Sir Gibbie Part 37

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 h.e.l.lfire 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.

"G.o.d 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 pa.s.sers-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 rect.i.tude, such as it was, trying to hold it still his own, he would sit for hours without moving--a perfect creature, temple, G.o.d, and worshipper, all in one--only that the worshipper was hardly content with his G.o.d, 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sociated. 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 n.o.body. When the gate-bell rang, he always looked out, and if a visitor appeared, withdrew to his bedroom.

One brilliant Sat.u.r.day 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 repet.i.tion it had lost force. In haste she put on her little brown-ribboned bonnet, took the moth-eaten m.u.f.f 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 m.u.f.fler, 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 ma.n.u.script, 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 a.s.sault. 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 ma.n.u.script 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 obligat.i.t 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."