THE SLATE.
From that very next day, then, after he was received into the cottage
on Glashgar, Gibbie, as a matter of course, took upon him the work his
hand could find to do, and Janet averred to her husband that never
had any of her daughters been more useful to her. At the same time,
however, she insisted that Robert should take the boy out with him. She
would not have him do woman’s work, especially work for which she was
herself perfectly able. She had not come to her years, she said, to
learn _idleset_; and the boy would save Robert many a weary step among
the hills.
“He canna speyk to the dog,” objected Robert, giving utterance to the
first difficulty that suggested itself.
“The dog canna speyk himsel’,” returned Janet, “an’ the won’er is
he can un’erstan’: wha kens but he may come full nigher ane ’at’s
speechless like himsel’! Ye gie the cratur the chance, an’ I s’ warran’
he’ll mak himsel’ plain to the dog. Ye jist try ’im. Tell ye him to
tell the dog sae and sae, an’ see what ’ll come o’ ’t.”
Robert made the experiment, and it proved satisfactory. As soon as he
had received Robert’s orders, Gibbie claimed Oscar’s attention. The
dog looked up in his face, noted every glance and gesture, and, partly
from sympathetic instinct, that gift lying so near the very essence of
life, partly from observation of the state of affairs in respect of the
sheep, divined with certainty what the duty required of him was, and
was off like a shot.
“The twa dumb craturs un’erstan’ ane anither better nor I un’erstan’
aither o’ them,” said Robert to his wife when they came home.
And now indeed it was a blessed time for Gibbie. It had been pleasant
down in the valley, with the cattle and Donal, and foul weather
sometimes; but now it was the full glow of summer; the sweet keen air
of the mountain bathed him as he ran, entered into him, filled him with
life like the new wine of the kingdom of God, and the whole world rose
in its glory around him. Surely it is not the outspread sea, however
the sight of its storms and its labouring ships may enhance the sense
of safety to the onlooker, but the outspread land of peace and plenty,
with its nestling houses, its well-stocked yards, its cattle feeding in
the meadows, and its men and horses at labour in the fields, that gives
the deepest delight to the heart of the poet! Gibbie was one of the
meek, and inherited the earth. Throned on the mountain, he beheld the
multiform “goings on of life,” and in love possessed the whole. He was
of the poet-kind also, and now that he was a shepherd, saw everything
with shepherd-eyes. One moment, to his fancy, the great sun above
played the shepherd to the world, the winds were the dogs, and the men
and women the sheep. The next, in higher mood, he would remember the
good shepherd of whom Janet had read to him, and pat the head of the
collie that lay beside him: Oscar too was a shepherd and no hireling;
he fed the sheep; he turned them from danger and barrenness; and he
barked well.
“I’m the dumb dog!” said Gibbie to himself, not knowing that he was
really a copy in small of the good shepherd; “but maybe there may be
mair nor ae gait o’ barkin’.”
Then what a joy it was to the heaven-born obedience of the child, to
hearken to every word, watch every look, divine every wish of the
old man! Child Hercules could not have waited on mighty old Saturn
as Gibbie waited on Robert. For he was to him the embodiment of all
that was reverend and worthy, a very gulf of wisdom, a mountain of
rectitude. Gibbie was one of those few elect natures to whom obedience
is a delight--a creature so different from the vulgar that they have
but one tentacle they can reach such with--that of contempt.
“I jist lo’e the bairn as the verra aipple o’ my ee,” said Robert. “I
can scarce consaive a wuss, but there’s the cratur wi’ a grip o’ ’t! He
seems to ken what’s risin’ i’ my min’, an’ in a moment he’s up like the
dog to be ready, an’ luiks at me waitin’.”
Nor was it long before the town-bred child grew to love the heavens
almost as dearly as the earth. He would gaze and gaze at the clouds
as they came and went, and watching them and the wind, weighing the
heat and the cold, and marking many indications, known some of them
perhaps only to himself, understood the signs of the earthly times at
length nearly as well as an insect or a swallow, and far better than
long-experienced old Robert. The mountain was Gibbie’s very home; yet
to see him far up on it, in the red glow of the setting sun, with his
dog, as obedient as himself, hanging upon his every signal, one could
have fancied him a shepherd boy come down from the plains of heaven
to look after a lost lamb. Often, when the two old people were in bed
and asleep, Gibbie would be out watching the moon rise--seated, still
as ruined god of Egypt, on a stone of the mountain-side, islanded in
space, nothing alive and visible near him, perhaps not even a solitary
night-wind blowing and ceasing like the breath of a man’s life, and
the awfully silent moon sliding up from the hollow of a valley below.
If there be indeed a one spirit, ever awake and aware, should it be
hard to believe that that spirit should then hold common thought with a
little spirit of its own? If the nightly mountain was the prayer-closet
of him who said he would be with his disciples to the end of the world,
can it be folly to think he would hold talk with such a child, alone
under the heaven, in the presence of the father of both? Gibbie never
thought about himself, therefore was there wide room for the entrance
of the spirit. Does the questioning thought arise to my reader: How
could a man be conscious of bliss without the thought of himself? I
answer the doubt: When a man turns to look at himself, that moment
the glow of the loftiest bliss begins to fade; the pulsing fire-flies
throb paler in the passionate night; an unseen vapour steams up from
the marsh and dims the star-crowded sky and the azure sea; and the next
moment the very bliss itself looks as if it had never been more than a
phosphorescent gleam--the summer lightning of the brain. For then the
man sees himself but in his own dim mirror, whereas ere he turned to
look in that, he knew himself in the absolute clarity of God’s present
thought out-bodying him. The shoots of glad consciousness that come to
the obedient man, surpass in bliss whole days and years of such ravined
rapture as he gains whose weariness is ever spurring the sides of his
intent towards the ever retreating goal of his desires. I am a traitor
even to myself if I would live without my life.
But I withhold my pen; for vain were the fancy, by treatise or sermon
or poem or tale, to persuade a man to forget himself. He cannot if he
would. Sooner will he forget the presence of a raging tooth. There is
no forgetting of ourselves but in the finding of our deeper, our true
self--God’s idea of us when he devised us--the Christ in us. Nothing
but that self can displace the false, greedy, whining self, of which,
most of us are so fond and proud. And that self no man can find for
himself; seeing of himself he does not even know what to search for.
“But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons
of God.”
Then there was the delight, fresh every week, of the Saturday gathering
of the brothers and sisters, whom Gibbie could hardly have loved more,
had they been of his own immediate kin. Dearest of all was Donal,
whose greeting--“Weel, cratur,” was heavenly in Gibbie’s ears. Donal
would have had him go down and spend a day, every now and then, with
him and the _nowt_, as in old times--so soon the times grow old to the
young!--but Janet would not hear of it, until the foolish tale of the
brownie should have quite blown over.
“Eh, but I wuss,” she added, as she said so, “I cud win at something
aboot his fowk, or aiven whaur he cam frae, or what they ca’d him!
Never ae word has the cratur spoken!”
“Ye sud learn him to read, mither,” said Donal.
“Hoo wad I du that, laddie? I wad hae to learn him to speyk first,”
returned Janet.
“Lat him come doon to me, an’ I’ll try my han’,” said Donal.
Janet, notwithstanding, persisted in her refusal--for the present. By
Donal’s words set thinking of the matter, however, she now pondered the
question day after day, how she might teach him to read; and at last
the idea dawned upon her to substitute writing for speech.
She took the Shorter Catechism, which, in those days, had always an
alphabet as janitor to the gates of its mysteries--who, with the
catechism as a consequence even dimly foreboded, would even have
learned it?--and showed Gibbie the letters, naming each several times,
and going over them repeatedly. Then she gave him Donal’s school-slate,
with a _sklet-pike_, and said, “Noo, mak a muckle A, cratur.”
Gibbie did so, and well too: she found that already he knew about half
the letters.
“_He’s_ no fule!” she said to herself in triumph.
The other half soon followed; and she then began to show him words--not
in the Catechism, but in the New Testament. Having told him what any
word was, and led him to consider the letters composing it, she would
desire him to make it on the slate, and he would do so with tolerable
accuracy: she was not very severe about the spelling, if only it
was plain he knew the word. Ere long he began to devise short ways
of making the letters, and soon wrote with remarkable facility in a
character modified from the printed letters. When at length Janet saw
him take the book by himself, and sit pondering over it, she had not a
doubt he was understanding it, and her heart leapt for joy. He had to
ask her a good many words at first, and often the meaning of one and
another; but he seldom asked a question twice; and as his understanding
was far ahead of his reading, he was able to test a conjectured meaning
by the sense or nonsense it made of the passage.
One day she turned him to the paraphrases.[2] At once, to his
astonishment, he found there, all silent, yet still the same delight
which Donal used to divide to him from the book of _ballants_. His joy
was unbounded. He jumped from his seat; he danced, and laughed, and
finally stood upon one leg: no other mode of expression but this, the
expression of utter failure to express, was of avail to the relief of
his feeling.
[2] Metrical paraphrases of passages of Scripture, always to be found
at the end of the Bibles printed for Scotland.
One day, a few weeks after Gibbie had begun to read by himself, Janet
became aware that he was sitting on his stool, in what had come to
be called _the cratur’s corner_, more than usually absorbed in some
attempt with slate and pencil--now ceasing, lost in thought, and now
commencing anew. She went near and peeped over his shoulder. At the top
of the slate he had written the word _give_, then the word _giving_,
and below them, _gib_, then _gibing_; upon these followed _gib_ again,
and he was now plainly meditating something further. Suddenly he seemed
to find what he wanted, for in haste, almost as if he feared it might
escape him, he added a _y_, making the word _giby_--then first lifted
his head, and looked round, evidently seeking her. She laid her hand
on his head. He jumped up with one of his most radiant smiles, and
holding out the slate to her, pointed with his pencil to the word he
had just completed. She did not know it for a word, but sounded it
as it seemed to stand, making the _g_ soft, as I daresay some of my
readers, not recognizing in _Gibbie_ the diminutive of _Gilbert_,
may have treated its more accurate form. He shook his head sharply,
and laid the point of his pencil upon the _g_ of the _give_ written
above. Janet had been his teacher too long not to see what he meant,
and immediately pronounced the word as he would have it. Upon this he
began a wild dance, but sobering suddenly, sat down, and was instantly
again absorbed in further attempt. It lasted so long that Janet
resumed her previous household occupation. At length he rose, and with
thoughtful, doubtful contemplation of what he had done, brought her the
slate. There, under the fore-gone success, he had written the words
_galatians_ and _breath_, and under them, _galbreath_. She read them
all, and at the last, which, witnessing to his success, she pronounced
to his satisfaction, he began another dance, which again he ended
abruptly, to draw her attention once more to the slate. He pointed to
the _giby_ first, and the _galbreath_ next, and she read them together.
This time he did not dance, but seemed waiting some result. Upon Janet
the idea was dawning that he meant himself, but she was thrown out by
the cognomen’s correspondence with that of the laird, which suggested
that the boy had been merely attempting the name of the great man of
the district. With this in her mind, and doubtfully feeling her way,
she essayed the tentative of setting him right in the Christian name,
and said: “_Thomas--Thomas_ Galbraith.” Gibbie shook his head as
before, and again resumed his seat. Presently he brought her the slate,
with all the rest rubbed out, and these words standing alone--_sir giby
galbreath_. Janet read them aloud, whereupon Gibbie began stabbing his
forehead with the point of his slate-pencil, and dancing once more in
triumph: he had, he hoped, for the first time in his life, conveyed a
fact through words.
“That’s what they ca’ ye, is ’t?” said Janet, looking motherly at him:
“--Sir Gibbie Galbraith?”
Gibbie nodded vehemently.
“It’ll be some nickname the bairns hae gi’en him,” said Janet to
herself, but continued to gaze at him, in questioning doubt of her
own solution. She could not recall having ever heard of a _Sir_ in
the family; but ghosts of things forgotten kept rising formless and
thin in the sky of her memory: _had_ she never heard of a Sir Somebody
Galbraith somewhere? And still she stared at the child, trying to grasp
what she could not even see. By this time Gibbie was standing quite
still, staring at her in return: he could not think what made her stare
so at him.
“Wha ca’d ye that?” said Janet at length, pointing to the slate.
Gibbie took the slate, dropped upon his seat, and after considerable
cogitation and effort, brought her the words, _gibyse fapher_. Janet
for a moment was puzzled, but when she thought of correcting the _p_
with a _t_, Gibbie entirely approved.
“What was yer father, cratur?” she asked.
Gibbie, after a longer pause, and more evident labour than hitherto,
brought her the enigmatical word, _asootr_, which, the _Sir_ running
about in her head, quite defeated Janet. Perceiving his failure, he
jumped upon a chair, and reaching after one of Robert’s Sunday shoes on
the _crap o’ the wa’_, the natural shelf running all round the cottage,
formed by the top of the wall where the rafters rested, caught hold
of it, tumbled with it upon his creepie, took it between his knees,
and began a pantomime of the making or mending of the same with such
verisimilitude of imitation, that it was clear to Janet he must have
been familiar with the processes collectively called shoemaking; and
therewith she recognized the word on the slate--_a sutor_. She smiled
to herself at the association of name and trade, and concluded that
the _Sir_ at least was a nickname. And yet--and yet--whether from the
presence of some rudiment of an old memory, or from something about the
boy that belonged to a higher style than his present showing, her mind
kept swaying in an uncertainty whose very object eluded her.
“What is ’t yer wull ’at we ca’ ye, than, cratur?” she asked, anxious
to meet the child’s own idea of himself.
He pointed to the _giby_.
“Weel, Gibbie,” responded Janet,--and at the word, now for the first
time addressed by her to himself, he began dancing more wildly than
ever, and ended with standing motionless on one leg: now first and at
last he was fully recognized for what he was!--“Weel, Gibbie, I s’ ca’
ye what ye think fit,” said Janet. “An’ noo gang yer wa’s, Gibbie, an’
see ’at Crummie’s no ower far oot o’ sicht.”
From that hour Gibbie had his name from the whole family--his Christian
name only, however, Robert and Janet having agreed it would be wise
to avoid whatever might possibly bring the boy again under the notice
of the laird. The latter half of his name they laid aside for him, as
parents do a dangerous or over-valuable gift to a child.