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 arms 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 explainned 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,
“Hoot, 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 become 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 thougt 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 disappoinment 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 cauld 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’ cauld 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.
“Hoot!” 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 schlrfen, 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 at 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 its 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-cornerd 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 mou’fu’ mair,” she said to herself; “it’s but a mou’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 intill’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 — disgusted, 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 roun’ 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’ roun’ 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 bonny broo, an’ luik as I wadna hae ye luik, mem, ’cause ye wadna luik freely sae bonny 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 bonny 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 bonny 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’ bonny 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 he 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 bonny 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 intill ‘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 bonny 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 ahint 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 ahint 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: h’aven 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 whaur ance was a hert; (hollow) 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 whaur ance was a low; (ashes)(flame) For i’ you 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