GIBBIE’S CALLING.
I am not sure that his father’s neglect was not on the whole better for
Gibbie than would have been the kindness of such a father persistently
embodying itself. But the picture of Sir George, by the help of whisky
and the mild hatching oven of Mistress Croale’s parlour, softly
breaking from the shell of the cobbler, and floating a mild gentleman
in the air of his lukewarm imagination, and poor wee Gibbie trotting
outside in the frosty dark of the autumn night, through which the
moon keeps staring down, vague and disconsolate, is hardly therefore
the less pathetic. Under the window of the parlour where the light of
revel shone radiant through a red curtain, he would stand listening
for a moment, then, darting off a few yards suddenly and swiftly like
a scared bird, fall at once into his own steady trot--up the lane and
down, till he reached the window again, where again he would stand and
listen. Whether he made this departure and return twenty or a hundred
times in a night, he nor any one else could have told. Sometimes he
would for a change extend his trot along the Widdiehill, sometimes
along the parallel Vennel, but never far from Jink Lane and its glowing
window. Never moth haunted lamp so persistently. Ever as he ran, up
this pavement and down that, on the soft-sounding soles of his bare
feet, the smile on the boy’s face grew more and more sleepy, but still
he smiled and still he trotted, still paused at the window, and still
started afresh.
He was not so much to be pitied as my reader may think. Never in his
life had he yet pitied himself. The thought of hardship or wrong had
not occurred to him. It would have been difficult--impossible, I
believe--to get the idea into his head that existence bore to him any
other shape than it ought. Things were with him as they had always
been, and whence was he to take a fresh start, and question what had
been from the beginning? Had any authority interfered, with a decree
that Gibbie should no more scour the midnight streets, no more pass and
repass that far-shining splendour of red, then indeed would bitter,
though inarticulate, complaint have burst from his bosom. But there
was no evil power to issue such a command, and Gibbie’s peace was not
invaded.
It was now late, and those streets were empty; neither carriage nor
cart, wheelbarrow nor truck, went any more bumping and clattering
over their stones. They were well lighted with gas, but most of the
bordering houses were dark. Now and then a single foot-farer passed
with loud, hollow-sounding boots along the pavement; or two girls
would come laughing along, their merriment echoing rude in the wide
stillness. A cold wind, a small, forsaken, solitary wind, moist with
a thin fog, seemed, as well as wee Gibbie, to be roaming the night,
for it met him at various corners, and from all directions. But it had
nothing to do, and nowhere to go, and there it was not like Gibbie, the
business of whose life was even now upon him, the mightiest hope of
whose conscious being was now awake.
All he expected, or ever desired to discover, by listening at the
window, was simply whether there were yet signs of the company’s
breaking up; and his conclusions on that point were never mistaken:
how he arrived at them it would be hard to say. Seldom had he there
heard the voice of his father, still seldomer anything beyond its tone.
This night, however, as the time drew near when they must go, lest
the Sabbath should be broken in Mistress Croale’s decent house, and
Gibbie stood once more on tiptoe, with his head just on the level of
the windowsill, he heard his father utter two words: “Up Daurside” came
to him through the window, in the voice he loved, plain and distinct.
The words conveyed to him nothing at all; the mere hearing of them
made them memorable. For the time, however, he forgot them, for, by
indications best known to himself, he perceived that the company was on
the point of separating, and from that moment did not take his eyes off
the door until he heard the first sounds of its opening. As, however,
it was always hard for Gibbie to stand still, and especially hard on
a midnight so cold that his feet threatened to grow indistinguishable
from the slabs of the pavement, he was driven, in order not to lose
sight of it, to practise the art, already cultivated by him to a
crab-like perfection, of running first backwards, then forwards with
scarcely superior speed. But it was not long ere the much expected
sound of Mistress Croale’s voice heralded the hour for patience to
blossom into possession. The voice was neither loud nor harsh, but
clear and firm; the noise that followed was both loud and strident.
Voices had a part in it, but the movement of chairs and feet and the
sudden contact of different portions of the body with walls and tables,
had a larger. The guests were obeying the voice of their hostess all
in one like a flock of sheep, but it was poor shepherd-work to turn
them out of the fold at midnight. Gibbie bounded up and stood still as
a statue at the very door-cheek, until he heard Mistress Croale’s hand
upon the lock, when he bolted, trembling with eagerness, into the entry
of a court a few houses nearer to the Widdiehill.
One after one the pitiable company issued from its paradise, and each
stumbled away, too far gone for leave-taking. Most of them passed
Gibbie where he stood, but he took no heed; his father was always the
last--and the least capable. But, often as he left her door, never did
it close behind him until with her own eyes Mistress Croale had seen
Gibbie dart like an imp out of the court--to take him in charge, and,
all the weary way home, hover, not very like a guardian angel, but not
the less one in truth, around the unstable equilibrium of his father’s
tall and swaying form. And thereupon commenced a series of marvellous
gymnastics on the part of wee Gibbie. Imagine a small boy with a
gigantic top, which, six times his own size, he keeps erect on its peg,
not by whipping it round, but by running round it himself, unfailingly
applying, at the very spot and at the very moment, the precise measure
of impact necessary to counterbalance its perpetual tendency to fall in
one direction or another, so that the two have all the air of a single
invention--such an invention as one might meet with in an ancient
clock, contrived when men had time to mingle play with earnest--and you
will have in your mind’s eye a real likeness of Sir George attended,
any midnight in the week, by his son Gilbert. Home the big one
staggered, reeled, gyrated, and tumbled; round and round him went the
little one, now behind, now before, now on this side, now on that, his
feet never more than touching the ground but dancing about like those
of a prize-fighter, his little arms up and his hands well forward, like
flying buttresses. And such indeed they were--buttresses which flew and
flew all about a universally leaning tower. They propped it here, they
propped it there; with wonderful judgment and skill and graduation of
force they applied themselves, and with perfect success. Not once, for
the last year and a half, during which time wee Gibbie had been the
nightly guide of Sir George’s homeward steps, had the self-disabled
mass fallen prostrate in the gutter, there to snore out the night.
The first special difficulty, that of turning the corner of Jink Lane
and the Widdiehill, successfully overcome, the twain went reeling
and revolving along the street, much like a whirlwind that had half
forgotten the laws of gyration, until at length it spun into the court,
and up to the foot of the outside stair over the baronet’s workshop.
Then commenced the real struggle of the evening for Gibbie--and for his
father too, though the latter was aware of it only in the momentary and
evanescent flashes of such enlightenment as made him just capable of
yielding to the pushes and pulls of the former. All up the outside and
the two inside stairs, his waking and sleeping were as the alternate
tictac of a pendulum; but Gibbie stuck to his business like a man, and
his resolution and perseverance were at length, as always, crowned with
victory.
The house in which lords and ladies had often reposed was now filled
with very humble folk, who were all asleep when Gibbie and his
father entered; but the noise they made in ascending caused no great
disturbance of their rest; for, if any of them were roused for a
moment, it was but to recognize at once the cause of the tumult, and
with the remark, “It’s only wee Gibbie luggin’ hame Sir George,” to
turn on the other side and fall asleep again.
Arrived at last at the garret door, which stood wide open, Gibbie had
small need of light in the nearly pitch darkness of the place, for
there was positively nothing to stumble over or against between the
door and the ancient four-post bed, which was all of his father’s house
that remained to Sir George. With heavy shuffling feet the drunkard
lumbered laboriously bedward; and the bare posts and crazy frame
groaned and creaked as he fell upon the oat-chaff that lay waiting him
in place of the vanished luxury of feathers. Wee Gibbie flew at his
legs, nor rested until, the one after the other, he had got them on the
bed; if then they were not very comfortably deposited, he knew that, in
his first turn, their owner would get them all right.
And now rose the _culmen_ of Gibbie’s day! its cycle, rounded through
regions of banishment, returned to its nodus of bliss. In triumph he
spread over his sleeping father his dead mother’s old plaid of Gordon
tartan, all the bedding they had, and without a moment’s further
delay--no shoes even to put off--crept under it, and nestled close
upon the bosom of his unconscious parent. A victory more! another day
ended with success! his father safe, and all his own! the canopy of the
darkness and the plaid over them, as if they were the only two in the
universe! his father unable to leave him--his for whole dark hours to
come! It was Gibbie’s paradise now! His heaven was his father’s bosom,
to which he clung as no infant yet ever clung to his mother’s. He never
thought to pity himself that the embrace was all on his side, that no
answering pressure came back from the prostrate form. He never said
to himself, “My father is a drunkard, but I must make the best of it;
he is all I have!” He clung to his one possession--only clung: this
was his father--all in all to him. What must be the bliss of such a
heart--of any heart--when it comes to know that there is a father of
fathers, yea, a father of fatherhood! a father who never slumbers nor
sleeps, but holds all the sleeping in his ever waking bosom--a bosom
whose wakefulness is the sole fountain of their slumber!
The conscious bliss of the child was of short duration, for in a few
minutes he was fast asleep; but for the gain of those few minutes only,
the day had been well spent.