THE LAIRD AND THE PREACHER.
Since he came to town, Gibbie had seen Ginevra but once--that was in
the North church. She looked so sad and white that his heart was very
heavy for her. Could it be that she repented?--She must have done it to
please her father! If she would marry Donal, he would engage to give
her Glashruach. She should have Glashruach all the same whatever she
did, only it might influence her father. He paced up and down before
the cottage once for a whole night, but no good came of that. He paced
before it from dusk to bedtime again and again, in the poor hope of
a chance of speaking to Ginevra, but he never saw even her shadow on
the white blind. He went up to the door once, but in the dread of
displeasing her, lost his courage, and paced the street the whole
morning instead, but saw no one come out.
Fergus had gradually become essential to the small remaining happiness
of which the laird was capable. He had gained his favour chiefly
through the respect and kindly attention he showed him. The young
preacher knew little of the laird’s career, and looked upon him as
an unfortunate man, towards whom loyalty now required even a greater
show of respect than while he owned his father’s farm. The impulse
transmitted to him from the devotion of ancestors to the patriarchal
head of the clan, had found blind vent in the direction of the mere
feudal superior, and both the impulse and its object remained. He felt
honoured, even now that he had reached the goal of his lofty desires
and was a popular preacher, in being permitted to play backgammon with
the great man, or to carve a chicken, when the now trembling hands,
enfeebled far more through anxiety and disappointment than from age,
found themselves unequal to the task: the laird had begun to tell long
stories, and drank twice as much as he did a year ago; he was sinking
in more ways than one.
Fergus at length summoned courage to ask him if he might _pay his
addresses_ to Miss Galbraith. The old man started, cast on him a
withering look, murmured “The heiress of Glashruach!” remembered, threw
himself back in his chair, and closed his eyes. Fergus, on the other
side of the table, sat erect, a dice-box in his hand, waiting a reply.
The father reflected that if he declined what he could not call an
honour, he must lose what was unquestionably a comfort: how was he to
pass _all_ the evenings of the week without the preacher? On the other
hand, if he accepted him, he might leave the miserable cottage, and
go to the manse: from a moral point of view--that was, from the point
of other people’s judgment of him--it would be of consequence to have
a clergyman for a son-in-law. Slowly he raised himself in his chair,
opened his unsteady eyes, which rolled and pitched like boats on a
choppy sea, and said solemnly,
“You have my permission, Mr. Duff.”
The young preacher hastened to find Ginevra, but only to meet a
refusal, gentle and sorrowful. He pleaded for permission to repeat his
request after an interval, but she distinctly refused. She did not,
however, succeed in making a man with such a large opinion of himself
hopeless. Disappointed and annoyed he was, but he sought and fancied he
found reasons for her decision which were not unfavourable to himself,
and continued to visit her father as before, saying to him he had not
quite succeeded in drawing from her a favourable answer, but hoped to
prevail. He nowise acted the despairing lover, but made grander sermons
than ever, and, as he came to feel at home in his pulpit, delivered
them with growing force. But delay wrought desire in the laird; and at
length, one evening, having by cross-questioning satisfied himself that
Fergus made no progress, he rose, and going to his desk, handed him
Donal’s verses. Fergus read them, and remarked he had read better, but
the first stanza had a slight flavour of Shelley.
“I don’t care a straw about their merit or demerit,” said Mr.
Galbraith; “poetry is nothing but spoilt prose. What I want to know
is, whether they do not suggest a reason for your want of success with
Jenny. Do you know the writing?”
“I cannot say I do. But I think it is very likely that of Donal Grant;
he sets up for the Burns of Daurside.”
“Insolent scoundrel!” cried the laird, bringing down his fist on the
table, and fluttering the wine glasses. “Next to superstition I hate
romance--with my whole heart I do!” And something like a flash of cold
moonlight on wintred water gleamed over, rather than shot from, his
poor focusless eyes.
“But, my dear sir,” said Fergus, “if I am to understand these lines--”
“Yes! if you are to understand where there is no sense whatever!”
“I think I understand them--if you will excuse me for venturing to say
so; and what I read in them is, that, whoever the writer may be, the
lady, whoever she may be, had refused him.”
“You cannot believe that the wretch had the impudence to make my
daughter--the heiress of--at least--What! make my daughter an offer!
She would at once have acquainted me with the fact, that he might
receive suitable chastisement. Let me look at the stuff again.”
“It is quite possible,” said Fergus, “it may be only a poem some friend
has copied for her from a newspaper.”
While he spoke, the laird was reading the lines, and persuading himself
he understood them. With sudden resolve, the paper held torch-like in
front of him, he strode into the next room, where Ginevra sat.
“Do you tell me,” he said fiercely, “that you have so far forgotten all
dignity and propriety as to give a dirty cow-boy the encouragement to
make you an offer of marriage? The very notion sets my blood boiling.
You will make me _hate_ you, you--you--unworthy creature!”
Ginevra had turned white, but looking him straight in the face, she
answered,
“If that is a letter for me, you know I have not read it.”
“There! see for yourself.--Poetry!” He uttered the word with contempt
inexpressible.
She took the verses from his hand and read them. Even with her father
standing there, watching her like an inquisitor, she could not help the
tears coming in her eyes as she read.
“There is no such thing here, papa,” she said. “They are only
verses--bidding me good-bye.”
“And what right has any such fellow to bid my daughter good-bye?
Explain that to me, if you please. Of course I have been for many years
aware of your love of low company, but I had hoped as you grew older
you would learn manners: modesty would have been too much to look
for.--If you had nothing to be ashamed of, why did you not tell me of
the unpleasant affair? Is not your father your best friend?”
“Why should I make both him and you uncomfortable, papa--when there was
not going to be anything more of it?”
“Why then do you go hankering after him still, and refusing Mr. Duff?
It is true he is not exactly a gentleman by birth, but he is such by
education, by manners, by position, by influence.”
“Papa, I have already told Mr. Duff, as plainly as I could without
being rude, that I would never let him talk to me so. What lady would
refuse Donal Grant and listen to him!”
“You are a bold, insolent hussey!” cried her father in fresh rage and
leaving the room, rejoined Fergus.
They sat silent both for a while--then the preacher spoke.
“Other communications may have since reached her from the same
quarter,” he said.
“That is impossible,” rejoined the laird.
“I don’t know that,” insisted Fergus. “There is a foolish--a half-silly
companion of his about the town. They call him Sir Gibbie Galbraith.”
“Jenny knows no such person.”
“Indeed she does. I have seen them together.”
“Oh! you mean the lad the minister adopted! the urchin he took off
the streets!--Sir Gibbie Galbraith!” he repeated sneeringly, but
as one reflecting. “--I do vaguely recall a slanderous rumour in
which a certain female connection of the family was hinted at.--Yes!
that’s where the nickname comes from.--And you think she keeps up a
communication with the clown through him?”
“I don’t say that, sir. I merely think it possible she may see this
Gibbie occasionally; and I know he worships the cow-boy: it is a
positive feature of his foolishness, and I wish it were the worst.”
Therewith he told what he heard from Miss Kimble, and what he had seen
for himself on the night when he watched Gibbie.
“Her very blood must be tainted!” said her father to himself, but
added, “--from her mother’s side;” and his attacks upon her after
this were at least diurnal. It was a relief to his feeling of having
wronged her, to abuse her with justice. For a while she tried hard to
convince him now that this, now that that notion of her conduct, or
of Gibbie’s or Donal’s, was mistaken: he would listen to nothing she
said, continually insisting that the only amends for her past was to
marry according to his wishes; to give up superstition, and poetry, and
cow-boys, and dumb rascals, and settle down into a respectable matron,
a comfort to the gray hairs she was now bringing with sorrow to the
grave. Then Ginevra became absolutely silent; he had taught her that
any reply was but a new start for his objurgation, a knife wherewith
to puncture a fresh gall-bladder of abuse. He stormed at her for her
sullenness, but she persisted in her silence, sorely distressed to find
how dead her heart seemed growing under his treatment of her: what
would at one time have made her utterly miserable, now passed over her
as one of the billows of a trouble that had to be borne, as one of the
throbs of a headache, drawing from her scarcely a sigh. She did not
understand that, her heaven being dark, she could see no individual
cloud against it, that, her emotional nature untuned, discord itself
had ceased to jar.