Kirsty
My father had a housekeeper, a trusty woman, he considered her. We
thought her _very_ old. I suppose she was about forty. She was not
pleasant, for she was grim-faced and censorious, with a very straight
back, and a very long upper lip. Indeed the distance from her nose to
her mouth was greater than the length of her nose. When I think of her
first, it is always as making some complaint to my father against
us. Perhaps she meant to speak the truth, or rather, perhaps took it
for granted that she always did speak the truth; but certainly she
would exaggerate things, and give them quite another look. The bones
of her story might be true, but she would put a skin over it after her
own fashion, which was not one of mildness and charity. The
consequence was that the older we grew, the more our minds were
alienated from her, and the more we came to regard her as our enemy.
If she really meant to be our friend after the best fashion she knew,
it was at least an uncomely kind of friendship, that showed itself in
constant opposition, fault-finding, and complaint. The real mistake
was that we were boys. There was something in her altogether
antagonistic to the boy-nature. You would have thought that to be a
boy was in her eyes to be something wrong to begin with; that boys
ought never to have been made; that they must always, by their very
nature, be about something amiss. I have occasionally wondered how she
would have behaved to a girl. On reflection, I think a little better;
but the girl would have been worse off, because she could not have
escaped from her as we did. My father would hear her complaints to the
end without putting in a word, except it were to ask her a question,
and when she had finished, would turn again to his book or his sermon,
saying--
“Very well, Mrs. Mitchell; I will speak to them about it.”
My impression is that he did not believe the half she told him. At all
events, when he had sent for us, he would ask our version of the
affair, and listen to that as he had listened to hers. Then he would
set forth to us where we had been wrong, if we were wrong, and send us
away with an injunction not to provoke Mrs. Mitchell, who couldn’t
help being short in her temper, poor thing! Somehow or other we got it
into our heads that the shortness of her temper was mysteriously
associated with the shortness of her nose.
She was saving even to stinginess. She would do her best to provide
what my father liked, but for us she thought almost anything good
enough. She would, for instance, give us the thinnest of milk--we said
she skimmed it three times before she thought it blue enough for us.
My two younger brothers did not mind it so much as I did, for I was
always rather delicate, and if I took a dislike to anything, would
rather go without than eat or drink of it. But I have told you enough
about her to make it plain that she could be no favourite with us; and
enough likewise to serve as a background to my description of Kirsty.
Kirsty was a Highland woman who had the charge of the house in which
the farm servants lived. She was a cheerful, gracious, kind woman--a
woman of God’s making, one would say, were it not that, however
mysterious it may look, we cannot deny that he made Mrs. Mitchell too.
It is very puzzling, I confess. I remember once that my youngest
brother Davie, a very little fellow then, for he could not speak
plainly, came running in great distress to Kirsty, crying, “Fee, fee!”
by which he meant to indicate that a flea was rendering his life
miserable. Kirsty at once undressed him and entered on the pursuit.
After a successful search, while she was putting on his garments
again, little Davie, who had been looking very solemn and thoughtful
for some time, said, not in a questioning, but in a concluding tone--
“God didn’t make the fees, Kirsty!”
“Oh yes, Davie! God made everything. God did make the fleas,” said
Kirsty.
Davie was silent for a while. Then he opened his mouth and spake like
a discontented prophet of old:
“Why doesn’t he give them something else to eat, then?”
“You must ask himself that,” said Kirsty, with a wisdom I have since
learned to comprehend, though I remember it shocked me a little at the
time.
All this set me thinking. Before the dressing of little Davie was
over, I had _my_ question to put to Kirsty. It was, in fact, the same
question, only with a more important object in the eye of it.
“_Then_ I suppose God made Mrs. Mitchell, as well as you and the rest
of us, Kirsty?” I said.
“Certainly, Ranald,” returned Kirsty.
“Well, I wish he hadn’t,” was my remark, in which I only imitated my
baby brother, who was always much cleverer than I.
“Oh! she’s not a bad sort,” said Kirsty; “though I must say, if I was
her, I would try to be a little more agreeable.”
To return to Kirsty: she was our constant resort. The farmhouse was a
furlong or so from the manse, but with the blood pouring from a cut
finger, the feet would of themselves devour that furlong rather than
apply to Mrs. Mitchell. Oh! she was dear, and good, and kind, our
Kirsty!
In person she was short and slender, with keen blue eyes and dark
hair; an uncommonly small foot, which she claimed for all Highland
folk; a light step, a sweet voice, and a most bounteous hand--but
there I come into the moral nature of her, for it is the mind that
makes the hand bountiful. For her face, I think that was rather queer,
but in truth I can hardly tell, so entirely was it the sign of good to
me and my brothers; in short, I loved her so much that I do not know
now, even as I did not care then, whether she was nice-looking or not.
She was quite as old as Mrs. Mitchell, but we never thought of _her_
being old. She was our refuge in all time of trouble and necessity. It
was she who gave us something to eat as often and as much as we
wanted. She used to say it was no cheating of the minister to feed
the minister’s boys.
And then her stories! There was nothing like them in all that
countryside. It was rather a dreary country in outward aspect, having
many bleak moorland hills, that lay about like slow-stiffened waves,
of no great height but of much desolation; and as far as the
imagination was concerned, it would seem that the minds of former
generations had been as bleak as the country, they had left such small
store of legends of any sort. But Kirsty had come from a region where
the hills were hills indeed--hills with mighty skeletons of stone
inside them; hills that looked as if they had been heaped over huge
monsters which were ever trying to get up--a country where every
cliff, and rock, and well had its story--and Kirsty’s head was full of
such. It was delight indeed to sit by her fire and listen to them.
That would be after the men had had their supper, early of a winter
night, and had gone, two of them to the village, and the other to
attend to the horses. Then we and the herd, as we called the boy who
attended to the cattle, whose work was over for the night, would sit
by the fire, and Kirsty would tell us stories, and we were in our
heaven.