Here was a nauseous draught for me. Having finished my tale, I turned
to Gavin for sympathy; and, behold, he had been listening for the
cannon instead of to my final words. So, like an old woman at her
hearth, we warm our hands at our sorrows and drop in faggots, and each
thinks his own fire a sun, in presence of which all other fires should
go out. I was soured to see Gavin prove this, and then I could have
laughed without mirth, for had not my bitterness proved it too?
"And now," I said, rising, "whether Margaret is to hold up her head
henceforth lies no longer with me, but with you."
It was not to that he replied.
"You have suffered long, Mr. Ogilvy," he said. "Father," he added,
wringing my hand. I called him son; but it was only an exchange of
musty words that we had found too late. A father is a poor estate to
come into at two and twenty.
"I should have been told of this," he said.
"Your mother did right, sir," I answered slowly, but he shook his
head.
"I think you have misjudged her," he said. "Doubtless while my fa--,
while Adam Dishart lived, she could only think of you with pain; but
after his death----"
"After his death," I said quietly, "I was still so horrible to her
that she left Harvie without letting a soul know whither she was
bound. She dreaded my following her."
"Stranger to me," he said, after a pause, "than even your story is her
being able to keep it from me. I believed no thought ever crossed her
mind that she did not let me share."
"And none, I am sure, ever did," I answered, "save that, and such
thoughts as a woman has with God only. It was my lot to bring disgrace
on her. She thought it nothing less, and she has hidden it all these
years for your sake, until now it is not burdensome. I suppose she
feels that God has taken the weight off her. Now you are to put a
heavier burden in its place."
He faced me boldly, and I admire him for it now.
"I cannot admit," he said, "that I did wrong in forgetting my mother
for that fateful quarter of an hour. Babbie and I loved each other,
and I was given the opportunity of making her mine or losing her
forever. Have you forgotten that all this tragedy you have told me of
only grew out of your own indecision? I took the chance that you let
slip by."
"I had not forgotten," I replied. "What else made me tell you last
night that Babbie was in Nanny's house?"
"But now you are afraid--now when the deed is done, when for me there
can be no turning back. Whatever be the issue, I should be a cur to
return to Thrums without my wife. Every minute I feel my strength
returning, and before you reach Thrums I will have set out to the
Spittal."
There was nothing to say after that. He came with me in the rain as
far as the dike, warning me against telling his people what was not
true.
"My first part," I answered, "will be to send word to your mother that
you are in safety. After that I must see Whamond. Much depends on
him."
"You will not go to my mother?"
"Not so long as she has a roof over her head," I said, "but that may
not be for long."
So, I think, we parted--each soon to forget the other in a woman.
But I had not gone far when I heard something that stopped me as
sharply as if it had been McKenzie's hand once more on my shoulder.
For a second the noise appalled me, and then, before the echo began, I
knew it must be the Spittal cannon. My only thought was one of
thankfulness. Now Gavin must see the wisdom of my reasoning. I would
wait for him until he was able to come with me to Thrums. I turned
back, and in my haste I ran through water I had gone round before.
I was too late. He was gone, and into the rain I shouted his name in
vain. That he had started for the Spittal there could be no doubt;
that he would ever reach it was less certain. The earl's collie was
still crouching by the fire, and, thinking it might be a guide to him,
I drove the brute to the door, and chased it in the direction he
probably had taken. Not until it had run from me did I resume my own
journey. I do not need to be told that you who read would follow Gavin
now rather than me; but you must bear with the dominie for a little
while yet, as I see no other way of making things clear.
In some ways I was not ill-equipped for my attempt. I do not know any
one of our hillsides as it is known to the shepherd, to whom every
rabbit-hole and glimmer of mica is a landmark; but he, like his flock,
has only to cross a dike to find himself in a strange land, while I
have been everywhere in the glen.
In the foreground the rain slanted, transparent till it reached the
ground, where a mist seemed to blow it along as wind ruffles grass. In
the distance all was a driving mist. I have been out for perhaps an
hour in rains as wetting, and I have watched floods from my window,
but never since have I known the fifth part of a season's rainfall in
eighteen hours; and if there should be the like here again, we shall
be found better prepared for it. Men have been lost in the glen in
mists so thick that they could plunge their fingers out of sight in it
as into a meal girnel; but this mist never came within twenty yards of
me. I was surrounded by it, however, as if I was in a round tent; and
out of this tent I could not walk, for it advanced with me. On the
other side of this screen were horrible noises, at whose cause I could
only guess, save now and again when a tongue of water was shot at my
feet, or great stones came crashing through the canvas of mist. Then I
ran wherever safety prompted, and thus tangled my bearings until I was
like that one in the child's game who is blindfolded and turned round
three times that he may not know east from west.
Once I stumbled over a dead sheep and a living lamb; and in a clump of
trees which puzzled me--for they were where I thought no trees should
be--a wood-pigeon flew to me, but struck my breast with such force
that I picked it up dead. I saw no other living thing, though half a
dozen times I must have passed within cry of farmhouses. At one time I
was in a cornfield, where I had to lift my hands to keep them out of
water, and a dread filled me that I had wandered in a circle, and was
still on Waster Lunny's land. I plucked some corn and held it to my
eyes to see if it was green; but it was yellow, and so I knew that at
last I was out of the glen.
People up here will complain if I do not tell how I found the farmer
of Green Brae's fifty pounds. It is one of the best-remembered
incidents of the flood, and happened shortly after I got out of the
cornfield. A house rose suddenly before me, and I was hastening to it
when as suddenly three of its walls fell. Before my mind could give a
meaning to what my eyes told it, the water that had brought down the
house had lifted me off my feet and flung me among waves. That would
have been the last of the dominie had I not struck against a chest,
then halfway on its voyage to the sea. I think the lid gave way under
me; but that is surmise, for from the time the house fell till I was
on the river in a kist that was like to be my coffin, is almost a
blank. After what may have been but a short journey, though I had time
in it to say my prayers twice, we stopped, jammed among fallen trees;
and seeing a bank within reach, I tried to creep up it. In this there
would have been little difficulty had not the contents of the kist
caught in my feet and held on to them, like living things afraid of
being left behind. I let down my hands to disentangle my feet, but
failed; and then, grown desperate, I succeeded in reaching firm
ground, dragging I knew not what after me. It proved to be a
pillow-slip. Green Brae still shudders when I tell him that my first
impulse was to leave the pillow-slip unopened. However, I ripped it
up, for to undo the wet strings that had ravelled round my feet would
have wearied even a man with a needle to pick open the knots; and
among broken gimlets, the head of a grape, and other things no beggar
would have stolen, I found a tin canister containing fifty pounds.
Waster Lunny says that this should have made a religious man of Green
Brae, and it did to this extent, that he called the fall of the
cotter's house providential. Otherwise the cotter, at whose expense it
may be said the money was found, remains the more religious man of the
two.
At last I came to the Kelpie's brig, and I could have wept in joy (and
might have been better employed), when, like everything I saw on that
journey, it broke suddenly through the mist, and seemed to run at me
like a living monster. Next moment I ran back, for as I stepped upon
the bridge I saw that I had been about to walk into the air. What was
left of the Kelpie's brig ended in mid-stream. Instead of thanking God
for the light without which I should have gone abruptly to my death, I
sat down miserable and hopeless.
Presently I was up and trudging to the Loups of Malcolm. At the Loups
the river runs narrow and deep between cliffs, and the spot is so
called because one Malcolm jumped across it when pursued by wolves.
Next day he returned boastfully to look at his jump, and gazing at it
turned dizzy and fell into the river. Since that time chains have been
hung across the Loups to reduce the distance between the farms of
Carwhimple and Keep-What-You-Can from a mile to a hundred yards. You
must cross the chains on your breast. They were suspended there by Rob
Angus, who was also the first to breast them.
But I never was a Rob Angus. When my pupils practise what they call
the high jump, two small boys hold a string aloft, and the bigger ones
run at it gallantly until they reach it, when they stop meekly and
creep beneath. They will repeat this twenty times, and yet never, when
they start for the string, seem to know where their courage will fail.
Nay, they will even order the small boys to hold the string higher. I
have smiled at this, but it was the same courage while the difficulty
is far off that took me to the Loups. At sight of them I turned away.
I prayed to God for a little of the mettle of other men, and He heard
me, for with my eyes shut I seemed to see Margaret beckoning from
across the abyss as if she had need of me. Then I rose calmly and
tested the chains, and crossed them on my breast. Many have done it
with the same danger, at which they laugh, but without that vision I
should have held back.
I was now across the river, and so had left the chance of drowning
behind, but I was farther from Thrums than when I left the school-house,
and this countryside was almost unknown to me. The mist had begun to
clear, so that I no longer wandered into fields; but though I kept to the
roads, I could not tell that they led toward Thrums, and in my
exhaustion I had often to stand still. Then to make a new start in the
mud was like pulling stakes out of the ground. So long as the rain
faced me I thought I could not be straying far; but after an hour I lost
this guide, for a wind rose that blew it in all directions.
In another hour, when I should have been drawing near Thrums, I found
myself in a wood, and here I think my distress was greatest; nor is
this to be marvelled at, for instead of being near Thrums, I was
listening to the monotonous roar of the sea. I was too spent to
reason, but I knew that I must have travelled direct east, and must be
close to the German Ocean. I remember putting my back against a tree
and shutting my eyes, and listening to the lash of the waves against
the beach, and hearing the faint toll of a bell, and wondering
listlessly on what lighthouse it was ringing. Doubtless I would have
lain down to sleep forever had I not heard another sound near at hand.
It was the knock of a hammer on wood, and might have been a fisherman
mending his boat. The instinct of self-preservation carried me to it,
and presently I was at a little house. A man was standing in the rain,
hammering new hinges to the door; and though I did not recognize him,
I saw with bewilderment that the woman at his side was Nanny.
"It's the dominie," she cried, and her brother added:
"Losh, sir, you hinna the look o' a living man."
"Nanny," I said, in perplexity, "what are you doing here?"
"Whaur else should I be?" she asked.