that perhaps, if they went down again
to the Lorrie, Donal might come, and bring the book. But when they
reached the bank and looked across, they saw him occupied with Gibbie.
They had their heads close together over a slate, upon which now the
one, now the other, seemed to be drawing. This went on and on, and they
never looked up. Ginny would have gone home, and come again in the
afternoon, but Nicie instantly called Donal. He sprang to his feet and
came to them, followed by Gibbie. Donal crossed the burn, but Gibbie
remained on the other side, and when presently Donal took his “buik o’
ballants” from his pocket, and the little company seated themselves,
stood with his back to them, and his eyes on the _nowt_. That morning
they were not interrupted.

Donal read to them for a whole hour, concerning which reading, and
Ginevra’s reception of it, Nicie declared she could not see what
for they made sic a wark aboot a wheen auld ballants, ane efter
anither.--“They’re no half sae bonnie as the paraphrases, Donal,” she
said.

After this, Ginevra went frequently with Nicie to see her mother, and
learned much of the best from her. Often also they went down to the
Lorrie, and had an interview with Donal, which was longer or shorter as
Gibbie was there or not to release him.

Ginny’s life was now far happier than it had ever been. New channels
of thought and feeling were opened, new questions were started, new
interests awaked; so that, instead of losing by Miss Machar’s continued
inability to teach her, she was learning far more than she could give
her, learning it, too, with the pleasure which invariably accompanies
true learning.

Little more than child as she was, Donal felt from the first the charm
of her society; and she by no means received without giving, for his
mental development was greatly expedited thereby. Few weeks passed
before he was her humble squire, devoted to her with all the chivalry
of a youth for a girl whom he supposes as much his superior in kind as
she is in worldly position; his sole advantage, in his own judgment,
and that which alone procured him the privilege of her society,
being, that he was older, and therefore knew a little more. So potent
and genial was her influence on his imagination, that, without once
thinking of her as their object, he now first found himself capable of
making verses--such as they were; and one day, with his book before
him--it was Burns, and he had been reading the Gowan poem to Ginevra
and his sister--he ventured to repeat, as if he read them from the
book, the following: they halted a little, no doubt, in rhythm, neither
were perfectly rimed, but for a beginning, they had promise. Gibbie,
who had thrown himself down on the other bank, and lay listening, at
once detected the change in the tone of his utterance, and before he
ceased had concluded that he was not reading them, and that they were
his own.

  Rin, burnie! clatter;
  To the sea win:
  Gien I was a watter,
  Sae wad I rin.

  Blaw, win’, caller, clean!
  Here an’ hyne awa:
  Gien I was a win’,
  Wadna I blaw!

  Shine, auld sun,
  Shine strang an’ fine:
  Gien I was the sun’s son,
  Herty I wad shine.

Hardly had he ended, when Gibbie’s pipes began from the opposite side
of the water, and, true to time and cadence and feeling, followed with
just the one air to suit the song--from which Donal, to his no small
comfort, understood that one at least of his audience had _received_
his lilt. If the poorest nature in the world responds with the tune
to the mightiest master’s song, he knows, if not another echo should
come back, that he has uttered a true cry. But Ginevra had not received
it, and being therefore of her own mind, and not of the song’s, was
critical. It is of the true things it does not, perhaps cannot receive,
that human nature is most critical.

“That one is nonsense, Donal,” she said. “Isn’t it now? How could a man
be a burn, or a wind, or the sun? But poets are silly. Papa says so.”

In his mind Donal did not know which way to look; physically, he
regarded the ground. Happily at that very moment Hornie caused a
diversion, and Gibbie understood what Donal was feeling too well to
make even a pretence of going after her. I must, to his praise, record
the fact that, instead of wreaking his mortification upon the cow,
Donal spared her several blows out of gratitude for the deliverance
her misbehaviour had wrought him. He was in no haste to return to his
audience. To have his first poem _thus_ rejected was killing. She was
but a child who had so unkindly criticized it, but she was the child
he wanted to please; and for a few moments life itself seemed scarcely
worth having. He called himself a fool, and resolved never to read
another poem to a girl so long as he lived. By the time he had again
walked through the burn, however, he was calm and comparatively wise,
and knew what to say.

“Div ye hear yon burn efter ye gang to yer bed, mem?” he asked Ginevra,
as he climbed the bank, pointing a little lower down the stream to the
mountain brook which there joined it.

“Always,” she answered. “It runs right under my window.”

“What kin’ o’ a din dis ’t mak?” he asked again.

“It is different at different times,” she answered. “It sings and
chatters in summer, and growls and cries and grumbles in winter, or
after rain up in Glashgar.”

“Div ye think the burn’s ony happier i’ the summer, mem?”

“No, Donal; the burn has no life in it, and therefore can’t be happier
one time than another.”

“Weel, mem, I wad jist like to speir what waur it is to fancy yersel’
a burn, than to fancy the burn a body, ae time singin’ an’ chatterin’,
an’ the neist growlin’ an’ grum’lin’.”

“Well, but, Donal, _can_ a man be a burn?”

“Weel, mem, _no_--at least no i’ this warl’, an’ at ’is ain wull. But
whan ye’re lyin’ hearkenin’ to the burn, did ye never imaigine yersel’
rinnin’ doon wi’ ’t--doon to the sea?”

“No, Donal; I always fancy myself going up the mountain where it comes
from, and running about wild there in the wind, when all the time I
know I’m safe and warm in bed.”

“Weel, maybe that’s better yet--I wadna say,” answered Donal; “but
jist the nicht, for a cheenge like, ye turn an’ gang doon wi’ ’t--i’
yer thouchts, I mean. Lie an’ hearken herty till ’t the nicht, whan
ye’re i’ yer bed; hearken an’ hearken till the soon’ rins awa wi’ ye
like, an’ ye forget a’ aboot yersel’, an’ think yersel’ awa wi’ the
burn, rinnin’, rinnin’, throu’ this an’ throu’ that, throu’ stanes an’
birks an’ bracken, throu’ heather, an’ plooed lan’ an’ corn, an’ wuds
an’ gairdens, aye singin’, an’ aye cheengin’ yer tune accordin’, till
it wins to the muckle roarin’ sea, an’ ’s a’ tint. An’ the first nicht
’at the win’ ’s up an’ awa, dee the same, mem, wi’ the win’. Get up
upo’ the back o’ ’t, like, as gien it was yer muckle horse, an’ jist
ride him to the deith; an’ efter that, gien ye dinna maybe jist wuss
’at ye was a burn or a blawin’ win’--aither wad be a sair loss to the
universe--ye wunna, I’m thinkin’, be sae ready to fin’ fau’t wi’ the
chiel ’at made yon bit sangie.”

“Are you vexed with me, Donal?--I’m _so_ sorry!” said Ginevra, taking
the earnestness of his tone for displeasure.

“Na, na, mem. Ye’re ower guid an’ ower bonnie,” answered Donal, “to be
a vex to onybody; but it _wad_ be a vex to hear sic a cratur as you
speykin’ like ane o’ the fules o’ the warl’, ’at believe i’ naething
but what comes in at the holes i’ their heid.”

Ginevra was silent. She could not quite understand Donal, but she felt
she must be wrong somehow; and of this she was the more convinced when
she saw the beautiful eyes of Gibbie fixed in admiration, and brimful
of love, upon Donal.

The way Donal kept his vow never to read another poem of his own to a
girl, was to proceed that very night to make another for the express
purpose, as he lay awake in the darkness.

The last one he ever read to her in that meadow was this:

  What gars ye sing, said the herd laddie,
    What gars ye sing sae lood?
  To tice them oot o’ the yaird, laddie,
    The worms, for my daily food.

        An’ aye he sang, an’ better he sang,
          An’ the worms creepit in an’ oot;
        An’ ane he tuik, an’ twa he loot gang,
          But still he carolled stoot.

  It’s no for the worms, sir, said the herd,
    They comena for yer sang.
  Think ye sae, sir? answered the bird,
    Maybe ye’re no i’ the wrang.
        But aye &c.

  Sing ye yoong sorrow to beguile
    Or to gie auld fear the flegs?
  Na, quo’ the mavis; it’s but to wile
    My wee things oot o’ her eggs.
        An’ aye &c.

  The mistress is plenty for that same gear,
    Though ye sangna ear’ nor late.
  It’s to draw the deid frae the moul’ sae drear,
    An’ open the kirkyaird gate.
        An’ aye &c.

  Na, na; it’s a better sang nor yer ain,
    Though ye hae o’ notes a feck,
  ’At wad mak auld Barebanes there sae fain
    As to lift the muckle sneck!
        But aye &c.

  Better ye sing nor a burn i’ the mune,
    Nor a wave ower san’ that flows,
  Nor a win’ wi’ the glintin’ stars abune,
    An’ aneth the roses in rows;
        An’ aye &c.

  But I’ll speir ye nae mair, sir, said the herd.
    I fear what ye micht say neist.
  Ye wad but won’er the mair, said the bird,
    To see the thouchts i’ my breist.

      And aye he sang, an’ better he sang,
        An’ the worms creepit in an’ oot;
      An’ ane he tuik, an’ twa he loot gang,
        But still he carolled stoot.

I doubt whether Ginevra understood this song better than the first,
but she was now more careful of criticizing; and when by degrees it
dawned upon her that he was the maker of these and other verses he
read, she grew half afraid of Donal, and began to regard him with big
eyes; he became, from a herd-boy, an unintelligible person, therefore
a wonder. For, brought thus face to face with the maker of verses, she
could not help trying to think how he did the thing; and as she felt
no possibility of making verses herself, it remained a mystery and an
astonishment, causing a great respect for the poet to mingle with the
kindness she felt towards Nicie’s brother.




CHAPTER XXXI.

THEIR REWARD.

By degrees Gibbie had come to be well known about the Mains and
Glashruach. Angus’s only recognition of him was a scowl in return for
his smile; but, as I have said, he gave him no farther annoyance, and
the tales about the beast-loon were dying out from Daurside. Jean Mavor
was a special friend to him: for she knew now well enough who had been
her brownie, and made him welcome as often as he showed himself with
Donal. Fergus was sometimes at home; sometimes away; but he was now
quite a fine gentleman, a student of theology, and only condescendingly
cognizant of the existence of Donal Grant. All he said to him when he
came home a master of arts, was, that he had expected better of him:
he ought to be something more than herd by this time. Donal smiled and
said nothing. He had just finished a little song that pleased him,
and could afford to be patronized. I am afraid, however, he was not
contented with that, but in his mind’s eye measured Fergus from top to
toe.

In the autumn, Mr. Galbraith returned to Glashruach, but did not remain
long. His schemes were promising well, and his self-importance was
screwed yet a little higher in consequence. But he was kinder than
usual to Ginevra. Before he went he said to her that, as Mr. Machar
had sunk into a condition requiring his daughter’s constant attention,
he would find her an English governess as soon as he reached London;
meantime she must keep up her studies by herself as well as she could.
Probably he forgot all about it, for the governess was not heard of at
Glashruach, and things fell into their old way. There was no spiritual
traffic between the father and daughter, consequently Ginevra never
said anything about Donal or Gibbie, or her friendship for Nicie. He
had himself to blame altogether; he had made it impossible for her to
talk to him. But it was well he remained in ignorance, and so did not
put a stop to the best education she could at this time of her life
have been having--such as neither he nor any friend of his could have
given her.

It was interrupted, however, by the arrival of the winter--a wild time
in that region, fierce storm alternating with the calm of death. After
howling nights, in which it seemed as if all the _polter-geister_ of
the universe must be out on a disembodied lark, the mountains stood
there in the morning solemn still, each with his white turban of snow
unrumpled on his head, in the profoundest silence of blue air, as if
he had never in his life passed a more thoughtful, peaceful time than
the very last night of all. To such feet as Ginevra’s the cottage on
Glashgar was for months almost as inaccessible as if it had been in
Sirius. More than once the Daur was frozen thick; for weeks every beast
was an absolute prisoner to the byre, and for months was fed with straw
and turnips and potatoes and oilcake. Then was the time for stories;
and often in the long dark, while yet it was hours too early for bed,
would Ginevra go with Nicie, who was not much of a _raconteuse_, to the
kitchen, to get one of the other servants to tell her an old tale. For
even in his own daughter and his own kitchen, the great laird could not
extinguish the accursed superstition. Not a glimpse did Ginevra get all
this time of Donal or of Gibbie.

At last, like one of its own flowers in its own bosom, the spring
began again to wake in God’s thought of his world; and the snow, like
all other deaths, had to melt and run, leaving room for hope; then
the summer woke smiling, as if she knew she had been asleep; and the
two youths and the two maidens met yet again on Lorrie bank, with the
brown water falling over the stones, the gold nuggets of the broom
hanging over the water, and the young larch-wood scenting the air all
up the brae side between them and the house, which the tall hedge hid
from their view. The four were a year older, a year nearer trouble,
and a year nearer getting out of it. Ginevra was more of a woman,
Donal more of a poet, Nicie as nice and much the same, and Gibbie, if
possible, more a foundling of the universe than ever. He was growing
steadily, and showed such freedom and ease, and his motions were all
so rapid and direct, that it was plain at a glance the beauty of his
countenance was in no manner or measure associated with weakness. The
mountain was a grand nursery for him, and the result, both physical and
spiritual, corresponded. Janet, who, better than anyone else, knew what
was in the mind of the boy, revered him as much as he revered her; the
first impression he made upon her had never worn off--had only changed
its colour a little. More even than a knowledge of the truth, is a
readiness to receive it; and Janet saw from the first that Gibbie’s
ignorance at its worst was but room vacant for the truth: when it came
it found bolt nor bar on door or window, but had immediate entrance.
The secret of this power of reception was, that to see a truth and
to do it was one and the same thing with Gibbie. To know and not do
would have seemed to him an impossibility, as it is in vital idea a
monstrosity.

This unity of vision and action was the main cause also of a certain
daring simplicity in the exercise of the imagination, which so far from
misleading him reacted only in obedience--which is the truth of the
will--the truth, therefore, of the whole being. He did not do the less
well for his sheep, that he fancied they knew when Jesus Christ was on
the mountain, and always at such times both fed better and were more
frolicsome. He thought Oscar knew it also, and interpreted a certain
look of the dog by the supposition that he had caught a sign of the
bodily presence of his Maker. The direction in which his imagination
ran forward, was always that in which his reason pointed; and so long
as Gibbie’s fancies were bud-blooms upon his obedience, his imagination
could not be otherwise than in harmony with his reason. Imagination is
a poor root, but a worthy blossom, and in a nature like Gibbie’s its
flowers cannot fail to be lovely. For no outcome of a man’s nature is
so like himself as his imaginations, except it be his fancies, indeed.
Perhaps his imaginations show what he is meant to be, his fancies what
he is making of himself.

In the summer, Mr. Galbraith, all unannounced, reappeared at
Glashruach, but so changed that, startled at the sight of him, Ginevra
stopped midway in her advance to greet him. The long thin man was now
haggard and worn; he looked sourer too, and more suspicious--either
that experience had made him so, or that he was less equal to the
veiling of his feelings in dignified indifference. He was annoyed that
his daughter should recognize an alteration in him, and, turning away,
leaned his head on the hand whose arm was already supported by the
mantelpiece, and took no further notice of her presence; but perhaps
conscience also had something to do with this behaviour. Ginevra knew
from experience that the sight of tears would enrage him, and with all
her might repressed those she felt beginning to rise. She went up to
him timidly, and took the hand that hung by his side. He did not repel
her--that is, he did not push her away, or even withdraw his hand, but
he left it hanging lifeless, and returned with it no pressure upon
hers--which was much worse.

“Is anything the matter, papa?” she asked with trembling voice.

“I am not aware that I have been in the habit of communicating with you
on the subject of my affairs,” he answered; “nor am I likely to begin
to do so, where my return after so long an absence seems to give so
little satisfaction.”

“Oh, papa! I was frightened to see you looking so ill.”

“Such a remark upon my personal appearance is but a poor recognition of
my labours for your benefit, I venture to think, Jenny,” he said.

He was at the moment contemplating, as a necessity, the sale of every
foot of the property her mother had brought him. Nothing less would
serve to keep up his credit, and gain time to disguise more than one
failing scheme. Everything had of late been going so badly, that he had
lost a good deal of his confidence and self-satisfaction; but he had
gained no humility instead. It had not dawned upon him yet that he was
not unfortunate, but unworthy. The gain of such a conviction is to a
man enough to outweigh infinitely any loss that even his unworthiness
can have caused him; for it involves some perception of the worthiness
of the truth, and makes way for the utter consolation which the birth
of that truth in himself will bring. As yet Mr. Galbraith was but
overwhelmed with care for a self which, so far as he had to do with the
making of it, was of small value indeed, although in the possibility,
which is the birthright of every creature, it was, not less than that
of the wretchedest of dog-licked Lazaruses, of a value by himself
unsuspected and inappreciable. That he should behave so cruelly to
his one child, was not unnatural to that self with which he was so
much occupied: failure had weakened that command of behaviour which so
frequently gains the credit belonging only to justice and kindness,
and a temper which never was good, but always feeling the chain, was
ready at once to show its ugly teeth. He was a proud man, whose pride
was always catching cold from his heart. He might have lived a hundred
years in the same house with a child that was not his own, without
feeling for her a single movement of affection.

The servants found more change in him than Ginevra did; his relations
with them, if not better conceived than his paternal ones, had been
less evidently defective. Now he found fault with every one, so
that even Joseph dared hardly open his mouth, and said he must give
warning. The day after his arrival, having spent the morning with Angus
walking over certain fields, much desired, he knew, of a neighbouring
proprietor, inwardly calculating the utmost he could venture to ask
for them with a chance of selling, he scolded Ginevra severely on his
return because she had not had lunch, but had waited for him; whereas
a little reflection might have shown him she dared not take it without
him. Naturally, therefore, she could not now eat, because of a certain
sensation in her throat. The instant he saw she was not eating, he
ordered her out of the room: he would have no such airs in his family!
By the end of the week--he arrived on the Tuesday--such a sense of
estrangement possessed Ginevra, that she would turn on the stair and
run up again, if she heard her father’s voice below. Her aversion
to meeting him, he became aware of, and felt relieved in regard to
the wrong he was doing his wife, by reflecting upon her daughter’s
behaviour towards him; for he had a strong constitutional sense of what
was fair, and a conscience disobeyed becomes a cancer.

In this evil mood he received from some one--all his life Donal
believed it was Fergus--a hint concerning the relations between his
daughter and his tenant’s herd-boy. To describe his feelings at the
bare fact that such a hint was possible, would be more labour than the
result would repay.--What! his own flesh and blood, the heiress of
Glashruach, derive pleasure from the boorish talk of such a companion!
It could not be true, when the mere thought, without the belief of it,
filled him with such indignation! He was overwhelmed with a righteous
disgust. He did himself the justice of making himself certain before
he took measures; but he never thought of doing them the justice of
acquainting himself first with the nature of the intercourse they held.
But it mattered little; for he would have found nothing in that to give
him satisfaction, even if the thing itself had not been outrageous. He
watched and waited, and more than once pretended to go from home: at
last one morning, from the larch-wood, he saw the unnatural girl seated
with her maid on the bank of the river, the cow-herd reading to them,
and on the other side the dumb idiot lying listening. He was almost
beside himself--with what, I can hardly define. In a loud voice of bare
command he called to her to come to him. With a glance of terror at
Nicie she rose, and they went up through the larches together.

I will not spend my labour upon a reproduction of the verbal torrent of
wrath, wounded dignity, disgust, and contempt, with which the father
assailed his shrinking, delicate, honest-minded woman-child. For Nicie,
he dismissed her on the spot. Not another night would he endure her in
the house, after her abominable breach of confidence! She had to depart
without even a good-bye from Ginevra, and went home weeping in great
dread of what her mother would say.

“Lassie,” said Janet, when she heard her story, “gien onybody be to
blame it’s mysel’; for ye loot me ken ye gaed whiles wi’ yer bonnie
missie to hae a news wi’ Donal, an’ I saw an’ see noucht ’at’s wrang
intil ’t. But the fowk o’ this warl’ has ither w’ys o’ jeedgin’ o’
things, an’ I maun bethink mysel’ what lesson o’ the serpent’s wisdom I
hae to learn frae ’t. Ye’re walcome hame, my bonnie lass. Ye ken I aye
keep the wee closet ready for ony o’ ye ’at micht come ohn expeckit.”

Nicie, however, had not long to occupy the closet, for those of her
breed were in demand in the country.




CHAPTER XXXII.

PROLOGUE.

Ever since he became a dweller in the air of Glashgar, Gibbie, mindful
of his first visit thereto, and of his grand experience on that
occasion, had been in the habit, as often as he saw reason to expect a
thunder-storm, and his duties would permit, of ascending the mountain,
and there on the crest of the granite peak, awaiting the arrival of
the tumult. Everything antagonistic in the boy, everything that could
naturally find relief, or pleasure, or simple outcome, in resistance or
contention, debarred as it was by the exuberance of his loving kindness
from obtaining satisfaction or alleviation in strife with his fellows,
found it wherever he could encounter the forces of Nature, in personal
wrestle with them where possible, and always in wildest sympathy with
any uproar of the elements. The absence of personality in them allowed
the co-existence of sympathy and antagonism in respect of them. Except
those truths awaking delight at once calm and profound, of which so few
know the power, and the direct influence of human relation, Gibbie’s
emotional joy was more stirred by storm than by anything else; and
with all forms of it he was so familiar that, young as he was, he had
unconsciously begun to generalize on its phases.

Towards the evening of a wondrously fine day in the beginning of
August--a perfect day of summer in her matronly beauty, it began
to rain. All the next day the slopes and stairs of Glashgar were
alternately glowing in sunshine, and swept with heavy showers, driven
slanting in strong gusts of wind from the northwest. How often he was
wet through and dried again that day, Gibbie could not have told. He
wore so little that either took but a few moments, and he was always
ready for a change. The wind and the rain together were cold, but that
only served to let the sunshine deeper into him when it returned.

In the afternoon there was less sun, more rain, and more wind; and
at last the sun seemed to give it up; the wind grew to a hurricane,
and the rain strove with it which should inhabit the space. The whole
upper region was like a huge mortar, in which the wind was the pestle,
and, with innumerable gyres, vainly ground at the rain. Gibbie drove
his sheep to the refuge of a pen on the lower slope of a valley that
ran at right angles to the wind, where they were sheltered by a rock
behind, forming one side of the enclosure, and dykes of loose stones,
forming the others, at a height there was no tradition of any flood
having reached. He then went home, and having told Robert what he had
done, and had his supper, set out in the early-failing light, to ascend
the mountain. A great thunder-storm was at hand, and was calling him.
It was almost dark before he reached the top, but he knew the surface
of Glashgar nearly as well as the floor of the cottage. Just as he
had fought his way to the crest of the peak in the face of one of the
fiercest of the blasts abroad that night, a sudden rush of fire made
the heavens like the smoke-filled vault of an oven, and at once the
thunder followed, in a succession of single sharp explosions without
any roll between. The mountain shook with the windy shocks, but the
first of the thunder-storm was the worst, and it soon passed. The wind
and the rain continued, and the darkness was filled with the rush of
the water everywhere wildly tearing down the sides of the mountain.
Thus heaven and earth held communication in torrents all the night.
Down the steeps of the limpid air they ran to the hard sides of the
hills, where at once, as if they were no longer at home, and did not
like the change, they began to work mischief. To the ears and heart
of Gibbie their noises were a mass of broken music. Every spring and
autumn the floods came, and he knew them, and they were welcome to him
in their seasons.

It required some care to find his way down through the darkness and the
waters to the cottage, but as he was neither in fear nor in haste, he
was in little danger, and his hands and feet could pick out the path
where his eyes were useless. When at length he reached his bed, it was
not for a long time to sleep, but to lie awake and listen to the raging
of the wind all about and above and below the cottage, and the rushing
of the streams down past it on every side. To his imagination it was as
if he lay in the very bed of the channel by which the waters of heaven
were shooting to the valleys of the earth; and when he fell asleep at
last, his dream was of the rush of the river of the water of life from
under the throne of God; and he saw men drink thereof, and everyone as
he drank straightway knew that he was one with the Father, and one with
every child of his throughout the infinite universe.

He woke, and what remained of his dream was love in his heart, and
in his ears the sound of many waters. It was morning. He rose, and,
dressing hastily, opened the door. What a picture of grey storm rose
outspread before him! The wind fiercely invaded the cottage, thick
charged with water-drops, and stepping out he shut the door in haste,
lest it should blow upon the old people in bed and wake them. He could
not see far on any side, for the rain that fell, and the mist and steam
that rose, upon which the wind seemed to have no power; but wherever
he did see, there water was running down. Up the mountain he went--he
could hardly have told why. Once, for a moment, as he ascended, the
veil of the vapour either rose, or was torn asunder, and he saw the
great wet gleam of the world below. By the time he reached the top,
it was as light as it was all the day; but it was with a dull yellow
glare, as if the sun were obscured by the smoke and vaporous fumes of
a burning world which the rain had been sent to quench. It was a wild,
hopeless scene--as if God had turned his face away from the world, and
all Nature was therefore drowned in tears--no Rachel weeping for her
children, but the whole creation crying for the Father, and refusing to
be comforted. Gibbie stood gazing and thinking. Did God like to look
at the storm he made? If Jesus did, would he have left it all and gone
to sleep, when the wind and waves were howling, and flinging the boat
about like a toy between them? He must have been tired, surely! With
what? Then first Gibbie saw that perhaps it tired Jesus to heal people;
that every time what cured man or woman was life that went out of him,
and that he missed it, perhaps--not from his heart, but from his body;
and if it were so, then it was no wonder if he slept in the midst of a
right splendid storm. And upon that Gibbie remembered what St. Matthew
says just before he tells about the storm--that “he cast out the
spirits with his word, and healed all that were sick, that it might be
fulfilled which was spoken by Esaias the prophet, saying, Himself took
our infirmities, and bare our sicknesses.”

That moment it seemed as if he must be himself in some wave-tossed
boat, and not upon a mountain of stone, for Glashgar gave a great
heave under him, then rocked and shook from side to side a little, and
settled down so still and steady, that motion and the mountain seemed
again two ideas that never could be present together in any mind.
The next instant came an explosion, followed by a frightful roaring
and hurling, as of mingled water and stones; and on the side of the
mountain beneath him he saw what, through the mist, looked like a cloud
of smoke or dust rising to a height. He darted towards it. As he drew
nearer, the cloud seemed to condense, and presently he saw plainly
enough that it was a great column of water shooting up and out from
the face of the mountain. It sank and rose again, with the alternation
of a huge pulse: the mountain was cracked, and through the crack, with
every throb of its heart, the life-blood of the great hull of the world
seemed beating out. Already it had scattered masses of gravel on all
sides, and down the hill a river was shooting in sheer cataract, raving
and tearing, and carrying stones and rocks with it like foam. Still and
still it pulsed and rushed and ran, born, like another Xanthus, a river
full-grown, from the heart of the mountain.

Suddenly Gibbie, in the midst of his astonishment and awful delight,
noted the path of the new stream, and from his knowledge of the face
of the mountain, perceived that its course was direct for the cottage.
Down the hill he shot after it, as if it were a wild beast that his
fault had freed from its cage. He was not terrified. One believing like
him in the perfect Love and perfect Will of a Father of men, as the
fact of facts, fears nothing. Fear is faithlessness. But there is so
little that is worthy the name of faith, that such a confidence will
appear to most not merely incredible but heartless. The Lord himself
seems not to have been very hopeful about us, for he said, When the Son
of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth? A perfect faith would
lift us absolutely above fear. It is in the cracks, crannies, and gulfy
faults of our belief, the gaps that are not faith, that the snow of
apprehension settles, and the ice of unkindness forms.

The torrent had already worn for itself a channel: what earth there
was, it had swept clean away to the rock, and the loose stones it had
thrown up aside, or hurled with it in its headlong course. But as
Gibbie bounded along, following it with a speed almost equal to its
own, he was checked in the midst of his hearty haste by the sight, a
few yards away, of another like terror--another torrent issuing from
the side of the hill, and rushing to swell the valley stream. Another
and another he saw, with growing wonder, as he ran; before he reached
home he passed some six or eight, and had begun to think whether a
second deluge of the whole world might not be at hand, commencing this
time with Scotland. Two of them joined the one he was following, and
he had to cross them as he could; the others he saw near and farther
off--one foaming deliverance after another, issuing from the entrails
of the mountain, like imprisoned demons, that, broken from their
bonds, ran to ravage the world with the accumulated hate of dreariest
centuries. Now and then a huge boulder, loosened from its bed by the
trail of this or that watery serpent, would go rolling, leaping,
bounding down the hill before him, and just in time he escaped one
that came springing after him as if it were a living thing that wanted
to devour him. Nor was Glashgar the only torrent-bearing mountain of
Gormgarnet that day, though the rain prevented Gibbie from seeing
anything of what the rest of them were doing. The fountains of the
great deep were broken up, and seemed rushing together to drown the
world. And still the wind was raging, and the rain tumbling to the
earth, rather in sheets than in streams.

Gibbie at length forsook the bank of the new torrent to take the
nearest way home, and soon reached the point whence first, returning in
that direction, he always looked to see the cottage. For a moment he
was utterly bewildered: no cottage was to be seen. From the top of the
rock against which it was built, shot the whole mass of the water he
had been pursuing, now dark with stones and gravel, now grey with foam,
or glassy in the lurid light.

“O Jesus Christ!” he cried, and darted to the place. When he came near,
to his amazement there stood the little house unharmed, the very centre
of the cataract! For a few yards on the top of the rock, the torrent
had a nearly horizontal channel, along which it rushed with unabated
speed to the edge, and thence shot clean over the cottage, dropping
only a dribble of rain on the roof from the underside of its half-arch.
The garden ground was gone, swept clean from the bare rock, which made
a fine smooth shoot for the water a long distance in front. He darted
through the drizzle and spray, reached the door, and lifted the latch.
The same moment he heard Janet’s voice in joyful greeting.

“Noo, noo! come awa, laddie,” she said. “Wha wad hae thoucht we wad
hae to lea’ the rock to win oot o’ the water? We’re but waitin’ you to
gang.--Come, Robert, we’ll awa doon the hill.”

She stood in the middle of the room in her best gown, as if she had
been going to church, her Bible, a good-sized octavo, under her arm,
with a white handkerchief folded round it, and her umbrella in her hand.

“He that believeth shall not make haste,” she said, “but he maunna
tempt the Lord, aither. Drink that milk, Gibbie, an’ pit a bannock i’
yer pooch, an’ come awa.”

Robert rose from the edge of the bed, staff in hand, ready too. He also
was in his Sunday clothes. Oscar, who could make no change of attire,
but was always ready, and had been standing looking up in his face for
the last ten minutes, wagged his tail when he saw him rise, and got
out of his way. On the table were the remains of their breakfast of
oat-cake and milk--the fire Janet had left on the hearth was a spongy
mass of peat, as wet as the winter before it was dug from the bog, so
they had had no porridge. The water kept coming in splashes down the
_lum_, the hillocks of the floor were slimy, and in the hollows little
lakes were gathering: the lowest film of the torrent-water ran down the
rock behind, and making its way between rock and roof, threatened soon
to render the place uninhabitable.

“What’s the eese o’ lo’denin’ yersel’ wi’ the umbrell?” said Robert.
“Ye’ll get it a’ drookit (_drenched_).”

“Ow, I’ll jist tak it,” replied Janet, with a laugh in acknowledgment
of her husband’s fun; “it’ll haud the rain ohn blin’t me.”

“That’s gien ye be able to haud it up. I doobt the win’ ’ll be ower
sair upo’ ’t. I’m thinkin’, though, it’ll be mair to haud yer beuk dry!”

Janet smiled and made no denial.

“Noo, Gibbie,” she said, “ye gang an’ lowse Crummie. But ye’ll hae to
lead her. She winna be to caw in sic a win’ ’s this, an’ no plain ro’d
afore her.”

“Whaur div ye think o’ gauin’?” asked Robert, who, satisfied as usual
with whatever might be in his wife’s mind, had not till this moment
thought of asking her where she meant to take refuge.

“Ow, we’ll jist mak for the Mains, gien ye be agreeable, Robert,” she
answered. “It’s there we belang till, an’ in wather like this naebody
wad refeese bield till a beggar, no to say Mistress Jean till her ain
fowk.”

With that she led the way to the door and opened it.

“His v’ice was like the soon’ o’ mony watters,” she said to herself
softly, as the liquid thunder of the torrent came in the louder.

Gibbie shot round the corner to the byre, whence through all the roar,
every now and then they had heard the cavernous mooing of Crummie,
piteous and low. He found a stream a foot deep running between her fore
and hind legs, and did not wonder that she wanted to be on the move.
Speedily he loosed her, and fastening the chain-tether to her halter,
led her out. She was terrified at sight of the falling water, and they
had some trouble in getting her through behind it, but presently after,
she was making the descent as carefully and successfully as any of them.

It was a heavy undertaking for the two old folk to walk all the way
to the Mains, and in such a state of the elements; but where there is
no choice, we do well to make no difficulty. Janet was half troubled
that her mountain, and her foundation on the rock, should have failed
her; but consoled herself that they were but shadows of heavenly
things and figures of the true; and that a mountain or a rock was in
itself no more to be trusted than a horse or a prince or the legs of a
man. Robert plodded on in contented silence, and Gibbie was in great
glee, singing, after his fashion, all the way, though now and then
half-choked by the fierceness of the wind round some corner of rock,
filled with rain-drops that stung like hailstones.

By and by Janet stopped and began looking about her. This naturally
seemed to her husband rather odd in the circumstances.

“What are ye efter, Janet?” he said, shouting through the wind from a
few yards off, by no means sorry to stand for a moment, although any
recovering of his breath seemed almost hopeless in such a tempest.

“I want to lay my umbrell in safity,” answered Janet, “--gien I cud but
perceive a shuitable spot. Ye was richt, Robert, it’s mair w’alth nor I
can get the guid o’.”

“Hoots! fling ’t frae ye, than, lass,” he returned. “Is this a day to
be thinkin’ o’ warl’s gear?”

“What for no, Robert?” she rejoined. “Ae day’s as guid ’s anither for
thinkin’ aboot onything the richt gait.”

“What!” retorted Robert, “--whan we hae ta’en oor lives in oor han’,
an’ can no more than houp we may cairry them throu’ safe!”

“What’s that ’at ye ca’ oor lives, Robert? The Maister never made
muckle o’ the savin’ o’ sic like ’s them. It seems to me they’re
naething but a kin’ o’ warl’s gear themsel’s.”

“An’ yet,” argued Robert, “ye’ll tak thoucht aboot an auld umbrell?
Whaur’s yer consistency, lass?”

“Gien I war tribled aboot my life,” said Janet, “I cud ill spare
thoucht for an auld umbrell. But they baith trible me sae little, ’at
I may jist as weel luik efter them baith. It’s auld an’ casten an’
bow-ribbit, it’s true, but it wad ill become me to drap it wi’oot a
thoucht, whan him ’at could mak haill loaves, said, ‘Gether up the
fragments ’at naething be lost.’--Na,” she continued, still looking
about her, “I maun jist dee my duty by the auld umbrell; syne come o’
’t ’at likes, I carena.”

So saying she walked to the lee side of a rock, and laid the umbrella
close under it, then a few large stones upon it to keep it down.

I may add, that the same umbrella, recovered, and with two new ribs,
served Janet to the day of her death.




CHAPTER XXXIII.

THE MAINS.

They reached at length the valley road. The water that ran in the
bottom was the Lorrie. Three days ago it was a lively little stream,
winding and changing within its grassy banks--here resting silent
in a deep pool, there running and singing over its pebbles. Now it
had filled and far overflowed its banks, and was a swift river. It
had not yet, so far up the valley, encroached on the road; but the
torrents on the mountain had already in places much injured it, and
with considerable difficulty they crossed some of the new-made gullies.
When they approached the bridge, however, by which they must cross the
Lorrie to reach the Mains, their worst trouble lay before them. For the
enemy, with whose reinforcements they had all the time been descending,
showed himself ever in greater strength the farther they advanced; and
here the road was flooded for a long way on both sides of the bridge.
There was therefore a good deal of wading to be done; but the road was
an embankment, there was little current, and in safety at last they
ascended the rising ground on which the farm-building stood. When they
reached the yard, they sent Gibbie to find shelter for Crummie, and
themselves went up to the house.

“The Lord preserve ’s!” cried Jean Mavor, with uplifted hands, when she
saw them enter the kitchen.

“He’ll dee that, mem,” returned Janet, with a smile.

“But what _can_ he dee? Gien ye be droont oot o’ the hills, what’s to
come o’ his i’ the how? I wad ken that!” said Jean.

“The watter’s no up to yer door yet,” remarked Janet.

“God forbid!” retorted Jean, as if the very mention of such a state of
things was too dreadful to be polite. “--But, eh, ye’re weet!”

“_Weet_’s no the word,” said Robert, trying to laugh, but failing from
sheer exhaustion, and the beginnings of an asthmatic attack.

The farmer, hearing their voices, came into the kitchen--a middle-sized
and middle-aged, rather coarse-looking man, with keen eyes, who took
snuff amazingly. His manner was free, with a touch of satire. He was
proud of driving a hard bargain, but was thoroughly hospitable. He had
little respect for person or thing, but showed an occasional touch of
tenderness.

“Hoots, Rob!” he said roughly as he entered, “I thoucht ye had mair
sense! What’s broucht ye here at sic a time?”

But as he spoke he held out his snuff-box to the old man.

“Fell needcessity, sir,” answered Robert, taking a good pinch.

“Necessity!” retorted the farmer. “Was ye oot o’ meal?”

“Oot o’ dry meal, I doobt, by this time, sir,” replied Robert.

“Hoots! I wuss we war a’ in like necessity--weel up upo’ the hill
i’stead o’ doon here upo’ the haugh (_river-meadow_). It’s jist clean
ridic’lous. Ye sud hae kenned better at your age, Rob. Ye sud hae
thoucht twise, man.”

“’Deed, sir,” answered Robert, quietly finishing his pinch of snuff,
“there was sma’ need, an’ less time to think, an’ Glashgar bursten,
an’ the watter comin’ ower the tap o’ the bit hoosie as gien ’twar a
muckle owershot wheel, an’ no a place for fowk to bide in. Ye dinna
think Janet an’ me wad be twa sic auld fules as pit on oor Sunday claes
to sweem in, gien we thoucht to see things as we left them whan we
gaed back! Ye see, sir, though the hoose be fun’t upo’ a rock, it’s
maist biggit o’ fells, an’ the foundation’s a’ I luik even to see o’ ’t
again. Whan the force o’ the watter grows less, it’ll come doon upo’
the riggin’ wi’ the haill weicht o’ ’t.”

“Ay!” said Janet, in a low voice, “the live stanes maun come to the
live rock to bigg the hoose ’at’ll stan’.”

“What think ye, Maister Fergus, you ’at’s gauin’ to be a minister?”
said Robert, referring to his wife’s words, as the young man looked in
at the door of the kitchen.

“Lat him be,” interposed his father, blowing his nose with unnecessary
violence; “setna him preachin’ afore ’s time. Fess the whusky, Fergus,
an’ gie auld Robert a dram. Haith! gien the watter be rinnin’ ower the
tap o’ yer hoose, man, it was time to flit. Fess twa or three glaisses,
Fergus; we hae a’ need o’ something ’at’s no watter. It’s perfeckly
ridic’lous!”

Having taken a little of the whisky, the old people went to change
their clothes for some Jean had provided, and in the mean time she made
up her fire, and prepared some breakfast for them.

“An’ whaur’s yer dummie?” she asked, as they re-entered the kitchen.

“He had puir Crummie to luik efter,” answered Janet; “but he micht hae
been in or this time.”

“He’ll be wi’ Donal i’ the byre, nae doobt,” said Jean: “he’s aye some
shy o’ comin’ in wantin’ an inveet.” She went to the door, and called
with a loud voice across the yard, through the wind and the clashing
torrents, “Donal, sen’ Dummie in till ’s brakfast.”

“He’s awa till ’s sheep,” cried Donal in reply.

“Preserve ’s!--the cratur ’ll be lost!” said Jean.

“Less likly nor ony man aboot the place,” bawled Donal, half angry with
his mistress for calling his friend _dummie_. “Gibbie kens better what
he’s aboot nor ony twa ’at thinks him a fule ’cause he canna lat oot
sic stuff an’ nonsense as they canna haud in.”

Jean went back to the kitchen, only half reassured concerning her
brownie, and far from contented with his absence. But she was glad to
find that neither Janet nor Robert appeared alarmed at the news.

“I wuss the cratur had had some brakfast,” she said.

“He has a piece in ’s pooch,” answered Janet. “He’s no oonprovidit wi’
what can be made mair o’.”

“I dinna richtly un’erstan’ ye there,” said Jean.

“Ye canna hae failt to remark, mem,” answered Janet, “’at whan the
Maister set himsel’ to feed the hungerin’ thoosan’s, he teuk intil ’s
han’ what there was, an’ vroucht upo’ that to mak mair o’ ’t. I hae
wussed sometimes ’at the laddie wi’ the five barley loaves an’ the twa
sma’ fishes, hadna been there that day. I wad fain ken hoo the Maister
wad hae managed wantin’ onything to begin upo’. As it was, he aye hang
what he did upo’ something his Father had dune afore him.”

“Hoots!” returned Jean, who looked upon Janet as a lover of conundrums,
“ye’re aye warstlin’ wi’ run k-nots an’ teuch moo’fu’s.”

“Ow na, no aye,” answered Janet; “--only whiles, whan the speerit o’
speirin’ gets the upper han’ o’ me for a sizon.”

“I doobt that same speerit ’ll lead ye far frae the still watters some
day, Janet,” said Jean, stirring the porridge vehemently.

“Ow, I think not,” answered Janet very calmly. “Whan the Maister
says--_what’s that to thee?_--I tak care he hasna to say ’t twise, but
jist get up an’ follow him.”

This was beyond Jean, but she held her peace, for, though she feared
for Janet’s orthodoxy, and had a strong opinion of the superiority
of her own common sense--in which, as in the case of all who pride
themselves in the same, there was a good deal more of the _common_ than
of the _sense_--she had the deepest conviction of Janet’s goodness,
and regarded her as a sort of heaven-favoured idiot, whose utterances
were somewhat privileged. Janet, for her part, looked upon Jean as “an
honest wuman, wha ’ll get a heap o’ licht some day.”

When they had eaten their breakfast, Robert took his pipe to the barn,
saying there was not much danger of fire that day; Janet washed up the
dishes, and sat down to her Book; and Jean went out and in, attending
to many things.

Mean time the rain fell, the wind blew, the water rose. Little could
be done beyond feeding the animals, threshing a little corn in the
barn, and twisting straw ropes for the thatch of the ricks of the
coming harvest--if indeed there was a harvest on the road, for, as
the day went on, it seemed almost to grow doubtful whether any ropes
would be wanted; while already not a few of last year’s ricks, from
farther up the country, were floating past the Mains, down the Daur
to the sea. The sight was a dreadful one--had an air of the day of
judgment about it to farmers’ eyes. From the Mains, to right and left
beyond the rising ground on which the farm buildings stood, everywhere
as far as the bases of the hills, instead of fields was water, yellow
brown, here in still expanse or slow progress, there sweeping along in
fierce current. The quieter parts of it were dotted with trees, divided
by hedges, shaded with ears of corn; upon the swifter parts floated
objects of all kinds.

Mr. Duff went wandering restlessly from one spot to another,
finding nothing to do. In the gloaming, which fell the sooner that
a rain-blanket miles thick wrapt the earth up from the sun, he came
across from the barn, and, entering the kitchen, dropped, weary with
hopelessness, on a chair.

“I can weel un’erstan’,” he said, “what for the Lord sud set doon Bony
an’ set up Louy, but what for he sud gar corn grow, an’ syne sen’ a
spate to sweem awa wi’ ’t, that’s mair nor mortal man can see the sense
o’.--Haud yer tongue, Janet. I’m no sayin’ there’s onything wrang; I’m
sayin’ naething but the sair trowth, ’at I canna see the what-for o’
’t. I canna see the guid o’ ’t till onybody. A’thing’s on the ro’d to
the German Ocean. The lan’ ’s jist miltin’ awa intil the sea!”

Janet sat silent, knitting hard at a stocking she had got hold of, that
Jean had begun for her brother. She knew argument concerning the uses
of adversity was vain with a man who knew of no life but that which
consisted in eating and drinking, sleeping and rising, working and
getting on in the world: as to such things existing only that they may
subserve a real life, he was almost as ignorant, notwithstanding he was
an elder of the church, as any heathen.

From being nearly in the centre of its own land, the farm-steading of
the Mains was at a considerable distance from any other; but there
were two or three cottages upon the land, and as the evening drew on,
another aged pair, who lived in one only a few hundred yards from the
house, made their appearance, and were soon followed by the wife of the
foreman with her children, who lived farther off. Quickly the night
closed in, and Gibbie was not come. Robert was growing very uneasy;
Janet kept comforting and reassuring him.

“There’s ae thing,” said the old man: “Oscar’s wi’ ’im.”

“Ay,” responded Janet, unwilling, in the hearing of others, to say a
word that might seem to savour of rebuke to her husband, yet pained
that he should go to the dog for comfort--“Ay; he’s a well-made animal,
Oscar! There’s been a fowth o’ sheep-care pitten intil ’im. Ye see
him ’at made ’im, bein’ a shepherd himsel’, kens what’s wantit o’ the
dog.”--None but her husband understood what lay behind the words.

“Oscar’s no wi’ im,” said Donal. “The dog cam to me i’ the byre, lang
efter Gibbie was awa, greitin’ like, an’ luikin’ for ’im.”

Robert gave a great sigh, but said nothing.

Janet did not sleep a wink that night: she had so many to pray for.
Not Gibbie only, but every one of her family was in perils of waters,
all being employed along the valley of the Daur. It was not, she said,
confessing to her husband her sleeplessness, that she was afraid. She
was only “keepin’ them company, an’ haudin’ the yett open,” she said.
The latter phrase was her picture-periphrase for _praying_. She never
said she _prayed_; she _held the gate open_. The wonder is but small
that Donal should have turned out a poet.

The dawn appeared--but the farm had vanished. Not even heads of growing
corn were anywhere more to be seen. The loss would be severe, and John
Duff’s heart sank within him. The sheep which had been in the mown
clover-field that sloped to the burn, were now all in the corn-yard,
and the water was there with them. If the rise did not soon cease,
every rick would be afloat. There was little current, however, and
not half the danger there would have been had the houses stood a few
hundred yards in any direction from where they were.

“Tak yer brakfast, John,” said his sister.

“Lat them tak ’at hungers,” he answered.

“Tak, or ye’ll no hae the wut to save,” said Jean.

Thereupon he fell to, and ate, if not with appetite, then with a will
that was wondrous.

The flood still grew, and still the rain poured, and Gibbie did not
come. Indeed no one any longer expected him, whatever might have become
of him: except by boat the Mains was inaccessible now, they thought.
Soon after breakfast, notwithstanding, a strange woman came to the
door. Jean, who opened it to her knock, stood and stared speechless.
It was a greyhaired woman, with a more disreputable look than her
weather-flouted condition would account for.

“Gran’ wither for the deuks!” she said.

“Whaur come _ye_ frae?” returned Jean, who did not relish the freedom
of her address.

“Frae ower by,” she answered.

“An’ hoo wan ye here?”

“Upo’ my twa legs.”

Jean looked this way and that over the watery waste, and again stared
at the woman in growing bewilderment.--They came afterwards to the
conclusion that she had arrived, probably half-drunk, the night before,
and passed it in one of the outhouses.

“Yer legs maun be langer nor they luik than, wuman,” said Jean,
glancing at the lower part of the stranger’s person.

The woman only laughed--a laugh without any laughter in it.

“What’s yer wull, noo ’at ye _are_ here?” continued Jean with severity.
“Ye camna to the Mains to tell them there what kin’ o’ wather it wis!”

“I cam whaur I cud win,” answered the woman; “an’ for my wull, that’s
naething to naebody noo--it’s no as it was ance--though, gien I cud get
it, there micht be mair nor me the better for ’t. An’ sae as ye wad
gang the len’th o’ a glaiss o’ whusky--”

“Ye s’ get nae whusky here,” interrupted Jean, with determination.

The woman gave a sigh, and half turned away as if she would depart.
But however she might have come, it was plainly impossible she should
depart and live.

“Wuman,” said Jean, “ken an’ I care naething aboot ye, an’ mair, I
dinna like ye, nor the luik o’ ye; and gien ’t war a fine simmer nicht
’at a body cud lie thereoot, or gang the farther, I wad steek the door
i’ yer face; but that I daurna dee the day again’ my neebour’s soo; sae
ye can come in an’ sit doon an’, my min’ spoken, ye s’ get what’ll haud
the life i’ ye, an’ a puckle strae i’ the barn. Only ye maun jist hae a
quaiet sough, for the gudeman disna like tramps.”

“Tramps here, tramps there!” exclaimed the woman, starting into high
displeasure; “I wad hae ye ken I’m an honest wuman, an’ no tramp!”

“Ye sudna luik sae like ane than,” said Jean coolly. “But come yer wa’s
in, an’ I s’ say naething sae lang as ye behave.”

The woman followed her, took the seat pointed out to her by the fire,
and sullenly ate, without a word of thanks, the cakes and milk handed
her, but seemed to grow better tempered as she ate, though her black
eyes glowed at the food with something of disgust and more of contempt:
she would rather have had a gill of whisky than all the milk on the
Mains. On the other side of the fire sat Janet, knitting away busily,
with a look of ease and leisure. She said nothing, but now and then
cast a kindly glance out of her grey eyes at the woman: there was an
air of the lost sheep about the stranger, which, in whomsoever she
might see it, always drew her affection. “She maun be ane o’ them
the Maister cam to ca’,” she said to herself. But she was careful to
suggest no approach, for she knew the sheep that has left the flock has
grown wild, and is more suspicious and easily startled than one in the
midst of its brethren.

With the first of the light, some of the men on the farm had set out
to look for Gibbie, well knowing it would be a hard matter to touch
Glashgar. About nine they returned, having found it impossible. One of
them, caught in a current and swept into a hole, had barely escaped
with his life. But they were unanimous that the dummie was better off
in any cave on Glashgar than he would be in the best bed-room at the
Mains, if things went on as they threatened.

Robert had kept on going to the barn, and back again to the kitchen,
all the morning, consumed with anxiety about the son of his old age;
but the barn began to be flooded, and he had to limit his prayer-walk
to the space between the door of the house and the chair where Janet
sat--knitting busily, and praying with countenance untroubled, amidst
the rush of the seaward torrents, the mad howling and screeching of the
wind, and the lowing of the imprisoned cattle.

“O Lord,” she said in her great trusting heart, “gien my bonnie man be
droonin’ i’ the watter, or deein’ o’ caul’ on the hill-side, haud ’s
han’. Binna far frae him, O Lord; dinna lat him be fleyt.”

To Janet, what we call life and death were comparatively small matters,
but she was very tender over suffering and fear. She did not pray half
so much for Gibbie’s life as for the presence with him of him who is
at the deathbed of every sparrow. She went on waiting, and refused to
be troubled. True, she was not his bodily mother, but she loved him
far better than the mother who, in such a dread for her child, would
have been mad with terror. The difference was, that Janet loved up as
well as down, loved down so widely, so intensely, _because_ the Lord
of life, who gives his own to us, was more to her than any child can
be to any mother, and she knew he could not forsake her Gibbie, and
that his presence was more and better than life. She was unnatural, was
she?--inhuman?--Yes, if there be no such heart and source of humanity
as she believed in; if there be, then such calmness and courage and
content as hers are the mere human and natural condition to be hungered
after by every aspiring soul. Not until such condition is mine shall I
be able to regard life as a godlike gift, except in the hope that it
is drawing nigh. Let him who understands, understand better; let him
not say the good is less than perfect, or excuse his supineness and
spiritual sloth by saying to himself that a man can go too far in his
search after the divine, can sell too much of what he has to buy the
field of the treasure. Either there is no Christ of God, or my all is
his.

Robert seemed at length to have ceased his caged wandering. For a
quarter of an hour he had been sitting with his face buried in his
hands. Janet rose, went softly to him, and said in a whisper:

“Is Gibbie waur aff, Robert, i’ this watter upo’ Glashgar, nor the
dissiples i’ the boat upo’ yon loch o’ Galilee, an’ the Maister no come
to them? Robert, my ain man! dinna gar the Maister say to you, _O ye o’
little faith! Wharfor did ye doobt?_ Tak hert, man; the Maister wadna
hae his men be cooards.”

“Ye’re richt, Janet; ye’re aye richt,” answered Robert, and rose.

She followed him into the passage.

“Whaur are ye gauin’, Robert?” she said.

“I wuss I cud tell ye,” he answered. “I’m jist hungerin’ to be my lane.
I wuss I had never left Glashgar. There’s aye room there. Or gien I cud
win oot amo’ the rigs! There’s nane o’ _them_ left, but there’s the
rucks--they’re no soomin’ yet! I want to gang to the Lord, but I maunna
weet Willie Mackay’s claes.”

“It’s a sair peety,” said Janet, “’at the men fowk disna learn to weyve
stockins, or dee something or ither wi’ their han’s. Mony’s the time
my stockin’ ’s been ’maist as guid ’s a cloaset to me, though I cudna
jist gang intil ’t. But what maitters ’t! A prayer i’ the hert ’s sure
to fin’ the ro’d oot. The hert’s the last place ’at can haud ane in. A
prayin’ hert has nae reef (_roof_) till ’t.”

She turned and left him. Comforted by her words, he followed her back
into the kitchen, and sat down beside her.

“Gibbie ’ill be here mayhap whan least ye luik for him,” said Janet.

Neither of them caught the wild eager gleam that lighted the face
of the strange woman at those last words of Janet. She looked up at
her with the sharpest of glances, but the same instant compelled her
countenance to resume its former expression of fierce indifference, and
under that became watchful of everything said and done.

Still the rain fell and the wind blew; the torrents came tearing down
from the hills, and shot madly into the rivers; the rivers ran into the
valleys, and deepened the lakes that filled them. On every side of the
Mains, from the foot of Glashgar to Gormdhu, all was one yellow and
red sea, with roaring currents and vortices numberless. It burrowed
holes, it opened long-deserted channels and water-courses; here it
deposited inches of rich mould, there yards of sand and gravel; here
it was carrying away fertile ground, leaving behind only bare rock or
shingle where the corn had been waving; there it was scooping out the
bed of a new lake. Many a thick soft lawn, of loveliest grass, dotted
with fragrant shrubs and rare trees, vanished, and nothing was there
when the waters subsided but a stony waste, or a gravelly precipice.
Woods and copses were undermined, and trees and soil together swept
into the wash: sometimes the very place was hardly there to say it
knew its children no more. Houses were torn to pieces, and their
contents, as from broken boxes, sent wandering on the brown waste,
through the grey air, to the discoloured sea, whose saltness for a long
way out had vanished with its hue. Haymows were buried to the very
top in sand; others went sailing bodily down the mighty stream--some
of them followed or surrounded, like big ducks, by a great brood
of ricks for their ducklings. Huge trees went past as if shot down
an Alpine slide, cottages, and bridges of stone, giving way before
them. Wooden mills, thatched roofs, great mill-wheels, went dipping
and swaying and hobbling down. From the upper windows of the Mains,
looking towards the chief current, they saw a drift of everything
belonging to farms and dwelling-houses that would float. Chairs and
tables, chests, carts, saddles, chests of drawers, tubs of linen, beds
and blankets, workbenches, harrows, girnels, planes, cheeses, churns,
spinning-wheels, cradles, iron pots, wheel-barrows--all these and many
other things hurried past as they gazed. Everybody was looking, and for
a time all had been silent.

“Lord save us!” cried Mr. Duff, with a great start, and ran for his
telescope.

A four-post bed came rocking down the river, now shooting straight for
a short distance, now slowly wheeling, now shivering, struck by some
swifter thing, now whirling giddily round in some vortex. The soaked
curtains were flacking and flying in the great wind--and--yes, the
telescope revealed it!--there was a figure in it! dead or alive the
farmer could not tell, but it lay still!--A cry burst from them all;
but on swept the strange boat, bound for the world beyond the flood,
and none could stay its course.

The water was now in the stable and cow-houses and barn. A few minutes
more and it would be creeping into the kitchen. The Daur and its
tributary the Lorrie were about to merge their last difference on the
floor of Jean’s parlour. Worst of all, a rapid current had set in
across the farther end of the stable, which no one had as yet observed.

Jean bustled about her work as usual, nor, although it was so much
augmented, would accept help from any of her guests until it came to
preparing dinner, when she allowed Janet and the foreman’s wife to lend
her a hand. “The tramp-wife” she would not permit to touch plate or
spoon, knife or potato. The woman rose in anger at her exclusion, and
leaving the house waded to the barn. There she went up the ladder to
the loft where she had slept, and threw herself on her straw-bed.

As there was no doing any work, Donal was out with two of the men,
wading here and there where the water was not too deep, enjoying the
wonder of the strange looks and curious conjunctions of things. None of
them felt much of dismay at the havoc around them: beyond their chests
with their Sunday clothes and at most two clean shirts, neither of the
men had anything to lose worth mentioning; and for Donal, he would
gladly have given even his books for such a _ploy_.

“There’s ae thing, mither,” he said, entering the kitchen, covered with
mud, a rabbit in one hand and a large salmon in the other, “we’re no
like to sterve, wi’ sawmon i’ the hedges, an’ mappies i’ the trees!”

His master questioned him with no little incredulity. It was easy to
believe in salmon anywhere, but rabbits in trees!

“I catched it i’ the brainches o’ a lairick (_larch_),” Donal answered,
“easy eneuch, for it cudna rin far, an’ was mair fleyt at the watter
nor at me; but for the sawmon, haith I was ower an’ ower wi’ hit i’ the
watter, efter I gruppit it, er I cud ca’ ’t my ain.”

Before the flood subsided, not a few rabbits were caught in trees,
mostly spruce-firs and larches. For salmon, they were taken
everywhere--among grass, corn, and potatoes, in bushes, and hedges, and
cottages. One was caught on a lawn with an umbrella; one was reported
to have been found in a press-bed; another, coiled round in a pot
hanging from the crook--ready to be boiled, only that he was alive and
undressed.

Donal was still being cross-questioned by his master when the strange
woman re-entered. Lying upon her straw, she had seen, through the
fanlight over the stable door, the swiftness of the current there
passing, and understood the danger.

“I doobt,” she said, addressing no one in particular, “the ga’le o’ the
stable winna stan’ abune anither half-hoor.”

“It maun fa’ than,” said the farmer, taking a pinch of snuff in
hopeless serenity, and turning away.

“Hoots!” said the woman, “dinna speyk that gait, sir. It’s no
wice-like. Tak a dram, an’ tak hert, an’ dinna fling the calf efter the
coo. Whaur’s yer boatle, sir?”

John paid no heed to her suggestion, but Jean took it up.

“The boatle’s whaur ye s’ no lay han’ upo’ ’t,” she said.

“Weel, gien ye hae nae mercy upo’ yer whusky, ye sud hae some upo’ yer
horse-beasts, ony gait,” said the woman indignantly.

“What mean ye by that?” returned Jean, with hard voice, and eye of
blame.

“Ye micht at the leest gie the puir things a chance,” the woman
rejoined.

“Hoo wad ye dee that?” said Jean. “Gien ye lowsed them they wad but tak
to the watter wi’ fear, an’ droon the seener.”

“Na, na, Jean,” interposed the farmer, “they wad tak care o’ themsel’s
to the last, an’ aye haud to the dryest, jist as ye wad yersel’.”

“Allooin’,” said the stranger, replying to Jean, yet speaking rather as
if to herself, while she thought about something else, “I wad raither
droon soomin’ nor tied by the heid.--But what’s the guid o’ doctrine
whaur there’s onything to be dune?--Ye hae whaur to put them.--What
kin’ ’s the fleers (_floors_) up the stair, sir?” she asked abruptly,
turning full on her host, with a flash in her deep-set black eyes.

“Ow, guid dale fleers--what ither?” answered the farmer. “--It’s the
wa’s, wuman, no the fleers we hae to be concernt aboot i’ this wather.”

“Gien the j’ists be strang, an’ weel set intil the wa’s, what for sudna
ye tak the horse up the stair intil yer bedrooms? It’ll be a’ to the
guid o’ the wa’s, for the weicht o’ the beasts ’ll be upo’ them to haud
them doon, an’ the haill hoose again’ the watter. An’ gien I was you,
I wad pit the best o’ the kye an’ the nowt intil the parlour an’ the
kitchen here. I’m thinkin’ we’ll lowse them a’ else; for the byre wa’s
’ll gang afore the hoose.”

Mr. Duff broke into a strange laughter.

“Wad ye no tak up the carpets first, wuman?” he said.

“I wad,” she answered; “that gangs ohn speirt--_gien there was time_;
but I tell ye there’s nane; an’ ye’ll buy twa or three carpets for the
price o’ ae horse.”

“Haith! the wuman’s i’ the richt,” he cried, suddenly waking up to the
sense of the proposal, and shot from the house.

All the women, Jean making no exception to any help now, rushed to
carry the beds and blankets to the garret.

Just as Mr. Duff entered the stable from the nearer end, the opposite
gable fell out with a great splash, letting in the wide level vision of
turbidly raging waters, fading into the obscurity of the wind-driven
rain. While he stared aghast, a great tree struck the wall like a
battering-ram, so that the stable shook. The horses, which had been
for some time moving uneasily, were now quite scared. There was not a
moment to be lost. Duff shouted for his men; one or two came running;
and in less than a minute more those in the house heard the iron-shod
feet splashing and stamping through the water, as, one after another,
the horses were brought across the yard to the door of the house. Mr.
Duff led by the halter his favourite Snowball, who was a good deal
excited, plunging and rearing so that it was all he could do to hold
him. He had ordered the men to take the others first, thinking he would
follow more quietly. But the moment Snowball heard the first thundering
of hoofs on the stair, he went out of his senses with terror, broke
from his master, and went plunging back to the stable. Duff darted
after him, but was only in time to see him rush from the further end
into the swift current, where he was at once out of his depth, and
was instantly caught and hurried, rolling over and over, from his
master’s sight. He ran back into the house, and up to the highest
window. From that he caught sight of him a long way down, swimming.
Once or twice he saw him turned heels over head--only to get his neck
up again presently, and swim as well as before. But alas! it was in
the direction of the Daur, which would soon, his master did not doubt,
sweep his carcase into the North Sea. With troubled heart he strained
his sight after him as long as he could distinguish his lessening head,
but it got amongst some wreck, and unable to tell any more whether he
saw it or not, he returned to his men with his eyes full of tears.




CHAPTER XXXIV.

GLASHRUACH.

As soon as Gibbie had found a stall for Crummie, and thrown a great
dinner before her, he turned and sped back the way he had come: there
was no time to lose if he would have the bridge to cross the Lorrie by;
and his was indeed the last foot that ever touched it. Guiding himself
by well-known points yet salient, for he knew the country perhaps
better than any man born and bred in it, he made straight for Glashgar,
itself hid in the rain. Now wading, now swimming, now walking along the
top of a wall, now caught and baffled in a hedge, Gibbie held stoutly
on. Again and again he got into a current, and was swept from his
direction, but he soon made his lee way good, and at length clear of
the level water, and with only the torrents to mind, seated himself on
a stone under a rock a little way up the mountain. There he drew from
his pocket the putty-like mass to which the water had reduced the cakes
with which it was filled, and ate it gladly, eyeing from his shelter
the slanting lines of the rain, and the rushing sea from which he had
just emerged. So lost was the land beneath the water, that he had to
think to be certain under which of the roofs, looking like so many
foundered Noah’s arks, he had left his father and mother. Ah! yonder
were cattle!--a score of heads, listlessly drifting down, all the swim
out of them, their long horns, like bits of dry branches, knocking
together! There was a pig, and there another! And, alas! yonder floated
half a dozen helpless sponges of sheep!

At sight of these last he started to his feet, and set off up the hill.
It was not so hard a struggle to cross the water, but he had still
to get to the other side of several torrents far more dangerous than
any current he had been in. Again and again he had to ascend a long
distance before he found a possible place to cross at; but he reached
the fold at last.

It was in a little valley opening on that where lay the tarn. Swollen
to a lake, the waters of it were now at the very gate of the pen. For a
moment he regretted he had not brought Oscar, but the next he saw that
not much could with any help have been done for the sheep, beyond what
they could, if at liberty, do for themselves. Left where they were they
would probably be drowned; if not they would be starved; but if he let
them go, they would keep out of the water, and find for themselves what
food and shelter were to be had. He opened the gate, drove them out and
a little way up the hill, and left them.

By this time it was about two o’clock, and Gibbie was very hungry. He
had had enough of the water for one day, however, and was not inclined
to return to the Mains. Where could he get something to eat? If the
cottage were still standing--and it might be--he would find plenty
there. He turned towards it. Great was his pleasure when, after another
long struggle, he perceived that not only was the cottage there, but
the torrent gone: either the flow from the mountain had ceased, or the
course of the water had been diverted. When he reached the Glashburn,
which lay between him and the cottage, he saw that the torrent had
found its way into it, probably along with others of the same brood,
for it was frightfully swollen, and went shooting down to Glashruach
like one long cataract. He had to go a great way up before he could
cross it.

When at length he reached home, he discovered that the overshooting
stream must have turned aside very soon after they left, for the
place was not much worse than then. He swept out the water that lay
on the floor, took the dryest peats he could find, succeeded with the
tinder-box and sulphur-match at the first attempt, lighted a large
fire, and made himself some water-brose--which is not only the most
easily cooked of dishes, but is as good as any for a youth of capacity
for strong food.

His hunger appeased, he sat resting in Robert’s chair, gradually
drying; and falling asleep, slept for an hour or so. When he woke, he
took his New Testament from the _crap o’ the wa’_, and began to read.

Of late he had made a few attempts upon one and another of the
Epistles, but, not understanding what he read, had not found profit,
and was on the point of turning finally from them for the present, when
his eye falling on some of the words of St. John, his attention was
at once caught, and he had soon satisfied himself, to his wonder and
gladness, that his First Epistle was no sealed book any more than his
Gospel. To the third chapter of that Epistle he now turned, and read
until he came to these words: “Hereby perceive we the love of God,
because he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our
lives for the brethren.”

“What learned him that?” said Gibbie to himself; Janet had taught him
to search the teaching of the apostles for what the Master had taught
them. He thought and thought, and at last remembered “This is my
commandment, that ye love one another as I have loved you.”

“And here am I,” said Gibbie to himself, “sittin’ here in idleset, wi’
my fire, an’ my brose, an’ my Bible, and a’ the warl’ aneath Glashgar
lyin’ in a spate (_flood_)! I canna lay doon my life to save their
sowls; I maun save for them what I can--it may be but a hen or a calf.
I maun dee the warks o’ him ’at sent me--he’s aye savin’ at men.”

The Bible was back in its place, and Gibbie out of the door the
same moment. He had not an idea what he was going to do. All he yet
understood was, that he must go down the hill, to be where things might
have to be done--and _that_ before the darkness fell. He must go where
there were people. As he went his heart was full of joy, as if he had
already achieved some deliverance. Down the hill he went singing and
dancing. If mere battle with storm was a delight to the boy, what would
not a mortal tussle with the elements for the love of men be? The
thought itself was a heavenly felicity, and made him “happy as a lover.”

His first definitely directive thought was, that his nearest neighbours
were likely enough to be in trouble--“the fowk at the muckle hoose.” He
would go thither straight.

Glashruach, as I have already said, stood on one of the roots of
Glashgar, where the mountain settles down into the valley of the Daur.
Immediately outside its principal gate ran the Glashburn; on the other
side of the house, within the grounds, ran a smaller hill-stream,
already mentioned as passing close under Ginevra’s window. Both these
fell into the Lorrie. Between them the mountain sloped gently up for
some little distance, clothed with forest. On the side of the smaller
burn, however, the side opposite the house, the ground rose abruptly.
There also grew firs, but the soil was shallow, with rock immediately
below, and they had not come to much. Straight from the mountain,
between the two streams, Gibbie approached the house, through larches
and pines, raving and roaring in the wind. As he drew nearer, and saw
how high the house stood above the valley and its waters, he began to
think he had been foolish in coming there to find work; but when he
reached a certain point whence the approach from the gate was visible,
he started, stopped and stared. He rubbed his eyes. No; he was not
asleep and dreaming by the cottage fire; the wind was about him, and
the firs were howling and hissing; there was the cloudy mountain, with
the Glashburn, fifty times its usual size, darting like brown lightning
from it; but where was the iron gate with its two stone pillars,
crested with wolf’s-heads? where was the bridge? where was the wall,
and the gravelled road to the house? Had he mistaken his bearings? was
he looking in a wrong direction? Below him was a wide, swift, fiercely
rushing river, where water was none before! No; he made no mistake:
there was the rest of the road, the end of it next the house! That was
a great piece of it that fell frothing into the river and vanished!
Bridge and gate and wall were gone utterly. The burn had swallowed
them, and now, foaming with madness, was roaring along, a great way
within the grounds, and rapidly drawing nearer to the house, tearing to
pieces and devouring all that defended it. There! what a mouthful of
the shrubbery it gobbled up! Slowly, graciously, the tall trees bowed
their heads and sank into the torrent, but the moment they touched it,
shot away like arrows. Would the foundations of the house outstand
it? Were they as strong as the walls of Babylon, yet if the water
undermined them, down they must! Did the laird know that the enemy was
within his gates? Not with all he had that day seen and gone through,
had Gibbie until now gathered any notion of the force of rushing water.

Rousing himself from his bewildered amazement, he darted down the hill.
If the other burn was behaving in like fashion, then indeed the fate of
the house was sealed. But no; huge and wild as that was also, it was
not able to tear down its banks of rock. From that side the house did
not seem in danger.

Mr. Galbraith had gone again, leaving Ginevra to the care of Mistress
MacFarlane, with a strict order to both, and full authority to
the latter to enforce it, that she should not set foot across the
threshold on any pretext, or on the smallest expedition, without the
housekeeper’s attendance. He must take Joseph with him, he said, as
he was going to the Duke’s, but she could send for Angus upon any
emergency.

The laird had of late been so little at home, that the establishment
had been much reduced; Mistress MacFarlane did most of the cooking
herself; had quarrelled with the housemaid and not yet got another;
and, Nicie dismissed, and the kitchen maid gone to visit her mother,
was left alone in the house with her Mistress, if such we can call
her who was really her prisoner. At this moment, however, she was
not alone, for on the other side of the fire sat Angus, not thither
attracted by any friendship for the housekeeper, but by the glass of
whisky of which he sipped as he talked. Many a flood had Angus seen,
and some that had done frightful damage, but never one that had caused
him anxiety; and although this was worse than any of the rest, he had
not yet a notion how bad it really was. For, as there was nothing to
be done out of doors, and he was not fond of being idle, he had been
busy all the morning in the woodhouse, sawing and splitting for the
winter-store, and working the better that he knew what honorarium
awaited his appearance in the kitchen. In the woodhouse he only heard
the wind and the rain and the roar, he saw nothing of the flood; when
he entered the kitchen, it was by the back door, and he sat there
without the smallest suspicion of what was going on in front.

Ginevra had had no companion since Nicie left her, and her days had
been very dreary, but this day had been the dreariest in her life.
Mistress MacFarlane made herself so disagreeable that she kept away
from her as much as she could, spending most of her time in her own
room, with her needlework and some books of poetry she had found in
the library. But the poetry had turned out very dull--not at all like
what Donal read, and throwing one of them aside for the tenth time that
day, she wandered listlessly to the window, and stood there gazing
out on the wild confusion--the burn roaring below, the trees opposite
ready to be torn to pieces by the wind, and the valley beneath covered
with stormy water. The tumult was so loud, that she did not hear a
gentle knock at her door: as she turned away, weary of everything, she
saw it softly open--and there to her astonishment stood Gibbie--come,
she imagined, to seek shelter, because their cottage had been blown
down.--Calculating the position of her room from what he knew of its
windows, he had, with the experienced judgment of a mountaineer, gone
to it almost direct.

“You mustn’t come here, Gibbie,” she said, advancing. “Go down to the
kitchen, to Mistress MacFarlane. She will see to what you want.”

Gibbie made eager signs to her to go with him. She concluded that he
wanted her to accompany him to the kitchen and speak for him; but
knowing that would only enrage her keeper with them both, she shook
her head, and went back to the window. She thought, as she approached
it, there seemed a lull in the storm, but the moment she looked out,
she gave a cry of astonishment, and stood staring. Gibbie had followed
her as softly as swiftly, and looking out also, saw good cause indeed
for her astonishment: the channel of the raging burn was all but dry!
Instantly he understood what it meant. In his impotence to persuade,
he caught the girl in his arms, and rushed with her from the room. She
had faith enough in him by this time not to struggle or scream. He shot
down the stair with her, and out of the front door. Her weight was
nothing to his excited strength. The moment they issued, and she saw
the Glashburn raving along through the lawn, with little more than the
breadth of the drive between it and the house, she saw the necessity of
escape, though she did not perceive half the dire necessity for haste.
Every few moments, a great gush would dash out twelve or fifteen yards
over the gravel and sink again, carrying many feet of the bank with it,
and widening by so much the raging channel.

“Put me down, Gibbie,” she said; “I will run as fast as you like.”

He obeyed at once.

“Oh!” she cried, “Mistress MacFarlane!--I wonder if she knows. Run and
knock at the kitchen window.”

Gibbie darted off, gave three loud hurried taps on the window, came
flying back, took Ginevra’s hand in his, drew her on till she was at
her full speed, turned sharp to the left round the corner of the house,
and shot down to the empty channel of the burn. As they crossed it,
even to the inexperienced eyes of the girl it was plain what had caused
the phenomenon. A short distance up the stream, the whole facing of
its lofty right bank had slipped down into its channel. Not a tree,
not a shrub, not a bed of moss was to be seen; all was bare wet rock.
A confused heap of mould, with branches and roots sticking out of
it in all directions, lay at its foot, closing the view upward. The
other side of the heap was beaten by the raging burn. They could hear,
though they could not see it. Any moment the barrier might give way,
and the water resume its course. They made haste, therefore, to climb
the opposite bank. In places it was very steep, and the soil slipped
so that often it seemed on its way with them to the bottom, while the
wind threatened to uproot the trees to which they clung, and carry them
off through the air. It was with a fierce scramble they gained the top.
Then the sight was a grand one. The arrested water swirled and beat
and foamed against the landslip, then rushed to the left, through the
wood, over bushes and stones, a raging river, the wind tearing off the
tops of its waves, to the Glashburn, into which it plunged, swelling
yet higher its huge volume. Rapidly it cut for itself a new channel.
Every moment a tree fell and shot with it like a rocket. Looking up its
course, they saw it come down the hillside a white streak, and burst
into boiling brown and roar at their feet. The wind nearly swept them
from their place; but they clung to the great stones, and saw the airy
torrent, as if emulating that below it, fill itself with branches and
leaves and lumps of foam. Then first Ginevra became fully aware of the
danger in which the house was, and from which Gibbie had rescued her.
Augmented in volume and rapidity by the junction of its neighbour,
the Glashburn was now within a yard--so it seemed from that height at
least--of the door. But they must not linger. The nearest accessible
shelter was the cottage, and Gibbie knew it would need all Ginevra’s
strength to reach it. Again he took her by the hand.

“But where’s Mistress MacFarlane?” she said. “Oh, Gibbie! we mustn’t
leave her.”

He replied by pointing down to the bed of the stream: there were she
and Angus crossing. Ginevra, was satisfied when she saw the gamekeeper
with her, and they set out, as fast as they could go, ascending the
mountain, Gibbie eager to have her in warmth and safety before it was
dark.

Both burns were now between them and the cottage, which greatly added
to their difficulties. The smaller burn came from the tarn, and round
that they must go, else Ginevra would never get to the other side of
it; and then there was the Glashburn to cross. It was an undertaking
hard for any girl, especially such for one unaccustomed to exertion;
and what made it far worse was that she had only house-shoes, which
were continually coming off as she climbed. But the excitement of
battling with the storm, the joy of adventure, and the pleasure of
feeling her own strength, sustained her well for a long time; and in
such wind and rain, the absence of bonnet and cloak was an advantage,
so long as exertion kept her warm. Gibbie did his best to tie her
shoes on with strips of her pocket handkerchief; but when at last
they were of no more use, he pulled off his corduroy jacket, tore out
the sleeves, and with strips from the back tied them about her feet
and ankles. Her hair also was a trouble: it would keep blowing in
her eyes, and in Gibbie’s too, and that sometimes with quite a sharp
lash. But she never lost her courage, and Gibbie, though he could not
hearten her with words, was so ready with smile and laugh, was so
cheerful--even merry, so fearless, so free from doubt and anxiety,
while doing everything he could think of to lessen her toil and pain,
that she hardly felt in his silence any lack; while often, to rest her
body, and withdraw her mind from her sufferings, he made her stop and
look back on the strange scene behind them. It was getting dark when
they reached the only spot where he judged it possible to cross the
Glashburn. He carried her over, and then it was all down-hill to the
cottage. Once inside it, Ginevra threw herself into Robert’s chair, and
laughed, and cried, and laughed again. Gibbie blew up the peats, made a
good fire, and put on water to boil; then opened Janet’s drawers, and
having signified to his companion to take what she could find, went to
the cow house, threw himself on a heap of wet straw, worn out, and had
enough to do to keep himself from falling asleep. A little rested, he
rose and re-entered the cottage, when a merry laugh from both of them
went ringing out into the storm: the little lady was dressed in Janet’s
workday garments, and making porridge. She looked very funny. Gibbie
found plenty of milk in the dairy under the rock, and they ate their
supper together in gladness. Then Gibbie prepared the bed in the little
closet for his guest and she slept as if she had not slept for a week.

Gibbie woke with the first of the dawn. The rain still fell--descending
in spoonfuls rather than drops; the wind kept shaping itself into long
hopeless howls, rising to shrill yells that went drifting away over the
land; and then the howling rose again. Nature seemed in despair. There
must be more for Gibbie to do! He must go again to the foot of the
mountain, and see if there was anybody to help. They might even be in
trouble at the Mains, who could tell!

Ginevra woke, rose, made herself as tidy as she could, and left her
closet. Gibbie was not in the cottage. She blew up the fire, and,
finding the pot ready beside it, with clean water, set it on to boil.
Gibbie did not come. The water boiled. She took it off, but being
hungry, put it on again. Several times she took it off and put it on
again. Gibbie never came. She made herself some porridge at last.
Everything necessary was upon the table, and as she poured it into the
wooden dish for the purpose, she took notice of a slate beside it, with
something written upon it. The words were, “I will cum back as soon as
I cann.”

She was alone, then! It was dreadful; but she was too hungry to think
about it. She ate her porridge, and then began to cry. It was very
unkind of Gibbie to leave her, she said to herself. But then he was a
sort of angel, and doubtless had to go and help somebody else. There
was a little pile of books on the table, which he must have left for
her. She began examining them, and soon found something to interest
her, so that an hour or two passed quickly. But Gibbie did not return,
and the day went wearily. She cried now and then, made great efforts
to be patient, succeeded pretty well for a while, and cried again. She
read and grew tired a dozen times; ate cakes and milk, cried afresh,
and ate again. Still Gibbie did not come. Before the day was over, she
had had a good lesson in praying. For here she was, one who had never
yet acted on her own responsibility, alone on a bare mountain-side, in
the heart of a storm which seemed as if it would never cease, and not a
creature knew where she was but the dumb boy, and he had left her! If
he should never come back, what would become of her? She could not find
her way down the mountain; and if she could, where was she to go, with
all Daurside under water? She would soon have eaten up all the food in
the cottage, and the storm might go on for ever, who could tell? Or who
could tell whether, when it was over, and she got down to the valley
below, she should not find it a lifeless desert, everybody drowned, and
herself the only person left alive in the world?

Then the noises were terrible. She seemed to inhabit noise. Through
the general roar of wind and water and rain every now and then came
a sharper sound, like a report or crack, followed by a strange low
thunder, as it seemed. They were the noises of stones carried down by
the streams, grinding against each other, and dashed stone against
stone; and of rocks falling and rolling, and bounding against their
fast-rooted neighbours. When it began to grow dark, her misery seemed
more than she could bear; but then, happily, she grew sleepy, and slept
the darkness away.

With the new light came new promise and fresh hope. What should we
poor humans do without our God’s nights and mornings? Our ills are all
easier to help than we know--except the one ill of a central self,
which God himself finds it hard to help.--It no longer rained so
fiercely; the wind had fallen; and the streams did not run so furious
a race down the sides of the mountain. She ran to the burn, got some
water to wash herself--she could not spare the clear water, of which
there was some still left in Janet’s pails--and put on her own clothes,
which were now quite dry. Then she got herself some breakfast, and
after that tried to say her prayers, but found it very difficult, for,
do what she might to model her slippery thoughts, she could not help,
as often as she turned herself towards him, seeing God like her father,
the laird.




CHAPTER XXXV.

THE WHELP.

Gibbie sped down the hill through a worse rain than ever. The morning
was close, and the vapours that filled it were like smoke burned to the
hue of the flames whence it issued. Many a man that morning believed
another great deluge begun, and all measures relating to things of
this world lost labour. Going down his own side of the Glashburn, the
nearest path to the valley, the gamekeeper’s cottage was the first
dwelling on his way. It stood a little distance from the bank of the
burn, opposite the bridge and gate, while such things were.

It had been with great difficulty, for even Angus did not know the
mountain so well as Gibbie, that the gamekeeper reached it with the
housekeeper the night before. It was within two gunshots of the house
of Glashruach, yet to get to it they had to walk miles up and down
Glashgar. A mountain in storm is as hard to cross as a sea. Arrived,
they did not therefore feel safe. The tendency of the Glashburn was
indeed away from the cottage, as the grounds of Glashruach sadly
witnessed; but a torrent is double-edged, and who could tell? The
yielding of one stone in its channel might send it to them. All night
Angus watched, peering out ever again into the darkness, but seeing
nothing save three lights that burned above the water--one of them,
he thought, at the Mains. The other two went out in the darkness, but
that only in the dawn. When the morning came, there was the Glashburn
meeting the Lorrie in his garden. But the cottage was well built, and
fit to stand a good siege, while any moment the waters might have
reached their height. By breakfast time, however, they were round it
from behind. There is nothing like a flood for revealing the variations
of surface, the dips and swells of a country. In a few minutes they
were isolated, with the current of the Glashburn on one side, and that
of the Lorrie in front. When he saw the water come in at front and back
doors at once, Angus ordered his family up the stair: the cottage had a
large attic, with dormer windows, where they slept. He himself remained
below for some time longer, in that end of the house where he kept
his guns and fishing-tackle; there he sat on a table, preparing nets
for the fish that would be left in the pools; and not until he found
himself afloat did he take his work to the attic.

There the room was hot, and they had the window open. Mistress MacPholp
stood at it, looking out on the awful prospect, with her youngest
child, a sickly boy, in her arms. He had in his a little terrier-pup,
greatly valued of the gamekeeper. In a sudden outbreak of peevish
wilfulness, he threw the creature out of the window. It fell on the
slooping roof, and before it could recover itself, being too young to
have the full command of four legs, rolled off.

“Eh! the doggie’s i’ the watter!” cried Mistress MacPholp in dismay.

Angus threw down everything with an ugly oath, for he had given strict
orders not one of the children should handle the whelp, jumped up, and
got out on the roof. From there he might have managed to reach it, so
high now was the water, had the little thing remained where it fell,
but already it had swam a yard or two from the house. Angus, who was a
fair swimmer and an angry man, threw off his coat, and plunged after
it, greatly to the delight of the little one, caught the pup with his
teeth by the back of the neck, and turned to make for the house. Just
then a shrub, swept from the hill, caught him in the face, and so
bewildered him, that, before he got rid of it, he had blundered into
the edge of the current, which seized and bore him rapidly away. He
dropped the pup, and struck out for home with all his strength. But he
soon found the most he could do was to keep his head above water, and
gave himself up for lost. His wife screamed in agony. Gibbie heard her
as he came down the hill, and ran at full speed towards the cottage.

About a hundred yards from the house, the current bore Angus straight
into a large elder tree. He got into the middle of it, and there
remained trembling, the weak branches breaking with every motion he
made, while the stream worked at the roots, and the wind laid hold of
him with fierce leverage. In terror, seeming still to sink as he sat,
he watched the trees dart by like battering-rams in the swiftest of
the current: the least of them diverging would tear the elder tree
with it. Brave enough in dealing with poachers, Angus was not the man
to gaze with composure in the face of a sure slow death, against which
no assault could be made. Many a man is courageous because he has not
conscience enough to make a coward of him, but Angus had not quite
reached that condition, and from the branches of the elder tree showed
a pale, terror-stricken visage. Amidst the many objects on the face of
the water, Gibbie, however, did not distinguish it, and plunging in
swam round to the front of the cottage to learn what was the matter.
There the wife’s gesticulations directed his eyes to her drowning
husband.

But what was he to do? He could swim to the tree well enough, and, he
thought, back again, but how was that to be made of service to Angus?
He could not save him by main force--there was not enough of that
between them. If he had a line, and there must be plenty of lines in
the cottage, he would carry him the end of it to haul upon--that would
do. If he could send it to him that would be better still, for then
he could help at the other end, and would be in the right position,
up stream, to help farther, if necessary, for down the current alone
was the path of communication open. He caught hold of the eaves, and
scrambled on to the roof. But in the folly and faithlessness of her
despair, the woman would not let him enter. With a curse caught from
her husband, she struck him from the window, crying,

“Ye s’ no come in here, an’ my man droonin’ yon’er! Gang till ’im, ye
cooard!”

Never had poor Gibbie so much missed the use of speech. On the slope
of the roof he could do little to force an entrance, therefore threw
himself off it to seek another, and betook himself to the windows
below. Through that of Angus’s room, he caught sight of a floating
anker cask. It was the very thing!--and there on the walls hung a
quantity of nets and cordage! But how to get in? It was a sash-window,
and of course swollen with the wet, therefore not to be opened; and
there was not a square in it large enough to let him through. He swam
to the other side, and crept softly on to the roof, and over the ridge.
But a broken slate betrayed him. The woman saw him, rushed to the
fire-place, caught up the poker, and darted back to defend the window.

“Ye s’ no come in here, I tell ye,” she screeched, “an’ my man stickin’
i’ yon boortree buss!”

Gibbie advanced. She made a blow at him with the poker. He caught it,
wrenched it from her grasp, and threw himself from the roof. The next
moment they heard the poker at work, smashing the window.

“He’ll be in an’ murder ’s a’!” cried the mother, and ran to the stair,
while the children screamed and danced with terror.

But the water was far too deep for her. She returned to the attic,
barricaded the door, and went again to the window to watch her drowning
husband.

Gibbie was inside in a moment, and seizing the cask, proceeded to
attach to it a strong line. He broke a bit from a fishing-rod, secured
the line round the middle of it with a notch, put the stick through
the bunghole in the bilge, and corked up the hole with a net-float.
Happily he had a knife in his pocket. He then joined strong lines
together until he thought he had length enough, secured the last end
to a bar of the grate, and knocked out both sashes of the window with
an axe. A passage thus cleared, he floated out first a chair, then a
creepie, and one thing after another, to learn from what point to start
the barrel. Seeing and recognizing them from above, Mistress MacPholp
raised a terrible outcry. In the very presence of her drowning husband,
such a wanton dissipation of her property roused her to fiercest wrath,
for she imagined Gibbie was emptying her house with leisurely revenge.
Satisfied at length, he floated out his barrel, and followed with the
line in his hand, to aid its direction if necessary. It struck the
tree. With a yell of joy Angus laid hold of it, and hauling the line
taut, and feeling it secure, committed himself at once to the water,
holding by the barrel, and swimming with his legs, while Gibbie, away
to the side with a hold of the rope, was swimming his hardest to draw
him out of the current. But a weary man was Angus, when at length he
reached the house. It was all he could do to get himself in at the
window, and crawl up the stair. At the top of it he fell benumbed on
the floor.

By the time that, repentant and grateful, Mistress MacPholp bethought
herself of Gibbie, not a trace of him was to be seen; and Angus,
contemplating his present experience in connection with that of Robert
Grant’s cottage, came to the conclusion that he must be an emissary
of Satan who on two such occasions had so unexpectedly rescued him.
Perhaps the idea was not quite so illogical as it must seem; for
how should such a man imagine any other sort of messenger taking an
interest in his life? He was confirmed in the notion when he found that
a yard of the line remained attached to the grate, but the rest of it
with the anker was gone--fit bark for the angel he imagined Gibbie, to
ride the stormy waters withal. While they looked for him in the water
and on the land, Gibbie was again in the room below, carrying out a
fresh thought. With the help of the table, he emptied the cask, into
which a good deal of water had got. Then he took out the stick, corked
the bunghole tight, laced the cask up in a piece of net, attached the
line to the net, and wound it about the cask by rolling the latter
round and round, took the cask between his hands, and pushed from the
window straight into the current of the Glashburn. In a moment it had
swept him to the Lorrie. By the greater rapidity of the former he got
easily across the heavier current of the latter, and was presently in
water comparatively still, swimming quietly towards the Mains, and
enjoying his trip none the less that he had to keep a sharp look-out:
if he should have to dive to avoid any drifting object, he might lose
his barrel. Quickly now, had he been so minded, he could have returned
to the city--changing vessel for vessel, as one after another went to
pieces. Many a house-roof offered itself for the voyage; now and then
a great water-wheel, horizontal and helpless, devoured of its element.
Once he saw a cradle come gyrating along, and, urging all his might,
intercepted it, but hardly knew whether he was more sorry or relieved
to find it empty. When he was about half-way to the Mains, a whole
fleet of ricks bore down upon him. He boarded one, and scrambled to the
top of it, keeping fast hold of the end of his line, which unrolled
from the barrel as he ascended. From its peak he surveyed the wild
scene. All was running water. Not a human being was visible, and but
a few house-roofs, of which for a moment it was hard to say whether
or not they were of those that were afloat. Here and there were the
tops of trees, showing like low bushes. Nothing was uplifted except
the mountains. He drew near the Mains. All the ricks in the yard were
bobbing about, as if amusing themselves with a slow contradance; but
they were as yet kept in by the barn, and a huge old hedge of hawthorn.
What was that cry from far away? Surely it was that of a horse in
danger! It brought a lusty equine response from the farm. Where could
horses be with such a depth of water about the place? Then began a
great lowing of cattle. But again came the cry of the horse from afar,
and Gibbie, this time recognizing the voice as Snowball’s, forgot
the rest. He stood up on the very top of the rick and sent his keen
glance round on all sides. The cry came again and again, so that he was
satisfied in what direction he must look. The rain had abated a little,
but the air was so thick with vapour that he could not tell whether it
was really an object he seemed to see white against the brown water,
far away to the left, or a fancy of his excited hope: it _might_ be
Snowball on the turn-pike road, which thereabout ran along the top of
a high embankment. He tumbled from the rick, rolled the line about the
barrel, and pushed vigorously for what might be the horse.

It took him a weary hour--in so many currents was he caught, one after
the other, all straining to carry him far below the object he wanted
to reach: an object it plainly was before he had got half-way across,
and by and by as plainly it was Snowball--testified to ears and eyes
together. When at length he scrambled on the embankment beside him, the
poor, shivering, perishing creature gave a low neigh of delight: he
did not know Gibbie, but he was a human being. He was quite cowed and
submissive, and Gibbie at once set about his rescue. He had reasoned
as he came along that, if there were beasts at the Mains, there must
be room for Snowball, and thither he would endeavour to take him. He
tied the end of the line to the remnant of the halter on his head, the
other end being still fast to the barrel, and took to the water again.
Encouraged by the power upon his head, the pressure, namely, of the
halter, the horse followed, and they made for the Mains. It was a long
journey, and Gibbie had not breath enough to sing to Snowball, but
he made what noise he could, and they got slowly along. He found the
difficulties far greater now that he had to look out for the horse as
well as for himself. None but one much used to the water could have
succeeded in the attempt, or could indeed have stood out against its
weakening influence and the strain of the continued exertion together
so long. At length his barrel got water-logged, and he sent it adrift.




CHAPTER XXXVI.

THE BRANDER.

Mistress Croale was not, after all, the last who arrived at the Mains.
But that the next arrival was accounted for, scarcely rendered it less
marvellous than hers.--Just after the loss of Snowball, came floating
into the farmyard, over the top of the gate, with such astonishment
of all who beheld that each seemed to place more confidence in his
neighbour’s eyes than in his own, a woman on a raft, with her four
little children seated around her, holding the skirt of her gown above
her head and out between her hands for a sail. She had made the raft
herself, by tying some bars of a paling together, and crossing them
with what other bits of wood she could find--a _bran’er_ she called
it, which is Scotch for a gridiron, and thence for a grating. Nobody
knew her. She had come down the Lorrie. The farmer was so struck with
admiration of her invention, daring, and success, that he vowed he
would keep the brander as long as it would stick together; and as it
could not be taken into the house, he secured it with a rope to one of
the windows.

When they had the horses safe on the first floor, they brought the
cattle into the lower rooms; but it became evident that if they were to
have a chance, they also must be got up to the same level. Thereupon
followed a greater tumult than before--such a banging of heads and hind
quarters, of horns and shoulders, against walls and partitions, such
a rushing and thundering, that the house seemed in more danger from
within than from without; for the cattle were worse to manage than the
horses, and one moment stubborn as a milestone, would the next moment
start into a frantic rush. One poor wretch broke both her horns clean
off against the wall, at a sharp turn of the passage; and after two or
three more accidents, partly caused by over-haste in the human mortals,
Donal begged that the business should be left to him and his mother.
His master consented, and it was wonderful what Janet contrived to
effect by gentleness, coaxing, and suggestion. When Hornie’s turn came,
Donal began to tie ropes to her hind hoofs. Mr. Duff objected.

“Ye dinna ken her sae weel as I dee, sir,” answered Donal. “She wad caw
her horns intil a man-o-war ’at angert her. An’ up yon’er ye cudna get
a whack at her, for hurtin’ ane ’at didna deserve ’t. I s’ dee her no
mischeef, I s’ warran’. Ye jist lea’ her to me, sir.”

His master yielded. Donal tied a piece of rope round each hind
pastern--if cows have pasterns--and made a loop at the end. The moment
she was at the top of the stair, he and his mother dropped each a loop
over a horn.

“Noo, she’ll naither stick nor fling (_gore nor kick_),” said Donal:
she could but bellow, and paw with her fore-feet.

The strangers were mostly in Fergus’s bedroom; the horses were all in
their owner’s; and the cattle were in the remaining rooms. Bursts of
talk amongst the women were followed by fits of silence: who could tell
how long the flood might last!--or indeed whether the house might not
be undermined before morning, or be struck by one of those big things
of which so many floated by, and give way with one terrible crash! Mr.
Duff, while preserving a tolerably calm exterior, was nearly at his
wits’ end. He would stand for half an hour together, with his hands
in his pockets, looking motionless out of a window, murmuring now and
then to himself, “This is clean ridic’lous!” But when anything had
to be done, he was active enough. Mistress Croale sat in a corner,
very quiet, and looking not a little cowed. There was altogether more
water than she liked. Now and then she lifted her lurid black eyes to
Janet, who stood at one of the windows, knitting away at her master’s
stocking, and casting many a calm glance at the brown waters and the
strange drift that covered them; but if Janet turned her head and
made a remark to her, she never gave back other than curt if not rude
reply. In the afternoon Jean brought the whisky bottle. At sight of
it, Mistress Croale’s eyes shot flame. Jean poured out a glassful,
took a sip, and offered it to Janet. Janet declining it, Jean, invaded
possibly by some pity of her miserable aspect, offered it to Mistress
Croale. She took it with affected coolness, tossed it off at a gulp,
and presented the glass--not to the hand from which she had taken it,
but to Jean’s other hand, in which was the bottle. Jean cast a piercing
look into her greedy eyes, and taking the glass from her, filled it,
and presented it to the woman who had built and navigated the brander.
Mistress Croale muttered something that sounded like a curse upon
scrimp measure, and drew herself farther back into the corner, where
she had seated herself on Fergus’s portmanteau.

“I doobt we hae an Ahchan i’ the camp--a Jonah intil the ship!” said
Jean to Janet, as she turned, bottle and glass in her hands, to carry
them from the room.

“Na, na; naither sae guid nor sae ill,” replied Janet. “Fowk ’at’s
been ill-guidit, no kennin’ whaur their help lies, whiles taks to the
boatle. But this is but a day o’ punishment, no a day o’ judgment yet,
an’ I’m thinkin’ the warst’s nearhan’ ower.--Gien only Gibbie war here!”

Jean left the room, shaking her head, and Janet stood alone at the
window as before. A hand was laid on her arm. She looked up. The black
eyes were close to hers, and the glow that was in them gave the lie to
the tone of indifference with which Mistress Croale spoke.

“Ye hae mair nor ance made mention o’ ane conneckit wi’ ye, by the name
o’ Gibbie,” she said.

“Ay,” answered Janet, sending for the serpent to aid the dove; “an’
what may be yer wull wi’ him?”

“Ow, naething,” returned Mistress Croale. “I kenned ane o’ the name
lang syne ’at was lost sicht o’.”

“There’s Gibbies here an’ Gibbies there,” remarked Janet, probing her.

“Weel I wat!” she answered peevishly, for she had had whisky enough
only to make her cross, and turned away, muttering however in an
undertone, but not too low for Janet to hear, “but there’s nae mony wee
Sir Gibbies, or the warl’ wadna be sae dooms like hell.”

Janet was arrested in her turn: could the fierce, repellent,
whisky-craving woman be the mother of her gracious Gibbie? Could she
be, and look so lost? But the loss of him had lost her perhaps. Anyhow
God was his Father, whoever was the mother of him.

“Hoo cam ye to tyne yer bairn, wuman?” she asked.

But Mistress Croale was careful also, and had her reasons.

“He ran frae the bluidy han’,” she said enigmatically.

Janet recalled how Gibbie came to her, scored by the hand of cruelty.
Were there always innocents in the world, who in their own persons, by
the will of God, unknown to themselves, carried on the work of Christ,
filling up that which was left behind of the sufferings of their
Master--women, children, infants, idiots--creatures of sufferance, with
souls open to the world to receive wrong, that it might pass and cease?
little furnaces they, of the consuming fire, to swallow up and destroy
by uncomplaining endurance--the divine destruction!

“Hoo cam he by the bonnie nickname?” she asked at length.

“Nickname!” retorted Mistress Croale fiercely; “I think I hear ye! His
ain name an’ teetle by law an’ richt, as sure’s ever there was a King
Jeames ’at first pat his han’ to the makin’ o’ baronets!--as it’s aften
I hae h’ard Sir George, the father o’ ’im, tell the same.”

She ceased abruptly, annoyed with herself, as it seemed, for having
said so much.

“Ye wadna be my lady yersel’, wad ye, mem?” suggested Janet in her
gentlest voice.

Mistress Croale made her no answer. Perhaps she thought of the days
when she alone of women did the simplest of woman’s offices for Sir
George. Anyhow, it was one thing to rush of herself to the verge of her
secret, and quite another to be fooled over it.

“Is ’t lang sin ye lost him?” asked Janet, after a bootless pause.

“Ay,” she answered, gruffly and discourteously, in a tone intended to
quench interrogation.

But Janet persisted.

“Wad ye ken ’im again gien ye saw ’im?”

“Ken ’im? I wad ken ’im gien he had grown a gran’father. Ken ’im, quo’
she! Wha ever kenned ’im as I did, bairn ’at he was, an’ wadna ken ’im
gien he war deid an’ an angel made o’ ’im!--But weel I wat, it’s little
differ that wad mak!”

She rose in her excitement, and going to the other window, stood gazing
vacantly out upon the rushing sea. To Janet it was plain she knew more
about Gibbie than she was inclined to tell, and it gave her a momentary
sting of apprehension.

“What was aboot him ye wad ken sae weel?” she asked in a tone of
indifference, as if speaking only through the meshes of her work.

“I’ll ken them ’at speirs afore I tell,” she replied sullenly.--But the
next instant she screamed aloud, “Lord God Almichty! yon’s _him_! yon’s
himsel’!” and, stretching out her arms, dashed a hand through a pane,
letting in an eddying swirl of wind and water, while the blood streamed
unheeded from her wrist.

The same moment Jean entered the room. She heard both the cry and the
sound of the breaking glass.

“Care what set the beggar-wife!” she exclaimed. “Gang frae the window,
ye randy.”

Mistress Croale took no heed. She stood now staring from the window
still as a statue except for the panting motion of her sides. At
the other window stood Janet, gazing also, with blessed face. For
there, like a triton on a sea-horse, came Gibbie through the water on
Snowball, swimming wearily.

He caught sight of Janet at the window, and straightway his countenance
was radiant with smiles. Mistress Croale gave a shuddering sigh, drew
back from her window, and betook herself again to her dark corner. Jean
went to Janet’s window, and there beheld the triumphal approach of her
brownie, saving from the waters the lost and lamented Snowball. She
shouted to her brother.

“John! John! here’s yer Snawba’; here’s yer Snawba’.”

John ran to her call, and, beside himself with joy when he saw his
favourite come swimming along, threw the window wide, and began to bawl
the most unnecessary directions and encouragements, as if the exploit
had been brought thus far towards a happy issue solely through him,
while from all the windows Gibbie was welcomed with shouts and cheers
and congratulations.

“Lord preserve ’s!” cried Mr. Duff, recognizing the rider at last,
“it’s Rob Grant’s innocent! Wha wad hae thoucht it?”

“The Lord’s babes an’ sucklin’s are gey cawpable whiles,” remarked
Janet to herself.--She believed Gibbie had more faculty than any of her
own, Donal included, nor did she share the prevalent prejudice of the
city that heart and brains are mutually antagonistic; for in her own
case she had found that her brains were never worth much to her until
her heart took up the education of them. But the intellect is, so much
oftener than by love, seen and felt to be sharpened by necessity and
greed, that it is not surprising such a prejudice should exist.

“Tak ’im roon’ to the door.”--“Whaur got ye ’im?”--“Ye wad best get ’im
in at the window upo’ the stair.”--“He’ll be maist hungert.”--“Ye’ll
be some weet, I’m thinkin’!”--“Come awa up the stair, an’ tell ’s
a’ aboot it.”--A score of such conflicting shouts assailed Gibbie
as he approached, and he replied to them all with the light of his
countenance.

When they arrived at the door, they found a difficulty waiting them:
the water was now so high that Snowball’s head rose above the lintel;
and, though all animals can swim, they do not all know how to dive.
A tumult of suggestions immediately broke out. But Donal had already
thrown himself from a window with a rope, and swum to Gibbie’s
assistance; the two understood each other, and heeding nothing the
rest were saying, held their own communications. In a minute the rope
was fastened round Snowball’s body, and the end of it drawn between
his fore-legs and through the ring of his head-stall, when Donal swam
with it to his mother who stood on the stair, with the request that, as
soon as she saw Snowball’s head under the water, she would pull with
all her might, and draw him in at the door. Donal then swam back, and
threw his arms round Snowball’s neck from below, while the same moment
Gibbie cast his whole weight on it from above: the horse was over head
and ears in an instant, and through the door in another. With snorting
nostrils and blazing eyes his head rose in the passage, and in terror
he struck out for the stair. As he scrambled heavily up from the water,
his master and Robert seized him, and with much petting and patting and
gentling, though there was little enough difficulty in managing him
now, conducted him into the bedroom to the rest of the horses. There he
was welcomed by his companions, and immediately began devouring the hay
upon his master’s bedstead. Gibbie came close behind him, was seized by
Janet at the top of the stair, embraced like one come alive from the
grave, and led, all dripping as he was, into the room where the women
were. The farmer followed soon after with the whisky, the universal
medicine in those parts, of which he offered a glass to Gibbie, but
the innocent turned from it with a curious look of mingled disgust and
gratefulness: his father’s life had not been all a failure; he had
done what parents so rarely effect--handed the general results of his
experience to his son. The sight and smell of whisky were to Gibbie a
loathing flavoured with horror.

The farmer looked back from the door as he was leaving the room: Gibbie
was performing a wild circular dance of which Janet was the centre,
throwing his limbs about like the toy the children call a jumping Jack,
which ended suddenly in a motionless ecstasy upon one leg. Having
regarded for a moment the rescuer of Snowball with astonishment, John
Duff turned away with the reflection, how easy it was and natural for
those who had nothing, and therefore could lose nothing, to make merry
in others’ adversity. It did not once occur to him that it was the joy
of having saved that caused Gibbie’s merriment thus to overflow.

“The cratur’s a born idiot!” he said afterwards to Jean; “an’ it’s
jist a mervel what he’s cawpable o’!--But, ’deed, there’s little to
cheese atween Janet an’ him! They’re baith tarred wi’ the same stick.”
He paused a moment, then added, “They’ll dee weel eneuch i’ the ither
warl’, I doobtna, whaur naebody has to haud aff o’ themsel’s.”

That day, however, Gibbie had proved that a man _may_ well afford both
to have nothing, and to take no care of himself, seeing he had, since
he rose in the morning, rescued a friend, a foe, and a beast of the
earth. Verily, he might stand on one leg!

But when he told Janet that he had been home, and had found the cottage
uninjured and out of danger, she grew very sober in the midst of her
gladness. She could say nothing there amongst strangers, but the dread
arose in her bosom that, if indeed she had not like Peter denied her
Master before men, she had like Peter yielded homage to the might
of the elements in his ruling presence; and she justly saw the same
faithlessness in the two failures.

“Eh!” she said to herself, “gien only I had been prayin’ i’stead o’
rinnin’ awa, I wad hae been there whan he turnt the watter aside! I wad
hae seen the mirricle! O my Maister! what think ye o’ me noo?”

For all the excitement Mistress Croale had shown at first view of
Gibbie, she sat still in her dusky corner, made no movement towards
him, nor did anything to attract his attention, only kept her eyes
fixed upon him; and Janet in her mingled joy and pain forgot her
altogether. When at length it recurred to her that she was in the room,
she cast a somewhat anxious glance towards the place she had occupied
all day. It was empty; and Janet was perplexed to think how she had
gone unseen. She had crept out after Mr. Duff, and probably Janet saw
her, but as one of those who seeing, see not, and immediately forget.

Just as the farmer left the room, a great noise arose among the cattle
in that adjoining; he set down the bottle on a chair that happened to
be in the passage, and ran to protect the partitions. Exultation would
be a poor word wherewith to represent the madness of the delight that
shot its fires into Mistress Croale’s eyes when she saw the bottle
actually abandoned within her reach. It was to her as the very key of
the universe. She darted upon it, put it to her lips, and _drank_. Yet
she took heed, thought while she drank, and did not go beyond what she
could carry. Little time such an appropriation required. Noiselessly
she set the bottle down, darted into a closet containing a solitary
calf, and there stood looking from the open window in right innocent
fashion, curiously contemplating the raft attached to it, upon which
she had seen the highland woman arrive with her children.

At supper-time she was missing altogether. Nobody could with certainty
say when he had last seen her. The house was searched from top to
bottom, and the conclusion arrived at was, that she must have fallen
from some window and been drowned--only, surely she would at least have
uttered one cry! Examining certain of the windows to know whether she
might not have left some sign of such an exit, the farmer discovered
that the brander was gone.

“Losh!” cried the orra man, with a face bewildered to shapelessness,
like that of an old moon rising in a fog, “yon’ll be her I saw an hoor
ago, hyne doon the watter!”

“Ye muckle gowk!” said his master, “hoo cud she win sae far ohn gane to
the boddom?”

“Upo’ the bran’er, sir,” answered the orra man. “I tuik her for a
muckle dog upo’ a door. The wife maun be a witch!”

John Duff stared at the man with his mouth open, and for half a minute
all were dumb. The thing was incredible, yet hardly to be controverted.
The woman was gone, the raft was gone, and something strange that
might be the two together had been observed about the time, as near as
they could judge, when she ceased to be observed in the house. Had the
farmer noted the change in the level of the whisky in his bottle, he
might have been surer of it--except indeed the doubt had then arisen
whether they might not rather find her at the foot of the stair when
the water subsided.

Mr. Duff said the luck changed with the return of Snowball; his sister
said, with the departure of the beggar-wife. Before dark the rain had
ceased, and it became evident that the water had not risen for the last
half-hour. In two hours more it had sunk a quarter of an inch.

Gibbie threw himself on the floor beside his mother’s chair, she
covered him with her grey cloak, and he fell fast asleep. At dawn, he
woke with a start. He had dreamed that Ginevra was in trouble. He made
Janet understand that he would return to guide them home as soon as the
way was practicable, and set out at once.

The water fell rapidly. Almost as soon as it was morning, the people
at the Mains could begin doing a little towards restoration. But from
that day forth, for about a year, instead of the waters of the Daur and
the Lorrie, the house was filled with the gradually subsiding flood
of Jean’s lamentations over her house-gear--one thing after another,
and twenty things together. There was scarcely an article she did not,
over and over, proclaim utterly ruined, in a tone apparently indicating
ground of serious complaint against some one who did not appear, though
most of the things, to other eyes than hers, remained seemingly about
as useful as before. In vain her brother sought to comfort her with
the assurance that there were worse losses at Culloden; she answered,
that if he had not himself been specially favoured in the recovery of
Snowball, he would have made a much worse complaint about him alone
than she did about all her losses; whereupon, being an honest man, and
not certain that she spoke other than the truth, he held his peace. But
he never made the smallest acknowledgment to Gibbie for the saving of
the said Snowball: what could an idiot understand about gratitude? and
what use was money to a boy who did not set his life at a pin’s fee?
But he always spoke kindly to him thereafter, which was more to Gibbie
than anything he could have given him; and when a man is content, his
friends may hold their peace.

The next day Jean had her dinner strangely provided. As her brother
wrote to a friend in Glasgow, she “found at the back of the house,
and all lying in a heap, a handsome dish of trout, a pike, a hare,
a partridge, and a turkey, with a dish of potatoes, and a dish of
turnips, all brought down by the burn, and deposited there for the
good of the house, except the turkey, which, alas! was one of her own
favourite flock.”[3]

[3] See Sir Thomas Dick Lauder’s account of the Morayshire Floods in
1829 (1st Ed., p. 181)--an enchanting book, especially to one whose
earliest memories are interwoven with water-floods. For details in such
kind here given, I am much indebted to it. Again and again, as I have
been writing, has it rendered me miserable--my tale showing so flat
and poor beside Sir Thomas’s narrative. Known to me from childhood, it
wakes in me far more wonder and pleasure now, than it did even in the
days when the marvel of things came more to the surface.

In the afternoon, Gibbie re-appeared at the Mains, and Robert and Janet
set out at once to go home with him. It was a long journey for them--he
had to take them so many rounds. They rested at several houses, and
saw much misery on their way. It was night before they arrived at the
cottage. They found it warm and clean and tidy: Ginevra had, like a
true lady, swept the house that gave her shelter: _that_ ladies often
do; and perhaps it is yet more their work in the world than they fully
understand. For Ginevra, it was heavenly bliss to her to hear their
approaching footsteps; and before she left them she had thoroughly
learned that the poorest place where the atmosphere is love, is more
homely, and by consequence more heavenly, than the most beautiful even,
where law and order are elements supreme.

“Eh, gien I had only had faith an’ bidden!” said Janet to herself as
she entered; and to the day of her death she never ceased to bemoan her
too hasty desertion of “the wee hoosie upo’ the muckle rock.”

As to the strange woman’s evident knowledge concerning Gibbie, she
could do nothing but wait--fearing rather than hoping; but she had got
so far above time and chance, that nothing really troubled her, and she
could wait quietly. At the same time it did not seem likely they would
hear anything more of the woman herself: no one believed she could have
gone very far without being whelmed, or _whumled_ as they said, in the
fierce waters.




CHAPTER XXXVII.

MR. SCLATER.

It may be remembered that, upon Gibbie’s disappearance from the city,
great interest was felt in his fate, and such questions started
about the boy himself as moved the Rev. Clement Sclater to gather
all the information at which he could arrive concerning his family
and history. That done, he proceeded to attempt interesting in his
unknown fortunes those relatives of his mother whose existence and
residences he had discovered. In this, however, he had met with no
success. At the house where she was born, there was now no one but
a second cousin, to whom her brother, dying unmarried, had left the
small estate of the Withrops, along with the family contempt for her
husband, and for her because of him, inasmuch as, by marrying him,
she had brought disgrace upon herself, and upon all her people. So
said the cousin to Mr. Sclater, but seemed himself nowise humbled by
the disgrace he recognized, indeed almost claimed. As to the orphan,
he said, to speak honestly (as he did at least that once), the more
entirely he disappeared, the better he would consider it--not that
personally he was the least concerned in the matter; only if, according
to the Scripture, there were two more generations yet upon which had
to be visited the sins of Sir George and Lady Galbraith, the greater
the obscurity in which they remained, the less would be the scandal.
The brother who had taken to business, was the senior partner in
a large ship-building firm at Greenock. This man, William Fuller
Withrop by name--Wilful Withrop the neighbours had nicknamed him--was
a bachelor, and reputed rich. Mr. Sclater did not hear of him what
roused very brilliant hopes. He was one who would demand more reason
than reasonable for the most reasonable of actions that involved
parting with money; yet he had been known to do a liberal thing for
a public object. Waste was so wicked that any other moral risk was
preferable. Of the three, he would waste mind and body rather than
estate. Man was made neither to rejoice nor to mourn, but to possess.
To leave no stone unturned, however, Mr. Sclater wrote to Mr. Withrop.
The answer he received was, that, as the sister, concerning whose
child he had applied to him, had never been anything but a trouble to
the family; as he had no associations with her memory save those of
misery and disgrace; as, before he left home, her name had long ceased
to be mentioned among them; and as her own father had deliberately
and absolutely disowned her because of her obstinate disobedience
and wilfulness, it could hardly be expected of him, and indeed would
ill become him, to show any lively interest in her offspring. Still,
although he could not honestly pretend to the smallest concern about
him, he had, from pure curiosity, made inquiry of correspondents with
regard to the boy; from which the resulting knowledge was, that he was
little better than an idiot, whose character, education, and manners,
had been picked up in the streets. Nothing, he was satisfied, could be
done for such a child, which would not make him more miserable, as well
as more wicked, than he was already. Therefore, &c., &c., &c.

Thus failing, Mr. Sclater said to himself he had done all that could be
required of him--and he had indeed taken trouble. Nor could anything
be asserted, he said further to himself, as his duty in respect of
this child, that was not equally his duty in respect of every little
wanderer in the streets of his parish. That a child’s ancestors had
been favoured above others, and had so misused their advantages that
their last representative was left in abject poverty, could hardly
be a reason why that child, born, in more than probability, with the
same evil propensities which had ruined them, should be made an elect
object of favour. Who was he, Clement Sclater, to intrude upon the
divine prerogative, and presume to act on the doctrine of election!
Was a child with a _Sir_ to his name, anything more in the eyes of God
than a child without a name at all? Would any title--even that of Earl
or Duke, be recognized in the kingdom of heaven? His relatives ought
to do something: they failing, of whom could further requisition be
made? There were vessels to honour and vessels to dishonour: to which
class this one belonged, let God in his time reveal. A duty could not
be passed on. It could not become the duty of the minister of a parish,
just because those who ought and could, would not, to spend time and
money, to the neglect of his calling, in hunting up a boy whom he would
not know what to do with if he had him, a boy whose home had been with
the dregs of society.

In justice to Mr. Sclater, it must be mentioned that he did not know
Gibbie, even by sight. There remains room, however, for the question,
whether, if Mr. Sclater had not been the man to change his course as he
did afterwards, he would not have acted differently from the first.

One morning, as he sat at breakfast with his wife, late Mrs. Bonniman,
and cast, as is, I fear, the rude habit of not a few husbands, not a
few stolen glances, as he ate, over the morning paper, his eye fell
upon a paragraph announcing the sudden death of the well-known William
Fuller Withrop, of the eminent ship-building firm of Withrop and
Playtell, of Greenock. Until he came to the end of the paragraph, his
cup of coffee hung suspended in mid air. Then down it went untasted, he
jumped from his seat, and hurried from the room. For the said paragraph
ended with the remark, that the not unfrequent incapacity of the ablest
of business men for looking the inevitable in the face with coolness
sufficient to the making of a will, was not only a curious fact, but
in the individual case a pity, where two hundred thousand pounds was
concerned. Had the writer been a little more philosophical still, he
might have seen that the faculty for making money by no means involves
judgment in the destination of it, and that the money may do its part
for good and evil without, just as well as with, a will at the back of
it.

But though this was the occasion, it remains to ask what was the
cause of the minister’s precipitancy. Why should Clement Sclater
thereupon spring from his chair in such a state of excitement that
he set his cup of coffee down upon its side instead of its bottom,
to the detriment of the tablecloth, and of something besides, more
unquestionably the personal property of his wife? Why was it that,
heedless of her questions, backed although they were both by just anger
and lawful curiosity, he ran straight from the room and the house,
nor stayed until, at one and the same moment, his foot was on the top
step of his lawyer’s door, and his hand upon its bell? No doubt it was
somebody’s business, and perhaps it might be Mr. Sclater’s, to find
the heirs of men who died intestate; but what made it so indubitably,
so emphatically, so individually, so pressingly Mr. Sclater’s, that
he forgot breakfast, tablecloth, wife, and sermon, all together, that
he might see to this boy’s rights? Surely if they were rights, they
could be in no such imminent danger as this haste seemed to signify.
Was it only that he might be the first in the race to right him?--and
if so, then again, why? Was it a certainty indisputable, that any boy,
whether such an idle tramp as the minister supposed this one to be
or not, would be redeemed by the heirship to the hugest of fortunes?
Had it, some time before this, become at length easier for a rich boy
to enter into the kingdom of heaven? Or was it that, with all his
honesty, all his religion, all his churchism, all his protestantism,
and his habitual appeal to the word of God, the minister was yet a most
reverential worshipper of Mammon,--not the old god mentioned in the
New Testament, of course, but a thoroughly respectable modern Mammon,
decently dressed, perusing a subscription list! No doubt justice ought
to be done, and the young man over at Roughrigs was sure to be putting
in a false claim, but where were the lawyers, whose business it was?
There was no need of a clergyman to remind them of their duty where
the picking of such a carcase was concerned. Had Mr. Sclater ever
conceived the smallest admiration or love for the boy, I would not have
made these reflections; but, in his ignorance of him and indifference
concerning him, he believed there would at least be trouble in proving
him of approximately sound mind and decent intellect. What, then, I
repeat and leave it, did all this excitement on the part of one of the
iron pillars of the church indicate?

From his lawyer he would have gone at once to Mistress Croale--indeed
I think he would have gone to her first, to warn her against imparting
what information concerning Gibbie she might possess to any other
than himself, but he had not an idea where she might even be heard
of. He had cleansed his own parish, as he thought, by pulling up the
tare, contrary to commandment, and throwing it into his neighbour’s,
where it had taken root, and grown a worse tare than before; until at
length, she who had been so careful over the manners and morals of her
drunkards, was a drunkard herself and a wanderer, with the reputation
of being a far worse woman than she really was. For some years now
she had made her living, one poor enough, by hawking small household
necessities; and not unfrequently where she appeared, the housewives
bought of her because her eyes, and her nose, and an undefined sense
of evil in her presence, made them shrink from the danger of offending
her. But the real cause of the bad impression she made was, that she
was sorely troubled with what is, by huge discourtesy, called a bad
conscience--being in reality a conscience doing its duty so well that
it makes the whole house uncomfortable.

On her next return to the Daurfoot, as the part of the city was called
where now she was most at home, she heard the astounding and welcome
news that Gibbie had fallen heir to a large property, and that the
reward of one hundred pounds--a modest sum indeed, but where was the
good of wasting money, thought Mr. Sclater--had been proclaimed by
tuck of drum, to any one giving such information as should lead to the
discovery of Sir Gilbert Galbraith, commonly known as _wee Sir Gibbie_.
A description of him was added, and the stray was so _kenspeckle_, that
Mistress Croale saw the necessity of haste to any hope of advantage.
She had nothing to guide her beyond the fact of Sir George’s habit, in
his cups, of referring to the property on Daurside, and the assurance
that with the said habit Gibbie must have been as familiar as herself.
With this initiative, as she must begin somewhere, and could prosecute
her business anywhere, she filled her basket and set out at once for
Daurside. There, after a good deal of wandering hither and thither, and
a search whose fruitlessness she probably owed to too great caution,
she made the desired discovery unexpectedly and marvellously, and left
behind her in the valley the reputation of having been on more familiar
terms with the flood and the causes of it, than was possible to any but
one who kept company worse than human.




CHAPTER XXXVIII.

THE MUCKLE HOOSE.

The next morning, Janet felt herself in duty bound to make inquiry
concerning those interested in Miss Galbraith. She made, therefore, the
best of her way with Gibbie to the _Muckle Hoose_, but, as the latter
expected, found it a ruin in a wilderness. Acres of trees and shrubbery
had disappeared, and a hollow waste of sand and gravel was in their
place. What was left of the house stood on the edge of a red gravelly
precipice of fifty feet in height, at whose foot lay the stones of the
kitchen-wing, in which had been the room whence Gibbie carried Ginevra.
The newer part of the house was gone from its very roots; the ancient
portion, all innovation wiped from it, stood grim, desolated, marred,
and defiant as of old. Not a sign of life was about the place; the
very birds had fled. Angus had been there that same morning, and had
locked or nailed up every possible entrance: the place looked like a
ruin of centuries. With difficulty they got down into the gulf, with
more difficulty crossed the burn, clambered up the rocky bank on the
opposite side, and knocked at the door of the gamekeeper’s cottage. But
they saw only a little girl, who told them her father had gone to find
the laird, that her mother was ill in bed, and Mistress MacFarlane on
her way to her own people.

It came out afterwards that when Angus and the housekeeper heard
Gibbie’s taps at the window, and, looking out, saw nobody there, but
the burn within a few yards of the house, they took the warning for
a supernatural interference to the preservation of their lives, and
fled at once. Passing the foot of the stair, Mistress MacFarlane
shrieked to Ginevra to come, but ran on without waiting a reply.
They told afterwards that she left the house with them, and that,
suddenly missing her, they went back to look for her, but could find
her nowhere, and were just able to make their second escape with their
lives, hearing the house fall into the burn behind them. Mistress
MacFarlane had been severe as the law itself against lying among the
maids, but now, when it came to her own defence where she knew her self
wrong, she lied just like one of the wicked.

“My dear missie,” said Janet, when they got home, “ye maun write to yer
father, or he’ll be oot o’ ’s wuts aboot ye.”

Ginevra wrote therefore to the duke’s, and to the laird’s usual address
in London as well; but he was on his way from the one place to the
other when Angus overtook him, and received neither letter.

Now came to the girl a few such days of delight, of freedom, of life,
as she had never even dreamed of. She roamed Glashgar with Gibbie, the
gentlest, kindest, most interesting of companions. Wherever his sheep
went, she went too, and to many places besides--some of them such
strange, wild, terrible places, as would have terrified her without
him. How he startled her once by darting off a rock like a seagull,
straight, head-foremost, into the Death-pot! She screamed with horror,
but he had done it only to amuse her; for, after what seemed to her a
fearful time, he came smiling up out of the terrible darkness. What a
brave, beautiful boy he was! He never hurt anything, and nothing ever
seemed to hurt him. And what a number of things he knew! He showed her
things on the mountain, things in the sky, things in the pools and
streams wherever they went. He did better than tell her about them;
he made her see them, and then the things themselves told her. She
was not always certain she saw just what he wanted her to see, but
she always saw something that made her glad with knowledge. He had a
New Testament Janet had given him, which he carried in his pocket,
and when she joined him, for he was always out with his sheep hours
before she was up, she would generally find him seated on a stone, or
lying in the heather, with the little book in his hand, looking solemn
and sweet. But the moment he saw her, he would spring merrily up to
welcome her. It were indeed an argument against religion as strong as
sad, if one of the children the kingdom specially claims, could not be
possessed by the life of the Son of God without losing his simplicity
and joyousness. Those of my readers will be the least inclined to doubt
the boy, who, by obedience, have come to know its reward. For obedience
alone holds wide the door for the entrance of the spirit of wisdom.
There was as little to wonder at in Gibbie as there was much to love
and admire, for from the moment when, yet a mere child, he heard there
was such a one claiming his obedience, he began to turn to him the
hearing ear, the willing heart, the ready hand. The main thing which
rendered this devotion more easy and natural to him than to others was,
that, more than in most, the love of man had in him prepared the way of
the Lord. He who so loved the sons of men was ready to love the Son of
Man the moment he heard of him; love makes obedience a joy; and of him
who obeys, all heaven is the patrimony--he is fellow-heir with Christ.

On the fourth day, the rain, which had been coming and going, finally
cleared off, the sun was again glorious, and the farmers began to hope
a little for the drying and ripening of some portion of their crops.
Then first Ginevra asked Gibbie to take her down to Glashruach; she
wanted to see the ruin they had described to her. When she came near,
and notions changed into visible facts, she neither wept nor wailed.
She felt very miserable, it is true, but it was at finding that the
evident impossibility of returning thither for a long time, woke in her
pleasure and not pain. So utterly altered was the look of everything,
that had she come upon it unexpectedly, she would not have recognized
either place or house. They went up to a door. She seemed never to
have seen it; but when they entered, she knew it as one from the hall
into a passage, which, with what it led to being gone, the inner had
become an outer door. A quantity of sand was heaped up in the hall,
and the wainscot was wet and swelled and bulging. They went into the
dining-room. It was a miserable sight--the very picture of the soul
of a drunkard. The thick carpet was sodden--spongy like a bed of moss
after heavy rains; the leather chairs looked diseased; the colour was
all gone from the table; the paper hung loose from the walls; and
everything lay where the water, after floating it about, had let it
drop as it ebbed.

She ascended the old stone stair which led to her father’s rooms above,
went into his study, in which not a hair was out of its place, and
walked towards the window to look across to where once had been her own
chamber. But as she approached it, there, behind the curtain, she saw
her father, motionless, looking out. She turned pale, and stood. Even
at such a time, had she known he was in the house, she would not have
dared set her foot in that room. Gibbie, who had followed and entered
behind her, preceived her hesitation, saw and recognized the back of
the laird, knew that she was afraid of her father, and stood also
waiting he knew not what.

“Eh!” he said to himself, “hers is no like mine! Nae mony has had
fathers sae guid ’s mine.”

Becoming aware of a presence, the laird half turned, and seeing
Gibbie, imagined he had entered in a prowling way, supposing the place
deserted. With stately offence he asked him what he wanted there, and
waved his dismissal. Then first he saw another, standing white-faced,
with eyes fixed upon him. He turned pale also, and stood staring at
her. The memory of that moment ever after disgraced him in his own
eyes: for one instant of unreasoning weakness, he imagined he saw a
ghost--believed what he said he knew to be impossible. It was but one
moment, but it might have been more, had not Ginevra walked slowly up
to him, saying in a trembling voice, as if she expected the blame of
all that had happened, “I couldn’t help it, papa.” He took her in his
arms, and, for the first time since the discovery of her atrocious
familiarity with Donal, kissed her. She clung to him, trembling now
with pleasure as well as apprehension. But, alas! there was no impiety
in the faithlessness that pronounced such a joy too good to endure,
and the end came yet sooner than she feared. For, when the father
rose erect from her embrace, and was again the laird, there, to his
amazement, still stood the odd-looking, outlandish intruder, smiling
with the most impertinent interest! Gibbie had forgotten himself
altogether, beholding what he took for a thorough reconciliation.

“Go away, boy. You have nothing to do here,” said the laird, anger
almost overwhelming his precious dignity.

“Oh, papa!” cried Ginevra, clasping her hands, “that’s Gibbie! He saved
my life. I should have been drowned but for him.”

The laird was both proud and stupid, therefore more than ordinarily
slow to understand what he was unprepared to hear.

“I am much obliged to him,” he said haughtily; “but there is no
occasion for him to wait.”

At this point his sluggish mind began to recall something:--why, this
was the very boy he saw in the meadow with her that morning!--He turned
fiercely upon him where he lingered, either hoping for a word of adieu
from Ginevra, or unwilling to go while she was uncomfortable.

“Leave the house instantly,” he said, “or I will knock you down.”

“O papa!” moaned Ginevra wildly--it was the braver of her that she was
trembling from head to foot--“don’t speak so to Gibbie. He is a good
boy. It was he that Angus whipped so cruelly--long ago: I have never
been able to forget it.”

Her father was confounded at her presumption: how dared she expostulate
with him! She had grown a bold, bad girl! Good heavens! Evil
communications!

“If he does not get out of this directly,” he cried, “I will have him
whipped again. Angus!”

He shouted the name, and its echo came back in a wild tone, altogether
strange to Ginevra. She seemed struggling in the meshes of an evil
dream. Involuntarily she uttered a cry of terror and distress. Gibbie
was at her side instantly, putting out his hand to comfort her. She was
just laying hers on his arm, scarcely knowing what she did, when her
father seized him, and dashed him to the other side of the room. He
went staggering backwards, vainly trying to recover himself, and fell,
his head striking against the wall. The same instant Angus entered, saw
nothing of Gibbie where he lay, and approached his master. But when
he caught sight of Ginevra, he gave a gasp of terror that ended in a
broken yell, and stared as if he had come suddenly on the verge of the
bottomless pit, while all round his head his hair stood out as if he
had been electrified. Before he came to himself, Gibbie had recovered
and risen. He saw now that he could be of no service to Ginevra, and
that his presence only made things worse for her. But he saw also that
she was unhappy about him, and that must not be. He broke into such a
merry laugh--and it had need to be merry, for it had to do the work
of many words of reassurance--that she could scarcely refrain from a
half-hysterical response as he walked from the room. The moment he was
out of the house, he began to sing; and for many minutes, as he walked
up the gulf hollowed by the Glashburn, Ginevra could hear the strange,
other-world voice, and knew it was meant to hold communion with her and
comfort her.

“What do you know of that fellow, Angus!” asked his master.

“He’s the verra deevil himsel’, sir,” muttered Angus, whom Gibbie’s
laughter had in a measure brought to his senses.

“You will see that he is sent off the property at once--and for good,
Angus,” said the laird. “His insolence is insufferable. The scoundrel!”

On the pretext of following Gibbie, Angus was only too glad to leave
the room. Then Mr. Galbraith upon his daughter.

“So, Jenny!” he said, with his loose lips pulled out straight, “that
is the sort of companion you choose when left to yourself!--a low,
beggarly, insolent scamp!--scarcely the equal of the brutes he has the
charge of!”

“They’re sheep, papa!” pleaded Ginevra, in a wail that rose almost to a
scream.

“I do believe the girl is an idiot!” said her father, and turned from
her contemptuously.

“I think I am, papa,” she sobbed. “Don’t mind me. Let me go away, and
I will never trouble you any more.” She would go to the mountain, she
thought, and be a shepherdess with Gibbie.

Her father took her roughly by the arm, pushed her into a closet,
locked the door, went and had his luncheon, and in the afternoon,
having borrowed Snowball, took her just as she was, drove to meet the
mail coach, and in the middle of the night was set down with her at the
principal hotel in the city, whence the next morning he set out early
to find a school where he might leave her and his responsibility with
her.

When Gibbie knew himself beyond the hearing of Ginevra, his song died
away, and he went home sad. The gentle girl had stepped at once from
the day into the dark, and he was troubled for her. But he remembered
that she had another father besides the laird, and comforted himself.

When he reached home, he found his mother in serious talk with a
stranger. The tears were in her eyes, and had been running down her
cheeks, but she was calm and dignified as usual.

“Here he comes!” she said as he entered. “The will o’ the Lord be
dune--noo an’ for ever-mair! I’m at his biddin’.--An’ sae’s Gibbie.”

It was Mr. Sclater. The witch had sailed her brander well.




CHAPTER XXXIX.

DAUR STREET.

One bright afternoon, towards the close of the autumn, the sun shining
straight down one of the wide clean stony streets of the city, with
a warmth which he had not been able to impart to the air, a company
of school-girls, two and two in long file, mostly with innocent, and,
for human beings, rather uninteresting faces, was walking in orderly
manner, a female grenadier at its head, along the pavement, more than
usually composed, from having the sun in their eyes. Amongst the faces
was one very different from the rest, a countenance almost solemn and a
little sad, of still, regular features, in the eyes of which by loving
eyes might have been read uneasy thought patiently carried, and the
lack of some essential to conscious well-being. The other girls were
looking on this side and that, eager to catch sight of anything to
trouble the monotony of the daily walk; but the eyes of this one were
cast down, except when occasionally lifted in answer to words of the
schoolmistress, the grenadier, by whose side she was walking. They were
lovely brown eyes, trustful and sweet, and although, as I have said,
a little sad, they never rose, even in reply to the commonest remark,
without shining a little. Though younger than not a few of them, and
very plainly dressed, like all the others--I have a suspicion that
Scotch mothers dress their girls rather too plainly, which tends to the
growth of an undue and degrading love of dress--she was not so girlish,
was indeed, in some respects, more of a young woman than even the
governess who walked by the side of them.

Suddenly came a rush, a confusion, a fluttering of the doves, whence
or how none seemed to know, a gentle shriek from several of the girls,
a general sense of question and no answer; but, as their ruffled
nerves composed themselves a little, there was the vision of the
schoolmistress poking the point of her parasol at a heedless face,
radiant with smiles, that of an odd-looking lad, as they thought, who
had got hold of one of the daintily gloved hands of her companion, laid
a hand which, considered conventionally, was not that of a gentleman,
upon her shoulder, and stood, without a word, gazing in rapturous
delight.

“Go away, boy! What do you mean by such impertinence?” cried the
outraged Miss Kimble, changing her thrust, and poking in his chest
the parasol with which she had found it impossible actually to assail
his smiling countenance.--Such a strange looking creature! He could
not be in his sound senses, she thought. In the momentary mean time,
however, she had failed to observe that, after the first start and
following tremor, her companion stood quite still, and was now looking
in the lad’s face with roseate cheeks and tear-filled eyes, apparently
forgetting to draw her hand from his, or to move her shoulder from
under his caress. The next moment, up, with hasty yet dignified step,
came the familiar form of their own minister, the Rev. Clement Sclater,
who, with reproof in his countenance, which was red with annoyance and
haste, laid his hands on the lad’s shoulders to draw him from the prey
on which he had pounced.

“Remember, you are not on a hill-side, but in a respectable street,”
said the reverend gentleman, a little foolishly.

The youth turned his head over his shoulder, not otherwise changing his
attitude, and looked at him with some bewilderment. Then, not he, but
the young lady spoke.

“Gibbie and I are old friends,” she said, and reaching up laid her free
hand in turn on his shoulder, as if to protect him--for, needlessly,
with such grace and strength before her, the vision of an old horror
came rushing back on the mind of Ginevra.

Gibbie had darted from his companion’s side some hundred yards off.
The cap which Mr. Sclater had insisted on his wearing had fallen as
he ran, and he had never missed it; his hair stood out on all sides
of his head, and the sun behind him shone in it like a glory, just
as when first he appeared to Ginevra in the peat-moss, like an angel
standing over her. Indeed, while to Miss Kimble and the girls he was
“_a mad-like object_” in his awkward ill-fitting clothes, made by a
village tailor in the height of the village fashion, to Ginevra he
looked hardly less angelic now than he did then. His appearance, judged
without prejudice, was rather that of a sailor boy on shore than a
shepherd boy from the hills.

“Miss Galbraith!” said Miss Kimble, in the tone that indicates nostrils
distended, “I am astonished at you! What an example to the school!
I never knew you misbehave yourself before! Take your hand from
this--this--very strange looking person’s shoulder directly.”

Ginevra obeyed, but Gibbie stood as before.

“Remove your hand, boy, instantly,” cried Miss Kimble, growing more and
more angry, and began knocking the hand on the girl’s shoulder with her
parasol, which apparently Gibbie took for a joke, for he laughed aloud.

“Pray do not alarm yourself, ma’am,” said Mr. Sclater, slowly
recovering his breath: he was not yet quite sure of Gibbie, or
confident how best he was to be managed; “this young--_gentleman_ is
Sir Gilbert Galbraith, my ward.--Sir Gilbert, this lady is Miss Kimble.
You must have known her father well--the Rev. Matthew Kimble of the
next parish to your own?”

Gibbie smiled. He did not nod, for that would have meant that he did
know him, and he did not remember having ever even heard the name of
the Rev. Matthew Kimble.

“Oh!” said the lady, who had ceased her battery, and stood bewildered
and embarrassed--the more that by this time the girls had all gathered
round, staring and wondering.

Ginevra’s eyes too had filled with wonder; she cast them down, and a
strange smile began to play about her sweet strong mouth. All at once
she was in the middle of a fairy tale, and had not a notion what was
coming next. Her dumb shepherd boy a baronet!--and, more wonderful
still, a Galbraith! She must be dreaming in the wide street! The last
she had seen of him was as he was driven from the house by her father,
when he had just saved her life. That was but a few weeks ago, and
here he was, called Sir Gilbert Galbraith! It was a delicious bit of
wonderment.

“Oh!” said Miss Kimble a second time, recovering herself a little,
“I see! A relative, Miss Galbraith! I did not understand. That of
course sets everything right--at least--even then--the open street,
you know!--You will understand, Mr. Sclater.--I beg your pardon, Sir
Gilbert. I hope I did not hurt you with my parasol!”

Gibbie again laughed aloud.

“Thank you,” said Miss Kimble confused, and annoyed with herself for
being so, especially before her girls. “I should be sorry to have hurt
you.--Going to college, I presume, Sir Gilbert?”

Gibbie looked at Mr. Sclater.

“He is going to study with me for a while first,” answered the minister.

“I am glad to hear it. He could not do better,” said Miss Kimble.
“Come, girls.”

And with friendly farewells, she moved on, her train after her,
thinking with herself what a boor the young fellow was--the
young--baronet?--Yes, he must be a baronet; he was too young to have
been knighted already. But where ever could he have been brought up?

Mr. Sclater had behaved judiciously, and taken gentle pains to satisfy
the old couple that they must part with Gibbie. One of the neighbouring
clergy knew Mr. Sclater well, and with him paid the old people a
visit, to help them to dismiss any lingering doubt that he was the
boy’s guardian legally appointed. To their own common sense indeed it
became plain that, except some such story was true, there could be
nothing to induce him to come after Gibbie, or desire to take charge
of the outcast; but they did not feel thoroughly satisfied until Mr.
Sclater brought Fergus Duff to the cottage, to testify to him as being
what he pretended. It was a sore trial, but amongst the griefs of
losing him, no fear of his forgetting them was included. Mr. Sclater’s
main difficulty was with Gibbie himself. At first he laughed at the
absurdity of his going away from his father and mother and the sheep.
They told him he was Sir Gilbert Galbraith. He answered on his slate,
as well as by signs which Janet at least understood perfectly, that
he had told them so, and had been so all the time, “and what differ
does that mak?” he added. Mr. Sclater told him he was--or would be, at
least, he took care to add, when he came of age--a rich man as well as
a baronet.

“Writch men,” wrote Gibbie, “dee as they like, and Ise bide.”

Mr. Sclater told him it was only poor boys who could do as they
pleased, for the law looked after boys like him, so that, when it came
into their hands, they might be capable of using their money properly.
Almost persuaded at length that he had no choice, that he could no
longer be his own master, until he was one and twenty, he turned and
looked at Janet, his eyes brimful of tears. She gave him a little nod.
He rose and went out, climbed the crest of Glashgar, and did not return
to the cottage till midnight.

In the morning appeared on his countenance signs of unusual resolve.
Amid the many thoughts he had had the night before, had come the
question--what he would do with the money when he had it--first of all
what he could do for Janet and Robert and everyone of their family; and
naturally enough to a Scotch boy, the first thing that occurred to him
was, to give Donal money to go to college like Fergus Duff. In that he
knew he made no mistake. It was not so easy to think of things for the
rest, but _that_ was safe. Had not Donal said twenty times he would
not mind being a herd all his life, if only he could go to college
first? But then he began to think what a long time it was before he
would be one and twenty, and what a number of things might come and go
before then: Donal might by that time have a wife and children, and
he could not leave them to go to college! Why should not Mr. Sclater
manage somehow that Donal should go at once? It was now the end almost
of October, and the college opened in November. Some other rich person
would lend them the money, and he would pay it, with compound interest,
when he got his. Before he went to bed, he got his slate, and wrote as
follows:

“my dear minister, If you will teak Donal too, and lett him go to the
kolledg, I will go with you as seens ye like; butt if ye will not, I
will runn away.”

When Mr. Sclater, who had a bed at the gamekeeper’s, appeared the next
morning, anxious to conclude the business, and get things in motion for
their departure, Gibbie handed him the slate the moment he entered the
cottage, and while he read, stood watching him.

Now Mr. Sclater was a prudent man, and always looked ahead, therefore
apparently took a long time to read Gibbie’s very clear, although
unscholarly communication; before answering it, he must settle the
probability of what Mrs. Sclater would think of the proposal to take
_two_ savages into her house together, where also doubtless the
presence of this Donal would greatly interfere with the process of
making a gentleman of Gibbie. Unable to satisfy himself, he raised his
head at length, unconsciously shaking it as he did so. That instant
Gibbie was out of the house. Mr. Sclater, perceiving the blunder he had
made, hurried after him, but he was already out of sight. Returning
in some dismay, he handed the slate to Janet, who, with sad, resigned
countenance, was _baking_. She rubbed the oatmeal dough from her hands,
took the slate, and read with a smile.

“Ye maunna tak Gibbie for a young cowt, Maister Sclater, an’ think to
brak him in,” she said, after a thoughtful pause, “or ye’ll hae to
learn yer mistak. There’s no eneuch o’ himsel’ in him for ye to get a
grip o’ ’im by that han’le. He aye kens what he wad hae, an’ he’ll aye
get it, as sure ’s it’ll aye be richt. As anent Donal, Donal’s my ain,
an’ I s’ say naething. Sit ye doon, sir; ye’ll no see Gibbie the day
again.”

“Is there no means of getting at him, my good woman?” said Mr. Sclater,
miserable at the prospect of a day utterly wasted.

“I cud gie ye sicht o’ ’im, I daursay, but what better wad ye be for
that? Gien ye hed a’ the lawyers o’ Embrough at yer back, ye wadna
touch Gibbie upo’ Glashgar.”

“But you could persuade him, I am sure, Mistress Grant. You have only
to call him in your own way, and he will come at once.”

“What wad ye hae me perswaud him till, sir? To onything ’at’s richt,
Gibbie wants nae perswaudin’; an’ for this ’at’s atween ye, the laddies
are jist verra brithers, an’ I hae no richt to interfere wi’ what the
tane wad for the tither, the thing seemin’ to me rizon eneuch.”

“What sort of lad is this son of yours? The boy seems much attached to
him!”

“He’s a laddie ’at’s been gi’en ower till ’s buik sin ever I learnt
him to read mysel’,” Janet answered. “But he’ll be here the nicht,
I’m thinkin’, to see the last o’ puir Gibbie, an’ ye can jeedge for
yersel’.”

It required but a brief examination of Donal to satisfy Mr. Sclater
that he was more than prepared for the university. But I fear me
greatly the time is at hand when such as Donal will no more be able
to enter her courts. Unwise and unpatriotic are any who would rather
have a few prime scholars sitting about the wells of learning, than see
those fountains flow freely for the poor, who are yet the strength of a
country. It is better to have many upon the high road of learning, than
a few even at its goal, if that were possible.

As to Donal’s going to Mr. Sclater’s house, Janet soon relieved him.

“Na, na, sir,” she said; “it wad be to learn w’ys ’at wadna be fittin’
a puir lad like him.”

“It would be much safer for him,” said Mr. Sclater, but incidentally.

“Gien I cudna lippen my Donal till ’s ain company an’ the hunger for
better, I wad begin to doobt wha made the warl’,” said his mother; and
Donal’s face flushed with pleasure at her confidence. “Na, he maun get
a garret roomie some gait i’ the toon, an’ there haud till ’s buik; an
ye’ll lat Gibbie gang an’ see him whiles whan he can be spared. There
maun be many a dacent wuman ’at wad be pleased to tak him in.”

Mr. Sclater seemed to himself to foresee no little trouble in his
new responsibility, but consoled himself that he would have more
money at his command, and in the end would sit, as it were, at the
fountain-head of large wealth. Already, with his wife’s property, he
was a man of consideration; but he had a great respect for money, and
much overrated its value as a means of doing even what he called good:
religious people generally do--with a most unchristian dulness. We are
not told that the Master made the smallest use of money for his end.
When he paid the temple-rate, he did it to avoid giving offence; and
he defended the woman who divinely wasted it. Ten times more grace and
magnanimity would be needed, wisely and lovingly to avoid making a
fortune, than it takes to spend one for what are called good objects
when it is made.

When they met Miss Kimble and her “young ladies,” they were on their
way from the coach-office to the minister’s house in Daur Street.
Gibbie knew every corner, and strange was the swift variety of thoughts
and sensations that went filing through his mind. Up this same street
he had tended the wavering steps of a well-known if not highly
respected town-councillor! that was the door, where, one cold morning
of winter, the cook gave him a cup of hot coffee and a roll! What happy
days they were, with their hunger and adventure! There had always been
food and warmth about the city, and he had come in for his share! The
Master was in its streets as certainly as on the rocks of Glashgar.
Not one sheep did he lose sight of, though he could not do so much for
those that would not follow, and had to have the dog sent after them!




CHAPTER XL

MRS. SCLATER.

Gibbie was in a dream of mingled past and future delights, when his
conductor stopped at a large and important-looking house, with a flight
of granite steps up to the door. Gibbie had never been inside such a
house in his life, but when they entered, he was not much impressed.
He did look with a little surprise, it is true, but it was down, not
up: he felt his feet walking soft, and wondered for a moment that there
should be a field of grass in a house. Then he gave a glance round,
thought it was a big place, and followed Mr. Sclater up the stair
with the free mounting step of the Glashgar shepherd. Forgetful and
unconscious, he walked into the drawing-room with his bonnet on his
head. Mrs. Sclater rose when they entered, and he approached her with a
smile of welcome to the house which he carried, always full of guests,
in his bosom. He never thought of looking to her to welcome him. She
shook hands with him in a doubtful kind of way.

“How do you do, Sir Gilbert?” she said. “Only ladies are allowed to
wear their caps in the drawing-room, you know,” she added, in a tone of
courteous and half-rallying rebuke, speaking from a flowery height of
conscious superiority.

What she meant by the drawing-room, Gibbie had not an idea. He looked
at her head, and saw no cap; she had nothing upon it but a quantity
of beautiful black hair; then suddenly remembered his bonnet; he knew
well enough bonnets had to be taken off in house or cottage: he had
never done so because he never had worn a bonnet. But it was with a
smile of amusement only that he now took it off. He was so free from
selfishness that he knew nothing of shame. Never a shadow of blush
at his bad manners tinged his cheek. He put the cap in his pocket,
and catching sight of a footstool by the corner of the chimney-piece,
was so strongly reminded of his creepie by the cottage-hearth, which,
big lad as he now was, he had still haunted, that he went at once and
seated himself upon it. From this coign of vantage he looked round the
room with a gentle curiosity, casting a glance of pleasure every now
and then at Mrs. Sclater, to whom her husband, in a manner somewhat
constrained because of his presence, was recounting some of the
incidents of his journey, making choice, after the manner of many, of
the most commonplace and uninteresting.

Gibbie had not been educated in the relative grandeur of things of this
world, and he regarded the things he now saw just as things, without
the smallest notion of any power in them to confer superiority by being
possessed: can a slave knight his master? The reverend but poor Mr.
Sclater was not above the foolish consciousness of importance accruing
from the refined adjuncts of a more needy corporeal existence; his wife
would have felt out of her proper sphere had she ceased to see them
around her, and would have lost some of her _aplomb_; but the divine
idiot Gibbie was incapable even of the notion that they mattered a
straw to the life of any man. Indeed, to compare man with man was no
habit of his; hence it cannot be wonderful that stone hearth and steel
grate, clay floor and Brussels carpet were much the same to him. Man
was the one sacred thing. Gibbie’s unconscious creed was a powerful
leveller, but it was a leveller up, not down. The heart that revered
the beggar could afford to be incapable of homage to position. His
was not one of those contemptible natures which have no reverence
because they have no aspiration, which think themselves fine because
they acknowledge nothing superior to their own essential baseness. To
Gibbie every man was better than himself. It was for him a sudden and
strange descent--from the region of poetry and closest intercourse with
the strong and gracious and vital simplicities of Nature, human and
other, to the rich commonplaces, amongst them not a few fashionable
vulgarities, of an ordinary well-appointed house, and ordinary
well-appointed people; but, however bedizened, humanity was there; and
he who does not love human more than any other nature has not life in
himself, does not carry his poetry in him, as Gibbie did, therefore
cannot find it except where it has been shown to him. Neither was a
common house like this by any means devoid of any things to please
him. If there was not the lovely homeliness of the cottage which at
once gave all it had, there was a certain stateliness which afforded
its own reception; if there was little harmony, there were individual
colours that afforded him delight--as for instance, afterwards, the
crimson covering the walls of the dining-room, whose colour was of
that soft deep-penetrable character which a flock paper alone can
carry. Then there were pictures, bad enough most of them, no doubt, in
the eyes of the critic, but endlessly suggestive, therefore endlessly
delightful to Gibbie. It is not the man who knows most about Nature
that is hardest to please, however he may be hardest to satisfy, with
the attempt to follow her. The accomplished poet will derive pleasure
from verses which are a mockery to the soul of the unhappy mortal whose
business is judgment--the most thankless of all labours, and justly so.
Certain fruits one is unable to like until he has eaten them in their
perfection; after that, the reminder in them of the perfect will enable
him to enjoy even the inferior a little, recognizing their kind--always
provided he be not one given to judgment--a connoisseur, that is, one
who cares less for the truth than for the knowing comparison of one
embodiment of it with another. Gibbie’s regard then, as it wandered
round the room, lighting on this colour, and that texture, in curtain,
or carpet, or worked screen, found interest and pleasure. Amidst the
mere upholstery of houses and hearts, amidst the common life of the
common crowd, he was, and had to be, what he had learned to be amongst
the nobility and in the palace of Glashgar.

Mrs. Sclater, late Mrs. Bonniman, was the widow of a merchant who
had made his money in foreign trade, and to her house Mr. Sclater
had _flitted_ when he married her. She was a well-bred woman, much
the superior of her second husband in the small duties and graces of
social life, and, already a sufferer in some of his not very serious
_grossièretés_, regarded with no small apprehension the arrival of one
in whom she expected the same kind of thing in largely exaggerated
degree. She did not much care to play the mother to a bear cub, she
said to her friends, with a good-humoured laugh. “Just think,” she
added, “with such a childhood as the poor boy had, what a mass of
vulgarity must be lying in that uncultivated brain of his! It is no
small mercy, as Mr. Sclater says, that our ears at least are safe. Poor
boy!”--She was a woman of about forty, rather tall, of good complexion
tending to the ruddy, with black smooth shining hair parted over a
white forehead, black eyes, nose a little aquiline, good mouth, and
fine white teeth--altogether a handsome woman--some notion of whose
style may be gathered from the fact that, upon the testimony of her
cheval glass, she preferred satin to the richest of silks, and almost
always wore it. Now and then she would attempt a change, but was always
defeated and driven back into satin. She was precise in her personal
rules, but not stiff in the manners wherein she embodied them: these
were indeed just a little florid and wavy, a trifle profuse in their
grace. She kept an excellent table, and every appointment about the
house was _in good style_--a favourite phrase with her. She was her own
housekeeper, an exact mistress, but considerate, so that her servants
had no bad time of it. She was sensible, kind, always responsive to
appeal, had scarcely a thread of poetry or art in her upper texture,
loved fair play, was seldom in the wrong, and never confessed it when
she was. But when she saw it, she took some pains to avoid being so
in a similar way again. She held hard by her own opinion; was capable
of a mild admiration of truth and righteousness in another; had one
or two pet commandments to which she paid more attention than to the
rest; was a safe member of society, never carrying tales; was kind
with condescension to the poor, and altogether a good wife for a
minister of Mr. Sclater’s sort. She knew how to hold her own with any
who would have established superiority. A little more coldness, pride,
indifference, and careless restraint, with just a touch of rudeness,
would have given her the freedom of the best society, if she could
have got into it. Altogether it would not have been easy to find one
who could do more for Gibbie in respect for the social _rapports_
that seemed to await him. Even some who would gladly themselves have
undertaken the task, admitted that he might have fallen into much less
qualified hands. Her husband was confident that, if anybody could, his
wife would make a gentleman of Sir Gilbert; and he ought to know, for
she had done a good deal of polishing upon him.

She was now seated on a low chair at the other side of the fire,
leaning back at a large angle, slowly contemplating out of her black
eyes the lad on the footstool, whose blue eyes she saw wandering about
the room, in a manner neither vague nor unintelligent, but showing
more of interest than of either surprise or admiration. Suddenly he
turned them full upon her; they met hers, and the light rushed into
them like a torrent, breaking forth after its way in a soulful smile.
I hope my readers are not tired of the mention of Gibbie’s smiles: I
can hardly avoid it; they were all Gibbie had for the small coin of
intercourse; and if my readers care to be just, they will please to
remember that they have been spared many a _he said_ and _she said_.
Unhappily for me there is no way of giving the delicate differences of
those smiles. Much of what Gibbie perhaps felt the more that he could
not say it, had got into the place where the smiles are made, and,
like a variety of pollens, had impregnated them with all shades and
colours of expression, whose varied significance those who had known
him longest, dividing and distinguishing, had gone far towards being
able to interpret. In that which now shone on Mrs. Sclater, there was
something, she said the next day to a friend, which no woman could
resist, and which must come of his gentle blood. If she could have seen
a few of his later ancestors at least, she would have doubted if they
had anything to do with that smile beyond its mere transmission from
“the first stock-father of gentleness.” She responded, and from that
moment the lady and the shepherd lad were friends.

Now that a real introduction had taken place between them, and in her
answering smile Gibbie had met the lady herself, he proceeded, in
most natural sequence, without the smallest shyness or suspicion of
rudeness, to make himself acquainted with the phenomena presenting her.
As he would have gazed upon a rainbow, trying perhaps to distinguish
the undistinguishable in the meeting and parting of its colours, only
that here behind was the all-powerful love of his own, he began to
examine the lady’s face and form, dwelling and contemplating with eyes
innocent as any baby’s. This lasted; but did not last long before it
began to produce in the lady a certain uncertain embarrassment, a
something she did not quite understand, therefore could not account
for, and did not like. Why should she mind eyes such as those making
acquaintance with what a whole congregation might see any Sunday at
church, or for that matter, the whole city on Monday, if it pleased to
look upon her as she walked shopping in Pearl-street? Why indeed? Yet
she began to grow restless, and feel as if she wanted to let down her
veil. She could have risen and left the room, but she had “no notion”
of being thus put to flight by her bear-cub; she was ashamed that a
woman of her age and experience should be so foolish; and besides, she
wanted to come to an understanding with herself as to what herself
meant by it. She did not feel that the boy was rude; she was not angry
with him as with one taking a liberty; yet she did wish he would not
look at her like that; and presently she was relieved.

Her hands, which had been lying all the time in her lap, white upon
black, had at length drawn and fixed Gibbie’s attention. They were very
lady-like hands, long-fingered, and with the orthodox long-oval nails,
each with a quarter segment of a pale rising moon at the root--hands
nearly faultless, and, I suspect, considered by their owner entirely
such--but a really faultless hand, who has ever seen?--To Gibbie’s eyes
they were such beautiful things, that, after a moment or two spent in
regarding them across the length of the hairy hearthrug, he got up,
took his footstool, crossed with it to the other side of the fire, set
it down by Mrs. Sclater, and reseated himself. Without moving more than
her fine neck, she looked down on him curiously, wondering what would
come next; and what did come next was, that he laid one of his hands on
one of those that lay in the satin lap; then, struck with the contrast
between them, burst out laughing. But he neither withdrew his hand,
nor showed the least shame of the hard, brown, tarry-seamed, strong,
though rather small prehensile member, with its worn and blackened
nails, but let it calmly remain outspread, side by side with the white,
shapely, spotless, gracious and graceful thing, adorned, in sign of
the honour it possessed in being the hand of Mrs. Sclater,--it was her
favourite hand,--with a half hoop of fine blue-green turkises, and a
limpid activity of many diamonds. She laughed also--who could have
helped it? that laugh would have set silver bells ringing in responsive
sympathy!--and patted the lumpy thing which, odd as the fact might
be, was also called a hand, with short little pecking pats; she did
not altogether like touching so painful a degeneracy from the ideal.
But his very evident admiration of hers, went far to reconcile her to
his,--as was but right, seeing a man’s admirations go farther to denote
him truly, than the sort of hands or feet either he may happen to have
received from this or that vanished ancestor. Still she found his
presence--more than his proximity--discomposing, and was glad when Mr.
Sclater, who, I forgot to mention, had left the room, returned and took
Gibbie away to show him his, and instruct him what changes he must make
upon his person in preparation for dinner.

When Mrs. Sclater went to bed that night she lay awake a good while
thinking, and her main thought was--what could be the nature of the
peculiar feeling which the stare of the boy had roused in her? Nor
was it long before she began to suspect that, unlike her hand beside
his, she showed to some kind of disadvantage beside the shepherd lad.
Was it dissatisfaction then with herself that his look had waked? She
was aware of nothing in which she had failed or been in the wrong
of late. She never did anything to be called wrong--by herself,
that is, or indeed by her neighbours. She had never done anything
_very_ wrong, she thought; and anything wrong she had done, was now
far away and so nearly forgotten, that it seemed to have left her
almost quite innocent; yet the look of those blue eyes, searching,
searching, without seeming to know it, made her feel something like
the discomfort of a dream of expected visitors, with her house not
quite in a condition to receive them. She must see to her hidden house.
She must take dust-pan and broom and go about a little. For there are
purifications in which king and cowboy must each serve himself. The
things that come out of a man are they that defile him, and to get
rid of them, a man must go into himself, be a convict, and scrub the
floor of his cell. Mrs. Sclater’s cell was very tidy and respectable
for a cell, but no human consciousness can be _clean_, until it lies
wide open to the eternal sun, and the all-potent wind; until, from a
dim-lighted cellar it becomes a mountain-top.




CHAPTER XLI.

INITIATION.

Mrs. Sclater’s first piece of business the following morning was to
take Gibbie to the most fashionable tailor in the city, and have him
measured for such clothes as she judged suitable for a gentleman’s
son. As they went through the streets, going and returning, the
handsome lady walking with the youth in the queer country-made clothes,
attracted no little attention, and most of the inhabitants who saw
them, having by this time heard of the sudden importance of their
old acquaintance, wee Sir Gibbie, and the search after him, were not
long in divining the secret of the strange conjunction. But although
Gibbie seemed as much at home with the handsome lady as if she had
been his own mother, and walked by her side with a step and air as
free as the wind from Glashgar, he felt anything but comfortable in
his person. For here and there Tammy Breeks’s seams came too close
to his skin, and there are certain kinds of hardship which, though
the sufferer be capable of the patience of Job, will yet fret. Gibbie
could endure cold or wet or hunger, and sing like a mavis; he had borne
pain upon occasion with at least complete submission; but the tight
arm-holes of his jacket could hardly be such a decree of Providence
as it was rebellion to interfere with; and therefore I do not relate
what follows, as a pure outcome of that benevolence in him which was
yet equal to the sacrifice of the best fitting of garments. As they
walked along Pearl-street, the handsomest street of the city, he
darted suddenly from Mrs. Sclater’s side, and crossed to the opposite
pavement. She stood and looked after him wondering, hitherto he had
broken out in no vagaries! As he ran, worse and worse! he began tugging
at his jacket, and had just succeeded in getting it off as he arrived
at the other side, in time to stop a lad of about his own size, who was
walking bare-footed and in his shirt sleeves--if _shirt_ or _sleeves_
be a term applicable to anything visible upon him. With something of
the air of the tailor who had just been waiting upon himself, but with
as much kindness and attention as if the boy had been Donal Grant
instead of a stranger, he held the jacket for him to put on. The lad
lost no time in obeying, gave him one look and nod of gratitude, and
ran down a flight of steps to a street below, never doubting his
benefactor an idiot, and dreading some one to whom he belonged would
be after him presently to reclaim the gift. Mrs. Sclater saw the
proceeding with some amusement and a little foreboding. She did not
mourn the fate of the jacket; had it been the one she had just ordered,
or anything like it, the loss would have been to her not insignificant:
but was the boy altogether in his right mind? She in her black satin
on the opposite pavement, and the lad scudding down the stair in the
jacket, were of similar mind concerning the boy, who, in shirt sleeves
indubitable, now came bounding back across the wide street. He took
his place by her side as if nothing had happened, only that he went
along swinging his arms as if he had just been delivered from manacles.
Having for so many years roamed the streets with scarcely any clothes
at all, he had no idea of looking peculiar, and thought nothing more of
the matter.

But Mrs. Sclater soon began to find that even in regard to social
externals, she could never have had a readier pupil. He watched her
so closely, and with such an appreciation of the difference in things
of the kind between her and her husband, that for a short period he
was in danger of falling into habits of movement and manipulation
too dainty for a man, a fault happily none the less objectionable in
the eyes of his instructress, that she, on her own part, carried the
feminine a little beyond the limits of the natural. But here also she
found him so readily set right, that she imagined she was going to
do anything with him she pleased, and was not a little proud of her
conquest, and the power she had over the young savage. She had yet to
discover that Gibbie had his own ideas too, that it was the general
noble teachableness and affection of his nature that had brought about
so speedy an understanding between them in everything wherein he saw
she could show him the better way, but that nowhere else would he
feel bound or inclined to follow her injunctions. Much and strongly
as he was drawn to her by her ladyhood, and the sense she gave him
of refinement and familiarity with the niceties, he had no feeling
that she had authority over him. So neglected in his childhood, so
absolutely trusted by the cottagers, who had never found in him the
slightest occasion for the exercise of authority, he had not an idea
of owing obedience to any but the One. Gifted from the first with a
heart of devotion, the will of the Master set the will of the boy
upon the throne of service, and what he had done from inclination
he was now capable of doing against it, and would most assuredly do
against it if ever occasion should arise: what other obedience was
necessary to his perfection? For his father and mother and Donal he had
reverence--profound and tender, and for no one else as yet among men;
but at the same time something far beyond respect for every human shape
and show. He would not, could not make any of the social distinctions
which to Mr. and Mrs. Sclater seemed to belong to existence itself,
and their recognition essential to the living of their lives; whence
it naturally resulted that upon occasion he seemed to them devoid of
the first rudiments of breeding, without respect or any notion of
subordination.

Mr. Sclater was conscientious in his treatment of him. The very day
following that of their arrival, he set to work with him. He had been a
tutor, was a good scholar, and a sensible teacher, and soon discovered
how to make the most of Gibbie’s facility in writing. He was already
possessed of a little Latin, and after having for some time accustomed
him to translate from each language into the other, the minister began
to think it might be of advantage to learning in general, if at least
half the boys and girls at school, and three parts of every Sunday
congregation, were as dumb as Sir Gilbert Galbraith. When at length
he set him to Greek, he was astonished at the avidity with which he
learned it! He had hardly got him over _τύπτω_, when he found him one
day so intent upon the Greek Testament, that, exceptionally keen of
hearing as he was, he was quite unaware that anyone had entered the
room.

What Gibbie made of Mr. Sclater’s prayers, either in congregational or
family devotion, I am at some loss to imagine. Beside his memories of
the direct fervid outpouring and appeal of Janet, in which she seemed
to talk face to face with God, they must have seemed to him like the
utterances of some curiously constructed wooden automaton, doing its
best to pray, without any soul to be saved, any weakness to be made
strong, any doubt to be cleared, any hunger to be filled. What can be
less like religion than the prayers of a man whose religion is his
profession, and who, if he were not “in the church,” would probably
never pray at all? Gibbie, however, being the reverse of critical,
must, I can hardly doubt, have seen in them a good deal more than was
there--a pitiful faculty to the man who cultivates that of seeing in
everything less than is there.

To Mrs. Sclater, it was at first rather depressing, and for a time
grew more and more painful, to have a live silence by her side. But
when she came into rapport with the natural utterance of the boy, his
presence grew more like a constant speech, and that which was best in
her was not unfrequently able to say for the boy what he would have
said could he have spoken: the nobler part of her nature was in secret
alliance with the thoughts and feelings of Gibbie. But this relation
between them, though perceptible, did not become at all plain to her
until after she had established more definite means of communication.
Gibbie, for his part, full of the holy simplicities of the cottage, had
a good many things to meet which disappointed, perplexed, and shocked
him. Middling good people are shocked at the wickedness of the wicked;
Gibbie, who knew both so well, and what ought to be expected, was
shocked only at the wickedness of the righteous. He never came quite
to understand Mr. Sclater: the inconsistent never can be _understood_.
That only which has absolute reason in it can be understood of man.
There is a bewilderment about the very nature of evil which only he who
made us capable of evil that we might be good, can comprehend.




CHAPTER XLII.

DONAL’S LODGING.

Donal had not accompanied Mr. Sclater and his ward, as he generally
styled him, to the city, but continued at the Mains until another
herd-boy should be found to take his place. All were sorry to part
with him, but no one desired to stand in the way of his good fortune
by claiming his service to the end of his half-year. It was about a
fortnight after Gibbie’s departure when he found himself free. His last
night he spent with his parents on Glashgar, and the next morning set
out in the moonlight to join the coach, with some cakes and a bit of
fresh butter tied up in a cotton handkerchief. He wept at leaving them,
nor was too much excited with the prospect before him to lay up his
mother’s parting words in his heart. For it is not every son that will
not learn of his mother. He who will not goes to the school of Gideon.
Those last words of Janet to her Donal were, “Noo, min’ yer no a win’le
strae (_a straw dried on its root_), but a growin’ stalk ’at maun luik
till ’ts corn.”

When he reached the spot appointed, there already was the cart from
the Mains, with his _kist_ containing all his earthly possessions.
They did not half fill it, and would have tumbled about in the great
chest, had not the bounty of Mistress Jean complemented its space with
provision--a cheese, a bag of oatmeal, some oatcakes, and a pound or
two of the best butter in the world; for now that he was leaving them,
a herd-boy no more, but a _colliginer_, and going to be a gentleman, it
was right to be liberal. The box, whose ponderosity was unintelligible
to its owner, having been hoisted, amid the smiles of the passengers,
to the mid region of the roof of the coach, Donal clambered after
it, and took, for the first time in his life, his place behind four
horses--to go softly rushing through the air towards endless liberty.
It was to the young poet an hour of glorious birth--in which there
seemed nothing too strange, nothing but what should have come. I fancy,
when they die, many will find themselves more at home than ever they
were in this world. But Donal is not the subject of my story, and I
must not spend upon him. I will only say that his feelings on this
grand occasion were the less satisfactory to himself, that, not being
poet merely, but philosopher as well, he sought to understand them:
the mere poet, the man-bird, would have been content with them in
themselves. But if he who is both does not rise above both by learning
obedience, he will have a fine time of it between them.

The streets of the city at length received them with noise and echo. At
the coach-office Mr. Sclater stood waiting, welcomed him with dignity
rather than kindness, hired a porter with his truck whom he told where
to take the chest, said Sir Gilbert would doubtless call on him the
next day, and left him with the porter.

It was a cold afternoon, the air half mist, half twilight. Donal
followed the rattling, bumping truck over the stones, walking close
behind it, almost in the gutter. They made one turning, went a long way
through the narrow, sometimes crowded, Widdiehill, and stopped. The
man opened a door, returned to the truck, and began to pull the box
from it. Donal gave him effective assistance, and they entered with it
between them. There was just light enough from a tallow candle with a
wick like a red-hot mushroom, to see that they were in what appeared to
Donal a house in most appalling disorder, but was in fact a furniture
shop. The porter led the way up a dark stair, and Donal followed with
his end of the trunk. At the top was a large room, into which the last
of the day glimmered through windows covered with the smoke and dust of
years, showing this also full of furniture, chiefly old. A lane through
the furniture led along the room to a door at the other end. To Donal’s
eyes it looked a dreary place; but when the porter opened the other
door, he saw a neat little room with a curtained bed, a carpeted floor,
a fire burning in the grate, a kettle on the hob, and the table laid
for tea: this was like a bit of a palace, for he had never in his life
even looked into such a chamber. The porter set down his end of the
chest, said “Guid nicht to ye,” and walked out, leaving the door open.

Knowing nothing about towns and the ways of them, Donal was yet a
little surprised that there was nobody to receive him. He approached
the fire, and sat down to warm himself, taking care not to set his
hobnailed shoes on the grandeur of the little hearthrug. A few moments
and he was startled by a slight noise, as of suppressed laughter. He
jumped up. One of the curtains of his bed was strangely agitated. Out
leaped Gibbie from behind it, and threw his arms about him.

“Eh, cratur! ye gae me sic a fleg!” said Donal. “But, losh! they hae
made a gentleman o’ ye a’ready!” he added, holding him at arm’s length,
and regarding him with wonder and admiration.

A notable change had indeed passed upon Gibbie, mere externals
considered, in that fortnight. He was certainly not so picturesque as
before, yet the alteration was entirely delightful to Donal. Perhaps
he felt it gave a good hope for the future of his own person. Mrs.
Sclater had had his hair cut; his shirt was of the whitest of linen,
his necktie of the richest of black silk, his clothes were of the
newest cut and best possible fit, and his boots perfect: the result was
altogether even to her satisfaction. In one thing only was she foiled:
she could not get him to wear gloves. He had put on a pair, but found
them so miserably uncomfortable that, in merry wrath, he pulled them
off on the way home, and threw them--“The best kid!” exclaimed Mrs.
Sclater--over the Pearl Bridge. Prudently fearful of over-straining her
influence, she yielded for the present, and let him go without.

Mr. Sclater also had hitherto exercised prudence in his demands upon
Gibbie--not that he desired anything less than unlimited authority with
him, but, knowing it would be hard to enforce, he sought to establish
it by a gradual tightening of the rein, a slow encroachment of law
upon the realms of disordered license. He had never yet refused to
do anything he required of him, had executed entirely the tasks he
set him, was more than respectful, and always ready; yet somehow Mr.
Sclater could never feel that the lad was exactly obeying him. He
thought it over, but could not understand it, and did not like it, for
he was fond of authority. Gibbie in fact did whatever was required
of him from his own delight in meeting the wish expressed, not from
any sense of duty or of obligation to obedience. The minister had no
perception of what the boy was, and but a very small capacity for
appreciating what was best in him, and had a foreboding suspicion that
the time would come when they would differ.

He had not told him that he was going to meet the coach, but Gibbie was
glad to learn from Mrs. Sclater that such was his intention, for he
preferred meeting Donal at his lodging. He had recognized the place at
once from the minister’s mention of it to his wife, having known the
shop and its owner since ever he could remember himself. He loitered
near until he saw Donal arrive, then crept after him and the porter up
the stair, and when Donal sat down by the fire, got into the room and
behind the curtain.

The boys had then a jolly time of it. They made their tea, for which
everything was present, and ate as boys know how, Donal enjoying the
rarity of the white bread of the city, Gibbie, who had not tasted
oatmeal since he came, devouring “mother’s cakes.” When they had done,
Gibbie, who had learned much since he came, looked about the room till
he found a bell-rope, and pulled it, whereupon the oddest-looking old
woman, not a hair altered from what Gibbie remembered her, entered,
and, with friendly chatter, proceeded to remove the tray. Suddenly
something arrested her, and she began to regard Gibbie with curious
looks; in a moment she was sure of him, and a torrent of exclamations
and reminiscences and appeals followed, which lasted, the two lads now
laughing, now all but crying for nearly an hour, while, all the time,
the old woman kept doing and undoing about the hearth and the tea
table. Donal asked many questions about his friend, and she answered
freely, except as often as one approached his family, when she would
fall silent, and bustle about as if she had not heard. Then Gibbie
would look thoughtful and strange and a little sad, and a far-away gaze
would come into his eyes, as if he were searching for his father in the
other world.

When the good woman at length left them, they uncorded Donal’s kist,
discovered the cause of its portentous weight, took out everything, put
the provisions in a cupboard, arranged the few books, and then sat down
by the fire for “a read” together.

The hours slipped away; it was night; and still they sat and read. It
must have been after ten o’ clock when they heard footsteps coming
through the adjoining room; the door opened swiftly; in walked Mr.
Sclater, and closed it behind him. His look was angry--severe enough
for boys caught card-playing, or drinking, or reading something that
was not divinity on a Sunday. Gibbie had absented himself without
permission, had stayed away for hours, had not returned even when the
hour of worship arrived; and these were sins against the respectability
of his house which no minister like Mr. Sclater could pass by. It
mattered nothing what they were doing! it was all one when it got to
midnight! then it became revelling, and was sinful and dangerous,
vulgar and ungentlemanly, giving the worst possible example to those
beneath them! What could their landlady think?--the very first
night?--and a lodger whom he had recommended? Such was the sort of
thing with which Mr. Sclater overwhelmed the two boys. Donal would
have pleaded in justification, or at least excuse, but he silenced him
peremptorily. I suspect there had been some difference between Mrs.
Sclater and him just before he left: how otherwise could he have so
entirely forgotten his wise resolves anent Gibbie’s gradual subjugation?

When first he entered, Gibbie rose with his usual smile of greeting,
and got him a chair. But he waved aside the attention with indignant
indifference, and went on with his foolish reproof--unworthy of record
except for Gibbie’s following behaviour. Beaten down by the suddenness
of the storm, Donal had never risen from his chair, but sat glowering
into the fire. He was annoyed, vexed, half-ashamed; with that readiness
of the poetic nature to fit itself to any position, especially one
suggested by an unjust judgment, he felt, with the worthy parson thus
storming at him, almost as if guilty in everything laid to their
joint charge. Gibbie on his feet looked the minister straight in the
face. His smile of welcome, which had suddenly mingled itself with
bewilderment, gradually faded into one of concern, then of pity, and by
degrees died away altogether, leaving in its place a look of question.
More and more settled his countenance grew, while all the time he never
took his eyes off Mr. Sclater’s, until its expression at length was
that of pitiful unconscious reproof, mingled with sympathetic shame.
He had never met anything like this before. Nothing low like this--for
all injustice, and especially all that sort of thing which Janet called
“dingin’ the motes wi’ the beam,” is eternally low--had Gibbie seen
in the holy temple of Glashgar! He had no way of understanding or
interpreting it save by calling to his aid the sad knowledge of evil,
gathered in his earliest years. Except in the laird and Fergus and
the gamekeeper, he had not, since fleeing from Lucky Croale’s houff,
seen a trace of unreasonable anger in any one he knew. Robert or Janet
had never scolded him. He might go and come as he pleased. The night
was sacred as the day in that dear house. His father, even when most
overcome by the wicked thing, had never scolded him!

The boys remaining absolutely silent, the minister had it all his own
way. But before he had begun to draw to a close, across the blinding
mists of his fog-breeding wrath he began to be aware of the shining
of two heavenly lights, the eyes, namely, of the dumb boy fixed upon
him. They jarred him a little in his onward course; they shook him as
if with a doubt; the feeling undefined slowly grew to a notion, first
obscure, then plain: they were eyes of reproof that were fastened upon
his! At the first suspicion, his anger flared up more fierce than
ever; but it was a flare of a doomed flame; slowly the rebuke told,
was telling; the self-satisfied _in-the-rightness_--a very different
thing from _righteousness_--of the man was sinking before the innocent
difference of the boy; he began to feel awkward, he hesitated, he
ceased: for the moment Gibbie, unconsciously, had conquered; without
knowing it, he was the superior of the two, and Mr. Sclater had begun
to learn that he could never exercise authority over him. But the
wordly-wise man will not seem to be defeated even where he knows he
is. If he do give in, he will make it look as if it came of the proper
motion of his own goodness. After a slight pause, the minister spoke
again, but with the changed tone of one who has had an apology made to
him, whose anger is appeased, and who therefore acts the Neptune over
the billows of his own sea. That was the way he would slide out of it.

“Donal Grant,” he said, “you had better go to bed at once, and get fit
for your work to-morrow. I will go with you to call upon the principal.
Take care you are not out of the way when I come for you.--Get your
cap, Sir Gilbert, and come. Mrs. Sclater was already very uneasy about
you when I left her.”

Gibbie took from his pocket the little ivory tablets Mrs. Sclater had
given him, wrote the following words, and handed them to the minister:

“Dear sir, I am going to slepe this night with Donal. The bed is bigg
enuf for 2. Good night, sir.”

For a moment the minister’s wrath seethed again. Like a volcano,
however, that has sent out a puff of steam, but holds back its lava,
he thought better of it: here was a chance of retiring with grace--in
well-conducted retreat, instead of headlong rout.

“Then be sure you are home by lesson-time,” he said. “Donal can come
with you. Good night. Mind you don’t keep each other awake.”

Donal said “Good night, sir,” and Gibbie gave him a serious and
respectful nod. He left the room, and the boys turned and looked at
each other. Donal’s countenance expressed an indignant sense of wrong,
but Gibbie’s revealed a more profound concern. He stood motionless,
intent on the receding steps of the minister. The moment the sound
of them ceased, he darted soundless after him. Donal, who from Mr.
Sclater’s reply had understood what Gibbie had written, was astonished,
and starting to his feet followed him. By the time he reached the
door, Gibbie was past the second lamp, his shadow describing a huge
half-circle around him, as he stole from lamp to lamp after the
minister, keeping always a lamp-post still between them. When the
minister turned a corner, Gibbie made a soundless dart to it, and
peeped round, lingered a moment looking, then followed again. On and
on went Mr. Sclater, and on and on went Gibbie, careful constantly
not to be seen by him; and on and on went Donal, careful to be seen
of neither. They went a long way as he thought, for to the country
boy distance between houses seemed much greater than between dykes or
hedges. At last the minister went up the steps of a handsome house,
took a key from his pocket, and opened the door. From some impulse or
other, as he stepped in, he turned sharp round, and saw Gibbie.

“Come in,” he said, in a loud authoritative tone, probably taking the
boy’s appearance for the effect of repentance and a desire to return to
his own bed.

Gibbie lifted his cap, and walked quietly on towards the other end of
Daur-street. Donal dared not follow, for Mr. Sclater stood between,
looking out. Presently however the door shut with a great bang, and
Donal was after Gibbie like a hound. But Gibbie had turned a corner,
and was gone from his sight. Donal turned a corner too, but it was a
wrong corner. Concluding that Gibbie had turned another corner ahead of
him, he ran on and on, in the vanishing hope of catching sight of him
again; but he was soon satisfied he had lost him,--nor him only, but
himself as well, for he had not the smallest idea how to return, even
as far as the minister’s house. It rendered the matter considerably
worse that, having never heard the name of the street where he lodged
but once--when the minister gave direction to the porter, he had
utterly forgotten it. So there he was, out in the night, astray in the
streets of a city of many tens of thousands, in which he had never till
that day set foot--never before having been in any larger abode of men
than a scattered village of thatched roofs. But he was not tired, and
so long as a man is not tired, he can do well, even in pain. But a city
is a dreary place at night, even to one who knows his way in it--much
drearier to one lost--in some respects drearier than a heath--except
there be old mine-shafts in it.

“It’s as gien a’ the birds o’ a country had creepit intil their bit
eggs again, an’ the day was left bare o’ sang!” said the poet to
himself as he walked. Night amongst houses was a new thing to him.
Night on the hillsides and in the fields he knew well; but this was
like a place of tombs--what else, when all were dead for the night? The
night is the world’s graveyard, and the cities are its catacombs. He
repeated to himself all his own few ballads, then repeated them aloud
as he walked, indulging the fancy that he had a long audience on each
side of him; but he dropped into silence the moment any night-wanderer
appeared. Presently he found himself on the shore of the river, and
tried to get to the edge of the water; but it was low tide, the lamps
did not throw much light so far, the moon was clouded, he got among
logs and mud, and regained the street bemired, and beginning to feel
weary. He was saying to himself what ever was he to do all the night
long, when round a corner a little way off came a woman. It was no use
asking counsel of her, however, or of anyone, he thought, so long as he
did not know even the name of the street he wanted--a street which as
he walked along it had seemed interminable. The woman drew near. She
was rather tall, erect in the back, but bowed in the shoulders, with
fierce black eyes, which were all that he could see of her face, for
she had a little tartan shawl over her head, which she held together
with one hand, while in the other she carried a basket. But those eyes
were enough to make him fancy he must have seen her before. They were
just passing each other, under a lamp, when she looked hard at him, and
stopped.

“Man,” she said, “I hae set e’en upo’ _your_ face afore!”

“Gien that be the case,” answered Donal, “ye set e’en upo’ ’t again.”

“Whaur come ye frae?” she asked.

“That’s what I wad fain speir mysel’,” he replied. “But, wuman,” he
went on, “I fancy I hae set e’en upo’ your e’en afore--I canna weel say
for yer face. Whaur come _ye_ frae?”

“Ken ye a place they ca’--Daurside?” she rejoined.

“Daurside’s a gey lang place,” answered Donal; “an’ this maun be aboot
the tae en’ o’ ’t, I’m thinkin’.”

“Ye’re no far wrang there,” she returned; “an’ ye hae a gey gleg tongue
i’ yer heid for a laad frae Daurside.”

“I never h’ard ’at tongues war cuttit shorter there nor ither gaits,”
said Donal; “but I didna mean ye ony offence.”

“There’s nane ta’en, nor like to be,” answered the woman.--“Ken ye a
place they ca’ Mains o’ Glashruach?”

As she spoke she let go her shawl, and it opened from her face like two
curtains.

“Lord! it’s the witch-wife!” cried Donal, retreating a pace in his
astonishment.

The woman burst into a great laugh, a hard, unmusical, but not
unmirthful laugh.

“Ay!” she said, “was that hoo the fowk wad hae ’t o’ me?”

“It wasna muckle won’er, efter ye cam wydin’ throu’ watter yairds deep,
an’ syne gaed doon the spate on a bran’er.”

“Weel, it was the maddest thing!” she returned, with another laugh
which stopped abruptly. “--I wadna dee the like again to save my life.
But the Michty cairried me throu’.--An’ hoo’s wee Sir Gibbie?--Come
in--I dinna ken yer name--but we’re jist at the door o’ my bit garret.
Come quaiet up the stair, an’ tell me a’ aboot it.”

“Weel, I wadna be sorry to rist a bit, for I hae tint mysel’
a’thegither, an’ I’m some tiret,” answered Donal. “I but left the Mains
thestreen.”

“Come in an’ walcome; an whan ye’re ristit, an’ I’m rid o’ my basket,
I’ll sune pit ye i’ the gait o’ hame.”

Donal was too tired, and too glad to be once more in the company of a
human being, to pursue further explanation at present. He followed her,
as quietly as he could, up the dark stair. When she struck a light, he
saw a little garret-room--better than decently furnished, it seemed to
the youth from the hills, though his mother would have thought it far
from tidy. The moment the woman got a candle lighted, she went to a
cupboard, and brought thence a bottle and a glass. When Donal declined
the whisky she poured out, she seemed disappointed, and setting down
the glass, let it stand. But when she had seated herself, and begun to
relate her adventures in quest of Gibbie, she drew it towards her, and
sipped as she talked. Some day she would tell him, she said, the whole
story of her voyage on the brander, which would make him laugh; it made
her laugh, even now, when it came back to her in her bed at night,
though she was far enough from laughing at the time. Then she told him
a great deal about Gibbie and his father.

“An’ noo,” remarked Donal, “he’ll be thinkin’ ’t a’ ower again, as he
rins aboot the toon this verra meenute, luikin’ for me!”

“Dinna ye trible yersel’ aboot him,” said the woman. “He kens the toon
as weel ’s ony rottan kens the drains o’ ’t.--But whaur div ye pit up?”
she added, “for it’s time dacent fowk was gauin’ to their beds.”

Donal explained that he knew neither the name of the street nor of the
people where he was lodging.

“Tell me this or that--something--onything aboot the hoose or the fowk,
or what they’re like, an’ it may be ’at I’ll ken them,” she said.

But scarcely had he begun his description of the house when she cried,

“Hoots, man! it’s at Lucky Murkison’s ye are, i’ the Wuddiehill. Come
awa, an’ I s’ tak ye hame in a jiffey.”

So saying, she rose, took the candle, showed him down the stair, and
followed.

It was past midnight, and the moon was down, but the street-lamps
were not yet extinguished, and they walked along without anything to
interrupt their conversation--chiefly about Sir Gibbie and Sir George.
But perhaps if Donal had known the cause of Gibbie’s escape from the
city, and that the dread thing had taken place in this woman’s house,
he would not have walked quite so close to her.

Poor Mistress Croale, however, had been nowise to blame for that, and
the shock it gave her had even done something to check the rate of
her downhill progress. It let her see, with a lightning flash from
the pit, how wide the rent now yawned between her and her former
respectability. She continued, as we know, to drink whisky, and was
not unfrequently overcome by it; but in her following life as peddler,
she measured her madness more; and, much in the open air and walking a
great deal, with a basket sometimes heavy, her indulgence did her less
physical harm; her temper recovered a little, she regained a portion
of her self-command; and at the close of those years of wandering,
she was less of a ruin, both mentally and spiritually, than at their
commencement.

When she received her hundred pounds for the finding of Sir Gibbie, she
rented a little shop in the gallery of the market, where she sold such
things as she had carried about the country, adding to her stock, upon
the likelihood of demand, without respect to unity either conventional
or real, in the character of the wares she associated. The interest
and respectability of this new start in life, made a little fresh
opposition to the inroads of her besetting sin; so that now she did not
consume as much whisky in three days as she did in one when she had
her _houff_ on the shore. Some people seem to have been drinking all
their lives, of necessity getting more and more into the power of the
enemy, but without succumbing at a rapid rate, having even their times
of uplifting and betterment. Mistress Croale’s complexion was a little
clearer; her eyes were less fierce; her expression was more composed;
some of the women who, like her, had shops in the market, had grown a
little friendly with her; and, which was of more valuable significance,
she had come to be not a little regarded by the poor women of the lower
parts behind the market, who were in the way of dealing with her. For
the moment a customer of this class, and she had but few of any other,
appeared at her shop, or covered stall, rather, she seemed in spirit to
go outside the counter and buy with her, giving her the best counsel
she had, now advising the cheaper, now the dearer of two articles;
while now and then one could tell of having been sent by her to another
shop, where, in the particular case, she could do better. A love of
affairs, no doubt, bore a part in this peculiarity, but there is all
the difference between the two ways of embodying activity--to one’s
own advantage only, and--to the advantage of one’s neighbour as well.
For my part, if I knew a woman behaved to her neighbours as Mistress
Croale did to hers, were she the worst of drunkards in between, I could
not help both respecting and loving her. Alas that such virtue is so
portentously scarce! There are so many that are sober for one that is
honest! Deep are the depths of social degradation to which the clean,
purifying light yet reaches, and lofty are the heights of social honour
where yet the light is nothing but darkness. Any thoughtful person who
knew Mistress Croale’s history, would have feared much for her, and
hoped a little: her so-called fate was still undecided. In the mean
time she made a living, did not get into debt, spent an inordinate
portion of her profits in drink, but had regained and was keeping up a
kind and measure of respectability.

Before they reached the Widdiehill, Donal, with the open heart of the
poet, was full of friendliness to her, and rejoiced in the mischance
that had led him to make her acquaintance.

“Ye ken, of coorse,” he happened to say, “’at Gibbie’s wi’ Maister
Sclater?”

“Weel eneuch,” she answered. “I hae seen him tee; but he’s a gran’
gentleman grown, an’ I wadna like to be affrontit layin’ claim till ’s
acquaintance,--walcome as he ance was to my hoose!”

She had more reason for the doubt and hesitation she thus expressed
than Donal knew. But his answer was none the less the true one as
regarded his friend.

“Ye little ken Gibbie,” he said “gien ye think that gait o’ ’im! Gang
ye to the minister’s door and speir for ’im! He’ll be doon the stair
like a shot.--But ’deed maybe he’s come back, an’ ’s i’ my chaumer the
noo! Ye’ll come up the stair an’ see?”

“Na, I wunna dee that,” said Mistress Croale, who did not wish to face
Mistress Murkison, well known to her in the days of her comparative
prosperity.

She pointed out the door to him, but herself stood on the other side of
the way till she saw it opened by her old friend in her night-cap, and
heard her make jubilee over his return.

Gibbie had come home and gone out again to look for him, she said.

“Weel,” remarked Donal, “there wad be sma’ guid in my gaein’ to luik
for him. It wad be but the sheep gaein’ to luik for the shepherd.”

“Ye’re richt there,” said his landlady. “A tint bairn sud aye sit doon
an’ sit still.”

“Weel, ye gang till yer bed, mem,” returned Donal. “Lat me see hoo yer
door works, an’ I’ll lat him in whan he comes.”

Gibbie came within an hour, and all was well. They made their
communication, of which Donal’s was far the more interesting, had their
laugh over the affair, and went to bed.




CHAPTER XLIII.

THE MINISTER’S DEFEAT.

The minister’s wrath, when he found he had been followed home by
Gibbie who yet would not enter the house, instantly rose in redoubled
strength. He was ashamed to report the affair to Mrs. Sclater just as
it had passed. He was but a married old bachelor, and fancied he must
keep up his dignity in the eyes of his wife, not having yet learned
that, if a man be true, his friends and lovers will see to his dignity.
So his anger went on smouldering all night long, and all through his
sleep, without a touch of cool assuagement, and in the morning he
rose with his temper very feverish. During breakfast he was gloomy,
but would confess to no inward annoyance. What added to his unrest
was, that, although he felt insulted, he did not know what precisely
the nature of the insult was. Even in his wrath he could scarcely set
down Gibbie’s following of him to a glorying mockery of his defeat.
Doubtless, for a man accustomed to deal with affairs, to rule over a
parish--for one who generally had his way in the kirk-session, and to
whom his wife showed becoming respect, it was scarcely fitting that
the rude behaviour of an ignorant country dummy should affect him so
much: he ought to have been above such injury. But the lad whom he so
regarded, had first with his mere looks lowered him in his own eyes,
then showed himself beyond the reach of his reproof by calmly refusing
to obey him, and then became unintelligible by following him like a
creature over whom surveillance was needful! The more he thought of
this last, the more inexplicable it seemed to become, except on the
notion of deliberate insult. And the worst was, that henceforth he
could expect to have no power at all over the boy! If it was like this
already, how would it be in the time to come? If, on the other hand, he
were to re-establish his authority at the cost of making the boy hate
him, then, the moment he was of age, his behaviour would be that of a
liberated enemy: he would go straight to the dogs, and his money with
him!--The man of influence and scheme did well to be annoyed.

Gibbie made his appearance at ten o’clock, and went straight to the
study, where at that hour the minister was always waiting him. He
entered with his own smile, bending his head in morning salutation. The
minister said “Good morning,” but gruffly, and without raising his eyes
from the last publication of the Spalding Club. Gibbie seated himself
in his usual place, arranged his book and slate, and was ready to
commence--when the minister, having now summoned resolution, lifted his
head, fixed his eyes on him, and said sternly--

“Sir Gilbert, what was your meaning in following me, after refusing to
accompany me?”

Gibbie’s face flushed. Mr. Sclater believed he saw him for the first
time ashamed of himself; his hope rose; his courage grew; he augured
victory and a re-established throne: he gathered himself up in dignity,
prepared to overwhelm him. But Gibbie showed no hesitation; he took his
slate instantly, found his pencil, wrote, and handed the slate to the
minister. There stood these words:

“I thought you was drunnk.”

Mr. Sclater started to his feet, the hand which held the offending
document uplifted, his eyes flaming, his checks white with passion,
and with the flat of the slate came down a great blow on the top of
Gibbie’s head. Happily the latter was the harder of the two, and the
former broke, flying mostly out of the frame. It took Gibbie terribly
by surprise. Half-stunned, he started to his feet, and for one moment
the wild beast which was in him, as it is in everybody, rushed to the
front of its cage. It would have gone ill then with the minister, had
not as sudden a change followed; the very same instant, it was as if an
invisible veil, woven of gracious air and odour and dew, had descended
upon him; the flame of his wrath went out, quenched utterly; a smile
of benignest compassion overspread his countenance; in his offender
he saw only a brother. But Mr. Sclater saw no brother before him, for
when Gibbie rose he drew back to better his position, and so doing
made it an awkard one indeed. For it happened occasionally that, the
study being a warm room, Mrs. Sclater, on a winter evening, sat there
with her husband, whence it came that on the floor squatted a low
foot-stool, subject to not unfrequent clerical imprecation: when he
stepped back, he trod on the edge of it, stumbled, and fell. Gibbie
darted forward. A part of the minister’s body rested upon the stool,
and its elevation, made the first movement necessary to rising rather
difficult, so that he could not at once get off his back.

What followed was the strangest act for a Scotch boy, but it must be
kept in mind how limited were his means of expression. He jumped over
the prostrate minister, who the next moment seeing his face bent over
him from behind, and seized, like the gamekeeper, with suspicion born
of his violence, raised his hands to defend himself, and made a blow
at him. Gibbie avoided it, laid hold of his arms inside each elbow,
clamped them to the floor, kissed him on forehead and cheek, and began
to help him up like a child.

Having regained his legs, the minister stood for a moment, confused and
half-blinded. The first thing he saw was a drop of blood stealing down
Gibbie’s forehead. He was shocked at what he had done. In truth he had
been frightfully provoked, but it was not for a clergyman so to avenge
an insult, and as mere chastisement it was brutal. What would Mrs.
Sclater say to it? The rascal was sure to make his complaint to her!
And there too was his friend, the herd-lad, in the drawing-room with
her!

“Go and wash your face,” he said, “and come back again directly.”

Gibbie put his hand to his face, and feeling something wet, looked, and
burst into a merry laugh.

“I am sorry I have hurt you,” said the minister, not a little relieved
at the sound; “but how dared you write such a--such an insolence? A
clergyman never gets drunk.”

Gibbie picked up the frame which the minister had dropped in his fall:
a piece of the slate was still sticking in one side, and he wrote upon
it:

_I will kno better the next time. I thout it was alwais whisky that
made peeple like that. I begg your pardon, sir._

He handed him the fragment, ran to his own room, returned presently,
looking all right, and when Mr. Sclater would have attended to his
wound, would not let him even look at it, laughing at the idea. Still
further relieved to find there was nothing to attract observation to
the injury, and yet more ashamed of himself, the minister made haste to
the refuge of their work; but it did not require the gleam of the paper
substituted for the slate, to keep him that morning in remembrance of
what he had done; indeed it hovered about him long after the gray of
the new slate had passed into a dark blue.

From that time, after luncheon, which followed immediately upon
lessons, Gibbie went and came as he pleased. Mrs. Sclater begged he
would never be out after ten o’clock without having let them know that
he meant to stay all night with his friend: not once did he neglect
this request, and they soon came to have perfect confidence not only in
any individual promise he might make, but in his general punctuality.
Mrs. Sclater never came to know anything of his wounded head, and it
gave the minister a sharp sting of compunction, as well as increased
his sense of moral inferiority, when he saw that for a fortnight or
so he never took his favourite place at her feet, evidently that she
should not look down on his head.

The same evening they had friends to dinner. Already Gibbie was so
far civilized, as they called it, that he might have sat at any
dining-table without attracting the least attention, but that evening
he attracted a great deal. For he could scarcely eat his own dinner for
watching the needs of those at the table with him, ready to spring from
his chair and supply the least lack. This behaviour naturally harassed
the hostess, and at last, upon one of those occasions, the servants
happening to be out of the room, she called him to her side, and said,

“You were quite right to do that now, Gilbert, but please never do such
a thing when the servants are in the room. It confuses them, and makes
us all uncomfortable.”

Gibbie heard with obedient ear, but took the words as containing
express permission to wait upon the company in the absence of other
ministration. When therefore the servants finally disappeared, as was
the custom there in small households, immediately after placing the
dessert, Gibbie got up, and, much to the amusement of the guests,
waited on them as quite a matter of course. But they would have
wondered could they have looked into the heart of the boy, and beheld
the spirit in which the thing was done, the soil in which was hid
the root of the service; for to him the whole thing was sacred as an
altar-rite to the priest who ministers. Round and round the table,
deft and noiseless, he went, altogether aware of the pleasure of the
thing, not at all of its oddity--which, however, had he understood it
perfectly, he would not in the least have minded.

All this may, both in Gibbie and the narrative, seem trifling, but
I more than doubt whether, until our small services are sweet with
divine affection, our great ones, if such we are capable of, will ever
have the true Christian flavour about them. And then such eagerness to
pounce upon every smallest opportunity of doing the will of the Master,
could not fail to further proficiency in the service throughout.

Presently the ladies rose, and when they had left the room, the host
asked Gibbie to ring the bell. He obeyed with alacrity, and a servant
appeared. She placed the utensils for making and drinking toddy, after
Scotch custom, upon the table. A shadow fell upon the soul of Gibbie:
for the first time since he ran from the city, he saw the well-known
appointments of midnight orgy, associated in his mind with all the
horrors from which he had fled. The memory of old nights in the street,
as he watched for his father, and then helped him home; of his father’s
last prayer, drinking and imploring; of his white, motionless face the
next morning; of the row at Lucky Croale’s, and poor black Sambo’s
gaping throat--all these terrible things came back upon him, as he
stood staring at the tumblers and the wine glasses and the steaming
kettle.

“What is the girl thinking of!” exclaimed the minister, who had been
talking to his next neighbour, when he heard the door close behind the
servant. “She has actually forgotten the whisky!--Sir Gilbert,” he went
on, with a glance at the boy, “as you are so good, will you oblige me
by bringing the bottle from the sideboard?”

Gibbie started at the sound of his name, but did not move from the
place. After a moment, the minister, who had resumed the conversation,
thinking he had not heard him, looked up. There, between the foot of
the table and the sideboard, stood Gibbie as if fixed to the floor
gazing out of his blue eyes at the minister--those eyes filmy with
gathering tears, the smile utterly faded from his countenance.--Would
the Master have drunk out of that bottle? he was thinking with
himself. Imagining some chance remark had hurt the boy’s pride, and
not altogether sorry--it gave hope of the gentleman he wanted to make
him--Mr. Sclater spoke again:

“It’s just behind you, Sir Gilbert--the whisky bottle--that purple one
with the silver top.”

Gibbie never moved, but his eyes began to run over. A fearful
remembrance of the blow he had given him on the head rushed back on Mr.
Sclater: could it be the consequence of that? Was the boy paralyzed? He
was on the point of hurrying to him, but restrained himself, and rising
with deliberation, approached the sideboard. A nearer sight of the
boy’s face reassured him.

“I beg your pardon, Sir Gilbert,” he said; “I thought you would not
mind waiting on us as well as on the ladies. It is your own fault, you
know.--There,” he added, pointing to the table; “take your place, and
have a little toddy. It won’t hurt you.”

The eyes of all the guests were by this time fixed on Gibbie. What
could be the matter with the curious creature? they wondered. His
gentle merriment and quiet delight in waiting upon them, had given a
pleasant concussion to the spirits of the party, which had at first
threatened to be rather a stiff and dull one; and there now was the
boy all at once looking as if he had received a blow, or some cutting
insult which he did not know how to resent!

Between the agony of refusing to serve, and the impossibility of
putting his hand to unclean ministration, Gibbie had stood as if
spell-bound. He would have thought little of such horrors in Lucky
Croale’s houff, but the sight of the things here terrified him. He felt
as a Corinthian Christian must, catching a sight of one of the elders
of the church feasting in a temple. But the last words of the minister
broke the painful charm. He burst into tears, and darting from the
room, not a little to his guardian’s relief, hurried to his own.

The guests stared bewildered.

“He’ll be gone to the ladies,” said their host. “He’s an odd creature.
Mrs. Sclater understands him better than I do. He’s more at home with
her.”

Therewith he proceeded to tell them his history, and whence the
interest he had in him, not bringing down his narrative beyond the
afternoon of the preceding day.

The next morning, Mrs. Sclater had a talk with him concerning his whim
of waiting at table, telling him he must not do so again; it was not
the custom for gentlemen to do the things that servants were paid to
do; it was not fair to the servants, and so on--happening to end with
an utterance of mild wonder at his fancy for such a peculiarity. This
exclamation Gibbie took for a question, or at least the expression of a
desire to understand the reason of the thing. He went to a side-table,
and having stood there a moment or two, returned with a New Testament,
in which he pointed out the words, “But I am among you as he that
serveth.” Giving her just time to read them, he took the book again,
and in addition presented the words, “The disciple is not above his
master, but every one that is perfect shall be as his master.”

Mrs. Sclater was as much _put out_ as if he had been guilty of another
and worse indiscretion. The idea of anybody ordering his common doings,
not to say his oddities, by principles drawn from a source far too
sacred to be practically regarded, was too preposterous to have ever
become even a notion to her. Henceforth, however, it was a mote to
trouble her mind’s eye, a mote she did not get rid of until it began to
turn to a glimmer of light. I need hardly add that Gibbie waited at her
dinner-table no more.




CHAPTER XLIV.

THE SINNER.

No man can order his life, for it comes flowing over him from behind.
But if it lay before us, and we could watch its current approaching
from a long distance, what could we do with it before it had reached
the now? In like wise a man thinks foolishly who imagines he could
have done this and that with his own character and development, if
he had but known this and that in time. Were he as good as he thinks
himself wise he could but at best have produced a fine cameo in very
low relief: with a work in the round, which he is meant to be, he could
have done nothing. The one secret of life and development, is not to
devise and plan, but to fall in with the forces at work--to do every
moment’s duty aright--that being the part in the process allotted to
us; and let come--not what will, for there is no such thing--but what
the eternal Thought wills for each of us, has intended in each of us
from the first. If men would but believe that they are in process
of creation, and consent to be made--let the maker handle them as
the potter his clay, yielding themselves in respondent motion and
submissive hopeful action with the turning of his wheel, they would ere
long find themselves able to welcome every pressure of that hand upon
them, even when it was felt in pain, and sometimes not only to believe
but to recognize the divine end in view, the bringing of a son into
glory; whereas, behaving like children who struggle and scream while
their mother washes and dresses them, they find they have to be washed
and dressed, notwithstanding, and with the more discomfort: they may
even have to find themselves set half naked and but half dried in a
corner, to come to their right minds, and ask to be finished.

At this time neither Gibbie nor Donal strove against his creation--what
the wise of this world call their fate. In truth Gibbie never did; and
for Donal, the process was at present in a stage much too agreeable
to rouse any inclination to resist. He enjoyed his new phase of life
immensely. If he did not distinguish himself as a scholar, it was not
because he neglected his work, but because he was at the same time
doing that by which alone the water could ever rise in the well he
was digging: he was himself growing. Far too eager after knowledge to
indulge in emulation, he gained no prizes: what had he to do with how
much or how little those around him could eat as compared with himself?
No work noble or lastingly good can come of emulation any more than of
greed: I think the motives are spiritually the same. To excite it is
worthy only of the commonplace vulgar schoolmaster, whose ambition is
to show what fine scholars he can turn out, that he may get the more
pupils. Emulation is the devil-shadow of aspiration. The set of the
current in the schools is at present towards a boundless swamp, but the
wise among the scholars see it, and wisdom is the tortoise which shall
win the race. In the mean time how many, with the legs and the brain
of the hare, will think they are gaining it, while they are losing
things whose loss will make any prize unprized! The result of Donal’s
work appeared but very partially in his examinations, which were honest
and honourable to him; it was hidden in his thoughts, his aspirations,
his growth, and his verse--all which may be seen should I one day tell
Donal’s story. For Gibbie, the minister had not been long teaching
him, before he began to desire to make a scholar of him. Partly from
being compelled to spend some labour upon it, the boy was gradually
developing an unusual facility in expression. His teacher, compact of
conventionalities, would have modelled the result upon some writer
imagined by him a master of style; but the hurtful folly never got
any hold of Gibbie: all he ever cared about was to say what he meant,
and avoid saying something else; to know when he had not said what he
meant, and to set the words right. It resulted that, when people did
not understand what he meant, the cause generally lay with them not
with him; and that, if they sometimes smiled over his mode, it was
because it lay closer to nature than theirs: they would have found it a
hard task to improve it.

What the fault with his organs of speech was, I cannot tell. His
guardian lost no time in having them examined by a surgeon in high
repute, a professor of the university, but Dr. Skinner’s opinion put
an end to question and hope together. Gibbie was not in the least
disappointed. He had got on very well as yet without speech. It was
not like sight or hearing. The only voice he could not hear was his
own, and that was just the one he had neither occasion nor desire to
hear. As to his friends, those who had known him the longest minded
his dumbness the least. But the moment the defect was understood
to be irreparable, Mrs. Sclater very wisely proceeded to learn the
finger-speech; and as she learned it, she taught it to Gibbie.

As to his manners, which had been and continued to be her chief care,
a certain disappointment followed her first rapid success: she never
could get them to take on the case-hardening needful for what she
counted the final polish. They always retained a certain simplicity
which she called childishness. It came in fact of childlikeness,
but the lady was not child enough to distinguish the difference--as
great as that between the back and the front of a head. As, then,
the minister found him incapable of _forming_ a style, though time
soon proved him capable of _producing_ one, so the minister’s wife
found him as incapable of putting on company manners of any sort, as
most people are incapable of putting them off--without being rude. It
was disappointing to Mrs. Sclater, but Gibbie was just as content to
appear what he was, as he was unwilling to remain what he was. Being
dumb, she would say to herself he would pass in any society; but if
he had had his speech, she never could have succeeded in making him a
thorough gentleman: he would have always been saying the right thing
in the wrong place. By the wrong place she meant the place where alone
the thing could have any pertinence. In after years, however, Gibbie’s
manners were, whether pronounced such or not, almost universally _felt_
to be charming. But Gibbie knew nothing of his manners any more than of
the style in which he wrote.

One night on their way home from an evening party, the minister and his
wife had a small difference, probably about something of as little real
consequence to them as the knowledge of it is to us, but by the time
they reached home, they had got to the very summit of politeness with
each other. Gibbie was in the drawing-room, as it happened, waiting
their return. At the first sound of their voices, he knew, before a
syllable reached him, that something was wrong. When they entered, they
were too much engrossed in difference to heed his presence, and went on
disputing--with the utmost external propriety of words and demeanour,
but with both injury and a sense of injury in every tone. Had they
looked at Gibbie, I cannot think they would have been silenced; but
while neither of them dared turn eyes the way of him, neither had
moral strength sufficient to check the words that rose to the lips. A
discreet, socially wise boy would have left the room, but how could
Gibbie abandon his friends to the fiery darts of the wicked one! He
ran to the side-table before mentioned. With a vague presentiment of
what was coming, Mrs. Sclater, feeling rather than seeing him move
across the room like a shadow, sat in dread expectation; and presently
her fear arrived, in the shape of a large New Testament, and a face of
loving sadness, and keen discomfort, such as she had never before seen
Gibbie wear. He held out the book to her, pointing with a finger to
the words--she could not refuse to let her eyes fall upon them--“Have
salt in yourselves, and have peace one with another.” What Gibbie made
of the salt, I do not know; and whether he understood it or not was of
little consequence, seeing he had it; but the rest of the sentence he
understood so well that he would fain have the writhing yoke-fellows
think of it.

The lady’s cheeks had been red before, but now they were redder. She
rose, cast an angry look at the dumb prophet, a look which seemed to
say “How dare you suggest such a thing?” and left the room.

“What have you got there?” asked the minister, turning sharply upon
him. Gibbie showed him the passage.

“What have _you_ got to do with it?” he retorted, throwing the book on
the table. “Go to bed.”

“A detestable prig!” you say, reader?--That is just what Mr. and Mrs.
Sclater thought him that night, but they never quarrelled again before
him. In truth, they were not given to quarrelling. Many couples who
love each other more, quarrel more, and with less politeness. For
Gibbie, he went to bed--puzzled, and afraid there must be a beam in his
eye.

The very first time Donal and he could manage it, they set out together
to find Mistress Croale. Donal thought he had nothing to do but walk
straight from Mistress Murkison’s door to hers, but, to his own
annoyance, and the disappointment of both, he soon found he had not a
notion left as to how the place lay, except that it was by the river.
So, as it was already rather late, they put off their visit to another
time, and took a walk instead.

But Mistress Croale, haunted by old memories, most of them far from
pleasant, grew more and more desirous of looking upon the object of
perhaps the least disagreeable amongst them: she summoned resolution at
last, went to the market a little better dressed than usual, and when
business there was over, and she had shut up her little box of a shop,
walked to Daur-street to the minister’s house.

“He’s aften eneuch crossed my door,” she said to herself, speaking of
Mr. Sclater; “an’ though, weel I wat, the sicht o’ ’im never bodit me
onything but ill, I never loot him ken he was less nor walcome; an’
gien bein’ a minister gies the freedom o’ puir fowk’s hooses, it oucht
in the niffer (_exchange_) to gie them the freedom o’ his.”

Therewith encouraging herself, she walked up the steps and rang the
bell. It was a cold, frosty winter evening and as she stood waiting for
the door to be opened, much the poor woman longed for her own fireside
and a dram. Her period of expectation was drawn out not a little
through the fact that the servant whose duty it was to answer the bell
was just then waiting at table: because of a public engagement, the
minister had to dine earlier than usual. They were in the middle of
their soup--cockie-leekie, nice and hot, when the maid informed her
master that a woman was at the door, wanting to see Sir Gilbert.

Gibbie looked up, put down his spoon, and was rising to go, when the
minister, laying his hand on his arm, pressed him gently back to his
chair, and Gibbie yielded, waiting.

“What sort of a woman?” he asked the girl.

“A decent-lookin’ workin’-like body,” she answered. “I couldna see her
verra weel, it’s sae foggy the nicht aboot the door.”

“Tell her we’re at dinner; she may call again in an hour. Or if she
likes to leave a message--Stay: tell her to come again to-morrow
morning.--I wonder who she is,” he added, turning, he thought, to
Gibbie.

But Gibbie was gone. He had passed behind his chair, and all he saw
of him was his back as he followed the girl from the room. In his
eagerness he left the door open, and they saw him dart to the visitor,
shake hands with her in evident delight, and begin pulling her towards
the room.

Now Mistress Croale, though nowise inclined to quail before the
minister, would not willingly have intruded herself upon him,
especially while he sat at dinner with his rather formidable lady;
but she fancied, for she stood where she could not see into the
dining-room, that Gibbie was taking her where they might have a quiet
_news_ together, and, occupied with her bonnet or some other source
of feminine disquiet, remained thus mistaken until she stood on the
threshold, when, looking up, she started, stopped, made an _obedience_
to the minister, and another to the minister’s lady, and stood
doubtful, if not a little abashed.

“Not here! my good woman,” said Mr. Sclater, rising. “--Oh, it’s you,
Mistress Croale!--I will speak to you in the hall.”

Mrs. Croale’s face flushed, and she drew back a step. But Gibbie still
held her, and with a look to Mr. Sclater that should have sent straight
to his heart the fact that she was dear to his soul, kept drawing her
into the room; he wanted her to take his chair at the table. It passed
swiftly through her mind that one who had been so intimate both with
Sir George and Sir Gibbie in the old time, and had given the latter his
tea every Sunday night for so long, might surely, even in such changed
circumstances, be allowed to enter the same room with him, however
grand it might be; and involuntarily almost she yielded half a doubtful
step, while Mr. Sclater, afraid of offending Sir Gilbert, hesitated
on the advance to prevent her. How friendly the warm air felt! how
consoling the crimson walls with the soft flicker of the great fire
upon them! how delicious the odour of the cockie-leekie! She could give
up whisky a good deal more easily, she thought, if she had the comforts
of a minister to fall back upon! And this was the same minister who had
once told her that her soul was as precious to him as that of any other
in his parish--and then driven her from respectable Jink Lane to the
disreputable Daurfoot! It all passed through her mind in a flash, while
yet Gibbie pulled and she resisted.

“Gilbert, come here,” called Mrs. Sclater.

He went to her side, obedient and trusting as a child.

“Really, Gilbert, you must not,” she said, rather loud for a whisper.
“It won’t do to turn things upside down this way. If you are to be a
gentleman, and an inmate of _my_ house, you must behave like other
people. I _cannot_ have a woman like that sitting at _my_ table.--Do
you know what sort of a person she is?” Gibbie’s face shone up. He
raised his hands. He was already able to talk a little.

“Is she a sinner?” he asked on his fingers.

Mrs. Sclater nodded.

Gibbie wheeled round, and sprang back to the hall, whither the minister
had, coming down upon her, bows on, like a sea-shouldering whale, in
a manner ejected Mistress Croale, and where he was now talking to her
with an air of confidential condescension, willing to wipe out any
feeling of injury she might perhaps be inclined to cherish at not being
made more welcome: to his consternation, Gibbie threw his arms round
her neck, and gave her a great hug.

“Sir Gilbert!” he exclaimed, very angry, and the more angry that he
knew he was in the right, “leave Mistress Croale alone, and go back to
your dinner immediately.--Jane, open the door.”

Jane opened the door, Gibbie let her go, and Mrs. Croale went. But on
the threshold she turned.

“Weel, sir,” she said, with more severity than pique, and a certain sad
injury not unmingled with dignity, “ye hae stappit ower my door-sill
mony’s the time, an’ that wi’ sairer words i’ yer moo’ nor I ever
mintit at peyin’ ye back; an’ I never said to ye gang. Sae first ye
turnt me oot o’ my ain hoose, an’ noo ye turn me oot o’ yours; an’
what’s left ye to turn me oot o’ but the hoose o’ the Lord? An’, ’deed,
sir, ye need never won’er gien the likes o’ me disna care aboot gangin’
to hear a _preacht_ gospel: we wad fain see a practeesed ane! Gien ye
had said to me noo the nicht, ‘Come awa ben, Mistress Croale, an’ tak
a plet o’ cockie-leekie wi’ ’s; it’s a caul’ nicht;’ it’s mysel’ wad
hae been sae upliftit wi’ yer kin’ness, ’at I wad hae gane hame an’
ta’en--I dinna ken--aiblins a read at my Bible, an’ been to be seen at
the kirk upo’ Sunday I wad--o’ that ye may be sure; for it’s a heap
easier to gang to the kirk nor to read the buik yer lane, whaur ye
canna help thinkin’ upo’ what it says to ye. But noo, as ’tis, I’m awa
hame to the whusky boatle, an’ the sin o’ ’t, gien there be ony in sic
a nicht o’ caul’ an’ fog, ’ill jist lie at your door.”

“You shall have a plate of soup, and welcome, Mistress Croale!” said
the minister, in a rather stagey tone of hospitality “--Jane, take
Mistress Croale to the kitchen with you, and--”

“The deil’s tail i’ yer soup!--’At I sud say ’t!” cried Mistress
Croale, drawing herself up suddenly, with a snort of anger: “whan turnt
I beggar? I wad fain be informt! Was ’t yer soup or yer grace I soucht
till, sir? The Lord be atween you an’ me! There’s first ’at ’ll be
last, an’ last ’at ’ll be first. But the tane’s no me, an’ the tither’s
no you, sir.”

With that she turned and walked down the steps, holding her head high.

“Really, Sir Gilbert,” said the minister, going back into the
dining-room--but no Gibbie was there!--nobody but his wife, sitting
in solitary discomposure at the head of her dinner-table. The same
instant, he heard a clatter of feet down the steps, and turned quickly
into the hall again, where Jane was in the act of shutting the door.

“Sir Gilbert’s run oot efter the wuman, sir!” she said.

“Hoots!” grunted the minister, greatly displeased, and went back to his
wife.

“Take Sir Gilbert’s plate away,” said Mrs. Sclater to the servant.

“That’s his New Testament again!” she went on, when the girl had left
the room.

“My dear! my dear! take care,” said her husband. He had not much notion
of obedience to God, but he had some idea of respect to religion. He
was just an idolater of a Christian shade.

“Really, Mr. Sclater,” his wife continued, “I had no idea what I was
undertaking. But you gave me no choice. The creature is incorrigible.
But of course he must prefer the society of women like that. They are
the sort he was accustomed to when he received his first impressions,
and how could it be otherwise? You knew how he had been brought up, and
what you had to expect!”

“Brought up!” cried the minister, and caused his spoonful of
cockie-leekie to rush into his mouth with the noise of the German
_schlürfen_, then burst into a loud laugh. “You should have seen him
about the streets!--with his trowsers--”

“_Mister_ Sclater! Then you ought to have known better!” said his wife,
and laying down her spoon, sat back into the embrace of her chair.

But in reality she was not the least sorry he had undertaken the
charge. She could not help loving the boy, and her words were merely
the foam of vexation, mingled with not a little jealousy, that he had
left her, and his nice hot dinner, to go with the woman. Had she been a
fine lady like herself, I doubt if she would have liked it much better;
but she specially recoiled from coming into rivalry with one in whose
house a horrible murder had been committed, and who had been before the
magistrates in consequence.

Nothing further was said until the second course was on the table. Then
the lady spoke again:

“You really must, Mr. Sclater, teach him the absurdity of attempting
to fit every point of his behaviour to--to--words which were of course
quite suitable to the time when they were spoken, but which it is
impossible to take literally now-a-days--as impossible as to go about
the streets with a great horn on your head and a veil hanging across
it.--Why!”--Here she laughed--a laugh the less lady-like that, although
it was both low and musical, it was scornful, and a little shaken
by doubt.--“You saw him throw his arms round the horrid creature’s
neck!--Well, he had just asked me if she was a sinner. I made no doubt
she was. Off with the word goes my gentleman to embrace her!”

Here they laughed together.

Dinner over, they went to a missionary meeting, where the one stood and
made a speech and the other sat and listened, while Gibbie was having
tea with Mistress Croale.

From that day Gibbie’s mind was much exercised as to what he could
do for Mistress Croale, and now first he began to wish he had his
money. As fast as he learned the finger-alphabet he had taught it to
Donal, and, as already they had a good many symbols in use between
them, so many indeed that Donal would often instead of speaking make
use of signs, they had now the means of intercourse almost as free as
if they had had between them two tongues instead of one. It was easy
therefore for Gibbie to impart to Donal his anxiety concerning her, and
his strong desire to help her, and doing so, he lamented in a gentle
way his present inability. This communication Donal judged it wise to
impart in his turn to Mistress Croale.

“Ye see, mem,” he said in conclusion, “he’s some w’y or anither gotten
’t intil ’s heid ’at ye’re jist a wheen ower free wi’ the boatle. I
kenna. Ye’ll be the best jeedge o’ that yersel’!”

Mistress Croale was silent for a whole minute by the clock. From the
moment when Gibbie forsook his dinner and his grand new friends to go
with her, the woman’s heart had begun to grow to the boy, and her old
memories fed the new crop of affection.

“Weel,” she replied at length, with no little honesty, “--I mayna
be sae ill ’s he thinks me, for he had aye his puir father afore ’s
e’en; but the bairn’s richt i’ the main, an’ we maun luik till ’t, an’
see what can be dune; for eh! I wad be laith to disappint the bonnie
laad!--Maister Grant, gien ever there wis a Christi-an sowl upo’ the
face o’ this wickit warl’, that Christi-an sowl’s wee Sir Gibbie!--an’
wha cud hae thoucht it! But it’s the Lord’s doin’, an’ mervellous in
oor eyes!--Ow! ye needna luik like that; I ken my Bible no that ill!”
she added, catching a glimmer of surprise on Donal’s countenance.
“But for that Maister Scletter--dod! I wadna be sair upon ’im--but
gien he be fit to caw a nail here an’ a nail there, an fix a sklet
or twa, creepin’ upo’ the riggin’ o’ the kirk, I’m weel sure he’s
nae wise maister-builder fit to lay ony fundation.--Ay! I tellt ye I
kent my beuk no that ill!” she added with some triumph; then resumed:
“What the waur wad he or she or Sir Gibbie hae been though they _hed_
inveetit me, as I _was_ there, to sit me doon, an’ tak’ a plet o’ their
cockie-leekie wi’ them? There was ane ’at thoucht them ’at was far
waur nor me, guid eneuch company for him; an’ maybe I may sit doon wi’
him efter a’, wi’ the help o’ my bonnie wee Sir Gibbie.--I canna help
ca’in him _wee_ Sir Gibbie--a’ the toon ca’d ’im that, though haith!
he’ll be a big man or he behaud. An’ for ’s teetle, I was aye ane to
gie honour whaur honour was due, an’ never ance, weel as I kenned him,
did I ca’ his honest father, for gien ever there was an honest man, yon
was him!--never did I ca’ him onything but Sir George, naither mair
nor less, an’ that though he vroucht the hardest at the cobblin’ a’
the ook, an’ upo’ Setterdays was pleased to hae a guid wash i’ my ain
bedroom, an’ pit on a clean sark o’ my deid man’s--rist his sowl!--no
’at I’m a papist, Maister Grant, an’ aye kent better nor think it was
ony eese prayin’ for them ’at’s gane; for wha is there to pey ony heed
to sic haithenish prayers as that wad be? Na! we maun pray for the
livin’ ’at it may dee some guid till, an’ no for them ’at it’s a’ ower
wi’--the Lord hae mercy upo’ them!”

My readers may suspect, one for one reason, another for another,
that she had already, before Donal came that evening, been holding
communion with the idol in the three-cornered temple of her cupboard;
and I confess that it was so. But it is equally true that before the
next year was gone, she was a shade better--and that not without
considerable struggle, and more failures than successes.

Upon one occasion--let those who analyze the workings of the human
mind as they would the entrails of an eight-day clock, explain the
phenomenon I am about to relate, or decline to believe it, as they
choose--she became suddenly aware that she was getting perilously near
the brink of actual drunkenness.

“I’ll tak but this ae moo’fu’ mair,” she said to herself; “it’s but a
moo’fu’, an’ it’s the last i’ the boatle, an’ it wad be a peety naebody
to get the guid o’ ’t.”

She poured it out. It was nearly half a glass. She took it in one
large mouthful. But while she held it in her mouth to make the most of
it, even while it was between her teeth, something smote her with the
sudden sense that this very moment was the crisis of her fate, that now
the axe was laid to the root of her tree. She dropped on her knees--not
to pray like poor Sir George--but to spout the mouthful of whisky into
the fire. In roaring flame it rushed up the chimney. She started back.

“Eh!” she cried; “guid God! sic a deevil ’s I maun be, to cairry the
like o’ that i’ my inside!--Lord! I’m a perfec’ byke o’ deevils! My
name, it maun be Legion. What _is_ to become o’ my puir sowl!”

It was a week before she drank another drop--and then she took her
devils with circumspection, and the firm resolve to let no more of them
enter into her than she could manage to keep in order.

Mr. and Mrs. Sclater got over their annoyance as well as they could,
and agreed that in this case no notice should be taken of Gibbie’s
conduct.




CHAPTER XLV.

SHOALS AHEAD.

It had come to be the custom that Gibbie should go to Donal every
Friday afternoon about four o’clock, and remain with him till the same
time on Saturday, which was a holiday with both. One Friday, just after
he was gone, the temptation seized Mrs. Sclater to follow him, and,
paying the lads an unexpected visit, see what they were about.

It was a bright cold afternoon; and in fur tippet and muff, amidst the
snow that lay everywhere on roofs and window-sills and pavements, and
the wind that blew cold as it blows in few places besides, she looked,
with her bright colour and shining eyes, like life itself laughing
at death. But not many of those she met carried the like victory in
their countenances, for the cold was bitter. As she approached the
Widdiehill, she reflected that she had followed Gibbie so quickly, and
walked so fast, that the boys could hardly have had time to settle to
anything, and resolved therefore to make a little round and spend a few
more minutes upon the way. But as, through a neighbouring street, she
was again approaching the Widdiehill, she caught sight of something
which, as she was passing a certain shop, that of a baker known to her
as one of her husband’s parishioners, made her stop and look in through
the glass which formed the upper half of the door. There she saw
Gibbie, seated on the counter, dangling his legs, eating a penny loaf,
and looking as comfortable as possible.--“So soon after luncheon, too!”
said Mrs. Sclater to herself with indignation, reading through the
spectacles of her anger a reflection on her housekeeping. But a second
look revealed, as she had dreaded, far weightier cause for displeasure:
a very pretty girl stood behind the counter, with whose company Gibbie
was evidently much pleased. She was fair of hue, with eyes of gray and
green, and red lips whose smile showed teeth whiter than the whitest
of flour. At the moment she was laughing merrily, and talking gaily to
Gibbie. Clearly they were on the best of terms, and the boy’s bright
countenance, laughter, and eager motions, were making full response to
the girl’s words.

Gibbie had been in the shop two or three times before, but this was the
first time he had seen his old friend, Mysie, of the amethyst ear-ring.
And now one of them had reminded the other of that episode in which
their histories had run together; from that, Mysie had gone on to other
reminiscences of her childhood in which wee Gibbie bore a part, and
he had, as well as he could, replied with others of his, in which she
was concerned. Mysie was a simple, well-behaved girl, and the entrance
of neither father nor mother would have made the least difference in
her behaviour to Sir Gilbert, though doubtless she was more pleased to
have a chat with him than with her father’s apprentice, who could speak
indeed, but looked dull as the dough he worked in, whereas Gibbie,
although dumb, was radiant. But the faces of people talking often look
more meaningful to one outside the talk-circle than they really are,
and Mrs. Sclater, gazing through the glass, found, she imagined, large
justification of displeasure. She opened the door sharply, and stepped
in. Gibbie jumped from his seat on the counter, and, with a smile of
playful roguery, offered it to her; a vivid blush overspread Mysie’s
fair countenance.

“I thought you had gone to see Donal,” said Mrs. Sclater, in the tone
of one deceived, and took no notice of the girl.

Gibbie gave her to understand that Donal would arrive presently, and
they were then going to the point of the pier, that Donal might learn
what the sea was like in a nor’-easter.

“But why did you make your appointment here?” asked the lady.

“Because Mysie and I are old friends,” answered the boy on his fingers.

Then first Mrs. Sclater turned to the girl: having got over her first
indignation, she spoke gently and with a frankness natural to her.

“Sir Gilbert tells me you are old friends,” she said.

Thereupon Mysie told her the story of the ear-ring, which had
introduced their present conversation, and added several other little
recollections, in one of which she was drawn into a description, half
pathetic, half humorous, of the forlorn appearance of wee Gibbie, as
he ran about in his truncated trousers. Mrs. Slater was more annoyed,
however, than interested, for, in view of the young baronet’s future,
she would have had all such things forgotten; but Gibbie was full of
delight in the vivid recollections thus brought him of some of the less
painful portions of his past, and appreciated every graphic word that
fell from the girl’s pretty lips.

Mrs. Sclater took good care not to leave until Donal came. Then the
boys, having asked her if she would not go with them, which invitation
she declined with smiling thanks, took their departure and went to
pay their visit to the German Ocean, leaving her with Mysie--which
they certainly would not have done, could they have foreseen how the
well-meaning lady--nine-tenths of the mischiefs in the world are
well-meant--would hurt the feelings of the gentle-conditioned girl.
For a long time after, as often as Gibbie entered the shop, Mysie left
it and her mother came--a result altogether as Mrs. Sclater would have
had it. But hardly anybody was ever in less danger of falling in love
than Gibbie; and the thing would not have been worth recording, but for
the new direction it caused in Mrs. Sclater’s thoughts: measures, she
judged, must be taken.

Gladly as she would have centred Gibbie’s boyish affections in herself,
she was too conscientious and experienced not to regard the danger
of any special effort in that direction, and began therefore to cast
about in her mind what could be done to protect him from one at least
of the natural consequences of his early familiarity with things
unseemly--exposure, namely, to the risk of forming low alliances--the
more imminent that it was much too late to attempt any restriction of
his liberty, so as to keep him from roaming the city at his pleasure.
Recalling what her husband had told her of the odd meeting between
the boy and a young lady at Miss Kimble’s school--some relation, she
thought he had said--also the desire to see her again which Gibbie, on
more than one occasion, had shown, she thought whether she could turn
the acquaintance to account. She did not much like Miss Kimble, chiefly
because of her affectations--which, by the way, were caricatures of her
own; but she knew her very well, and there was no reason why she should
not ask her to come and spend the evening, and bring two or three of
the elder girls with her: a little familiarity with the looks, manners,
and dress of refined girls of his own age, would be the best antidote
to his taste for low society, from that of bakers’ daughters downwards.

It was Mrs. Sclater’s own doing that Gibbie had not again spoken to
Ginevra. Nowise abashed at the thought of the grenadier or her array
of doves, he would have gone, the very next day after meeting them in
the street, to call upon her: it was some good, he thought, of being
a rich instead of a poor boy, that, having lost thereby those whom he
loved best, he had come where he could at least see Miss Galbraith;
but Mrs. Sclater had pretended not to understand where he wanted to
go, and used other artifices besides--well-meant, of course--to keep
him to herself until she should better understand him. After that,
he had seen Ginevra more than once at church, but had had no chance
of speaking to her. For, in the sudden dispersion of its agglomerate
particles, a Scotch congregation is--or was in Gibbie’s time--very
like the well-known vitreous drop called a Prince Rupert’s tear, in
which the mutually repellent particles are held together by a strongly
contracted homogeneous layer--to separate with explosion the instant
the tough skin is broken and vibration introduced; and as Mrs. Sclater
generally sat in her dignity to the last, and Gibbie sat with her,
only once was he out in time to catch a glimpse of the ultimate rank
of the retreating girls. He was just starting to pursue them, when
Mrs. Sclater, perceiving his intention, detained him by requesting
the support of his arm--a way she had, pretending to be weary, or to
have given her ankle a twist, when she wanted to keep him by her side.
Another time he had followed them close enough to see which turn they
took out of Daur-street; but that was all he had learned, and when the
severity of the winter arrived, and the snow lay deep, sometimes for
weeks together, the chances of meeting them were few. The first time
the boys went out together, that when they failed to find Mistress
Croale’s garret, they made an excursion in search of the girls’ school,
but had been equally unsuccessful in that; and although they never
after went for a walk without contriving to pass through some part
of the region in which they thought it must lie, they had never yet
even discovered a house upon which they could agree as presenting
probabilities.

Mr. Galbraith did not take Miss Kimble into his confidence with respect
to his reasons for so hurriedly placing his daughter under her care:
he was far too reticent, too proud, and too much hurt for that. Hence,
when Mrs. Sclater’s invitation arrived, the schoolmistress was aware of
no reason why Miss Galbraith should not be one of the girls to go with
her, especially as there was her cousin, Sir Gilbert, whom she herself
would like to meet again, in the hope of removing the bad impression
which, in the discharge of her duty, she feared she must have made upon
him.

One day, then, at luncheon, Mrs. Sclater told Gibbie that some ladies
were coming to tea, and they were going to have supper instead of
dinner. He must put on his best clothes, she said. He did as she
desired, was duly inspected, approved on the whole, and finished off
by a few deft fingers at his necktie, and a gentle push or two from
the loveliest of hands against his hair-thatch, and was seated in the
drawing-room with Mrs. Sclater when the ladies arrived. Ginevra and
he shook hands, she with the sweetest of rose-flushes, he with the
radiance of delighted surprise. But, a moment after, when Mrs. Sclater
and her guests had seated themselves, Gibbie, their only gentleman,
for Mr. Sclater had not yet made his appearance, had vanished from the
room. Tea was not brought until some time after, when Mr. Sclater came
home, and then Mrs. Sclater sent Jane to find Sir Gilbert; but she
returned to say he was not in the house. The lady’s heart sank, her
countenance fell, and all was gloom: her project had miscarried! he was
gone! who could tell whither?--perhaps to the baker’s daughter, or to
the horrid woman Croale!

The case was however very much otherwise. The moment Gibbie ended his
greetings, he had darted off to tell Donal: it was not his custom to
enjoy alone anything sharable.

The news that Ginevra was at that moment seated in Mrs. Sclater’s
house, at that moment, as his eagerness had misunderstood Gibbie’s,
expecting his arrival, raised such a commotion in Donal’s atmosphere,
that for a time it was but a huddle of small whirlwinds. His heart
was beating like the trample of a trotting horse. He never thought
of inquiring whether Gibbie had been commissioned by Mrs. Sclater to
invite him, or reflected that his studies were not half over for the
night. An instant before the arrival of the blessed fact, he had been
absorbed in a rather abstruse metaphysico-mathematical question; now
not the metaphysics of the universe would have appeared to him worth a
moment’s meditation. He went pacing up and down the room, and seemed
lost to everything. Gibbie shook him at length, and told him, by two
signs, that he must put on his Sunday clothes. Then first shyness, like
the shroud of northern myth that lies in wait in a man’s path, leaped
up, and wrapped itself around him. It was very well to receive ladies
in a meadow, quite another thing to walk into their company in a grand
room, such as, before entering Mrs. Sclater’s, he had never beheld even
in Fairyland or the Arabian Nights. He knew the ways of the one, and
not the ways of the other. Chairs ornate were doubtless poor things to
daisied banks, yet the other day he had hardly brought himself to sit
on one of Mrs. Sclater’s! It was a moment of awful seeming. But what
would he not face to see once more the lovely lady-girl! He bethought
himself that he was no longer a cowherd but a student, and that such
feelings were unworthy of one who would walk level with his fellows.
He rushed to the labours of his toilette, performed severe ablutions,
endued his best shirt--coarse, but sweet from the fresh breezes of
Glashgar, a pair of trousers of buff-coloured fustian stamped over with
a black pattern, an olive-green waistcoat, a blue tailcoat with lappets
behind, and a pair of well-polished shoes, the soles of which in honour
of Sunday were studded with small instead of large knobs of iron, set
a tall beaver hat, which no brushing would make smooth, on the back
of his head, stuffed a silk hankerchief, crimson and yellow, in his
pocket, and declared himself ready.

Now Gibbie, although he would not have looked so well in his woolly
coat in Mrs. Sclater’s drawing-room as on the rocks of Glashgar, would
have looked better in almost any other than the evening dress, now,
alas! nearly European. Mr. Sclater, on the other hand, would have
looked worse in any other because being less commonplace, it would have
been less like himself; and so long as the commonplace conventional so
greatly outnumber the simply individual, it is perhaps well the present
fashion should hold. But Donal could hardly have put on any clothes
that would have made him look worse, either in respect of himself or
of the surroundings of social life, than those he now wore. Neither of
the boys, however, had begun to think about dress in relation either to
custom or to fitness, and it was with complete satisfaction that Gibbie
carried off Donal to present to the guest of his guardians.

Donal’s preparations had taken a long time, and before they reached the
house, tea was over and gone. They had had some music; and Mrs. Sclater
was now talking kindly to two of the school-girls, who, seated erect on
the sofa, were looking upon her elegance with awe and envy. Ginevra,
was looking at the pictures of an annual. Mr. Sclater was making Miss
Kimble agreeable to herself. He had a certain gift of talk--depending
in a great measure on the assurance of being listened to, an assurance
which is, alas! nowise the less hurtful to many a clergyman out of the
pulpit, that he may be equally aware no one heeds him in it.




CHAPTER XLVI.

THE GIRLS.

The door was opened. Donal spent fully a minute rubbing his shoes on
the mat, as diligently as if he had just come out of the cattle-yard,
and then Gibbie led him in triumph up the stair to the drawing-room.
Donal entered in that loose-jointed way which comes of the brains
being as yet all in the head, and stood, resisting Gibbie’s pull on
his arm, his keen hazel eyes looking gently round upon the company,
until he caught sight of the face he sought, when, with the stride of
a sower of corn, he walked across the room to Ginevra. Mrs. Sclater
rose; Mr. Sclater threw himself back and stared; the latter astounded
at the presumption of the youths, the former uneasy at the possible
results of their ignorance. To the astonishment of the company, Ginevra
rose, respect and modesty in every feature, as the youth, clownish
rather than awkward, approached her, and almost timidly held out her
hand to him. He took it in his horny palm, shook it hither and thither
sideways, like a leaf in a doubtful air, then held it like a precious
thing he was at once afraid of crushing by too tight a grasp, and of
dropping from too loose a hold, until Ginevra took charge of it herself
again. Gibbie danced about behind him, all but standing on one leg,
but, for Mrs. Sclater’s sake, restraining himself. Ginevra sat down,
and Donal, feeling very large and clumsy, and wanting to “be naught
a while,” looked about him for a chair, and then first espying Mrs.
Sclater, went up to her with the same rolling, clamping stride, but
without embarrassment, and said, holding out his hand,

“Hoo are ye the nicht, mem? I sawna yer bonnie face whan I cam in. A
gran’ hoose, like this o’ yours--an’ I’m sure, mem, it cudna be ower
gran’ to fit yersel’, but it’s jist some perplexin’ to plain fowk like
me, ’at’s been used to mair room, an’ less intil ’t.”

Donal was thinking of the meadow on the Lorrie bank.

“I was sure of it!” remarked Mrs. Sclater to herself. “One of nature’s
gentlemen! _He_ would soon be taught.”

She was right; but he was more than a gentleman, and could have taught
her what she could have taught nobody in turn.

“You will soon get accustomed to our town ways, Mr. Grant. But many
of the things we gather about us are far more trouble than use,” she
replied, in her sweetest tones, and with a gentle pressure of the hand,
which went a long way to set him at his ease. “I am glad to see you
have friends here,” she added.

“Only ane, mem. Gibbie an’ me--”

“Excuse me, Mr. Grant, but would you oblige me--of course with _me_ it
is of no consequence, but just for habit’s sake, would you oblige me by
calling Gilbert by his own name--_Sir_ Gilbert, please. I wish him to
get used to it.”

“Yer wull be ’t, mem.--Weel, as I was sayin’, Sir Gibbie--Sir Gilbert,
that is, mem--an mysel’, we hae kenned Miss Galbraith this lang time,
bein’ o’ the laird’s ain fowk, as I may say.”

“Will you take a seat beside her, then,” said Mrs. Sclater, and rising,
herself placed a chair for him near Ginevra, wondering how any Scotch
laird, the father of such a little lady as she, could have allowed her
such an acquaintance.

To most of the company he must have looked very queer. Gibbie, indeed,
was the only one who saw the real Donal. Miss Kimble and her pupils
stared at the distorted reflexion of him in the spoon-bowl of their own
elongated narrowness; Mrs. Sclater saw the possible gentleman through
the loop-hole of a compliment he had paid her; and Mr. Sclater beheld
only the minimum which the reversed telescope of his own enlarged
importance, he having himself come of sufficiently humble origin, made
of him; while Ginevra looked up to him more as one who marvelled at
the grandly unintelligible, than one who understood the relations and
proportions of what she beheld. Nor was it possible she could help
feeling that he was a more harmonious object to the eye both of body
and mind when dressed in his corduroys and blue bonnet, walking the
green fields, with cattle about him, his club under his arm, and a book
in his hand. So seen, his natural dignity was evident; now he looked
undeniably odd. A poet needs a fine house rather than a fine dress to
set him off, and Mrs. Sclater’s drawing-room was neither large nor
beautiful enough to frame this one, especially with his Sunday clothes
to get the better of. To the school ladies, mistress and pupils, he
was simply a clodhopper, and from their report became a treasure of
poverty-stricken amusement to the school. Often did Ginevra’s cheek
burn with indignation at the small insolences of her fellow-pupils. At
first she attempted to make them understand something of what Donal
really was, but finding them unworthy of the confidence, was driven
to betake herself to such a silence as put a stop to their offensive
remarks in her presence.

“I thank ye, mem,” said Donal, as he took the chair; “ye’re verra
condescendin’.” Then turning to Ginevra, and trying to cross one knee
over the other, but failing from the tightness of certain garments,
which, like David with Saul’s not similarly faulty armour, he had not
hitherto proved, “Weel, mem,” he said, “ye haena forgotten Hornie, I
houp.”

The other girls must be pardoned for tittering, offensive as is the
habit so common to their class, for the only being they knew by that
name was one to whom the merest reference sets pit and gallery in a
roar. Miss Kimble was shocked--_disgusssted_, she said afterwards;
and until she learned that the clown was there uninvited, cherished a
grudge against Mrs. Sclater.

Ginevra smiled him a satisfactory negative.

“I never read the ballant aboot the worm lingelt roon’ the tree,”
said Donal, making rather a long link in the chain of association,
“ohn thoucht upo’ that day, mem, whan first ye cam doon the brae wi’
my sister Nicie, an’ I cam ower the burn till ye, an’ ye garred me
lauch aboot weetin’ o’ my feet! Eh, mem! wi’ you afore me there, I
see the blew lift again, an’ the gerse jist lowin’ (_flaming_) green,
an’ the nowt at their busiest, the win’ asleep, an’ the burn sayin’,
‘Ye need nane o’ ye speyk: I’m here, an’ it’s my business.’ Eh, mem!
whan I think upo’ ’t a’, it seems to me ’at the human hert closed i’
the mids o’ sic a coffer o’ cunnin’ workmanship, maun be a terrible
precious-like thing.”

Gibbie, behind Donal’s chair, seemed pulsing light at every pore, but
the rest of the company, understanding his words perfectly, yet not
comprehending a single sentence he uttered, began to wonder whether he
was out of his mind, and were perplexed to see Ginevra listening to him
with such respect. They saw a human offence where she knew a poet. A
word is a word, but its interpretations are many, and the understanding
of a man’s words depends both on what the hearer is, and on what is
his idea of the speaker. As to the pure all things are pure, because
only purity can enter, so to the vulgar all things are vulgar, because
only the vulgar can enter. Wherein then is the commonplace man to be
blamed, for as he is, so must he think? In this, that he consents to
be commonplace, willing to live after his own idea of himself, and
not after God’s idea of him--the real idea, which, every now and then
stirring in him, makes him uneasy with silent rebuke.

Ginevra said little in reply. She had not much to say. In her world
the streams were still, not vocal. But Donal meant to hold a little
communication with her which none of them, except indeed Gibbie--he did
not mind Gibbie--should understand.

“I hed sic a queer dream the ither nicht, mem,” he said, “an’ I’ll
jist tell ye ’t.--I thoucht I was doon in an awfu’ kin’ o’ a weet bog,
wi’ dry graivelly-like hills a’ aboot it, an’ naething upo’ them but
a wheen short hunger-like gerse. An’ oot o’ the mids o’ the bog there
grew jist ae tree--a saugh, I think it was, but unco auld--’maist past
kennin’ wi’ age;--an’ roon’ the rouch gnerlet trunk o’ ’t was twistit
three faulds o’ the oogliest, ill-fauredest cratur o’ a serpent ’at
ever was seen. It was jist laithly to luik upo’. I cud describe it
till ye, mem, but it wad only gar ye runkle yer bonnie broo, an’ luik
as I wadna hae ye luik, mem, ’cause ye wadna luik freely sae bonnie
as ye div noo whan ye luik jist yersel’. But ae queer thing was, ’at
atween hit an’ the tree it grippit a buik, an’ I kent it for the buik
o’ ballants. An’ I gaed nearer, luikin’ an’ luikin’, an’ some frichtit.
But I wadna stan’ for that, for that wad be to be caitiff vile, an’
no true man: I gaed nearer an’ nearer, till I had gotten within a
yaird o’ the tree, whan a’ at ance, wi’ a swing an’ a swirl, I was
three-fauld aboot the tree, an’ the laithly worm was me mesel’; an’ I
was the laithly worm. The verra hert gaed frae me for hoarible dreid,
an’ scunner at mysel’! Sae there I was! But I wasna lang there i’ my
meesery, afore I saw, oot o’ my ain serpent e’en, ’maist blin’t wi’
greitin’, ower the tap o’ the brae afore me, atween me an’ the lift,
as gien it reacht up to the verra stars, for it wasna day but nicht
by this time aboot me, as weel it micht be,--I saw the bonnie sicht
come up o’ a knicht in airmour, helmet an’ shield an’ iron sheen an’
a’; but somehoo I kent by the gang an’ the stan’ an’ the sway o’ the
bonnie boady o’ the knicht, ’at it was nae man, but a wuman.--Ye see,
mem, sin I cam frae Daurside, I hae been able to get a grip o’ buiks
’at I cudna get up there; an’ I hed been readin’ Spenser’s Fairy Queen
the nicht afore, a’ yon aboot the lady ’at pat on the airmour o’ a man,
an’ foucht like a guid ane for the richt an’ the trowth--an’ that hed
putten ’t i’ my heid maybe; only whan I saw her, I kent her, an’ her
name wasna Britomart. She had a twistit brainch o’ blew berries aboot
her helmet, an’ they ca’d her Juniper: wasna that queer, noo? An’ she
cam doon the hill wi’ bonnie big strides, no ower big for a stately
wuman, but eh, sae different frae the nipperty mincin’ stippety-stap
o’ the leddies ye see upo’ the streets here! An’ sae she cam doon the
brae. An’ I soucht sair to cry oot--first o’ a’ to tell her gien she
didna luik till her feet, she wad be lairt i’ the bog, an’ syne to beg
o’ her for mercy’s sake to draw her swoord, an’ caw the oogly heid
aff o’ me, an’ lat me dee. Noo I maun confess ’at the ballant o’ Kemp
Owen was rinnin’ i’ the worm-heid o’ me, an’ I cudna help thinkin’
what, notwithstan’in’ the cheenge o’ han’s i’ the story, lay still to
the pairt o’ the knicht; but hoo was ony man, no to say a mere ugsome
serpent, to mint at sic a thing till a leddy, whether she was in steel
beets an’ spurs or in lang train an’ silver slippers? An’ haith! I
sune fan’ ’at I cudna hae spoken the word, gien I had daured ever sae
stoot. For whan I opened my moo’ to cry till her, I cud dee naething
but shot oot a forkit tongue, an’ cry _sss_. Mem, it was dreidfu’! Sae
I had jist to tak in my tongue again, an’ say naething, for fear o’
fleggin’ awa my bonnie leddy i’ the steel claes. An’ she cam an’ cam,
doon an’ doon, an’ on to the bog; an’ for a’ the weicht o’ her airmour
she sankna a fit intil ’t. An’ she cam, an’ she stude, an’ she luikit
at me; an’ I hed seen her afore, an’ kenned her weel. An’ she luikit at
me, an’ aye luikit; an’ I winna say what was i’ the puir worm’s hert.
But at the last she gae a gret sich, an’ a sab, like, an’ stude jist as
gien she was tryin’ sair, but could _not_ mak up her bonnie min’ to yon
’at was i’ the ballant. An’ eh! hoo I grippit the buik atween me an’
the tree--for there it was--a’ as I saw ’t afore! An’ sae at last she
gae a kin’ o’ a cry, an’ turnt an’ gaed awa, wi’ her heid hingin’ doon,
an’ her swoord trailin’, an’ never turnt to luik ahin’ her, but up the
brae, an’ ower the tap o’ the hill, an’ doon an’ awa; an’ the brainch
wi’ the blew berries was the last I saw o’ her gaein’ doon like the
meen ahin’ the hill. An’ jist wi’ the fell greitin’ I cam to mysel’,
an’ my hert was gaein’ like a pump ’at wad fain pit oot a fire.--Noo
wasna that a queer-like dream?--I’ll no say, mem, but I hae curriet an’
kaimbt it up a wee, to gar ’t tell better.”

Ginevra had from the first been absorbed in listening, and her brown
eyes seemed to keep growing larger and larger as he went on. Even the
girls listened and were silent, looking as if they saw a peacock’s
feather in a turkey’s tail. When he ended, the tears rushed from
Ginevra’s eyes--for bare sympathy--she had no perception of personal
intent in the parable; it was long before she saw into the name of the
lady-knight, for she had never been told the English of _Ginevra_; she
was the simplest, sweetest of girls, and too young to suspect anything
in the heart of a man.

“O Donal!” she said, “I am very sorry for the poor worm; but it was
naughty of you to dream such a dream.”

“Hoo’s that, mem?” returned Donal, a little frightened.

“It was not fair of you,” she replied, “to dream a knight of a lady,
and then dream her doing such an unknightly thing. I am sure if ladies
went out in that way, they would do quite as well, on the whole, as
gentlemen.”

“I mak _nae_ doobt o’ ’t, mem: haiven forbid!” cried Donal; “but ye see
dreams is sic senseless things ’at they winna be helpit;--an’ that was
hoo I dreemt it.”

“Well, well, Donal!” broke in the harsh pompous voice of Mr. Sclater,
who, unknown to the poet, had been standing behind him almost the whole
time, “you have given the ladies quite enough of your romancing. That
sort of thing, you know, my man, may do very well round the fire in
the farm kitchen, but it’s not the sort of thing for a drawing-room.
Besides, the ladies don’t understand your word of mouth; they don’t
understand such broad Scotch.--Come with me, and I’ll show you
something you would like to see.”

He thought Donal was boring his guests, and at the same time preventing
Gibbie from having the pleasure in their society for the sake of which
they had been invited.

Donal rose, replying,

“Think ye sae, sir? I thoucht I was in auld Scotlan’ still--here
as weel ’s upo’ Glashgar. But may be my jography buik’s some
auld-fashioned.--Didna ye un’erstan’ me, mem?” he added, turning to
Ginevra.

“Every word, Donal,” she answered.

Donal followed his host contented.

Gibbie took his place, and began to teach Ginevra the finger alphabet.
The other girls found him far more amusing than Donal--first of all
because he could not speak, which was much less objectionable than
speaking like Donal--and funny too, though not so funny as Donal’s
clothes. And then he had such a romantic history! and was a baronet!

In a few minutes Ginevra knew the letters, and presently she and Gibbie
were having a little continuous _talk_ together, a thing they had
never had before. It was so slow, however, as to be rather tiring. It
was mainly about Donal. But Mrs. Sclater opened the piano, and made a
diversion. She played something brilliant, and then sang an Italian
song in _strillaceous_ style, revealing to Donal’s clownish ignorance
a thorough mastery of caterwauling. Then she asked Miss Kimble to play
something, who declined, without mentioning that she had neither voice
nor ear nor love of music, but said Miss Galbraith should sing--“for
once in a way, as a treat.--That little Scotch song you sing now and
then, my dear,” she added.

Ginevra rose timidly, but without hesitation, and going to the piano,
sang, to a simple old Scotch air, to which they had been written, the
following verses. Before she ended, the minister, the late herd-boy,
and the dumb baronet were grouped crescent-wise behind the music-stool.

  I dinna ken what’s come ower me!
  There’s a how (_hollow_) whaur ance was a hert;
  I never luik oot afore me,
  An’ a cry winna gar me stert;
  There’s naething nae mair to come ower me,
  Blaw the win’ frae ony airt. (_quarter_)

  For i’ yon kirkyaird there’s a hillock,
  A hert whaur ance was a how;
  An’ o’ joy there’s no left a mealock--(_crumb_)
  Deid aiss (_ashes_) whaur ance was a low; (_flame_)
  For i’ yon kirkyaird, i’ the hillock,
  Lies a seed ’at winna grow.

  It’s my hert ’at hauds up the wee hillie--
  That’s hoo there’s a how i’ my breist;
  It’s awa doon there wi’ my Willie,
  Gaed wi’ him whan he was releast;
  It’s doon i’ the green-grown hillie,
  But I s’ be efter it neist.

  Come awa, nichts and mornin’s,
  Come ooks, years, a’ time’s clan;
  Ye’re walcome ayont a’ scornin’:
  Tak me till him as fest as ye can.
  Come awa, nichts an’ mornin’s,
  Ye are wings o’ a michty span!

  For I ken he’s luikin’ an’ waitin’,
  Luikin’ aye doon as I clim’:
  Wad I hae him see me sit greitin’,
  I’stead o’ gaein’ to him?
  I’ll step oot like ane sure o’ a meetin’,
  I’ll traivel an’ rin to him.

Three of them knew that the verses were Donal’s. If the poet went home
feeling more like a fellow in blue coat and fustian trowsers, or a
winged genius of the tomb, I leave my reader to judge. Anyhow, he felt
he had had enough for one evening, and was able to encounter his work
again. Perhaps also, when supper was announced, he reflected that his
reception had hardly been such as to justify him in partaking of their
food, and that his mother’s hospitality to Mr. Sclater had not been in
expectation of return. As they went down the stair, he came last and
alone, behind the two whispering school-girls; and when they passed on
into the dining-room, he spilt out of the house, and ran home to the
furniture-shop and his books.

When the ladies took their leave, Gibbie walked with them. And now at
last he learned where to find Ginevra.




CHAPTER XLVII.

A LESSON OF WISDOM.

In obedience to the suggestion of his wife, Mr. Sclater did what he
could to show Sir Gilbert how mistaken he was in imagining he could fit
his actions to the words of our Lord. Shocked as even he would probably
have been at such a characterization of his attempt, it amounted
practically to this: Do not waste your powers in the endeavour to
keep the commandments of our Lord, for it cannot be done, and he knew
it could not be done, and never meant it should be done. He pointed
out to him, not altogether unfairly, the difficulties, and the causes
of mistake, with regard to his words; but said nothing to reveal the
spirit and the life of them. Showing more of them to be figures than
at first appeared, he made out the meanings of them to be less, not
more than the figures, his pictures to be greater than their subjects,
his parables larger and more lovely than the truths they represented.
In the whole of his lecture, through which ran from beginning to end a
tone of reproof, there was not one flash of enthusiasm for our Lord,
not a sign that, to his so-called minister, he was a refuge, or a
delight--that he who is the joy of his Father’s heart, the essential
bliss of the universe, was anything to the soul of his creature, who
besides had taken upon him to preach his good news, more than a name to
call himself by--that the story of the Son of God was to him anything
better than the soap and water wherewith to blow theological bubbles
with the tobacco-pipe of his speculative understanding. The tendency
of it was simply to the quelling of all true effort after the knowing
of him through obedience, the quenching of all devotion to the central
good. Doubtless Gibbie, as well as many a wiser man, might now and
then make a mistake in the embodiment of his obedience, but even where
the action misses the command, it may yet be obedience to him who
gave the command, and by obeying, one learns how to obey. I hardly
know, however, where Gibbie blundered, except it was in failing to
recognize the animals before whom he ought not to cast his pearls--in
taking it for granted that, because his guardian was a minister, and
his wife a minister’s wife, they must therefore be the disciples of
the Jewish carpenter, the eternal Son of the Father of us all. Had he
had more of the wisdom of the serpent, he would not have carried them
the New Testament as an ending of strife, the words of the Lord as an
enlightening law; he would perhaps have known that to try too hard to
make people good, is one way to make them worse; that the only way to
make them good is to be good--remembering well the beam and the mote;
that the time for speaking comes rarely, the time for being never
departs.

But in talking thus to Gibbie, the minister but rippled the air: Gibbie
was all the time pondering with himself where he had met the same kind
of thing, the same sort of person before. Nothing he said had the
slightest effect upon him. He was too familiar with truth to take the
yeasty bunghole of a working barrel for a fountain of its waters. The
unseen Lord and his reported words were to Gibbie realities, compared
with which the very visible Mr. Sclater and his assured utterance were
as the merest seemings of a phantom mood. He had never resolved to
keep the words of the Lord: he just kept them; but he knew amongst the
rest the Lord’s words about the keeping of his words, and about being
ashamed of him before men, and it was with a pitiful indignation he
heard the minister’s wisdom drivel past his ears. What he would have
said, and withheld himself from saying, had he been able to speak, I
cannot tell; I only know that in such circumstances the less said the
better, for what can be more unprofitable than a discussion where but
one of the disputants understands the question, and the other has all
the knowledge? It would have been the eloquence of the wise and the
prudent against the perfected praise of the suckling.

The effect of it all upon Gibbie was to send him to his room to his
prayers, more eager than ever to keep the commandments of him who had
said, _If ye love me_. Comforted then and strengthened, he came down to
go to Donal--not to tell him, for to none but Janet could he have made
such a communication. But in the middle of his descent he remembered
suddenly of what and whom Mr. Sclater had all along been reminding him,
and turned aside to Mrs. Sclater to ask her to lend him the Pilgrim’s
Progress. This, as a matter almost of course, was one of the few books
in the cottage on Glashgar--a book beloved of Janet’s soul--and he had
read it again and again. Mrs. Sclater told him where in her room to
find a copy, and presently he had satisfied himself that it was indeed
Mr. Worldly Wiseman whom his imagination had, in cloudy fashion, been
placing side by side with the talking minister.

Finding his return delayed, Mrs. Sclater went after him, fearing he
might be indulging his curiosity amongst her personal possessions.
Peeping in, she saw him seated on the floor beside her little bookcase,
lost in reading: she stole behind, and found that what so absorbed him
was the conversation between Christian and Worldly--I beg his pardon,
he is nothing without his _Mr._--between Christian and Mr. Worldly
Wiseman.

In the evening, when her husband was telling her what he had said to
“the young Pharisee” in the morning, the picture of Gibbie on the
floor, with the Pilgrim’s Progress and Mr. Worldly Wiseman, flashed
back on her mind, and she told him the thing. It stung him, not that
Gibbie should perhaps have so paralleled him, but that his wife should
so interpret Gibbie. To her, however, he said nothing. Had he been a
better man, he would have been convinced by the lesson; as it was, he
was only convicted, and instead of repenting was offended grievously.
For several days he kept expecting the religious gadfly to come buzzing
about him with his sting, that is, his forefinger, stuck in the
Pilgrim’s Progress, and had a swashing blow ready for him; but Gibbie
was beginning to learn a lesson or two, and if he was not yet so wise
as some serpents, he had always been more harmless than some doves.

That he had gained nothing for the world was pretty evident to the
minister the following Sunday--from the lofty watchtower of the pulpit
where he sat throned, while the first psalm was being sung. His own pew
was near one of the side doors, and at that door some who were late
kept coming in. Amongst them were a stranger or two, who were at once
shown to seats. Before the psalm ended, an old man came in and stood by
the door--a poor man in mean garments, with the air of a beggar who had
contrived to give himself a Sunday look. Perhaps he had come hoping to
find it warmer in church than at home. There he stood, motionless as
the leech-gatherer, leaning on his stick, disregarded of men--it may
have been only by innocent accident, I do not know. But just ere the
minister must rise for the first prayer, he saw Gibbie, who had heard a
feeble cough, cast a glance round, rise as swiftly as noiselessly, open
the door of the pew, get out into the passage, take the old man by the
hand, and lead him to his place beside the satin-robed and sable-muffed
ministerial consort. Obedient to Gibbie’s will, the old man took the
seat, with an air both of humility and respect, while happily for Mrs.
Sclater’s remnant of ruffled composure, there was plenty of room in
the pew, so that she could move higher up. The old man, it is true,
followed, to make a place for Gibbie, but there was still an interval
between them sufficient to afford space to the hope that none of the
evils she dreaded would fall upon her to devour her. Flushed, angry,
uncomfortable, notwithstanding, her face glowed like a bale-fire to the
eyes of her husband, and, I fear, spoiled the prayer--but that did not
matter much.

While the two thus involuntarily signalled each other, the boy who
had brought discomposure into both pulpit and pew, sat peaceful as a
summer morning, with the old man beside him quiet in the reverence of
being himself revered. And the minister, while he preached from the
words, _Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall_, for
the first time in his life began to feel doubtful whether he might not
himself be a humbug. There was not much fear of his falling, however,
for he had not yet stood on his feet.

Not a word was said to Gibbie concerning the liberty he had taken:
the minister and his wife were in too much dread--not of St. James
and the “poor man in vile raiment,” for they were harmless enough
in themselves, but of Gibbie’s pointing finger to back them. Three
distinct precautions, however, they took; the pew-opener on that side
was spoken to; Mrs. Sclater made Gibbie henceforth go into the pew
before her; and she removed the New Testament from the drawing-room.




CHAPTER XLVIII.

NEEDFULL ODDS AND ENDS.

It will be plain from what I have told, that Donal’s imagination
was full of Ginevra, and his was not an economy whose imagination
could enjoy itself without calling the heart to share. At the same
time, his being in love, if already I may use concerning him that
most general and most indefinite of phrases, so far from obstructing
his study, was in reality an aid to his thinking and a spur to
excellence--not excellence over others, but over himself. There
were moments, doubtless, long moments too, in which he forgot Homer
and Cicero and differential calculus and chemistry, for “the bonnie
lady-lassie,”--that was what he called her to himself; but it was
only, on emerging from the reverie, to attack his work with fresh
vigour. She was so young, so plainly girlish, that as yet there was
no room for dread or jealousy; the feeling in his heart was a kind
of gentle angel-worship; and he would have turned from the idea of
marrying her, if indeed it had ever presented itself, as an irreverent
thought, which he dared not for a moment be guilty of entertaining. It
was besides, an idea too absurd to be indulged in by one who, in his
wildest imaginations, always, through every Protean embodiment, sought
and loved and clung to the real. His chief thought was simply to find
favour in the eyes of the girl. His ideas hovered about her image, but
it was continually to burn themselves in incense to her sweet ladyhood.
As often as a song came fluttering its wings at his casement, the
next thought was Ginevra--and there would be something to give her! I
wonder how many loves of the poets have received their offerings in
correspondent fervour. I doubt if Ginevra, though she read them with
marvel, was capable of appreciating the worth of Donal’s. She was
hardly yet woman enough to do them justice; for the heart of a girl, in
its very sweetness and vagueness, is ready to admire alike the good and
the indifferent, if their outer qualities be similar. It would cause a
collapse in many a swelling of poet’s heart if, while he heard lovely
lips commending his verses, a voice were to whisper in his ear what
certain other verses the lady commended also.

On Saturday evenings, after Gibbie left him, Donal kept his own private
holiday, which consisted in making verses, or rather in setting himself
in the position for doing so, when sometimes verses would be the
result, sometimes not. When the moon was shining in at the windows of
the large room adjoining, he would put out his lamp, open his door,
and look from the little chamber, glowing with fire-light, into the
strange, eerie, silent waste, crowded with the chaos of dis-created
homes. There scores on scores of things, many of them _unco_, that is
_uncouth_, the first meaning of which is _unknown_, to his eyes, stood
huddled together in the dim light. The light looked weary and faint, as
if with having forced its way through the dust of years on the windows;
and Donal felt as if gazing from a clear conscious present out into a
faded dream. Sometimes he would leave his nest, and walk up and down
among spider-legged tables, tall cabinets, secret-looking bureaus,
worked chairs--yielding himself to his fancies. He was one who needed
no opium, or such-like demon-help, to set him dreaming; he could dream
at his will--only his dreams were brief and of rapid change--probably
not more so, after the clock, than those other artificial ones, in
which, to speculate on the testimony, the feeling of their length
appears to be produced by an infinite and continuous subdivision of
the subjective time. Now he was a ghost come back to flit, hovering
and gliding about sad old scenes, that had gathered a new and a
worse sadness from the drying up of the sorrow which was the heart
of them--his doom, to live thus over again the life he had made so
little of in the body; his punishment, to haunt the world and pace its
streets, unable to influence by the turn of a hair the goings on of its
life,--so to learn what a useless being he had been, and repent of his
self-embraced insignificance. Now he was a prisoner, pining and longing
for life and air and human companionship; that was the sun outside,
whose rays shone thus feebly into his dungeon by repeated reflections.
Now he was a prince in disguise, meditating how to appear again and
defeat the machinations of his foes, especially of the enchanter who
made him seem to the eyes of his subjects that which he was not. But
ever his thoughts would turn again to Ginevra, and ever the poems he
devised were devised as in her presence and for her hearing. Sometimes
a dread would seize him--as if the strange things were all looking at
him, and something was about to happen; then he would stride hastily
back to his own room, close the door hurriedly, and sit down by the
fire. Once or twice he was startled by the soft entrance of his
landlady’s grand-daughter, come to search for something in one of the
cabinets they had made a repository for small odds and ends of things.
Once he told Gibbie that something _had_ looked at him, but he could
not tell what or whence or how, and laughed at himself, but persisted
in his statement.

He had not yet begun to read his New Testament in the way Gibbie did,
but he thought in the direction of light and freedom, and looked
towards some goal dimly seen in vague grandeur of betterness. His
condition was rather that of eyeless hunger after growth, than of
any conscious aspiration towards less undefined good. He had a large
and increasing delight in all forms of the generous, and shrunk
instinctively from the base, but had not yet concentrated his efforts
towards becoming that which he acknowledged the best, so that he was
hardly yet on the straight path to the goal of such oneness with good
as alone is a man’s peace. I mention these things not with the intent
of here developing the character of Donal, but with the desire that my
readers should know him such as he then was.

Gibbie and he seldom talked about Ginevra. She was generally
_understood_ between them--only referred to upon needful occasion:
they had no right to talk about her, any more than to intrude on her
presence unseasonably.

Donal went to Mr. Sclater’s church because Mr. Sclater required it,
in virtue of the position he assumed as his benefactor. Mr. Sclater
in the pulpit was a trial to Donal, but it consoled him to be near
Gibbie, also that he had found a seat in the opposite gallery, whence
he could see Ginevra when her place happened to be not far from the
door of one of the school-pews. He did not get much benefit from Mr.
Sclater’s sermons: I confess he did not attend very closely to his
preaching--often directed against doctrinal errors of which, except
from himself, not one of his congregation had ever heard, or was likely
ever to hear. But I cannot say he would have been better employed in
listening, for there was generally something going on in his mind that
had to go on, and make way for more. I have said _generally_, for
I must except the times when his thoughts turned upon the preacher
himself, and took forms such as the following. But it might be a lesson
to some preachers to know that a decent lad like Donal may be making
some such verses about one of them while he is preaching. I have known
not a few humble men in the pulpit of whom rather than write such a
thing Donal would have lost the writing hand.

  ’Twas a sair sair day ’twas my hap till
  Come under yer soon’, Mr. Sclater;
  But things maun he putten a stap till,
  An’ sae maun ye, seener or later!

  For to hear ye rowtin’ an’ scornin’,
  Is no to hark to the river;
  An’ to sit here till brak trowth’s mornin’,
  Wad be to be lost for ever.

I confess I have taken a liberty, and changed one word for another
in the last line. He did not show these verses to Gibbie; or indeed
ever find much fault with the preacher in his hearing; for he knew
that while he was himself more open-minded to the nonsense of the
professional gentleman, Gibbie was more open-hearted towards the merits
of the man, with whom he was far too closely associated on week-days
not to feel affection for him; while, on the other hand, Gibbie made
neither head nor tail of his sermons, not having been instructed in
the theological mess that goes with so many for a theriac of the very
essentials of religion; and therefore, for anything he knew, they might
be very wise and good. At first he took refuge from the sermon in his
New Testament; but when, for the third time, the beautiful hand of
the ministerial spouse appeared between him and the book, and gently
withdrew it, he saw that his reading was an offence in her eyes, and
contented himself thereafter with thinking: listening to the absolutely
unintelligible he found impossible. What a delight it would have been
to the boy to hear Christ preached such as he showed himself, such as
in no small measure he had learned him--instead of such as Mr. Sclater
saw him reflected from the tenth or twentieth distorting mirror! They
who speak against the Son of Man oppose mere distortions and mistakes
of him, having never beheld, neither being now capable of beholding,
him; but those who have transmitted to them these false impressions,
those, namely, who preach him without being themselves devoted to him,
and those who preach him having derived their notions of him from other
scources than himself, have to bear the blame that they have such
excuses for not seeking to know him. He submits to be mis-preached, as
he submitted to be lied against while visibly walking the world, but
his truth will appear at length to all: until then, until he is known
as he is, our salvation tarrieth.

Mrs. Sclater showed herself sincere, after her kind, to Donal as well
as to Gibbie. She had by no means ceased to grow, and already was
slowly bettering under the influences of the New Testament in Gibbie,
notwithstanding she had removed the letter of it from her public
table. She told Gibbie that he must talk to Donal about his dress
and his speech. That he was a lad of no common gifts was plain, she
said, but were he ever so “talented” he could do little in the world,
certainly would never raise himself, so long as he dressed and spoke
ridiculously. The wisest and best of men would be utterly disregarded,
she said, if he did not look and speak like other people. Gibbie
thought with himself this could hardly hold, for there was John the
Baptist; he answered her, however, that Donal could speak very good
English if he chose, but that the affected tone and would-be-fine
pronunciation of Fergus Duff had given him the notion that to speak
anything but his mother-tongue would be unmanly and false. As to his
dress, Donal was poor, Gibbie said, and could not give up wearing any
clothes so long as there was any wear in them. “If you had seen me
once!” he added, with a merry laugh to finish for his fingers.

Mrs. Sclater spoke to her husband, who said to Gibbie that, if he chose
to provide Donal with suitable garments, he would advance him the
money:--that was the way he took credit for every little sum he handed
his ward, but in his accounts was correct to a farthing.

Gibbie would thereupon have dragged Donal at once to the tailor; but
Donal was obstinate.

“Na, na,” he said; “the claes is guid eneuch for him ’at weirs them. Ye
dee eneuch for me, Sir Gilbert, a’ready; an’ though I wad be obleeged
to you as I wad to my mither hersel’, to cleed me gien I warna dacent,
I winna tak your siller nor naebody ither’s to gang fine. Na, na; I’ll
weir the claes oot, an’ we s’ dee better wi’ the neist. An’ for that
bonnie wuman, Mistress Scletter, ye can tell her, ’at by the time I hae
onything to say to the warl’, it winna be my claes ’at’ll haud fowk
ohn hearkent; an’ gien she considers them ’at I hae noo, ower sair a
disgrace till her gran’ rooms, she maun jist no inveet me, an’ I’ll no
come; for I canna presently help them. But the neist session, whan I
hae better, for I’m sure to get wark eneuch in atween, I’ll come an’
shaw mysel’, an’ syne she can dee as she likes.”

This high tone of liberty, so free from offence either given or
taken, was thoroughly appreciated by both Mr. and Mrs. Sclater, and
they did not cease to invite him. A little talk with the latter soon
convinced him that there was neither assumption nor lack of patriotism
in speaking the language of the people among whom he found himself;
and as he made her his _model_ in the pursuit of the accomplishment,
he very soon spoke a good deal better English than Mr. Sclater. But
with Gibbie, and even with the dainty Ginevra, he could not yet bring
himself to talk anything but his mother-tongue.

“I can_not_ mak my moo’,” he would say, “to speyk onything but the
naitral tongue o’ poetry till sic a bonnie cratur as Miss Galbraith;
an’ for yersel’, Gibbie--man! I wad be ill willin’ to bigg a stane wa’
atween me an’ the bonnie days whan Angus MacPholp was the deil we did
fear, an’ Hornie the deil we didna.--Losh, man! what wad come o’ me
gien I hed to say my prayers in English! I doobt gien ’t wad come oot
prayin’ at a’!”

I am well aware that most Scotch people of that date tried to say their
prayers in English, but not so Janet or Robert, and not so had they
taught their children. I fancy not a little unreality was thus in their
case avoided.

“What will you do when you are a minister?” asked Gibbie on his fingers.

“Me a minnister?” echoed Donal. “Me a minnister!” he repeated. “Losh,
man! gien I can save my ain sowl, it’ll be a’ ’at I’m fit for, ohn
lo’dent it wi’ a haill congregation o’ ither fowks. Na, na; gien I can
be a schuilmaister, an’ help the bairnies to be guid, as my mither
taucht mysel’, an’ hae time to read, an’ a feow shillin’s to buy buiks
aboot Aigypt an’ the Holy Lan’, an’ a full an’ complete edition o’
Plato, an’ a Greek Lexicon--a guid ane, an’ a Jamieson’s Dictionar’,
haith, I’ll be a hawpy man! An’ gien I dinna like the schuilmaisterin’,
I can jist tak to the wark again, whilk I cudna dee sae weel gien I
had tried the preachin’: fowk wad ca’ me a stickit minister! Or maybe
they’ll gie me the sheep to luik efter upo’ Glashgar, whan they’re ower
muckle for my father, an’ that wad weel content me. Only I wad hae to
bigg a bit mair to the hoosie, to haud my buiks: I maun hae buiks. I
wad get the newspapers whiles, but no aften, for they’re a sair loss o’
precious time. Ye see they tell ye things afore they’re sure, an’ ye
hae to spen’ yer time the day readin’ what ye’ll hae to spen’ yer time
the morn readin’ oot again; an’ ye may as weel bide till the thing’s
sattled a wee. I wad jist lat them fecht things oot ’at thoucht they
saw hoo they oucht to gang; an’ I wad gie them guid mutton to haud them
up to their dreary wark, an’ maybe a sangie noo an’ than ’at wad help
them to drap it a’thegither.”

“But wouldn’t you like to have a wife, Donal, and children, like your
father and mother?” spelt Gibbie.

“Na, na; nae wife for me, Gibbie!” answered the philosopher. “Wha wad
hae aither a pure schuilmaister or a shepherd?--’cep it was maybe some
lass like my sister Nicie, ’at wadna ken Euclid frae her hose, or Burns
frae a mill-dam, or conic sections frae the hole i’ the great peeramid.”

“I don’t like to hear you talk like that, Donal,” said Gibbie. “What do
you say to mother?”

“The mither’s no to be said aboot,” answerd Donal. “She’s ane by
hersel’, no ane like ither fowk. Ye wadna think waur o’ the angel
Gabriel ’at he hedna jist read Homer clean throu’, wad ye?”

“If I did,” answered Gibbie, “he would only tell me there was time
enough for that.”

When they met on a Friday evening, and it was fine, they would rove
the streets, Gibbie taking Donal to the places he knew so well in his
childhood, and enjoying it the more that he could now tell him so much
better what he remembered. The only place he did not take him to was
Jink Lane, with the house that had been Mistress Croale’s. He did take
him to the court in the Widdiehill, and show him the Auld Hoose o’
Galbraith, and the place under the stair where his father had worked.
The shed was now gone; the neighbours had by degrees carried it away
for firewood. The house was occupied still as then by a number of poor
people, and the door was never locked, day or night, any more than when
Gibbie used to bring his father home. He took Donal to the garret where
they had slept--one could hardly say lived, and where his father died.
The door stood open, and the place was just as they had left it. A year
or two after, Gibbie learned how it came to be thus untenanted: it was
said to be haunted. Every Sunday Sir George was heard at work, making
boots for his wee Gibbie from morning to night; after which, when it
was dark, came dreadful sounds of supplication, as of a soul praying in
hell-fire. For a while the house was almost deserted in consequence.

“Gien I was you, Sir Gilbert,” said Donal, who now and then remembered
Mrs. Sclater’s request--they had come down, and looking at the
outside of the house, had espied a half-obliterated stone-carving of
the Galbraith arms--“Gien I was you, Sir Gilbert, I wad gar Maister
Scletter keep a sherp luik oot for the first chance o’ buyin’ back this
hoose. It wad be a great peety it sud gang to waur afore ye get it. Eh!
sic tales as this hoose cud tell!”

“How am I to do that, Donal? Mr. Sclater would not mind me. The money’s
not mine yet, you know,” said Gibbie.

“The siller is yours, Gibbie,” answered Donal; “it’s yours as the
kingdom o’ haiven’s yours; it’s only ’at ye canna jist lay yer han’s
upo’ ’t yet. The seener ye lat that Maister Scletter ken ’at ye
ken what ye’re aboot, the better. An’ believe me, whan he comes to
un’erstan’ ’at ye want that hoose koft, he’ll no be a day ohn gane to
somebody or anither aboot it.”

Donal was right, for within a month the house was bought, and certain
necessary repairs commenced.

Sometimes on those evenings they took tea with Mistress Croale, and
it was a proud time with her when they went. That night at least the
whisky bottle did not make its appearance.

Mrs. Sclater continued to invite young ladies to the house for Gibbie’s
sake, and when she gave a party, she took care there should be a
proportion of young people in it; but Gibbie, although, of course,
kind and polite to all, did not much enjoy these gatherings. It began
to trouble him a little that he seemed to care less for his kind than
before; but it was only a seeming, and the cause of it was this: he was
now capable of perceiving facts in nature and character which prevented
real contact, and must make advances towards it appear as offensive as
they were useless. But he did not love the less that he had to content
himself, until the kingdom should come nearer, with loving at a more
conscious distance; by loving kindness and truth he continued doing all
he could to bring the kingdom whose end is unity. Hence he had come to
restrain his manner--nothing could have constrained his manners, which
now from the conventional point of view were irreproachable; but if he
did not so often execute a wild dance, or stand upon one leg, the glow
in his eyes had deepened, and his response to any advance was as ready
and thorough, as frank and sweet as ever; his eagerness was replaced
by a stillness from which his eyes took all coldness, and his smile
was as the sun breaking out in a gray day of summer, and turning all
from doves to peacocks. In this matter there was one thing worthy of
note common to Donal and him, who had had the same divine teaching from
Janet: their manners to all classes were the same, they showed the same
respect to the poor, the same ease with the rich.

I must confess, however, that before the session was over, Donal
found it required all his strength of mind to continue to go to Mrs.
Sclater’s little parties--from kindness she never asked him to her
larger ones; and the more to his praise it was that he did not refuse
one of her invitations. The cause was this: one bright Sunday morning
in February, coming out of his room to go to church, and walking down
the path through the furniture in a dreamy mood, he suddenly saw a
person meeting him straight in the face. “Sic a queer-like chiel!” he
remarked inwardly, stepped on one side to let him pass--and perceived
it was himself reflected from head to foot in a large mirror, which had
been placed while he was out the night before. The courage with which
he persisted, after such a painful enlightenment, in going into company
in those same garments, was right admirable and enviable; but no one
knew of it until its exercise was long over.

The little pocket-money Mr. Sclater allowed Gibbie, was chiefly spent
at the shop of a certain secondhand bookseller, nearly opposite
Mistress Murkison’s. The books they bought were carried to Donal’s
room, there to be considered by Gibbie Donal’s, and by Donal Gibbie’s.
Among the rest was a reprint of Marlow’s Faust, the daring in the one
grand passage of which both awed and delighted them; there were also
some of the Ettrick Shepherd’s eerie stories, alone in their kind; and
above all there was a miniature copy of Shelley, whose verse did much
for the music of Donal’s, while yet he could not quite appreciate the
truth for the iridescence of it: he said it seemed to him to have been
all composed in a balloon. I have mentioned only works of imagination,
but it must not be supposed they had not a relish for stronger food:
the books more severe came afterwards, when they had liberty to choose
their own labours; now they had plenty of the harder work provided for
them.

Somewhere about this time Fergus Duff received his license to preach,
and set himself to acquire what his soul thirsted after--a reputation,
namely, for eloquence. This was all the flood-mark that remained of the
waters of verse with which he had at one time so plentifully inundated
his soul. He was the same as man he had been as youth--handsome,
plausible, occupied with himself, determined to succeed, not determined
to labour. Praise was the very necessity of his existence, but he had
the instinct not to display his beggarly hunger--which reached even
to the approbation of such to whom he held himself vastly superior.
He seemed generous, and was niggardly, by turns; cultivated suavity;
indulged in floridity both of manners and speech; and signed his name
so as nobody could read it, though his handwriting was plain enough.

In the spring, summer, and autumn, Donal laboured all day with his
body, and in the evening as much as he could with his mind. Lover
of Nature as he was, however, more alive indeed than before to the
delights of the country, and the genial companionship of terrene sights
and sounds, scents and motions, he could not help longing for the
winter and the city, that his soul might be freer to follow its paths.
And yet what a season some of the labours of the field afforded him for
thought! To the student who cannot think without books, the easiest
of such labours are a dull burden, or a distress; but for the man in
whom the wells have been unsealed, in whom the waters are flowing, the
labour mingles gently and genially with the thought, and the plough he
holds with his hands lays open to the sun and the air more soils than
one. Mr. Sclater without his books would speedily have sunk into the
mere shrewd farmer; Donal, never opening a book, would have followed
theories and made verses to the end of his days.

Every Saturday, as before, he went to see his father and mother. Janet
kept fresh and lively, although age told on her, she said, more rapidly
since Gibbie went away.

“But gien the Lord lat auld age wither me up,” she said, “he’ll luik
efter the cracks himsel’.”

Six weeks of every summer between Donal’s sessions, while the minister
and his wife took their holiday, Gibbie spent with Robert and Janet.
It was a blessed time for them all. He led then just the life of the
former days, with Robert and Oscar and the sheep, and Janet and her cow
and the New Testament--only he had a good many more things to think
about now, and more ways of thinking about them. With his own hands he
built a neat little porch to the cottage door, with close sides and a
second door to keep the wind off: Donal and he carried up the timber
and the mortar. But although he tried hard to make Janet say what he
could do for her more, he could not bring her to reveal any desire that
belonged to this world--except, indeed, for two or three trifles for
her husband’s warmth and convenience.

“The sicht o’ my Lord’s face,” she said once, when he was pressing her,
“is a’ ’at I want, Sir Gibbie. For this life it jist blecks me to think
o’ onything I wad hae or wad lowse. This boady o’ mine’s growin’ some
heavy-like, I maun confess, but I wadna hae ’t ta’en aff o’ me afore
the time. It wad be an ill thing for the seed to be shal’t ower sune.”

They almost always called him _Sir Gibbie_, and he never objected, or
seemed either annoyed or amused at it; he took it just as the name that
was his, the same way as his hair or his hands were his; he had been
called wee Sir Gibbie for so long.




CHAPTER XLIX.

THE HOUSELESS.

The minister kept Gibbie hard at work, and by the time Donal’s last
winter came, Gibbie was ready for college also. To please Mr. Sclater
he _competed_ for a bursary, and gained a tolerably good one, but
declined accepting it. His guardian was annoyed, he could not see why
he should refuse what he had “earned.” Gibbie asked him whether it was
the design of the founder of those bursaries that rich boys should have
them. Were they not for the like of Donal? Whereupon Mr. Sclater could
not help remembering what a difference it would have made to him in his
early struggles, if some rich bursar above him had yielded a place--and
held his peace.

Daur-street being too far from Elphinstone College for a student to
live there, Mr. Sclater consented to Gibbie’s lodging with Donal,
but would have insisted on their taking rooms in some part of the
town--more suitable to the young baronet’s position, he said; but
as there was another room to be had at Mistress Murkison’s, Gibbie
insisted that one who had shown them so much kindness must not be
forsaken; and by this time he seldom found difficulty in having his
way with his guardian. Both he and his wife had come to understand
him better, and nobody could understand Gibbie better without also
understanding better all that was good and true and right: although
they hardly knew the fact themselves, the standard of both of them had
been heightened by not a few degrees since Gibbie came to them; and
although he soon ceased to take direct notice of what in their conduct
distressed him, I cannot help thinking it was not amiss that he uttered
himself as he did at the first; knowing a little his ways of thinking
they came to feel his judgment unexpressed. For Mrs. Sclater, when she
bethought herself that she had said or done something he must count
worldly, the very silence of the dumb boy was a reproof to her.

One night the youths had been out for a long walk and came back to
the city late, after the shops were shut. Only here and there a light
glimmered in some low-browed little place, probably used in part by
the family. Not a soul was visible in the dingy region through which
they now approached their lodging, when round a corner, moving like
a shadow, came, soft-pacing, a ghostly woman in rags, with a white,
worn face, and the largest black eyes, it seemed to the youths that
they had ever seen--an apparition of awe and grief and wonder. To
compare a great thing to a small, she was to their eyes as a ruined,
desecrated shrine to the eyes of the saint’s own peculiar worshipper.
I may compare her to what I please, great or small--to a sapphire
set in tin, to an angel with draggled feathers; for far beyond all
comparison is that temple of the holy ghost in the desert--a woman in
wretchedness and rags. She carried her puny baby rolled hard in the
corner of her scrap of black shawl. To the youths a sea of trouble
looked out of those wild eyes. As she drew near them, she hesitated,
half-stopped, and put out a hand from under the shawl--stretched out
no arm, held out only a hand from the wrist, white against the night.
Donal had no money. Gibbie had a shilling. The hand closed upon it,
a gleam crossed the sad face, and a murmur of thanks fluttered from
the thin lips as she walked on her way. The youths breathed deep, and
felt a little relieved, but only a little. The thought of the woman
wandering in the dark and the fog and the night, was a sickness at
their hearts. Was it impossible to gather such under the wings of any
night-brooding hen? That Gibbie had gone through so much of the same
kind of thing himself, and had found it endurable enough, did not make
her case a whit the less pitiful in his eyes, and indeed it was widely,
sadly different from his. Along the deserted street, which looked to
Donal like a waterless canal banked by mounds of death, and lighted
by phosphorescent grave-damps, they followed her with their eyes, the
one living thing, fading away from lamp to lamp; and when they could
see her no farther, followed her with their feet; they could not bear
to lose sight of her. But they kept just on the verge of vision, for
they did not want her to know the espial of their love. Suddenly she
disappeared, and keeping their eyes on the spot as well as they could,
they found when they reached it a little shop, with a red curtain, half
torn down, across the glass door of it. A dim oil lamp was burning
within. It looked like a rag-shop, dirty and dreadful. There she stood,
while a woman with a bloated face, looking to Donal like a feeder of
hell-swine, took from some secret hole underneath, a bottle which
seemed to Gibbie the very one his father used to drink from. He would
have rushed in and dashed it from her hand, but Donal withheld him.

“Hoots!” he said, “we canna follow her a’ nicht; an’ gien we did, what
better wad she be i’ the mornin’? Lat her be, puir thing!”

She received the whisky in a broken tea-cup, swallowed some of it
eagerly, then, to the horror of the youths, put some of it into the
mouth of her child from her own. Draining the last drops from the cup,
she set it quietly down, turned, and without a word spoken, for she had
paid beforehand, came out, her face looking just as white and thin as
before, but having another expression in the eyes of it. At the sight,
Donal’s wisdom forsook him.

“Eh, wuman,” he cried, “yon wasna what ye hed the shillin’ for!”

“Ye said naething,” answered the poor creature, humbly, and walked on,
hanging her head, and pressing her baby to her bosom.

The boys looked at each other.

“That wasna the gait yer shillin’ sud hae gane, Gibbie,” said Donal.
“It’s clear it winna dee to gie shillin’s to sic like as her. Wha kens
but the hunger an’ the caul’, an’ the want o’ whusky may be the wuman’s
evil things here, ’at she may ’scape the hellfire o’ the Rich Man
hereafter?”

He stopped, for Gibbie was weeping. The woman and her child he would
have taken to his very heart, and could do nothing for them. Love
seemed helpless, for money was useless. It set him thinking much, and
the result appeared. From that hour the case of the homeless haunted
his heart and brain and imagination; and as his natural affections
found themselves repelled and chilled in what is called Society, they
took refuge more and more with the houseless and hungry and shivering.
Through them, also, he now, for the first time, began to find grave and
troublous questions mingling with his faith and hope; so that already
he began to be rewarded for his love: to the true heart every doubt is
a door. I will not follow and describe the opening of these doors to
Gibbie, but, as what he discovered found always its first utterance in
action, wait until I can show the result.

For the time the youths were again a little relieved about the woman:
following her still, to a yet more wretched part of the city, they
saw her knock at a door, pay something, and be admitted. It looked a
dreadful refuge, but she was at least under cover, and shelter, in such
a climate as ours in winter, must be the first rudimentary notion of
salvation. No longer haunted with the idea of her wandering all night
about the comfortless streets, “like a ghost awake in Memphis,” Donal
said, they went home. But it was long before they got to sleep, and in
the morning their first words were about the woman.

“Gien only we hed my mither here!” said Donal.

“Mightn’t you try Mr. Sclater?” suggested Gibbie.

Donal answered with a great roar of laughter.

“He wad tell her she oucht to tak shame till hersel’,” he said, “an’
I’m thinkin’ she’s lang brunt a’ her stock o’ that firin’. He wud tell
her she sud work for her livin’, an’ maybe there isna ae turn the puir
thing can dee ’at onybody wad gie her a bawbee for a day o’!--But what
say ye to takin’ advice o’ Miss Galbraith?”

It was strange how, with the marked distinctions between them, Donal
and Gibbie would every now and then, like the daughters of the Vicar of
Wakefield, seem to change places and parts.

“God can make praise-pipes of babes and sucklings,” answered Gibbie;
“but it does not follow that they can give advice. Don’t you remember
your mother saying that the stripling David was enough to kill a
braggart giant, but a sore-tried man was wanted to rule the people?”

It ended in their going to Mistress Croale. They did not lay bare to
her their perplexities, but they asked her to find out who the woman
was, and see if anything could be done for her. They said to themselves
she would know the condition of such a woman, and what would be moving
in her mind, after the experience she had herself had, better at least
than the minister or his lady-wife. Nor were they disappointed. To
be thus taken into counsel revived for Mistress Croale the time of
her dignity while yet she shepherded her little flock of drunkards.
She undertook the task with hearty good will, and carried it out with
some success. Its reaction on herself to her own good was remarkable.
There can be no better auxiliary against our own sins than to help
our neighbour in the encounter with his. Merely to contemplate our
neighbour will recoil upon us in quite another way: we shall see his
faults so black, that we will not consent to believe ours so bad, and
will immediately begin to excuse, which is the same as to cherish them,
instead of casting them from us with abhorrence.

One day early in the session, as the youths were approaching the gate
of Miss Kimble’s school, a thin, care-worn man, in shabby clothes, came
out, and walked along meeting them. Every now and then he bowed his
shoulders, as if something invisible had leaped upon them from behind,
and as often seemed to throw it off and with effort walk erect. It was
the laird. They lifted their caps, but in return he only stared, or
rather tried to stare, for his eyes seemed able to fix themselves on
nothing. He was now at length a thoroughly ruined man, and had come
to the city to end his days in a cottage belonging to his daughter.
Already Mr. Sclater, who was unweariedly on the watch over the material
interests of his ward, had, through his lawyer, and without permitting
his name to appear, purchased the whole of the Glashruach property. For
the present, however, he kept Sir Gilbert in ignorance of the fact.




CHAPTER L

A WALK.

The cottage to which Mr. Galbraith had taken Ginevra, stood in a
suburban street--one of those small, well-built stone houses common,
I fancy, throughout Scotland, with three rooms and a kitchen on its
one floor, and a large attic with dormer windows. It was low and
wide-roofed, and had a tiny garden between it and the quiet street.
This garden was full of flowers in summer and autumn, but the tops of a
few gaunt stems of hollyhocks, and the wiry straggling creepers of the
honeysuckle about the eaves, was all that now showed from the pavement.
It had a dwarf wall of granite, with an iron railing on the top,
through which, in the season, its glorious colours used to attract many
eyes, but Mr. Galbraith had had the railing and the gate lined to the
very spikes with boards: the first day of his abode he had discovered
that the passers-by--not to say those who stood to stare admiringly at
the flowers, came much too near his faded but none the less conscious
dignity. He had also put a lock on the gate, and so made of the garden
a sort of propylon to the house. For he had of late developed a
tendency towards taking to earth, like the creatures that seem to have
been created ashamed of themselves, and are always burrowing. But it
was not that the late laird was ashamed of himself in any proper sense.
Of the dishonesty of his doings he was as yet scarcely half conscious,
for the proud man shrinks from repentance, regarding it as disgrace.
To wash is to acknowledge the need of washing. He avoided the eyes of
men for the mean reason that he could no longer appear in dignity as
laird of Glashruach and chairman of a grand company; while he felt as
if something must have gone wrong with the laws of nature that it had
become possible for Thomas Galbraith, of Glashruach, Esq., to live in a
dumpy cottage. He had thought seriously of resuming his patronymic of
Durrant, but reflected that he was too well known to don that cloak of
transparent darkness without giving currency to the idea that he had
soiled the other past longer wearing. It would be imagined, he said,
picking out one dishonesty of which he had not been guilty, that he had
settled money on his wife, and retired to enjoy it.

His condition was far more pitiful than his situation. Having no
faculty for mental occupation except with affairs, finding nothing
to do but cleave, like a spent sailor, with hands and feet to the
slippery rock of what was once his rectitude, such as it was, trying
to hold it still his own, he would sit for hours without moving--a
perfect creature, temple, god, and worshipper, all in one--only that
the worshipper was hardly content with his god, and that a worm was
gnawing on at the foundation of the temple. Nearly as motionless, her
hands excepted, would Ginevra sit opposite to him, not quieter, but
more peaceful than when a girl, partly because now she was less afraid
of him. He called her, in his thoughts as he sat there, heartless
and cold, but not only was she not so, but it was his fault that she
appeared to him such. In his moral stupidity he would rather have
seen her manifest concern at the poverty to which he had reduced her,
than show the stillness of a contented mind. She was not much given
to books, but what she read was worth reading, and such as turned
into thought while she sat. They are not the best students who are
most dependent on books. What can be got out of them is at best only
material: a man must build his house for himself. She would have read
more, but with her father beside her doing nothing, she felt that to
take a book would be like going into a warm house, and leaving him
out in the cold. It was very sad to her to see him thus shrunk and
withered, and lost in thought that plainly was not thinking. Nothing
interested him; he never looked at the papers, never cared to hear a
word of news. His eyes more unsteady, his lips looser, his neck thinner
and longer, he looked more than ever like a puppet whose strings hung
slack. How often would Ginevra have cast herself on his bosom if she
could have even hoped he would not repel her! Now and then his eyes did
wander to her in a dazed sort of animal-like appeal, but the moment she
attempted response, he turned into a corpse. Still, when it came, that
look was a comfort, for it seemed to witness some bond between them
after all. And another comfort was, that now, in his misery, she was
able, if not to forget those painful thoughts about him which had all
these years haunted her, at least to dismiss them when they came, in
the hope that, as already such a change had passed upon him, further
and better change might follow.

She was still the same brown bird as of old--a bird of the twilight,
or rather a twilight itself, with a whole night of stars behind it,
of whose existence she scarcely knew, having but just started on
the voyage of discovery which life is. She had the sweetest, rarest
smile--not frequent and flashing like Gibbie’s, but stealing up
from below, like the shadowy reflection of a greater light, gently
deepening, permeating her countenance until it reached her eyes, thence
issuing in soft flame. Always however, an soon as her eyes began to
glow duskily, down went their lids, and down dropt her head like the
frond of a sensitive plant. Her atmosphere was an embodied stillness;
she made a quiet wherever she entered; she was not beautiful, but she
was lovely; and her presence at once made a place such as one would
desire to be in.

The most pleasant of her thoughts were of necessity those with which
the two youths were associated. How dreary but for them and theirs
would the retrospect of her life have been! Several times every winter
they had met at the minister’s, and every summer she had again and
again seen Gibbie with Mrs. Sclater, and once or twice had had a walk
with them, and every time Gibbie had something of Donal’s to give her.
Twice Gibbie had gone to see her at the school, but the second time she
asked him not to come again, as Miss Kimble did not like it. He gave a
big stare of wonder, and thought of Angus and the laird; but followed
the stare with a swift smile, for he saw she was troubled, and asked
no question, but waited for the understanding of all things that must
come. But now, when or where was she ever to see them more? Gibbie was
no longer at the minister’s, and perhaps she would never be invited
to meet them there again. She dared not ask Donal to call: her father
would be indignant; and for her father’s sake she would not ask Gibbie;
it might give him pain; while the thought that he would of a certainty
behave so differently to him now that he was well-dressed, and mannered
like a gentleman, was almost more unendurable to her than the memory of
his past treatment of him.

Mr. and Mrs. Sclater had called upon them the moment they were settled
in the cottage; but Mr. Galbraith would see nobody. When the gate-bell
rang, he always looked out, and if a visitor appeared, withdrew to his
bedroom.

One brilliant Saturday morning, the second in the session, the ground
hard with an early frost, the filmy ice making fairy caverns and
grottos in the cart-ruts, and the air so condensed with cold that every
breath, to those who ate and slept well, had the life of two, Mrs.
Sclater rang the said bell. Mr. Galbraith peeping from the window, saw
a lady’s bonnet, and went. She walked in, followed by Gibbie, and would
have Ginevra go with them for a long walk. Pleased enough with the
proposal, for the outsides of life had been dull as well as painful of
late, she went and asked her father. If she did not tell him that Sir
Gilbert was with Mrs. Sclater, perhaps she ought to have told him; but
I am not sure, and therefore am not going to blame her. When parents
are not fathers and mothers, but something that has no name in the
kingdom of heaven, they place the purest and most honest of daughters
in the midst of perplexities.

“Why do you ask me?” returned her father. “My wishes are nothing to any
one now; to you they never were anything.”

“I will stay at home, if you wish it, papa,--with pleasure,” she
replied, as cheerfully as she could after such a reproach.

“By no means. If you do, I shall go and dine at the Red Hart,” he
answered--not having money enough in his possession to pay for a dinner
there.

I fancy he meant to be kind, but, like not a few, alas! took no pains
to look as kind as he was. There are many, however, who seem to delight
in planting a sting where conscience or heart will not let them deny.
It made her miserable for a while of course, but she had got so used
to his way of breaking a gift as he handed it, that she answered only
with a sigh. When she was a child, his ungraciousness had power to
darken the sunlight, but by repetition it had lost force. In haste she
put on her little brown-ribboned bonnet, took the moth-eaten muff that
had been her mother’s, and rejoined Mrs. Sclater and Gibbie, beaming
with troubled pleasure. Life in her was strong, and their society soon
enabled her to forget, not her father’s sadness, but his treatment of
her.

At the end of the street, they found Donal waiting them--without
greatcoat or muffler, the picture of such health as suffices to its
own warmth, not a mark of the midnight student about him, and looking
very different, in town-made clothes, from the Donal of the mirror.
He approached and saluted her with such an air of homely grace as one
might imagine that of the Red Cross Knight, when, having just put on
the armour of a Christian man, from a clownish fellow he straightway
appeared the goodliest knight in the company. Away they walked together
westward, then turned southward. Mrs. Sclater and Gibbie led, and
Ginevra followed with Donal. And they had not walked far, before
something of the delight of old times on Glashruach began to revive
in the bosom of the too sober girl. In vain she reminded herself that
her father sat miserable at home, thinking of her probably as the
most heartless of girls; the sun, and the bright air like wine in her
veins, were too much for her, Donal had soon made her cheerful, and now
and then she answered his talk with even a little flash of merriment.
They crossed the bridge, high-hung over the Daur, by which on that
black morning Gibbie fled; and here for the first time, with his three
friends about him, he told on his fingers the dire deed of the night,
and heard from Mrs. Sclater that the murderers had been hanged. Ginevra
grew white and faint as she read his fingers and gestures, but it was
more at the thought of what the child had come through, than from the
horror of his narrative. They then turned eastward to the sea, and came
to the top of the rock-border of the coast, with its cliffs rent into
gullies, eerie places to look down into, ending in caverns into which
the waves rushed with bellow and boom. Although so nigh the city, this
was always a solitary place, yet, rounding a rock, they came upon a
young man, who hurried a book into his pocket, and would have gone by
the other side, but perceiving himself recognized, came to meet them,
and saluted Mrs. Sclater, who presented him to Ginevra as the Rev. Mr.
Duff.

“I have not had the pleasure of seeing you since you were quite a
little girl, Miss Galbraith,” said Fergus.

Ginevra said coldly she did not remember him. The youths greeted him in
careless student fashion: they had met now and then for a moment about
the college; and a little meaningless talk followed.

He was to preach the next day--and for several Sundays following--at a
certain large church in the city, at the time without a minister; and
when they came upon him he was studying his sermon--I do not mean the
truths he intended to press upon his audience--those he had mastered
long ago--but his manuscript, _studying_ it in the sense in which
actors use the word, learning it, that is, by heart laboriously, that
the words might come from his lips as much like an extemporaneous
utterance as possible, consistently with not being mistaken for one,
which, were it true as the Bible, would have no merit in the ears of
those who counted themselves judges of the craft. The kind of thing
suited Fergus, whose highest idea of life was _seeming_. Naturally
capable, he had already made of himself rather a dull fellow; for
when a man spends his energy on appearing to have, he is all the time
destroying what he has, and therein the very means of becoming what he
desires to seem. If he gains his end his success is his punishment.

Fergus never forgot that he was a clergyman, always carrying himself
according to his idea of the calling; therefore when the interchange
of commonplaces flagged, he began to look about him for some remark
sufficiently tinged with his profession to be suitable for him to make,
and for the ladies to hear as his. The wind was a thoroughly wintry one
from the north-east, and had been blowing all night, so that the waves
were shouldering the rocks with huge assault. Now Fergus’s sermon,
which he meant to use as a spade for the casting of the first turf of
the first parallel in the siege of the pulpit of the North parish, was
upon the vanity of human ambition, his text being the grand verse--_And
so I saw the wicked buried, who had come and gone from the place of
the holy_; there was no small amount of fine writing in the manuscript
he had thrust into his pocket; and his sermon was in his head when he
remarked, with the wafture of a neatly-gloved hand seawards--

“I was watching these waves when you found me: they seem to me such a
picture of the vanity of human endeavour! But just as little as those
waves would mind me, if I told them they were wasting their labour
on these rocks, will men mind me, when I tell them to-morrow of the
emptiness of their ambitions.”

“A present enstance o’ the vainity o’ human endeevour!” said Donal.
“What for sud ye, in that case, gang on preachin’, sae settin’ them an
ill exemple?”

Duff gave him a high-lidded glance, vouchsafing no reply.

“Just as those waves,” he continued, “waste themselves in effort, as
often foiled as renewed, to tear down these rocks, so do the men of
this world go on and on, spending their strength for nought.”

“Hoots, Fergus!” said Donal again, in broadest speech, as if with its
bray he would rebuke not the madness but the silliness of the prophet,
“ye dinna mean to tell me yon jaws (_billows_) disna ken their business
better nor imaigine they hae to caw doon the rocks?”

Duff cast a second glance of scorn at what he took for the prosaic
stupidity or poverty-stricken logomachy of Donal, while Ginevra opened
on him big brown eyes, as much as to say, “Donal, who was it set me
down for saying a man couldn’t be a burn?” But Gibbie’s face was
expectant: he knew Donal. Mrs. Sclater also looked interested: she did
not much like Duff, and by this time she suspected Donal of genius.
Donal turned to Ginevra with a smile, and said, in the best English he
could command--

“Bear with me a moment, Miss Galbraith. If Mr. Duff will oblige me by
answering my question, I trust I shall satisfy you I am no turncoat.”

Fergus stared. What did his father’s herd-boy mean by talking such
English to the ladies, and such vulgar Scotch to him? Although now
a magistrand--that is, one about to take his degree of Master of
Arts--Donal was still to Fergus the cleaner-out of his father’s
byres--an upstart, whose former position was his real one--towards
him at least, who knew him. And did the fellow challenge him to a
discussion? Or did he presume on the familiarity of their boyhood, and
wish to sport his acquaintance with the popular preacher? On either
supposition, he was impertinent.

“I spoke poetically,” he said, with cold dignity.

“Ye’ll excuse me, Fergus,” replied Donal, “--for the sake o’ auld
langsyne, whan I was, as I ever will be, sair obligatit till ye--but i’
that ye say noo, ye’re sair wrang: ye wasna speykin’ poetically, though
I ken weel ye think it, or ye wadna say ’t; an’ that’s what garred me
tak ye up. For the verra essence o’ poetry is trowth, an’ as sune ’s a
word’s no true, it’s no poetry, though it may hae on the cast claes o’
’t. It’s nane but them ’at kens na what poetry is, ’at blethers aboot
poetic license, an’ that kin’ o’ hen-scraich, as gien a poet was sic a
gowk ’at naebody eedit hoo he lee’d, or whether he gaed wi’ ’s cwite
(_coat_) hin’ side afore or no.”

“I am at a loss to understand you--Donal?--yes, Donal Grant. I remember
you very well; and from the trouble I used to take with you to make you
distinguish between the work of the poet and that of the rhymester, I
should have thought by this time you would have known a little more
about the nature of poetry. Personification is a figure of speech in
constant use by all poets.”

“Ow aye! but there’s true and there’s fause personification; an’ it’s
no ilka poet ’at kens the differ. Ow, I ken! ye’ll be doon upo’ me
wi’ yer Byron,”--Fergus shook his head as at a false impeachment, but
Donal went on--“but even a poet canna mak lees poetry. An’ a man ’at
in ane o’ his gran’est verses cud haiver aboot the birth o’ a yoong
airthquack!--losh! to think o’ ’t growin’ an auld airthquack!--haith,
to me it’s no up till a deuk-quack!--sic a poet micht weel, I grant ye,
be he ever sic a guid poet whan he tuik heed to what he said, he micht
weel, I say, blether nonsense aboot the sea warrin’ again’ the rocks,
an’ sic stuff.”

“But don’t you see them?” said Fergus, pointing to a great billow that
fell back at the moment, and lay churning in the gulf beneath them.
“Are they not in fact wasting the rocks away by slow degrees?”

“What comes o’ yer seemile than, anent the vainity o’ their endeevour?
But that’s no what I’m carin’ aboot. What I mainteen is, ’at though
they div weir awa the rocks, that’s nae mair their design nor it’s the
design o’ a yeuky owse to kill the tree whan he rubs hit’s skin an’ his
ain aff thegither.”

“Tut! nobody ever means, when he personifies the powers of nature, that
they know what they are about.”

“The mair necessar’ till attreebute till them naething but their rale
design.”

“If they don’t know what they are about, how can you be so foolish as
talk of their design?”

“Ilka thing has a design,--an’ gien it dinna ken ’t itsel’, that’s
jist whaur yer true an’ lawfu’ personification comes in. There’s no
rizon ’at a poet sudna attreebute till a thing as a conscious design
that which lies at the verra heart o’ ’ts bein’, the design for which
it’s there. That an’ no ither sud determine the personification ye
gie a thing--for that’s the trowth o’ the thing. Eh, man, Fergus! the
jaws is fechtin’ wi’ nae rocks. They’re jist at their pairt in a gran’
cleansin’ hermony. They’re at their hoosemaid’s wark, day an’ nicht,
to haud the warl’ clean, an’ gran’; an’ bonnie they sing at it. Gien I
was you, I wadna tell fowk any sic nonsense as yon; I wad tell them ’at
ilk ane ’at disna dee his wark i’ the warl’, an’ dee ’t the richt gait,
’s no the worth o’ a minnin, no to say a whaul, for ilk ane o’ thae
wee craturs dis the wull o’ him ’at made ’im wi’ ilka whisk o’ his bit
tailie, fa’in’ in wi’ a’ the jabble o’ the jaws again’ the rocks, for
it’s a’ ae thing--an’ a’ to haud the muckle sea clean. An’ sae whan I
lie i’ my bed, an’ a’ at ance there comes a wee soughie o’ win’ i’ my
face, an’ I luik up an’ see it was naething but the wings o’ a flittin’
flee, I think wi’ mysel’ hoo a’ the curses are but blessin’s ’at ye
dinna see intil, an’ hoo ilka midge, an’ flee, an’ muckle dronin’ thing
’at gangs aboot singin’ bass, no to mention the doos an’ the mairtins
an’ the craws an’ the kites an’ the oolets an’ the muckle aigles an’
the butterflees, is a’ jist haudin’ the air gauin’ ’at ilka defilin’
thing may be weel turnt ower, an’ brunt clean. That’s the best I got
oot o’ my cheemistry last session. An’ fain wad I haud air an’ watter
in motion aboot me, an’ sae serve my en’--whether by waggin’ wi’ my
wings or whiskin’ wi’ my tail. Eh! it’s jist won’erfu’. Its a’ ae gran’
consortit confusion o’ hermony an’ order; an’ what maks the confusion
is only jist ’at a’ thing’s workin’ an’ naething sits idle. But awa wi’
the nonsense o’ ae thing worryin’ an’ fechtin’ at anither!--no till ye
come to beasts an’ fowk, an’ syne ye hae eneuch o’ ’t.”

All the time Fergus had been poking the point of his stick into the
ground, a smile of superiority curling his lip.

“I hope, ladies, our wits are not quite swept away in this flood of
Doric,” he said.

“You have a poor opinion of the stability of our brains, Mr. Duff,”
said Mrs. Sclater.

“I was only judging by myself,” he replied, a little put out. “I can’t
say I understood our friend here. Did you?”

“Perfectly,” answered Mrs. Sclater.

At that moment came a thunderous wave with a great _bowff_ into the
hollow at the end of the gully on whose edge they stood.

“There’s your housemaid’s broom, Donal!” said Ginevra.

They all laughed.

“Everything depends on how you look at a thing,” said Fergus, and said
no more--inwardly resolving, however, to omit from his sermon a certain
sentence about the idle waves dashing themselves to ruin on the rocks
they would destroy, and to work in something instead about the winds of
the winter tossing the snow. A pause followed.

“Well, this is Saturday, and tomorrow is my work-day, you know,
ladies,” he said. “If you would oblige me with your address, Miss
Galbraith, I should do myself the honour of calling on Mr. Galbraith.”

Ginevra told him where they lived, but added she was afraid he must not
expect to see her father, for he had been out of health lately, and
would see nobody.

“At all events I shall give myself the chance,” he rejoined, and
bidding the ladies good-bye, and nodding to the youths, turned and
walked away.

For some time there was silence. At length Donal spoke.

“Poor Fergus!” he said with a little sigh. “He’s a good-natured
creature, and was a great help to me; but when I think of him a
preacher, I seem to see an Egyptian priest standing on the threshold of
the great door at Ipsambul, blowing with all his might to keep out the
Libyan desert; and the four great stone gods, sitting behind the altar,
far back in the gloom, laughing at him.”

Then Ginevra asked him something which led to a good deal of talk about
the true and false in poetry, and made Mrs. Sclater feel it was not
for nothing she had befriended the lad from the hills in the strange
garments. And she began to think whether her husband might not be
brought to take a higher view of his calling.

On Monday Fergus went to pay his visit to Mr. Galbraith. As Ginevra had
said, her father did not appear, but Fergus was far from disappointed.
He had taken it into his head that Miss Galbraith sided with him when
that ill-bred fellow made his rude, not to say ungrateful, attack upon
him, and was much pleased to have a talk with her. Ginevra thought it
would not be right to cherish against him the memory of the one sin of
his youth in her eyes, but she could not like him. She did not know
why, but the truth was, she felt, without being able to identify, his
unreality: she thought it was because, both in manners and in dress, so
far as the custom of his calling would permit, he was that unpleasant
phenomenon, a fine gentleman. She had never heard him preach, or she
would have liked him still less; for he was an orator wilful and
prepense, choice of long words, fond of climaxes, and always aware of
the points at which he must wave his arm, throw forward his hands, wipe
his eyes with the finest of large cambric handkerchiefs. As it was, she
was heartily tired of him before he went, and when he was gone, found,
as she sat with her father, that she could not recall a word he had
said. As to what had made the fellow stay so long, she was therefore
positively unable to give her father an answer; the consequence of
which was, that, the next time he called, Mr. Galbraith, much to her
relief, stood the brunt of his approach, and received him. The ice thus
broken, his ingratiating manners, and the full-blown respect he showed
Mr. Galbraith, enabling the weak man to feel himself, as of old, every
inch a laird, so won upon him that, when he took his leave, he gave him
a cordial invitation to repeat his visit.

He did so, in the evening this time, and remembering a predilection
of the laird’s, begged for a game of backgammon. The result of his
policy was, that, of many weeks that followed, every Monday evening at
least he spent with the laird. Ginevra was so grateful to him for his
attention to her father, and his efforts to draw him out of his gloom,
that she came gradually to let a little light of favour shine upon him.
And if the heart of Fergus Duff was drawn to her, that is not to be
counted to him a fault--neither that, his heart thus drawn, he should
wish to marry her. Had she been still heiress of Glashruach, he dared
not have dreamed of such a thing, but, noting the humble condition to
which they were reduced, the growing familiarity of the father, and the
friendliness of the daughter, he grew very hopeful, and more anxious
than ever to secure the presentation to the North church, which was in
the gift of the city. He could easily have got a rich wife, but he was
more greedy of distinction than of money, and to marry the daughter of
the man to whom he had been accustomed in childhood to look up as the
greatest in the known world, was in his eyes like a patent of nobility,
would be a ratification of his fitness to mingle with the choice of the
land.




CHAPTER LI.

THE NORTH CHURCH.

It was a cold night in March, cloudy and blowing. Every human body was
turned into a fortress for bare defence of life. There was no snow on
the ground, but it seemed as if there must be snow everywhere else.
There was snow in the clouds overhead, and there was snow in the mind
of man beneath. The very air felt like the quarry out of which the snow
had been dug which was being ground above. The wind felt black, the
sky was black, and the lamps were blowing about as if they wanted to
escape, for the darkness was after them. It was the Sunday following
the induction of Fergus, and this was the meteoric condition through
which Donal and Gibbie passed on their way to the North church, to hear
him preach in the pulpit that was now his own.

The people had been gathering since long before the hour, and the
youths could find only standing room near the door. Cold as was the
weather, and keen as blew the wind into the church every time a door
was opened, the instant it was shut again it was warm, for the place
was crowded from the very height of the great steep-sloping galleries,
at the back of which the people were standing on the window sills,
down to the double swing-doors, which were constantly cracking open
as if the house was literally too full to hold the congregation. The
aisles also were crowded with people standing, all eager yet solemn,
with granite faces and live eyes. One who did not know better might
well have imagined them gathered in hunger after good tidings from
the kingdom of truth and hope, whereby they might hasten the coming
of that kingdom in their souls and the souls they loved. But it was
hardly that; it was indeed a long way from it, and no such thing: the
eagerness was, in the mass, doubtless with exceptions, to hear the new
preacher, the pyrotechnist of human logic and eloquence, who was about
to burn his halfpenny blue lights over the abyss of truth, and throw
his yelping crackers into it.

The eyes of the young men went wandering over the crowd, looking for
any of their few acquaintances, but below they mostly fell of course on
the backs of heads. There was, however, no mistaking either Ginevra’s
bonnet or the occiput perched like a capital on the long neck of her
father. They sat a good way in front, about the middle of the great
church. At the sight of them Gibbie’s face brightened, Donal’s turned
pale as death. For, only the last week but one, he had heard of the
frequent visits of the young preacher to the cottage, and of the favour
in which he was held by both father and daughter; and his state of mind
since, had not, with all his philosophy to rectify and support it, been
an enviable one. That he could not for a moment regard himself as a fit
husband for the lady-lass, or dream of exposing himself or her to the
insult which the offer of himself as a son-in-law would bring on them
both from the laird, was not a reflection to render the thought of such
a bag of wind as Fergus Duff marrying her, one whit the less horribly
unendurable. Had the laird been in the same social position as before,
Donal would have had no fear of his accepting Fergus; but misfortune
alters many relations. Fergus’s father was a man of considerable
property, Fergus himself almost a man of influence, and already in
possession of a comfortable income: it was possible to imagine that the
impoverished Thomas Galbraith, late of Glashruach, Esq., might contrive
to swallow what annoyance there could not but in any case be in wedding
his daughter to the son of John Duff, late his own tenant of the Mains.
Altogether Donal’s thoughts were not of the kind to put him in fit
mood--I do not say to gather benefit from the prophesying of Fergus,
but to give fair play to the peddler who now rose to display his loaded
calico and beggarly shoddy over the book-board of the pulpit. But the
congregation listened rapt. I dare not say there was no divine reality
concerned in his utterance, for Gibbie saw many a glimmer through the
rents in his logic and the thin-worn patches of his philosophy; but
it was not such glimmers that fettered the regards of the audience,
but the noisy flow and false eloquence of the preacher. In proportion
to the falsehood in us are we exposed to the falsehood in others. The
false plays upon the false without discord; comes to the false, and is
welcomed as the true; there is no jar, for the false to the false look
the true; darkness takes darkness for light, and great is the darkness.
I will not attempt an account of the sermon; even admirably rendered,
it would be worthless as the best of copies of a bad wall-paper. There
was in it, to be sure, such a glowing description of the city of God
as might have served to attract thither all the diamond-merchants of
Amsterdam; but why a Christian should care to go to such a place, let
him tell who knows; while, on the other hand, the audience appeared
equally interested in his equiponderating description of the place of
misery. Not once did he even attempt to give, or indeed could have
given, the feeblest idea, to a single soul present, of the one terror
of the universe--the peril of being cast from the arms of essential
Love and Life into the bosom of living Death. For this teacher of men
knew nothing whatever but by hearsay, had not in himself experienced
one of the joys or one of the horrors he endeavoured to embody.

Gibbie was not at home listening to such a sermon; he was distressed,
and said afterwards to Donal he would far rather be subjected to Mr.
Sclater’s _isms_ than Fergus’s _ations_. It caused him pain too to see
Donal look so scornful, so contemptuous even; while it added to Donal’s
unrest, and swelled his evil mood, to see Mr. Galbraith absorbed. For
Ginevra’s bonnet, it did not once move--but then it was not set at an
angle to indicate either eyes upturned in listening, or cast down in
emotion. Donal would have sacrificed not a few songs, the only wealth
he possessed, for one peep round the corner of that bonnet. He had
become painfully aware, that, much as he had seen of Ginevra, he knew
scarcely anything of her thoughts; he had always talked so much more
to her than she to him, that now, when he longed to know, he could
not even guess what she might be thinking, or what effect such “an
arrangement” of red and yellow would have upon her imagination and
judgment. She could not think or receive what was not true, he felt
sure, but she might easily enough attribute truth where it did not
exist.

At length the rockets, Roman candles, and squibs were all burnt out,
the would-be “eternal blazon” was over, and the preacher sunk back
exhausted in his seat. The people sang; a prayer, fit pendent to such
a sermon, followed, and the congregation was dismissed--it could not
be with much additional strength to meet the sorrows, temptations,
sophisms, commonplaces, disappointments, dulnesses, stupidities, and
general devilries of the week, although not a few paid the preacher
welcome compliments on his “gran’ discoorse.”

The young men were out among the first, and going round to another
door, in the church-yard, by which they judged Ginevra and her father
must issue, there stood waiting. The night was utterly changed. The
wind had gone about, and the vapours were high in heaven, broken all
into cloud-masses of sombre grandeur. Now from behind, now upon their
sides, they were made glorious by the full moon, while through their
rents appeared the sky and the ever marvellous stars. Gibbie’s eyes
went climbing up the spire that shot skyward over their heads. Around
its point the clouds and the moon seemed to gather, grouping themselves
in grand carelessness; and he thought of the Son of Man coming in the
clouds of heaven; to us mere heaps of watery vapour, ever ready to
fall, drowning the earth in rain, or burying it in snow; to angel-feet
they might be solid masses whereon to tread attendant upon him, who,
although with his word he ruled winds and seas, loved to be waited
on by the multitude of his own! He was yet gazing, forgetful of the
human tide about him, watching the glory dominant over storm, when
his companion pinched his arm: he looked, and was aware that Fergus,
muffled to the eyes, was standing beside them. He seemed not to see
them, and they were nowise inclined to attract his attention, but gazed
motionless on the church door, an unsealed fountain of souls. What a
curious thing it is to watch an issuing crowd of faces for one loved
one--all so unattractive, provoking, blamable, as they come rolling
round corners, dividing, and flowing away--not one of them the right
one! But at last out she did come--Ginevra, like a daisy among mown
grass! It was really she!--but with her father. She saw Donal, glanced
from him to Gibbie, cast down her sweet eyes, and made no sign. Fergus
had already advanced and addressed the laird.

“Ah, Mr. Duff!” said Mr. Galbraith; “excuse me, but would you oblige me
by giving your arm to my daughter? I see a friend waiting to speak to
me. I shall overtake you in a moment.”

Fergus murmured his pleasure, and Ginevra and he moved away together.
The youths for a moment watched the father. He dawdled--evidently
wanted to speak to no one. They then followed the two, walking some
yards behind them. Every other moment Fergus would bend his head
towards Ginevra; once or twice they saw the little bonnet turn upwards
in response or question. Poor Donal was burning with lawless and
foolish indignation: why should the minister muffle himself up like
an old woman in the crowd, and take off the great handkerchief when
talking with the lady? When the youths reached the street where the
cottage stood, they turned the corner after them, and walked quickly up
to them where they stood at the gate waiting for it to be opened.

“Sic a gran’ nicht!” said Donal, after the usual greetings. “Sir Gibbie
an’ me ’s haein’ a dauner wi’ the mune. Ye wad think she had licht
eneuch to haud the cloods aff o’ her, wad ye no, mem? But na! they’ll
be upon her, an’ I’m feart there’s ae unco black ane yon’er--dinna ye
see ’t--wi’ a straik o’ white, aboot the thrapple o’ ’t?--There--dinna
ye see ’t?” he went on pointing to the clouds about the moon, “--that
ane, I’m doobtin’, ’ill hae the better o’ her or lang--tak her intil
’ts airms, an’ bray a’ the licht oot o’ her. Guid nicht, mem.--Guid
nicht, Fergus. You ministers sudna mak yersels sae like cloods. Ye
sud be cled in white an’ gowd, an’ a’ colours o’ stanes, like the new
Jerooslem ye tell sic tales aboot, an’ syne naebody wad mistak the news
ye bring.”

Therewith Donal walked on, doubtless for the moment a little relieved.
But before they had walked far, he broke down altogether.

“Gibbie,” he said, “yon rascal’s gauin’ to merry the leddy-lass! an’
it drives me mad to think it. Gien I cud but ance see an’ speyk till
her--ance--jist ance! Lord! what ’ll come o’ a’ the gowans upo’ the
Mains, an’ the heather upo’ Glashgar!”

He burst out crying, but instantly dashed away his tears with
indignation at his weakness.

“I maun dree my weird,” (_undergo my doom_), he said, and said no more.

Gibbie’s face had grown white in the moon-gleams, and his lips
trembled. He put his arm through Donal’s and clung to him, and in
silence they went home. When they reached Donal’s room, Donal entering
shut the door behind him and shut out Gibbie. He stood for a moment
like one dazed, then suddenly coming to himself, turned away, left the
house, and ran straight to Daur-street.

When the minister’s door was opened to him, he went to that of the
dining-room, knowing Mr. and Mrs. Sclater would then be at supper.
Happily for his intent, the minister was at the moment having his
tumbler of toddy after the labours of the day, an indulgence which,
so long as Gibbie was in the house, he had, ever since that first
dinner-party, taken in private, out of regard, as he pretended to
himself, for the boy’s painful associations with it, but in reality,
to his credit be it told if it may, from a little shame of the thing
itself; and his wife therefore, when she saw Gibbie, rose, and, meeting
him, took him with her to her own little sitting-room, where they had a
long talk, of which the result appeared the next night in a note from
Mrs. Sclater to Gibbie, asking him and Donal to spend the evening of
Tuesday with her.




CHAPTER LII.

THE QUARRY.

Donal threw everything aside, careless of possible disgrace in the
class the next morning, and, trembling with hope, accompanied Gibbie:
she would be there--surely! It was one of those clear nights in which
a gleam of straw-colour in the west, with light-thinned gray-green
deepening into blue above it, is like the very edge of the axe of the
cold--the edge that reaches the soul. But the youths were warm enough:
they had health and hope. The hospitable crimson room, with its round
table set out for a Scotch tea, and its fire blazing hugely, received
them. And there sat Ginevra by the fire! with her pretty feet on a
footstool before it: in those days ladies wore open shoes, and showed
dainty stockings. Her face looked rosy, but it was from the firelight,
for when she turned it towards them, it showed pale as usual. She
received them, as always, with the same simple sincerity that had been
hers on the bank of the Lorrie burn. But Gibbie read some trouble in
her eyes, for his soul was all touch, and, like a delicate spiritual
seismograph, responded at once to the least tremble of a neighbouring
soul. The minister was not present, and Mrs. Sclater had both to be
the blazing coal, and keep blowing herself, else, however hot it might
be at the smouldering hearth, the little company would have sent up no
flame of talk.

When tea was over, Gibbie went to the window, got within the red
curtains, and peeped out. Returning presently, he spelled with fingers
and signed with hands to Ginevra that it was a glorious night: would
she not come for a walk? Ginevra looked to Mrs. Sclater.

“Gibbie wants me to go for a walk,” she said.

“Certainly, my dear--if you are well enough to go with him,” replied
her friend.

“I am always well,” answered Ginevra.

“I can’t go with you,” said Mrs. Sclater, “for I expect my husband
every moment; but what occasion is there, with two such knights to
protect you?”

She was straining hard on the bit of propriety; but she knew them all
so well! she said to herself. Then first perceiving Gibbie’s design,
Donal cast him a grateful glance, while Ginevra rose hastily, and ran
to put on her outer garments. Plainly to Donal, she was pleased to go.

When they stood on the pavement, there was the moon, the very cream of
light, ladying it in a blue heaven. It was not all her own, but the
clouds about her were white and attendant, and ever when they came near
her took on her livery--the poor paled-rainbow colours, which are all
her reflected light can divide into: that strange brown we see so often
on her cloudy people must, I suppose, be what the red or the orange
fades to. There was a majesty and peace about her airy domination,
which Donal himself would have found difficult, had he known her state,
to bring into harmony with her aeonian death. Strange that the light of
lovers should be the coldest of all cold things within human ken--dead
with cold, millions of years before our first father and mother
appeared each to the other on the earth! The air was keen but dry.
Nothing could fall but snow; and of anything like it there was nothing
but those few frozen vapours that came softly out of the deeps to wait
on the moon. Between them and behind them lay depth absolute, expressed
in the perfection of nocturnal blues, deep as gentle, the very home of
the dwelling stars. The steps of the youths rang on the pavements, and
Donal’s voice seemed to him so loud and clear that he muffled it all in
gentler meaning. He spoke low, and Ginevra answered him softly. They
walked close together, and Gibbie flitted to and fro, now on this side,
now on that, now in front of them, now behind.

“Hoo likit ye the sermon, mem?” asked Donal.

“Papa thought it a grand sermon,” answered Ginevra.

“An’ yersel’?” persisted Donal.

“Papa tells me I am no judge,” she replied.

“That’s as muckle as to say ye didna like it sae weel as he did!”
returned Donal, in a tone expressing some relief.

“Mr. Duff is very good to my father, Donal,” she rejoined, “and I don’t
like to say anything against his sermon; but all the time I could not
help thinking whether your mother would like this and that; for you
know, Donal, any good there is in me I have got from her, and from
Gibbie--and from you, Donal.”

The youth’s heart beat with a pleasure that rose to physical pain. Had
he been a winged creature he would have flown straight up; but being a
sober wingless animal, he stumped on with his two happy legs. Gladly
would he have shown her the unreality of Fergus--that he was a poor
shallow creature, with only substance enough to carry show and seeming,
but he felt, just because he had reason to fear him, that it would
be unmanly to speak the truth of him behind his back, except in the
absolute necessity of rectitude. He felt also that, if Ginevra owed her
father’s friend such delicacy, he owed him at least a little silence;
for was he not under more obligation to this same shallow-pated orator,
than to all eternity he could wipe out, even if eternity carried in it
the possibility of wiping out an obligation? Few men understand, but
Donal did, that he who would cancel an obligation is a dishonest man.
I cannot help it that many a good man--good, that is, because he is
growing better--must then be reckoned in the list of the dishonest: he
is in their number until he leaves it.

Donal remaining silent, Ginevra presently returned him his own question:

“How did _you_ like the sermon, Donal?”

“Div ye want me to say, mem?” he asked.

“I do, Donal,” she answered.

“Weel, I wad jist say, in a general w’y, ’at I canna think muckle o’
ony sermon ’at micht gar a body think mair o’ the precher nor o’ him
’at he comes to prech aboot. I mean, ’at I dinna see hoo onybody was
to lo’e God or his neebour ae jot the mair for hearin’ yon sermon last
nicht.”

“But might not some be frightened by it, and brought to repentance,
Donal?” suggested the girl.

“Ou aye; I daur say; I dinna ken. But I canna help thinkin’ ’at what
disna gie God onything like fair play, canna dee muckle guid to men,
an’ may, I doobt, dee a heap o’ ill. It’s a pagan kin’ o’ a thing yon.”

“That’s just what I was feeling--I don’t say thinking, you know--for
you say we must not say _think_ when we have taken no trouble about it.
I am sorry for Mr. Duff, if he has taken to teaching where he does not
understand.”

They had left the city behind them, and were walking a wide open road,
with a great sky above it. On its borders were small fenced fields, and
a house here and there with a garden. It was a plain-featured, slightly
undulating country, with hardly any trees--not at all beautiful,
except as every place under the heaven which man has not defiled is
beautiful to him who can see what _is_ there. But this night the earth
was nothing: what was in them and over them was all. Donal felt--as
so many will feel, before the earth, like a hen set to hatch the eggs
of a soaring bird, shall have done rearing broods for heaven--that,
with this essential love and wonder by his side, to be doomed to go on
walking to all eternity would be a blissful fate, were the landscape
turned to a brick-field, and the sky to persistent gray.

“Wad ye no tak my airm, mem?” he said at length, summoning courage.
“I jist fin’ mysel’ like a horse wi’ a reyn brocken, gaein’ by mysel’
throu’ the air this gait.”

Before he had finished the sentence Ginevra had accepted the offer. It
was the first time. His arm trembled. He thought it was her hand.

“Ye’re no caul’, are ye, mem?” he said.

“Not the least,” she answered.

“Eh, mem! gien fowk was but a’ made oot o’ the same clay, like, ’at ane
micht say till anither--‘Ye hae me as ye hae yersel’’!”

“Yes, Donal,” rejoined Ginevra; “I wish we were all made of the
poet-clay like you! What it would be to have a well inside, out of
which to draw songs and ballads as I pleased! That’s what you have,
Donal--or, rather, you’re just a draw-well of music yourself.”

Donal laughed merrily. A moment more and he broke out singing:

  My thoughts are like fireflies, pulsing in moonlight;
    My heart is a silver cup, full of red wine;
  My soul a pale gleaming horizon, whence soon light
    Will flood the gold earth with a torrent divine.

“What’s that, Donal?” cried Ginevra.

“Ow, naething,” answered Donal. “It was only my hert lauchin’.”

“Say the words,” said Ginevra.

“I canna--I dinna ken them noo,” replied Donal.

“Oh, Donal! are those lovely words gone--altogether--for ever? Shall I
_not_ hear them again?”

“I’ll try to min’ upo’ them whan I gang hame,” he said. “I canna the
noo. I can think o’ naething but ae thing.”

“And what is that, Donal?”

“Yersel’,” answered Donal.

Ginevra’s hand lifted just a half of its weight from Donal’s arm, like
a bird that had thought of flying, then settled again.

“It is very pleasant to be together once more as in the old time,
Donal--though there are no daisies and green fields.--But what place is
that, Donal?”

Instinctively, almost unconsciously, she wanted to turn the
conversation. The place she pointed to was an opening immediately on
the roadside, through a high bank--narrow and dark, with one side
half lighted by the moon. She had often passed it, walking with her
school-fellows, but had never thought of asking what it was. In the
shining dusk it looked strange and a little dreadful.

“It’s the muckle quarry, mem,” answered Donal: “div ye no ken that?
That’s whaur ’maist the haill toon cam oot o’. It’s a some eerie kin’
o’ a place to luik at i’ this licht. I won’er at ye never saw ’t.”

“I have seen the opening there, but never took much notice of it
before,” said Ginevra.

“Come an’ I’ll lat ye see ’t,” rejoined Donal. “It’s weel worth luikin’
intil. Ye hae nae notion sic a place as ’tis. It micht be amo’ the
grenite muntains o’ Aigypt, though they takna freely sic fine blocks
oot o’ this ane as they tuik oot o’ that at Syene. Ye wadna be fleyt to
come an’ see what the meen maks o’ ’t, wad ye, mem?”

“No, Donal. I would not be frightened to go anywhere with you. But--”

“Eh, mem! it maks me richt prood to hear ye say that. Come awa than.”

So saying, he turned aside, and led her into the narrow passage, cut
through a friable sort of granite. Gibbie, thinking they had gone to
have but a peep and return, stood in the road, looking at the clouds
and the moon, and crooning to himself. By and by, when he found they
did not return, he followed them.

When they reached the end of the cutting, Ginevra started at sight of
the vast gulf, the moon showing the one wall a ghastly gray, and from
the other throwing a shadow half across the bottom. But a winding road
went down into it, and Donal led her on. She shrunk at first, drawing
back from the profound, mysterious-looking abyss, so awfully still; but
when Donal looked at her, she was ashamed to refuse to go farther, and
indeed almost afraid to take her hand from his arm; so he led her down
the terrace road. The side of the quarry was on one hand, and on the
other she could see only into the gulf.

“Oh, Donal!” she said at length, almost in a whisper, “this is like a
dream I once had, of going down and down a long roundabout road, inside
the earth, down and down, to the heart of a place full of the dead--the
ground black with death, and between horrible walls.”

Donal looked at her; his face was in the light reflected from the
opposite gray precipice: she thought it looked white and strange, and
grew more frightened, but dared not speak. Presently Donal again began
to sing, and this is something like what he sang:--

  “Death! whaur do ye bide, auld Death?”
  “I bide in ilka breath,”
  Quo’ Death.
  “No i’ the pyramids,
  An’ no the worms amids,
  ’Neth coffin-lids;
  I bidena whaur life has been,
  An’ whaur ’s nae mair to be dune.”

  “Death! whaur do ye bide, auld Death?”
  “Wi’ the leevin’, to dee ’at’s laith,”
  Quo’ Death.
  “Wi’ the man an’ the wife
  ’At lo’e like life,
  But (_without_) strife;
  Wi’ the bairns ’at hing to their mither,
  An’ a’ ’at lo’e ane anither.”

  “Death! whaur do ye bide, auld Death?”
  “Abune an’ aboot an’ aneath,”
  Quo’ Death.
  “But o’ a’ the airts,
  An’ o’ a’ the pairts,
  In herts,
  Whan the tane to the tither says na,
  An’ the north win’ begins to blaw.”

“What a terrible song, Donal!” said Ginevra.

He made no reply, but went on, leading her down into the pit: he had
been afraid she was going to draw back, and sang the first words her
words suggested, knowing she would not interrupt him. The aspect of the
place grew frightful to her.

“Are you sure there are no holes--full of water, down there?” she
faltered.

“Ay, there’s ane or twa,” replied Donal, “but we’ll haud oot o’ them.”

Ginevra shuddered, but was determined to show no fear: Donal should
not reproach her with lack of faith! They stepped at last on the level
below, covered with granite chips and stones and great blocks. In the
middle rose a confused heap of all sorts. To this, and round to the
other side of it, Donal led her. There shone the moon on the corner of
a pool, the rest of which crept away in blackness under an overhanging
mass. She caught his arm with both hands. He told her to look up. Steep
granite rock was above them all round, on one side dark, on the other
mottled with the moon and the thousand shadows of its own roughness;
over the gulf hung vaulted the blue, cloud-blotted sky, whence the moon
seemed to look straight down upon her, asking what they were about,
away from their kind, in such a place of terror.

Suddenly Donal caught her hand. She looked in his face. It was not the
moon that could make it so white.

“Ginevra!” he said, with trembling voice.

“Yes, Donal,” she answered.

“Ye’re no angry at me for ca’in ye by yer name? I never did it afore.”

“I always call you Donal,” she answered.

“That’s naitral. Ye’re a gran’ leddy, an’ I’m naething abune a
herd-laddie.”

“You’re a great poet, Donal, and that’s much more than being a lady or
a gentleman.”

“Ay, maybe,” answered Donal listlessly, as if he were thinking of
something far away; “but it winna mak up for the tither; they’re no
upo’ the same side o’ the watter, like. A puir lad like me daurna lift
an ee till a gran’ leddy like you, mem. A’ the warl’ wad but scorn him,
an’ lauch at the verra notion. My time’s near ower at the college, an’
I see naething for ’t but gang hame an’ fee (_hire myself_). I’ll be
better workin’ wi’ my han’s nor wi’ my heid whan I hae nae houp left
o’ ever seein’ yer face again. I winna lowse a day aboot it. Gien I
lowse time I may lowse my rizon. Hae patience wi’ me ae meenute, mem;
I’m jist driven to tell ye the trowth. It’s mony a lang sin I hae kent
mysel’ wantin’ you. Ye’re the boady, an’ I’m the shaidow. I dinna
mean nae hyperbolics--that’s the w’y the thing luiks to me i’ my ain
thouchts. Eh, mem, but ye’re bonnie! Ye dinna ken yersel’ hoo bonnie
ye are, nor what a subversion you mak i’ my hert an’ my heid. I cud
jist cut my heid aff, an’ lay ’t aneth yer feet to haud them aff o’ the
caul’ flure.”

Still she looked him in the eyes, like one bewildered, unable to
withdraw her eyes from his. Her face too had grown white.

“Tell me to haud my tongue, mem, an’ I’ll haud it,” he said.

Her lips moved, but no sound came.

“I ken weel,” he went on, “ye can never luik upo’ me as onything mair
nor a kin’ o’ a human bird, ’at ye wad hing in a cage, an’ gie seeds
an’ bits o’ sugar till, an’ hearken till whan he sang. I’ll never
trouble ye nae mair, an’ whether ye grant me my prayer or no, ye’ll
never see me again. The only differ ’ill be ’at I’ll aither hing my
heid or haud it up for the rest o’ my days. I wad fain ken ’at I wasna
despised, an’ ’at maybe gien things had been different,--but na, I
dinna mean that; I mean naething ’at wad fricht ye frae what I wad hae.
It sudna mean a hair mair nor lies in itsel’.”

“What is it, Donal?” said Ginevra, half inaudibly, and with effort: she
could scarcely speak for a fluttering in her throat.

“I cud beseech ye upo’ my k-nees,” he went on, as if she had not
spoken, “to lat me kiss yer bonnie fut; but that ye micht grant for
bare peety, an’ that wad dee me little guid; sae for ance an’ for
a’, till maybe efter we’re a’ ayont the muckle sea, I beseech at the
fawvour o’ yer sweet sowl, to lay upo’ me, as upo’ the lips o’ the
sowl ’at sang ye the sangs ye likit sae weel to hear whan ye was but a
leddy-lassie--ae solitary kiss. It shall be holy to me as the licht;
an’ I sweir by the Trowth I’ll think o’ ’t but as ye think, an’ man nor
wuman nor bairn, no even Gibbie himsel’, sall ken--”

The last word broke the spell upon Ginevra.

“But, Donal,” she said, as quietly as when years ago they talked by the
Lorrie side, “would it be right?--a secret with you I could not tell to
_any_ one?--not even if afterwards--”

Donal’s face grew so ghastly with utter despair that absolute terror
seized her; she turned from him and fled, calling “Gibbie! Gibbie!”

He was not many yards off, approaching the mound as she came from
behind it. He ran to meet her. She darted to him like a dove pursued
by a hawk, threw herself into his arms, laid her head on his shoulder,
and wept. Gibbie held her fast, and with all the ways in his poor power
sought to comfort her. She raised her face at length. It was all wet
with tears which glistened in the moonlight. Hurriedly Gibbie asked on
his fingers:

“Was Donal not good to you?”

“He’s _beautiful_,” she sobbed; “but I couldn’t, you know, Gibbie, I
couldn’t. I don’t care a straw about position and all that--who would
with a poet?--but I couldn’t, you know, Gibbie. I couldn’t let him
think I might have married him--in any case: could I now, Gibbie?”

She laid her head again on his shoulder and sobbed. Gibbie did not
well understand her. Donal, where he had thrown himself on a heap of
granite chips, heard and understood, felt and knew and resolved all in
one. The moon shone, and the clouds went flitting like ice-floe about
the sky, now gray in distance, now near the moon and white, now in her
very presence and adorned with her favour on their bosoms, now drifting
again into the gray; and still the two, Ginevra and Gibbie, stood
motionless--Gibbie with the tears in his eyes, and Ginevra weeping as
if her heart would break; and behind the granite blocks lay Donal.

Again Ginevra raised her head.

“Gibbie, you must go and look after poor Donal,” she said.

Gibbie went, but Donal was nowhere to be seen. To escape the two he
loved so well, and be alone as he felt, he had crept away softly into
one of the many recesses of the place. Again and again Gibbie made the
noise with which he was accustomed to call him, but he gave back no
answer, and they understood that wherever he was he wanted to be left
to himself. They climbed again the winding way out of the gulf, and
left him the heart of its desolation.

“Take me home, Gibbie,” said Ginevra, when they reached the high road.

As they went, not a word more passed between them. Ginevra was as dumb
as Gibbie, and Gibbie was sadder than he had ever been in his life--not
only for Donal’s sake, but because, in his inexperienced heart, he
feared that Ginevra would not listen to Donal because she could
not--because she had already promised herself to Fergus Duff; and with
all his love to his kind, he could not think it well that Fergus should
be made happy at such a price. He left her at her own door, and went
home, hoping to find Donal there before him.

He was not there. Hour after hour passed, and he did not appear. At
eleven o’clock, Gibbie set out to look for him, but with little hope
of finding him. He went all the way back to the quarry, thinking it
possible he might be waiting there, expecting him to return without
Ginevra. The moon was now low, and her light reached but a little way
into it, so that the look of the place was quite altered, and the
bottom of it almost dark. But Gibbie had no fear. He went down to
the spot, almost feeling his way, where they had stood, got upon the
heap, and called and whistled many times. But no answer came. Donal
was away, he did not himself know where, wandering wherever the feet
in his spirit led him. Gibbie went home again, and sat up all night,
keeping the kettle boiling, ready to make tea for him the moment he
should come in. But even in the morning Donal did not appear. Gibbie
was anxious--for Donal was unhappy.

He might hear of him at the college, he thought, and went at the usual
hour. Sure enough, as he entered the quadrangle, there was Donal going
in at the door leading to the moral philosophy class-room. For hours,
neglecting his own class, he watched about the court, but Donal never
showed himself. Gibbie concluded he had watched to avoid him, and had
gone home by Crown-street, and himself returned the usual and shorter
way, sure almost of now finding him in his room--although probably with
the door locked. The room was empty, and Mistress Murkison had not seen
him.

Donal’s final examination, upon which alone his degree now depended,
came on the next day: Gibbie watched at a certain corner, and unseen
saw him pass--with a face pale but strong, eyes that seemed not to have
slept, and lips that looked the inexorable warders of many sighs. After
that he did not see him once till the last day of the session arrived.
Then in the public room he saw him go up to receive his degree. Never
before had he seen him look grand; and Gibbie knew that there was not
_any_ evil in the world, except wrong. But it had been the dreariest
week he had ever passed. As they came from the public room, he lay in
wait for him once more, but again in vain: he must have gone through
the sacristan’s garden behind.

When he reached his lodging, he found a note from Donal waiting him, in
which he bade him good-bye, said he was gone to his mother, and asked
him to pack up his things for him: he would write to Mistress Murkison
and tell her what to do with the chest.




CHAPTER LIII.

A NIGHT-WATCH.

A sense of loneliness, such as in all his forsaken times he had never
felt, overshadowed Gibbie when he read this letter. He was altogether
perplexed by Donal’s persistent avoidance of him. He had done nothing
to hurt him, and knew himself his friend in his sorrow as well as in
his joy. He sat down in the room that had been his, and wrote to him.
As often as he raised his eyes--for he had not shut the door--he saw
the dusty sunshine on the old furniture. It was a bright day, one of
the pursuivants of the yet distant summer, but how dreary everything
looked! how miserable and heartless now Donal was gone, and would never
regard those things any more! When he had ended his letter, almost for
the first time in his life, he sat thinking what he should do next.
It was as if he were suddenly becalmed on the high seas; one wind had
ceased to blow, and another had not begun. It troubled him a little
that he must now return to Mr. Sclater, and once more feel the pressure
of a nature not homogeneous with his own. But it would not be for long.

Mr. Sclater had thought of making a movement towards gaining an
extension of his tutelage beyond the ordinary legal period, on the
ground of unfitness in his ward for the management of his property; but
Gibbie’s character and scholarship, and the opinion of the world which
would follow failure, had deterred him from the attempt. In the month
of May, therefore, when, according to the registry of his birth in the
parish book, he would be of age, he would also be, as he expected, his
own master, so far as other mortals were concerned. As to what he would
then do, he had thought much, and had plans, but no one knew anything
of them except Donal--who had forsaken him.

He was in no haste to return to Daur-street. He packed Donal’s things,
with all the books they had bought together, and committed the chest
to Mistress Murkison. He then told her he would rather not give up his
room just yet, but would like to keep it on for a while, and come and
go as he pleased; to which the old woman replied,

“As ye wull, Sir Gibbie. Come an’ gang as free as the win’. Mak o’ my
hoose as gien it war yer ain.”

He told her he would sleep there that night, and she got him his dinner
as usual; after which, putting a Greek book in his pocket, he went out,
thinking to go to the end of the pier and sit there a while. He would
gladly have gone to Ginevra, but she had prevented him when she was
at school, and had never asked him since she left it. But Gibbie was
not _ennuyé_: the pleasure of his life came from the very roots of his
being, and would therefore run into any channel of his consciousness;
neither was he greatly troubled; nothing could “put rancours in the
vessel of” his “peace;” he was only very hungry after the real presence
of the human; and scarcely had he set his foot on the pavement, when
he resolved to go and see Mistress Croale. The sun, still bright, was
sinking towards the west, and a cold wind was blowing. He walked to the
market, up to the gallery of it, and on to the farther end, greeting
one and another of the keepers of the little shops, until he reached
that of Mistress Croale. She was overjoyed at sight of him, and proud
the neighbours saw the terms they were on. She understood his signs
and finger-speech tolerably, and held her part of the conversation
in audible utterance. She told him that for the week past Donal had
occupied her garret--she did not know why, she said, and hoped nothing
had gone wrong between them. Gibbie signed that he could not tell her
about it there, but would go and take tea with her in the evening.

“I’m sorry I canna be hame sae ear’,” she replied. “I promised to tak
my dish o’ tay wi’ auld Mistress Green--the kail-wife, ye ken, Sir
Gibbie.”--Gibbie nodded and she resumed:--“But gien ye wad tak a lug o’
a Fin’on haddie wi’ me at nine o’clock, I wad be prood.”

Gibbie nodded again, and left her.

All this time he had not happened to discover that the lady who stood
at the next counter, not more than a couple of yards from him, was
Miss Kimble--which was the less surprising in that the lady took
some trouble to hide the fact. She extended her purchasing when she
saw who was shaking hands with the next stall-keeper, but kept her
face turned from him, heard all Mrs. Croale said to him, and went
away asking herself what possible relations except objectionable
ones could exist between such a pair. She knew little or nothing of
Gibbie’s early history, for she had not been a dweller in the city
when Gibbie was known as well as the town-cross to almost every man,
woman, and child in it, else perhaps she might, but I doubt it, have
modified her conclusion. Her instinct was in the right, she said, with
self-gratulation; he was a lad of low character and tastes, just what
she had taken him for the first moment she saw him: his friends could
not know what he was; she was bound to acquaint them with his conduct;
and first of all, in duty to her old pupil, she must let Mr. Galbraith
know what sort of friendships this Sir Gilbert, his nephew, cultivated.
She went therefore straight to the cottage.

Fergus was there when she rang the bell. Mr. Galbraith looked out,
and seeing who it was, retreated--the more hurriedly that he owed her
money, and imagined she had come to dun him. But when she found to
her disappointment that she could not see him, Miss Kimble did not
therefore attempt to restrain a little longer the pent-up waters of her
secret. Mr. Duff was a minister, and the intimate friend of the family:
she would say what she had seen and heard. Having then first abjured
all love of gossip, she told her tale, appealing to the minister
whether she had not been right in desiring to let Sir Gilbert’s uncle
know how he was going on.

“I was not aware that Sir Gilbert was a cousin of yours, Miss
Galbraith,” said Fergus.

Ginevra’s face was rosy red, but it was now dusk, and the fire-light
had friendly retainer-shadows about it.

“He is not my cousin,” she answered.

“Why, Ginevra! you told me he was your cousin,” said Miss Kimble, with
keen moral reproach.

“I beg your pardon; I never did,” said Ginevra.

“I must see your father instantly,” cried Miss Kimble, rising in anger.
“He must be informed at once how much he is mistaken in the young
gentleman he permits to be on such friendly terms with his daughter.”

“My father does not know him,” rejoined Ginevra; “and I should prefer
they were not brought together just at present.”

Her words sounded strange even in her own ears, but she knew no way but
the straight one.

“You quite shock me, Ginevra!” said the school-mistress, resuming her
seat: “you cannot mean to say you cherish acquaintance with a young man
of whom your father knows nothing, and whom you dare not introduce to
him?”

To explain would have been to expose her father to blame.

“I have known Sir Gilbert from my childhood,” she said.

“Is it possible your duplicity reaches so far?” cried Miss Kimble,
assured in her own mind that Ginevra had said he was her cousin.

Fergus thought it was time to interfere.

“I know something of the circumstances that led to the acquaintance of
Miss Galbraith with Sir Gilbert,” he said, “and I am sure it would only
annoy her father to have any allusion made to it by one--excuse me,
Miss Kimble--who is comparatively a stranger. I beg you will leave the
matter to me.”

Fergus regarded Gibbie as a half witted fellow, and had no fear of him.
He knew nothing of the commencement of his acquaintance with Ginevra,
but imagined it had come about through Donal; for, studiously as Mr.
Galbraith had avoided mention of his quarrel with Ginevra because of
the lads, something of it had crept out, and reached the Mains; and in
now venturing allusion to that old story, Fergus was feeling after a
nerve whose vibration, he thought, might afford him some influence over
Ginevra.

He spoke authoritatively, and Miss Kimble, though convinced it was a
mere pretence of her graceless pupil that her father would not see her,
had to yield, and rose. Mr. Duff rose also, saying he would walk with
her. He returned to the cottage, dined with them, and left about eight
o’clock.

Already well enough acquainted in the city to learn without difficulty
where Mistress Croale lived, and having nothing very particular to do,
he strolled in the direction of her lodging, and saw Gibbie go into the
house. Having seen him in, he was next seized with the desire to see
him out again; having lain in wait for him as a beneficent brownie,
he must now watch him as a profligate baronet forsooth! To haunt the
low street until he should issue was a dreary prospect--in the east
wind of a March night, which some giant up above seemed sowing with
great handfuls of rain-seed; but having made up his mind, he stood his
ground. For two hours he walked, vaguely cherishing an idea that he was
fulfilling a duty of his calling, as a moral policeman.

When at length Gibbie appeared, he had some difficulty in keeping
him in sight, for the sky was dark, the moon was not yet up, and
Gibbie walked like a swift shadow before him. Suddenly, as if some
old association had waked the old habit, he started off at a quick
trot. Fergus did his best to follow. As he ran, Gibbie caught sight
of a woman seated on a doorstep, almost under a lamp, a few paces up
a narrow passage, stopped, stepped within the passage, and stood in a
shadow watching her. She had turned the pocket of her dress inside out,
and seemed unable to satisfy herself that there was nothing there but
the hole, which she examined again and again, as if for the last news
of her last coin. Too thoroughly satisfied at length, she put back the
pocket, and laid her head on her hands. Gibbie had not a farthing. Oh,
how cold it was! and there sat his own flesh and blood shivering in it!
He went up to her. The same moment Fergus passed the end of the court.
Gibbie took her by the hand. She started in terror, but his smile
reassured her. He drew her, and she rose. He laid her hand on his arm,
and she went with him. He had not yet begun to think about prudence,
and perhaps, if some of us thought more about right, we should have
less occasion to cultivate the inferior virtue. Perhaps also we should
have more belief that there is One to care that things do not go wrong.

Fergus had given up the chase, and having met a policeman, was talking
to him, when Gibbie came up with the woman on his arm, and passed
them. Fergus again followed, sure of him now. Had not fear of being
recognized prevented him from passing them and looking, he would have
seen only a poor old thing, somewhere about sixty; but if she had been
beautiful as the morning, of course Gibbie would have taken her all the
same. He was the Gibbie that used to see the drunk people home. Gibbies
like him do not change; they grow.

After following them through several streets, Fergus saw them stop at
a door. Gibbie opened it with a key which his spy imagined the woman
gave him. They entered, and shut it almost in Fergus’s face, as he
hurried up determined to speak. Gibbie led the poor shivering creature
up the stair, across the chaos of furniture, and into his room, in
the other corner next to Donal’s. To his joy he found the fire was
not out. He set her in the easiest chair he had, put the kettle on,
blew the fire to a blaze, made coffee, cut bread and butter, got out a
pot of marmalade, and ate and drank with his guest. She seemed quite
bewildered and altogether unsure. I believe she took him at last,
finding he never spoke, for half-crazy, as not a few had done, and as
many would yet do. She smelt of drink, but was sober, and ready enough
to eat. When she had taken as much as she would, Gibbie turned down the
bed-clothes, made a sign to her she was to sleep there, took the key
from the outside of the door, and put it in the lock on the inside,
nodded a good-night, and left her, closing the door softly, which he
heard her lock behind him, and going to Donal’s room, where he slept.

In the morning he knocked at her door, but there was no answer, and
opening it, he found she was gone.

When he told Mistress Murkison what he had done, he was considerably
astonished at the wrath and indignation which instantly developed
themselves in the good creature’s atmosphere. That her respectable
house should be made a hiding-place from the wind and a covert from
the tempest, was infuriating. Without a moment’s delay, she began a
sweeping and scrubbing, and general cleansing of the room, as if all
the devils had spent the night in it. And then for the first time
Gibbie reflected, that, when he ran about the streets, he had never
been taken home--except once, to be put under the rod and staff of the
old woman. If Janet had been like the rest of them, he would have died
upon Glashgar, or be now wandering about the country, doing odd jobs
for half-pence! He must not do like other people--would not, could
not, dared not be like them! He had had such a thorough schooling in
humanity as nobody else had had! He had been to school in the streets,
in dark places of revelry and crime, and in the very house of light!

When Mistress Murkison told him that if ever he did the like again,
she would give him notice to quit, he looked in her face: she stared a
moment in return, then threw her arms round his neck, and kissed him.

“Ye’re the bonniest cratur o’ a muckle idiot ’at ever man saw!” she
cried; “an’ gien ye dinna tak the better care, ye’ll be soopit aff to
haiven afore ye ken whaur ye are or what ye’re aboot.”

Her feelings, if not her sentiments, experienced a relapse when she
discovered that one of her few silver tea-spoons was gone--which,
beyond a doubt, the woman had taken: she abused her, and again scolded
Gibbie, with much vigour. But Gibbie said to himself, “The woman is not
bad, for there were two more silver spoons on the table.” Even in the
matter of stealing we must think of our own beam before our neighbour’s
mote. It is not easy to be honest. There is many a thief who is less of
a thief than many a respectable member of society. The thief must be
punished, and assuredly the other shall not come out until he has paid
the uttermost farthing. Gibbie, who would have died rather than cast
a shadow of injustice, was not shocked at the woman’s depravity like
Mistress Murkison. I am afraid he smiled. He took no notice either of
her scoldings or her lamentations; but the first week after he came of
age, he carried her a present of a dozen spoons.

Fergus could not tell Ginevra what he had seen; and if he told her
father, she would learn that he had been playing the spy. To go to Mr.
Sclater would have compromised him similarly. And what great occasion
was there? He was not the fellow’s keeper!

That same day Gibbie went back to his guardians. At his request Mrs.
Sclater asked Ginevra to spend the following evening with them: he
wanted to tell her about Donal. She accepted the invitation. But in a
village near the foot of Glashgar, Donal had that morning done what
was destined to prevent her from keeping her engagement: he had posted
a letter to her. In an interval of comparative quiet, he had recalled
the verses he sang to her as they walked that evening, and now sent
them--completed in a very different tone. Not a word accompanied them.

  My thouchts are like fire-flies pulsing in moonlight;
    My heart like a silver cup full of red wine;
  My soul a pale gleaming horizon, whence soon light
    Will flood the gold earth with a torrent divine.

  My thouchts are like worms in a starless gloamin’;
    My hert like a sponge that’s fillit wi’ gall;
  My sowl like a bodiless ghaist sent a roamin’,
    To bide i’ the mirk till the great trumpet call.

  But peace be upo’ ye, as deep as ye’re lo’esome!
    Brak na an hoor o’ yer fair-dreamy sleep,
  To think o’ the lad wi’ a weicht in his bosom,
    ’At ance sent a cry till ye oot o’ the deep.

  Some sharp rocky heicht, to catch a far mornin’
    Ayont a’ the nichts o’ this warl’, he’ll clim’;
  For nane shall say, Luik! he sank doon at her scornin’,
    Wha rase by the han’ she hield frank oot to him.

The letter was handed, with one or two more, to Mr. Galbraith, at the
breakfast table. He did not receive many letters now, and could afford
time to one that was for his daughter. He laid it with the rest by his
side, and after breakfast took it to his room and read it. He could
no more understand it than Fergus could the Epistle to the Romans,
and therefore the little he did understand of it was too much. But he
had begun to be afraid of his daughter: her still dignity had begun
to tell upon him in his humiliation. He laid the letter aside, said
nothing, and waited, inwardly angry and contemptuous. After a while he
began to flatter himself with the hope that perhaps it was but a sort
of impertinent valentine, the writer of which was unknown to Ginevra.
From the moment of its arrival, however, he kept a stricter watch upon
her, and that night prevented her from going to Mrs. Sclater’s. Gibbie,
aware that Fergus continued his visits, doubted less and less that
she had given herself to “The Bledder,” as Donal called the popular
preacher.




CHAPTER LIV.

OF AGE.

There were no rejoicings upon Gibbie’s attainment of his twenty-first
year. His guardian, believing he alone had acquainted himself with
the date, and desiring in his wisdom to avoid giving him a feeling
of importance, made no allusion to the fact, as would have been most
natural, when they met at breakfast on the morning of the day. But,
urged thereto by Donal, Gibbie had learned the date for himself,
and finding nothing was said, fingered to Mrs. Sclater, “This is my
birthday.”

“I wish you many happy returns,” she answered, with kind
_empressement_. “How old are you to-day?”

“Twenty-one,” he answered--by holding up all his fingers twice and then
a forefinger.

She looked struck, and glanced at her husband, who thereupon, in his
turn, gave utterance to the usual formula of goodwill, and said no
more. Seeing he was about to leave the table, Gibbie, claiming his
attention, spelled on his fingers, very slowly, for Mr. Sclater was
slow at following this mode of communication:

“If you please, sir, I want to be put in possession of my property as
soon as possible.”

“All in good time, Sir Gilbert,” answered the minister, with a superior
smile, for he clung with hard reluctance to the last vestige of his
power.

“But what is good time?” spelled Gibbie with a smile, which, none the
less that it was of genuine friendliness, indicated there might be
difference of opinion on the point.

“Oh! we shall see,” returned the minister coolly. “These are not things
to be done in a hurry,” he added, as if he had been guardian to twenty
wards in chancery before. “We’ll see in a few days what Mr. Torrie
proposes.”

“But I want my money at once,” insisted Gibbie. “I have been waiting
for it, and now it is time, and why should I wait still?”

“To learn patience, if for no other reason, Sir Gilbert,” answered the
minister, with a hard laugh, meant to be jocular. “But indeed such
affairs cannot be managed in a moment. You will have plenty of time to
make a good use of your money, if you should have to wait another year
or two.”

So saying he pushed back his plate and cup, a trick he had, and rose
from the table.

“When will you see Mr. Torrie?” asked Gibbie, rising too, and working
his telegraph with greater rapidity than before.

“By and by,” answered Mr. Sclater, and walked towards the door. But
Gibbie got between him and it.

“Will you go with me to Mr. Torrie to-day?” he asked.

The minister shook his head. Gibbie withdrew, seeming a little
disappointed. Mr. Sclater left the room.

“You don’t understand business, Gilbert,” said Mrs. Sclater.

Gibbie smiled, got his writing-case, and sitting down at the table,
wrote as follows:--

“Dear Mr. Sclater,--As you have never failed in your part, how can you
wish me to fail in mine? I am now the one accountable for this money,
which surely has been idle long enough, and if I leave it still unused,
I shall be doing wrong, and there are things I have to do with it which
ought to be set about immediately. I am sorry to seem importunate, but
if by twelve o’clock you have not gone with me to Mr. Torrie, I will
go to Messrs. Hope & Waver, who will tell me what I ought to do next,
in order to be put in possession. It makes me unhappy to write like
this, but I am not a child any longer, and having a man’s work to do, I
cannot consent to be treated as a child. I will do as I say. I am, dear
Mr. Sclater, your affectionate ward, Gilbert Galbraith.”

He took the letter to the study, and having given it to Mr. Sclater,
withdrew. The minister might have known by this time with what sort of
a youth he had to deal! He came down instantly, put the best face on it
he could, said that if Sir Gilbert was so eager to take up the burden,
he was ready enough to cast it off, and they would go at once to Mr.
Torrie.

With the lawyer, Gibbie insisted on understanding everything, and that
all should be legally arranged as speedily as possible. Mr. Torrie
saw that, if he did not make things plain, or gave the least cause
for doubt, the youth would most likely apply elsewhere for advice,
and therefore took trouble to set the various points, both as to the
property and the proceedings necessary, before him in the clearest
manner.

“Thank you,” said Gibbie, through Mr. Sclater. “Please remember I
am more accountable for this money than you, and am compelled to
understand.”--Janet’s repeated exhortations on the necessity of sending
for the serpent to take care of the dove, had not been lost upon him.

The lawyer being then quite ready to make him an advance of money,
they went with him to the bank, where he wrote his name, and received
a cheque book. As they left the bank, he asked the minister whether he
would allow him to keep his place in his house till the next session,
and was almost startled at finding how his manner to him was changed.
He assured Sir Gilbert, with a deference and respect both painful and
amusing, that he hoped he would always regard his house as one home,
however many besides he might now choose to have.

So now at last Gibbie was free to set about realizing a long-cherished
scheme.

The repairs upon the Auld Hoose o’ Galbraith were now nearly finished.
In consequence of them, some of the tenants had had to leave, and
Gibbie now gave them all notice to quit at their earliest convenience,
taking care, however, to see them provided with fresh quarters, towards
which he could himself do not a little, for several of the houses in
the neighbourhood had been bought for him at the same time with the old
mansion. As soon as it was empty, he set more men to work, and as its
internal arrangements had never been altered, speedily, out of squalid
neglect, caused not a little of old stateliness to reappear. He next
proceeded to furnish at his leisure certain of the rooms, chiefly from
the accumulations of his friend Mistress Murkison. By the time he had
finished, his usual day for going home had arrived: while Janet lived,
the cottage on Glashgar was home. Just as he was leaving, the minister
told him that Glashruach was his. Mrs. Sclater was present, and read in
his eyes what induced her instantly to make the remark: “How could that
man deprive his daughter of the property he had to take her mother’s
name to get!”

“He had misfortunes,” indicated Gibbie, “and could not help it, I
suppose.”

“Yes indeed!” she returned, “--misfortunes so great that they amounted
to little less than swindling. I wonder how many he has brought to
grief besides himself! If he had Glashruach once more he would begin it
all over again.”

“Then I’ll give it to Ginevra,” said Gibbie.

“And let her father coax her out of it, and do another world of
mischief with it!” she rejoined.

Gibbie was silent. Mrs. Sclater was right! To give is not always to
bless. He must think of some way. With plenty to occupy his powers of
devising, he set out.

He would gladly have seen Ginevra before he left, but had no chance. He
had gone to the North church every Sunday for a long time now, neither
for love of Fergus, nor dislike to Mr. Sclater, but for the sake of
seeing his lost friend: had he not lost her when she turned from Donal
to Fergus? Did she not forsake him too when she forsook his Donal? His
heart would rise into his throat at the thought, but only for a moment:
he never pitied himself. Now and then he had from her a sweet sad
smile, but no sign that he might go and see her. Whether he was to see
Donal when he reached Daurside, he could not tell; he had heard nothing
of him since he went; his mother never wrote letters.

“Na, na; I canna,” she would say. “It wad tak a’ the pith oot o’ me to
vreet letters. A’ ’at I hae to say I sen’ the up-road; it’s sure to win
hame ear’ or late.”

Notwithstanding his new power, it was hardly, therefore, with his usual
elation, that he took his seat on the coach. But his reception was the
same as ever. At his mother’s persuasion, Donal, he found, instead
of betaking himself again to bodily labours as he had purposed, had
accepted a situation as tutor offered him by one of the professors. He
had told his mother all his trouble.

“He’ll be a’ the better for ’t i’ the en’,” she said, with a smile of
the deepest sympathy, “though, bein’ my ain, I canna help bein’ wae for
’im. But the Lord was i’ the airthquak, an’ the fire, an’ the win’ that
rave the rocks, though the prophet couldna see ’im. Donal ’ill come oot
o’ this wi’ mair room in ’s hert an’ mair licht in ’s speerit.”

Gibbie took his slate from the _crap o’ the wa’_ and wrote. “If money
could do anything for him, I have plenty now.”

“I ken yer hert, my bairn,” replied Janet; “but na; siller’s but a deid
horse for onything ’at smacks o’ salvation. Na; the puir fallow maun
warstle oot o’ the thicket o’ deid roses as best he can--sair scrattit,
nae doobt. Eh! it’s a fearfu’ an’ won’erfu’ thing that drawin’ o’ hert
to hert, an’ syne a great snap, an’ a stert back, an’ there’s miles
atween them! The Lord alane kens the boddom o’ ’t; but I’m thinkin’
there’s mair intil ’t, an’ a heap mair to come oot o’ ’t ere a’ be
dune, than we hae ony guiss at.”

Gibbie told her that Glashruach was his. Then first the extent of his
wealth seemed to strike his old mother.

“Eh! ye’ll be the laird, wull ye, than? Eh, sirs! To think o’ this
hoose an’ a’ bein’ wee Gibbie’s! Weel, it dings a’. The w’ys o’ the
Lord are to be thoucht upon! He made Dawvid a king, an’ Gibbie he’s
made the laird! Blest be his name.”

“They tell me the mountain is mine,” Gibbie wrote: “your husband shall
be laird of Glashgar if he likes.”

“Na, na,” said Janet, with a loving look. “He’s ower auld for that. He
micht na dee sae easy for ’t.--Eh! please the Lord, I wad fain gang
wi’ him.--An’ what better wad Robert be to be laird? We pey nae rent
as ’tis, an’ he has as mony sheep to lo’e as he can weel ken ane frae
the ither, noo ’at he’s growin’ auld. I ken naething ’at he lacks, but
Gibbie to gang wi’ ’im aboot the hill. A neebour’s laddie comes an’
gangs, to help him, but, eh, says Robert, he’s no Gibbie!--But gien
Glashruach be yer ain, my bonnie man, ye maun gang doon there this
verra nicht, and gie a luik to the burn; for the last time I was there,
I thoucht it was creepin’ in aneth the bank some fearsome like for
what’s left o’ the auld hoose, an’ the suner it’s luikit efter maybe
the better. Eh, Sir Gibbie, but ye sud merry the bonnie leddy, an’ tak
her back till her ain hoose.”

Gibbie gave a great sigh to think of the girl that loved the hill
and the heather and the burns, shut up in the city, and every Sunday
going to the great church--with which in Gibbie’s mind was associated
no sound of glad tidings. To him Glashgar was full of God; the North
church or Mr. Sclater’s church--well, he had tried hard, but had not
succeeded in discovering temple-signs about either.

The next day he sent to the city for an architect; and within a week
masons and quarrymen were at work, some on the hill blasting blue
boulders and red granite, others roughly shaping the stones, and others
laying the foundation of a huge facing and buttressing wall, which was
to slope up from the bed of the Glashburn fifty feet to the foot of the
castle, there to culminate in a narrow terrace with a parapet. Others
again were clearing away what of the ruins stuck to the old house, in
order to leave it, as much as might be, in its original form. There
was no space left for rebuilding, neither was there any between the
two burns for adding afresh. The channel of the second remained dry,
the landslip continuing to choke it, and the stream to fall into the
Glashburn. But Gibbie would not consent that the burn Ginevra had loved
should sing no more as she had heard it sing. Her chamber was gone,
and could not be restored, but another chamber should be built for
her, beneath whose window it should again run: when she was married to
Fergus, and her father could not touch it, the place should be hers.
More masons were gathered, and foundations blasted in the steep rock
that formed the other bank of the burn. The main point in the building
was to be a room for Ginevra. He planned it himself--with a windowed
turret projecting from the wall, making a recess in the room, and
overhanging the stream. The turret he carried a story higher than the
wall, and in the wall placed a stair leading to its top, whence, over
the roof of the ancient part of the house, might be seen the great
Glashgar, and its streams coming down from heaven, and singing as they
came. Then from the middle of the first stair in the old house, the
wall, a yard and a half thick, having been cut through, a solid stone
bridge, with a pointed arch, was to lead across the burn to a like
landing in the new house--a close passage, with an oriel window on
each side, looking up and down the stream, and a steep roof. And while
these works were going on below, two masons, high on the mountain, were
adding to the cottage a warm bedroom for Janet and Robert.

The architect was an honest man, and kept Gibbie’s secret, so that,
although he was constantly about the place, nothing disturbed the
general belief that Glashruach had been bought, and was being made
habitable, by a certain magnate of the county adjoining.




CHAPTER LV.

TEN AULD HOOSE O’ GALBRAITH.

One cold afternoon in the end of October, when Mistress Croale was
shutting up her shop in the market, and a tumbler of something hot was
haunting her imagination, Gibbie came walking up the long gallery with
the light hill-step which he never lost, and startled her with a hand
on her shoulder, making signs that she must come with him. She made
haste to lock her door, and they walked side by side to the Widdiehill.
As they crossed the end of it she cast a look down Jink Lane, and
thought of her altered condition with a sigh. Then the memory of the
awful time amongst the sailors, in which poor Sambo’s frightful death
was ever prominent, came back like a fog from hell. But so far gone
were those times now, that, seeing their events more as they really
were, she looked upon them with incredulous horror, as things in which
she could hardly have had any part or lot. Then returned her wanderings
and homeless miseries, when often a haystack or a heap of straw in a
shed was her only joy--whisky always excepted. Last of all came the
dread perils, the hairbreadth escapes of her too adventurous voyage
on the brander;--and after all these things, here she was, walking in
peace by the side of wee Sir Gibbie, a friend as strong now as he had
always been true! She asked herself, or some power within asked her,
whence came the troubles that had haunted her life. Why had she been
marked out for such misfortunes? Her conscience answered--from her
persistence in living by the sale of drink after she had begun to feel
it was wrong. Thence it was that she had learned to drink, and that
she was even now liable, if not to be found drunk in the streets, yet
to go to bed drunk as any of her former customers. The cold crept into
her bones; the air seemed full of blue points and clear edges of cold,
that stung and cut her. She was a wretched, a low creature! What would
her late aunt think to see her now? What if this cold in her bones
were the cold of coming death? To lie for ages in her coffin, with her
mouth full of earth, longing for whisky! A verse from the end of the
New Testament with “_nor drunkards_” in it, came to her mind. She had
always had faith, she said to herself; but let them preach what they
liked about salvation by faith, she knew there was nothing but hell for
her if she were to die that night. There was Mistress Murkison looking
out of her shop-door! She was respected as much as ever! Would Mistress
Murkison be saved if she died that night? At least nobody would want
her damned; whereas not a few, and Mr. Sclater in particular, would
think it no fair play if Mistress Croale were not damned!

They turned into the close of the Auld Hoose o’ Galbraith.

“Wee Gibbie’s plottin’ to lead me to repentance!” she said to herself.
“He’s gaein’ to shaw me whaur his father dee’d, an’ whaur they leevit
in sic meesery--a’ throu’ the drink I gae ’im, an’ the respectable
hoose I keepit to ’tice him till ’t! He wad hae me persuaudit to lea’
aff the drink! Weel, I’m a heap better nor ance I was, an’ gie ’t up I
wull a’thegither--afore it comes to the last wi’ me.”

By this time Gibbie was leading her up the dark stair. At the top, on a
wide hall-like landing, he opened a door. She drew back with shy amaze.
Her first thought was--“That prood madam, the minister’s wife, ’ill
be there!” Was affront lying in wait for her again? She looked round
angrily at her conductor. But his smile reassured her, and she stepped
in.

It was almost a grand room, rich and sombre in colour, old-fashioned in
its somewhat stately furniture. A glorious fire was blazing and candles
were burning. The table was covered with a white cloth, and laid for
two. Gibbie shut the door, placed a chair for Mistress Croale by the
fire, seated himself, took out his tablets, wrote “Will you be my
housekeeper? I will give you £100 a year,” and handed them to her.

“Lord, Sir Gibbie!” she cried, jumping to her feet, “hae ye tint yer
wuts? Hoo wad an auld wife like me luik in sic a place--an’ in sic duds
as this? It wad gar Sawtan lauch, an’ that he can but seldom.”

Gibbie rose, and taking her by the hand, led her to the door of an
adjoining room. It was a bedroom, as grand as the room they had left,
and if Mistress Croale was surprised before, she was astonished now. A
fire was burning here too, candles were alight on the dressing-table,
a hot bath stood ready, on the bed lay a dress of rich black satin,
with linen and everything down, or up, to collars, cuffs, mittens,
cap, and shoes. All these things Gibbie had bought himself, using the
knowledge he had gathered in shopping with Mrs. Sclater, and the advice
of her dressmaker, whom he had taken into his confidence, and who had
entered heartily into his plan. He made signs to Mistress Croale that
everything there was at her service, and left her.

Like one in a dream she yielded to the rush of events, not too much
bewildered to dress with care, and neither too old nor too wicked nor
too ugly to find pleasure in it. She might have been a born lady just
restored to the habits of her youth, to judge by her delight over the
ivory brushes and tortoise-shell comb, and great mirror. In an hour or
so she made her appearance--I can hardly say reappeared, she was so
altered. She entered the room neither blushing nor smiling, but wiping
the tears from her eyes like a too blessed child. What Mrs. Sclater
would have felt, I dare hardly think; for there was “the horrid woman”
arrayed as nearly after her fashion as Gibbie had been able to get
her up! A very good “get-up” nevertheless it was, and satisfactory to
both concerned. Mistress Croale went out a decent-looking poor body,
and entered a not uncomely matron of the housekeeper class, rather
agreeable to look upon, who had just stood a nerve-shaking but not
unpleasant surprise, and was recovering. Gibbie was so satisfied with
her appearance that, come of age as he was, and vagrant no more, he
first danced round her several times with a candle in his hand, much to
the danger but nowise to the detriment of her finery, then set it down,
and executed his old lavolta of delight, which, as always, he finished
by standing on one leg.

Then they sat down to a nice nondescript meal, also of Gibbie’s own
providing.

When their meal was ended, he went to a bureau, and brought thence a
paper, plainly written to this effect:

“I agree to do whatever Sir Gilbert Galbraith may require of me, so
long as it shall not be against my conscience; and consent that, if I
taste whisky once, he shall send me away immediately, without further
reason given.”

He handed it to Mistress Croale; she read, and instantly looked about
for pen and ink: she dreaded seeming for a moment to hesitate. He
brought them to her, she signed, and they shook hands.

He then conducted her all over the house--first to the rooms prepared
for his study and bedroom, and next to the room in the garret, which he
had left just as it was when his father died in it. There he gave her
a look by which he meant to say, “See what whisky brings people to!”
but which her conscience interpreted, “See what you brought my father
to!” Next, on the floor between, he showed her a number of bedrooms,
all newly repaired and fresh-painted,--with double windows, the inside
ones filled with frosted glass. These rooms, he gave her to understand,
he wished her to furnish, getting as many things as she could from
Mistress Murkison. Going back then to the sitting-room, he proceeded
to explain his plans, telling her he had furnished the house that he
might not any longer be himself such a stranger as to have no place
to take a stranger to. Then he got a Bible there was in the room, and
showed her those words in the book of Exodus--“Also, thou shalt not
oppress a stranger; for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were
strangers in the land of Egypt;” and while she thought again of her
wanderings through the country, and her nights in the open air, made
her understand that whomsoever he should at any time bring home she was
to treat as his guest. She might get a servant to wait upon herself,
he said, but she must herself help him to wait upon his guests, in the
name of the Son of Man.

She expressed hearty acquiescence, but would not hear of a servant: the
more work the better for her! she said. She would to-morrow arrange for
giving up her shop and disposing of her stock and the furniture in her
garret. But Gibbie requested the keys of both those places. Next, he
insisted that she should never utter a word as to the use he intended
making of his house; if the thing came out, it would ruin his plans,
and he must give them up altogether--and thereupon he took her to the
ground floor and showed her a door in communication with a poor little
house behind, by which he intended to introduce and dismiss his guests,
that they should not know where they had spent the night. Then he made
her read to him the hundred and seventh Psalm; after which he left her,
saying he would come to the house as soon as the session began, which
would be in a week; until then he should be at Mr. Sclater’s.

Left alone in the great house--like one with whom the most beneficent
of fairies had been busy, the first thing Mistress Croale did was to go
and have a good look at herself--from head to foot--in the same mirror
that had enlightened Donal as to his outermost man. Very different
was the re-reflection it caused in Mistress Croale: she was satisfied
with everything she saw there, except her complexion, and that she
resolved should improve. She was almost painfully happy. Out there was
the Widdiehill, dark and dismal and cold, through which she had come,
sad and shivering and haunted with miserable thoughts, into warmth and
splendour and luxury and bliss! Wee Sir Gibbie had made a lady of her!
If only poor Sir George were alive to see and share!--There was but one
thing wanted to make it Paradise indeed--a good tumbler of toddy by the
fire before she went to bed!

Then first she thought of the vow she had made as she signed the paper,
and shuddered--not at the thought of breaking it, but at the thought of
having to keep it, and no help.--No help! it was the easiest thing in
the world to get a bottle of whisky. She had but to run to Jink Lane at
the farthest, to her own old house, which, for all Mr. Sclater, was a
whisky shop yet! She had emptied her till, and had money in her pocket.
Who was there to tell? She would not have a chance when Sir Gibbie came
home to her. She must make use of what time was left her. She was safe
now from going too far, because she _must_ give it up; and why not
then have one farewell night of pleasure, to bid a last good-bye to
her old friend Whisky? what should she have done without him, lying in
the cold wind by a dykeside, or going down the Daur like a shot on her
brander?--Thus the tempting passion; thus, for aught I know, a tempting
devil at the ear of her mind as well.--But with that came the face of
Gibbie; she thought how troubled that face would look if she failed
him. What a lost, irredeemable wretch was she about to make of herself
after all he had done for her! No; if whisky _was_ heaven, and the want
of it _was_ hell, she _would_ not do it! She ran to the door, locked
it, brought away the key, and laid it under the Bible from which she
had been reading to Sir Gibbie. Perhaps she might have done better than
betake herself again to her finery, but it did help her through the
rest of the evening, and she went to her grand bed not only sober, but
undefiled of the enemy. When Gibbie came to her a week after, he came
to a true woman, one who had kept faith with him.




CHAPTER LVI.

THE LAIRD AND THE PREACHER.

Since he came to town, Gibbie had seen Ginevra but once--that was in
the North church. She looked so sad and white that his heart was very
heavy for her. Could it be that she repented?--She must have done it to
please her father! If she would marry Donal, he would engage to give
her Glashruach. She should have Glashruach all the same whatever she
did, only it might influence her father. He paced up and down before
the cottage once for a whole night, but no good came of that. He paced
before it from dusk to bedtime again and again, in the poor hope of
a chance of speaking to Ginevra, but he never saw even her shadow on
the white blind. He went up to the door once, but in the dread of
displeasing her, lost his courage, and paced the street the whole
morning instead, but saw no one come out.

Fergus had gradually become essential to the small remaining happiness
of which the laird was capable. He had gained his favour chiefly
through the respect and kindly attention he showed him. The young
preacher knew little of the laird’s career, and looked upon him as
an unfortunate man, towards whom loyalty now required even a greater
show of respect than while he owned his father’s farm. The impulse
transmitted to him from the devotion of ancestors to the patriarchal
head of the clan, had found blind vent in the direction of the mere
feudal superior, and both the impulse and its object remained. He felt
honoured, even now that he had reached the goal of his lofty desires
and was a popular preacher, in being permitted to play backgammon with
the great man, or to carve a chicken, when the now trembling hands,
enfeebled far more through anxiety and disappointment than from age,
found themselves unequal to the task: the laird had begun to tell long
stories, and drank twice as much as he did a year ago; he was sinking
in more ways than one.

Fergus at length summoned courage to ask him if he might _pay his
addresses_ to Miss Galbraith. The old man started, cast on him a
withering look, murmured “The heiress of Glashruach!” remembered, threw
himself back in his chair, and closed his eyes. Fergus, on the other
side of the table, sat erect, a dice-box in his hand, waiting a reply.
The father reflected that if he declined what he could not call an
honour, he must lose what was unquestionably a comfort: how was he to
pass _all_ the evenings of the week without the preacher? On the other
hand, if he accepted him, he might leave the miserable cottage, and
go to the manse: from a moral point of view--that was, from the point
of other people’s judgment of him--it would be of consequence to have
a clergyman for a son-in-law. Slowly he raised himself in his chair,
opened his unsteady eyes, which rolled and pitched like boats on a
choppy sea, and said solemnly,

“You have my permission, Mr. Duff.”

The young preacher hastened to find Ginevra, but only to meet a
refusal, gentle and sorrowful. He pleaded for permission to repeat his
request after an interval, but she distinctly refused. She did not,
however, succeed in making a man with such a large opinion of himself
hopeless. Disappointed and annoyed he was, but he sought and fancied he
found reasons for her decision which were not unfavourable to himself,
and continued to visit her father as before, saying to him he had not
quite succeeded in drawing from her a favourable answer, but hoped to
prevail. He nowise acted the despairing lover, but made grander sermons
than ever, and, as he came to feel at home in his pulpit, delivered
them with growing force. But delay wrought desire in the laird; and at
length, one evening, having by cross-questioning satisfied himself that
Fergus made no progress, he rose, and going to his desk, handed him
Donal’s verses. Fergus read them, and remarked he had read better, but
the first stanza had a slight flavour of Shelley.

“I don’t care a straw about their merit or demerit,” said Mr.
Galbraith; “poetry is nothing but spoilt prose. What I want to know
is, whether they do not suggest a reason for your want of success with
Jenny. Do you know the writing?”

“I cannot say I do. But I think it is very likely that of Donal Grant;
he sets up for the Burns of Daurside.”

“Insolent scoundrel!” cried the laird, bringing down his fist on the
table, and fluttering the wine glasses. “Next to superstition I hate
romance--with my whole heart I do!” And something like a flash of cold
moonlight on wintred water gleamed over, rather than shot from, his
poor focusless eyes.

“But, my dear sir,” said Fergus, “if I am to understand these lines--”

“Yes! if you are to understand where there is no sense whatever!”

“I think I understand them--if you will excuse me for venturing to say
so; and what I read in them is, that, whoever the writer may be, the
lady, whoever she may be, had refused him.”

“You cannot believe that the wretch had the impudence to make my
daughter--the heiress of--at least--What! make my daughter an offer!
She would at once have acquainted me with the fact, that he might
receive suitable chastisement. Let me look at the stuff again.”

“It is quite possible,” said Fergus, “it may be only a poem some friend
has copied for her from a newspaper.”

While he spoke, the laird was reading the lines, and persuading himself
he understood them. With sudden resolve, the paper held torch-like in
front of him, he strode into the next room, where Ginevra sat.

“Do you tell me,” he said fiercely, “that you have so far forgotten all
dignity and propriety as to give a dirty cow-boy the encouragement to
make you an offer of marriage? The very notion sets my blood boiling.
You will make me _hate_ you, you--you--unworthy creature!”

Ginevra had turned white, but looking him straight in the face, she
answered,

“If that is a letter for me, you know I have not read it.”

“There! see for yourself.--Poetry!” He uttered the word with contempt
inexpressible.

She took the verses from his hand and read them. Even with her father
standing there, watching her like an inquisitor, she could not help the
tears coming in her eyes as she read.

“There is no such thing here, papa,” she said. “They are only
verses--bidding me good-bye.”

“And what right has any such fellow to bid my daughter good-bye?
Explain that to me, if you please. Of course I have been for many years
aware of your love of low company, but I had hoped as you grew older
you would learn manners: modesty would have been too much to look
for.--If you had nothing to be ashamed of, why did you not tell me of
the unpleasant affair? Is not your father your best friend?”

“Why should I make both him and you uncomfortable, papa--when there was
not going to be anything more of it?”

“Why then do you go hankering after him still, and refusing Mr. Duff?
It is true he is not exactly a gentleman by birth, but he is such by
education, by manners, by position, by influence.”

“Papa, I have already told Mr. Duff, as plainly as I could without
being rude, that I would never let him talk to me so. What lady would
refuse Donal Grant and listen to him!”

“You are a bold, insolent hussey!” cried her father in fresh rage and
leaving the room, rejoined Fergus.

They sat silent both for a while--then the preacher spoke.

“Other communications may have since reached her from the same
quarter,” he said.

“That is impossible,” rejoined the laird.

“I don’t know that,” insisted Fergus. “There is a foolish--a half-silly
companion of his about the town. They call him Sir Gibbie Galbraith.”

“Jenny knows no such person.”

“Indeed she does. I have seen them together.”

“Oh! you mean the lad the minister adopted! the urchin he took off
the streets!--Sir Gibbie Galbraith!” he repeated sneeringly, but
as one reflecting. “--I do vaguely recall a slanderous rumour in
which a certain female connection of the family was hinted at.--Yes!
that’s where the nickname comes from.--And you think she keeps up a
communication with the clown through him?”

“I don’t say that, sir. I merely think it possible she may see this
Gibbie occasionally; and I know he worships the cow-boy: it is a
positive feature of his foolishness, and I wish it were the worst.”

Therewith he told what he heard from Miss Kimble, and what he had seen
for himself on the night when he watched Gibbie.

“Her very blood must be tainted!” said her father to himself, but
added, “--from her mother’s side;” and his attacks upon her after
this were at least diurnal. It was a relief to his feeling of having
wronged her, to abuse her with justice. For a while she tried hard to
convince him now that this, now that that notion of her conduct, or
of Gibbie’s or Donal’s, was mistaken: he would listen to nothing she
said, continually insisting that the only amends for her past was to
marry according to his wishes; to give up superstition, and poetry, and
cow-boys, and dumb rascals, and settle down into a respectable matron,
a comfort to the gray hairs she was now bringing with sorrow to the
grave. Then Ginevra became absolutely silent; he had taught her that
any reply was but a new start for his objurgation, a knife wherewith
to puncture a fresh gall-bladder of abuse. He stormed at her for her
sullenness, but she persisted in her silence, sorely distressed to find
how dead her heart seemed growing under his treatment of her: what
would at one time have made her utterly miserable, now passed over her
as one of the billows of a trouble that had to be borne, as one of the
throbs of a headache, drawing from her scarcely a sigh. She did not
understand that, her heaven being dark, she could see no individual
cloud against it, that, her emotional nature untuned, discord itself
had ceased to jar.




CHAPTER LVII.

A HIDING-PLACE FROM THE WIND.

Gibbie found everything at the Auld Hoose in complete order for his
reception: Mistress Croale had been very diligent, and promised well
for a housekeeper--looked well, too, in her black satin and lace, with
her complexion, she justly flattered herself, not a little improved.
She had a good meal ready for him, with every adjunct in proper style,
during the preparation of which she had revelled in the thought that
some day, when she had quite established her fitness for her new
position, Sir Gibbie would certainly invite the minister and his lady
to dine with him, when she, whom they were too proud to ask to partake
of their cockie-leekie, would show them she knew both what a dinner
ought to be, and how to preside at it; and the soup--it should be
cockie-leekie.

Everything went comfortably. Gibbie was so well up in mathematics,
thanks to Mr. Sclater, that, doing all requisite for honourable
studentship, but having no desire to distinguish himself, he had
plenty of time for more important duty. Now that he was by himself,
as if old habit had returned in the shape of new passion, he roamed
the streets every night. His custom was this: after dinner, which he
had when he came from college, about half-past four, he lay down, fell
asleep in a moment, as he always did, and slept till half-past six;
then he had tea, and after that, studied--not dawdled over his books,
till ten o’clock, when he took his Greek Testament. At eleven he went
out, seldom finally returning before half-past one, sometimes not for
an hour longer--during which time Mistress Croale was in readiness to
receive any guest he might bring home.

The history of the special endeavour he had now commenced does not
belong to my narrative. Some nights, many nights together, he would
not meet a single wanderer; occasionally he would meet two or three in
the same night. When he found one, he would stand regarding him until
he spoke. If the man was drunk he would leave him: such were not those
for whom he could now do most. If he was sober, he made him signs of
invitation. If he would not go with him, he left him, but kept him in
view, and tried him again. If still he would not, he gave him a piece
of bread, and left him. If he called, he stopped, and by circuitous
ways brought him to the little house at the back. It was purposely
quite dark. If the man was too apprehensive to enter, he left him; if
he followed, he led him to Mistress Croale. If anything suggested the
possibility of helping farther, a possibility turning entirely on the
person’s self, the attempt was set on foot; but in general, after a
good breakfast, Gibbie led him through a dark passage into the darkened
house, and dismissed him from the door by which he had entered. He
never gave money, and never sought such a guest except in the winter.
Indeed, he was never in the city in the summer. Before the session
was over, they had one woman and one girl in a fair way of honest
livelihood, and one small child, whose mother had an infant besides,
and was evidently dying, he had sent “in a present” to Janet, by the
hand of Mistress Murkison. Altogether it was a tolerable beginning, and
during the time, not a word reached him indicating knowledge of his
proceedings, although within a week or two a rumour was rife in the
lower parts of the city, of a mysterious being who went about doing
this and that for poor folk, but, notwithstanding his gifts, was far
from canny.

Mr. and Mrs. Sclater could not fail to be much annoyed when they found
he was no longer lodging with Mistress Murkison, but occupying the
Auld Hoose, with “that horrible woman” for a housekeeper; they knew,
however, that expostulation with one possessed by such a headstrong
sense of duty was utterly useless, and contented themselves with
predicting to each other some terrible check, the result of his
ridiculous theory concerning what was required of a Christian--namely,
that the disciple should be as his Master. At the same time Mrs.
Sclater had a sacred suspicion that no real ill would ever befall God’s
innocent, Gilbert Galbraith.

Fergus had now with his father’s help established himself in the manse
of the North Church, and thither he invited Mr. and Miss Galbraith
to dine with him on a certain evening. Her father’s absolute desire
compelled Ginevra’s assent; she could not, while with him, rebel
absolutely. Fergus did his best to make the evening a pleasant one, and
had special satisfaction in showing the laird that he could provide
both a good dinner and a good bottle of port. Two of his congregation,
a young lawyer and his wife, were the only other guests. The laird
found the lawyer an agreeable companion, chiefly from his readiness to
listen to his old law stories, and Fergus laid himself out to please
the two ladies: secure of the admiration of one, he hoped it might
help to draw the favour of the other. He had conceived the notion that
Ginevra probably disliked his profession, and took pains therefore to
show how much he was a man of the world--talked about Shakspere, and
flaunted rags of quotation in elocutionary style; got books from his
study, and read passages from Byron, Shelley, and Moore--chiefly from
“The Loves of the Angels” of the last, ecstasizing the lawyer’s lady,
and interesting Ginevra, though all he read taken together seemed to
her unworthy of comparison with one of poor Donal’s songs.

It grew late. The dinner had been at a fashionable hour; they had
stayed an unfashionable time: it was nearly twelve o’clock when guests
and host left the house in company. The lawyer and his wife went one
way, and Fergus went the other with the laird and Ginevra.

Hearing the pitiful wailing of a child and the cough of a woman, as
they went along a street bridge, they peeped over the parapet, and
saw, upon the stair leading to the lower street, a woman, with a child
asleep in her lap, trying to eat a piece of bread, and coughing as if
in the last stage of consumption. On the next step below sat a man
hushing in his bosom the baby whose cry they had heard. They stood
for a moment, the minister pondering whether his profession required
of him action, and Ginevra’s gaze fixed on the head and shoulders of
the foreshortened figure of the man, who vainly as patiently sought to
soothe the child by gently rocking it to and fro. But when he began a
strange humming song to it, which brought all Glashgar before her eyes,
Ginevra knew beyond a doubt that it was Gibbie. At the sound the child
ceased to wail, and presently the woman with difficulty rose, laying
a hand for help on Gibbie’s shoulder. Then Gibbie rose also, cradling
the infant on his left arm, and making signs to the mother to place the
child on his right. She did so, and turning, went feebly up the stair.
Gibbie followed with the two children, one lying on his arm, the other
with his head on his shoulder, both wretched and pining, with gray
cheeks, and dark hollows under their eyes. From the top of the stair
they went slowly up the street, the poor woman coughing, and Gibbie
crooning to the baby, who cried no more, but now and then moaned. Then
Fergus said to the laird:

“Did you see that young man, sir? That is the so-called Sir Gilbert
Galbraith we were talking of the other night. They say he has come into
a good property, but you may judge for yourself whether he seems fit to
manage it!”

Ginevra withdrew her hand from his arm.

“Good God, Jenny!” exclaimed the laird, “you do not mean to tell _me_
you have ever spoken to a young man like that?”

“I know him very well, papa,” replied Ginevra, collectedly.

“You are incomprehensible, Jenny! If you know him, why do I not know
him? If you had not known good reason to be ashamed of him, you would,
one time or other, have mentioned his name in my hearing.--I ask you,
and I demand an answer,”--here he stopped, and fronted her--“why have
you concealed from me your acquaintance with this--this--person?”

“Because I thought it might be painful to you, papa,” she answered,
looking in his face.

“Painful to me! Why should it be painful to me--except indeed that it
breaks my heart as often as I see you betray your invincible fondness
for low company?”

“Do you desire me to tell you, papa, why I thought it might be painful
to you to make that young man’s acquaintance?”

“I do distinctly. I command you.”

“Then I will: that young man, Sir Gilbert Galbraith,--”

“Nonsense, girl! there is no such Galbraith. It is the merest of
scoffs.”

Ginevra did not care to argue with him this point. In truth she knew
little more about it than he.

“Many years ago,” she recommenced, “when I was a child,--Excuse me, Mr.
Duff, but it is quite time I told my father what has been weighing upon
my mind for so many years.”

“Sir Gilbert!” muttered her father contemptuously.

“One day,” again she began, “Mr. Fergus Duff brought a ragged little
boy to Glashruach--the most innocent and loving of creatures, who had
committed no crime but that of doing good in secret. I saw Mr. Duff box
his ears on the bridge; and you, papa, gave him over to that wretch,
Angus MacPholp, to whip him--so at least Angus told me, after he had
whipped him till he dropped senseless. I can hardly keep from screaming
now when I think of it.”

“All this, Jenny, is nothing less than cursed folly. Do you mean to
tell me you have all these years been cherishing resentment against
your own father, for the sake of a little thieving rascal, whom it was
a good deed to fright from the error of his ways? I have no doubt Angus
gave him merely what he deserved.”

“You must remember, Miss Galbraith, we did not know he was dumb,” said
Fergus, humbly.

“If you had had any heart,” said Ginevra, “you would have seen in his
face that he was a perfect angelic child. He ran to the mountain,
without a rag to cover his bleeding body, and would have died of cold
and hunger, had not the Grants, the parents of your father’s herd-boy,
Mr. Duff, taken him to their hearts, and been father and mother to
him.”--Ginevra’s mouth was opened at last.--“After that,” she went on,
“Angus, that bad man, shot him like a wild beast, when he was quietly
herding Robert Grant’s sheep. In return Sir Gilbert saved his life in
the flood. And just before the house of Glashruach fell--the part in
which my room was, he caught me up, because he could not speak, and
carried me out of it; and when I told you that he had saved my life,
you ordered him out of the house, and when he was afraid to leave me
alone with you, dashed him against the wall, and sent for Angus to whip
him again. But I should have liked to see Angus try it _then_!”

“I do remember an insolent fellow taking advantage of the ruinous state
the house was in to make his way into my study,” said the laird.

“And now,” Ginevra continued, “Mr. Duff makes question of his wits
because he finds him carrying a poor woman’s children, going to get
them a bed somewhere! If Mr. Duff had run about the streets when he was
a child, like Sir Gilbert, he might not, perhaps, think it so strange
he should care about a houseless woman and her brats!”

Therewith Ginevra burst into tears.

“Abominably disagreeable!” muttered the laird. “I always thought she
was an idiot!--Hold your tongue, Jenny! you will wake the street. All
you say may or may not be quite true; I do not say you are telling
lies, or even exaggerating; but I see nothing in it to prove the lad a
fit companion for a young lady. Very much to the contrary. I suppose
he told you he was your injured, neglected, ill-used cousin? He may be
your cousin: you may have any number of such cousins, if half the low
tales concerning your mother’s family be true.”

Ginevra did not answer him--did not speak another word. When Fergus
left them at their own door, she neither shook hands with him nor bade
him good night.

“Jenny,” said her father, the moment he was gone, “if I hear of your
once speaking again to that low vagabond,--and now I think of it,”
he cried, interrupting himself with a sudden recollection, “there
was a cobbler-fellow in the town here they used to call Sir Somebody
Galbraith!--that must be his father! Whether the _Sir_ was title or
nickname, I neither know nor care. A title without money is as bad as
a saintship without grace. But this I tell you, that if I hear of your
speaking one word, good or bad, to the fellow again, I will, I swear to
Almighty God, I will turn you out of the house.”

To Ginevra’s accumulated misery, she carried with her to her room a
feeling of contempt for her father, with which she lay struggling in
vain half the night.




CHAPTER LVIII.

THE CONFESSION.

Although Gibbie had taken no notice of the laird’s party, he had
recognized each of the three as he came up the stair, and in Ginevra’s
face read an appeal for deliverance. It seemed to say, “You help
everybody but me! Why do you not come and help me too? Am I to have no
pity because I am neither hungry nor cold?” He did not, however, lie
awake the most of the night, or indeed a single hour of it, thinking
what he should do; long before the poor woman and her children were in
bed, he had made up his mind.

As soon as he came home from college the next day and had hastily
eaten his dinner, going upon his vague knowledge of law business
lately acquired, he bought a stamped paper, wrote upon it, and put
it in his pocket; then he took a card and wrote on it: _Sir Gilbert
Galbraith, Baronet, of Glashruach_, and put that in his pocket also.
Thus provided, and having said to Mistress Croale that he should not
be home that night--for he expected to set off almost immediately in
search of Donal, and had bespoken horses, he walked deliberately along
Pearl-street out into the suburb, and turning to the right, rang the
bell at the garden gate of the laird’s cottage. When the girl came, he
gave her his card, and followed her into the house. She carried it into
the room where, dinner over, the laird and the preacher were sitting,
with a bottle of the same port which had pleased the laird at the manse
between them. Giving time, as he judged, and no more, to read the card,
Gibbie entered the room: he would not risk a refusal to see him.

It was a small room with a round table. The laird sat sideways to the
door; the preacher sat between the table and the fire.

“What the devil does this mean? A vengeance take him!” cried the laird.

His big tumbling eyes had required more time than Gibbie had allowed,
so that, when with this exclamation he lifted them from the card, they
fell upon the object of his imprecation standing in the middle of the
room between him and the open door. The preacher, snug behind the
table, scarcely endeavoured to conceal the smile with which he took no
notice of Sir Gilbert. The laird rose in the perturbation of mingled
anger and unpreparedness.

“Ah!” he said, but it was only a sound, not a word, “to what--may I
ask--have I--I have not the honour of your acquaintance, Mr.--Mr.--”
Here he looked again at the card he held, fumbled for and opened a
double eyeglass, then with deliberation examined the name upon it,
thus gaining time by rudeness, and gathering his force for more, while
Gibbie remained as unembarrassed as if he had been standing to his
tailor for his measure. “Mr.--ah, I see! Galbraith, you say.--To what,
Mr., Mr.”--another look at the card--“Galbraith, do I owe the honour of
this unexpected--and--and--I must say--un-looked-for visit--and at such
an unusual hour for making a business call--for business, I presume, it
must be that brings you, seeing I have not the honour of the slightest
acquaintance with you?”

He dropped his eyeglass with a clatter against his waistcoat, threw the
card into his finger-glass, raised his pale eyes, and stared at Sir
Gilbert with all the fixedness they were capable of. He had already
drunk a good deal of wine, and it was plain he had, although he was
far from being overcome by it. Gibbie answered by drawing from the
breast-pocket of his coat the paper he had written, and presenting it
like a petition. Mr. Galbraith sneered, and would not have touched it
had not his eye caught the stamp, which from old habit at once drew his
hand. From similar habit, or perhaps to get it nearer the light, he sat
down. Gibbie stood, and Fergus stared at him with insolent composure.
The laird read, but not aloud: I, Gilbert Galbraith, Baronet, hereby
promise and undertake to transfer to Miss Galbraith, only daughter of
Thomas Galbraith, Esq., on the day when she shall be married to Donal
Grant, Master of Arts, the whole of the title deeds of the house and
lands of Glashruach, to have and to hold as hers, with absolute power
to dispose of the same as she may see fit. Gilbert Galbraith, Old House
of Galbraith, Widdiehill, March, etc., etc.

The laird stretched his neck like a turkeycock, and gobbled
inarticulately, threw the paper to Fergus, and turning on his chair,
glowered at Gibbie. Then suddenly starting to his feet, he cried,

“What do you mean, you rascal, by daring to insult me in my own house?
Damn your insolent foolery!”

“A trick! a most palpable trick! and an exceedingly silly one!”
pronounced Fergus, who had now read the paper; “quite as foolish as
unjustifiable! Everybody knows Glashruach is the property of Major
Culsalmon!”--Here the laird sought the relief of another oath or
two.--“I entreat you to moderate your anger, my dear sir,” Fergus
resumed. “The thing is hardly worth so much indignation. Some animal
has been playing the poor fellow an ill-natured trick--putting him
up to it for the sake of a vile practical joke. It is exceedingly
provoking, but you must forgive him. He is hardly to blame, scarcely
accountable, under the natural circumstances.--Get away with you,” he
added, addressing Gibbie across the table. “Make haste before worse
comes of it. You have been made a fool of.”

When Fergus began to speak, the laird turned, and while he spoke stared
at him with lack-lustre yet gleaming eyes, until he addressed Gibbie,
when he turned on him again as fiercely as before. Poor Gibbie stood
shaking his head, smiling, and making eager signs with hands and arms;
but in the laird’s condition of both heart and brain he might well
forget and fail to be reminded that Gibbie was dumb.

“Why don’t you speak, you fool?” he cried. “Get out and don’t stand
making faces there. Be off with you, or I will knock you down with a
decanter.”

Gibbie pointed to the paper, which lay before Fergus, and placed a hand
first on his lips, then on his heart.

“Damn your mummery!” said the laird, choking with rage. “Go away, or,
by God! I will break your head.”

Fergus at this rose and came round the table to get between them. But
the laird caught up a pair of nutcrackers, and threw it at Gibbie.
It struck him on the forehead, and the blood spirted from the wound.
He staggered backwards. Fergus seized the laird’s arm, and sought to
pacify him.

Her father’s loud tones had reached Ginevra in her room; she ran
down, and that instant entered: Gibbie all but fell into her arms.
The moment’s support she gave him, and the look of loving terror she
cast in his face, restored him; and he was again firm on his feet,
pressing her handkerchief to his forehead, when Fergus, leaving the
laird, advanced with the pacific intention of getting him safe from the
house. Ginevra stepped between them. Her father’s rage thereupon broke
loose quite, and was madness. He seized hold of her with violence, and
dragged her from the room. Fergus laid hands upon Gibbie more gently,
and half would have forced, half persuaded him to go. A cry came from
Ginevra: refusing to be sent to her room before Gibbie was in safety,
her father struck her. Gibbie would have darted to her help. Fergus
held him fast, but knew nothing of Gibbie’s strength, and the next
moment found himself on his back upon the table, amidst the crash of
wineglasses and china. Having locked the door, Gibbie sprung to the
laird, who was trying to drag his daughter, now hardly resisting, up
the first steps of the stair, took him round the waist from behind,
swept him to the other room, and there locked him up also. He then
returned to Ginevra where she lay motionless on the stair, lifted her
in his arms, and carried her out of the house, nor stopped until,
having reached the farther end of the street, he turned the corner of
it into another equally quiet.

The laird and Fergus, when they were released by the girl from their
respective prisons and found that the enemy was gone, imagined that
Ginevra had retired again to her room; and what they did after is not
interesting.

Under a dull smoky oil-lamp Gibbie stopped. He knew by the tightening
of her arms that Ginevra was coming to herself.

“Let me down,” she said feebly.

He did so, but kept his arm round her. She gave a deep sigh, and gazed
bewildered. When she saw him, she smiled.

“With _you_, Gibbie!” she murmured. “--But they will be after us!”

“They shall not touch you,” signified Gibbie.

“What was it all about?” she asked.

Gibbie spelled on his fingers,

“Because I offered to give you Glashruach, if your father would let you
marry Donal.”

“Gibbie! how could you?” she cried almost in a scream, and pushing
away his arm, turned from him and tried to run, but after two steps,
tottered to the lamp-post, and leaned against it--with such a scared
look!

“Then come with me and be my sister, Ginevra, and I will take care of
you,” spelled Gibbie. “I can do nothing to take care of you while I
can’t get near you.”

“Oh, Gibbie! nobody does like that,” returned Ginevra, “--else I should
be so glad!”

“There is no other way then that I know. You won’t marry anybody, you
see.”

“Won’t I, Gibbie? What makes you think that?”

“Because of course you would never refuse Donal and marry anybody else;
that is not possible.”

“Oh! don’t tease me, Gibbie.”

“Ginevra, you don’t mean you would?”

In the dull light, and with the imperfect means of Gibbie for the
embodiment of his thoughts, Ginevra misunderstood him.

“Yes, Gibbie,” she said, “I would. I thought it was understood between
us, ever since that day you found me on Glashgar. In my thoughts I have
been yours all the time.”

She turned her face to the lamp-post. But Gibbie made her look.

“You do not mean,” he spelled very hurriedly, “that you would marry
_me?--Me?_ I never dreamed of such a thing!”

“_You_ didn’t mean it then!” said Ginevra, with a cry--bitter but
feeble with despair and ending in a stifled shriek. “What _have_ I been
saying then! I thought I belonged to you! I thought you meant to take
me all the time!” She burst into an agony of sobbing. “Oh me! me! I
have been alone all the time, and did not know it!”

She sank on the pavement at the foot of the lamp-post, weeping sorely,
and shaken with her sobs. Gibbie was in sad perplexity. Heaven had
opened before his gaze; its colours filled his eyes; its sounds filled
his ears and heart and brain; but the portress was busy crying and
would not open the door. Neither could he get at her to comfort her,
for, her eyes being wanted to cry with, his poor signs were of no use.
Dumbness is a drawback to the gift of consolation.

It was a calm night early in March, clear overhead, and the heaven
full of stars. The first faint think-odour of spring was in the air. A
crescent moon hung half-way between the zenith and the horizon, clear
as silver in firelight, and peaceful in the consciousness that not much
was required of her yet. Both bareheaded, the one stood under the lamp,
the other had fallen in a heap at its foot; the one was in the seventh
paradise, and knew it; the other was weeping her heart out, yet was in
the same paradise, if she would but have opened her eyes. Gibbie held
one of her hands and stroked it. Then he pulled off his coat and laid
it softly upon her. She grew a little quieter.

“Take me home, Gibbie,” she said, in a gentle voice. All was over;
there was no use in crying or even in thinking any more.

Gibbie put his arms round her, and helped her to her feet. She looked
at him, and saw a face glorious with bliss. Never, not even on
Glashgar, in the skin-coat of the beast-boy, had she seen him so like
an angel. And in his eyes was that which triumphed, not over dumbness,
but over speech. It brought the rose-fire rushing into her wan cheeks;
she hid her face on his bosom; and, under the dingy red flame of the
lamp in the stony street, they held each other, as blessed as if they
had been under an orange tree haunted with fire-flies. For they knew
each the heart of the other, and God is infinite.

How long they stood thus, neither of them knew. The lady would not
have spoken if she could, and the youth could not if he would. But the
lady shivered, and because she shivered, she would have the youth take
his coat. He mocked at cold; made her put her arms in the sleeves,
and buttoned it round her: both laughed to see how wide it was. Then
he took her by the hand, and led her away, obedient as when first he
found her and her heart upon Glashgar. Like two children, holding each
other fast, they hurried along, in dread of pursuit. He brought her to
Daur-street, and gave her into Mrs. Sclater’s arms. Ginevra told her
everything except that her father had struck her, and Gibbie begged
her to keep his wife for him till they could be married. Mrs. Sclater
behaved like a mother to them, sent Gibbie away, and Ginevra to a hot
bath and to bed.




CHAPTER LIX.

CATASTROPHE.

Gibbie went home as if Pearl-street had been the stairs of Glashgar,
and the Auld Hoose a mansion in the heavens. He seemed to float along
the way as one floats in a happy dream, where motion is born at once
of the will, without the intermediating mechanics of nerve, muscle,
and fulcrum. Love had been gathering and ever storing itself in his
heart so many years for this brown dove! now at last the rock was
smitten, and its treasure rushed forth to her service. In nothing was
it changed as it issued, save as the dark, silent, motionless water
of the cavern changes into the sparkling, singing, dancing rivulet.
Gibbie’s was love simple, unselfish, undemanding--not merely asking
for no return, but asking for no recognition, requiring not even that
its existence should be known. He was a rare one, who did not make the
common miserable blunder of taking the shadow cast by love--the desire,
namely, to be loved--for love itself; his love was a vertical sun,
and his own shadow was under his feet. Silly youths and maidens count
themselves martyrs of love, when they are but the pining witnesses
to a delicious and entrancing selfishness. But do not mistake me
through confounding, on the other hand, the desire to be loved--which
is neither wrong nor noble, any more than hunger is either wrong or
noble--and the delight in being loved, to be devoid of which a man must
be lost in an immeasurably deeper, in an evil, ruinous, yea, a fiendish
selfishness. Not to care for love is the still worse reaction from the
self-foiled and outworn greed of love. Gibbie’s love was a diamond
among gem-loves. There are men whose love to a friend is less selfish
than their love to the dearest woman; but Gibbie’s was not a love to
be less divine towards a woman than towards a man. One man’s love is
as different from another’s as the one is himself different from the
other. The love that dwells in one man is an angel, the love in another
is a bird, that in another a hog. Some would count worthless the love
of a man who loved everybody. There would be no distinction in being
loved by such a man!--and distinction, as a guarantee of their own
great worth, is what such seek. There are women who desire to be the
_sole_ object of a man’s affection, and are all their lives devoured
by unlawful jealousies. A love that had never gone forth upon human
being but themselves, would be to them the treasure to sell all that
they might buy. And the man who brought such a love might in truth be
all-absorbed therein himself: the poorest of creatures may well be
absorbed in the poorest of loves. A heart has to be taught to love,
and its first lesson, however well learnt, no more makes it perfect in
love, than the A B C makes a _savant_. The man who loves most will love
best. The man who throughly loves God and his neighbour is the only
man who will love a woman ideally--who can love her with the love God
thought of between them when he made man male and female. The man, I
repeat, who loves God with his very life, and his neighbour as Christ
loves him, is the man who alone is capable of grand, perfect, glorious
love to any woman. Because Gibbie’s love was towards everything human,
he was able to love Ginevra as Donal, poet and prophet, was not yet
grown able to love her. To that of the most passionate of unbelieving
lovers, Gibbie’s love was as the fire of a sun to that of a forest.
The fulness of a world of love-ways and love-thoughts was Gibbie’s.
In sweet affairs of loving-kindness, he was in his own kingdom, and
sat upon its throne. And it was this essential love, acknowledging
and embracing, as a necessity of its being, everything that could be
loved, which now concentrated its rays on the individual’s individual.
His love to Ginevra stood like a growing thicket of aromatic shrubs,
until her confession set the fire of heaven to it, and the flame that
consumes not, but gives life, arose and shot homeward. He had never
imagined, never hoped, never desired she should love him like that.
She had refused his friend, the strong, the noble, the beautiful,
Donal the poet, and it never could but from her own lips have found
way to his belief that she had turned her regard upon wee Sir Gibbie,
a nobody, who to himself was a mere burning heart running about in
tattered garments. His devotion to her had forestalled every pain with
its antidote of perfect love, had negatived every lack, had precluded
every desire, had shut all avenues of entrance against self. Even if “a
little thought unsound” should have chanced upon an entrance, it would
have found no soil to root and grow in: the soil for the harvest of
pain is that brought down from the peaks of pride by the torrents of
desire. Immeasurably the greater therefore was his delight, when the
warmth and odour of the love that had been from time to him immemorial
passing out from him in virtue of consolation and healing, came back
upon him in the softest and sweetest of flower-waking spring-winds.
Then indeed was his heart a bliss worth God’s making. The sum of
happiness in the city, if gathered that night into one wave, could not
have reached half-way to the crest of the mighty billow tossing itself
heavenward as it rushed along the ocean of Gibbie’s spirit.

He entered the close of the Auld Hoose. But the excess of his joy had
not yet turned to light, was not yet passing from him in physical
flame: whence then the glow that illumined the court? He looked up. The
windows of Mistress Croale’s bedroom were glaring with light! He opened
the door hurriedly and darted up. On the stair he was met by the smell
of burning, which grew stronger as he ascended. He opened Mistress
Croale’s door. The chintz curtains of her bed were flaming to the
ceiling. He darted to it. Mistress Croale was not in it. He jumped upon
it, and tore down the curtains and tester, trampling them under his
feet upon the blankets. He had almost finished, and, at the bottom of
the bed, was reaching up and pulling at the last of the flaming rags,
when a groan came to his ears. He looked down: there, at the foot of
the bed, on her back upon the floor, lay Mistress Croale in her satin
gown, with red swollen face, wide-open mouth, and half-open eyes, dead
drunk, a heap of ruin. A bit of glowing tinder fell on her forehead.
She opened her eyes, looked up, uttered a terrified cry, closed them,
and was again motionless, except for her breathing. On one side of her
lay a bottle, on the other a chamber-candlestick upset, with the candle
guttered into a mass.

With the help of the water-jugs, and the bath which stood ready in his
room, he succeeded at last in putting out the fire, and then turned his
attention to Mistress Croale. Her breathing had grown so stertorous
that he was alarmed, and getting more water, bathed her head, and laid
a wet handkerchief on it, after which he sat down and watched her.
It would have made a strange picture: the middle of the night, the
fire-blasted bed, the painful, ugly carcase on the floor, and the sad
yet--I had almost said _radiant_ youth, watching near. The slow night
passed.

The gray of the morning came, chill and cheerless. Mistress Croale
stirred, moved, crept up rather than rose to a sitting position, and
stretched herself yawning. Gibbie had risen and stood over her. She
caught sight of him; absolute terror distorted her sodden face; she
stared at him, then stared about her, like one who had suddenly waked
in hell. He took her by the arm. She obeyed, rose, and stood, fear
conquering the remnants of drunkenness, with her whisky-scorched eyes
following his every movement, as he got her cloak and bonnet. He put
them on her. She submitted like a child caught in wickedness, and
cowed by the capture. He led her from the house, out into the dark
morning, made her take his arm, and away they walked together, down to
the riverside. She gave a reel now and then, and sometimes her knees
would double under her; but Gibbie was no novice at the task, and
brought her safe to the door of her lodging--of which, in view of such
a possibility, he had been paying the rent all the time. He opened the
door with her pass-key, led her up the stair, unlocked the door of her
garret, placed her in a chair, and left her, closing the doors gently
behind him. Instinctively she sought her bed, fell upon it, and slept
again.

When she woke, her dim mind was haunted by a terrible vision of
resurrection and damnation, of which the only point she could plainly
recall, was an angel, as like Sir Gibbie as he could look, hanging in
the air above her, and sending out flames on all sides of him, which
burned her up, inside and out, shrivelling soul and body together.
As she lay thinking over it, with her eyes closed, suddenly she
remembered, with a pang of dismay, that she had got drunk and broken
her vow--that was the origin of the bad dream, and the dreadful
headache, and the burning at her heart! She must have water! Painfully
lifting herself upon one elbow, she opened her eyes. Then what a
bewilderment, and what a discovery, slow unfolding itself, were hers!
Like her first parents she had fallen; her paradise was gone; she lay
outside among the thorns and thistles before the gate. From being the
virtual mistress of a great house, she was back in her dreary lonely
garret! Re-exiled in shame from her briefly regained respectability,
from friendship and honourable life and the holding forth of help to
the world, she lay there a sow that had been washed, and washed in
vain! What a sight of disgrace was her grand satin gown--wet, and
scorched, and smeared with candle! and ugh! how it smelt of smoke and
burning and the dregs of whisky! And her lace!--She gazed at her finery
as an angel might on his feathers which the enemy had burned while he
slept on his watch.

She must have water! She got out of bed with difficulty, then for a
whole hour sat on the edge of it motionless, unsure that she was not
in hell. At last she wept--acrid tears, for very misery. She rose,
took off her satin and lace, put on a cotton gown, and was once more
a decent-looking poor body--except as to her glowing face and burning
eyes, which to bathe she had nothing but tears. Again she sat down,
and for a space did nothing, only suffered in ignominy. At last life
began to revive a little. She rose and moved about the room, staring
at the things in it as a ghost might stare at the grave-clothes on its
abandoned body. There on the table lay her keys; and what was that
under them?--A letter addressed to her. She opened it, and found five
pound-notes, with these words: “I promise to pay to Mrs. Croale five
pounds monthly, for nine months to come. Gilbert Galbraith.” She wept
again. He would never speak to her more! She had lost him at last--her
only friend!--her sole link to God and goodness and the kingdom of
heaven!--lost him for ever!

The day went on, cold and foggy without, colder and drearier within.
Sick and faint and disgusted, the poor heart had no atmosphere to beat
in save an infinite sense of failure and lost opportunity. She had fuel
enough in the room to make a little fire, and at length had summoned
resolve sufficient for the fetching of water from the street-pump.
She went to the cupboard to get a jug: she could not carry a pailful.
There in the corner stood her demon-friend! her own old familiar, the
black bottle! as if he had been patiently waiting for her all the
long dreary time she had been away! With a flash of fierce joy she
remembered she had left it half-full. She caught it up, and held it
between her and the fading light of the misty window: it was half-full
still!--One glass--a hair of the dog--would set her free from faintness
and sickness, disgust and misery! There was no one to find fault with
her now! She could do as she liked--there was no one to care!--nothing
to take fire!--She set the bottle on the table, because her hand shook,
and went again to the cupboard to get a glass. On the way--borne
upward on some heavenly current from the deeps of her soul, the face
of Gibbie, sorrowful because loving, like the face of the Son of Man,
met her. She turned, seized the bottle, and would have dashed it on the
hearthstone, but that a sudden resolve arrested her lifted arm: Gibbie
should see! She would be strong! That bottle should stand on that shelf
until the hour when she could show it him and say, “See the proof of
my victory!” She drove the cork fiercely in. When its top was level
with the neck, she set the bottle back in its place, and from that hour
it stood there, a temptation, a ceaseless warning, the monument of a
broken but reparable vow, a pledge of hope. It may not have been a
prudent measure. To a weak nature it would have involved certain ruin.
But there are natures that do better under difficulty; there are many
such. And with that fiend-like shape in her cupboard the one ambition
of Mistress Croale’s life was henceforth inextricably bound up: she
would turn that bottle into a witness for her against the judgment she
had deserved. Close by the cupboard door, like a kite or an owl nailed
up against a barn, she hung her soiled and dishonoured satin gown; and
the dusk having now gathered, took the jug, and fetched herself water.
Then, having set her kettle on the fire, she went out with her basket,
and bought bread, and butter. After a good cup of tea and some nice
toast, she went to bed again, much easier both in mind and body, and
slept.

In the morning she went to the market, opened her shop, and waited for
customers. Pleasure and surprise at her reappearance brought the old
ones quickly back. She was friendly and helpful to them as before; but
the slightest approach to inquiry as to where she had been or what
she had been doing, she met with simple obstinate silence. Gibbie’s
bounty and her faithful abstinence enabled her to add to her stock and
extend her trade. By and by she had the command of a little money; and
when in the late autumn there came a time of scarcity and disease, she
went about among the poor like a disciple of Sir Gibbie. Some said
that, from her knowledge of their ways, from her judgment, and by her
personal ministration of what, for her means, she gave more bountifully
than any, she did more to hearten their endurance, than all the ladies
together who administered money subscribed. It came to Sir Gibbie’s
ears, and rejoiced his heart: his old friend was on the King’s highway
still! In the mean time she saw nothing of him. Not once did he pass
her shop, where often her mental, and not unfrequently her bodily,
attitude was that of a watching lover. The second day, indeed, she saw
him at a little distance, and sorely her heart smote her, for one of
his hands was in a sling; but he crossed to the other side, plainly to
avoid her. She was none the less sure, however, that when she asked
him he would forgive her; and ask him she would, as soon as she had
satisfactory proof of repentance to show him.




CHAPTER LX.

ARRANGEMENT AND PREPARATION.

The next morning, the first thing after breakfast, Mr. Sclater,
having reflected that Ginevra was under age and they must be careful,
resumed for the nonce, with considerable satisfaction, his office of
guardian, and holding no previous consultation with Gibbie, walked to
the cottage, and sought an interview with Mr. Galbraith, which the
latter accorded with a formality suitable to his idea of his own inborn
grandeur. But his assumption had no effect on nut-headed Mr. Sclater,
who, in this matter at all events, was at peace with his conscience.

“I have to inform you, Mr. Galbraith,” he began, “that Miss Galbraith--”

“Oh!” said the laird, “I beg your pardon; I was not aware it was my
daughter you wished to see.”

He rose and rang the bell. Mr. Sclater, annoyed at his manner, held his
peace.

“Tell your mistress,” said the laird, “that the Rev. Mr. Sclater wishes
to see her.”

The girl returned with a scared face, and the news that her mistress
was not in her room. The laird’s loose mouth dropped looser.

“Miss Galbraith did us the honour to sleep at our house last night,”
said Mr. Sclater deliberately.

“The devil!” cried the laird, relieved. “Why!--What!--Are you aware of
what you are saying, sir?”

“Perfectly; and of what I saw too. A blow looks bad on a lady’s face.”

“Good heavens! the little hussey dared to say I struck her?”

“She did not say so; but no one could fail to see some one had. If you
do not know who did it, I do.”

“Send her home instantly, or I will come and fetch her,” cried the
laird.

“Come and dine with us if you want to see her. For the present she
remains where she is. You want her to marry Fergus Duff; she prefers my
ward, Gilbert Galbraith, and I shall do my best for them.”

“She is under age,” said the laird.

“That fault will rectify itself as fast in my house as in yours,”
returned the minister. “If you invite the publicity of a legal action,
I will employ counsel, and wait the result.”

Mr. Sclater was not at all anxious to hasten the marriage; he would
much rather, in fact, have it put off, at least until Gibbie should
have taken his degree. The laird started up in a rage, but the room was
so small that he sat down again. The minister leaned back in his chair.
He was too much displeased with the laird’s behaviour to lighten the
matter for him by setting forth the advantages of having Sir Gibbie for
a son-in-law.

“Mr. Sclater,” said the laird at length, “I am shocked, unspeakably
shocked, at my daughter’s conduct. To leave the shelter of her father’s
roof, in the middle of the night, and--”

“About seven o’clock in the evening,” interjected Mr. Sclater.

“--and take refuge with strangers!” continued the laird.

“By no means strangers, Mr. Galbraith!” said the minister. “You drive
your daughter from your house, and are then shocked to find she has
taken refuge with friends!”

“She is an unnatural child. She knows well enough what I think of her,
and what reason she has given me so to think.”

“When a man happens to be alone in any opinion,” remarked the minister,
“even if the opinion should be of his own daughter, the probabilities
are he is wrong. Every one but yourself has the deepest regard for Miss
Galbraith.”

“She has always cultivated strangely objectionable friendships,” said
the laird.

“For my own part,” said the minister, as if heedless of the laird’s
last remark, “although I believe she has no dowry, and there are
reasons besides why the connection should not be desirable, I do not
know a lady I should prefer for a wife to my ward.”

The minister’s plain speaking was not without effect upon the laird.
It made him uncomfortable. It is only when the conscience is wide
awake and regnant that it can be appealed to without giving a cry for
response. Again he sat silent a while. Then gathering all the pomp and
stiffness at his command,

“Oblige me by informing my daughter,” he said, “that I request her, for
the sake of avoiding scandal, to return to her father’s house until she
is of age.”

“And in the mean time you undertake--”

“I undertake nothing,” shouted the laird, in his feeble, woolly, yet
harsh voice.

“Then I refuse to carry your message. I will be no bearer of that from
which, as soon as delivered, I should dissuade.”

“Allow me to ask, are you a minister of the gospel, and stir up a child
against her own father?”

“I am not here to bandy words with you, Mr. Galbraith. It is nothing
to me what you think of me. If you will engage not to urge your choice
upon Miss Galbraith, I think it probable she will at once return to
you. If not--”

“I will not force her inclinations,” said the laird. “She knows my
wish, and she ought to know the duty of a daughter.”

“I will tell her what you say,” answered the minister, and took his
departure.

When Gibbie heard, he was not at all satisfied with Mr. Sclater’s
interference to such result. He wished to marry Ginevra at once, in
order to take her from under the tyranny of her father. But he was
readily convinced it would be better, now things were understood, that
she should go back to him, and try once more to gain him. The same day
she did go back, and Gibbie took up his quarters at the minister’s.

Ginevra soon found that her father had not yielded the idea of having
his own way with her, but her spirits and courage were now so good,
that she was able not only to endure with less suffering, but to carry
herself quite differently. Much less afraid of him, she was the more
watchful to minister to his wants, dared a loving liberty now and then
in spite of his coldness, took his objurgations with something of the
gaiety of one who did not or would not believe he meant them, and when
he abused Gibbie, did not answer a word, knowing events alone could set
him right in his idea of him. Rejoiced that he had not laid hold of the
fact that Glashruach was Gibbie’s, she never mentioned the place to
him; for she shrunk with sharpest recoil from the humiliation of seeing
him, upon conviction, turn from Fergus to Gibbie: the kindest thing
they could do for him would be to marry against his will, and save him
from open tergiversation; for no one could then blame him, he would be
thoroughly pleased, and not having the opportunity of self-degradation,
would be saved the cause for self-contempt.

For some time Fergus kept on hoping. The laird, blinded by his own
wishes, and expecting Gibbie would soon do something to bring public
disgrace upon himself, did not tell him of his daughter’s determination
and self-engagement, while, for her part, Ginevra believed she
fulfilled her duty towards him in the endeavour to convince him by
her conduct that nothing could ever induce her to marry him. So the
remainder of the session passed--the laird urging his objections
against Gibbie, and growing extravagant in his praises of Fergus, while
Ginevra kept taking fresh courage, and being of good cheer. Gibbie went
to the cottage once or twice, but the laird made it so uncomfortable
for them, and Fergus was so rude, that they agreed it would be better
to content themselves with meeting when they had the chance.

At the end of the month Gibbie went home as usual, telling Ginevra he
must be present to superintend what was going on at Glashruach to get
the house ready for her, but saying nothing of what he was building
there. By the beginning of the winter, they had got the buttress-wall
finished and the coping on it, also the shell of the new house roofed
in, so that the carpenters had been at work all through the frost
and snow, and things had made great progress without any hurry; and
now, since the first day the weather had permitted, the masons were
at work again. The bridge was built, the wall of the old house broken
through, the turret carried aloft. The channel of the little burn they
had found completely blocked by a great stone at the farther edge of
the landslip; up to this stone they opened the channel, protecting it
by masonry against further slip, and by Gibbie’s directions left it
so--after boring the stone, which still turned every drop of the water
aside into the Glashburn, for a good charge of gunpowder. All the
hollow where the latter burn had carried away pine-wood and shrubbery,
gravel drive and lawn, had been planted, mostly with fir trees; and a
weir of strong masonry, a little way below the house, kept the water
back, so that it rose and spread, and formed a still pool just under
the house, reflecting it far beneath. If Ginevra pleased, Gibbie meant
to raise the weir, and have quite a little lake in the hollow. A new
approach had been contrived, and was nearly finished before Gibbie
returned to college.




CHAPTER LXI.

THE WEDDING.

In the mean time Fergus, dull as he was to doubt his own importance
and success--for did not the public acknowledge both?--yet by degrees
lost heart and hope so far as concerned Ginevra, and at length told the
laird that, much as he valued his society, and was indebted for his
kindness, he must deny himself the pleasure of visiting any more at the
cottage--so plainly was his presence unacceptable to Miss Galbraith.
The laird blustered against his daughter, and expostulated with the
preacher, not forgetting to hint at the ingratitude of forsaking him,
after all he had done and borne in the furthering of his interests:
Jenny must at length come to see what reason and good sense required
of her! But Fergus had at last learned his lesson, and was no longer
to be blinded. Besides, there had lately come to his church a certain
shopkeeper, retired rich, with one daughter; and as his hope of the
dignity of being married to Ginevra faded, he had come to feel the
enticement of Miss Lapraik’s money and good looks--which gained in
force considerably when he began to understand the serious off-sets
there were to the honour of being son-in-law to Mr. Galbraith: a nobody
as was old Lapraik in himself and his position, he was at least looked
upon with respect, argued Fergus; and indeed the man was as honest as
it is possible for any worshipper of Mammon to be. Fergus therefore
received the laird’s expostulations and encouragements with composure,
but when at length, in his growing acidity, Mr. Galbraith reflected on
his birth, and his own condescension in showing him friendship, Fergus
left the house, never to go near it again. Within three months, for
a second protracted courtship was not to be thought of, he married
Miss Lapraik, and lived respectable ever after--took to writing hymns,
became popular afresh through his poetry, and exercised a double
influence for the humiliation of Christianity. But what matter, while
he counted himself fortunate, and thought himself happy! his fame
spread; he had good health; his wife worshipped him; and if he had
had a valet, I have no doubt he would have been a hero to him, thus
climbing the topmost untrodden peak of the world’s greatness.

When the next evening came, and Fergus did not appear, the laird
fidgeted, then stormed, then sank into a moody silence. When the second
night came, and Fergus did not come, the sequence was the same, with
exasperated symptoms. Night after night passed thus, and Ginevra began
to fear for her father’s reason. She challenged him to play backgammon
with her, but he scorned the proposal. She begged him to teach her
chess, but he scouted the notion of her having wit enough to learn. She
offered to read to him, entreated him to let her do something with him,
but he repelled her every advance with contempt and surliness, which
now and then broke into rage and vituperation.

As soon as Gibbie returned, Ginevra let him know how badly things were
going with her father. They met, consulted, agreed that the best thing
was to be married at once, made their preparations, and confident that,
if asked, he would refuse his permission, proceeded, for his sake, as
if they had had it.

One morning, as he sat at breakfast, Mr. Galbraith received from Mr.
Torrie, whom he knew as the agent in the purchase of Glashruach, and
whom he supposed to have bought it for Major Culsalmon, a letter, more
than respectful, stating that matters had come to light regarding the
property which rendered his presence on the spot indispensable for
their solution, especially as there might be papers of consequence in
view of the points in question, in some drawer or cabinet of those he
had left locked behind him. The present owner, therefore, through Mr.
Torrie, begged most respectfully that Mr. Galbraith would sacrifice
two days of his valuable time, and visit Glashruach. The result, he
did not doubt, would be to the advantage of both parties. If Mr.
Galbraith would kindly signify to Mr. Torrie his assent, a carriage and
four, with postilions, that he might make the journey in all possible
comfort, should be at his house the next morning, at ten o’clock, if
that hour would be convenient.

For weeks the laird had been an unmitigated bore to himself, and the
invitation laid hold upon him by the most projecting handle of his
being, namely, his self-importance. He wrote at once to signify his
gracious assent; and in the evening told his daughter he was going to
Glashruach on business, and had arranged for Miss Kimble to come and
stay with her till his return.

At nine o’clock the schoolmistress came to breakfast, and at ten a
travelling-carriage with four horses drew up at the door, looking
nearly as big as the cottage. With monstrous stateliness, and a
fur-coat on his arm, the laird descended to his garden gate, and got
into the carriage, which instantly dashed away for the western road,
restoring Mr. Galbraith to the full consciousness of his inherent
grandeur: if he was not exactly laird of Glashruach again, he was
something quite as important. His carriage was just out of the street,
when a second, also with four horses, drew up, to the astonishment
of Miss Kimble, at the garden gate. Out of it stepped Mr. and Mrs.
Sclater! then a young gentleman, whom she thought very graceful until
she discovered it was that low-lived Sir Gilbert! and Mr. Torrie,
the lawyer! They came trooping into the little drawing-room, shook
hands with them both, and sat down, Sir Gilbert beside Ginevra--but
nobody spoke. What could it mean! A morning call? It was too early.
And four horses to a morning call! A pastoral visitation? Four horses
and a lawyer to a pastoral visitation! A business call? There was
Mrs. Sclater! and that Sir Gilbert!--It must after all be a pastoral
visitation, for there was the minister commencing a religious
service!--during which however it suddenly revealed itself to the
horrified spinster that she was part and parcel of a clandestine
wedding! An anxious father had placed her in charge of his daughter,
and this was how she was fulfilling her trust! There was Ginevra being
married in a brown dress! and to that horrid lad, who called himself
a baronet, and hobnobbed with a low market-woman! But, alas! just as
she was recovering her presence of mind, Mr. Sclater pronounced them
husband and wife! She gave a shriek, and cried out, “I forbid the
banns,” at which the company, bride and bridegroom included, broke into
“a loud smile.” The ceremony over, Ginevra glided from the room, and
returned almost immediately in her little brown bonnet. Sir Gilbert
caught up his hat, and Ginevra held out her hand to Miss Kimble. Then
at length the abashed and aggrieved lady found words of her own.

“Ginevra!” she cried, “you are never going to leave me alone in the
house!--after inviting me to stay with you till your father returned!”

But the minister answered her.

“It was her father who invited you, I believe, not Lady Galbraith,”
he said; “and you understood perfectly that the invitation was not
meant to give her pleasure. You would doubtless have her postpone her
wedding-journey on your account, but my lady is under no obligation to
think of you.”--He had heard of her tattle against Sir Gilbert, and
thus rudely showed his resentment.

Miss Kimble burst into tears. Ginevra kissed her, and said,

“Never mind, dear Miss Kimble. You could not help it. The whole thing
was arranged. We are going after my father, and we have the best
horses.”

Mr. Torrie laughed outright.

“A new kind of runaway marriage!” he cried. “The happy couple pursuing
the obstinate parent with four horses! Ha! ha! ha!”

“But after the ceremony!” said Mr. Sclater.

Here the servant ran down the steps with a carpet-bag, and opened
the gate for her mistress. Lady Galbraith got into the carriage; Sir
Gilbert followed; there was kissing and tears at the door of it; Mrs.
Sclater drew back; the postilions spurred their horses; off went the
second carriage faster than the first; and the minister’s party walked
quietly away, leaving Miss Kimble to declaim to the maid of all work,
who cried so that she did not hear a word she said. The schoolmistress
put on her bonnet, and full of indignation carried her news of the
treatment to which she had been subjected to the Rev. Fergus Duff, who
remarked to himself that it was sad to see youth and beauty turn away
from genius and influence to wed money and idiocy, gave a sigh, and
went to see Miss Lapraik.

Between the second stage and the third, Gibbie and Ginevra came in
sight of their father’s carriage. Having arranged with the postilions
that the two carriages should not change horses at the same places,
they easily passed unseen by him, while, thinking of nothing so little
as their proximity, he sat in state before the door of a village inn.

Just as Mr. Galbraith was beginning to hope the major had contrived a
new approach to the place, the carriage took an unexpected turn, and he
found presently they were climbing, by a zig-zag road, the height over
the Lorrie burn; but the place was no longer his, and to avoid a sense
of humiliation, he avoided taking any interest in the change.

A young woman--it was Donal’s eldest sister, but he knew nothing of
her--opened the door to him, and showed him up the stair to his old
study. There a great fire was burning; but, beyond that, everything,
even to the trifles on his writing table, was just as when last he left
the house. His chair stood in its usual position by the fire, and wine
and biscuits were on a little table near.

“Very considerate!” he said to himself. “I trust the major does not
mean to keep me waiting, though. Deuced hard to have to leave a place
like this!”

Weary with his journey he fell into a doze, dreamed of his dead wife,
woke suddenly, and heard the door of the room open. There was Major
Culsalmon entering with outstretched hand! and there was a lady--his
wife doubtless! But how young the major was! he had imagined him a man
in middle age at least!--Bless his soul! was he never to get rid of
this impostor fellow! it was not the major! it was the rascal calling
himself Sir Gilbert Galbraith!--the half-witted wretch his fool of
a daughter insisted on marrying! Here he was, ubiquitous as Satan!
And--bless his soul again! there was the minx, Jenny! looking as if the
place was her own! The silly tears in her eyes too!--It was all too
absurd! He had just been dreaming of his dead wife, and clearly that
was it! he was not awake yet!

He tried hard to wake, but the dream mastered him.

“Jenny!” he said, as the two stood for a moment regarding him, a little
doubtfully, but with smiles of welcome, “what is the meaning of this? I
did not know Major Culsalmon had invited you! And what is this person
doing here?”

“Papa,” replied Ginevra, with a curious smile, half merry, half
tearful, “this person is my husband, Sir Gilbert Galbraith of
Glashruach; and you are at home in your own study again.”

“Will you never have done masquerading, Jenny?” he returned. “Inform
Major Culsalmon that I request to see him immediately.”

He turned towards the fire, and took up a newspaper. They thought it
better to leave him. As he sat, by degrees the truth grew plain to
him. But not one other word on the matter did the man utter to the day
of his death. When dinner was announced, he walked straight from the
dining-room door to his former place at the foot of the table. But
Robina Grant was equal to the occasion. She caught up the dish before
him, and set it at the side. There Gibbie seated himself; and, after a
moment’s hesitation, Ginevra placed herself opposite her husband.

The next day Gibbie provided him with something to do. He had the
chest of papers found in the Auld Hoose o’ Galbraith carried into his
study, and the lawyer found both employment and interest for weeks
in deciphering and arranging them. Amongst many others concerning
the property, its tenures, and boundaries, appeared some papers
which, associated and compared, threw considerable doubt on the way
in which portions of it had changed hands, and passed from those of
Gibbie’s ancestors into those of Ginevra’s--who were lawyers as well
as Galbraiths; and the laird was keen of scent as any nose-hound after
dishonesty in other people. In the course of a fortnight he found
himself so much at home in his old quarters, and so much interested in
those papers and his books, that when Sir Gilbert informed him Ginevra
and he were going back to the city, he pronounced it decidedly the
better plan, seeing he was there himself to look after affairs.

For the rest of the winter, therefore, Mr. Galbraith played the grand
seigneur as before among the tenants of Glashruach.




CHAPTER LXII.

THE BURN.

The moment they were settled in the Auld Hoose, Gibbie resumed the
habits of the former winter, which Mistress Croale’s failure had
interrupted. And what a change it was to Ginevra--from imprisonment
to ministration! She found difficulties at first, as may readily be
believed. But presently came help. As soon as Mistress Croale heard of
their return, she went immediately to Lady Galbraith, one morning while
Sir Gibbie was at college, literally knelt at her feet, and with tears
told her the whole tale, beseeching her intercession with Sir Gibbie.

“I want naething,” she insisted, “but his fawvour, an’ the licht o’ his
bonnie coontenance.”

The end of course was that she was gladly received again into the
house, where once more she attended to all the principal at least of
her former duties. Before she died, there was a great change and growth
in her: she was none of those before whom pearls must not be cast.

Every winter, for many years, Sir Gilbert and Lady Galbraith occupied
the Auld Hoose; which by degrees came at length to be known as the
refuge of all that were in honest distress, the salvation of all in
themselves such as could be helped, and a covert for the night to
all the houseless, of whatever sort, except those drunk at the time.
Caution had to be exercised, and judgment used; the caution was tender
and the judgment stern. The next year they built a house in a sheltered
spot on Glashgar, and thither from the city they brought many invalids,
to spend the summer months under the care of Janet and her daughter
Robina, whereby not a few were restored sufficiently to earn their
bread for a time thereafter.

The very day the session was over, they returned to Glashruach, where
they were received by the laird, as he was still called, as if they
had been guests. They found Joseph, the old butler, reinstated, and
Angus again acting as gamekeeper. Ginevra welcomed Joseph, but took
the first opportunity of telling Angus that for her father’s sake Sir
Gilbert allowed him to remain, but on the first act of violence he
should at once be dismissed, and probably prosecuted as well. Donal’s
eldest brother was made bailiff. Before long Gibbie got the other two
also about him, and as soon as, with justice, he was able, settled
them together upon one of his farms. Every Saturday, so long as Janet
lived, they met, as in the old times, at the cottage--only with Ginevra
in the place of the absent Donal. More to her own satisfaction, after
all, than Robert’s, Janet went home first,--“to be at han’,” she said,
“to open the door till him whan he chaps.” Then Robert went to his sons
below on their farm, where he was well taken care of; but happily he
did not remain long behind his wife. That first summer, Nicie returned
to Glashruach to wait on Lady Galbraith, was more her friend than her
servant, and when she married, was settled on the estate.

For some little time Ginevra was fully occupied in getting her house
in order, and furnishing the new part of it. When that was done, Sir
Gilbert gave an entertainment to his tenants. The laird preferred a
trip to the city, “on business,” to the humiliation of being present as
other than the greatest; though perhaps he would have minded it less
had he ever himself given a dinner to his tenants.

Robert and Janet declined the invitation.

“We’re ower auld for makin’ merry ’cep in oor ain herts,” said Janet.
“But bide ye, my bonnie Sir Gibbie, till we’re a’ up yon’er, an’ syne
we’ll see.”

The place of honour was therefore given to Jean Mavor, who was beside
herself with joy to see her broonie lord of the land, and be seated
beside him in respect and friendship. But her brother said it was
“clean ridic’lous;” and not to the last would consent to regard the new
laird as other than half-witted, insisting that everything was done by
his wife, and that the talk on his fingers was a mere pretence.

When the main part of the dinner was over, Sir Gilbert and his lady
stood at the head of the table, and, he speaking by signs and she
interpreting, made a little speech together. In the course of it Sir
Gibbie took occasion to apologize for having once disturbed the peace
of the country-side by acting the supposed part of a _broonie_, and
in relating his adventures of the time, accompanied his wife’s text
with such graphic illustration of gesture, that his audience laughed
at the merry tale till the tears ran down their cheeks. Then with a
few allusions to his strange childhood, he thanked the God who led him
through thorny ways into the very arms of love and peace in the cottage
of Robert and Janet Grant, whence, and not from the fortune he had
since inherited, came all his peace.

“He desires me to tell you,” said Lady Galbraith, “that he was a
stranger, and you folk of Daurside took him in, and if ever he can do
a kindness to you or yours, he will.--He desires me also to say, that
you ought not to be left ignorant that you have a poet of your own,
born and bred among you--Donal Grant, the son of Robert and Janet,
the friend of Sir Gilbert’s heart, and one of the noblest of men. And
he begs you to allow me to read you a poem he had from him this very
morning--probably just written. It is called _The Laverock_. I will
read it as well as I can. If any of you do not like poetry, he says--I
mean Sir Gilbert says--you can go to the kitchen and light your pipes,
and he will send your wine there to you.”

She ceased. Not one stirred, and she read the verses--which, for the
sake of having Donal in at the last of my book, I will print. Those who
do not care for verse, may--metaphorically, I would not be rude--go and
smoke their pipes in the kitchen.


THE LAVEROCK. (_lark_)


THE MAN SAYS:

  Laverock i’ the lift, (_sky_)
  Hae ye nae sang-thrift,
  ’At ye scatter ’t sae heigh, an’ lat it a’ drift?
                Wasterfu’ laverock!

  Dinna ye ken
  ’At ye hing ower men
  Wha haena a sang or a penny to spen’?
                Hertless laverock!

  But up there, you,
  I’ the bow o’ the blue,
  Haud skirlin’ (_keep shrilling_) on as gien a’ war new!
                Toom-heidit (_empty-headed_) laverock!

  Haith! ye’re ower blythe:
  I see a great scythe
  Swing whaur yer nestie lies, doon i’ the lythe, (_shelter_)
                Liltin’ laverock!

  Eh, sic a soon’!
  Birdie, come doon--
  Ye’re fey (_death-doomed_) to sing sic a merry tune,
                Gowkit (_silly_) laverock!

  Come to yer nest;
  Yer wife’s sair prest;
  She’s clean worn oot wi’ duin’ her best,
                Rovin’ laverock!

  Winna ye haud?
  Ye’re surely mad!
  Is there naebody there to gie ye a daud? (_blow_)
                Menseless laverock!

  Come doon an’ conform;
  Pyke an honest worm,
  An’ hap yer bairns frae the muckle storm,
                Spendrife laverock!


THE BIRD SINGS:

  My nestie it lieth
    I’ the how (_hollow_) o’ a han’;
  The swing o’ the scythe
    ’Ill miss ’t by a span.

  The lift it’s sae cheerie!
    The win’ it’s sae free!
  I hing ower my dearie,
    An’ sing ’cause I see.

  My wifie’s wee breistie
    Grows warm wi’ my sang,
  An’ ilk crumpled-up beastie
    Kens no to think lang.

  Up here the sun sings, but
    He only shines there!
  Ye haena nae wings, but
    Come up on a prayer.


THE MAN SINGS:

  Ye wee daurin’ cratur,
    Ye rant an’ ye sing
  Like an oye (_grandchild_) o’ auld Natur
    Ta’en hame by the King!

  Ye wee feathert priestie,
    Yer bells i’ yer thro’t.
  Yer altar yer breistie
    Yer mitre forgot--

  Offerin’ an’ Aaron,
    Ye burn hert an’ brain
  An’ dertin’ an’ daurin’
    Flee back to yer ain.

  Ye wee minor prophet,
    It’s maist my belief
  ’At I’m doon i’ Tophet,
    An’ you abune grief!

  Ye’ve deavt (_deafened_) me an’ daudit, (_buffeted_)
    An’ ca’d me a fule:
  I’m nearhan’ persuaudit
    To gang to your schule!

  For, birdie, I’m thinkin’
    Ye ken mair nor me--
  Gien ye haena been drinkin’,
    An’ sing as ye see.

  Ye maun hae a sicht ’at
    Sees geyan (_considerably_) far ben; (_inwards_)
  An’ a hert for the micht o’ ’t
    Wad sair (_serve_) for nine men!

  Somebody’s been till
    Roun to ye wha (_whisper_)
  Said birdies war seen till
    E’en whan they fa’!


After the reading of the poem, Sir Gilbert and Lady Galbraith withdrew,
and went towards the new part of the house, where they had their rooms.
On the bridge, over which Ginevra scarcely ever passed without stopping
to look both up and down the dry channel in the rock, she lingered as
usual, and gazed from its windows. Below, the waterless bed of the burn
opened out on the great valley of the Daur; above was the landslip,
and beyond it the stream rushing down the mountain. Gibbie pointed up
to it. She gazed a while, and gave a great sigh. He asked her--their
communication was now more like that between two spirits: even signs
had become almost unnecessary--what she wanted or missed. She looked
in his face and said, “Naething but the sang o’ my burnie, Gibbie.”
He took a small pistol from his pocket, and put it in her hand; then,
opening the window, signed to her to fire it. She had never fired
a pistol, and was a little frightened, but would have been utterly
ashamed to shrink from anything Gibbie would have her do. She held
it out. Her hand trembled. He laid his upon it, and it grew steady.
She pulled the trigger, and dropped the pistol with a little cry. He
signed to her to listen. A moment passed, and then, like a hugely
magnified echo, came a roar that rolled from mountain to mountain, like
a thunder drum. The next instant, the landslip seemed to come hurrying
down the channel, roaring and leaping: it was the mud-brown waters of
the burn, careering along as if mad with joy at having regained their
ancient course. Ginevra stared with parted lips, delight growing to
apprehension as the live thing momently neared the bridge. With tossing
mane of foam, the brown courser came rushing on, and shot thundering
under. They turned, and from the other window saw it tumbling headlong
down the steep descent to the Lorrie. By quick gradations, even as
they gazed, the mud melted away; the water grew clearer and clearer,
and in a few minutes a small mountain-river, of a lovely lucid brown,
transparent as a smoke-crystal, was dancing along under the bridge. It
had ceased its roar and was sweetly singing.

“Let us see it from my room, Gibbie,” said Ginevra.

They went up, and from the turret window looked down upon the water.
They gazed until, like the live germ of the gathered twilight, it was
scarce to be distinguished but by abstract motion.

“It’s my ain burnie,” said Ginevra, “an’ it’s ain auld sang! I’ll
warran’ it hasna forgotten a note o’ ’t! Eh, Gibbie, ye gie me a’
thing!”

“_Gien I was a burnie, wadna I rin!_” sang Gibbie, and Ginevra heard
the words, though Gibbie could utter only the air he had found for them
so long ago. She threw herself into his arms, and hiding her face on
his shoulder, clung silent to her silent husband. Over her lovely bowed
head, he gazed into the cool spring night, sparkling with stars, and
shadowy with mountains. His eyes climbed the stairs of Glashgar to the
lonely peak dwelling among the lights of God; and if upon their way up
the rocks they met no visible sentinels of heaven, he needed neither
ascending stairs nor descending angels, for a better than the angels
was with them.

THE END.


BROAD SCOTS GLOSSARY

Note from John Bechard, creator of this Electronic text.

The following is a list of Scottish words which are found in George
MacDonald’s “Sir Gibbie”. I have compiled this list myself and worked
out the definitions from context with the help of Margaret West, from
Leven in Fife, Scotland, and also by referring to a word list found
in a collection of poems by Robert Burns and “Chamber’s Scots Dialect
Dictionary from the 17th century to the Present” c. 1911. I have tried
to be as thorough as possible given the limited resources and welcome
any feedback on this list which may be wrong (my e-mail address is
JaBBechard@aol.com). This was never meant to be a comprehensive list
of the National Scottish Language, but rather an aid to understanding
some of the conversations in this text which are carried out in the
Broad Scots. I do apologise for any mistakes or omissions. I aimed for
my list to be very comprehensive. As well, it includes words that are
quite obvious to native English speakers, only spelled in such a way to
demonstrate the local pronunciation.

There is a web site which features the Scottish language, DSL,
or Dictionaries of the Scots Language; and the National Scottish
Dictionary can be consulted if you have access to one.

This list is a compressed form that consists of three columns for
‘word’, ‘definition’, and ‘additional notes’. It is set up with a comma
between each item and a hard return at the end of each definition.
This means that this section could easily be cut and pasted into its
own text file and imported into a database or spreadsheet as a comma
separated variable file (.csv file). Failing that, you could do a
search and replace for commas in this section (I have not used any
commas in my words, definitions or notes) and replace the commas with
spaces or tabs.

  Word, Definition, Notes
  a’, all; every, also have,
  a’ body, everyone; everybody,
  a’ thing, everything; anything,
  aboot, about,
  absteen, abstain,
  abune, above; up,
  accoont, account,
  accordin’, according,
  accre, acre,
  ae, one,
  aff, off; away; past; beyond,
  affrontit, affronted; disgraced, also ashamed; shamed,
  afore, before; in front of,
  aften, often,
  again’, against, opposed to,
  agreeable, in agreement; willing,
  Ahchan, Achan, reference to Joshua 7,
  ahin’, behind; after; at the back of,
  aiblins, perhaps; possibly,
  aigles, eagles,
  Aigypt, Egypt,
  ain, own, also one,
  aipple, apple,
  airm, arm,
  airmour, armour,
  airms, arms, also coat of arms; crest,
  airt, quarter; direction; compass point,
  airthquack, earthquake,
  aiss, ashes,
  ait, eat,
  aiten, eaten,
  aith, oath,
  aither, either,
  aiven, even,
  alane, alone,
  alloo, allow,
  allooin’, allowing,
  Almichty, Almighty; God,
  amids, amidst,
  amo’, among,
  an’, and,
  ance, once,
  ane, one, also a single person or thing,
  aneath, beneath; under,
  anent, opposite to; in front of, also concerning,
  aneth, beneath; under,
  angert, angered; angry, also grieved,
  anither, another,
  anker, liquid measure of 4 gallons,
  a’ready, already,
  arrenge, arrange,
  as lang ’s, as long as,
  as sune ’s, as soon as,
  ashmy, asthma,
  ’at, that,
  at farest, at the farthest, also at the latest,
  ates, hates,
  a’thegither, altogether,
  a’thing, everything; anything,
  ’at’ll, that will,
  ’at’s, that is,
  attreebute, attribute,
  atween, between,
  auld, old,
  auld langsyne, days of long ago, also old friendship,
  auld-fashioned, old-fashioned,
  auncient, ancient,
  Aw, I, also all; owning,
  awa, away,
  awfu’, awful,
  Awva!, At all!, exclamation of surprise; contempt,
  aye, yes; indeed, exclamation of surprise; wonder,
  ayont, beyond; after,
  bairn, child,
  bairnies, little children, diminutive,
  baith, both,
  bale-fire, any large fire; bonfire,
  ballant, ballad; song,
  banes, bones,
  bannin’, cursing; swearing; abuse; scold,
  bannock, round flat griddle-baked cake,
  Barebanes, bare bones (i.e. death),
  bawbee, half penny,
  bealt, festered,
  beastie, beast; animal, diminutive to express sympathy or affection,
  beets, boots,
  behaud, withhold; wait; delay, also behold,
  beirin’, bearing; allowing,
  belang, belong,
  believet, believed,
  ben, in; inside; into; within; inwards, also inner room,
  be ’t, be it,
  bethink (oneself), stop to think; reflect,
  beuk, book, also Bible,
  Bible-word, word of honour,
  bicker, wooden vessel,
  bidden, abided; stayed,
  bide, endure; bear; remain; live, also desire; wish,
  bidena, do not bide; do not stay,
  bield, protection; shelter; cover,
  bigg, build,
  biggit, built,
  bin’, bind,
  binna, be not,
  birdie, little bird, diminutive,
  birk, birch tree,
  bit, but; bit, also little-diminutive,
  blate, over-modest; bashful; shy,
  blaw, blow,
  bleck, black; smut, also nonplus; perplex,
  bledder, bleater; snipe, also foolish or idle talker,
  blether, talk nonsense; babble; boast,
  blew, blue,
  blin’t, blinded,
  blude, blood,
  bluidy, bloody,
  boady, body,
  boasoms, bosoms,
  boatle, bottle (of whisky),
  boddom, bottom,
  bodies, people; fellows; folk,
  bodit, boded,
  body, person; fellow, also body,
  bonnie, good; beautiful; pretty; handsome,
  boortree, shrub elder,
  bosky, wild; unfrequented,
  bossie, large wooden bowl, serving bowl,
  boucht, bought,
  bow-ribbit, bent in the ribs,
  brackens, bracken; coarse fern,
  brae, hill; hillside; high ground by a river,
  brainch, branch,
  braird, first sprouting of young grain,
  brak, break,
  brakfast, breakfast,
  bran’er, brander; grating; gridiron; trestle,
  braw, beautiful; good; fine, also lovely (girl); handsome (boy),
  bray, press; squeeze; push,
  bree, brew; whisky; broth; gravy,
  breeks, breeches; trousers,
  breist, breast,
  breistie, little breast, diminutive,
  breith, breath,
  bridle, modify,
  brither, brother,
  brocken, broken,
  brods, boards; (book covers),
  broo, brow,
  broom, shrub with bright yellow flowers,
  broonie, brownie; benevolent elf,
  brose, water; soup; meal,
  broucht, brought,
  brunt, burned,
  buik, book, also Bible,
  bun’le, bundle,
  burn, water; stream; brook,
  burnie, little stream, diminutive,
  bursten, burst,
  buss, bush,
  butterflees, butterflies,
  by ordinar’, out of the ordinary; supernatural,
  byke, hive; swarm; crowd,
  byre, cowshed,
  ca’, call; name,
  ca’d, called,
  ca’in, calling,
  cairry, carry,
  caitiff, coward; cowardly, more of an older English word than Scots,
  caller, fresh; refreshing; cool,
  cam, came,
  camna, did not come,
  canna, cannot,
  carena, do not care,
  carolled, sang (carols),
  cast, thrown off; discarded (clothes),
  casten, spoilt; worthless; thrown aside,
  catched, caught,
  caul’, cold,
  caup, small wooden bowl,
  ’cause, because,
  caw, drive; impel; hammer,
  cawpable, capable,
  ’cep, except; but,
  certie, of a truth; certainly,
  chaps, knocks; hammers; strikes; raps,
  chaumer, chamber; room,
  cheek, side,
  cheemistry, chemistry,
  cheenge, change,
  cheerie, cheery,
  cheese, choose,
  chiel, child; young person, term of fondness or intimacy,
  chop, shop; store,
  chopdoor, shop door,
  claes, clothes; dress,
  clan, group; class; coterie,
  clappers, door knockers; rattles,
  clean, altogether; entirely, also comely; shapely; empty; clean,
  cled, clothed; clad,
  cleed, clothe; shelter,
  clim’, climb,
  cloaset, (prayer) closet,
  cloods, clouds,
  cloot, clout; box (ear); beat; slap, also patch; mend,
  closed, enclosed,
  closet, room; bedroom,
  coaties, children’s coats or petticoats,
  cobblin’, cobbling; shoemaking,
  cock-crawin’, crowing of the cock,
  coffer, legacy of wealth; fortune,
  colliginer, college student, also college boy,
  colloguin’, associating; conspiring; plotting,
  Come awa ben, Come on in,
  Come yer wa’s in, Come on in,
  comena, do not come,
  concernt, concerned,
  conduckit, conducted,
  conneckit, connected,
  consaive, conceive,
  considert, considered,
  consortit, consorted,
  contentit, contented,
  contrar’, contrary,
  coo, cow,
  cooard, coward,
  coontenance, countenance,
  coorse, coarse, also course
  cottar, farm tenant; cottager,
  couldna, could not,
  couples, rafters,
  cowt, colt,
  crap o’ the wa’, natural shelf between wall and roof,
  cratur, creature,
  craw, crow; rook (types of birds),
  creepie, (three legged) stool, a child’s chair,
  creepit, crept; crawled,
  crook, hooked iron chain inside a chimney, for hanging
   cooking pots on,
  cry, call; summon,
  cud, could,
  cudna, could not,
  curriet, curried; dressed,
  cursit, cursed,
  cuttit, cut; harvested,
  cweentry, country,
  cwite, coat,
  dacency, decency,
  dacent, decent,
  dale, deal; fir-or pinewood plank,
  damps, coal-pit gases,
  dang, knock; bang; drive,
  daud, blow; strike; abuse,
  daudit, buffeted; struck,
  dauner, stroll; saunter,
  daur, dare; challenge,
  daurna, dare not; do not dare,
  daursay, dare say,
  Dawvid, David,
  dearie, sweetheart; darling,
  deavt, deafened,
  dee, do, also die,
  deed, died, also deed,
  ’deed, indeed,
  dee’d, died,
  deein’, doing, also dying,
  deen, done,
  deevil, devil,
  deevilry, devilry,
  deid, dead,
  deif, deaf,
  deil, devil,
  deith, death,
  delicht, delight,
  dementit, demented; mad; crazy,
  denner, dinner,
  dertin’, darting,
  deuk-quack, duck quack,
  deuks, ducks,
  didna, did not,
  differ, difference, also differ,
  din, sound; din,
  dingin’, overcoming; wearying; vexing,
  dinna, do not,
  dinna fling the calf efter the coo, don’t give up,
   also baby/bathwater,
  dirt, worthless persons or things, term of contempt
  dis, does,
  disappint, disappoint,
  discoorse, discourse,
  disna, does not,
  dissiples, disciples,
  div, do,
  dod!, God! (exclamation),
  doggie, little dog, diminutive,
  doobt, suspect; know; doubt, have an unpleasant conviction,
  doobtna, do not suspect; do not know, also does not doubt,
  dooms, extremely; exceedingly,
  doon, down,
  door-cheek, door-post; threshold,
  door-sill, threshold,
  doos, doves,
  douce, gentle; sensible; sober; prudent,
  doup, bottom; backside; buttocks,
  draigon, dragon, reference to Revelation 12-13,
  dram, glass of whisky,
  drap, drop; small quantity of,
  drappit, dropped,
  drappy, little drop; a little (liquor), diminutive,
  drear, dreary; dreariness; tedium,
  dree, endure; undergo; suffer,
  dree my weird, undergo my doom,
  dreemt, dreamed,
  dreid, dread,
  dreidfu’, dreadful; dreadfully,
  drookit, drenched; soaked,
  droon, drown,
  drop, drop-shaped earring, also drop,
  drouth, thirst; dryness, also drought,
  drouthie, thirsty; dry,
  drucken, drunken; tipsy,
  du, do,
  duds, clothes; rags; tatters,
  duin’, doing,
  dulse, type of seaweed,
  dummie, little mute person, diminutive,
  dune, done,
  dyke, wall of stone or turf,
  ear’, early,
  ee, eye,
  e’e, eye,
  eedit, heeded,
  een, eyes,
  e’en, even; just; simply, also eyes; evening,
  eese, use,
  efter, after; afterwards,
  else, otherwise; at another time; already,
  Embrough, Edinburgh,
  en’, end,
  endeevour, endeavour,
  eneuch, enough,
  enstance, instance,
  er, ere; before,
  ettle, reach; intend; purpose; aim,
  even, even; compare,
  ever, before, also ever,
  ever-mair, ever more,
  exemple, example,
  expeckit, expected,
  fa’, fall; befall,
  failt, failed,
  faimily, family,
  fain, eager; anxious; fond, also fondly,
  fa’in’, falling,
  fallow, fellow; chap,
  fallow-feelin’, mutual feeling,
  fan’, found,
  fa’ntit, fainted,
  fardin’, farthing,
  faulds, folds,
  fause, false,
  fau’t, fault; blame,
  fawvour, favour,
  fearfu’, fearful; easily frightened,
  fearsome, terrifying; fearful; awful,
  feart, afraid; frightened; scared,
  feathert, feathered,
  fecht, fight; struggle,
  feck, value; worth; advantage; majority,
  fee, hire oneself out,
  feel, foolish, also fool,
  fegs, truly, mild oath; exclamation of surprise,
  fell, very; potent; keen; harsh; sharp, intensifies; also turf,
  fell-dyke, wall made of layers of sod,
  fellow-cratur, fellow creature,
  fells, sods,
  feow, few,
  fess, fetch,
  fest, fast,
  fey, doomed (to death),
  fillit, filled,
  fin’, find; feel,
  Fin’on haddie, smoked haddock,
  fit, foot; base, also fit; capable; able,
  flax, flax; wick,
  flee, fly (insect),
  fleers, floors,
  fleg, blow; kick; stroke,
  fleggit, blew; kicked; stroked,
  fleyt, terrified; frightened,
  fling, kick; throw,
  flit, shift; remove; depart,
  flure, floor,
  forby, as well; as well as; besides,
  forgie, forgive,
  forgi’en, forgiven,
  forgifness, forgiveness,
  forkit, forked,
  foucht, fought,
  fowk, folk,
  fowth, plenty; abundance; full measure,
  frae, from,
  frank, generous; lavish, also generously,
  fricht, frighten; scare away,
  frichtit, frightened; scared away,
  fule, fool,
  fulfillt, fulfilled,
  fundation, foundation,
  fun’t, founded,
  fut, foot,
  gae, gave,
  gaed, went,
  gaein’, going,
  ’gain, by; nearly; almost,
  gairdens, gardens,
  gait, way; fashion, also route; street,
  gaits, ways, also routes; streets,
  ga’le, gable,
  gane, gone,
  gang, go; goes; depart; walk,
  gang yer wa’s, go on,
  gar, cause; make; compel,
  gat, got,
  gauin’, going,
  gear, possessions; money; property, also livestock,
  geese, goose,
  German Ocean, old reference to the English Channel & North Sea,
  gerse, grass,
  gether, gather,
  gey, very; considerable,
  geyan, considerably; somewhat; rather,
  ghaist, ghost,
  ghem, game (hunted animal),
  gie, give,
  gied, gave,
  giein’, giving,
  gien, if; as if; then; whether,
  gi’en, given
  gien’t, if it,
  gies, gives,
  girdle, griddle for baking scones, iron disc,
  girnels, granaries; meal-chests,
  glaid, glad,
  glaiss, glass,
  glamour, spell; charm; enchantment,
  glaur, mud; dirt; ooze,
  gleg, quick; lively; smart; quick-witted,
  glimp, glimpse; glance, also the least degree,
  glintin’, twinkling; glittering,
  gloamin’, twilight; dusk,
  gnerlet, gnarled,
  goodman, master; husband; head of household,
  gowans, daisies,
  gowany, flowered with daisies,
  gowd, gold,
  gowk, cuckoo; fool; blockhead,
  gowkit, foolish; silly,
  graivelly, gravely,
  gran’, grand; capital; first-rate,
  gran’est, grandest,
  gran’father, grandfather,
  green bree, cesspool, also stagnant pool by a dunghill,
  greitin’, crying; weeping,
  grenite, granite,
  gret, great,
  grief, grieve,
  grip, grasp; understand,
  grippit, grasped; understood,
  grue, feeling of horror; tremor,
  grum’lin’, grumbling,
  grup, grip; grasp,
  gruppit, gripped; grabbed,
  gudeman, master; husband; head of household,
  guid, good, also God,
  guid-hertit, good-hearted,
  guidit, treated; handled; managed,
  guiss, guess,
  haddie, haddock,
  hadna, had not,
  hae, have; has,
  hae a news, talk; gossip,
  haein, having,
  haein’, having,
  haena, have not,
  haill, whole,
  hairm, harm,
  Haith!, Faith!, exclamation of surprise,
  haithen, heathen,
  haiven, heaven,
  haiver, talk nonsense,
  hale, whole,
  half-hoor, half-hour,
  hame, home,
  han’, hand,
  hang, hanged, also made,
  hangt, hanged,
  hanks, rope; coil; skein of cotton,
  han’le, handle,
  hantle, much; large quantity; far,
  hap, cover; wrap; shield,
  h’ard, heard,
  hark, listen,
  harns, brains,
  hasna, does not have,
  haud, hold; keep,
  hauden, held; kept,
  haugh, river-meadow,
  hause, neck; throat,
  hawpy, happy,
  haymows, large haystacks,
  heap, very much; heap,
  hearken, hearken; hear; listen to,
  hearten, encourage,
  Hech!, Oh!, strange!, a sighing exclamation,
  hed, had,
  hedna, had not,
  heedna, heed not; do not heed,
  heicht, height,
  heid, head; heading,
  heigh, high,
  helpit, helped,
  hen-scraich, chicken cackle, lit. chicken scream,
  herd, herd-boy; cow-boy, also herd,
  hermony, harmony,
  hersel’, herself,
  hert, heart,
  her ’t, it to her,
  hertenin’, enheartening; encouraging,
  hertless, heartless,
  herty, heartily; hearty,
  hid, had, also hid,
  hield, held,
  hillie, little hill, diminutive,
  himsel’, himself,
  hin’, hind; backside,
  hin’ side afore, back to front,
  hing, hang,
  hirplin, limping; hobbling,
  his, has, also his; us (emphatic),
  hit, it, emphatic,
  hoarible, horrible,
  hoo, how,
  hoor, hour,
  hoose, house,
  hoosie, little house, diminutive,
  hoots, exclamation of doubt or contempt,
  hose, stocking,
  houff, haunt,
  houp, hope,
  how, hollow; valley; glen,
  hum’le, hornless; fingerless,
  hun’ers, hundreds,
  hunger-like, shrivelled; lacking nutrients,
  hungert, starved,
  hurtit, hurt,
  hyne, far (away),
  i’, in; into,
  I doobt, I know; I suspect,
  I wat, I know; I assure (you),
  idleset, idleness; frivolous amusement,
  ilk(a), every; each, also common; ordinary,
  ill, bad; evil; hard; harsh, also misfortune; harm,
  ’ill, will,
  ill-fauredest, most unbecoming or unmannerly,
  ill-guideship, mismanagement; ill-treatment,
  ill-guidit, mismanaged; ill-treated,
  ’im, him,
  imaigine, imagine,
  immorawlity, immorality,
  in atween, in the meantime; between,
  informt, informed,
  ingle-neuk, chimney-corner or recess,
  inten’, intend,
  inten’it, intended,
  intil, into; in; within,
  inveet, invite; invitation,
  inveetit, invited,
  ir, are,
  ’is, his,
  I s’ awa, I’m off; I’d better go,
  Ise, I shall,
  isna, is not,
  i’stead, instead,
  ither, other; another; further,
  ’ithin, within,
  itsel’, itself,
  jabble, ripple; small broken waves,
  jaws, billows; splashes; surges,
  Jeames, James,
  jeedge, judge,
  Jerooslem, Jerusalem,
  jine, join,
  jints, joints,
  jist, just,
  j’ists, joists,
  jography, geography,
  jooggy, jigger; shot (of whisky),
  justifeed, justified,
  kail-wife, woman who sells colewort,
  kaimbt, combed,
  keepit, kept,
  keerious, curious,
  ken, know; be acquainted with; recognise,
  kenna, do not know,
  kenspeckle, conspicuous, easily recognised from some peculiarity,
  kent, known; knew,
  killt, killed,
  kin’, kind; nature; sort; agreeable, also somewhat; in some degree,
  kin’ness, kindness,
  kirk, church,
  kirkyaird, churchyard,
  kist, chest; coffer; box; chest of drawers,
  knicht, knight,
  koft, bought,
  kye, cattle; cows,
  laad, lad; boy, term of commendation or reverence,
  laddie, boy, term of affection,
  lads, boys, term of commendation or reverence,
  laidders, ladders,
  laird, landed proprietor; squire; lord,
  lairick, larch (type of tree),
  lairt, stuck fast (in mud or snow),
  laith, loath; unwilling; reluctant,
  laithly, loathsome; foul; repulsive,
  Laitin, Latin,
  lan’, land; country; ground,
  lane(s), lone; alone; lonely; solitary,
  lang, long; big; large, also slow; tedious,
  langer, longer,
  langsyne, ancient; (old) times; long ago,
  lan’s, lands; estates,
  lass, girl; young woman, term of address,
  lassie, girl, term of endearment,
  lat, let; allow,
  lat gang to dirt an’ green bree, go to pot; go to ruin,
  latten, let; allowed,
  lauch, laugh,
  lave, rest; remainder; others, also leave,
  laverock, lark (type of bird),
  lawfu’, lawful,
  lea’, leave,
  lear, learning; education; lore, also teach,
  learn, learn, also teach,
  learnt, learned, also taught,
  leddies, ladies,
  leddy, lady,
  lee, pasture; fallow ground, also shelter from wind or rain,
  lee’d, lied; told lies,
  lees, lies,
  leest, least,
  leeve, live,
  leevin’, living; living being,
  leevit, lived,
  leeward, towards the grassland, also towards the sheltered side,
  len’, lend; give; grant, also loan,
  len’th, length,
  leuk, look; watch; appearance,
  licht, light,
  lichtin’, lighting,
  lickit, thrashed; punished; struck,
  lift, load; boost; lift; helping hand, also sky; heavens,
  like, like; likely to; looking as if to, also as it were; as if,
  likesna, does not like,
  likit, liked,
  liltin’, singing softly; humming,
  lingelt, fastened; fettered; hobbled,
  lippen, trust; depend on,
  livin’, living,
  ’ll, will,
  loch, loch; lake,
  lodd, loaded,
  lo’denin’, loading,
  lo’dent, loaded,
  lo’e, love,
  lo’esome, loveable; lovely; winsome,
  lood, loud,
  loon, rascal; rogue; ragamuffin,
  loot, let; allowed; permitted,
  Losh!, corrupt form of ‘Lord’, exclamation of surprise or wonder,
  low, flame,
  lowse, loose; free,
  lucifer spunks, lucifer-matches,
  lug, ear, also shallow wooden dish,
  luik, look,
  luikit, looked,
  lum, chimney,
  lythe, shelter,
  mainner, manner,
  mainteen, maintain,
  mair, more; greater,
  mairtins, martins (type of bird),
  maist, most; mostly,
  ’maist, almost,
  maister, master; mister,
  maitter, matter,
  mak, make; do,
  mankin’, mankind,
  mappies, young rabbits, diminutive,
  maun, must; have to,
  maunna, must not; may not,
  mavis, song-thrush (type of bird),
  mayhap, perhaps; maybe,
  mayna, may not,
  mealock, crumb (of oatcake etc.),
  meen, moon,
  meenute, minute,
  meeserable, miserable,
  meesery, misery,
  mem, Ma’am; Miss; Madam,
  mendit, mended; healed,
  menseless, ill-bred; boorish; unmannerly,
  mercifu’, merciful; favourable,
  merriage, marriage,
  merry, marry, also merry,
  mervel, marvel,
  mesel’, myself,
  micht, might,
  michtna, might not,
  michty, mighty; God,
  midden, dunghill; manure pile,
  midge, midge; gnat; mosquito,
  mids, midst; middle,
  miltin’, melting,
  min’, mind; recollection, also recollect; remember,
  minnin, minnow,
  min’s, minds; reminds; recollects,
  mint, aimed at; intended to; attempted,
  mintit, minded; remembered,
  mirricle, miracle,
  mischeef, mischief; injury; harm,
  misguidit, wasted; mismanaged; ill-used,
  mistak, mistake,
  mither, mother,
  mony, many,
  moo’, mouth,
  moo’fu’s, mouthfuls,
  motes, motes; specks; crumbs, reference to Matthew 7:3-5,
  moul’, mould; loose earth; top soil,
  mould, mould; loose earth; top soil,
  muckle, huge; enormous; big; great; much,
  mune, moon,
  muntains, mountains,
  muv, move; affect,
  My certie!, Take my word for it!,
  my lane, on my own,
  mysel’, myself,
  na, not; by no means,
  nae, no; none; not,
  nae wise, nowise; in no way,
  naebody, nobody; no one,
  naegait, in no wise; nowhere,
  naething, nothing,
  naither, neither,
  naitral, natural,
  nane, none,
  natur, nature,
  nearhan’, nearly; almost; near by,
  necessar’, necessary,
  neebour, neighbour,
  needcessity, necessity; state of need,
  needfu’, needful; necessary; needy,
  needna, do not need; need not,
  neeper, neighbour,
  negleckit, neglected,
  neist, next; nearest,
  nepkin, large handkerchief,
  nestie, little nest, diminutive,
  ’neth, beneath; under,
  neuk, nook; recess; interior angle,
  news, talk; gossip,
  nicht, night; evening,
  nick, score; mark (as signature), also cut,
  nickum, mischievous and tricky boy,
  niffer, exchange; barter,
  nigher, nearer; closer,
  nipperty, mincing; affected,
  no, not,
  noo, now,
  nor, than; although; if, also nor,
  nor’-easter, northeast wind,
  notwithstan’in’, notwithstanding,
  noucht, nothing; not,
  nowt, cattle; oxen,
  o’, of; on,
  obleeged, obliged,
  obligatit, obligated; obliged,
  o’er, over; upon; too,
  ohn, without; un-, uses past participle not present progressive,
  ohn expeckit, unexpected,
  ony, any,
  onybody, anybody; anyone,
  onything, anything,
  oogly, ugly,
  ook, week,
  oolets, owls,
  oonprovidit, unprovided,
  oor, our,
  oor lanes, on our own,
  oorsel’s, ourselves,
  oot, out,
  ootcast, outcast,
  or, before; ere; until; by, also or,
  ordinar’, ordinary; usual; natural, also custom; habit,
  orra, odd job (man), also idle; having no settled occupation,
  ou, oh,
  oucht, anything; all, also ought,
  ow, oh, exclamation of surprise,
  ower, over; upon; too,
  owershot, very fast; racing; exploding,
  owse, ox,
  oye, grandchild; grandson; nephew,
  pairt, part,
  pale, pointed piece of wood for fencing,
  paling, fence of pales,
  passin’, passing; occasional,
  pastern, ankle (between hoof and fetlock),
  pat, put; made,
  pawkiness, shrewdness; cunning,
  peelt, skinned,
  peeramid, pyramid,
  peety, pity,
  percaution, precaution,
  perfec’, perfect; thorough; utter,
  perplexin’, perplexing,
  perris, parish,
  persuaudit, persuaded,
  perswaud, persuade,
  perswaudit, persuaded,
  pey, pay,
  pit, put; make,
  pitawtas, potatoes,
  pitten, put; made,
  plaguit, plagued; troubled,
  plet, plate; dish,
  plooed, ploughed,
  ploy, amusement; sport; escapade,
  poassible, possible,
  pooch, pocket,
  pooer, power,
  poun’, pound (sterling),
  practeesed, practised,
  prankit, played tricks on, also played fast and loose with,
  prayt, prayed,
  prech, preach,
  pree, taste; try; prove; experience,
  preevileeges, privileges,
  prentit, printed,
  press-bed, box-bed with doors,
  prest, pressed,
  preten’it, pretended,
  priestie, little priest, diminutive,
  pris’ner, prisoner,
  prood, proud,
  pruv, prove,
  pruv’t, proven; proved,
  pu’, pull,
  puckle, small quantity,
  puir, poor,
  pump, beer-shop, also pump,
  putten, put,
  pyke, pick; pluck,
  quaiet, quiet,
  quaiet sough, quiet tongue,
  quaitet, quieted; silenced,
  quest’ons, questions,
  quo’, swore; said; quoth,
  railly, really,
  raither, rather,
  rale, real; true; very,
  randy, rough; wild; riotous, also coarse-tongued; abusive,
  rant, make merry; revel,
  rase, rose,
  rave, tore,
  rax, extend; overdo it; stretch,
  reacht, reached,
  red, rid; free,
  redd, set in order; tidy; clean,
  reef, roof,
  refar, refer,
  refeese, refuse,
  reid, red,
  reik, smoke,
  releast, released,
  repentit, repented,
  reyn, rein,
  richt, right; correct, also mend,
  richtly, certainly; positively,
  ridic’lous, ridiculous; unseasonable (weather),
  riggin’, ridge; roof,
  rigs, ridges (in a ploughed field),
  rin, run,
  rintherroot, gadabout; homeless vagrant; tramp,
  rist, rest,
  ristet, rested,
  rizon, reason,
  ro’d, road; course; way,
  roomie, little room, diminutive,
  roon’, around; round,
  rottan, rat,
  rouch, rough,
  roun, whisper,
  rowtin’, bellowing; roaring; lowing,
  rucks, ricks; stacks,
  run k-nots, slip knots (that can not be untied),
  runkle, wrinkle; crease,
  ’s, us; his; as; is, also has,
  s’, shall,
  sab, sob,
  sae, so; as,
  safe, safely, also safe,
  safity, safety,
  sair, sore; sorely; sad; hard; very; greatly, also serve,
  saitisfee, satisfy,
  saiven, seven,
  sall, shall,
  san’, sand,
  sang, song,
  sangie, little song, diminutive,
  sangna, did not sing,
  sankna, did not sink,
  sarious, serious,
  sark, shirt,
  sattle, settle,
  saugh, sallow; willow (type of tree),
  saven, wise; knowledgeable,
  savet, saved,
  savin’, saving, also except,
  Sawbath, Sabbath,
  sawmon, salmon,
  sawna, did not see,
  Sawtan, Satan,
  saxpence, sixpence,
  ’scape, escape,
  scatter’t, scattered,
  schuil, school,
  schuilin’, schooling; education,
  schuilmaister, schoolmaster,
  schuilmaisterin’, schoolmastering; teaching,
  scomfished, suffocated; stifled; choked,
  scoorin’, scampering,
  scornin’, mocking; ridiculing,
  Scotlan’, Scotland,
  scrape, scrape; shave,
  scrattit, scratched; dug,
  scrimp, stunted; sparing, also short in weight or measure,
  scunner, disgust; disgusting; revolting,
  scunnerfu’, disgusting; loathsome; sickening,
  seemile, simile,
  seener, sooner,
  sen’, send,
  set, set out; start off; become,
  set doon Bony an’ set up Louy, lowers one; exalts another, Psalm 75:7,
  setna, do not set,
  Setterday, Saturday,
  settisfaction, satisfaction,
  shaidow, shadow,
  shal’t, shelled,
  shaw, show; reveal,
  shee, shoe,
  sheen, shoes,
  sherp, sharp,
  shirra’, sheriff,
  shoothers, shoulders,
  shot, speed; blasting; heavy breakers (sea), also shoot,
  shottin’, shooting,
  shuitable, suitable,
  sic, such; so,
  sich, sigh,
  sicht, sight,
  sids, husks of oats,
  siller, silver; money; wealth,
  simmer, Summer,
  sin, since; ago; since then, also sin; sun,
  sitten, sat,
  sizon, season,
  skirlin’, screaming; singing shrilly,
  sklet, (school) slate, also roofing slate,
  sklet-pike, slate pencil,
  sma’, small; little; slight; narrow; young,
  smokin’ flax, smouldering wick, reference to Matthew 12:20,
  snap, sharp blow; sudden stumble,
  snawba’, snowball,
  sneck, door-latch; catch (gate),
  snot, small lump (of soot),
  soary, sorry,
  some, somewhat; rather; quite; very, also some,
  somehoo, somehow,
  soo, ache; throb,
  soomin’, swimming; floating,
  soon’, sound,
  soopit, swept,
  soucht, sought,
  sough, sigh; sound of wind; deep breath,
  soughie, little sough, diminutive,
  sowens, sour pudding of oats and water,
  sowl, soul,
  spak, spoke,
  spate, spate; flood,
  speerit, spirit,
  speir, ask about; enquire; question,
  speirin’, asking about; enquiring; questioning,
  speirt, asked about; enquired; questioned,
  spen’, spend,
  spendrife, spendthrift,
  speyk, speak,
  spune, spoon,
  spunks, sparks; matches,
  spurtle, porridge stick, also wooden rod for turning oatcakes,
  stair, stairs,
  stan’, stand; stop,
  stane, stone; measure of weight, 1 stone = 14 pounds,
  stan’in, standing,
  stap, stop; stuff, also step,
  stappit, stopped; stuffed, also stepped,
  steek, shut; close; push, also stitch (as in clothing),
  stert, start; jump with surprise,
  sterve, starve,
  stick, stick; gore; butt with horns,
  stickit, stuck; gored,
  stippety-stap, short mincing gait,
  stirks, steers,
  stoot, stout; healthy; strong; plucky,
  strae, straw,
  straik, streak; stroke; caress,
  strang, strong,
  stray, lost; not at home,
  stude, stood,
  subjec’, subject,
  sud, should,
  sudna, should not,
  sune, soon; early,
  suner, sooner,
  sunest, soonest,
  supposit, supposed,
  sutor, shoemaker; cobbler,
  sweem, swim; float,
  sweir, swear,
  swoord, sword,
  syne, ago; since; then; at that time, also in (good) time,
  ’t, it,
  tae, toe, also the one,
  taeless, toeless,
  ta’en, taken; seized,
  tailie, little tail, diminutive,
  tak, take; seize,
  tak a lug, have a dish,
  tak tent, look out; pay attention,
  takna, do not take,
  tane, the one,
  tap, top; tip; head,
  tarn, mountain lake,
  taucht, taught,
  tay, tea,
  tee, ‘to ye’ i.e. to you, also tea; too; also,
  teetle, title,
  tellt, told,
  tent, attention; care; heed; notice,
  teuch, tough; hard,
  teuk, took,
  than, then, also than
  thankit, thanked,
  the day, today,
  the morn, tomorrow,
  the morn’s, tomorrow is,
  the nicht, tonight,
  the noo, just now,
  thegither, together,
  themsel’s, themselves,
  thereoot, outside; out there; out-of-doors,
  thestreen, last night,
  think, feel; experience; expect; wonder,
  Think ye?, Do you think so?,
  this lang time, for a long time,
  tho’, though,
  thoo, thou; you (God),
  thoom, thumb,
  thoosan’, thousand,
  thouch, though,
  thoucht, thought,
  thrapple, windpipe; neck,
  thraw, throw; turn; twist,
  thraw one’s lug, twist one’s ear; punish,
  three-fauld, threefold; three times,
  threep, argue obstinately, also maintain by dint of assertion,
  thro’t, throat,
  throt-ro’d, throat, i.e. be drunk,
  throu’, through,
  thunner, thunder,
  tice, entice; coax,
  ’tice, entice; coax,
  till, to; till; until; about; at; before,
  ting-a-ling, sound of a small bell,
  tint, lost; got lost,
  tiret, tired,
  ’tis, it is,
  tither, the other,
  tod, fox,
  toom, empty; unload,
  toom-heidit, empty headed,
  toon, town; village,
  tow, rope; string,
  trail, drag forcibly; haul along,
  traivel, travel,
  trible, trouble,
  trifflin’, trifling,
  trim’le, tremble,
  trimmin’, beating; scolding,
  troth, truth; indeed, used as an exclamation,
  trowth, truth,
  trustit, trusted,
  ’ts, its,
  tuck, beat (drum),
  tuik, took,
  tum’ler, tumbler; glass (of whisky),
  turnt, turned,
  twa, two; a few,
  ’twar, it were,
  ’twarna, it were not,
  ’twas, it was,
  twise, twice,
  twistet, twisted,
  tyauve, strive; struggle,
  tyne, lose; get lost,
  ugsome, disgusting; frightful; ghastly,
  umbrell, umbrella,
  unco, unknown; odd; strange; uncouth, also very great,
  un’er, under,
  un’erstan’, understand,
  up the stair, upstairs,
  upliftit, uplifted,
  upo’, upon; on to; at,
  up-road, road (to heaven),
  vailue, value,
  vainity, vanity,
  verra, very; true; real,
  v’ice, voice,
  vreet, write,
  vroucht, wrought; worked,
  wa’, wall, also way
  wad, would,
  wadna, would not,
  wae, woe; sad; sorrowful,
  waggin’, wagging; nodding,
  waitit, waited,
  walcome, welcome,
  w’alth, wealth; abundance,
  wan, reached; gained; got,
  wantin’, wanting; lacking; without; in want of,
  wantit, wanted,
  war, were,
  wark, work; labour,
  warl’, world; worldly goods, also a large number,
  warl’s gear, worldly substance,
  warna, were not,
  warran’, warrant; guarantee,
  warrin’, warring,
  warst, worst,
  warstle, wrestle,
  warstlin’, wrestling,
  wa’s, walls, also ways,
  washen, washed,
  wasna, was not,
  wasterfu’, wasteful; extravagant,
  water-brose, oatmeal stirred into boiling, water until thick,
  wather, weather,
  watter, water,
  waur, worse, also spend money
  wee, small; little; bit, also short time; while,
  weel, well; fine,
  weel-behaved, well-behaved,
  weet, wet; dew; rain,
  weetin’, wetting; getting wet,
  weicht, weight,
  weir, wear, also hedge; fence; enclosure,
  weird, doom; disaster,
  weyve, weave; knit,
  weyver, weaver; knitter, also knitter of stockings; spider,
  wha, who,
  whae’er, whoever,
  wha’ll, who will,
  whan, when,
  wharfor, what for; why; for what reason,
  wha’s, who is, also whose
  What ca’ they ye?, What’s your name?,
  What for no?, Why not?,
  What for?, Why?,
  whaten, (on; by) what; what kind of,
  what-for, why; reason, also punishment; retribution,
  whaul, whale,
  whaur, where,
  whause, whose,
  wheel, eddy; pool; deep still part of the river,
  wheen, little; few; number; quantity,
  whiles, sometimes; at times; now and then,
  whilk, which,
  Whisht!, Quiet! Silence! Hush!,
  whumled, whelmed; overwhelmed; upset,
  whup, whip,
  whusky, whisky,
  whustle, whistle,
  wi’, with,
  wice-like, seem wise,
  wicket, back-door of a barn,
  wickit, wicked,
  wifie, little woman, term of endearment,
  willin’est, willingest,
  win, reach; gain; get,
  win’, wind,
  win’le strae, straw or grass dried on its root, weak; unhealthy,
  winna, will not,
  wins, reaches; gains; gets,
  winsome, large; comely,
  wi’oot, without,
  wires, knitting needles,
  wis, was,
  wither, weather,
  won’er, wonder; marvel,
  won’erfu’, wonderful; great; large,
  won’erin’, wondering,
  worset, woollen fabric; wool; worsted,
  worum, worm,
  wrang, wrong; injured,
  writch, rich,
  wuddie, gallows, also willow,
  wuds, woods; forests,
  wull, will; wish; desire, also astray; stray; wild,
  wullin’, willing; wanting,
  wuman, woman,
  wunna, would not; will not,
  wur, lay out,
  wuss, wish,
  wut, wit; intelligence; sense,
  w’y, way,
  wydin’, wading,
  wyte, blame; reproach,
  yaird, yard,
  ye, you; yourself,
  year, years, also year,
  ye’ll, you will,
  yer, your,
  yer lane, on your own,
  ye’re, you are,
  yersel’, yourself,
  ye ’t, it to you,
  yett, gate,
  yeuks, itches,
  yeuky, itchy,
  ye’ve, you have,
  yon, that; those; that there,
  yon’er, yonder; over there; in that place,
  yon’ll, that will; that (thing) there will,
  yon’s, that is; that (thing) there is,
  yoong, young,