PROLOGUE.
Ever since he became a dweller in the air of Glashgar, Gibbie, mindful
of his first visit thereto, and of his grand experience on that
occasion, had been in the habit, as often as he saw reason to expect a
thunder-storm, and his duties would permit, of ascending the mountain,
and there on the crest of the granite peak, awaiting the arrival of
the tumult. Everything antagonistic in the boy, everything that could
naturally find relief, or pleasure, or simple outcome, in resistance or
contention, debarred as it was by the exuberance of his loving kindness
from obtaining satisfaction or alleviation in strife with his fellows,
found it wherever he could encounter the forces of Nature, in personal
wrestle with them where possible, and always in wildest sympathy with
any uproar of the elements. The absence of personality in them allowed
the co-existence of sympathy and antagonism in respect of them. Except
those truths awaking delight at once calm and profound, of which so few
know the power, and the direct influence of human relation, Gibbie’s
emotional joy was more stirred by storm than by anything else; and
with all forms of it he was so familiar that, young as he was, he had
unconsciously begun to generalize on its phases.
Towards the evening of a wondrously fine day in the beginning of
August--a perfect day of summer in her matronly beauty, it began
to rain. All the next day the slopes and stairs of Glashgar were
alternately glowing in sunshine, and swept with heavy showers, driven
slanting in strong gusts of wind from the northwest. How often he was
wet through and dried again that day, Gibbie could not have told. He
wore so little that either took but a few moments, and he was always
ready for a change. The wind and the rain together were cold, but that
only served to let the sunshine deeper into him when it returned.
In the afternoon there was less sun, more rain, and more wind; and
at last the sun seemed to give it up; the wind grew to a hurricane,
and the rain strove with it which should inhabit the space. The whole
upper region was like a huge mortar, in which the wind was the pestle,
and, with innumerable gyres, vainly ground at the rain. Gibbie drove
his sheep to the refuge of a pen on the lower slope of a valley that
ran at right angles to the wind, where they were sheltered by a rock
behind, forming one side of the enclosure, and dykes of loose stones,
forming the others, at a height there was no tradition of any flood
having reached. He then went home, and having told Robert what he had
done, and had his supper, set out in the early-failing light, to ascend
the mountain. A great thunder-storm was at hand, and was calling him.
It was almost dark before he reached the top, but he knew the surface
of Glashgar nearly as well as the floor of the cottage. Just as he
had fought his way to the crest of the peak in the face of one of the
fiercest of the blasts abroad that night, a sudden rush of fire made
the heavens like the smoke-filled vault of an oven, and at once the
thunder followed, in a succession of single sharp explosions without
any roll between. The mountain shook with the windy shocks, but the
first of the thunder-storm was the worst, and it soon passed. The wind
and the rain continued, and the darkness was filled with the rush of
the water everywhere wildly tearing down the sides of the mountain.
Thus heaven and earth held communication in torrents all the night.
Down the steeps of the limpid air they ran to the hard sides of the
hills, where at once, as if they were no longer at home, and did not
like the change, they began to work mischief. To the ears and heart
of Gibbie their noises were a mass of broken music. Every spring and
autumn the floods came, and he knew them, and they were welcome to him
in their seasons.
It required some care to find his way down through the darkness and the
waters to the cottage, but as he was neither in fear nor in haste, he
was in little danger, and his hands and feet could pick out the path
where his eyes were useless. When at length he reached his bed, it was
not for a long time to sleep, but to lie awake and listen to the raging
of the wind all about and above and below the cottage, and the rushing
of the streams down past it on every side. To his imagination it was as
if he lay in the very bed of the channel by which the waters of heaven
were shooting to the valleys of the earth; and when he fell asleep at
last, his dream was of the rush of the river of the water of life from
under the throne of God; and he saw men drink thereof, and everyone as
he drank straightway knew that he was one with the Father, and one with
every child of his throughout the infinite universe.
He woke, and what remained of his dream was love in his heart, and
in his ears the sound of many waters. It was morning. He rose, and,
dressing hastily, opened the door. What a picture of grey storm rose
outspread before him! The wind fiercely invaded the cottage, thick
charged with water-drops, and stepping out he shut the door in haste,
lest it should blow upon the old people in bed and wake them. He could
not see far on any side, for the rain that fell, and the mist and steam
that rose, upon which the wind seemed to have no power; but wherever
he did see, there water was running down. Up the mountain he went--he
could hardly have told why. Once, for a moment, as he ascended, the
veil of the vapour either rose, or was torn asunder, and he saw the
great wet gleam of the world below. By the time he reached the top,
it was as light as it was all the day; but it was with a dull yellow
glare, as if the sun were obscured by the smoke and vaporous fumes of
a burning world which the rain had been sent to quench. It was a wild,
hopeless scene--as if God had turned his face away from the world, and
all Nature was therefore drowned in tears--no Rachel weeping for her
children, but the whole creation crying for the Father, and refusing to
be comforted. Gibbie stood gazing and thinking. Did God like to look
at the storm he made? If Jesus did, would he have left it all and gone
to sleep, when the wind and waves were howling, and flinging the boat
about like a toy between them? He must have been tired, surely! With
what? Then first Gibbie saw that perhaps it tired Jesus to heal people;
that every time what cured man or woman was life that went out of him,
and that he missed it, perhaps--not from his heart, but from his body;
and if it were so, then it was no wonder if he slept in the midst of a
right splendid storm. And upon that Gibbie remembered what St. Matthew
says just before he tells about the storm--that “he cast out the
spirits with his word, and healed all that were sick, that it might be
fulfilled which was spoken by Esaias the prophet, saying, Himself took
our infirmities, and bare our sicknesses.”
That moment it seemed as if he must be himself in some wave-tossed
boat, and not upon a mountain of stone, for Glashgar gave a great
heave under him, then rocked and shook from side to side a little, and
settled down so still and steady, that motion and the mountain seemed
again two ideas that never could be present together in any mind.
The next instant came an explosion, followed by a frightful roaring
and hurling, as of mingled water and stones; and on the side of the
mountain beneath him he saw what, through the mist, looked like a cloud
of smoke or dust rising to a height. He darted towards it. As he drew
nearer, the cloud seemed to condense, and presently he saw plainly
enough that it was a great column of water shooting up and out from
the face of the mountain. It sank and rose again, with the alternation
of a huge pulse: the mountain was cracked, and through the crack, with
every throb of its heart, the life-blood of the great hull of the world
seemed beating out. Already it had scattered masses of gravel on all
sides, and down the hill a river was shooting in sheer cataract, raving
and tearing, and carrying stones and rocks with it like foam. Still and
still it pulsed and rushed and ran, born, like another Xanthus, a river
full-grown, from the heart of the mountain.
Suddenly Gibbie, in the midst of his astonishment and awful delight,
noted the path of the new stream, and from his knowledge of the face
of the mountain, perceived that its course was direct for the cottage.
Down the hill he shot after it, as if it were a wild beast that his
fault had freed from its cage. He was not terrified. One believing like
him in the perfect Love and perfect Will of a Father of men, as the
fact of facts, fears nothing. Fear is faithlessness. But there is so
little that is worthy the name of faith, that such a confidence will
appear to most not merely incredible but heartless. The Lord himself
seems not to have been very hopeful about us, for he said, When the Son
of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth? A perfect faith would
lift us absolutely above fear. It is in the cracks, crannies, and gulfy
faults of our belief, the gaps that are not faith, that the snow of
apprehension settles, and the ice of unkindness forms.
The torrent had already worn for itself a channel: what earth there
was, it had swept clean away to the rock, and the loose stones it had
thrown up aside, or hurled with it in its headlong course. But as
Gibbie bounded along, following it with a speed almost equal to its
own, he was checked in the midst of his hearty haste by the sight, a
few yards away, of another like terror--another torrent issuing from
the side of the hill, and rushing to swell the valley stream. Another
and another he saw, with growing wonder, as he ran; before he reached
home he passed some six or eight, and had begun to think whether a
second deluge of the whole world might not be at hand, commencing this
time with Scotland. Two of them joined the one he was following, and
he had to cross them as he could; the others he saw near and farther
off--one foaming deliverance after another, issuing from the entrails
of the mountain, like imprisoned demons, that, broken from their
bonds, ran to ravage the world with the accumulated hate of dreariest
centuries. Now and then a huge boulder, loosened from its bed by the
trail of this or that watery serpent, would go rolling, leaping,
bounding down the hill before him, and just in time he escaped one
that came springing after him as if it were a living thing that wanted
to devour him. Nor was Glashgar the only torrent-bearing mountain of
Gormgarnet that day, though the rain prevented Gibbie from seeing
anything of what the rest of them were doing. The fountains of the
great deep were broken up, and seemed rushing together to drown the
world. And still the wind was raging, and the rain tumbling to the
earth, rather in sheets than in streams.
Gibbie at length forsook the bank of the new torrent to take the
nearest way home, and soon reached the point whence first, returning in
that direction, he always looked to see the cottage. For a moment he
was utterly bewildered: no cottage was to be seen. From the top of the
rock against which it was built, shot the whole mass of the water he
had been pursuing, now dark with stones and gravel, now grey with foam,
or glassy in the lurid light.
“O Jesus Christ!” he cried, and darted to the place. When he came near,
to his amazement there stood the little house unharmed, the very centre
of the cataract! For a few yards on the top of the rock, the torrent
had a nearly horizontal channel, along which it rushed with unabated
speed to the edge, and thence shot clean over the cottage, dropping
only a dribble of rain on the roof from the underside of its half-arch.
The garden ground was gone, swept clean from the bare rock, which made
a fine smooth shoot for the water a long distance in front. He darted
through the drizzle and spray, reached the door, and lifted the latch.
The same moment he heard Janet’s voice in joyful greeting.
“Noo, noo! come awa, laddie,” she said. “Wha wad hae thoucht we wad
hae to lea’ the rock to win oot o’ the water? We’re but waitin’ you to
gang.--Come, Robert, we’ll awa doon the hill.”
She stood in the middle of the room in her best gown, as if she had
been going to church, her Bible, a good-sized octavo, under her arm,
with a white handkerchief folded round it, and her umbrella in her hand.
“He that believeth shall not make haste,” she said, “but he maunna
tempt the Lord, aither. Drink that milk, Gibbie, an’ pit a bannock i’
yer pooch, an’ come awa.”
Robert rose from the edge of the bed, staff in hand, ready too. He also
was in his Sunday clothes. Oscar, who could make no change of attire,
but was always ready, and had been standing looking up in his face for
the last ten minutes, wagged his tail when he saw him rise, and got
out of his way. On the table were the remains of their breakfast of
oat-cake and milk--the fire Janet had left on the hearth was a spongy
mass of peat, as wet as the winter before it was dug from the bog, so
they had had no porridge. The water kept coming in splashes down the
_lum_, the hillocks of the floor were slimy, and in the hollows little
lakes were gathering: the lowest film of the torrent-water ran down the
rock behind, and making its way between rock and roof, threatened soon
to render the place uninhabitable.
“What’s the eese o’ lo’denin’ yersel’ wi’ the umbrell?” said Robert.
“Ye’ll get it a’ drookit (_drenched_).”
“Ow, I’ll jist tak it,” replied Janet, with a laugh in acknowledgment
of her husband’s fun; “it’ll haud the rain ohn blin’t me.”
“That’s gien ye be able to haud it up. I doobt the win’ ’ll be ower
sair upo’ ’t. I’m thinkin’, though, it’ll be mair to haud yer beuk dry!”
Janet smiled and made no denial.
“Noo, Gibbie,” she said, “ye gang an’ lowse Crummie. But ye’ll hae to
lead her. She winna be to caw in sic a win’ ’s this, an’ no plain ro’d
afore her.”
“Whaur div ye think o’ gauin’?” asked Robert, who, satisfied as usual
with whatever might be in his wife’s mind, had not till this moment
thought of asking her where she meant to take refuge.
“Ow, we’ll jist mak for the Mains, gien ye be agreeable, Robert,” she
answered. “It’s there we belang till, an’ in wather like this naebody
wad refeese bield till a beggar, no to say Mistress Jean till her ain
fowk.”
With that she led the way to the door and opened it.
“His v’ice was like the soon’ o’ mony watters,” she said to herself
softly, as the liquid thunder of the torrent came in the louder.
Gibbie shot round the corner to the byre, whence through all the roar,
every now and then they had heard the cavernous mooing of Crummie,
piteous and low. He found a stream a foot deep running between her fore
and hind legs, and did not wonder that she wanted to be on the move.
Speedily he loosed her, and fastening the chain-tether to her halter,
led her out. She was terrified at sight of the falling water, and they
had some trouble in getting her through behind it, but presently after,
she was making the descent as carefully and successfully as any of them.
It was a heavy undertaking for the two old folk to walk all the way
to the Mains, and in such a state of the elements; but where there is
no choice, we do well to make no difficulty. Janet was half troubled
that her mountain, and her foundation on the rock, should have failed
her; but consoled herself that they were but shadows of heavenly
things and figures of the true; and that a mountain or a rock was in
itself no more to be trusted than a horse or a prince or the legs of a
man. Robert plodded on in contented silence, and Gibbie was in great
glee, singing, after his fashion, all the way, though now and then
half-choked by the fierceness of the wind round some corner of rock,
filled with rain-drops that stung like hailstones.
By and by Janet stopped and began looking about her. This naturally
seemed to her husband rather odd in the circumstances.
“What are ye efter, Janet?” he said, shouting through the wind from a
few yards off, by no means sorry to stand for a moment, although any
recovering of his breath seemed almost hopeless in such a tempest.
“I want to lay my umbrell in safity,” answered Janet, “--gien I cud but
perceive a shuitable spot. Ye was richt, Robert, it’s mair w’alth nor I
can get the guid o’.”
“Hoots! fling ’t frae ye, than, lass,” he returned. “Is this a day to
be thinkin’ o’ warl’s gear?”
“What for no, Robert?” she rejoined. “Ae day’s as guid ’s anither for
thinkin’ aboot onything the richt gait.”
“What!” retorted Robert, “--whan we hae ta’en oor lives in oor han’,
an’ can no more than houp we may cairry them throu’ safe!”
“What’s that ’at ye ca’ oor lives, Robert? The Maister never made
muckle o’ the savin’ o’ sic like ’s them. It seems to me they’re
naething but a kin’ o’ warl’s gear themsel’s.”
“An’ yet,” argued Robert, “ye’ll tak thoucht aboot an auld umbrell?
Whaur’s yer consistency, lass?”
“Gien I war tribled aboot my life,” said Janet, “I cud ill spare
thoucht for an auld umbrell. But they baith trible me sae little, ’at
I may jist as weel luik efter them baith. It’s auld an’ casten an’
bow-ribbit, it’s true, but it wad ill become me to drap it wi’oot a
thoucht, whan him ’at could mak haill loaves, said, ‘Gether up the
fragments ’at naething be lost.’--Na,” she continued, still looking
about her, “I maun jist dee my duty by the auld umbrell; syne come o’
’t ’at likes, I carena.”
So saying she walked to the lee side of a rock, and laid the umbrella
close under it, then a few large stones upon it to keep it down.
I may add, that the same umbrella, recovered, and with two new ribs,
served Janet to the day of her death.