The Dew of Their Youth, Samuel Rutherford Crockett [fox in socks read aloud .txt] 📗

"or I'll twist your foolish neck!"
"Keep us!" said Mrs. Pathrick, "why, how should she be? Did ye expect she would be up and bating the carpets?"
In half-a-dozen springs, as it seemed, I was within the gate. Then the clear, shrill wail with which a new soul prisoned in an unfamiliar body trumpets its discontent with the vanities of this world stopped me dead. Scarce knowing what I did, I took off my boots. I trod softly.
There was a hush now in the house--a sudden stoppage of that shrill bugle-note. I came upon my grandmother, as it seemed, moulding a little ruddy bundle, with as much apparent ease and absence of fuss as if it had been a pat of butter in the dairy at home.
And when she put my firstborn son into my arms, I had no high thoughts. I trembled, indeed, but it was with fear lest I should drop him.
Presently his nurse took him again, grumbling at the innate and incurable handlessness of men. Could I see Irma? Certainly not. What would I be doing, disturbing the poor thing? Very likely she was asleep. Oh, I had promised to go, had I? Well, she had nothing to do with that. But Irma would be expecting me! Oh, as to that, lad, lad, do not trouble yourself. She will be resting in a peace like the peace of the Lord, as you might know, if ever a man could know anything about such things.
Just for a minute? Well, then--a minute, and no more. Mind, she, Mary Lyon, would be at the door. I was not to speak even.
As I went in, Irma lifted her arms a little way and then let them fall. There was a kind of shiny dew on her face, little but chill to the touch of my lips. And, ah, how wistful her smile!
"Your ... little ... girl," she whispered, "has deserved ... well ... of her country. I hope he will be brave ... like his father. I prayed all might be well ... for your sake, my dear. His name is to be Duncan.... Yes, Duncan Louis Maitland!"
I had been kneeling at the bedside, kneeling and, well--perhaps sobbing. But at that moment I felt a hand on my collar. The next I was on my feet, and so, with only one glimpse of Irma's smile at my fate, I found myself outside the room.
"What was it I telled ye?--Not to excite her! Was it no?"
And Mary Lyon showed me the way down to the kitchen, which I had forgotten, where, on condition of not making a noise, I was to be permitted for the present to abide.
"But mind you," she added, threateningly, "not a foot-sole are ye to set on thae stairs withoot my permission. Or, my certes, lad, but ye will hear aboot it!"
Decidedly I was a man under authority. The extraordinary thing was that I was cautioned to make no noise, and there in the next room was that red imp yelling the roof off, yet neither of his female relatives seemed to mind in the least, though his remarks interfered very seriously with the article on "Irrigation Systems of Southern Europe," which I was working up for the _Universal_.
But when was a mere man (and breadwinner) considered at such times?
In all truly Christian and charitable cities refuges should be built for temporarily dispossessed, homeless, and hungry heads of families.


CHAPTER XXXVI
THE SUPPLANTER
Never did I realize so clearly the difference between what interests the people in a great city and those inhabiting remote provinces as when, in mid-August, I took Irma and my firstborn son down to the wholesome breath and quiet pine shadows of Heathknowes. I had seen the autumnal number of the _Universal_ safe into its wrapper of orange and purple. In Edinburgh the old town and the new alike thrilled and hummed with the noise of a contested election. There were processions, hustings, battles royal everywhere, the night made hideous, the day insupportable.
But here, looking from the door out of the sheltering arms of Marnhoul wood into the peace of the Valley, the ear could discern only the hum of the pirn-mill buzzing like a giant insect in the greenest of the shade, and farther off the whisper of the sea on the beaches and coves about Killantringan.
Now we had taken rather a roundabout road and rested some nights on the way, for I had business at Glasgow--a great and notable professor to visit at the college, and in the library several manuscripts to consult. So Irma remained with the Wondrous Duncan the Second at the inn of the White Horse, where the coach stopped.
When I came back I thought that Irma's face looked a trifle flushed. I discovered that, having asked the hostler to polish her shoes, he had refused with the rudeness common to his class when only rooms of the cheaper sort are engaged. Whereupon Irma, who would not let her temper get the better of her, had forthwith gone down to the pantry, taken the utensils and done them herself.
I said not much to her, but to the landlord and especially to the man himself I expressed myself with fulness and a vigour which the latter, at least, was not likely to forget for some time.
It was as well, however, that my grandmother was not there. For in that case murder might have been done, had she known of the scullion's answer and what Irma had done. Well also, on the whole, for us that she had refused to keep us company. For having been only once in a great city in her life, and never likely to be there again, Mary Lyon made the most of her time. She had had two trunks when she came to our gate. Four would not have held all that she travelled with on her way back. And when we remonstrated on the cost, she said, "Oh, fidget! 'Tis many a day since I cost anything to speak of to the goodman. He can brave and weel afford to pay for a trifle o' luggage."
Accordingly she never passed a fruit stall without yearning to buy the entire stock-in-trade "for the neighbours that have never seen siccan a thing as a sweet orange in their lives--lemons being the more marketable commodity in Eden Valley."
She had also as many commissions, for which she looked to be paid, as if she had been a commercial traveller. There were half-a-dozen "swatches" to be matched for Aunt Jen--cloth to supply missing "breadths," yarn to mend the toes of stockings, ribbons which would transform the ancient dingy bonnet into a wonder of beauty on the day of the summer communion. She had "patterns" to buy dress-lengths of--from the byre-lasses brown or drab to stand the stress of out-of-door--checked blue and white for the daintier dairy-worker among her sweet milk and cheese.
Even groceries, and a taste of the stuff they sell in town for "bacon ham"--to be sniffed at and to become the butt for all the goodwives in the parish--no tea, for Mary Lyon knew where that could be got better and cheaper, but a _Pilgrim's Progress_ for a neighbour lad who was known to be fond of the reading and deserved to be encouraged--lastly, as a vast secret, a gold wedding-ring which could not be bought without talk in Eden Valley itself. Grandmother did not tell us for whom this was intended. Nor did we know, till the little smile lurking at the corner of her mouth revealed the mystery, when Agnes Anne came home from the kirk and named who had been "cried" that day. It was no other than our sly Eben--and Miss Gertrude Greensleeves was the name of the bride--far too young for him, of course, but--he had taken his mother into his confidence and not a man of us dared say a word. Doubtless the women did, but even they not in the hearing of Mary Lyon.
But now we were at rest, and quite ten days ago grandmother had arrived with her cargo. The commissions were all distributed. The parish had had a solid week to get over its amazement. And, to put all in the background, there had been a successful run into Portowarren and another the same night to Balcary--a thing not often done in the very height of summer. Yet, because the preventive men were not expecting it, perhaps safer then than at any other time.
And above all and swamping all the endless talk of a busy, heartsome farm-town! Ah, how good it was. Even the little god in the "ben" room, Master Duncan Maitland MacAlpine, had times and seasons without a worshipper, all because there was a young farmer's son in the kitchen telling of his experiences "among the hills," with the gaugers behind them, and the morn breaking fast ahead.
How they must get to a place where they could hide, a place with water, where they could restore their beasts and repose themselves, a place of great shadowing rocks in a weary land. For of a certainty the sun would smite by day, even if the moon afforded them guidance over the waste by night.
Or Boyd Connoway would tell of the _Golden Hind_ having been seen out in the channel, of rafts of "buoyed" casks sunk to within three foot of the bottom, to be fished up when on a dark night the herring craft slipped out of Balcary or the Scaur, silent as a shadow.
Or mayhap (and this, married or single, Irma liked best of all) there came in some shy old farmer from the uplands, or perhaps a herd, to whose boy or girl "out at service" the mistress of Heathknowes had brought home a Bible. These had come to thank Mary Lyon, but could not get a word out. They sipped their currant wine as if it were medicine and moved uneasily on the edges of their chairs. They had excellent manners stowed away somewhere--the natural well-bredness of the hill and the heather, but in a place like that, with so many folk, it seemed as if they had somehow mislaid them.
Then was Irma's time. She would glide in, her face still pale, of course, but with such a gracious sweetness upon it that the shyest was soon at his ease. Here was a cup, an embarrassment to the hand. She would fill its emptiness, not with Aunt Jen's currant wine, but with good Hollands--not to the brim, because the owner would spill it over and so add the finishing touch to his bashfulness. She sat down by the oldest, the shaggiest, the roughest, and in a moment (as if, like a fairy of Elfland, she had waved her wand) old Glencross of Saltflats, who only talked in monosyllables to his own wife, was telling Irma all about the prospects of his hay crop, and the bad look-out there was along the Colvend shore owing to the rabbits breeding on the green hill pastures.
"Oh, but I'll thin them, missie," he affirmed, in response to her look of sympathy, "ow aye, there are waur things than hare soup and rabbit pie. Marget" (his wife) "is a great hand at the pie. Ye maun come ower some day and taste--you and your guidman. I will send ye word by that daft loon Davie."
Then with hardly an effort, now that the ice was broken, turning to my grandmother, "Eh, mistress, but it was awesome kind and mindfu' o' you to fetch the laddie a Bible a' the road frae Enbra. I hae juist been promising him a proper doing, a regular flailing if he doesna read in it every nicht afore he says his prayers."
Needless to say Davie had promised--but as to Davie's after performance no facts