The soutar was still meditating on things spiritual, still reading the
gospel of St. John, still making and mending shoes, and still watching
the development of his daughter, who had begun to unfold what not a few
of the neighbours, with most of whom she was in favour, counted beauty.
The farm labourers in the vicinity were nearly all more or less her
admirers, and many a pair of shoes was carried to her father for the
sake of a possible smile from Maggie; but because of a certain awe that
seemed to pervade her presence, no one had as yet dared a word to her
beyond that of greeting or farewell: each that looked upon her became at
once aware of a certain inferiority. Her beauty seemed to suggest behind
it a beauty it was unable to reveal.
She was rather short in stature, but altogether well proportioned, with
a face wonderfully calm and clear, and quiet but keen dark eyes. Her
complexion owed its white-rose tinge to a strong, gentle life, and its
few freckles to the pale sun of Scotland, for she courted every breeze
bonnetless on the hills, when she accompanied her father in his walks,
or carried home the work he had finished. He rejoiced especially that
she should delight in feeling the wind about her, for he held it to
indicate sympathy with that spirit whose symbol it was, and which he
loved to think of as folding her about, closer and more lovingly than
his own cherishing soul.
Of her own impulse, and almost from the moment of her mother’s death,
she had given herself to his service, first in doing all the little
duties of the house, and then, as her strength and faculty grew, in
helping him more and more in his trade. As soon as she had cleared away
the few things necessary for a breakfast of porridge and milk, Maggie
would hasten to join her father where he stooped over his last, for he
was a little shortsighted.
When he lifted his head you might see that, notwithstanding the
ruggedness of his face, he was a good-looking man, with strong,
well-proportioned features, in which, even on Sundays, when he scrubbed
his face unmercifully, there would still remain lines suggestive of
ingrained rosin and heelball. On week days he was not so careful to
remove every sign of the labour by which he earned his bread; but when
his work was over till the morning, and he was free to sit down to a
book, he would never even touch one without first carefully washing his
hands and face. In the workshop, Maggie’s place was a leather-seated
stool like her father’s, a yard or so away from his, to leave room for
his elbows in drawing out the lingels (_rosined threads_): there she
would at once resume the work she had left unfinished the night before;
for it was a curious trait in the father, early inherited by the
daughter, that he would never rise from a finished job, however near
might be the hour for dropping work, without having begun another to go
on with in the morning. It was wonderful how much cleaner Maggie managed
to keep her hands; but then to her fell naturally the lighter work for
women and children. She declared herself ambitious, however, of one day
making with her own hands a perfect pair of top-boots.
The advantages she gained from this constant intercourse with her father
were incalculable. Without the least loss to her freedom of thought,
nay, on the contrary, to the far more rapid development of her truest
liberty, the soutar seemed to avoid no subject as unsuitable for the
girl’s consideration, but to insist only on its being regarded from the
highest attainable point of view. Matters of indifferent import they
seldom, if ever, discussed at all; and nothing she knew her father cared
about did Maggie ever allude to with indifference. Full of an honest
hilarity ever ready to break out when occasion occurred, she was at the
same time incapable of a light word upon a sacred subject. Such jokes
as, more than elsewhere, one is in danger of hearing among the clergy of
every church, very seldom came out in her father’s company; and she
very early became aware of the kind of joke he would take or refuse.
The light use, especially, of any word of the Lord would sink him in a
profound silence. If it were an ordinary man who thus offended, he might
rebuke him by asking if he remembered who said those words; once, when
it was a man specially regarded who gave the offence, I heard him say
something to this effect, “The maister doesna forget whaur and whan he
spak thae words: I houp ye do forget!” Indeed the most powerful force
in the education of Maggie was the evident attitude of her father toward
that Son of Man who was even now bringing the children of God to the
knowledge of that Father of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is
named. Mingling with her delights in the inanimate powers of Nature, in
the sun and the wind, in the rain and the growth, in the running waters
and the darkness sown with stars, was such a sense of His presence that
she felt like him, He might at any moment appear to her father, or,
should it so please Him, even to herself.
Two or three miles away, in the heart of the hills, on the outskirts of
the farm of Stonecross, lived an old cottar and his wife, who paid a few
shillings of rent to Mr. Blatherwick for the acre or two their ancestors
had redeemed from the heather and bog, and gave, with their one son
who remained at home, occasional service on the farm. They were much
respected by the farmer and his wife, as well as the small circle to
which they were known in the neighbouring village—better known, and
more respected still in that kingdom called of heaven; for they were
such as he to whom the promise was given, that he should yet see the
angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man. They had long
and heartily loved and honoured the soutar, whom they had known before
the death of his wife, and for his sake and hers, both had always
befriended the motherless Maggie. They could not greatly pity her,
seeing she had such a father, yet old Eppie had her occasional moments
of anxiety as to how the bairn would grow up without a mother’s care.
No sooner, however, did the little one begin to show character, than
Eppie’s doubt began to abate; and long before the time to which my
narrative has now come, the child and the child-like old woman were fast
friends. Maggie was often invited to spend a day at Bogsheuch—oftener
indeed than she felt at liberty to leave her father and their common
work, though not oftener than she would have liked to go.
One morning, early in summer, when first the hillsides had begun to look
attractive, a small agricultural cart, such as is now but seldom seen,
with little paint except on its two red wheels, and drawn by a thin,
long-haired little horse, stopped at the door of the soutar’s house,
clay-floored and straw-thatched, in a back-lane of the village. It was
a cart the cottar used in the cultivation of his little holding, and his
son who drove it, now nearly middle-aged, was likely to succeed to the
hut and acres of Bogsheuch. Man and equipage, both well known to the
soutar, had come with an invitation, more pressing than usual, that
Maggie would pay them a visit of a few days.
Father and daughter, consulting together in the presence of Andrew
Cormack, arrived at the conclusion that, work being rather slacker than
usual, and nobody in need of any promised job which the soutar could not
finish by himself in good time, Maggie was quite at liberty to go. She
sprang up joyfully—not without a little pang at the thought of leaving
her father alone, although she knew him quite equal to anything
that could be required in the house before her return—and set about
preparing their dinner, while Andrew went to execute a few commissions
that the mistress at Stonecross and his mother at Bogsheuch had given
him. By the time he returned, Maggie was in her Sunday gown, with her
week-day wrapper and winsey petticoat in a bundle—for she reckoned on
being of some use to Eppie during her visit.
When they had eaten their humble dinner, Andrew brought the cart to the
door, and Maggie scrambled into it.
“Tak a piece wi’ ye,” said her father, following her to the cart: “ye
hadna muckle to yer denner, and ye may be hungry again or ye hae the
lang road ahint ye!”
He put several pieces of oatcake in her hand, which she received with a
loving smile; and they set out at a walking pace, which Andrew made no
attempt to quicken.
It was far from a comfortable carriage, neither was her wisp of straw in
the bottom of it altogether comfortable to sit upon; but the change from
her stool and the close attention her work required, to the open air
and the free rush of the thoughts that came crowding to her out of
the wilderness, put her at once in a blissful mood. Even the few dull
remarks that the slow-thinking Andrew made at intervals from his perch
on the front of the cart, seemed to come to her from the realm of
Faerie, the mysterious world that lay in the folds of the huddled hills.
Everything Maggie saw or heard that afternoon seemed to wear the glamour
of God’s imagination, which is at once the birth and the very truth of
everything. Selfishness alone can rub away that divine gilding, without
which gold itself is poor indeed.
Suddenly the little horse stood still. Andrew, waking up from a snooze,
jumped to the ground, and began, still half asleep, to search into the
cause of the arrest; for Jess, although she could not make haste, never
of her own accord stood still while able to keep on walking. Maggie,
on her part, had for some time noted that they were making very slow
progress.
“She’s deid cripple!” said Andrew at length, straightening his long back
from an examination of Jess’s fore feet, and coming to Maggie’s side of
the cart with a serious face. “I dinna believe the crater’s fit to gang
ae step furder! Yet I canna see what’s happent her.”
Maggie was on the road before he had done speaking. Andrew tried once
to lead Jess, but immediately desisted. “It would be fell cruelty!” he
said. “We maun jist lowse her, and tak her gien we can to the How o’ the
Mains. They’ll gie her a nicht’s quarters there, puir thing! And we’ll
see gien they can tak you in as weel, Maggie. The maister, I mak nae
doobt, ’ill len’ me a horse to come for ye i’ the morning.”
“I winna hear o’ ’t!” answered Maggie. “I can tramp the lave o’ the ro’d
as weel’s you, Andrew!”
“But I hae a’ thae things to cairry, and that’ll no lea’ me a han’ to
help ye ower the burn!” objected Andrew.
“What o’ that?” she returned. “I was sae fell tired o’ sittin that my
legs are jist like to rin awa wi’ me. Lat me jist dook mysel i’ the
bonny win’!” she added, turning herself round and round. “—Isna it jist
like awfu’ thin watter, An’rew?—Here, gie me a haud o’ that loaf. I s’
cairry that, and my ain bit bundle as weel; syne, I fancy, ye can manage
the lave yersel!”
Andrew never had much to say, and this time he had nothing. But her
readiness relieved him of some anxiety; for his mother would be very
uncomfortable if he went home without her!
Maggie’s spirits rose to lark-pitch as the darkness came on and
deepened; and the wind became to her a live gloom, in which, with no
eye-bound to the space enclosing her, she could go on imagining after
the freedom of her own wild will. As the world and everything in it
gradually disappeared, it grew easy to imagine Jesus making the darkness
light about him, and stepping from it plain before her sight. That
could be no trouble to him, she argued, as, being everywhere, he must be
there. He could appear in any form, who had created every shape on the
face of the whole world! If she were but fit to see him, then surely he
would come to her! For thus often had her father spoken to her, talking
of the varied appearances of the Lord after his resurrection, and his
promise that he would be with his disciples always to the end of the
world. Even after he had gone back to his father, had he not appeared to
the apostle Paul? and might it not be that he had shown himself to many
another through the long ages? In any case he was everywhere, and always
about them, although now, perhaps from lack of faith in the earth, he
had not been seen for a long time. And she remembered her father once
saying that nobody could even _think_ a thing if there was no possible
truth in it. The Lord went away that they might believe in him when out
of the sight of him, and so be in him, and he in them!
“I dinna think,” said Maggie aloud to herself, as she trudged along
beside the delightfully silent Andrew, “that my father would be the
least astonished—only filled wi’ an awfu’ glaidness—if at ony moment,
walkin at his side, the Lord was to call him by his name, and appear
til him. He would but think he had just steppit oot upon him frae some
secret door, and would say,—‘I thoucht, Lord, I would see you some day!
I was aye greedy efter a sicht o’ ye, Lord, and here ye are!’”