air of a beggar who had contrived to give himself a Sunday look. Perhaps he had come hoping to find it warmer in church than at home. There he stood, motionless as the leech-gatherer, leaning on his stick, disregarded of men — it may have been only by innocent accident, I do not know. But just ere the minister must rise for the first prayer, he saw Gibbie, who had heard a feeble cough, cast a glance round, rise as swiftly as noiselessly, open the door of the pew, get out into the passage, take the old man by the hand, and lead him to his place beside the satin-robed and sable-muffed ministerial consort. Obedient to Gibbie’s will, the old man took the seat, with an air both of humility and respect, while happily for Mrs. Sclater’s remnant of ruffled composure, there was plenty of room in the pew, so that she could move higher up. The old man, it is true, followed, to make a place for Gibbie, but there was still an interval between them sufficient to afford space to the hope that none of the evils she dreaded would fall upon her to devour her. Flushed, angry, uncomfortable, notwithstanding, her face glowed like a bale-fire to the eyes of her husband, and, I fear, spoiled the prayer — but that did not matter much.
While the two thus involuntarily signalled each other, the boy who had brought discomposure into both pulpit and pew, sat peaceful as a summer morning, with the old man beside him quiet in the reverence of being himself revered. And the minister, while he preached from the words, Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall, for the first time in his life began to feel doubtful whether he might not himself be a humbug. There was not much fear of his falling, however, for he had not yet stood on his feet.
Not a word was said to Gibbie concerning the liberty he had taken: the minister and his wife were in too much dread — not of St. James and the “poor man in vile raiment,” for they were harmless enough in themselves, but of Gibbie’s pointing finger to back them. Three distinct precautions, however, they took; the pew-opener on that side was spoken to; Mrs. Sclater made Gibbie henceforth go into the pew before her; and she removed the New Testament from the drawing-room.
CHAPTER XLVIII.
NEEDFULL ODDS AND ENDS.
It will be plain from what I have told, that Donal’s imagination was full of Ginevra, and his was not an economy whose imagination could enjoy itself without calling the heart to share. At the same time, his being in love, if already I may use concerning him that most general and most indefinite of phrases, so far from obstructing his study, was in reality an aid to his thinking and a spur to excellence — not excellence over others, but over himself. There were moments, doubtless, long moments too, in which he forgot Homer and Cicero and differential calculus and chemistry, for “the bonnie lady-lassie,” — that was what he called her to himself; but it was only, on emerging from the reverie, to attack his work with fresh vigour. She was so young, so plainly girlish, that as yet there was no room for dread or jealousy; the feeling in his heart was a kind of gentle angel-worship; and he would have turned from the idea of marrying her, if indeed it had ever presented itself, as an irreverent thought, which he dared not for a moment be guilty of entertaining. It was besides, an idea too absurd to be indulged in by one who, in his wildest imaginations, always, through every Protean embodiment, sought and loved and clung to the real. His chief thought was simply to find favour in the eyes of the girl. His ideas hovered about her image, but it was continually to burn themselves in incense to her sweet ladyhood. As often as a song came fluttering its wings at his casement, the next thought was Ginevra — and there would be something to give her! I wonder how many loves of the poets have received their offerings in correspondent fervour. I doubt if Ginevra, though she read them with marvel, was capable of appreciating the worth of Donal’s. She was hardly yet woman enough to do them justice; for the heart of a girl, in its very sweetness and vagueness, is ready to admire alike the good and the indifferent, if their outer qualities be similar. It would cause a collapse in many a swelling of poet’s heart if, while he heard lovely lips commending his verses, a voice were to whisper in his ear what certain other verses the lady commended also.
On Saturday evenings, after Gibbie left him, Donal kept his own private holiday, which consisted in making verses, or rather in setting himself in the position for doing so, when sometimes verses would be the result, sometimes not. When the moon was shining in at the windows of the large room adjoining, he would put out his lamp, open his door, and look from the little chamber, glowing with fire-light, into the strange, eerie, silent waste, crowded with the chaos of dis-created homes. There scores on scores of things, many of them unco, that is uncouth, the first meaning of which is unknown, to his eyes, stood huddled together in the dim light. The light looked weary and faint, as if with having forced its way through the dust of years on the windows; and Donal felt as if gazing from a clear conscious present out into a faded dream. Sometimes he would leave his nest, and walk up and down among spider-legged tables, tall cabinets, secret-looking bureaus, worked chairs — yielding himself to his fancies. He was one who needed no opium, or such-like demon-help, to set him dreaming; he could dream at his will — only his dreams were brief and of rapid change — probably not more so, after the clock, than those other artificial ones, in which, to speculate on the testimony, the feeling of their length appears to be produced by an infinite and continuous subdivision of the subjective time. Now he was a ghost come back to flit, hovering and gliding about sad old scenes, that had gathered a new and a worse sadness from the drying up of the sorrow which was the heart of them — his doom, to live thus over again the life he had made so little of in the body; his punishment, to haunt the world and pace its streets, unable to influence by the turn of a hair the goings on of its life, — so to learn what a useless being he had been, and repent of his self-embraced insignificance. Now he was a prisoner, pining and longing for life and air and human companionship; that was the sun outside, whose rays shone thus feebly into his dungeon by repeated reflections. Now he was a prince in disguise, meditating how to appear again and defeat the machinations of his foes, especially of the enchanter who made him seem to the eyes of his subjects that which he was not. But ever his thoughts would turn again to Ginevra, and ever the poems he devised were devised as in her presence and for her hearing. Sometimes a dread would seize him — as if the strange things were all looking at him, and something was about to happen; then he would stride hastily back to his own room, close the door hurriedly, and sit down by the fire. Once or twice he was startled by the soft entrance of his landlady’s grand-daughter, come to search for something in one of the cabinets they had made a repository for small odds and ends of things. Once he told Gibbie that something had looked at him, but he could not tell what or whence or how, and laughed at himself, but persisted in his statement.
He had not yet begun to read his New Testament in the way Gibbie did, but he thought in the direction of light and freedom, and looked towards some goal dimly seen in vague grandeur of betterness. His condition was rather that of eyeless hunger after growth, than of any conscious aspiration towards less undefined good. He had a large and increasing delight in all forms of the generous, and shrunk instinctively from the base, but had not yet concentrated his efforts towards becoming that which he acknowledged the best, so that he was hardly yet on the straight path to the goal of such oneness with good as alone is a man’s peace. I mention these things not with the intent of here developing the character of Donal, but with the desire that my readers should know him such as he then was.
Gibbie and he seldom talked about Ginevra. She was generally understood between them — only referred to upon needful occasion: they had no right to talk about her, any more than to intrude on her presence unseasonably.
Donal went to Mr. Sclater’s church because Mr. Sclater required it, in virtue of the position he assumed as his benefactor. Mr. Sclater in the pulpit was a trial to Donal, but it consoled him to be near Gibbie, also that he had found a seat in the opposite gallery, whence he could see Ginevra when her place happened to be not far from the door of one of the school-pews. He did not get much benefit from Mr. Sclater’s sermons: I confess he did not attend very closely to his preaching — often directed against doctrinal errors of which, except from himself, not one of his congregation had ever heard, or was likely ever to hear. But I cannot say he would have been better employed in listening, for there was generally something going on in his mind that had to go on, and make way for more. I have said generally, for I must except the times when his thoughts turned upon the preacher himself, and took forms such as the following. But it might be a lesson to some preachers to know that a decent lad like Donal may be making some such verses about one of them while he is preaching. I have known not a few humble men in the pulpit of whom rather than write such a thing Donal would have lost the writing hand.
‘Twas a sair sair day ’twas my hap till Come under yer soon’, Mr. Sclater;
But things maun he putten a tap till, An’ sae maun ye, seener or later!
For to hear ye rowtin’ an’ scornin’,
Is no to hark to the river;
An’ to sit here till brak trowth’s mornin’, Wad be to be lost for ever.
I confess I have taken a liberty, and changed one word for another in the last line. He did not show these verses to Gibbie; or indeed ever find much fault with the preacher in his hearing; for he knew that while he was himself more open-minded to the nonsense of the professional gentleman, Gibbie was more open-hearted towards the merits of the man, with whom he was far too closely associated on week-days not to feel affection for him; while, on the other hand, Gibbie made neither head nor tail of his sermons, not having been instructed in the theological mess that goes with so many for a theriac of the very essentials of religion; and therefore, for anything he knew, they might be very wise and good. At first he took refuge from the sermon in his New Testament; but when, for the third time, the beautiful hand of the ministerial spouse appeared between him and the book, and gently withdrew it, he saw that his reading was an offence in her eyes, and contented himself thereafter with thinking: listening to the absolutely unintelligible he found impossible. What a delight it would have been to the boy to hear Christ preached such as he showed himself, such as in no small measure he had learned him — instead of such as Mr. Sclater saw him reflected from the tenth or twentieth distorting mirror! They who speak against the Son of Man oppose mere distortions and mistakes of him, having never beheld, neither being now capable of beholding, him; but those who have transmitted to them these false impressions, those, namely, who preach him without being themselves devoted to him, and those who preach him having derived their notions of him from other scources than himself, have to bear the blame that they have such excuses for not seeking to know him. He submits to be mis-preached, as he submitted to be lied against while visibly walking the world, but his truth will appear at length to all: until then until he is known as he is, our salvation tarrieth.
Mrs. Sclater showed herself sincere, after her kind, to Donal as well as to Gibbie. She had by no means ceased to grow, and already was slowly bettering under the influences of the New Testament in Gibbie, notwithstanding she had removed the letter of it from her public table. She told Gibbie that he must talk to Donal about his dress and his speech. That he was a lad of no common gifts was plain, she said, but were he ever so “talented” he could do little in the world, certainly would never raise himself, so long as he dressed and spoke ridiculously. The wisest and best of men would be utterly disregarded, she said, if he did not look and speak like other people. Gibbie thought with himself this could hardly hold, for there was John the Baptist; he answered her, however, that Donal could speak very good English if he chose, but that the affected tone and would-be-fine pronunciation of Fergus Duff had given him the notion that to speak anything but his mother-tongue would be unmanly and false. As to his dress, Donal was poor, Gibbie said, and could not give up wearing any clothes so long as there was any wear in them. “If you had seen me once!” he added, with a merry laugh to finish for his fingers.
Mrs. Sclater spoke to her husband, who said to Gibbie that, if he chose to provide Donal with suitable garments, he would advance him the money: — that was the way he took credit for every little sum he handed his ward, but in his accounts was correct to a farthing.
Gibbie would thereupon have dragged Donal at once to the tailor; but Donal was obstinate.
“Na, na,” he said; “the claes is guid eneuch for him ‘at weirs them. Ye dee eneuch for me, Sir Gilbert, a’ready; an’ though I wad be obleeged to you as I wad to my mither hersel’, to cleed me gien I warna dacent, I winna tak your siller nor naebody ither’s to gang fine. Na, na; I’ll weir the claes oot, an’ we s’ dee better wi’ the neist. An’ for that bonnie wuman, Mistress Scletter, ye can tell her, ‘at by the time I hae onything to say to the warl’, it winna be my claes ‘at’ll haud fowk ohn hearkent; an’ gien she considers them ‘at I hae noo, ower sair a disgrace till her gran’ rooms, she maun jist no inveet me, an’ I’ll no come; for I canna presently help them. But the neist session, whan I hae better, for I’m sure to get wark eneuch in atween, I’ll come an’ shaw mysel’, an’ syne she can dee as she likes.”
This high tone of liberty, so free from offence either given or taken, was thoroughly appreciated by both Mr. and Mrs. Sclater, and they did not cease to invite him. A little talk with the latter soon convinced him that there was neither assumption nor lack of patriotism in speaking the language of the people among whom he found himself; and as he made her his model in the pursuit of the accomplishment, he very soon spoke a good deal better English than Mr. Sclater. But with Gibbie, and even with the dainty Ginevra, he could not yet bring himself to talk anything but his mother-tongue.
“I cannot mak my moo’,” he would say, “to speyk onything but the nat’ral tongue o’ poetry till sic a bonnie cratur as Miss Galbraith; an’ for yersel’, Gibbie — man! I wad be ill willin’ to bigg a stane wa’ atween me an’ the bonnie days whan Angus Mac Pholp was the deil we did fear, an’ Hornie the deil we didna. — Losh, man! what wad come o’ me gien I hed to say my prayers in English! I doobt gien ‘t wad come oot prayin’ at a’!”
I am well aware that most Scotch people of that date tried to say their prayers in English, but not so Janet or Robert, and not so had they taught their children. I fancy not a little unreality was thus in their case avoided.
“What will you do when you are a minister?” asked Gibbie on his fingers.
“Me a minnister?” echoed Donal. “Me a minnister!” he repeated. “Losh, man! gien I can save my ain sowl, it’ll be a’ ‘at I’m fit for, ohn lo’dent it wi’ a haill congregation o’ ither fowk’s. Na, na; gien I can be a schuilmaister, an’ help the bairnies to be guid, as my mither taucht mysel’, an’ hae time to read, an’ a feow shillin’s to buy buiks aboot Aigypt an’ the Holy Lan’, an’ a full an’ complete edition o’ Plato, an’ a Greek Lexicon — a guid ane, an’ a Jamieson’s Dictionar’, haith, I’ll be a hawpy man! An’ gien I dinna like the schuilmaisterin’, I can jist tak to the wark again, whilk I cudna dee sae weel gien I had tried the preachin’: fowk wad ca’ me a stickit minister! Or maybe they’ll gie me the sheep to luik efter upo’ Glashgar, whan they’re ower muckle for my father, an’ that wad weel content me. Only I wad hae to bigg a bit mair to the hoosie, to haud my buiks: I maun hae buiks. I wad get the newspapers whiles, but no aften, for they’re a sair loss o’ precious time. Ye see they tell ye things afore they’re sure, an’ ye hae to spen’ yer time the day readin’ what ye’ll hae to spen’ yer time the morn readin’ oot again; an’ ye may as weel bide till the thing’s sattled a wee. I wad jist lat them fecht things oot ‘at thoucht they saw hoo they oucht to gang; an’ I wad gie them guid mutton to haud them up to their dreary wark, an’ maybe a sangy noo an’ than ‘at wad help them to drap it a’thegither.”
“But wouldn’t you like to have a wife, Donal, and children, like your father and mother?” spelt Gibbie.
“Na, na; nae wife for me, Gibbie!” answered the philosopher. “Wha wad hae aither a pure schuilmaister or a shepherd? — ‘cep’ it was maybe some lass like my sister Nicie, ‘at wadna ken Euclid frae her hose, or Burns frae a mill-dam, or conic sections frae the hole i’ the great peeramid.”
“I don’t like to hear you talk like that, Donal,” said Gibbie. “What do you say to mother?”
“The mither’s no to be said aboot,” answerd Donal. “She’s ane by hersel’, no ane like ither fowk. Ye wadna think waur o’ the angel Gabriel ‘at he hedna jist read Homer clean throu’, wad ye?”
“If I did,” answered Gibbie, “he would only tell me there was time enough for that.”
When they met on a Friday evening, and it was fine, they would rove the streets, Gibbie taking Donal to the places he knew so well in his childhood, and enjoying it the more that he could now tell him so much better what he remembered. The only place he did not take him to was Jink Lane, with the house that had been Mistress Croale’s. He did take him to the court in the Widdiehill, and show him the Auld Hoose o’ Galbraith, and the place under the stair where his father had worked. The shed was now gone; the neighbours had by degrees carried it away for firewood. The house was occupied still as then by a number of poor people, and the door was never locked, day or night, any more than when Gibbie used to bring his father home. He took Donal to the garret where they had slept — one could hardly say lived, and where his father died. The door stood open, and the place was just as they had left it. A year or two after, Gibbie learned how it came to be thus untenanted: it was said to be haunted. Every Sunday Sir George was heard at work, making boots for his wee Gibbie from morning to night; after which, when it was dark, came dreadful sounds of supplication, as of a soul praying in hell-fire. For a while the house was almost deserted in consequence.
“Gien I was you, Sir Gilbert,” said Donal, who now and then remembered Mrs. Sclater’s request — they had come down, and looking at the outside of the house, had espied a half-obliterated stone-carving of the Galbraith arms — “Gien I was you, Sir Gilbert, I wad gar Maister Scletter keep a sherp luik oot for the first chance o’ buyin’ back this hoose. It wad be a great peety it sud gang to waur afore ye get it. Eh! sic tales as this hoose cud tell!”
“How am I to do that, Donal? Mr. Sclater would not mind me. The money’s not mine yet, you know,” said Gibbie.
“The siller is yours, Gibbie,” answered Donal; “it’s yours as the kingdom o’ h’aven’s yours; it’s only ‘at ye canna jist lay yer han’s upo’ ‘t yet. The seener ye lat that Maister Scletter ken ‘at ye ken what ye’re aboot, the better. An’ believe me, whan he comes to un’erstan’ ‘at ye want that hoose koft, he’ll no be a day ohn gane to somebody or anither aboot it.”
Donal was right, for within a month the house was bought, and certain necessary repairs commenced.
Sometimes on those evenings they took tea with Mistress Croale, and it was a proud time with her when they went. That night at least the whisky bottle did not make its appearance.
Mrs. Sclater continued to invite young ladies to the house for Gibbie’s sake, and when she gave a party, she took care there should be a proportion of young people in it; but Gibbie, although of course kind and polite to all, did not much enjoy these gatherings. It began to trouble him a little that he seemed to care less for his kind than before; but it was only a seeming, and the cause of it was this: he was now capable of perceiving facts in nature and character which prevented real contact, and must make advances towards it appear as offensive as they were useless. But he did not love the less that he had to content himself, until the kingdom should come nearer, with loving at a more conscious distance; by loving kindness and truth he continued doing all he could to bring the kingdom whose end is unity. Hence he had come to restrain his manner — nothing could have constrained his manners, which now from the conventional point of view were irreproachable; but if he did not so often execute a wild dance, or stand upon one leg, the glow in his eyes had deepened, and his response to any advance was as ready and thorough, as frank and sweet as ever; his eagerness was replaced by a stillness from which his eyes took all coldness, and his smile was as the sun breaking out in a gray day of summer, and turning all from doves to peacocks. In this matter there was one thing worthy of note common to Donal and him, who had had the same divine teaching from Janet: their manners to all classes were the same, they showed the same respect to the poor, the same ease with the rich.
I must confess, however, that before the session was over, Donal found it required all his strength of mind to continue to go to Mrs. Sclater’s little parties — from kindness she never asked him to her larger ones; and the more to his praise it was that he did not refuse one of her invitations. The cause was this: one bright Sunday morning in February, coming out of his room to go to church, and walking down the path through the furniture in a dreamy mood, he suddenly saw a person meeting him straight in the face. “Sic a queer-like chield!” he remarked inwardly, stepped on one side to let him pass — and perceived it was himself reflected from head to foot in a large mirror, which had been placed while he was out the night before. The courage with which he persisted, after such a painful enlightenment, in going into company in those same garments, was right admirable and enviable; but no one knew of it until its exercise was long over.
The little pocket-money Mr. Sclater allowed Gibbie, was chiefly spent at the shop of a certain secondhand bookseller, nearly opposite Mistress Murkison’s. The books they bought were carried to Donal’s room, there to be considered by Gibbie Donal’s, and by Donal Gibbie’s. Among the rest was a reprint of Marlow’s Faust, the daring in the one grand passage of which both awed and delighted them; there were also some of the Ettrick Shepherd’s eerie stories, alone in their kind; and above all there was a miniature copy of Shelley, whose verse did much for the music of Donal’s, while yet he could not quite appreciate the truth for the iridescence of it: he said it seemed to him to have been all composed in a balloon. I have mentioned only works of imagination, but it must not be supposed they had not a relish for stronger food: the books more severe came afterwards, when they had liberty to choose their own labours; now they had plenty of the harder work provided for them.
Somewhere about this time Fergus Duff received his license to preach, and set himself to acquire what his soul thirsted after — a reputation, namely, for eloquence. This was all the flood-mark that remained of the waters of verse with which he had at one time so plentifully inundated his soul. He was the same as man he had been as youth — handsome, plausible, occupied with himself, determined to succeed, not determined to labour. Praise was the very necessity of his existence, but he had the instinct not to display his beggarly hunger — which reached even to the approbation of such to whom he held himself vastly superior. He seemed generous, and was niggardly, by turns; cultivated suavity; indulged in floridity both of manners and speech; and signed his name so as nobody could read it, though his handwriting was plain enough.
In the spring, summer, and autumn, Donal laboured all day with his body, and in the evening as much as he could with his mind. Lover of Nature as he was, however, more alive indeed than before to the delights of the country, and the genial companionship of terrene sights and sounds, scents and motions, he could not help longing for the winter and the city, that his soul might be freer to follow its paths. And yet what a season some of the labours of the field afforded him for thought! To the student who cannot think without books, the easiest of such labours are a dull burden, or a distress; but for the man in whom the wells have been unsealed, in whom the waters are flowing, the labour mingles gently and genially with the thought, and the plough he holds with his hands lays open to the sun and the air more soils than one. Mr. Sclater without his books would speedily have sunk into the mere shrewd farmer; Donal, never opening a book, would have followed theories and made verses to the end of his days.
Every Saturday, as before, he went to see his father and mother. Janet kept fresh and lively, although age told on her, she said, more rapidly since Gibbie went away.
“But gien the Lord lat auld age wither me up,” she said, “he’ll luik efter the cracks himsel’.”
Six weeks of every summer between Donal’s sessions, while the minister and his wife took their holiday, Gibbie spent with Robert and Janet. It was a blessed time for them all. He led then just the life of the former days, with Robert and Oscar and the sheep, and Janet and her cow and the New Testament — only he had a good many more things to think about now, and more ways of thinking about them. With his own hands he built a neat little porch to the cottage door, with close sides and a second door to keep the wind off: Donal and he carried up the timber and the mortar. But although he tried hard to make Janet say what he could do for her more, he could not bring her to reveal any desire that belonged to this world — except, indeed, for two or three trifles for her husband’s warmth and convenience.
“The sicht o’ my Lord’s face,” she said once, when he was pressing her, “is a’ ‘at I want, Sir Gibbie. For this life it jist blecks me to think o’ onything I wad hae or wad lowse. This boady o’ mine’s growin’ some heavy-like, I maun confess, but I wadna hae’t ta’en aff o’ me afore the time. It wad be an ill thing for the seed to be shal’t ower sune.”
They almost always called him Sir Gibbie, and he never objected, or seemed either annoyed or amused at it; he took it just as the name that was his, the same way as his hair or his hands were his; he had been called wee Sir Gibbie for so long.
CHAPTER XLIX.
THE HOUSELESS.
The minister kept Gibbie hard at work, and by the time Donal’s last winter came, Gibbie was ready for college also. To please Mr. Sclater he competed for a bursary, and gained a tolerably good one, but declined accepting it. His guardian was annoyed, he could not see why he should refuse what he had “earned.” Gibbie asked him whether it was the design of the founder of those bursaries that rich boys should have them. Were they not for the like of Donal? Whereupon Mr. Sclater could not help remembering what a difference it would have made to him in his early struggles, if some rich bursar above him had yielded a place — and held his peace.
Daur-street being too far from Elphinstone College for a student to live there, Mr. Sclater consented to Gibbie’s lodging with Donal, but would have insisted on their taking rooms in some part of the town — more suitable to the young baronet’s position, he said; but as there was another room to be had at Mistress Murkison’s, Gibbie insisted that one who had shown them so much kindness must not be forsaken; and by this time he seldom found difficulty in having his way with his guardian. Both he and his wife had come to understand him better, and nobody could understand Gibbie better without also understanding better all that was good and true and right: although they hardly knew the fact themselves, the standard of both of them had been heightened by not a few degrees since Gibbie came to them; and although he soon ceased to take direct notice of what in their conduct distressed him, I cannot help thinking it was not amiss that he uttered himself as he did at the first; knowing a little his ways of thinking they came to feel his judgment unexpressed. For Mrs. Sclater, when she bethought herself that she had said or done something he must count worldly, the very silence of the dumb boy was a reproof to her.
One night the youths had been out for a long walk and came back to the city late, after the shops were shut. Only here and there a light glimmered in some low-browed little place, probably used in part by the family. Not a soul was visible in the dingy region through which they now approached their lodging, when round a corner, moving like a shadow, came, soft-pacing, a ghostly woman in rags, with a white, worn face, and the largest black eyes, it seemed to the youths that they had ever seen — an apparition of awe and grief and wonder. To compare a great thing to a small, she was to their eyes as a ruined, desecrated shrine to the eyes of the saint’s own peculiar worshipper. I may compare her to what I please, great or small — to a sapphire set in tin, to an angel with draggled feathers; for far beyond all comparison is that temple of the holy ghost in the desert — a woman in wretchedness and rags. She carried her puny baby rolled hard in the corner of her scrap of black shawl. To the youths a sea of trouble looked out of those wild eyes. As she drew near them, she hesitated, half-stopped, and put out a hand from under the shawl — stretched out no arm, held out only a hand from the wrist, white against the night. Donal had no money. Gibbie had a shilling. The hand closed upon it, a gleam crossed the sad face, and a murmur of thanks fluttered from the thin lips as she walked on her way. The youths breathed deep, and felt a little relieved, but only a little. The thought of the woman wandering in the dark and the fog and the night, was a sickness at their hearts. Was it impossible to gather such under the wings of any night-brooding hen? That Gibbie had gone through so much of the same kind of thing himself, and had found it endurable enough, did not make her case a whit the less pitiful in his eyes, and indeed it was widely, sadly different from his. Along the deserted street, which looked to Donal like a waterless canal banked by mounds of death, and lighted by phosphorescent grave-damps, they followed her with their eyes, the one living thing, fading away from lamp to lamp; and when they could see her no farther, followed her with their feet; they could not bear to lose sight of her. But they kept just on the verge of vision, for they did not want her to know the espial of their love. Suddenly she disappeared, and keeping their eyes on the spot as well as they could, they found when they reached it a little shop, with a red curtain, half torn down, across the glass door of it. A dim oil lamp was burning within. It looked like a rag-shop, dirty and dreadful. There she stood, while a woman with a bloated face, looking to Donal like a feeder of hell-swine, took from some secret hole underneath, a bottle which seemed to Gibbie the very one his father used to drink from. He would have rushed in and dashed it from her hand, but Donal withheld him.
“Hoots!” he said, “we canna follow her a’ nicht; an’ gien we did, what better wad she be i’ the mornin’? Lat her be, puir thing!”
She received the whisky in a broken tea-cup, swallowed some of it eagerly, then, to the horror of the youths, put some of it into the mouth of her child from her own. Draining the last drops from the cup, she set it quietly down, turned, and without a word spoken, for she had paid beforehand, came out, her face looking just as white and thin as before, but having another expression in the eyes of it. At the sight Donal’s wisdom forsook him.
“Eh, wuman,” he cried, “yon wasna what ye hed the shillin’ for!”
“Ye said naething,” answered the poor creature, humbly, and walked on, hanging her head, and pressing her baby to her bosom.
The boys looked at each other.
“That wasna the gait yer shillin’ sud hae gane, Gibbie,” said Donal. “It’s clear it winna dee to gie shillin’s to sic like as her. Wha kens but the hunger an’ the caul’, an’ the want o’ whisky may be the wuman’s evil things here, ‘at she may ‘scape the hellfire o’ the Rich Man hereafter?”
He stopped, for Gibbie was weeping. The woman and her child he would have taken to his very heart, and could do nothing for them. Love seemed helpless, for money was useless. It set him thinking much, and the result appeared. From that hour the case of the homeless haunted his heart and brain and imagination; and as his natural affections found themselves repelled and chilled in what is called Society, they took refuge more and more with the houseless and hungry and shivering. Through them, also, he now, for the first time, began to find grave and troublous questions mingling with his faith and hope; so that already he began to be rewarded for his love: to the true heart every doubt is a door. I will not follow and describe the opening of these doors to Gibbie, but, as what he discovered found always its first utterance in action, wait until I can show the result.
For the time the youths were again a little relieved about the woman: following her still, to a yet more wretched part of the city, they saw her knock at a door, pay something, and be admitted. It looked a dreadful refuge, but she was at least under cover, and shelter, in such a climate as ours in winter, must be the first rudimentary notion of salvation. No longer haunted with the idea of her wandering all night about the comfortless streets, “like a ghost awake in Memphis,” Donal said, they went home. But it was long before they got to sleep, and in the morning their first words were about the woman.
“Gien only we hed my mither here!” said Donal.
“Mightn’t you try Mr. Sclater?” suggested Gibbie.
Donal answered with a great roar of laughter.
“He wad tell her she oucht to tak shame till hersel’,” he said, “an’ I’m thinkin’ she’s lang brunt a’ her stock o’ that firin’. He wud tell her she sud work for her livin’, an’ maybe there isna ae turn the puir thing can dee ‘at onybody wad gie her a bawbee for a day o’! — But what say ye to takin’ advice o’ Miss Galbraith?”
It was strange how, with the marked distinctions between them, Donal and Gibbie would every now and then, like the daughters of the Vicar of Wakefield, seem to change places and parts.
“God can make praise-pipes of babes and sucklings,” answered Gibbie; “but it does not follow that they can give advice. Don’t you remember your mother saying that the stripling David was enough to kill a braggart giant, but a sore-tried man was wanted to rule the people?”
It ended in their going to Mistress Croale. They did not lay bare to her their perplexities, but they asked her to find out who the woman was, and see if anything could be done for her. They said to themselves she would know the condition of such a woman, and what would be moving in her mind, after the experience she had herself had, better at least than the minister or his lady-wife. Nor were they disappointed. To be thus taken into counsel revived for Mistress Croale the time of her dignity while yet she shepherded her little flock of drunkards. She undertook the task with hearty good will, and carried it out with some success. Its reaction on herself to her own good was remarkable. There can be no better auxiliary against our own sins than to help our neighbour in the encounter with his. Merely to contemplate our neighbour will recoil upon us in quite another way: we shall see his faults so black, that we will not consent to believe ours so bad, and will immediately begin to excuse, which is the same as to cherish them, instead of casting them from us with abhorrence.
One day early in the session, as the youths were approaching the gate of Miss Kimble’s school, a thin, care-worn man, in shabby clothes, came out, and walked along meeting them. Every now and then he bowed his shoulders, as if something invisible had leaped upon them from behind, and as often seemed to throw it off and with effort walk erect. It was the laird. They lifted their caps, but in return he only stared, or rather tried to stare, for his eyes seemed able to fix themselves on nothing. He was now at length a thoroughly ruined man, and had come to the city to end his days in a cottage belonging to his daughter. Already Mr. Sclater, who was unweariedly on the watch over the material interests of his ward, had, through his lawyer, and without permitting his name to appear, purchased the whole of the Glashruach property. For the present, however, he kept Sir Gilbert in ignorance of the fact.
CHAPTER L
A WALK.
The cottage to which Mr. Galbraith had taken Ginevra, stood in a suburban street — one of those small, well-built stone houses common, I fancy, throughout Scotland, with three rooms and a kitchen on its one floor, and a large attic with dormer windows. It was low and wide-roofed, and had a tiny garden between it and the quiet street. This garden was full of flowers in summer and autumn, but the tops of a few gaunt stems of hollyhocks, and the wiry straggling creepers of the honeysuckle about the eaves, was all that now showed from the pavement. It had a dwarf wall of granite, with an iron railing on the top, through which, in the season, its glorious colours used to attract many eyes, but Mr. Galbraith had had the railing and the gate lined to the very spikes with boards: the first day of his abode he had discovered that the passers-by — not to say those who stood to stare admiringly at the flowers, came much too near his faded but none the less conscious dignity. He had also put a lock on the gate, and so made of the garden a sort of propylon to the house. For he had of late developed a tendency towards taking to earth, like the creatures that seem to have been created ashamed of themselves, and are always burrowing. But it was not that the late laird was ashamed of himself in any proper sense. Of the dishonesty of his doings he was as yet scarcely half conscious, for the proud man shrinks from repentance, regarding it as disgrace. To wash is to acknowledge the need of washing. He avoided the eyes of men for the mean reason that he could no longer appear in dignity as laird of Glashruach and chairman of a grand company; while he felt as if something must have gone wrong with the laws of nature that it had become possible for Thomas Galbraith, of Glashruach, Esq., to live in a dumpy cottage. He had thought seriously of resuming his patronymic of Durrant, but reflected that he was too well known to don that cloak of transparent darkness without giving currency to the idea that he had soiled the other past longer wearing. It would be imagined, he said, picking out one dishonesty of which he had not been guilty, that he had settled money on his wife, and retired to enjoy it.
His condition was far more pitiful than his situation. Having no faculty for mental occupation except with affairs, finding nothing to do but cleave, like a spent sailor, with hands and feet to the slippery rock of what was once his rectitude, such as it was, trying to hold it still his own, he would sit for hours without moving — a perfect creature, temple, god, and worshipper, all in one — only that the worshipper was hardly content with his god, and that a worm was gnawing on at the foundation of the temple. Nearly as motionless, her hands excepted, would Ginevra sit opposite to him, not quieter but more peaceful than when a girl, partly because now she was less afraid of him. He called her, in his thoughts as he sat there, heartless and cold, but not only was she not so, but it was his fault that she appeared to him such. In his moral stupidity he would rather have seen her manifest concern at the poverty to which he had reduced her, than show the stillness of a contented mind. She was not much given to books, but what she read was worth reading, and such as turned into thought while she sat. They are not the best students who are most dependent on books. What can be got out of them is at best only material: a man must build his house for himself. She would have read more, but with her father beside her doing nothing, she felt that to take a book would be like going into a warm house, and leaving him out in the cold. It was very sad to her to see him thus shrunk and withered, and lost in thought that plainly was not thinking. Nothing interested him; he never looked at the papers, never cared to hear a word of news. His eyes more unsteady, his lips looser, his neck thinner and longer, he looked more than ever like a puppet whose strings hung slack. How often would Ginevra have cast herself on his bosom if she could have even hoped he would not repel her! Now and then his eyes did wander to her in a dazed sort of animal-like appeal, but the moment she attempted response, he turned into a corpse. Still, when it came, that look was a comfort, for it seemed to witness some bond between them after all. And another comfort was, that now, in his misery, she was able, if not to forget those painful thoughts about him which had all these years haunted her, at least to dismiss them when they came, in the hope that, as already such a change had passed upon him, further and better change might follow.
She was still the same brown bird as of old — a bird of the twilight, or rather a twilight itself, with a whole night of stars behind it, of whose existence she scarcely knew, having but just started on the voyage of discovery which life is. She had the sweetest, rarest smile — not frequent and flashing like Gibbie’s, but stealing up from below, like the shadowy reflection of a greater light, gently deepening, permeating her countenance until it reached her eyes, thence issuing in soft flame. Always however, an soon as her eyes began to glow duskily, down went their lids, and down dropt her head like the frond of a sensitive plant, Her atmosphere was an embodied stillness; she made a quiet wherever she entered; she was not beautiful, but she was lovely; and her presence at once made a place such as one would desire to be in.
The most pleasant of her thoughts were of necessity those with which the two youths were associated. How dreary but for them and theirs would the retrospect of her life have been! Several times every winter they had met at the minister’s, and every summer she had again and again seen Gibbie with Mrs. Sclater, and once or twice had had a walk with them, and every time Gibbie had something of Donal’s to give her. Twice Gibbie had gone to see her at the school, but the second time she asked him not to come again, as Miss Kimble did not like it. He gave a big stare of wonder, and thought of Angus and the laird; but followed the stare with a swift smile, for he saw she was troubled, and asked no question, but waited for the understanding of all things that must come. But now, when or where was she ever to see them more? Gibbie was no longer at the minister’s, and perhaps she would never be invited to meet them there again. She dared not ask Donal to call: her father would be indignant; and for her father’s sake she would not ask Gibbie; it might give him pain; while the thought that he would of a certainty behave so differently to him now that he was well-dressed, and mannered like a gentleman, was almost more unendurable to her than the memory of his past treatment of him.
Mr. and Mrs. Sclater had called upon them the moment they were settled in the cottage; but Mr. Galbraith would see nobody. When the gate-bell rang, he always looked out, and if a visitor appeared, withdrew to his bedroom.
One brilliant Saturday morning, the second in the session, the ground hard with an early frost, the filmy ice making fairy caverns and grottos in the cart-ruts, and the air so condensed with cold that every breath, to those who ate and slept well, had the life of two, Mrs. Sclater rang the said bell. Mr. Galbraith peeping from the window, saw a lady’s bonnet, and went. She walked in, followed by Gibbie, and would have Ginevra go with them for a long walk. Pleased enough with the proposal, for the outsides of life had been dull as well as painful of late, she went and asked her father. If she did not tell him that Sir Gilbert was with Mrs. Sclater, perhaps she ought to have told him; but I am not sure, and therefore am not going to blame her. When parents are not fathers and mothers, but something that has no name in the kingdom of heaven, they place the purest and most honest of daughters in the midst of perplexities.
“Why do you ask me?” returned her father. “My wishes are nothing to any one now; to you they never were anything.”
“I will stay at home, if you wish it, papa, — with pleasure,” she replied, as cheerfully as she could after such a reproach.
“By no means. If you do, I shall go and dine at the Red Hart,” he answered — not having money enough in his possession to pay for a dinner there.
I fancy he meant to be kind, but, like not a few, alas! took no pains to look as kind as he was. There are many, however, who seem to delight in planting a sting where conscience or heart will not let them deny. It made her miserable for a while of course, but she had got so used to his way of breaking a gift as he handed it, that she answered only with a sigh. When she was a child, his ungraciousness had power to darken the sunlight, but by repetition it had lost force. In haste she put on her little brown-ribboned bonnet, took the moth-eaten muff that had been her mother’s, and rejoined Mrs. Sclater and Gibbie, beaming with troubled pleasure. Life in her was strong, and their society soon enabled her to forget, not her father’s sadness, but his treatment of her.
At the end of the street, they found Donal waiting them — without greatcoat or muffler, the picture of such health as suffices to its own warmth, not a mark of the midnight student about him, and looking very different, in town-made clothes, from the Donal of the mirror. He approached and saluted her with such an air of homely grace as one might imagine that of the Red Cross Knight, when, having just put on the armour of a Christian man, from a clownish fellow he straightway appeared the goodliest knight in the company. Away they walked together westward, then turned southward. Mrs. Sclater and Gibbie led, and Ginevra followed with Donal. And they had not walked far, before something of the delight of old times on Glashruach began to revive in the bosom of the too sober girl. In vain she reminded herself that her father sat miserable at home, thinking of her probably as the most heartless of girls; the sun, and the bright air like wine in her veins, were too much for her, Donal had soon made her cheerful, and now and then she answered his talk with even a little flash of merriment. They crossed the bridge, high-hung over the Daur, by which on that black morning Gibbie fled; and here for the first time, with his three friends about him, he told on his fingers the dire deed of the night, and heard from Mrs. Sclater that the murderers had been hanged. Ginevra grew white and faint as she read his fingers and gestures, but it was more at the thought of what the child had come through, than from the horror of his narrative. They then turned eastward to the sea, and came to the top of the rock-border of the coast, with its cliffs rent into gullies, eerie places to look down into, ending in caverns into which the waves rushed with bellow and boom. Although so nigh the city, this was always a solitary place, yet, rounding a rock, they came upon a young man, who hurried a book into his pocket, and would have gone by the other side, but perceiving himself recognized, came to meet them, and saluted Mrs. Sclater, who presented him to Ginevra as the Rev. Mr. Duff.
“I have not had the pleasure of seeing you since you were quite a little girl, Miss Galbraith,” said Fergus.
Ginevra said coldly she did not remember him. The youths greeted him in careless student fashion: they had met now and then for a moment about the college; and a little meaningless talk followed.
He was to preach the next day — and for several Sundays following — at a certain large church in the city, at the time without a minister; and when they came upon him he was studying his sermon — I do not mean the truths he intended to press upon his audience — those he had mastered long ago — but his manuscript, studying it in the sense in which actors use the word, learning it, that is, by heart laboriously, that the words might come from his lips as much like an extemporaneous utterance as possible, consistently with not being mistaken for one, which, were it true as the Bible, would have no merit in the ears of those who counted themselves judges of the craft. The kind of thing suited Fergus, whose highest idea of life was seeming. Naturally capable, he had already made of himself rather a dull fellow; for when a man spends his energy on appearing to have, he is all the time destroying what he has, and therein the very means of becoming what he desires to seem. If he gains his end his success is his punishment.
Fergus never forgot that he was a clergyman, always carrying himself according to his idea of the calling; therefore when the interchange of commonplaces flagged, he began to look about him for some remark sufficiently tinged with his profession to be suitable for him to make, and for the ladies to hear as his. The wind was a thoroughly wintry one from the north-east, and had been blowing all night, so that the waves were shouldering the rocks with huge assault. Now Fergus’s sermon, which he meant to use as a spade for the casting of the first turf of the first parallel in the siege of the pulpit of the North parish, was upon the vanity of human ambition, his text being the grand verse — And so I saw the wicked buried, who had come and gone from the place of the holy; there was no small amount of fine writing in the manuscript he had thrust into his pocket; and his sermon was in his head when he remarked, with the wafture of a neatly-gloved hand seawards —
“I was watching these waves when you found me: they seem to me such a picture of the vanity of human endeavour! But just as little as those waves would mind me, if I told them they were wasting their labour on these rocks, will men mind me, when I tell them to-morrow of the emptiness of their ambitions.”
“A present enstance o’ the vainity o’ human endeevour!” said Donal. “What for sud ye, in that case, gang on preachin’, sae settin’ them an ill exemple?”
Duff gave him a high-lidded glance, vouchsafing no reply.
“Just as those waves,” he continued, “waste themselves in effort, as often foiled as renewed, to tear down these rocks, so do the men of this world go on and on, spending their strength for nought.”
“Hoots, Fergus!” said Donal again, in broadest speech, as if with its bray he would rebuke not the madness but the silliness of the prophet, “ye dinna mean to tell me yon jaws (billows) disna ken their business better nor imaigine they hae to caw doon the rocks?”
Duff cast a second glance of scorn at what he took for the prosaic stupidity or poverty-stricken logomachy of Donal, while Ginevra opened on him big brown eyes, as much as to say, “Donal, who was it set me down for saying a man couldn’t be a burn?” But Gibbie’s face was expectant: he knew Donal. Mrs. Sclater also looked interested: she did not much like Duff, and by this time she suspected Donal of genius. Donal turned to Ginevra with a smile, and said, in the best English he could command —
“Bear with me a moment, Miss Galbraith. If Mr. Duff will oblige me by answering my question, I trust I shall satisfy you I am no turncoat.”
Fergus stared. What did his father’s herd-boy mean by talking such English to the ladies, and such vulgar Scotch to him? Although now a magistrand — that is, one about to take his degree of Master of Arts — Donal was still to Fergus the cleaner-out of his father’s byres — an upstart, whose former position was his real one — towards him at least, who knew him. And did the fellow challenge him to a discussion? Or did he presume on the familiarity of their boyhood, and wish to sport his acquaintance with the popular preacher? On either supposition, he was impertinent.
“I spoke poetically,” he said, with cold dignity.
“Ye’ll excuse me, Fergus,” replied Donal, ” — for the sake o’ auld langsyne, whan I was, as I ever will be, sair obligatit till ye — but i’ that ye say noo, ye’re sair wrang: ye wasna speykin’ poetically, though I ken weel ye think it, or ye wadna say ‘t; an’ that’s what garred me tak ye up. For the verra essence o’ poetry is trowth, an’ as sune’s a word’s no true, it’s no poetry, though it may hae on the cast claes o’ ‘t. It’s nane but them ‘at kens na what poetry is, ‘at blethers aboot poetic license, an’ that kin’ o’ hen-scraich, as gien a poet was sic a gowk ‘at naebody eedit hoo he lee’d, or whether he gaed wi’ ‘s cwite (coat) hin’ side afore or no.”
“I am at a loss to understand you — Donal? — yes, Donal Grant. I remember you very well; and from the trouble I used to take with you to make you distinguish between the work of the poet and that of the rhymester, I should have thought by this time you would have known a little more about the nature of poetry. Personification is a figure of speech in constant use by all poets.”
“Ow ay! but there’s true and there’s fause personification; an’ it’s no ilka poet ‘at kens the differ. Ow, I ken! ye’ll be doon upo’ me wi’ yer Byron,” — Fergus shook his head as at a false impeachment, but Donal went on — “but even a poet canna mak lees poetry. An’ a man ‘at in ane o’ his gran’est verses cud haiver aboot the birth o’ a yoong airthquack! — losh! to think o’ ‘t growin’ an auld airthquack! — haith, to me it’s no up till a deuk-quack! — sic a poet micht weel, I grant ye, be he ever sic a guid poet whan he tuik heed to what he said, he micht weel, I say, blether nonsense aboot the sea warrin’ again’ the rocks, an’ sic stuff.”
“But don’t you see them?” said Fergus, pointing to a great billow that fell back at the moment, and lay churning in the gulf beneath them. “Are they not in fact wasting the rocks away by slow degrees?”
“What comes o’ yer seemile than, anent the vainity o’ their endeevour? But that’s no what I’m carin’ aboot. What I mainteen is, ‘at though they div weir awa’ the rocks, that’s nae mair their design nor it’s the design o’ a yewky owse to kill the tree whan he rubs hit’s skin an’ his ain aff thegither.”
“Tut! nobody ever means, when he personifies the powers of nature, that they know what they are about.”
“The mair necessar’ till attreebute till them naething but their rale design.”
“If they don’t know what they are about, how can you be so foolish as talk of their design?”
“Ilka thing has a design, — an’ gien it dinna ken’t itsel’, that’s jist whaur yer true an’ lawfu’ personification comes in. There’s no rizon ‘at a poet sudna attreebute till a thing as a conscious design that which lies at the verra heart o’ ‘ts bein’, the design for which it’s there. That an’ no ither sud determine the personification ye gie a thing — for that’s the trowth o’ the thing. Eh, man, Fergus! the jaws is fechtin’ wi’ nae rocks. They’re jist at their pairt in a gran’ cleansin’ hermony. They’re at their hoosemaid’s wark, day an’ nicht, to haud the warl’ clean, an’ gran’ an’ bonnie they sing at it. Gien I was you, I wadna tell fowk any sic nonsense as yon; I wad tell them ‘at ilk ane ‘at disna dee his wark i’ the warl’, an’ dee ‘t the richt gait, ‘s no the worth o’ a minnin, no to say a whaul, for ilk ane o’ thae wee craturs dis the wull o’ him ‘at made ‘im wi’ ilka whisk o’ his bit tailie, fa’in’ in wi’ a’ the jabble o’ the jaws again’ the rocks, for it’s a’ ae thing — an’ a’ to haud the muckle sea clean. An’ sae whan I lie i’ my bed, an’ a’ at ance there comes a wee soughie o’ win’ i’ my face, an’ I luik up an’ see it was naething but the wings o’ a flittin’ flee, I think wi’ mysel’ hoo a’ the curses are but blessin’s ‘at ye dinna see intill, an’ hoo ilka midge, an’ flee, an’ muckle dronin’ thing ‘at gangs aboot singin’ bass, no to mention the doos an’ the mairtins an’ the craws an’ the kites an’ the oolets an’ the muckle aigles an’ the butterflees, is a’ jist haudin’ the air gauin’ ‘at ilka defilin’ thing may be weel turnt ower, an’ brunt clean. That’s the best I got oot o’ my cheemistry last session. An’ fain wad I haud air an’ watter in motion aboot me, an’ sae serve my en’ — whether by waggin’ wi’ my wings or whiskin’ wi’ my tail. Eh! it’s jist won’erfu’. Its a’ ae gran’ consortit confusion o’ hermony an’ order; an’ what maks the confusion is only jist ‘at a’ thing’s workin’ an’ naething sits idle. But awa! wi’ the nonsense o’ ae thing worryin’ an’ fechtin’ at anither! — no till ye come to beasts an’ fowk, an’ syne ye hae eneuch o’ ‘t.”
All the time Fergus had been poking the point of his stick into the ground, a smile of superiority curling his lip.
“I hope, ladies, our wits are not quite swept away in this flood of Doric,” he said.
“You have a poor opinion of the stability of our brains, Mr. Duff,” said Mrs. Sclater.
“I was only judging by myself,” he replied, a little put out. “I can’t say I understood our friend here. Did you?”
“Perfectly,” answered Mrs. Sclater.
At that moment came a thunderous wave with a great bowff into the hollow at the end of the gully on whose edge they stood.
“There’s your housemaid’s broom, Donal!” said Ginevra.
They all laughed.
“Everything depends on how you look at a thing,” said Fergus, and said no more — inwardly resolving, however, to omit from his sermon a certain sentence about the idle waves dashing themselves to ruin on the rocks they would destroy, and to work in something instead about the winds of the winter tossing the snow. A pause followed.
“Well, this is Saturday, and tomorrow is my work-day, you know, ladies,” he said. “If you would oblige me with your address, Miss Galbraith, I should do myself the honour of calling on Mr. Galbraith.”
Ginevra told him where they lived, but added she was afraid he must not expect to see her father, for he had been out of health lately, and would see nobody.
“At all events I shall give myself the chance,” he rejoined, and bidding the ladies good-bye, and nodding to the youths, turned and walked away.
For some time there was silence. At length Donal spoke.
“Poor Fergus!” he said with a little sigh. “He’s a good-natured creature, and was a great help to me; but when I think of him a preacher, I seem to see an Egyptian priest standing on the threshold of the great door at Ipsambul, blowing with all his might to keep out the Libyan desert; and the four great stone gods, sitting behind the altar, far back in the gloom, laughing at him.”
Then Ginevra asked him something which led to a good deal of talk about the true and false in poetry, and made Mrs. Sclater feel it was not for nothing she had befriended the lad from the hills in the strange garments. And she began to think whether her husband might not be brought to take a higher view of his calling.
On Monday Fergus went to pay his visit to Mr. Galbraith. As Ginevra had said, her father did not appear, but Fergus was far from disappointed. He had taken it into his head that Miss Galbraith sided with him when that ill-bred fellow made his rude, not to say ungrateful, attack upon him, and was much pleased to have a talk with her. Ginevra thought it would not be right to cherish against him the memory of the one sin of his youth in her eyes, but she could not like him. She did not know why, but the truth was, she felt, without being able to identify, his unreality: she thought it was because, both in manners and in dress, so far as the custom of his calling would permit, he was that unpleasant phenomenon, a fine gentleman. She had never heard him preach, or she would have liked him still less; for he was an orator wilful and prepense, choice of long words, fond of climaxes, and always aware of the points at which he must wave his arm, throw forward his hands, wipe his eyes with the finest of large cambric handkerchiefs. As it was, she was heartily tired of him before he went, and when he was gone, found, as she sat with her father, that she could not recall a word he had said. As to what had made the fellow stay so long, she was therefore positively unable to give her father an answer; the consequence of which was, that, the next time he called, Mr. Galbraith, much to her relief, stood the brunt of his approach, and received him. The ice thus broken, his ingratiating manners, and the full-blown respect he showed Mr. Galbraith, enabling the weak man to feel himself, as of old, every inch a laird, so won upon him that, when he took his leave, he gave him a cordial invitation to repeat his visit.
He did so, in the evening this time, and remembering a predilection of the laird’s, begged for a game of backgammon. The result of his policy was, that, of many weeks that followed, every Monday evening at least he spent with the laird. Ginevra was so grateful to him for his attention to her father, and his efforts to draw him out of his gloom, that she came gradually to let a little light of favour shine upon him. And if the heart of Fergus Duff was drawn to her, that is not to be counted to him a fault — neither that, his heart thus drawn, he should wish to marry her. Had she been still heiress of Glashruach, he dared not have dreamed of such a thing, but, noting the humble condition to which they were reduced, the growing familiarity of the father, and the friendliness of the daughter, he grew very hopeful, and more anxious than ever to secure the presentation to the North church, which was in the gift of the city. He could easily have got a rich wife, but he was more greedy of distinction than of money, and to marry the daughter of the man to whom he had been accustomed in childhood to look up as the greatest in the known world, was in his eyes like a patent of nobility, would be a ratification of his fitness to mingle with the choice of the land.
CHATTER LI.
THE NORTH CHURCH.
It was a cold night in March, cloudy and blowing. Every human body was turned into a fortress for bare defence of life. There was no snow on the ground, but it seemed as if there must be snow everywhere else. There was snow in the clouds overhead, and there was snow in the mind of man beneath. The very air felt like the quarry out of which the snow had been dug which was being ground above. The wind felt black, the sky was black, and the lamps were blowing about as if they wanted to escape for the darkness was after them. It was the Sunday following the induction of Fergus, and this was the meteoric condition through which Donal and Gibbie passed on their way to the North church, to hear him preach in the pulpit that was now his own.
The people had been gathering since long before the hour, and the youths could find only standing room near the door. Cold as was the weather, and keen as blew the wind into the church every time a door was opened, the instant it was shut again it was warm, for the place was crowded from the very height of the great steep-sloping galleries, at the back of which the people were standing on the window sills, down to the double swing-doors, which were constantly cracking open as if the house was literally too full to hold the congregation. The aisles also were crowded with people standing, all eager yet solemn, with granite faces and live eyes. One who did not know better might well have imagined them gathered in hunger after good tidings from the kingdom of truth and hope, whereby they might hasten the coming of that kingdom in their souls and the souls they loved. But it was hardly that; it was indeed a long way from it, and no such thing: the eagerness was, in the mass, doubtless with exceptions, to hear the new preacher, the pyrotechnist of human logic and eloquence, who was about to burn his halfpenny blue lights over the abyss of truth, and throw his yelping crackers into it.
The eyes of the young men went wandering over the crowd, looking for any of their few acquaintances, but below they mostly fell of course on the backs of heads. There was, however, no mistaking either Ginevra’s bonnet or the occiput perched like a capital on the long neck of her father. They sat a good way in front, about the middle of the great church. At the sight of them Gibbie’s face brightened, Donal’s turned pale as death. For, only the last week but one, he had heard of the frequent visits of the young preacher to the cottage, and of the favour in which he was held by both father and daughter; and his state of mind since, had not, with all his philosophy to rectify and support it, been an enviable one. That he could not for a moment regard himself as a fit husband for the lady-lass, or dream of exposing himself or her to the insult which the offer of himself as a son-in-law would bring on them both from the laird, was not a reflection to render the thought of such a bag of wind as Fergus Duff marrying her, one whit the less horribly unendurable. Had the laird been in the same social position as before, Donal would have had no fear of his accepting Fergus; but misfortune alters many relations. Fergus’s father was a man of considerable property, Fergus himself almost a man of influence, and already in possession of a comfortable income: it was possible to imagine that the impoverished Thomas Galbraith, late of Glashruach, Esq., might contrive to swallow what annoyance there could not but in any case be in wedding his daughter to the son of John Duff, late his own tenant of the Mains. Altogether Donal’s thoughts were not of the kind to put him in fit mood — I do not say to gather benefit from the prophesying of Fergus, but to give fair play to the peddler who now rose to display his loaded calico and beggarly shoddy over the book-board of the pulpit. But the congregation listened rapt. I dare not say there was no divine reality concerned in his utterance, for Gibbie saw many a glimmer through the rents in his logic, and the thin-worn patches of his philosophy; but it was not such glimmers that fettered the regards of the audience, but the noisy flow and false eloquence of the preacher. In proportion to the falsehood in us are we exposed to the falsehood in others. The false plays upon the false without discord; comes to the false, and is welcomed as the true; there is no jar, for the false to the false look the true; darkness takes darkness for light, and great is the darkness. I will not attempt an account of the sermon; even admirably rendered, it would be worthless as the best of copies of a bad wall-paper. There was in it, to be sure, such a glowing description of the city of God as might have served to attract thither all the diamond-merchants of Amsterdam; but why a Christian should care to go to such a place, let him tell who knows; while, on the other hand, the audience appeared equally interested in his equiponderating description of the place of misery. Not once {did he even} attempt to give, or indeed could have given, the feeblest idea, to a single soul present, of the one terror of the universe — the peril of being cast from the arms of essential Love and Life into the bosom of living Death. For this teacher of men knew nothing whatever but by hearsay, had not in himself experienced one of the joys or one of the horrors he endeavoured to embody.
Gibbie was not at home listening to such a sermon; he was distressed, and said afterwards to Donal he would far rather be subjected to Mr. Sclater’s isms than Fergus’s ations. It caused him pain too to see Donal look so scornful, so contemptuous even; while it added to Donal’s unrest, and swelled his evil mood, to see Mr. Galbraith absorbed. For Ginevra’s bonnet, it did not once move — but then it was not set at an angle to indicate either eyes upturned in listening, or cast down in emotion. Donal would have sacrificed not a few songs, the only wealth he possessed, for one peep round the corner of that bonnet. He had become painfully aware, that, much as he had seen of Ginevra, he knew scarcely anything of her thoughts; he had always talked so much more to her than she to him, that now, when he longed to know, he could not even guess what she might be thinking, or what effect such “an arrangement” of red and yellow would have upon her imagination and judgment. She could not think or receive what was not true, he felt sure, but she might easily enough attribute truth where it did not exist.
At length the rockets, Roman candles, and squibs were all burnt out, the would-be “eternal blazon” was over, and the preacher sunk back exhausted in his seat. The people sang; a prayer, fit pendent to such a sermon, followed, and the congregation was dismissed — it could not be with much additional strength to meet the sorrows, temptations, sophisms, commonplaces, disappointments, dulnesses, stupidities, and general devilries of the week, although not a few paid the preacher welcome compliments on his “gran’ discoorse.”
The young men were out among the first, and going round to another door, in the church-yard, by which they judged Ginevra and her father must issue, there stood waiting. The night was utterly changed. The wind had gone about, and the vapours were high in heaven, broken all into cloud-masses of sombre grandeur. Now from behind, now upon their sides, they were made glorious by the full moon, while through their rents appeared the sky and the ever marvellous stars. Gibbie’s eyes went climbing up the spire that shot skyward over their heads. Around its point the clouds and the moon seemed to gather, grouping themselves in grand carelessness; and he thought of the Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven; to us mere heaps of watery vapour, ever ready to fall, drowning the earth in rain, or burying it in snow, to angel-feet they might be solid masses whereon to tread attendant upon him, who, although with his word he ruled winds and seas, loved to be waited on by the multitude of his own! He was yet gazing, forgetful of the human tide about him, watching the glory dominant over storm, when his companion pinched his arm: he looked, and was aware that Fergus, muffled to the eyes, was standing beside them. He seemed not to see them, and they were nowise inclined to attract his attention, but gazed motionless on the church door, an unsealed fountain of souls. What a curious thing it is to watch an issuing crowd of faces for one loved one — all so unattractive, provoking, blamable, as they come rolling round corners, dividing, and flowing away — not one of them the right one! But at last out she did come — Ginevra, like a daisy among mown grass! It was really she! — but with her father. She saw Donal, glanced from him to Gibbie, cast down her sweet eyes, and made no sign. Fergus had already advanced and addressed the laird.
“Ah, Mr. Duff!” said Mr. Galbraith; “excuse me, but would you oblige me by giving your arm to my daughter? I see a friend waiting to speak to me. I shall overtake you in a moment.”
Fergus murmured his pleasure, and Ginevra and he moved away together. The youths for a moment watched the father. He dawdled — evidently wanted to speak to no one. They then followed the two, walking some yards behind them. Every other moment Fergus would bend his head towards Ginevra; once or twice they saw the little bonnet turn upwards in response or question. Poor Donal was burning with lawless and foolish indignation: why should the minister muffle himself up like an old woman in the crowd, and take off the great handkerchief when talking with the lady? When the youths reached the street where the cottage stood, they turned the corner after them, and walked quickly up to them where they stood at the gate waiting for it to be opened.
“Sic a gran’ nicht!” said Donal, after the usual greetings. “Sir Gibbie an’ me ‘s haein’ a dauner wi’ the mune. Ye wad think she had licht eneuch to haud the cloods aff o’ her, wad ye no, mem? But na! they’ll be upon her, an’ I’m feart there’s ae unco black ane yon’er — dinna ye see ‘t — wi’ a straik o’ white, aboot the thrapple o’ ‘t? — There — dinna ye see ‘t?” he went on pointing to the clouds about the moon, ” — that ane, I’m doobtin’, ‘ill hae the better o’ her or lang — tak her intill ‘ts airms, an’ bray a’ the licht oot o’ her. Guid nicht, mem. — Guid nicht, Fergus. You ministers sudna mak yersels sae like cloods. Ye sud be cled in white an’ gowd, an’ a’ colours o’ stanes, like the new Jerooslem ye tell sic tales aboot, an’ syne naebody wad mistak the news ye bring.”
Therewith Donal walked on, doubtless for the moment a little relieved. But before they had walked far, he broke down altogether.
“Gibbie,” he said, “yon rascal’s gauin’ to merry the leddy-lass! an’ it drives me mad to think it. Gien I cud but ance see an’ speyk till her — ance — jist ance! Lord! what ‘ll come o’ a’ the gowans upo’ the Mains, an’ the heather upo’ Glashgar!”
He burst out crying, but instantly dashed away his tears with indignation at his weakness.
“I maun dree my weird,” (undergo my doom), he said, and said no more.
Gibbie’s face had grown white in the moon-gleams, and his lips trembled. He put his arm through Donal’s and clung to him, and in silence they went home. When they reached Donal’s room, Donal entering shut the door behind him and shut out Gibbie. He stood for a moment like one dazed, then suddenly coming to himself, turned away, left the house, and ran straight to Daur-street.
When the minister’s door was opened to him, he went to that of the dining-room, knowing Mr. and Mrs. Sclater would then be at supper. Happily for his intent, the minister was at the moment having his tumbler of toddy after the labours of the day, an indulgence which, so long as Gibbie was in the house, he had, ever since that first dinner-party, taken in private, out of regard, as he pretended to himself, for the boy’s painful associations with it, but in reality, to his credit be it told if it may, from a little shame of the thing itself; and his wife therefore, when she saw Gibbie, rose, and, meeting him, took him with her to her own little sitting-room, where they had a long talk, of which the result appeared the next night in a note from Mrs. Sclater to Gibbie, asking him and Donal to spend the evening of Tuesday with her.
CHAPTER LII.
THE QUARRY.
Donal threw everything aside, careless of possible disgrace in the class the next morning, and, trembling with hope, accompanied Gibbie: she would be there — surely! It was one of those clear nights in which a gleam of straw-colour in the west, with light-thinned gray-green deepening into blue above it, is like the very edge of the axe of the cold — the edge that reaches the soul. But the youths were warm enough: they had health and hope. The hospitable crimson room, with its round table set out for a Scotch tea, and its fire blazing hugely, received them. And there sat Ginevra by the fire! with her pretty feet on a footstool before it: in those days ladies wore open shoes, and showed dainty stockings. Her face looked rosy, but it was from the firelight, for when she turned it towards them, it showed pale as usual. She received them, as always, with the same simple sincerity that had been hers on the bank of the Lorrie burn. But Gibbie read some trouble in her eyes, for his soul was all touch, and, like a delicate spiritual seismograph, responded at once to the least tremble of a neighbouring soul. The minister was not present, and Mrs. Sclater had both to be the blazing coal, and keep blowing herself, else, however hot it might be at the smouldering hearth, the little company would have sent up no flame of talk.
When tea was over, Gibbie went to the window, got within the red curtains, and peeped out. Returning presently, he spelled with fingers and signed with hands to Ginevra that it was a glorious night: would she not come for a walk? Ginevra looked to Mrs. Sclater.
“Gibbie wants me to go for a walk,” she said.
“Certainly, my dear — if you are well enough to go with him,” replied her friend.
“I am always well,” answered Ginevra.
“I can’t go with you,” said Mrs. Sclater, “for I expect my husband every moment; but what occasion is there, with two such knights to protect you?”
She was straining hard on the bit of propriety; but she knew them all so well? she said to herself. Then first perceiving Gibbie’s design, Donal cast him a grateful glance, while Ginevra rose hastily, and ran to put on her outer garments. Plainly to Donal, she was pleased to go.
When they stood on the pavement, there was the moon, the very cream of light, ladying it in a blue heaven. It was not all her own, but the clouds about her were white and attendant, and ever when they came near her took on her livery — the poor paled-rainbow colours, which are all her reflected light can divide into: that strange brown we see so often on her cloudy people must, I suppose, be what the red or the orange fades to. There was a majesty and peace about her airy domination, which Donal himself would have found difficult, had he known her state, to bring into harmony with her aeonian death. Strange that the light of lovers should be the coldest of all cold things within human ken — dead with cold, millions of years before our first father and mother appeared each to the other on the earth! The air was keen but dry. Nothing could fall but snow; and of anything like it there was nothing but those few frozen vapours that came softly out of the deeps to wait on the moon. Between them and behind them lay depth absolute, expressed in the perfection of nocturnal blues, deep as gentle, the very home of the dwelling stars. The steps of the youths rang on the pavements, and Donal’s voice seemed to him so loud and clear that he muffled it all in gentler meaning. He spoke low, and Ginevra answered him softly. They walked close together, and Gibbie flitted to and fro, now on this side, now on that, now in front of them, now behind.
“Hoo likit ye the sermon, mem?” asked Donal.
“Papa thought it a grand sermon,” answered Ginevra.
“An’ yersel’?” persisted Donal.
“Papa tells me I am no judge,” she replied.
“That’s as muckle as to say ye didna like it sae weel as he did!” returned Donal, in a tone expressing some relief.
“Mr. Duff is very good to my father, Donal,” she rejoined, “and I don’t like to say anything against his sermon; but all the time I could not help thinking whether your mother would like this and that; for you know, Donal, any good there is in me I have got from her, and from Gibbie — and from you, Donal.”
The youth’s heart beat with a pleasure that rose to physical pain. Had he been a winged creature he would have flown straight up; but being a sober wingless animal, he stumped on with his two happy legs. Gladly would he have shown her the unreality of Fergus — that he was a poor shallow creature, with only substance enough to carry show and seeming, but he felt, just because he had reason to fear him, that it would be unmanly to speak the truth of him behind his back, except in the absolute necessity of rectitude. He felt also that, if Ginevra owed her father’s friend such delicacy, he owed him at least a little silence; for was he not under more obligation to this same shallow-pated orator, than to all eternity he could wipe out, even if eternity carried in it the possibility of wiping out an obligation? Few men understand, but Donal did, that he who would cancel an obligation is a dishonest man. I cannot help it that many a good man — good, that is, because he is growing better — must then be reckoned in the list of the dishonest: he is in their number until he leaves it.
Donal remaining silent, Ginevra presently returned him his own question:
“How did you like the sermon, Donal?”
“Div ye want me to say, mem?” he asked.
“I do, Donal,” she answered.
“Weel, I wad jist say, in a general w’y, ‘at I canna think muckle o’ ony sermon ‘at micht gar a body think mair o’ the precher nor o’ him ‘at he comes to prech aboot. I mean, ‘at I dinna see hoo onybody was to lo’e God or his neebour ae jot the mair for hearin’ yon sermon last nicht.”
“But might not some be frightened by it, and brought to repentance, Donal?” suggested the girl.
“Ou ay; I daur say; I dinna ken. But I canna help thinkin’ ‘at what disna gie God onything like fair play, canna dee muckle guid to men, an’ may, I doobt, dee a heap o’ ill. It’s a pagan kin’ o’ a thing yon.”
“That’s just what I was feeling — I don’t say thinking, you know — for you say we must not say think when we have taken no trouble about it. I am sorry for Mr. Duff, if he has taken to teaching where he does not understand.”
They had left the city behind them, and were walking a wide open road, with a great sky above it. On its borders were small fenced fields, and a house here and there with a garden. It was a plain-featured, slightly undulating country, with hardly any trees — not at all beautiful, except as every place under the heaven which man has not defiled is beautiful to him who can see what is there. But this night the earth was nothing: what was in them and over them was all. Donal felt — as so many will feel, before the earth, like a hen set to hatch the eggs of a soaring bird, shall have done rearing broods for heaven — that, with this essential love and wonder by his side, to be doomed to go on walking to all eternity would be a blissful fate, were the landscape turned to a brick-field, and the sky to persistent gray.
“Wad ye no tak my airm, mem?” he said at length, summoning courage. “I jist fin’ mysel’ like a horse wi’ a reyn brocken, gaein’ by mysel’ throu’ the air this gait.”
Before he had finished the sentence Ginevra had accepted the offer. It was the first time. His arm trembled. He thought it was her hand.
“Ye’re no cauld, are ye, mem?” he said.
“Not the least,” she answered.
“Eh, mem! gien fowk was but a’ made oot o’ the same clay, like, ‘at ane micht say till anither — ‘Ye hae me as ye hae yersel”!”
“Yes, Donal,” rejoined Ginevra; “I wish we were all made of the poet-clay like you! What it would be to have a well inside, out of which to draw songs and ballads as I pleased! That’s what you have, Donal — or, rather, you’re just a draw-well of music yourself.”
Donal laughed merrily. A moment more and he broke out singing:
My thoughts are like fireflies, pulsing in moonlight; My heart is a silver cup, full of red wine; My soul a pale gleaming horizon, whence soon light Will flood the gold earth with a torrent divine.
“What’s that, Donal?” cried Ginevra.
“Ow, naething,” answered Donal. “It was only my hert lauchin’.”
“Say the words,” said Ginevra.
“I canna — I dinna ken them noo,” replied Donal.
“Oh, Donal! are those lovely words gone — altogether — for ever? Shall I not hear them again?”
“I’ll try to min’ upo’ them whan I gang hame,” he said. “I canna the noo. I can think o’ naething but ae thing.”
“And what is that, Donal?”
“Yersel’,” answered Donal.
Ginevra’s hand lifted just a half of its weight from Donal’s arm, like a bird that had thought of flying, then settled again.
“It is very pleasant to be together once more as in the old time, Donal — though there are no daisies and green fields. — But what place is that, Donal?”
Instinctively, almost unconsciously, she wanted to turn the conversation. The place she pointed to was an opening immediately on the roadside, through a high bank — narrow and dark, with one side half lighted by the moon. She had often passed it, walking with her school-fellows, but had never thought of asking what it was. In the shining dusk it looked strange and a little dreadful.
“It’s the muckle quarry, mem,” answered Donal: “div ye no ken that? That’s whaur maist the haill toon cam oot o’. It’s a some eerie kin’ o’ a place to luik at i’ this licht. I won’er at ye never saw’t.”
“I have seen the opening there, but never took much notice of it before,” said Ginevra.
“Come an’ I’ll lat ye see’t,” rejoined Donal. “It’s weel worth luikin’ intill. Ye hae nae notion sic a place as ’tis. It micht be amo’ the grenite muntains o’ Aigypt, though they takna freely sic fine blocks oot o’ this ane as they tuik oot o’ that at Syene. Ye wadna be fleyt to come an’ see what the meen maks o’ ‘t, wad ye, mem?”
“No, Donal. I would not be frightened to go anywhere with you. But — “
“Eh, mem! it maks me richt prood to hear ye say that. Come awa’ than.”
So saying, he turned aside, and led her into the narrow passage, cut through a friable sort of granite. Gibbie, thinking they had gone to have but a peep and return, stood in the road, looking at the clouds and the moon, and crooning to himself. By and by, when he found they did not return, he followed them.
When they reached the end of the cutting, Ginevra started at sight of the vast gulf, the moon showing the one wall a ghastly gray, and from the other throwing a shadow half across the bottom. But a winding road went down into it, and Donal led her on. She shrunk at first, drawing back from the profound, mysterious-looking abyss, so awfully still; but when Donal looked at her, she was ashamed to refuse to go farther, and indeed almost afraid to take her hand from his arm; so he led her down the terrace road. The side of the quarry was on one hand, and on the other she could see only into the gulf.
“Oh, Donal!” she said at length, almost in a whisper, “this is like a dream I once had, of going down and down a long roundabout road, inside the earth, down and down, to the heart of a place full of the dead — the ground black with death, and between horrible walls.”
Donal looked at her; his face was in the light reflected from the opposite gray precipice: she thought it looked white and strange, and grew more frightened, but dared not speak. Presently Donal again began to sing, and this is something like what he sang: —
“Death! whaur do ye bide, auld Death?” “I bide in ilka breath,”
Quo’ Death.
“No i’ the pyramids,
An’ no the worms amids,
‘Neth coffin-lids;
I bidena whaur life has been,
An’ whaur’s nae mair to be dune.”
“Death! whaur do ye bide, auld Death?” “Wi’ the leevin’, to dee ‘at’s laith,”
Quo’ Death.
“Wi’ the man an’ the wife
‘At lo’e like life,
But strife; (without)
Wi’ the bairns ‘at hing to their mither, An’ a’ ‘at lo’e ane anither.”
“Death! whaur do ye bide, auld Death?” “Abune an’ aboot an’ aneath,”
Quo’ Death.
“But o’ a’ the airts,
An’ o’ a’ the pairts,
In herts,
Whan the tane to the tither says na, An’ the north win’ begins to blaw.”
“What a terrible song, Donal!” said Ginevra.
He made no reply, but went on, leading her down into the pit: he had been afraid she was going to draw back, and sang the first words her words suggested, knowing she would not interrupt him. The aspect of the place grew frightful to her.
“Are you sure there are no holes — full of water, down there?” she faltered.
“Ay, there’s ane or twa,” replied Donal, “but we’ll haud oot o’ them.”
Ginevra shuddered, but was determined to show no fear: Donal should not reproach her with lack of faith! They stepped at last on the level below, covered with granite chips and stones and great blocks. In the middle rose a confused heap of all sorts. To this, and round to the other side of it, Donal led her. There shone the moon on the corner of a pool, the rest of which crept away in blackness under an overhanging mass. She caught his arm with both hands. He told her to look up. Steep granite rock was above them all round, on one side dark, on the other mottled with the moon and the thousand shadows of its own roughness; over the gulf hung vaulted the blue, cloud-blotted sky, whence the moon seemed to look straight down upon her, asking what they were about, away from their kind, in such a place of terror.
Suddenly Donal caught her hand. She looked in his face. It was not the moon that could make it so white.
“Ginevra!” he said, with trembling voice.
“Yes, Donal,” she answered.
“Ye’re no angry at me for ca’in ye by yer name? I never did it afore.”
“I always call you Donal,” she answered.
“That’s nait’ral. Ye’re a gran’ leddy, an’ I’m naething abune a herd-laddie.”
“You’re a great poet, Donal, and that’s much more than being a lady or a gentleman.”
“Ay, maybe,” answered Donal listlessly, as if he were thinking of something far away; “but it winna mak up for the tither; they’re no upo’ the same side o’ the watter, like. A puir lad like me daurna lift an ee till a gran’ leddy like you, mem. A’ the warl’ wad but scorn him, an’ lauch at the verra notion. My time’s near ower at the college, an’ I see naething for ‘t but gang hame an’ fee (hire myself). I’ll be better workin’ wi’ my han’s nor wi’ my heid whan I hae nae houp left o’ ever seein’ yer face again. I winna lowse a day aboot it. Gien I lowse time I may lowse my rizon. Hae patience wi’ me ae meenute, mem; I’m jist driven to tell ye the trowth. It’s mony a lang sin’ I hae kent mysel’ wantin’ you. Ye’re the boady, an’ I’m the shaidow. I dinna mean nae hyperbolics — that’s the w’y the thing luiks to me i’ my ain thouchts. Eh, mem, but ye’re bonnie! Ye dinna ken yersel’ hoo bonnie ye are, nor what a subversion you mak i’ my hert an’ my heid. I cud jist cut my heid aff, an’ lay ‘t aneth yer feet to haud them aff o’ the cauld flure.”
Still she looked him in the eyes, like one bewildered, unable to withdraw her eyes from his. Her face too had grown white.
“Tell me to haud my tongue, mem, an’ I’ll haud it,” he said.
Her lips moved, but no sound came.
“I ken weel,” he went on, “ye can never luik upo’ me as onything mair nor a kin’ o’ a human bird, ‘at ye wad hing in a cage, an’ gie seeds an’ bits o’ sugar till, an’ hearken till whan he sang. I’ll never trouble ye nae mair, an’ whether ye grant me my prayer or no, ye’ll never see me again. The only differ ‘ill be ‘at I’ll aither hing my heid or haud it up for the rest o’ my days. I wad fain ken ‘at I wasna despised, an’ ‘at maybe gien things had been different, — but na, I dinna mean that; I mean naething ‘at wad fricht ye frae what I wad hae. It sudna mean a hair mair nor lies in itsel’.”
“What is it, Donal?” said Ginevra, half inaudibly, and with effort: she could scarcely speak for a fluttering in her throat.
“I cud beseech ye upo’ my k-nees,” he went on, as if she had not spoken, “to lat me kiss yer bonnie fut; but that ye micht grant for bare peety, an’ that wad dee me little guid; sae for ance an’ for a’, till maybe efter we’re a’ ayont the muckle sea, I beseech at the fauvour o’ yer sweet sowl, to lay upo’ me, as upo’ the lips o’ the sowl ‘at sang ye the sangs ye likit sae weel to hear whan ye was but a leddy-lassie — ae solitary kiss. It shall be holy to me as the licht; an’ I sweir by the Trowth I’ll think o’ ‘t but as ye think, an’ man nor wuman nor bairn, no even Gibbie himsel’, sall ken — “
The last word broke the spell upon Ginevra.
“But, Donal,” she said, as quietly as when years ago they talked by the Lorrie side, “would it be right? — a secret with you I could not tell to any one? — not even if afterwards — “
Donal’s face grew so ghastly with utter despair that absolute terror seized her; she turned from him and fled, calling “Gibbie! Gibbie!”
He was not many yards off, approaching the mound as she came from behind it. He ran to meet her. She darted to him like a dove pursued by a hawk, threw herself into his arms, laid her head on his shoulder, and wept. Gibbie held her fast, and with all the ways in his poor power sought to comfort her. She raised her face at length. It was all wet with tears which glistened in the moonlight. Hurriedly Gibbie asked on his fingers:
“Was Donal not good to you?”
“He’s beautiful,” she sobbed; “but I couldn’t, you know, Gibbie, I couldn’t. I don’t care a straw about position and all that — who would with a poet? — but I couldn’t, you know, Gibbie. I couldn’t let him think I might have married him — in any case: could I now, Gibbie?”
She laid her head again on his shoulder and sobbed. Gibbie did not well understand her. Donal, where he had thrown himself on a heap of granite chips, heard and understood, felt and knew and resolved all in one. The moon shone, and the clouds went flitting like ice-floe about the sky, now gray in distance, now near the moon and white, now in her very presence and adorned with her favour on their bosoms, now drifting again into the gray; and still the two, Ginevra and Gibbie, stood motionless — Gibbie with the tears in his eyes, and Ginevra weeping as if her heart would break; and behind the granite blocks lay Donal.
Again Ginevra raised her head.
“Gibbie, you must go and look after poor Donal,” she said.
Gibbie went, but Donal was nowhere to be seen. To escape the two he loved so well, and be alone as he felt, he had crept away softly into one of the many recesses of the place. Again and again Gibbie made the noise with which he was accustomed to call him, but he gave back no answer, and they understood that wherever he was he wanted to be left to himself. They climbed again the winding way out of the gulf, and left him the heart of its desolation.
“Take me home, Gibbie,” said Ginevra, when they reached the high road.
As they went, not a word more passed between them. Ginevra was as dumb as Gibbie, and Gibbie was sadder than he had ever been in his life — not only for Donal’s sake, but because, in his inexperienced heart, he feared that Ginevra would not listen to Donal because she could not — because she had already promised herself to Fergus Duff; and with all his love to his kind, he could not think it well that Fergus should be made happy at such a price. He left her at her own door, and went home, hoping to find Donal there before him.
He was not there. Hour after hour passed, and he did not appear. At eleven o’clock, Gibbie set out to look for him, but with little hope of finding him. He went all the way back to the quarry, thinking it possible he might be waiting there, expecting him to return without Ginevra. The moon was now low, and her light reached but a little way into it, so that the look of the place was quite altered, and the bottom of it almost dark. But Gibbie had no fear. He went down to the spot, almost feeling his way, where they had stood, got upon the heap, and called and whistled many times. But no answer came. Donal was away, he did not himself know where, wandering wherever the feet in his spirit led him. Gibbie went home again, and sat up all night, keeping the kettle boiling, ready to make tea for him the moment he should come in. But even in the morning Donal did not appear. Gibbie was anxious — for Donal was unhappy.
He might hear of him at the college, he thought, and went at the usual hour. Sure enough, as he entered the quadrangle, there was Donal going in at the door leading to the moral philosophy class-room. For hours, neglecting his own class, he watched about the court, but Donal never showed himself. Gibbie concluded he had watched to avoid him, and had gone home by Crown-street, and himself returned the usual and shorter way, sure almost of now finding him in his room — although probably with the door locked. The room was empty, and Mistress Murkison had not seen him.
Donal’s final examination, upon which alone his degree now depended, came on the next day: Gibbie watched at a certain corner, and unseen saw him pass — with a face pale but strong, eyes that seemed not to have slept, and lips that looked the inexorable warders of many sighs. After that he did not see him once till the last day of the session arrived. Then in the public room he saw him go up to receive his degree. Never before had he seen him look grand; and Gibbie knew that there was not any evil in the world, except wrong. But it had been the dreariest week he had ever passed. As they came from the public room, he lay in wait for him once more, but again in vain: he must have gone through the sacristan’s garden behind.
When he reached his lodging, he found a note from Donal waiting him, in which he bade him good-bye, said he was gone to his mother, and asked him to pack up his things for him: he would write to Mistress Murkison and tell her what to do with the chest.
CHAPTER LIII.
A NIGHT-WATCH.
A sense of loneliness, such as in all his forsaken times he had never felt, overshadowed Gibbie when he read this letter. He was altogether perplexed by Donal’s persistent avoidance of him. He had done nothing to hurt him, and knew himself his friend in his sorrow as well as in his joy. He sat down in the room that had been his, and wrote to him. As often as he raised his eyes — for he had not shut the door — he saw the dusty sunshine on the old furniture. It was a bright day, one of the poursuivants of the yet distant summer, but how dreary everything looked! how miserable and heartless now Donal was gone, and would never regard those things any more! When he had ended his letter, almost for the first time in his life, he sat thinking what he should do next. It was as if he were suddenly becalmed on the high seas; one wind had ceased to blow, and another had not begun. It troubled him a little that he must now return to Mr. Sclater, and once more feel the pressure of a nature not homogeneous with his own. But it would not be for long.
Mr. Sclater had thought of making a movement towards gaining an extension of his tutelage beyond the ordinary legal period, on the ground of unfitness in his ward for the management of his property; but Gibbie’s character and scholarship, and the opinion of the world which would follow failure, had deterred him from the attempt. In the month of May, therefore, when, according to the registry of his birth in the parish book, he would be of age, he would also be, as he expected, his own master, so far as other mortals were concerned. As to what he would then do, he had thought much, and had plans, but no one knew anything of them except Donal — who had forsaken him.
He was in no haste to return to Daur-street. He packed Donal’s things, with all the books they had bought together, and committed the chest to Mistress Murkison. He then told her he would rather not give up his room just yet, but would like to keep it on for a while, and come and go as he pleased; to which the old woman replied,
“As ye wull, Sir Gibbie. Come an’ gang as free as the win’. Mak o’ my hoose as gien it war yer ain.”
He told her he would sleep there that night, and she got him his dinner as usual; after which, putting a Greek book in his pocket, he went out, thinking to go to the end of the pier and sit there a while. He would gladly have gone to Ginevra, but she had prevented him when she was at school, and had never asked him since she left it. But Gibbie was not ennuy: the pleasure of his life came from the very roots of his being, and would therefore run into any channel of his consciousness; neither was he greatly troubled; nothing could “put rancours in the vessel of” his “peace;” he was only very hungry after the real presence of the human; and scarcely had he set his foot on the pavement, when he resolved to go and see Mistress Croale. The sun, still bright, was sinking towards the west, and a cold wind was blowing. He walked to the market, up to the gallery of it, and on to the farther end, greeting one and another of the keepers of the little shops, until he reached that of Mistress Croale. She was overjoyed at sight of him, and proud the neighbours saw the terms they were on. She understood his signs and finger-speech tolerably, and held her part of the conversation in audible utterance. She told him that for the week past Donal had occupied her garret — she did not know why, she said, and hoped nothing had gone wrong between them. Gibbie signed that he could not tell her about it there, but would go and take tea with her in the evening.
“I’m sorry I canna be hame sae ear’,” she replied. “I promised to tak my dish o’ tay wi’ auld Mistress Green — the kail-wife, ye ken, Sir Gibbie.” — Gibbie nodded and she resumed: — “But gien ye wad tak a lug o’ a Fin’on haddie wi’ me at nine o’clock, I wad be prood.”
Gibbie nodded again, and left her.
All this time he had not happened to discover that the lady who stood at the next counter, not more than a couple of yards from him, was Miss Kimble — which was the less surprising in that the lady took some trouble to hide the fact. She extended her purchasing when she saw who was shaking hands with the next stall-keeper, but kept her face turned from him, heard all Mrs. Croale said to him, and went away asking herself what possible relations except objectionable ones could exist between such a pair. She knew little or nothing of Gibbie’s early history, for she had not been a dweller in the city when Gibbie was known as well as the town-cross to almost every man, woman, and child in it, else perhaps she might, but I doubt it, have modified her conclusion. Her instinct was in the right, she said, with self-gratulation; he was a lad of low character and tastes, just what she had taken him for the first moment she saw him: his friends could not know what he was; she was bound to acquaint them with his conduct; and first of all, in duty to her old pupil, she must let Mr. Galbraith know what sort of friendships this Sir Gilbert, his nephew, cultivated. She went therefore straight to the cottage.
Fergus was there when she rang the bell. Mr. Galbraith looked out, and seeing who it was, retreated — the more hurriedly that he owed her money, and imagined she had come to dun him. But when she found to her disappointment that she could not see him, Miss Kimble did not therefore attempt to restrain a little longer the pent-up waters of her secret. Mr. Duff was a minister, and the intimate friend of the family: she would say what she had seen and heard. Having then first abjured all love of gossip, she told her tale, appealing to the minister whether she had not been right in desiring to let Sir Gilbert’s uncle know how he was going on.
“I was not aware that Sir Gilbert was a cousin of yours, Miss Galbraith,” said Fergus.
Ginevra’s face was rosy red, but it was now dusk, and the fire-light had friendly retainer-shadows about it.
“He is not my cousin,” she answered.
“Why, Ginevra! you told me he was your cousin,” said Miss Kimble, with keen moral reproach.
“I beg your pardon; I never did,” said Ginevra.
“I must see your father instantly,” cried Miss Kimble, rising in anger. “He must be informed at once how much he is mistaken in the young gentleman he permits to be on such friendly terms with his daughter.”
“My father does not know him,” rejoined Ginevra; “and I should prefer they were not brought together just at present.”
Her words sounded strange even in her own ears, but she knew no way but the straight one.
“You quite shock me, Ginevra!” said the school-mistress, resuming her seat: “you cannot mean to say you cherish acquaintance with a young man of whom your father knows nothing, and whom you dare not introduce to him?”
To explain would have been to expose her father to blame.
“I have known Sir Gilbert from my childhood,” she said.
“Is it possible your duplicity reaches so far?” cried Miss Kimble, assured in her own mind that Ginevra had said he was her cousin.
Fergus thought it was time to interfere.
“I know something of the circumstances that led to the acquaintance of Miss Galbraith with Sir Gilbert,” he said, “and I am sure it would only annoy her father to have any allusion made to it by one — excuse me, Miss Kimble — who is comparatively a stranger. I beg you will leave the matter to me.”
Fergus regarded Gibbie as a half witted fellow, and had no fear of him. He knew nothing of the commencement of his acquaintance with Ginevra, but imagined it had come about through Donal; for, studiously as Mr. Galbraith had avoided mention of his quarrel with Ginevra because of the lads, something of it had crept out, and reached the Mains; and in now venturing allusion to that old story, Fergus was feeling after a nerve whose vibration, he thought, might afford him some influence over Ginevra.
He spoke authoritatively, and Miss Kimble, though convinced it was a mere pretence of her graceless pupil that her father would not see her, had to yield, and rose. Mr. Duff rose also, saying he would walk with her. He returned to the cottage, dined with them, and left about eight o’clock.
Already well enough acquainted in the city to learn without difficulty where Mistress Croale lived, and having nothing very