THE BARN.
By this time Gibbie had got well up towards the roots of the hills of
Gormgarnet, and the river had dwindled greatly. He was no longer afraid
of it, but would lie for hours listening to its murmurs over its pebbly
bed, and sometimes even sleep in the hollows of its banks, or below the
willows that overhung it. Every here and there, a brown rivulet from
some peat-bog on a hill--brown and clear, like smoke-crystals molten
together, flowed into it, and when he had lost it, guided him back
to his guide. Farm after farm he passed, here one widely bordering a
valley stream, there another stretching its skirts up the hillsides
till they were lost in mere heather, where the sheep wandered about,
cropping what stray grass-blades and other eatables they could find.
Lower down he had passed through small towns and large villages: here,
farms and cottages, with an occasional country-seat and little village
of low thatched houses, made up the abodes of men. By this time he had
become greatly reconciled to the loneliness of Nature, and no more was
afraid in her solitary presence.
At the same time his heart had begun to ache and long after the
communion of his kind. For not once since he set out--and that seemed
months where it was only weeks, had he had an opportunity of doing
anything for anybody--except, indeed, unfastening the dog’s collar; and
not to be able to help was to Gibbie like being dead. Everybody, down
to the dogs, had been doing for him, and what was to become of him! It
was a state altogether of servitude into which he had fallen.
May had now set in, but up here among the hills she was May by courtesy
only: or if she was May, she would never be Might. She was, indeed,
only April, with her showers and sunshine, her tearful, childish
laughter, and again the frown, and the despair irremediable. Nay, as
if she still kept up a secret correspondence with her cousin March,
banished for his rudeness, she would not very seldom shake from her
skirts a snow storm, and oftener the dancing hail. Then out would come
the sun behind her, and laugh, and say--“I could not help _that_; but
here I am all the same, coming to you as fast as I can!” The green
crops were growing darker, and the trees were all getting out their
nets to catch carbon. The lambs were frolicking, and in sheltered
places the flowers were turning the earth into a firmament. And now
a mere daisy was enough to delight the heart of Gibbie. His joy in
humanity so suddenly checked, and his thirst for it left unslaked, he
had begun to see the human look in the face of the commonest flowers,
to love the trusting stare of the daisy, that gold-hearted boy, and the
gentle despondency of the girl harebell, dreaming of her mother, the
azure. The wind, of which he had scarce thought as he met it roaming
the streets like himself, was now a friend of his solitude, bringing
him sweet odours, alive with the souls of bees, and cooling with bliss
the heat of the long walk. Even when it blew cold along the waste moss,
waving the heads of the cotton-grass, the only live thing visible, it
was a lover, and kissed him on the forehead. Not that Gibbie knew what
a kiss was, any more than he knew about the souls of bees. He did not
remember ever having been kissed. In that granite city, the women were
not much given to kissing children, even their own, but if they had
been, who of them would have thought of kissing Gibbie! The baker’s
wife, kind as she always was to him, would have thought it defilement
to press her lips to those of the beggar child. And how is any child
to thrive without kisses! The first caresses Gibbie ever knew as
such, were given him by Mother Nature herself. It was only, however,
by degrees, though indeed rapid degrees, that he became capable of
them. In the first part of his journey he was stunned, stupid, lost in
change, distracted between a suddenly vanished past, and a future slow
dawning in the present. He felt little beyond hunger, and that vague
urging up Daurside, with occasional shoots of pleasure from kindness,
mostly of woman and dog. He was less shy of the country people by this
time, but he did not care to seek them. He thought them not nearly
so friendly and good as the town-people, forgetting that those knew
him and these did not. To Gibbie an introduction was the last thing
necessary for any one who wore a face, and he could not understand why
they looked at him so.
Whatever is capable of aspiring, must be troubled that it may wake and
aspire--then troubled still, that it may hold fast, be itself, and
aspire still.
One evening his path vanished between twilight and moonrise, and just
as it became dark he found himself at a rough gate, through which he
saw a field. There was a pretty tall hedge on each side of the gate,
and he was now a sufficiently experienced traveller to conclude that
he was not far from some human abode. He climbed the gate and found
himself in a field of clover. It was a splendid big bed, and even had
the night not been warm, he would not have hesitated to sleep in it. He
had never had a cold, and had as little fear for his health as for his
life. He was hungry, it is true; but although food was doubtless more
delicious to such hunger as his--that of the whole body--than it can be
to the mere palate and culinary imagination of an epicure, it was not
so necessary to him that he could not go to sleep without it. So down
he lay in the clover, and was at once unconscious.
When he woke, the moon was high in the heavens, and had melted the veil
of the darkness from the scene of still, well-ordered comfort. A short
distance from his couch, stood a little army of ricks, between twenty
and thirty of them, constructed perfectly--smooth and upright and round
and large, each with its conical top netted in with straw-rope, and
finished off with what the herd-boy called a _toupican_--a neatly tied
and trim tuft of the straw with which it was thatched, answering to the
stone-ball on the top of a gable. Like triangles their summits stood
out against the pale blue, moon-diluted air. They were treasure-caves,
hollowed out of space, and stored with the best of ammunition against
the armies of hunger and want; but Gibbie, though he had seen many
of them, did not know what they were. He had seen straw used for the
bedding of cattle and horses, and supposed _that_ the chief end of
such ricks. Nor had he any clear idea that the cattle themselves were
kept for any other object than to make them comfortable and happy. He
had stood behind their houses in the dark, and heard them munching
and grinding away even in the night. Probably the country was for
the cattle, as the towns for the men; and that would explain why
the country-people were so inferior. While he stood gazing, a wind
arose behind the hills, and came blowing down some glen that opened
northwards; Gibbie felt it cold, and sought the shelter of the ricks.
Great and solemn they looked as he drew nigh--near each other, yet
enough apart for plenty of air to flow and eddy between. Over a low
wall of unmortared stones, he entered their ranks: above him, as he
looked up from their broad base, they ascended huge as pyramids,
and peopled the waste air with giant forms. How warm it was in the
round-winding paths amongst the fruitful piles--tombs these, no
cenotaphs! He wandered about them, now in a dusky yellow gloom, and now
in the cold blue moonlight, which they seemed to warm. At length he
discovered that the huge things were flanked on one side by a long low
house, in which there was a door, horizontally divided into two parts.
Gibbie would fain have got in, to try whether the place was good for
sleep; but he found both halves fast. In the lower half, however, he
spied a hole, which, though not so large, reminded him of the entrance
to the kennel of his dog host; but alas! it had a door too, shut from
the inside. There might be some way of opening it. He felt about, and
soon discovered that it was a sliding valve, which he could push to
either side. It was, in fact, the cat’s door, specially constructed for
her convenience of entrance and exit. For the cat is the guardian of
the barn; the grain which tempts the rats and mice is no temptation to
her; the rats and mice themselves are; upon them she executes justice,
and remains herself an incorruptible, because untempted, therefore a
respectable member of the farm-community--only the dairy door must be
kept shut; that has no cat-wicket in it.
The hole was a small one, but tempting to the wee baronet; he might
perhaps be able to squeeze himself through. He tried and succeeded,
though with some little difficulty. The moon was there before him,
shining through a pane or two of glass over the door, and by her light
on the hard brown clay floor, Gibbie saw where he was, though if he had
been told he was in the barn, he would neither have felt nor been at
all the wiser. It was a very old-fashioned barn. About a third of it
was floored with wood--dark with age--almost as brown as the clay--for
threshing upon with flails. At that labour two men had been busy
during the most of the preceding day, and that was how, in the same
end of the barn, rose a great heap of oat-straw, showing in the light
of the moon like a mound of pale gold. Had Gibbie had any education
in the marvellous, he might now, in the midnight and moonlight, have
well imagined himself in some treasure-house of the gnomes. What he
saw in the other corner was still liker gold, and was indeed greater
than gold, for it was life--the heap, namely, of corn threshed from
the straw: Gibbie recognized this as what he had seen given to horses.
But now the temptation to sleep, with such facilities presented, was
overpowering, and took from him all desire to examine further: he shot
into the middle of the loose heap of straw, and vanished from the
glimpses of the moon, burrowing like a mole. In the heart of the golden
warmth, he lay so dry and comfortable that, notwithstanding his hunger
had waked with him, he was presently in a faster sleep than before. And
indeed what more luxurious bed, or what bed conducive to softer slumber
was there in the world to find!
“The moving moon went _down_ the sky,” the cold wind softened and grew
still; the stars swelled out larger; the rats came, and then came puss,
and the rats went with a scuffle and patter; the pagan grey came in
like a sleep-walker, and made the barn dreary as a dull dream; then
the horses began to fidget with their big feet, the cattle to low with
their great trombone throats, and the cocks to crow as if to give
warning for the last time against the devil, the world, and the flesh;
the men in the adjoining chamber woke, yawned, stretched themselves
mightily, and rose; the god-like sun rose after them, and, entering the
barn with them, drove out the grey; and through it all, the orphan lay
warm in God’s keeping and his nest of straw, like the butterfly of a
huge chrysalis.
When at length Gibbie became once more aware of existence, it was
through a stormy invasion of the still realm of sleep; the blows of two
flails fell persistent and quick-following, first on the thick head of
the sheaf of oats untied and cast down before them, then grew louder
and more deafening as the oats flew and the chaff fluttered, and the
straw flattened and broke and thinned and spread--until at last they
thundered in great hard blows on the wooden floor. It was the first of
these last blows that shook Gibbie awake. What they were or indicated
he could not tell. He wormed himself softly round in the straw to look
out and see.
Now whether it was that sleep was yet heavy upon him, and bewildered
his eyes, or that his imagination had in dreams been busy with foregone
horrors, I cannot tell; but, as he peered through the meshes of the
crossing and blinding straws, what he seemed to see was the body of an
old man with dishevelled hair, whom, prostrate on the ground, they were
beating to death with great sticks. His tongue clave to the roof of his
mouth, not a sound could he utter, not a finger could he move; he had
no choice but to lie still, and witness the fierce enormity. But it is
good that we are compelled to see some things, life amongst the rest,
to what we call the end of them. By degrees Gibbie’s sight cleared;
the old man faded away; and what was left of him he could see to be
only an armful of straw. The next sheaf they threw down, he perceived,
under their blows, the corn flying out of it, and began to understand
a little. When it was finished, the corn that had flown dancing from
its home, like hail from its cloud, was swept aside to the common heap,
and the straw tossed up on the mound that harboured Gibbie. It was well
that the man with the pitchfork did not spy his eyes peering out from
the midst of the straw: he might have taken him for some wild creature,
and driven the prongs into him. As it was, Gibbie did not altogether
like the look of him, and lay still as a stone. Then another sheaf
was unbound and cast on the floor, and the blows of the flails began
again. It went on thus for an hour and a half, and Gibbie although
he dropped asleep several times, was nearly stupid with the noise.
The men at length, however, swept up the corn and tossed up the straw
for the last time, and went out. Gibbie, judging by his own desires,
thought they must have gone to eat, but did not follow them, having
generally been ordered away the moment he was seen in a farmyard. He
crept out, however, and began to look about him--first of all for
something he could eat. The oats looked the most likely, and he took
a mouthful for a trial. He ground at them severely, but, hungry as he
was, he failed to find oats good for food. Their hard husks, their
dryness, their instability, all slipping past each other at every
attempt to crush them with his teeth, together foiled him utterly. He
must search farther. Looking round him afresh, he saw an open loft,
and climbing on the heap in which he had slept, managed to reach it.
It was at the height of the walls, and the couples of the roof rose
immediately from it. At the farther end was a heap of hay, which he
took for another kind of straw. Then he spied something he knew; a row
of cheeses lay on a shelf suspended from the rafters, ripening. Gibbie
knew them well from the shop windows--knew they were cheeses, and good
to eat, though whence and how they came he did not know, his impression
being that they grew in the fields like the turnips. He had still the
notion uncorrected, that things in the country belonged to nobody in
particular, and were mostly for the use of animals, with which, since
he became a wanderer, he had almost come to class himself. He was very
hungry. He pounced upon a cheese and lifted it between his two hands;
it smelled good, but felt very hard. That was no matter: what else were
teeth made strong and sharp for? He tried them on one of the round
edges, and, nibbling actively, soon got through to the softer body
of the cheese. But he had not got much farther when he heard the men
returning, and desisted, afraid of being discovered by the noise he
made. The readiest way to conceal himself was to lie down flat on the
loft, and he did so just where he could see the threshing-floor over
the edge of it by lifting his head. This, however, he scarcely ventured
to do; and all he could see as he lay was the tip of the swing-bar of
one of the flails, ever as it reached the highest point of its ascent.
But to watch for it very soon ceased to be interesting; and although
he had eaten so little of the cheese, it had yet been enough to make
him dreadfully thirsty, therefore he greatly desired to get away. But
he dared not go down: with their sticks those men might knock him over
in a moment! So he lay there thinking of the poor little hedgehog he
had seen on the road as he came; how he stood watching it, and wishing
he had a suit made all of great pins, which he could set up when he
pleased; and how the driver of a cart, catching sight of him at the
foot of the hedge, gave him a blow with his whip, and, poor fellow!
notwithstanding his clothes of pins, that one blow of a whip was too
much for him! There seemed nothing in the world but killing!
At length he could, unoccupied with something else, bear his thirst no
longer, and, squirming round on the floor, crept softly towards the
other end of the loft, to see what was to be seen there.
He found that the heap of hay was not in the loft at all. It filled a
small chamber in the stable, in fact; and when Gibbie clambered upon
it, what should he see below him on the other side, but a beautiful
white horse, eating some of the same sort of stuff he was now lying
upon! Beyond he could see the backs of more horses, but they were very
different--big and clumsy, and not white. They were all eating, and
this was their food on which he lay! He wished he too could eat it--and
tried, but found it even less satisfactory than the oats, for it nearly
choked him, and set him coughing so that he was in considerable danger
of betraying his presence to the men in the barn. How did the horses
manage to get such dry stuff down their throats? But the cheese was dry
too, and he could eat that! No doubt the cheese, as well as the fine
straw, was there for the horses! He would like to see the beautiful
white creature down there eat a bit of it; but with all his big teeth
he did not think he could manage a whole cheese, and how to get a piece
broken off for him, with those men there, he could not devise. It
would want a long-handled hammer like those with which he had seen men
breaking stones on the road.
A door opened beyond, and a man came in and led two of the horses out,
leaving the door open. Gibbie clambered down from the top of the hay
into the stall beside the white horse, and ran out. He was almost in
the fields, had not even a fence to cross.
He cast a glance around, and went straight for a neighbouring hollow,
where, taught by experience, he hoped to find water.