Bog-Myrtle and Peat Part 46

It was a hard job for a little lad to get a heavy tin filled--a harder still to unlock the door and creep away across the square of gravel.

"You have no idea" (so he said afterwards) "how badly gravel hurts your knees when they are bare."

Luckily it was a hot night, and not a breath of air was stirring, so the little white-clad figure moved slowly across the front of the house to the green gate of the garden. Jaikie could only reach out as far as his arms would go with the tin of water. Then painfully he pulled himself forward towards the tankard. But in spite of all he made headway, and soon he was creeping up the middle walk, past the great central sundial, which seemed high as a church-steeple above him. The ghostly moths fluttered about him, attracted by the waving white of his garments. In their corner he found the flowers, and, as he had thought, they were withered and drooping.

He lifted the water upon them with his palms, taking care that none dripped through, for it was very precious, and he seemed to have carried it many miles.

And as soon as they felt the water upon them the flowers paid him back in perfume. The musk lifted up its head, and mingled with the late velvety wallflower and frilled carnation in releasing a wonder of expressed sweetness upon the night air.

"I wish I had some for you, dear dimpled b.u.t.tercups," said Jaikie to the golden chalices which grew in the hollows by the burnside, where in other years there was much moisture; "can you wait another day?"

"We have waited long," they seemed to reply; "we can surely wait another day."

Then the honeysuckle reached down a single tendril to touch Jaikie on the cheek.

"Some for me, please," it said; "there are so many of us at our house, and so little to get. Our roots are such a long way off, and the big fellows farther down get most of the juice before it comes our way. If you cannot water us all, you might pour a little on our heads." So Jaikie lifted up his tankard and poured the few drops that were in the bottom upon the nodding heads of the honeysuckle blooms.

"Bide a little while," said he, "and you shall have plenty for root and flower, for branch and vine-stem."

There were not many more loving little boys than Jaikie in all the world; and with all his work and his helping and talking, he had quite forgotten about the pain in his foot.

Now, if I were telling a story--making it up, that is--it is just the time for something to happen,--for a great trumpet to blow to tell the world what a brave fellow this friend of the flowers was; or at least for some great person, perhaps the minister himself, to come and find him there alone in the night. Then he might be carried home with great rejoicing.

But nothing of the kind happened. In fact, nothing happened at all.

Jaikie began to creep back again in the quiet, colourless night; but before he had quite gone away the honeysuckle said--

"Remember to come back to-morrow and water us, and we will get ready such fine full cups of honey for you to suck."

And Jaikie promised. He shut the gate to keep out the hens. He crept across the pebbles, and they hurt more than ever. He hung up the tin dipper again on its peg, and climbed the stairs to his bedroom. Jiminy was breathing as quietly and equally as a lazy red-spotted trout in the shadow of the bank in the afternoon. Jaikie crept into his bed and fell asleep without a prayer or a thought.

He did not awake till quite late in the day, when Jiminy came to tell him that somebody had been watering the flowers in their Corner of Shadows during the night.

"_I_ think it must have been the angels," said Jiminy, before Jaikie had time to tell him how it all happened. "My father he thinks so too."

The latter statement was, of course, wholly unauthorised.

Jaikie sat up and put his foot to the floor. All the pain had gone away out of it. He told Jiminy, who had an explanation for everything. _He_ knew how the foot had got better and how the flowers were watered.

"'Course it must have been the angels, little baby angels that can't fly yet--only crawl. I did hear them scuffling about the floor last night."

And this, of course, explained everything.

BOOK FIFTH

TALES OF THE KIRK

I

THE MINISTER-EMERITUS

_Ho, let the viol's pleasing swifter grow-- Let Music's madness fascinate the will, And all Youth's pulses with the ardour thrill!

Hast thou, Old Time, e'er seen so brave a show?_

_Did not the dotard smile as he said "No"?

Pshaw! hang the grey-beard--let him prate his fill; Men are but dolts who talk of Good and Ill.

These grapes of ours are wondrous sour, I trow!_

_They sneer because we live for other things, And think they know The Good. I tell the fools We have the pleasure--We! Our master flings Full-measured bliss to all the folk he rules_,

_Nor asks he aught for quit-rent, fee, or t.i.the-- Ho, Bald-head, wherefore sharpenest thy scythe?_

In the winter season the Clint of Drumore is the forlornest spot in G.o.d's universe--twelve miles from anywhere, the roads barred with snowdrift, the great stone d.y.k.es which climb the sides of apparently inaccessible mountains sleeked fore and aft with curving banks of white.

In the howe of the hill, just where it bends away towards the valley of the Cree, stood a cottage buried up to its eyes in the snow. Originally a low thatch house, it had somewhat incongruously added on half a story, a couple of storm-windows, and a roof of purple Parton slates. There were one or two small office-houses about it devoted to a cow, a Galloway shelty, and a dozen hens. This snowy morning, from the door of the hen-house the lord of these dusky paramours occasionally jerked his head out, to see if anything hopeful had turned up. But mostly he sat forlornly enough, waiting with his comb drooping limply to one side and a foot drawn stiffly up under his feathers.

Within the cottage there was little more comfort. It consisted, as usual, of a "but" and a "ben," with a little room to the back, in which there were a bed, a chair, and a gla.s.s broken at the corner nailed to the wall. In this room a man was kneeling in front of the chair. He was clad in rusty black, with a great white handkerchief about his throat.

He prayed long and voicelessly. At last he rose, and, standing stiffly erect, slipped a small yellow photograph which he had been holding in his hand into a worn leather case.

A man of once stalwart frame, now bowed and broken, he walked habitually with the knuckles of one hand in the small of his back, as if he feared that his frail framework might give way at that point; silvery hair straggling about his temples, faded blue eyes, kindly and clouded under white shocks of eyebrow--such was the Reverend Fergus Symington, now for some years minister-emeritus. Once he had been pastor of the little hill congregation of the Bridge of Cairn, where he had faithfully served a scanty flock for thirty years. When he resigned he knew that it was but little that his people could do for him. They were sorry to part with him, and willingly enough accepted the terms which the Presbytery pressed on them, in order to be at liberty to call the man of their choice, a young student from a neighbouring glen, whose powers of fluent speech were thought remarkable in that part of the country. So Mr.

Symington left Bridge of Cairn pa.s.sing rich on thirty pounds a year, and retired with his deaf old housekeeper to the Clints of Drumore. Yet forty years before, the Reverend Fergus Symington was counted the luckiest young minister in the Stewartry; and many were the jokes made in public-house parlours and in private houses about his mercenary motives. He had married money. He had been wedded with much rejoicing to the rich daughter of a Liverpool merchant, who had made a fortune not too tenderly in the West Indian trade. Sophia Sugg was ten years the senior of her husband, and her temper was uncertain, but Fergus Symington honestly loved her. She had a tender and a kindly hearty and he had met her in the houses of the poor near her father's shooting-lodge in circ.u.mstances which did her honour. So he loved her, and told her of it as simply as though she had been a penniless la.s.s from one of the small farms that made up the staple of his congregation.

They were married, and it is obvious what the countryside would say, specially as there were many eyes that had looked not scornfully at the handsome young minister.

"This, all this was in the golden time, Long ago."

The mistress of the little white manse on the Cairn Water lived not unhappily with her husband for four years, and was then laid with her own people in the monstrous new family vault where her father lay in state. She left two children behind her--a boy of two and an infant girl of a few weeks.

The children had a nurse, Meysie d.i.c.kson, a girl who was already a woman in staidness and steadfastness at fifteen. She had been in a kind of half-hearted way engaged to be married to Weelum Lammitter, the grieve at Newlands; but when the two bairns were left on her hand, she told Weelum that he had better take Kirst Laurie, which Weelum Lammitter promptly did. There was a furnished house attached to the grieveship, and he could not let it stand empty any longer. Still, he would have preferred Meysie, other things being equal. He even said so to Kirst Laurie, especially when he was taking his tea--for Kirst was no baker.

So for twenty years the household moved on its quiet, ordered way in the manse by the Water of Cairn. Then the boy, entering into the inheritance devised to him by his mother's marriage-settlement, took the portion of goods that pertained to him, and went his way into a far country, and did there according to the manner of his kind. Meysie had been to some extent to blame for this, as had also his father. The minister himself, absorbed in his books and in his sermons, had only given occasional notice to the eager, ill-balanced boy who was growing up in his home. He had given him, indeed, his due hours of teaching till he went away to school, but he had known nothing of his recreations and amus.e.m.e.nts.

Meysie, who was by no means dumb though she was undoubtedly deaf, kept dinning in his ears that he must take his place with the highest in the land, by which she meant the young Laird of Cairnie and the Mitchels of Mitchelfleld. Some of these young fellows were exceedingly ready to show Clement Symington how to squander his ducats, and when he took the road to London he went away a pigeon ready for the plucking. The waters closed over his head, and so far as his father was concerned there was an end of him.

Elspeth Symington, the baby girl, turned out a child of another type.

Strong, masculine, resolute, with some of the determination of the old slave-driving grandfather in her, she had from an early age been under the care of a sister of her mother's. And with her she had learned many things, chiefly that sad lesson--to despise her father. It had never struck Mr. Symington in the way of complaint that he had no art or part in his wife's fortune, so that he was not disappointed when he found himself stranded in the little cottage by the Clints of Drumore with thirty pounds a year. He was lonely, it was true, but his books stood between him and unhappiness. Also Meysie, deaf and cross, grumbled and crooned loyally about his doors.

This wintry morning there was no fire in the room which was called by the minister the "study"--but by Meysie, more exactly and descriptively, "ben the hoose." The minister had written on Meysie's slate the night before that, as the peats were running done and no one could say how long the storm might continue, no fire was to be put in the study the next day.

So after Mr. Symington had eaten his porridge, taking it with a little milk from their one cow--Meysie standing by the while to "see that he suppit them"--he made an incursion or two down the house to the "room"

for some books that he needed. Then Meysie bustled about her work and cleaned up with prodigious birr and clatter, being utterly unable to hear the noise she made. The minister soon became absorbed in his book, and a light of contentment shone in his face. Occasionally his hand stole to his pocket. Meysie, whose eyes never wandered far from him, knew that he was feeling for the leather case in which he kept the photographs of his boy and girl. He liked to know that it was safe.

Elspeth had recently sent him a new portrait of herself in evening dress, with diamonds in her hair. It came from London in a large envelope with the florid monogram of Lady Smythe, the widow of the ex-Lord Mayor, upon it. The minister considered it the last triumph of art, and often took it out of his pocket to look at when he thought Meysie was not looking. She always was, however. She had little else to do. Nevertheless, Meysie knew, for all that, the worn yellow "card" of the lost son who never wrote or sent him anything, to be the dearest to him.

While the minister sat pondering over his book, Meysie went to the back door, and stood there a moment vaguely gazing out on the snow. As she did so, a figure came slouching round the corner of the byre. Meysie quickly shut the door behind her, and turned the key. Any visitor was a strange surprise in winter at the Clints of Drumore. But this figure she knew at the first glance. It was the Prodigal Son come home--the boy whom she had reared from the time that she took his sister from his dying mother's arms. Some deadly fear constrained her to lock the door behind her. For the lad's looks were terribly altered. There was a sullen, callous dourness where bright self-will had once had its dwelling. His clothing had once been fashionable, but it was now torn at the b.u.t.tonholes and frayed at the cuffs.

"Clement Symington, what brings ye to the Clints o' Drumore?" asked the old woman, going forward and taking hold of the skirts of his surtout, her face blanched like the blue shadows on the winter snow.