When I spoke next, I was back in the school-house, sitting there with
my bonnet on my head, Gavin looking at me. We had forgotten the cannon
at last.
In that chair I had anticipated this scene more than once of late. I
had seen that a time might come when Gavin would have to be told all,
and I had even said the words aloud, as if he were indeed opposite me.
So now I was only repeating the tale, and I could tell it without
emotion, because it was nigh nineteen years old; and I did not look at
Gavin, for I knew that his manner of taking it could bring no change
to me.
"Did you never ask your mother," I said, addressing the fire rather
than him, "why you were called Gavin?"
"Yes," he answered, "it was because she thought Gavin a prettier name
than Adam."
"No," I said slowly, "it was because Gavin is my name. You were called
after your father. Do you not remember my taking you one day to the
shore at Harvie to see the fishermen carried to their boats upon their
wives' backs, that they might start dry on their journey?"
"No," he had to reply. "I remember the women carrying the men through
the water to the boats, but I thought it was my father who--I
mean----"
"I know whom you mean," I said. "That was our last day together, but
you were not three years old. Yet you remembered me when you came to
Thrums. You shake your head, but it is true. Between the diets of
worship that first Sabbath I was introduced to you, and you must have
had some shadowy recollection of my face, for you asked, 'Surely I saw
you in church in the forenoon, Mr. Ogilvy?' I said 'Yes,' but I had
not been in the church in the forenoon. You have forgotten even that,
and yet I treasured it."
I could hear that he was growing impatient, though so far he had been
more indulgent than I had any right to expect.
"It can all be put into a sentence," I said calmly. "Margaret married
Adam Dishart, and afterwards, believing herself a widow, she married
me. You were born, and then Adam Dishart came back."
That is my whole story, and here was I telling it to my son, and not a
tear between us. It ended abruptly, and I fell to mending the fire.
"When I knew your mother first," I went on, after Gavin had said some
boyish things that were of no avail to me, "I did not think to end my
days as a dominie. I was a student at Aberdeen, with the ministry in
my eye, and sometimes on Saturdays I walked forty miles to Harvie to
go to church with her. She had another lover, Adam Dishart, a sailor
turned fisherman; and while I lingered at corners, wondering if I
could dare to meet her and her mother on their way to church, he would
walk past with them. He was accompanied always by a lanky black dog,
which he had brought from a foreign country. He never signed for any
ship without first getting permission to take it with him, and in
Harvie they said it did not know the language of the native dogs. I
have never known a man and dog so attached to each other."
"I remember that black dog," Gavin said. "I have spoken of it to my
mother, and she shuddered, as if it had once bitten her."
"While Adam strutted by with them," I continued, "I would hang back,
raging at his assurance or my own timidity; but I lost my next chance
in the same way. In Margaret's presence something came over me, a kind
of dryness in the throat, that made me dumb. I have known divinity
students stricken in the same way, just as they were giving out their
first text. It is no aid in getting a kirk or wooing a woman.
"If any one in Harvie recalls me now, it is as a hobbledehoy who
strode along the cliffs, shouting Homer at the sea-mews. With all my
learning, I, who gave Margaret the name of Lalage, understood women
less than any fisherman who bandied words with them across a boat. I
remember a Yule night when both Adam and I were at her mother's
cottage, and, as we were leaving, he had the audacity to kiss
Margaret. She ran out of the room, and Adam swaggered off, and when I
recovered from my horror, I apologized for what he had done. I shall
never forget how her mother looked at me, and said, 'Ay, Gavin, I see
they dinna teach everything at Aberdeen.' You will not believe it, but
I walked away doubting her meaning. I thought more of scholarship then
than I do now. Adam Dishart taught me its proper place.
"Well, that is the dull man I was; and yet, though Adam was always
saying and doing the things I was making up my mind to say and do, I
think Margaret cared more for me. Nevertheless, there was something
about him that all women seemed to find lovable, a dash that made them
send him away and then well-nigh run after him. At any rate, I could
have got her after her mother's death if I had been half a man. But I
went back to Aberdeen to write a poem about her, and while I was at it
Adam married her."