DONAL’S LODGING.
Donal had not accompanied Mr. Sclater and his ward, as he generally
styled him, to the city, but continued at the Mains until another
herd-boy should be found to take his place. All were sorry to part
with him, but no one desired to stand in the way of his good fortune
by claiming his service to the end of his half-year. It was about a
fortnight after Gibbie’s departure when he found himself free. His last
night he spent with his parents on Glashgar, and the next morning set
out in the moonlight to join the coach, with some cakes and a bit of
fresh butter tied up in a cotton handkerchief. He wept at leaving them,
nor was too much excited with the prospect before him to lay up his
mother’s parting words in his heart. For it is not every son that will
not learn of his mother. He who will not goes to the school of Gideon.
Those last words of Janet to her Donal were, “Noo, min’ yer no a win’le
strae (_a straw dried on its root_), but a growin’ stalk ’at maun luik
till ’ts corn.”
When he reached the spot appointed, there already was the cart from
the Mains, with his _kist_ containing all his earthly possessions.
They did not half fill it, and would have tumbled about in the great
chest, had not the bounty of Mistress Jean complemented its space with
provision--a cheese, a bag of oatmeal, some oatcakes, and a pound or
two of the best butter in the world; for now that he was leaving them,
a herd-boy no more, but a _colliginer_, and going to be a gentleman, it
was right to be liberal. The box, whose ponderosity was unintelligible
to its owner, having been hoisted, amid the smiles of the passengers,
to the mid region of the roof of the coach, Donal clambered after
it, and took, for the first time in his life, his place behind four
horses--to go softly rushing through the air towards endless liberty.
It was to the young poet an hour of glorious birth--in which there
seemed nothing too strange, nothing but what should have come. I fancy,
when they die, many will find themselves more at home than ever they
were in this world. But Donal is not the subject of my story, and I
must not spend upon him. I will only say that his feelings on this
grand occasion were the less satisfactory to himself, that, not being
poet merely, but philosopher as well, he sought to understand them:
the mere poet, the man-bird, would have been content with them in
themselves. But if he who is both does not rise above both by learning
obedience, he will have a fine time of it between them.
The streets of the city at length received them with noise and echo. At
the coach-office Mr. Sclater stood waiting, welcomed him with dignity
rather than kindness, hired a porter with his truck whom he told where
to take the chest, said Sir Gilbert would doubtless call on him the
next day, and left him with the porter.
It was a cold afternoon, the air half mist, half twilight. Donal
followed the rattling, bumping truck over the stones, walking close
behind it, almost in the gutter. They made one turning, went a long way
through the narrow, sometimes crowded, Widdiehill, and stopped. The
man opened a door, returned to the truck, and began to pull the box
from it. Donal gave him effective assistance, and they entered with it
between them. There was just light enough from a tallow candle with a
wick like a red-hot mushroom, to see that they were in what appeared to
Donal a house in most appalling disorder, but was in fact a furniture
shop. The porter led the way up a dark stair, and Donal followed with
his end of the trunk. At the top was a large room, into which the last
of the day glimmered through windows covered with the smoke and dust of
years, showing this also full of furniture, chiefly old. A lane through
the furniture led along the room to a door at the other end. To Donal’s
eyes it looked a dreary place; but when the porter opened the other
door, he saw a neat little room with a curtained bed, a carpeted floor,
a fire burning in the grate, a kettle on the hob, and the table laid
for tea: this was like a bit of a palace, for he had never in his life
even looked into such a chamber. The porter set down his end of the
chest, said “Guid nicht to ye,” and walked out, leaving the door open.
Knowing nothing about towns and the ways of them, Donal was yet a
little surprised that there was nobody to receive him. He approached
the fire, and sat down to warm himself, taking care not to set his
hobnailed shoes on the grandeur of the little hearthrug. A few moments
and he was startled by a slight noise, as of suppressed laughter. He
jumped up. One of the curtains of his bed was strangely agitated. Out
leaped Gibbie from behind it, and threw his arms about him.
“Eh, cratur! ye gae me sic a fleg!” said Donal. “But, losh! they hae
made a gentleman o’ ye a’ready!” he added, holding him at arm’s length,
and regarding him with wonder and admiration.
A notable change had indeed passed upon Gibbie, mere externals
considered, in that fortnight. He was certainly not so picturesque as
before, yet the alteration was entirely delightful to Donal. Perhaps
he felt it gave a good hope for the future of his own person. Mrs.
Sclater had had his hair cut; his shirt was of the whitest of linen,
his necktie of the richest of black silk, his clothes were of the
newest cut and best possible fit, and his boots perfect: the result was
altogether even to her satisfaction. In one thing only was she foiled:
she could not get him to wear gloves. He had put on a pair, but found
them so miserably uncomfortable that, in merry wrath, he pulled them
off on the way home, and threw them--“The best kid!” exclaimed Mrs.
Sclater--over the Pearl Bridge. Prudently fearful of over-straining her
influence, she yielded for the present, and let him go without.
Mr. Sclater also had hitherto exercised prudence in his demands upon
Gibbie--not that he desired anything less than unlimited authority with
him, but, knowing it would be hard to enforce, he sought to establish
it by a gradual tightening of the rein, a slow encroachment of law
upon the realms of disordered license. He had never yet refused to
do anything he required of him, had executed entirely the tasks he
set him, was more than respectful, and always ready; yet somehow Mr.
Sclater could never feel that the lad was exactly obeying him. He
thought it over, but could not understand it, and did not like it, for
he was fond of authority. Gibbie in fact did whatever was required
of him from his own delight in meeting the wish expressed, not from
any sense of duty or of obligation to obedience. The minister had no
perception of what the boy was, and but a very small capacity for
appreciating what was best in him, and had a foreboding suspicion that
the time would come when they would differ.
He had not told him that he was going to meet the coach, but Gibbie was
glad to learn from Mrs. Sclater that such was his intention, for he
preferred meeting Donal at his lodging. He had recognized the place at
once from the minister’s mention of it to his wife, having known the
shop and its owner since ever he could remember himself. He loitered
near until he saw Donal arrive, then crept after him and the porter up
the stair, and when Donal sat down by the fire, got into the room and
behind the curtain.
The boys had then a jolly time of it. They made their tea, for which
everything was present, and ate as boys know how, Donal enjoying the
rarity of the white bread of the city, Gibbie, who had not tasted
oatmeal since he came, devouring “mother’s cakes.” When they had done,
Gibbie, who had learned much since he came, looked about the room till
he found a bell-rope, and pulled it, whereupon the oddest-looking old
woman, not a hair altered from what Gibbie remembered her, entered,
and, with friendly chatter, proceeded to remove the tray. Suddenly
something arrested her, and she began to regard Gibbie with curious
looks; in a moment she was sure of him, and a torrent of exclamations
and reminiscences and appeals followed, which lasted, the two lads now
laughing, now all but crying for nearly an hour, while, all the time,
the old woman kept doing and undoing about the hearth and the tea
table. Donal asked many questions about his friend, and she answered
freely, except as often as one approached his family, when she would
fall silent, and bustle about as if she had not heard. Then Gibbie
would look thoughtful and strange and a little sad, and a far-away gaze
would come into his eyes, as if he were searching for his father in the
other world.
When the good woman at length left them, they uncorded Donal’s kist,
discovered the cause of its portentous weight, took out everything, put
the provisions in a cupboard, arranged the few books, and then sat down
by the fire for “a read” together.
The hours slipped away; it was night; and still they sat and read. It
must have been after ten o’ clock when they heard footsteps coming
through the adjoining room; the door opened swiftly; in walked Mr.
Sclater, and closed it behind him. His look was angry--severe enough
for boys caught card-playing, or drinking, or reading something that
was not divinity on a Sunday. Gibbie had absented himself without
permission, had stayed away for hours, had not returned even when the
hour of worship arrived; and these were sins against the respectability
of his house which no minister like Mr. Sclater could pass by. It
mattered nothing what they were doing! it was all one when it got to
midnight! then it became revelling, and was sinful and dangerous,
vulgar and ungentlemanly, giving the worst possible example to those
beneath them! What could their landlady think?--the very first
night?--and a lodger whom he had recommended? Such was the sort of
thing with which Mr. Sclater overwhelmed the two boys. Donal would
have pleaded in justification, or at least excuse, but he silenced him
peremptorily. I suspect there had been some difference between Mrs.
Sclater and him just before he left: how otherwise could he have so
entirely forgotten his wise resolves anent Gibbie’s gradual subjugation?
When first he entered, Gibbie rose with his usual smile of greeting,
and got him a chair. But he waved aside the attention with indignant
indifference, and went on with his foolish reproof--unworthy of record
except for Gibbie’s following behaviour. Beaten down by the suddenness
of the storm, Donal had never risen from his chair, but sat glowering
into the fire. He was annoyed, vexed, half-ashamed; with that readiness
of the poetic nature to fit itself to any position, especially one
suggested by an unjust judgment, he felt, with the worthy parson thus
storming at him, almost as if guilty in everything laid to their
joint charge. Gibbie on his feet looked the minister straight in the
face. His smile of welcome, which had suddenly mingled itself with
bewilderment, gradually faded into one of concern, then of pity, and by
degrees died away altogether, leaving in its place a look of question.
More and more settled his countenance grew, while all the time he never
took his eyes off Mr. Sclater’s, until its expression at length was
that of pitiful unconscious reproof, mingled with sympathetic shame.
He had never met anything like this before. Nothing low like this--for
all injustice, and especially all that sort of thing which Janet called
“dingin’ the motes wi’ the beam,” is eternally low--had Gibbie seen
in the holy temple of Glashgar! He had no way of understanding or
interpreting it save by calling to his aid the sad knowledge of evil,
gathered in his earliest years. Except in the laird and Fergus and
the gamekeeper, he had not, since fleeing from Lucky Croale’s houff,
seen a trace of unreasonable anger in any one he knew. Robert or Janet
had never scolded him. He might go and come as he pleased. The night
was sacred as the day in that dear house. His father, even when most
overcome by the wicked thing, had never scolded him!
The boys remaining absolutely silent, the minister had it all his own
way. But before he had begun to draw to a close, across the blinding
mists of his fog-breeding wrath he began to be aware of the shining
of two heavenly lights, the eyes, namely, of the dumb boy fixed upon
him. They jarred him a little in his onward course; they shook him as
if with a doubt; the feeling undefined slowly grew to a notion, first
obscure, then plain: they were eyes of reproof that were fastened upon
his! At the first suspicion, his anger flared up more fierce than
ever; but it was a flare of a doomed flame; slowly the rebuke told,
was telling; the self-satisfied _in-the-rightness_--a very different
thing from _righteousness_--of the man was sinking before the innocent
difference of the boy; he began to feel awkward, he hesitated, he
ceased: for the moment Gibbie, unconsciously, had conquered; without
knowing it, he was the superior of the two, and Mr. Sclater had begun
to learn that he could never exercise authority over him. But the
wordly-wise man will not seem to be defeated even where he knows he
is. If he do give in, he will make it look as if it came of the proper
motion of his own goodness. After a slight pause, the minister spoke
again, but with the changed tone of one who has had an apology made to
him, whose anger is appeased, and who therefore acts the Neptune over
the billows of his own sea. That was the way he would slide out of it.
“Donal Grant,” he said, “you had better go to bed at once, and get fit
for your work to-morrow. I will go with you to call upon the principal.
Take care you are not out of the way when I come for you.--Get your
cap, Sir Gilbert, and come. Mrs. Sclater was already very uneasy about
you when I left her.”
Gibbie took from his pocket the little ivory tablets Mrs. Sclater had
given him, wrote the following words, and handed them to the minister:
“Dear sir, I am going to slepe this night with Donal. The bed is bigg
enuf for 2. Good night, sir.”
For a moment the minister’s wrath seethed again. Like a volcano,
however, that has sent out a puff of steam, but holds back its lava,
he thought better of it: here was a chance of retiring with grace--in
well-conducted retreat, instead of headlong rout.
“Then be sure you are home by lesson-time,” he said. “Donal can come
with you. Good night. Mind you don’t keep each other awake.”
Donal said “Good night, sir,” and Gibbie gave him a serious and
respectful nod. He left the room, and the boys turned and looked at
each other. Donal’s countenance expressed an indignant sense of wrong,
but Gibbie’s revealed a more profound concern. He stood motionless,
intent on the receding steps of the minister. The moment the sound
of them ceased, he darted soundless after him. Donal, who from Mr.
Sclater’s reply had understood what Gibbie had written, was astonished,
and starting to his feet followed him. By the time he reached the
door, Gibbie was past the second lamp, his shadow describing a huge
half-circle around him, as he stole from lamp to lamp after the
minister, keeping always a lamp-post still between them. When the
minister turned a corner, Gibbie made a soundless dart to it, and
peeped round, lingered a moment looking, then followed again. On and
on went Mr. Sclater, and on and on went Gibbie, careful constantly
not to be seen by him; and on and on went Donal, careful to be seen
of neither. They went a long way as he thought, for to the country
boy distance between houses seemed much greater than between dykes or
hedges. At last the minister went up the steps of a handsome house,
took a key from his pocket, and opened the door. From some impulse or
other, as he stepped in, he turned sharp round, and saw Gibbie.
“Come in,” he said, in a loud authoritative tone, probably taking the
boy’s appearance for the effect of repentance and a desire to return to
his own bed.
Gibbie lifted his cap, and walked quietly on towards the other end of
Daur-street. Donal dared not follow, for Mr. Sclater stood between,
looking out. Presently however the door shut with a great bang, and
Donal was after Gibbie like a hound. But Gibbie had turned a corner,
and was gone from his sight. Donal turned a corner too, but it was a
wrong corner. Concluding that Gibbie had turned another corner ahead of
him, he ran on and on, in the vanishing hope of catching sight of him
again; but he was soon satisfied he had lost him,--nor him only, but
himself as well, for he had not the smallest idea how to return, even
as far as the minister’s house. It rendered the matter considerably
worse that, having never heard the name of the street where he lodged
but once--when the minister gave direction to the porter, he had
utterly forgotten it. So there he was, out in the night, astray in the
streets of a city of many tens of thousands, in which he had never till
that day set foot--never before having been in any larger abode of men
than a scattered village of thatched roofs. But he was not tired, and
so long as a man is not tired, he can do well, even in pain. But a city
is a dreary place at night, even to one who knows his way in it--much
drearier to one lost--in some respects drearier than a heath--except
there be old mine-shafts in it.
“It’s as gien a’ the birds o’ a country had creepit intil their bit
eggs again, an’ the day was left bare o’ sang!” said the poet to
himself as he walked. Night amongst houses was a new thing to him.
Night on the hillsides and in the fields he knew well; but this was
like a place of tombs--what else, when all were dead for the night? The
night is the world’s graveyard, and the cities are its catacombs. He
repeated to himself all his own few ballads, then repeated them aloud
as he walked, indulging the fancy that he had a long audience on each
side of him; but he dropped into silence the moment any night-wanderer
appeared. Presently he found himself on the shore of the river, and
tried to get to the edge of the water; but it was low tide, the lamps
did not throw much light so far, the moon was clouded, he got among
logs and mud, and regained the street bemired, and beginning to feel
weary. He was saying to himself what ever was he to do all the night
long, when round a corner a little way off came a woman. It was no use
asking counsel of her, however, or of anyone, he thought, so long as he
did not know even the name of the street he wanted--a street which as
he walked along it had seemed interminable. The woman drew near. She
was rather tall, erect in the back, but bowed in the shoulders, with
fierce black eyes, which were all that he could see of her face, for
she had a little tartan shawl over her head, which she held together
with one hand, while in the other she carried a basket. But those eyes
were enough to make him fancy he must have seen her before. They were
just passing each other, under a lamp, when she looked hard at him, and
stopped.
“Man,” she said, “I hae set e’en upo’ _your_ face afore!”
“Gien that be the case,” answered Donal, “ye set e’en upo’ ’t again.”
“Whaur come ye frae?” she asked.
“That’s what I wad fain speir mysel’,” he replied. “But, wuman,” he
went on, “I fancy I hae set e’en upo’ your e’en afore--I canna weel say
for yer face. Whaur come _ye_ frae?”
“Ken ye a place they ca’--Daurside?” she rejoined.
“Daurside’s a gey lang place,” answered Donal; “an’ this maun be aboot
the tae en’ o’ ’t, I’m thinkin’.”
“Ye’re no far wrang there,” she returned; “an’ ye hae a gey gleg tongue
i’ yer heid for a laad frae Daurside.”
“I never h’ard ’at tongues war cuttit shorter there nor ither gaits,”
said Donal; “but I didna mean ye ony offence.”
“There’s nane ta’en, nor like to be,” answered the woman.--“Ken ye a
place they ca’ Mains o’ Glashruach?”
As she spoke she let go her shawl, and it opened from her face like two
curtains.
“Lord! it’s the witch-wife!” cried Donal, retreating a pace in his
astonishment.
The woman burst into a great laugh, a hard, unmusical, but not
unmirthful laugh.
“Ay!” she said, “was that hoo the fowk wad hae ’t o’ me?”
“It wasna muckle won’er, efter ye cam wydin’ throu’ watter yairds deep,
an’ syne gaed doon the spate on a bran’er.”
“Weel, it was the maddest thing!” she returned, with another laugh
which stopped abruptly. “--I wadna dee the like again to save my life.
But the Michty cairried me throu’.--An’ hoo’s wee Sir Gibbie?--Come
in--I dinna ken yer name--but we’re jist at the door o’ my bit garret.
Come quaiet up the stair, an’ tell me a’ aboot it.”
“Weel, I wadna be sorry to rist a bit, for I hae tint mysel’
a’thegither, an’ I’m some tiret,” answered Donal. “I but left the Mains
thestreen.”
“Come in an’ walcome; an whan ye’re ristit, an’ I’m rid o’ my basket,
I’ll sune pit ye i’ the gait o’ hame.”
Donal was too tired, and too glad to be once more in the company of a
human being, to pursue further explanation at present. He followed her,
as quietly as he could, up the dark stair. When she struck a light, he
saw a little garret-room--better than decently furnished, it seemed to
the youth from the hills, though his mother would have thought it far
from tidy. The moment the woman got a candle lighted, she went to a
cupboard, and brought thence a bottle and a glass. When Donal declined
the whisky she poured out, she seemed disappointed, and setting down
the glass, let it stand. But when she had seated herself, and begun to
relate her adventures in quest of Gibbie, she drew it towards her, and
sipped as she talked. Some day she would tell him, she said, the whole
story of her voyage on the brander, which would make him laugh; it made
her laugh, even now, when it came back to her in her bed at night,
though she was far enough from laughing at the time. Then she told him
a great deal about Gibbie and his father.
“An’ noo,” remarked Donal, “he’ll be thinkin’ ’t a’ ower again, as he
rins aboot the toon this verra meenute, luikin’ for me!”
“Dinna ye trible yersel’ aboot him,” said the woman. “He kens the toon
as weel ’s ony rottan kens the drains o’ ’t.--But whaur div ye pit up?”
she added, “for it’s time dacent fowk was gauin’ to their beds.”
Donal explained that he knew neither the name of the street nor of the
people where he was lodging.
“Tell me this or that--something--onything aboot the hoose or the fowk,
or what they’re like, an’ it may be ’at I’ll ken them,” she said.
But scarcely had he begun his description of the house when she cried,
“Hoots, man! it’s at Lucky Murkison’s ye are, i’ the Wuddiehill. Come
awa, an’ I s’ tak ye hame in a jiffey.”
So saying, she rose, took the candle, showed him down the stair, and
followed.
It was past midnight, and the moon was down, but the street-lamps
were not yet extinguished, and they walked along without anything to
interrupt their conversation--chiefly about Sir Gibbie and Sir George.
But perhaps if Donal had known the cause of Gibbie’s escape from the
city, and that the dread thing had taken place in this woman’s house,
he would not have walked quite so close to her.
Poor Mistress Croale, however, had been nowise to blame for that, and
the shock it gave her had even done something to check the rate of
her downhill progress. It let her see, with a lightning flash from
the pit, how wide the rent now yawned between her and her former
respectability. She continued, as we know, to drink whisky, and was
not unfrequently overcome by it; but in her following life as peddler,
she measured her madness more; and, much in the open air and walking a
great deal, with a basket sometimes heavy, her indulgence did her less
physical harm; her temper recovered a little, she regained a portion
of her self-command; and at the close of those years of wandering,
she was less of a ruin, both mentally and spiritually, than at their
commencement.
When she received her hundred pounds for the finding of Sir Gibbie, she
rented a little shop in the gallery of the market, where she sold such
things as she had carried about the country, adding to her stock, upon
the likelihood of demand, without respect to unity either conventional
or real, in the character of the wares she associated. The interest
and respectability of this new start in life, made a little fresh
opposition to the inroads of her besetting sin; so that now she did not
consume as much whisky in three days as she did in one when she had
her _houff_ on the shore. Some people seem to have been drinking all
their lives, of necessity getting more and more into the power of the
enemy, but without succumbing at a rapid rate, having even their times
of uplifting and betterment. Mistress Croale’s complexion was a little
clearer; her eyes were less fierce; her expression was more composed;
some of the women who, like her, had shops in the market, had grown a
little friendly with her; and, which was of more valuable significance,
she had come to be not a little regarded by the poor women of the lower
parts behind the market, who were in the way of dealing with her. For
the moment a customer of this class, and she had but few of any other,
appeared at her shop, or covered stall, rather, she seemed in spirit to
go outside the counter and buy with her, giving her the best counsel
she had, now advising the cheaper, now the dearer of two articles;
while now and then one could tell of having been sent by her to another
shop, where, in the particular case, she could do better. A love of
affairs, no doubt, bore a part in this peculiarity, but there is all
the difference between the two ways of embodying activity--to one’s
own advantage only, and--to the advantage of one’s neighbour as well.
For my part, if I knew a woman behaved to her neighbours as Mistress
Croale did to hers, were she the worst of drunkards in between, I could
not help both respecting and loving her. Alas that such virtue is so
portentously scarce! There are so many that are sober for one that is
honest! Deep are the depths of social degradation to which the clean,
purifying light yet reaches, and lofty are the heights of social honour
where yet the light is nothing but darkness. Any thoughtful person who
knew Mistress Croale’s history, would have feared much for her, and
hoped a little: her so-called fate was still undecided. In the mean
time she made a living, did not get into debt, spent an inordinate
portion of her profits in drink, but had regained and was keeping up a
kind and measure of respectability.
Before they reached the Widdiehill, Donal, with the open heart of the
poet, was full of friendliness to her, and rejoiced in the mischance
that had led him to make her acquaintance.
“Ye ken, of coorse,” he happened to say, “’at Gibbie’s wi’ Maister
Sclater?”
“Weel eneuch,” she answered. “I hae seen him tee; but he’s a gran’
gentleman grown, an’ I wadna like to be affrontit layin’ claim till ’s
acquaintance,--walcome as he ance was to my hoose!”
She had more reason for the doubt and hesitation she thus expressed
than Donal knew. But his answer was none the less the true one as
regarded his friend.
“Ye little ken Gibbie,” he said “gien ye think that gait o’ ’im! Gang
ye to the minister’s door and speir for ’im! He’ll be doon the stair
like a shot.--But ’deed maybe he’s come back, an’ ’s i’ my chaumer the
noo! Ye’ll come up the stair an’ see?”
“Na, I wunna dee that,” said Mistress Croale, who did not wish to face
Mistress Murkison, well known to her in the days of her comparative
prosperity.
She pointed out the door to him, but herself stood on the other side of
the way till she saw it opened by her old friend in her night-cap, and
heard her make jubilee over his return.
Gibbie had come home and gone out again to look for him, she said.
“Weel,” remarked Donal, “there wad be sma’ guid in my gaein’ to luik
for him. It wad be but the sheep gaein’ to luik for the shepherd.”
“Ye’re richt there,” said his landlady. “A tint bairn sud aye sit doon
an’ sit still.”
“Weel, ye gang till yer bed, mem,” returned Donal. “Lat me see hoo yer
door works, an’ I’ll lat him in whan he comes.”
Gibbie came within an hour, and all was well. They made their
communication, of which Donal’s was far the more interesting, had their
laugh over the affair, and went to bed.