DONAL GRANT.
Hungering minds come of peasant people as often as of any, and have
appeared in Scotland as often, I fancy, as in any nation; not every
Scotsman, therefore, who may not himself have known one like Donal,
will refuse to believe in such a herd-laddie. Besides, there are still
those in Scotland, as well as in other nations, to whom the simple and
noble, not the commonplace and selfish, is the true type of humanity.
Of such as Donal, whether English or Scotch, is the class coming up to
preserve the honour and truth of our Britain, to be the oil of the lamp
of her life, when those who place her glory in knowledge, or in riches,
shall have passed from her history as the smoke from her chimneys.
Cheap as education then was in Scotland, the parents of Donal Grant
had never dreamed of sending a son to college. It was difficult for
them to save even the few quarterly shillings that paid the fees of the
parish schoolmaster: for Donal, indeed, they would have failed even in
this, but for the help his brothers and sisters afforded. After he left
school, however, and got a place as herd, he fared better than any of
the rest, for at the Mains he found a friend and helper in Fergus Duff,
his master’s second son, who was then at home from college, which he
had now attended two winters. Partly that he was delicate in health,
partly that he was something of a fine gentleman, he took no share with
his father and elder brother in the work of the farm, although he was
at the Mains from the beginning of April to the end of October. He was
a human kind of soul notwithstanding, and would have been much more
of a man if he had thought less of being a gentleman. He had taken a
liking to Donal, and having found in him a strong desire after every
kind of knowledge of which he himself had any share, had sought to
enliven the tedium of an existence rendered not a little flabby from
want of sufficient work, by imparting to him of the treasures he had
gathered. They were not great, and he could never have carried him far,
for he was himself only a respectable student, not a little lacking in
perseverance, and given to dreaming dreams of which he was himself the
hero. Happily, however, Donal was of another sort, and from the first
needed but to have the outermost shell of a thing broken for him, and
that Fergus could do: by and by Donal would break a shell for himself.
But perhaps the best thing Fergus did for him was the lending him
books. Donal had an altogether unappeasable hunger after every form of
literature with which he had as yet made acquaintance, and this hunger
Fergus fed with the books of the house, and many besides of such as he
purchased or borrowed for his own reading--these last chiefly poetry.
But Fergus Duff, while he revelled in the writings of certain of the
poets of the age, was incapable of finding poetry for himself in the
things around him: Donal Grant, on the other hand, while he seized
on the poems Fergus lent him, with an avidity even greater than his,
received from the nature around him influences similar to those which
exhaled from the words of the poet. In some sense, then, Donal was
original; that is, he received at first hand what Fergus required to
have “put on” him, to quote Celia, in _As you like it_, “as pigeons
feed their young.” Therefore, fiercely as it would have harrowed the
pride of Fergus to be informed of the fact, he was in the kingdom of
art only as one who ate of what fell from the table, while his father’s
herd-boy was one of the family. This was as far from Donal’s thought,
however, as from that of Fergus; the condescension, therefore, of the
latter did not impair the gratitude for which the former had such large
reason; and Donal looked up to Fergus as to one of the lords of the
world.
To find himself now in the reversed relation of superior and teacher to
the little outcast, whose whole worldly having might be summed in the
statement that he was not absolutely naked, woke in Donal an altogether
new and strange feeling; yet gratitude to his master had but turned
itself round, and become tenderness to his pupil.
After Donal left him in the field, and while he was ministering, first
to his beasts and then to himself, Gibbie lay on the grass, as happy
as child could well be. A loving hand laid on his feet or legs would
have found them like ice; but where was the matter so long as he never
thought of them? He could have supped a huge bicker of sowens, and
eaten a dozen potatoes; but of what mighty consequence is hunger, so
long as it neither absorbs the thought, nor causes faintness? The sun,
however, was going down behind a great mountain, and its huge shadow,
made of darkness, and haunted with cold, came sliding across the river,
and over valley and field, nothing staying its silent wave, until it
covered Gibbie with the blanket of the dark, under which he could
not long forget that he was in a body to which cold is unfriendly.
At the first breath of the night-wind that came after the shadow, he
shivered, and starting to his feet, began to trot, increasing his
speed until he was scudding up and down the field like a wild thing
of the night, whose time was at hand, waiting until the world should
lie open to him. Suddenly he perceived that the daisies, which all day
long had been full-facing the sun, like true souls confessing to the
father of them, had folded their petals together to points, and held
them like spear-heads tipped with threatening crimson, against the
onset of the night and her shadows, while within its white cone each
folded in the golden heart of its life, until the great father should
return, and, shaking the wicked out of the folds of the night, render
the world once more safe with another glorious day. Gibbie gazed and
wondered; and while he gazed--slowly, glidingly, back to his mind came
the ghost-mother of the ballad, and in every daisy he saw her folding
her neglected orphans to her bosom, while the darkness and the misery
rolled by defeated. He wished he knew a ghost that would put her arms
round him. He must have had a mother once, he supposed, but he could
not remember her, and of course she must have forgotten him. He did
not know that about him were folded the everlasting arms of the great,
the one Ghost, which is the Death of death--the life and soul of all
things and all thoughts. The Presence, indeed, was with him, and he
felt it, but he knew it only as the wind and shadow, the sky and closed
daisies: in all these things and the rest it took shape that it might
come near him. Yea, the Presence was in his very soul, else he could
never have rejoiced in friend, or desired ghost to mother him: still
he knew not the Presence. But it was drawing nearer and nearer to his
knowledge--even in sun and air and night and cloud, in beast and flower
and herd-boy, until at last it would reveal itself to him, in him,
as Life Himself. Then the man would know that in which the child had
rejoiced. The stars came out, to Gibbie the heavenly herd, feeding at
night, and gathering gold in the blue pastures. He saw them, looking up
from the grass where he had thrown himself to gaze more closely at the
daisies; and the sleep that pressed down his eyelids seemed to descend
from the spaces between the stars. But it was too cold that night to
sleep in the fields, when he knew where to find warmth. Like a fox into
his hole, the child would creep into the corner where God had stored
sleep for him: back he went to the barn, gently trotting, and wormed
himself through the cat-hole.
The straw was gone! But he remembered the hay. And happily, for he was
tired, there stood the ladder against the loft. Up he went, nor turned
aside to the cheese; but sleep was common property still. He groped
his way forward through the dark loft until he found the hay, when at
once he burrowed into it like a sand-fish into the wet sand. All night
the white horse, a glory vanished in the dark, would be close to him,
behind the thin partition of boards. He could hear his very breath as
he slept, and to the music of it, audible sign of companionship, he
fell fast asleep, and slept until the waking horses woke him.