THE RED GRANT.
It was while we continued to sojourn in Edinburgh for the protection of
the Convention that first I began to turn my mind to the stated ministry
of the Kirk, for I saw well that this soldiering work must ere long come
to an end. And yet all my heart went out towards something better than
the hewing of peats upon the moor and the foddering of oxen in stall.
Yet for long I could not see how the matter was to be accomplished, for
the Cameronian hill-folk had never had a minister since James Renwick
bade his farewell to sun and moon and Desirable General Meetings down in
the Edinburgh Grassmarket. There was no authority in Scotland capable of
ordaining a Cameronian minister. I knew how impossible it was that I
could go to Holland, as Renwick and Linning and Shields had done, at the
expense of the societies--for the way of some of these men had even now
begun to sour and disgust the elders of the Hill Folk.
So since no better might be I turned my mind to the ministry of the
Reformed Kirk as it had been established by law, and resolved to spend
my needful seasons as a student of the theologies in the town of
Edinburgh. I spoke to my father of my decision, and he was willing that
I should try the work.
“I will gladly be at your college charges, Quintin,” he said; “but mind,
lad, it will depend how I sell my sheep, whether ye get muckle to put in
your belly. Yet, perchance, as the auld saw hath it, ‘hungry dogs hunt
best,’ So mayhap that may likewise hold true of the getting of
learning.”
So in the autumn of that year of the Convention, and some months after
our return, I made me ready to go to college, and to my infinite
surprise Hob, my brother, declared that he would come also.
“For,” said he, “my father does not need me now at home, at least, not
till the spring and the lambing time.”
My father demurred a little. But Hob got his way because he had, as I
well saw, my mother behind him. Now Hob was (and is) the best of
brothers--slow, placid, self-contained, with little humour in him, but
filled with a great, quiet faithfulness. And he has abode with me
through many tears and stern trials.
So in due time to Edinburgh we twain went, and while I trudged it back
and forth to the college Hob bought with his savings a pedlar’s pack,
and travelled town and country with swatches of cloth, taches for the
hair, pins for the dresses of women-folk, and for the men chap-books and
Testaments. But the strange thing is that, slow and silent as our Hob is
at most times, he could make his way with the good wives of the Lothians
as none of those bred to the trade could do. They tell me he was
mightily successful.
I only know that many a day we two might have gone hungry to bed had it
not been for what Hob brought home, instead of, as it was, having our
kites panged full with good meat, like Tod Lowrie when the lambs are
young on the hill.[6]
And often when my heart was done with the dull and dowie days, the
hardness of my heart, and the wryness of learning, Hob would come in
with a lightsome quirk on his queer face, or a jest on his tongue,
picked up in some of the outlying villages, so that I could not help but
smile at him, which made the learning all the easier afterward.
Yet the hardest part of my sore toil at college was the thought that the
more I travailed at the theologies, the less of living religion was in
my soul. Indeed, it was not till I had been back some time among the
common folk who sin and die and are buried, that I began again to taste
the savour of vital religion as of old. For to my thinking there is no
more godless class than just the young collegers in divinity. Nor is
this only a mock, as Hob would have made of it, saying with his queer
smile, “Quintin, what think ye o’ a mission to the heathen divinity
lads--to set the fire o’ hell to their tails, even as Peden the Prophet
bade Richie Cameron do to the border thieves o’ Annandale?”
_Connect and Addition to Chapter XI. made in after years by Me, Hob
MacClellan._
It is well seen from the foregoing that Quintin, my brother, had no easy
time of it while he was at the college, where they called him
“Separator,” “Hill Whig,” “Young Drumclog,” and other nicknames, some
of which grieved the lad sore.
Now they were mostly leather-jawed, slack-twisted Geordies from the
Hieland border that so troubled our Quintin--who, though he was not
averse to the sword or the pistol in a good cause, yet would not even be
persuaded to lift his fist to one of these rascals, lest it should cause
religion to be spoken against. But I was held by none of these scruples.
So it chanced that one night as we came out of the College Wynd in the
early falling winter gloaming, one of these bothy-men from the North
called out an ill name after us--“porridge-fed Galloway pigs,” or
something of the kind. Whereat very gladly I dealt him so sound a buffet
on the angle of his jaw that his head was not set on straight again all
the winter.
After this we adjourned to settle our differences at the corner of the
plainstones; but Quintin and the other theologians who had characters to
lose took their way home, grieved in spirit. Or so at least I think he
pretended to himself.
For when I came in to our lodging an hour after his first words were:
“Did ye give him his licks, Hob?” And that question, to which I
answered simply that I had and soundly, did not argue that the ancient
Adam had been fully exorcised from our Quintin.
All the same the Highlandman was none so easy to handle, being a
red-headed Grant from Speyside, and more inclined to come at you with
his thick skull, like a charging boar of Rothiemurchus, than decently to
stand up with the brave bare knuckles, as we are wont to do in the
South.
A turn or two at Kelton Hill fair would have done him no harm and taught
him that he must not fight with such an ungodly battering-ram as his
head. I know lads there who would have met him on the crown with the toe
of their brogans.
But this I scorned, judging it feater to deal him a round-arm blow
behind the ear and leap aside. The first of these discouraged the Grant;
the second dropped him on the causeway dumb and limp.
“Well done, Galloway!” cried a voice above; “but ye shall answer for
this the morn, every man o’ ye!”
“Run, lads, run! ’Tis the Regent!” came the answering cry from the
collegers.
And with that every remaining student lad ran his best in the direction
of his own lodging.
“Well, sir, have ye killed the Speyside Hielandman?” said the Doctor
from his window, when I remained alone by the fallen chieftain. The
Regent came from the West himself, and, they say, bore the Grants no
love, for all that he was so holy a man.
“I think not,” I answered doubtfully, “but I’ll take him round to the
infirmary and see!”
And with that I hoisted up the Red Grant on my shoulders, carried him
down the Infirmary Close, and hammered on the door till the young
chirurgeon who kept the place, thinking me to be drunk, came to threaten
me with the watch.
Then, the bolts being drawn, I backed the Highlandman into the crack of
the door and discharged him upon the floor.
“There’s a heap of good college divinity,” I said. “The Regent sent me
to bid ye find out if he be dead or alive.”
So with no more said we got him on a board, and at the first jag of the
lancet my Grant lad sat him up on end with a loup like a
Jack-in-the-box. But when he saw where he was, and the poor bits of dead
folk that the surgeon laddies had been learning on that day, he fetched
a yell up from the soles of his Highland shoon, and bounced off the
board, crying, “Ye’ll no cut me up as lang as Donald Grant’s a leeving
man, whatever ye may do when he’s dead!”
And so he took through the door as if the dogs had been after him.
Then the blood-letting man was for charging me with the cost of his
time, but I bade him apply to Regent Campbell over at the college,
telling him that it was he who had sent me. But whether ever he did so
or not I never heard.
Now the rarest jest of the whole matter was on the morrow, when Quintin
went to attend his prelection in Hall. The lesson, so he told me, was in
the Latin of Essenius, his Compend, and Quintin was called up. After he
had answered upon his portion, and well, as I presume, for Quintin was
no dullard at his books, Dr. Campbell looked down a little queerly at
him.
“Can you tell me which is the sixth commandment?” says he.
“Thou shalt not kill!” answers Quintin, as simple as supping brose.
“Then, are you a murderer or no--this morning?”
Quintin, thinking that, after the fashion of the time, the Regent meant
some divinity quirk or puzzle, laid his brains asteep, and answered
that as he had certainly “hated his brother,” in that sense he was
doubtless, like all the rest of the human race, technically and
theologically a murderer.
“But,” said the Professor, “what of the Highland Grant lad that ye
felled like a bullock yestreen under my window?”
Now it had never struck me that I was like my brother Quintin in outward
appearance, save in the way that all we black MacClellans are like one
another--long in the nose, bushy in the eyebrows, which mostly reach
over to meet one another. And I grant it that Quintin was ever better
mettle for a lass’s eye than I--though not worth a pail of calf’s feed
in the matter of making love as love ought to be made, which counts more
with women than all fine appearings.
But for the nonce let that fly stick to the wall; at any rate, sure it
is that the Professor loon had taken me for Quintin.
Now it will greatly help those who read this chronicle to remember what
Quintin did on this occasion. I would not have cared a doit if he had
said, in the plain hearing of the class, that it was his brother Hob the
Lothian packman who had felled the Red Grant.
But would the lad betray his brother? No! He rather hung his head, and
said no more than that he heard the Red Grant was not seriously hurt.
For as he said afterwards, “I did not know what such a tribe of angry,
dirked Highlandmen might have done to you, Hob, if they had so much as
guessed it was no colleger’s fist which had taken Donald an inch beneath
the ear.
“Then,” said the Regent to Quintin, “my warrior of Wild Whigdom, you may
set to the learning of thirty psalms by heart in the original Hebrew.
And after you have said them without the book I will consider of your
letters of certification from this class.”
To which task my brother owes that familiarity with the Psalms of David
which has often served him to such noble purpose--both when, like
Boanerges, he thundered in the open fields to the listening peoples, and
when at closer range he spoke with his enemies in the gate. For thirty
would not suit this hungrisome Quintin of ours. He must needs learn the
whole hundred and fifty (is it not?) by rote before he went back to the
Regent.
“Which thirty psalms are ye prepared to recite?” queried the Professor
under the bush of his eyebrows.
“Any thirty!” answered brave Quintin, unabashed, yet noways uplifted.
* * * * *
Now the rest of my brother’s college life may be told in a word. I know
that he had written many chapters upon his struggles and
heart-questionings as to duty and guidance at that time. But whether he
destroyed them himself, or whether they exist in some undiscovered
repository, certain it is that the next portion of his autobiography
which has come into my hands deals with the time of his settlement in
the parish of Balmaghie, where he was to endure so many strange things.
It is enough to say that year after year Quintin and I returned to the
college with the fall of the leaf, I with my pack upon my back, ever
gaining ready hospitality because of the songs and merry tales in my
wallet. When we journeyed to and fro Quintin abode mostly at the
road-ends and loaning-foots while I went up to chaffer with the
good-wives in the hallans and ben-rooms of the farmhouses. Then, in the
same manner as at first, we fought our way through the dull, iron-grey
months of winter in Auld Reekie. Each spring, as the willow buds furred
and yellowed, saw us returning to the hill-farm again with our books and
packs. And all the while I kept Quintin cheerful company, looking to his
clothes and mending at his stockings and body-gear as he sat over his
books. Mainly it was a happy time, for I knew that the lad would do us
credit. And as my mother said many and many a time, “Our Quintin has
wealth o’ lear and wealth o’ grace, but he hasna as muckle common-sense
as wad seriously blind a midge.”
So partly because my mother put me through a searching catechism on my
return, and also because I greatly loved the lad, I watched him night
and day, laid his clothes out, dried his rig-and-fur hose, greased his
shoon of home-tanned leather to keep out the searching snow-brew of the
Edinburgh streets. For, save when the frost grips it, sharp and snell,
’tis a terrible place to live in, that town of Edinburgh in the winter
season.
_Here begins again the narrative of Quintin my
brother._