Bog-Myrtle and Peat Part 47

"Why, Mother Hubbard--" he broke out.

But Meysie stopped him, holding up her hand and pointing to her slate, which hung by a "tang" round her neck.

"Ha!" he murmured, "this is awkward--old woman gone deaf."

So he took the pencil and wrote--

"_Very hard up. Want some cash from the old man_," just as if he had been writing a telegram.

With her spectacles poised on the end of her nose, Meysie read the message. Her face took a hue greyer and duller than ever.

She looked at the lad she had once loved so well, and his s.h.i.+fty eye could not meet hers. He looked away over the moor, put his hands into his pockets, and whistled a music-hall catch, which sounded strangely in that white solitude.

"Weel do you ken that your faither has no sillar!" said Meysie. "You had a' the sillar, and what ye hae done with it only you an' your Maker ken.

But ye shallna come into this hoose to annoy yer faither. Gang to the barn, and wait till I bring you what I can get."

The young man grumblingly a.s.sented, and within that chilly enclosure he stood swearing under his breath and kicking his heels.

"A pretty poor sort of prodigal's return this," he said, remembering the parable he used to learn to say to his father on Sunday afternoons; "not so much as a blessed fatted calf--only a half-starved cow and a deaf old woman. I wonder what she'll bring a fellow."

In a little while Meysie came cautiously out of the back door with a bowl of broth under her ap.r.o.n. The minister had not stirred, deep in his folio Owen. The young man ate the thick soup with a horn spoon from Meysie's pocket. Then he stood looking at her a moment before he took the dangling pencil again and wrote on the slate--

"_Soup's good, but it's money I must have_!"

Meysie bent her head towards him.

"Ye shallna gang in to break yer faither's heart, Clement; but I hae brocht ye a' I hae, gin ye'll promise to gang awa' where ye cam' frae.

Your faither kens nocht aboot your last ploy, or that a son o' his has been in London gaol."

"And who told you?" broke in the youth furiously.

The old woman could not, of course, hear him, but she understood perfectly for all that.

"Your ain sister Elspeth telled me!" she answered.

"Curse her!" said the young man, succinctly and unfraternally. But he took the pencil and wrote--"_I promise to go away and not to disturb my father_."

Meysie took a lean green silk purse from her pocket and emptied out of it a five-pound note, three dirty one-pound notes, and seven silver s.h.i.+llings. Clement Symington took them and counted them over without a blush.

"You're none such a bad sort," he said.

"Now, mind your promise, Clement!" returned his old nurse.

He made his way at a dog's-trot down the half-snowed-up track that led towards the Ferry Town of the Cree; and though Meysie went to the stile of the orchard to watch, he ran out of sight without even turning his head. When the old woman went in, the minister was still deep in his book. He had never once looked up.

The short day faded into the long night. Icy gusts drove down from the heights of Craig Ronald, and the wind moaned mysteriously over the ridges which separated the valley of the Cree Water from the remote fastnesses of Loch Grannoch. The minister gathered his scanty family at the "buik," and his prayer was full of a fine reverence and feeling pity. He was pleading in the midst of a wilderness of silence, for the deaf woman heard not a word.

Yet it will do us no harm to hearken to the prayer of yearning and wrestling.

"O my G.o.d, who wast the G.o.d of my forefathers, keep Thou my two bairns.

They are gone from under my roof, but they are under Thine. Through the storm and the darkness be Thou about them. Let Thy light be in their hearts. Though here we meet no more, may we meet an unbroken family around Thy heavenly hearth. And have mercy on us who here await Thy hand, on this good ministering woman, and on me, alas! Thine unworthy servant, for I am but a sinful man, O Lord!"

Then Meysie made down her box-bed in the kitchen, and the minister retired to his own little chamber. He took his leather case out of his breast-pocket, and clasped it in his hand as he began his own protracted private devotions. He knelt on a place where his knees had long since worn a hole in the waxcloth. So, kneeling on the bare stone, he prayed long, even till the candle flickered itself out, smelling rankly in the room.

At the deepest time of the night, while the snow winds were raging about the half-buried cot, the dark figure of a young man opened the never-locked door and stepped quickly into the small lobby in which the minister's hat and worn overcoat were hanging. He paused to listen before he came into the kitchen, but nothing was to be heard except the steady breathing of the deaf woman. He came in and stepped across the floor. The red glow from the peats on the hearth revealed the figure of Clement Symington. He shook the snow from his coat and blew on his fingers. Then he went to the door of his father's room and listened.

Hearing no sound, he slowly opened it. His father had fallen asleep on his knees, with his forehead on his open Bible. The red glow of the dying peat-fire lighted the little room. "I wonder where he keeps his cash," he murmured to himself; "the sooner it's over the better." His eye caught something like a purse in his father's hand. As he took it, something broad and light fell out. He held it up to the moonbeam which came through the narrow upper panes. It was his own portrait taken in the suit which his father had bought him to go to college in. He had found the old man's wealth. A strangeness in his father's att.i.tude caught his eye. With a sudden, quick return of boyish affection he laid his hand on the bowed shoulder, forgetting for the moment his evil purpose and all else. The attenuated figure swayed and would have fallen to the side, had Clement Symington not caught it and laid his father tenderly on the bed. Then he stood upright and cried aloud in agony with that most terrible of griefs--the repentance that comes too late. But none heard him. The deaf woman slept on. And the dead gave no answer, being also for ever deaf and dumb.

II

A MINISTER'S DAY

_On either side the great and still ice sea Are compa.s.sing snow mountains near and far; While, dominant, Schreckhorn and Finsteraar Hold their grim peaks aloft defiantly_.

_Blind with excess of light and glory, we, Above whose heads in hottest mid-day glare The Schreckhorn and his sons arise in air, Sink in the weary snowfields to the knee_;

_Then, resting after peril pa.s.s'd in haste, We saw, from our rock-shelter'd vantage ledge, In the white fervent heat sole shadowy spot_,

_Familiar eyes that smiled amid the waste-- Lo! in the spa.r.s.ed snow at the glacier edge, The small blue flower they call Forget-me-not_!

The sun was glinting slantwise over the undulating uplands to the east.

Ben Gairn was blus.h.i.+ng a rosy purple, purer and fainter than the flamboyant hues of sunset, when the Reverend Richard Cameron looked out of his bedroom window in the little whitewashed manse of Cairn Edward.

His own favourite blackbird had awakened him, and he lay for a long while listening to its mellow fluting, till his conscience reproached him for lying so long a-bed on such a morning.

Richard Cameron was by nature an early riser, a gift to thank G.o.d for.

Many a Sabbath morning he had seen the sun rise from the ivy-grown arbour in the secluded garden behind the old whitewashed kirk. It was his habit to rise early, and, with the notes of his sermon in hand, to memorise, or "mandate," them, as it was called. So that on Sabbath, when the hill-folk gathered calm and slow, there might be no hesitation, and he might be able to pray the Cameronian supplication, "And bring the truth premeditated to ready recollection"--a prayer which no mere "reader" of a discourse would ever dare to utter.

But this was not a morning for "mandating" with the minister. It was the day of his pastoral visitation, and it behoved one who had a congregation scattered over a radius of more than twenty miles to be up and doing. The minister went down into the little study to take his spare breakfast of porridge and milk. Then, having called his housekeeper in for prayers--which included, even to that spa.r.s.e auditory, the exposition of the chapter read--he took his staff in hand, and, crossing the main street, took the road for the western hills, on which a considerable portion of his flock pastured.

As he went he whistled, whenever he found himself at a sufficient distance from the scattered houses which lined the roads. He was everywhere respectfully greeted, with an instinctive solemnity of a G.o.dly sort--a solemnity without fear. Men looked at him as he swung along, with right Scottish respect for his character and work. They knew him to be at once a man among men and a man of G.o.d.

The women stood and looked longer after him. There was nothing so striking to be seen in Galloway as that clear-cut, clean-shaven Greek face set on the square shoulders; for Galloway is a country of tall, stoop-shouldered men--a country also at that time of shaven upper lips and bristling beards, the most unpicturesque tonsure, barring the mutton-chop whisker, which has yet been discovered. The women, therefore, old and young, looked after him with a warmth about their hearts and a kindly moisture in their eyes. They felt that he was much too handsome to be going about unprotected.

Notwithstanding that the minister had a greeting in the bygoing for all, his limbs were of such excellent reach, and moved so fast over the ground, that his pace was rather over than under four miles an hour.

Pa.s.sing the thirteen chimneys of the "Lang Raw," he crossed Dee bridge and bent his way to the right along the wide s.p.a.ces of the sluggish river. The old fortress of the Douglases, the castle of Thrieve, loomed up behind him through the wavering heat of the morning. Above him was the hill of Knockcannon, from which Mons Meg fired her fatal shots. The young minister stood looking back and revolving the strange changes of the past. He saw how the way of the humble was exalted, and the lofty brought down from their seats.

"Some put their trust in horses, and some in chariots," said the minister, "but we will trust in the Lord."

He spake half aloud.

"As ye war sayin', sir, we wull trust the Lord--Himsel' wull be oor strength and stay."

The minister turned. It was a middle-aged man who spoke--David M'Kie, the familiar good spirit of the village of Whunnyliggate, and indeed of the whole parish. Wherever sickness was, there David was to be found.

"I was thinking," said the minister sententiously, "that it is not the high and lofty ones who sit most securely on their seats. The Lord is on the side of the quiet folk who wait."

"Ay, minister," said David M'Kie tentatively.