JANET.
Once away, Gibbie had no thought of returning. _Up Daurside_ was the
sole propulsive force whose existence he recognized. But when he lifted
his head from drinking at the stream, which was one of some size, and,
greatly refreshed, looked up its channel, a longing seized him to know
whence came the water of life which had thus restored him to bliss--how
a burn first appears upon the earth. He thought it might come from the
foot of a great conical mountain which seemed but a little way off. He
would follow it up and see. So away he went, yielding at once, as was
his wont, to the first desire that came. He had not trotted far along
the bank, however, before, at a sharp turn it took, he saw that its
course was a much longer one than he had imagined, for it turned from
the mountain, and led up among the roots of other hills; while here
in front of him, direct from the mountain, as it seemed, came down a
smaller stream, and tumbled noisily into this. The larger burn would
lead him too far from the Daur; he would follow the smaller one. He
found a wide shallow place, crossed the larger, and went up the side of
the smaller.
Doubly free after his imprisonment of the morning, Gibbie sped joyously
along. Already, nature, her largeness, her openness, her loveliness,
her changefulness, her oneness in change, had begun to heal the child’s
heart, and comfort him in his disappointment with his kind. The stream
he was now ascending ran along a claw of the mountain, which claw was
covered with almost a forest of pine, protecting little colonies of
less hardy timber. Its heavy green was varied with the pale delicate
fringes of the fresh foliage of the larches, filling the air with
aromatic breath. In the midst of their soft tufts, each tuft buttoned
with a brown spot, hung the rich brown knobs and tassels of last year’s
cones. But the trees were all on the opposite side of the stream, and
appeared to be mostly on the other side of a wall. Where Gibbie was,
the mountain-root was chiefly of rock, interspersed with heather.
A little way up the stream, he came to a bridge over it, closed at the
farther end by iron gates between pillars, each surmounted by a wolf’s
head in stone. Over the gate on each side leaned a rowan-tree, with
trunk and branches aged and gnarled amidst their fresh foliage. He
crossed the burn to look through the gate, and pressed his face between
the bars to get a better sight of a tame rabbit that had got out of its
hutch. It sat, like a Druid white with age, in the midst of a gravel
drive, much overgrown with moss, that led through a young larch wood,
with here and there an ancient tree, lonely amidst the youth of its
companions. Suddenly from the wood a large spaniel came bounding upon
the rabbit. Gibbie gave a shriek, and the rabbit made one white flash
into the wood, with the dog after him. He turned away sad at heart.
“Ilka cratur ’at can,” he said to himself, “ates ilka cratur ’at canna!”
It was his first generalization, but not many years passed before he
supplemented it with a conclusion:
“But the man ’at wad be a man, he maunna.”
Resuming his journey of investigation, he trotted along the bank of the
burn, farther and farther up, until he could trot no more, but must go
clambering over great stones, or sinking to the knees in bog, patches
of it red with iron, from which he would turn away with a shudder.
Sometimes he walked in the water, along the bed of the burn itself;
sometimes he had to scramble up its steep side, to pass one of the many
little cataracts of its descent. Here and there a small silver birch,
or a mountain-ash, or a stunted fir-tree, looking like a wizard child,
hung over the stream. Its banks were mainly of rock and heather, but
now and then a small patch of cultivation intervened. Gibbie had no
thought that he was gradually leaving the abodes of men behind him; he
knew no reason why in ascending things should change, and be no longer
as in plainer ways. For what he knew, there might be farm after farm,
up and up for ever, to the gates of heaven. But it would no longer
have troubled him greatly to leave all houses behind him for a season.
A great purple foxglove could do much now, just at this phase of his
story, to make him forget--not the human face divine, but the loss of
it. A lark aloft in the blue, from whose heart, as from a fountain
whose roots were lost in the air, its natural source, issued, not a
stream, but an ever spreading lake of song, was now more to him than
the memory of any human voice he had ever heard, except his father’s
and Sambo’s. But he was not yet quite out and away from the dwellings
of his kind.
I may as well now make the attempt to give some idea of Gibbie’s
appearance, as he showed after so long wandering. Of dress he had
hardly enough left to carry the name. Shoes, of course, he had none.
Of the shape of trousers there remained nothing, except the division
before and behind in the short petticoat to which they were reduced;
and those rudimentary divisions were lost in the multitude of rents
of equal apparent significance. He had never, so far as he knew,
had a shirt upon his body; and his sole other garment was a jacket,
so much too large for him, that to retain the use of his hands he
had folded back the sleeves quite to his elbows. Thus reversed they
became pockets, the only ones he had, and in them he stowed whatever
provisions were given him of which he could not make immediate
use--porridge and sowens and mashed potatoes included: they served
him, in fact, like the first of the stomachs of those animals which
have more than one--concerning which animals, by the way, I should
much like to know what they were in “Pythagoras’ time.” His head had
plentiful protection in his own natural crop--had never either had or
required any other. That would have been of the gold order, had not a
great part of its colour been sunburnt, rained, and frozen out of it.
All ways it pointed, as if surcharged with electric fluid, crowning
him with a wildness which was in amusing contrast with the placidity
of his countenance. Perhaps the resulting queerness in the expression
of the little vagrant, a look as if he had been hunted till his body
and soul were nearly ruffled asunder, and had already parted company in
aim and interest, might have been the first thing to strike a careless
observer. But if the heart was not a careless one, the eye would look
again and discover a stronger stillness than mere placidity--a sort
of live peace abiding in that weather-beaten little face under its
wild crown of human herbage. The features of it were well-shaped, and
not smaller than proportioned to the small whole of his person. His
eyes--partly, perhaps, because there was so little flesh upon his
bones--were large, and in repose had much of a soft animal expression:
there was not in them the look of _You and I know_. Frequently, too,
when occasion roused the needful instinct, they had a sharp expression
of outlook and readiness, which, without a trace of fierceness or
greed, was yet equally animal. Only, all the time there was present
something else, beyond characterization: behind them something seemed
to lie asleep. His hands and feet were small and childishly dainty, his
whole body well-shaped and well put together--of which the style of his
dress rather quashed the evidence.
Such was Gibbie to the eye, as he rose from Daurside to the last
cultivated ground on the borders of the burn, and the highest dwelling
on the mountain. It was the abode of a cottar, and was a dependency
of the farm he had just left. The cottar was an old man of seventy;
his wife was nearly sixty. They had reared stalwart sons and shapely
daughters, now at service here and there in the valleys below--all
ready to see God in nature, and recognize Him in providence. They
belong to a class now, I fear, extinct, but once, if my love prejudice
not my judgment too far, the glory and strength of Scotland: their
little acres are now swallowed up in the larger farms.
It was a very humble dwelling, built of turf upon a foundation of
stones, and roofed with turf and straw--warm, and nearly impervious to
the searching airs of the mountain-side. One little window of a foot
and a half square looked out on the universe. At one end stood a stack
of peat, half as big as the cottage itself. All around it were huge
rocks, some of them peaks whose masses went down to the very central
fires, others only fragments that had rolled from above. Here and
there a thin crop was growing in patches amongst them, the red grey
stone lifting its baldness in spots numberless through the soft waving
green. A few of the commonest flowers grew about the door, but there
was no garden. The door-step was live rock, and a huge projecting rock
behind formed the back and a portion of one of the end walls. This
latter rock had been the attraction to the site, because of a hollow
in it, which now served as a dairy. For up there with them lived the
last cow of the valley--the cow that breathed the loftiest air on all
Daurside--a good cow, and gifted in feeding well upon little. Facing
the broad south, and leaning against the hill, as against the bosom
of God, sheltering it from the north and east, the cottage looked so
high-humble, so still, so confident, that it drew Gibbie with the spell
of heart-likeness. He knocked at the old, weather-beaten, shrunk and
rent, but well patched door. A voice, alive with the soft vibrations of
thought and feeling, answered,
“Come yer wa’s in, whae’er ye be.”
Gibbie pulled the string that came through a hole in the door, so
lifting the latch, and entered.
A woman sat on a creepie, her face turned over her shoulder to see who
came. It was a grey face, with good simple features and clear grey
eyes. The plentiful hair that grew low on her forehead, was half grey,
mostly covered by a white cap with frills. A clean wrapper and apron,
both of blue print, over a blue winsey petticoat, blue stockings, and
strong shoes completed her dress. A book lay on her lap: always when
she had finished her morning’s work, and made her house tidy, she sat
down to _have her comfort_, as she called it. The moment she saw Gibbie
she rose. Had he been the angel Gabriel, come to tell her she was
wanted at the throne, her attention could not have been more immediate
or thorough. She was rather a little woman, and carried herself
straight and light.
“Eh, ye puir ootcast!” she said, in the pitying voice of a mother, “hoo
cam ye here sic a heicht? Cratur, ye hae left the warl’ ahin’ ye. What
wad ye hae here? _I_ hae naething.”
Receiving no answer but one of the child’s betwitching smiles, she
stood for a moment regarding him, not in mere silence, but with a
look of dumbness. She was a mother. One who is mother only to her own
children is not a mother; she is only a woman who has borne children.
But here was one of God’s mothers.
Loneliness and silence, and constant homely familiarity with the vast
simplicities of nature, assist much in the development of the deeper
and more wonderful faculties of perception. The perceptions themselves
may take this or that shape according to the education--may even embody
themselves fantastically, yet be no less perceptions. Now the very
moment before Gibbie entered, she had been reading the words of the
Lord: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my
brethren, ye have done it unto me”; and with her heart full of them,
she lifted her eyes and saw Gibbie. For one moment, with the quick
flashing response of the childlike imagination of the Celt, she fancied
she saw the Lord himself. Another woman might have made a more serious
mistake, and seen there _only_ a child. Often had Janet pondered, as
she sat alone on the great mountain, while Robert was with the sheep,
or she lay awake by his side at night, with the wind howling about the
cottage, whether the Lord might not sometimes take a lonely walk to
look after such solitary sheep of his flock as they, and let them know
he had not lost sight of them, for all the ups and downs of the hills.
There stood the child, and whether he was the Lord or not, he was
evidently hungry. Ah! who could tell but the Lord was actually hungry
in every one of his hungering little ones!
In the mean time--only it was but thought-time, not clock-time--Gibbie
stood motionless in the middle of the floor, smiling his innocent
smile, asking for nothing, hinting at nothing, but resting his wild
calm eyes, with a sense of safety and mother-presence, upon the grey
thoughtful face of the gazing woman. Her awe deepened; it seemed to
descend upon her and fold her in as with a mantle. Involuntarily she
bowed her head, and stepping to him took him by the hand, and led him
to the stool she had left. There she made him sit, while she brought
forward her table, white with scrubbing, took from a hole in the wall
and set upon it a platter of oatcakes, carried a wooden bowl to her
dairy in the rock through a whitewashed door, and bringing it back
filled, half with cream half with milk, set that also on the table.
Then she placed a chair before it, and said--
“Sit ye doon, an’ tak. Gien ye war the Lord himsel’, my bonnie man,
an’ ye may be for oucht I ken, for ye luik puir an’ despised eneuch, I
cud gie nae better, for it’s a’ I hae to offer ye--’cep it micht be an
egg,” she added, correcting herself, and turned and went out.
Presently she came back with a look of success, carrying two eggs,
which, having raked out a quantity, she buried in the hot ashes of the
peats, and left in front of the hearth to roast, while Gibbie went on
eating the thick oatcake, sweet and substantial, and drinking such milk
as the wildest imagination of town-boy could never suggest. It was
indeed angels’ food--food such as would have pleased the Lord himself
after a hard day with axe and saw and plane, so good and simple and
strong was it. Janet resumed her seat on the low three-legged stool,
and took her knitting that he might feel neither that he was watched as
he ate, nor that she was waiting for him to finish. Every other moment
she gave a glance at the stranger she had taken in; but never a word he
spoke, and the sense of mystery grew upon her.
Presently came a great bounce and scramble; the latch jumped up,
the door flew open, and after a moment’s pause, in came a sheep
dog--a splendid thorough-bred collie, carrying in his mouth a tiny,
long-legged lamb, which he dropped half dead in the woman’s lap. It
was a late lamb, born of a mother which had been sold from the hill,
but had found her way back from a great distance, in order that her
coming young one might have the privilege of being yeaned on the same
spot where she had herself awaked to existence. Another moment, and her
_mba-a_ was heard approaching the door. She trotted in, and going up to
Janet, stood contemplating the consequences of her maternal ambition.
Her udder was full, but the lamb was too weak to suck. Janet rose,
and going to the side of the room, opened the door of what might have
seemed an old press, but was a bed. Folding back the counterpane, she
laid the lamb in the bed, and covered it over. Then she got a _caup_, a
wooden dish like a large saucer, and into it milked the ewe. Next she
carried the caup to the bed; but what means she there used to enable
the lamb to drink, the boy could not see, though his busy eyes and
loving heart would gladly have taken in all.
In the mean time the collie, having done his duty by the lamb, and
perhaps forgotten it, sat on his tail, and stared with his two brave
trusting eyes at the little beggar that sat in the master’s chair, and
ate of the fat of the land. Oscar was a gentleman, and had never gone
to school, therefore neither fancied nor had been taught that rags
make an essential distinction, and ought to be barked at. Gibbie was a
stranger, and therefore as a stranger Oscar gave him welcome--now and
then stooping to lick the little brown feet that had wandered so far.
Like all wild creatures, Gibbie ate fast, and had finished everything
set before him ere the woman had done feeding the lamb. Without a
notion of the rudeness of it, his heart full of gentle gratitude, he
rose and left the cottage. When Janet turned from her shepherding,
there sat Oscar looking up at the empty chair.
“What’s come o’ the laddie?” she said to the dog, who answered with a
low whine, half-regretful, half-interrogative. It may be he was only
asking, like Esau, if there was no residuum of blessing for him also;
but perhaps he too was puzzled what to conclude about the boy. Janet
hastened to the door, but already Gibbie’s nimble feet refreshed to
the point of every toe with the food he had just swallowed, had borne
him far up the hill, behind the cottage, so that she could not get a
glimpse of him. Thoughtfully she returned, and thoughtfully removed
the remnants of the meal. She would then have resumed her Bible, but
her hospitality had rendered it necessary that she should put on her
_girdle_--not a cincture of leather upon her body, but a disc of iron
on the fire--to bake thereon cakes ere her husband’s return. It was a
simple enough process, for the oat-meal wanted nothing but water and
fire; but her joints had not yet got rid of the winter’s rheumatism,
and the labour of the baking was the hardest part of the sacrifice of
her hospitality. To many it is easy to give what they have, but the
offering of weariness and pain is never easy. They are indeed a true
salt to salt sacrifices withal. That it was the last of her meal till
her youngest boy should bring her a bag on his back from the mill the
next Saturday, made no point in her trouble.
When at last she had done, and put the things away, and swept up the
hearth, she milked the ewe, sent her out to nibble, took her Bible, and
sat down once more to read. The lamb lay at her feet, with his little
head projecting from the folds of her new flannel petticoat; and every
time her eye fell from the book upon the lamb, she felt as if somehow
the lamb was the boy that had eaten of her bread and drunk of her milk.
After she had read a while, there came a change, and the lamb seemed
the Lord himself, both lamb and shepherd, who had come to claim her
hospitality. Then, divinely invaded with the dread lest in the fancy
she should forget the reality, she kneeled down and prayed to the
friend of Martha and Mary and Lazarus, to come as he had said, and sup
with her indeed.
Not for years and years had Janet been to church; she had long been
unable to walk so far; and having no book but the best, and no help
to understand it but the highest, her faith was simple, strong,
real, all-pervading. Day by day she pored over the great gospel--I
mean just the good news according to Matthew and Mark and Luke and
John--until she had grown to be one of the noble ladies of the kingdom
of heaven--one of those who inherit the earth, and are ripening to
see God. For the Master, and his mind in hers, was her teacher. She
had little or no theology save what he taught her, or rather, what he
is. And of any other than that, the less the better; for no theology,
except the _Θεοῡ λόγος_, is worth the learning, no other being true. To
know _him_ is to know God. And he only who obeys him, does or can know
him; he who obeys him cannot fail to know him. To Janet, Jesus Christ
was no object of so-called theological speculation, but a living man,
who somehow or other heard her when she called to him, and sent her the
help she needed.