David Elginbrod

With him there was a Ploughman, was his brother.

CHAPTER I. THE FIR-WOOD

CHAUCER—Prologue to the Legend of Good Women.

“Meg! whaur are ye gaein’ that get, like a wull shuttle? Come in to the beuk.”

Meg’s mother stood at the cottage door, with arms akimbo and clouded brow, calling through the boles of a little forest of fir-trees after her daughter. One would naturally presume that the phrase she employed, comparing her daughter’s motions to those of a shuttle that had “gane wull,” or lost its way, implied that she was watching her as she threaded her way through the trees. But although she could not see her, the fir-wood was certainly the likeliest place for her daughter to be in; and the figure she employed was not in the least inapplicable to Meg’s usual mode of wandering through the trees, that operation being commonly performed in the most erratic manner possible. It was the ordinary occupation of the first hour of almost every day of Margaret’s life. As soon as she woke in the morning, the fir-wood drew her towards it, and she rose and went. Through its crowd of slender pillars, she strayed hither and thither, in an aimless manner, as if resignedly haunting the neighbourhood of something she had lost, or, hopefully, that of a treasure she expected one day to find.

It did not seem that she had heard her mother’s call, for no response followed; and Janet Elginbrod returned into the cottage, where David of the same surname, who was already seated at the white deal table with “the beuk,” or large family bible before him, straightway commenced reading a chapter in the usual routine from the Old Testament, the New being reserved for the evening devotions. The chapter was the fortieth of the prophet Isaiah; and as the voice of the reader re-uttered the words of old inspiration, one might have thought that it was the voice of the ancient prophet himself, pouring forth the expression of his own faith in his expostulations with the unbelief of his brethren. The chapter finished—it is none of the shortest, and Meg had not yet returned—the two knelt, and David prayed thus:

“O Thou who holdest the waters in the hollow of ae han’, and carriest the lambs o’ thy own making in thy bosom with the other han’, it would be altogether unworthy o’ thee, and o’ thy Maijesty o’ love, to require o’ us that which thou knowest we cannot bring unto thee, until thou enrich us with that same. Therefore, like thine own bairns, we boo doon afore thee, an’ pray that thou wouldst tak’ thy wull o’ us, thy holy an’ perfect an’ blessed wull o’ us; for, O God, we are a’ thine ain. An’ for oor lassie, wha’s oot amo’ thy trees, an’ wha’ we dinna think forgets her Maker, though she may whiles forget her prayers, Lord, keep her a bonnie lassie in thy sicht, as white and clean in thy een as she is fair an’ halesome in oors; an’ oh! we thank thee, Father in heaven, for giein’ her to us. An’ noo, for a’ oor wrang-duins an’ ill-min’ins, for a’ oor sins and trespasses o’ mony sorts, dinna forget them, O God, till thou pits them a’ richt, an’ syne exerceese thy michty power e’en ower thine ain sel, an’ clean forget them a’thegither; cast them ahint thy back, whaur e’en thine ain een shall ne’er see them again, that we may walk bold an’ upricht afore thee for evermore, an’ see the face o’ Him wha was as muckle God in doin’ thy biddin’, as gin he had been ordering’ a’ thing Himsel. For his sake, Ahmen.”

I hope my readers will not suppose that I give this as a specimen of Scotch prayers. I know better than that. David was an unusual man, and his prayers were unusual prayers. The present was a little more so in its style, from the fact that one of the subjects of it was absent, a circumstance that rarely happened. But the degree of difference was too small to be detected by any but those who were quite accustomed to his forms of thought and expression. How much of it Janet understood or sympathized with, it is difficult to say; for anything that could be called a thought rarely crossed the threshold of her utterance. On this occasion, the moment the prayer was ended, she rose from her knees, smoothed down her check apron, and went to the door; where, shading her eyes from the sun with her hand, she peered from under its penthouse into the fir-wood, and said in a voice softened apparently by the exercise in which she had taken a silent share.

“Whaur can the lassie be?”

And where was the lassie? In the fir-wood, to be sure, with the thousand shadows, and the sunlight through it all; for at this moment the light fell upon her far in its depths, and revealed her hastening towards the cottage in as straight a line as the trees would permit, now blotted out by a crossing shadow, and anon radiant in the sunlight, appearing and vanishing as she threaded the upright warp of the fir-wood. It was morning all around her; and one might see that it was morning within her too, as, emerging at last in the small open space around the cottage, Margaret—I cannot call her Meg, although her mother does—her father always called her “Maggy, my doo,” Anglicé, dove—Margaret approached her mother with a bright healthful face, and the least possible expression of uneasiness on her fair forehead. She carried a book in her hand.

“What gars ye gang stravaguin’ that get, Meg, whan ye ken weel eneuch ye sud a’ been in to worship lang syne? An sae we maun hae worship our lanes for want o’ you, ye hizzy!”

“I didna ken it was sae late, mither,” replied Margaret, in a submissive tone, musical in spite of the rugged dialect into which the sounds were fashioned.

“Nae dout! Ye had yer brakfast, an’ ye warna that hungry for the word. But here comes yer father, and ye’ll no mend for his flytin’, I’se promise.”

“Hoots! lat the bairn alane, Janet, my woman. The word’ll be mair to her afore lang.”

“I wat she has a word o’ her nain there. What beuk hae ye gotten there, Meg? Whaur got ye’t?”

Had it not been for the handsome binding of the book in her daughter’s hand, it would neither have caught the eye, nor roused the suspicions of Janet. David glanced at the book in his turn, and a faint expression of surprise, embodied chiefly in the opening of his eyelids a little wider than usual, crossed his face. But he only said with a smile:

“I didna ken that the tree o’ knowledge, wi’ sic fair fruit, grew in our wud, Maggy, my doo.”

“Whaur gat ye the beuk?” reiterated Janet.

Margaret’s face was by this time the colour of the crimson boards of the volume in her hand, but she replied at once:

“I got it frae Maister Sutherlan’, I reckon.”

Janet’s first response was an inverted whistle; her next, another question:

“Maister Sutherlan’! wha’s that o’t?”

“Hoot, lass!” interposed David, “ye ken weel aneuch. It’s the new tutor lad, up at the hoose; a fine, douce, honest chield, an’ weel-faured, forby. Lat’s see the bit beuky, lassie.”

Margaret handed it to her father.

“Col-e-ridge’s Poems,” read David, with some difficulty.

“Tak’ it hame direckly,” said Janet.

“Na, na,” said David; “a’ the apples o’ the tree o’ knowledge are no stappit wi sut an stew; an’ gin this ane be, she’ll sune ken by the taste o’t what’s comin’. It’s no muckle o’ an ill beuk ‘at ye’ll read, Maggy, my doo.”

“Guid preserve’s, man! I’m no sayin’ it’s an ill beuk. But it’s no richt to mak appintments wi’ stranger lads i’ the wud sae ear’ i’ the mornin’. Is’t noo, yersel, Meg?”

“Mither! mither!” said Margaret, and her eyes flashed through the watery veil that tried to hide them, “hoo can ye? Ye ken yersel I had nae appintment wi’ him or ony man.”

“Weel, weel!” said Janet; and, apparently either satisfied with or overcome by the emotion she had excited, she turned and went in to pursue her usual house-avocations; while David, handing the book to his daughter, went away down the path that led from the cottage door, in the direction of a road to be seen at a little distance through the trees, which surrounded the cottage on all sides. Margaret followed her mother into the cottage, and was soon as busy as she with her share of the duties of the household; but it was a good many minutes before the cloud caused by her mother’s hasty words entirely disappeared from a forehead which might with especial justice be called the sky of her face.

Meantime David emerged upon the more open road, and bent his course, still through fir-trees, towards a house for whose sake alone the road seemed to have been constructed.

CHAPTER II. DAVID ELGINBROD AND THE NEW TUTOR

The House of Turriepuffit stood about a furlong from David’s cottage. It was the abode of the Laird, or landed proprietor, in whose employment David filled several offices ordinarily distinct. The estate was a small one, and almost entirely farmed by the owner himself; who, with David’s help, managed to turn it to good account. Upon week-days, he appeared on horseback in a costume more fitted for following the plough; but he did not work with his own hands; and on Sundays was at once recognizable as a country gentleman.

David was his bailiff or grieve, to overlook the labourers on the estate; his steward to pay them, and keep the farm accounts; his head gardener—for little labour was expended in that direction, there being only one lady, the mistress of the house, and she no patroness of useless flowers: David was in fact the laird’s general adviser and executor.

The laird’s family, besides the lady already mentioned, consisted only of two boys, of the ages of eleven and fourteen, whom he wished to enjoy the same privileges he had himself possessed, and to whom, therefore, he was giving a classical and mathematical education, in view of the University, by means of private tutors; the last of whom—for the changes were not few, seeing the salary was of the smallest—was Hugh Sutherland, the young man concerning whom David Elginbrod has already given his opinion. But notwithstanding the freedom he always granted his daughter, and his good opinion of Hugh as well, David could not help feeling a little anxious, in his walk along the road towards the house, as to what the apparent acquaintance between her and the new tutor might evolve; but he got rid of all the difficulty, as far as he was concerned, by saying at last:

“What richt hae I to interfere? even supposin’ I wanted to interfere. But I can lippen weel to my bonny doo; an’ for the rest, she maun tak’ her chance like the lave o’s. An’ wha’ kens but it micht jist be stan’in’ afore Him, i’ the very get that He meant to gang. The Lord forgie me for speakin’ o’ chance, as gin I believed in ony sic havers. There’s no fear o’ the lassie. Gude mornin’ t’ye, Maister Sutherlan’. That’s a braw beuk o’ ballants ye gae the len’ o’ to my Maggy, this mornin’, sir.”

Sutherland was just entering a side-door of the house when David accosted him. He was not old enough to keep from blushing at David’s words; but, having a good conscience, he was ready with a good answer.

“It’s a good book, Mr. Elginbrod. It will do her no harm, though it be ballads.”

“I’m in no dreed o’ that, sir. Bairns maun hae ballants. An’, to tell the truth, sir, I’m no muckle mair nor a bairn in that respeck mysel’. In fac, this verra mornin’, at the beuk, I jist thocht I was readin’ a gran’ godly ballant, an’ it soundet nane the waur for the notion o’t.”

“You should have been a poet yourself, Mr. Elginbrod.”

“Na, na; I ken naething aboot yer poetry. I hae read auld John Milton ower an’ ower, though I dinna believe the half o’t; but, oh! weel I like some o’ the bonny bitties at the en’ o’t.”

“Il Penseroso, for instance?”

“Is that hoo ye ca’t? I ken’t weel by the sicht, but hardly by the soun’. I aye missed the name o’t, an’ took to the thing itsel’. Eh, man!—I beg yer pardon, sir—but its wonnerfu’ bonny!”

“I’ll come in some evening, and we’ll have a chat about it,” replied Sutherland. “I must go to my work now.”

“We’ll a’ be verra happy to see you, sir. Good mornin’, sir.”

“Good morning.”

David went to the garden, where there was not much to be done in the way of education at this season of the year; and Sutherland to the school-room, where he was busy, all the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon, with Caesar and Virgil, Algebra and Euclid; food upon which intellectual babes are reared to the stature of college youths.

Sutherland was himself only a youth; for he had gone early to college, and had not yet quite completed the curriculum. He was now filling up with teaching, the recess between his third and his fourth winter at one of the Aberdeen Universities. He was the son of an officer, belonging to the younger branch of a family of some historic distinction and considerable wealth. This officer, though not far removed from the estate and title as well, had nothing to live upon but his half-pay; for, to the disgust of his family, he had married a Welsh girl of ancient descent, in whose line the poverty must have been at least coeval with the history, to judge from the perfection of its development in the case of her father; and his relations made this the excuse for quarrelling with him; so relieving themselves from any obligations they might have been supposed to lie under, of rendering him assistance of some sort or other. This, however, rather suited the temperament of Major Robert Sutherland, who was prouder in his poverty than they in their riches. So he disowned them for ever, and accommodated himself, with the best grace in the world, to his yet more straitened circumstances. He resolved, however, cost what it might in pinching and squeezing, to send his son to college before turning him out to shift for himself. In this Mrs. Sutherland was ready to support him to the utmost; and so they had managed to keep their boy at college for three sessions; after the last of which, instead of returning home, as he had done on previous occasions, he had looked about him for a temporary engagement as tutor, and soon found the situation he now occupied in the family of William Glasford, Esq., of Turriepuffit, where he intended to remain no longer than the commencement of the session, which would be his fourth and last. To what he should afterwards devote himself he had by no means made up his mind, except that it must of necessity be hard work of some kind or other. So he had at least the virtue of desiring to be independent. His other goods and bads must come out in the course of the story. His pupils were rather stupid and rather good-natured; so that their temperament operated to confirm their intellectual condition, and to render the labour of teaching them considerably irksome. But he did his work tolerably well, and was not so much interested in the result as to be pained at the moderate degree of his success. At the time of which I write, however, the probability as to his success was scarcely ascertained, for he had been only a fortnight at the task.

It was the middle of the month of April, in a rather backward season. The weather had been stormy, with frequent showers of sleet and snow. Old winter was doing his best to hold young Spring back by the skirts of her garment, and very few of the wild flowers had yet ventured to look out of their warm beds in the mould. Sutherland, therefore, had made but few discoveries in the neighbourhood. Not that the weather would have kept him to the house, had he had any particular desire to go out; but, like many other students, he had no predilection for objectless exertion, and preferred the choice of his own weather indoors, namely, from books and his own imaginings, to an encounter with the keen blasts of the North, charged as they often were with sharp bullets of hail. When the sun did shine out between the showers, his cold glitter upon the pools of rain or melted snow, and on the wet evergreens and gravel walks, always drove him back from the window with a shiver. The house, which was of very moderate size and comfort, stood in the midst of plantations, principally of Scotch firs and larches, some of the former old and of great growth, so that they had arrived at the true condition of the tree, which seems to require old age for the perfection of its idea. There was very little to be seen from the windows except this wood, which, somewhat gloomy at almost any season, was at the present cheerless enough; and Sutherland found it very dreary indeed, as exchanged for the wide view from his own home on the side of an open hill in the Highlands.

In the midst of circumstances so uninteresting, it is not to be wondered at, that the glimpse of a pretty maiden should, one morning, occasion him some welcome excitement. Passing downstairs to breakfast, he observed the drawing-room door ajar, and looked in to see what sort of a room it was; for so seldom was it used that he had never yet entered it. There stood a young girl, peeping, with mingled curiosity and reverence, into a small gilt-leaved volume, which she had lifted from the table by which she stood. He watched her for a moment with some interest; when she, seeming to become mesmerically aware that she was not alone, looked up, blushed deeply, put down the book in confusion, and proceeded to dust some of the furniture. It was his first sight of Margaret. Some of the neighbours were expected to dinner, and her aid was in requisition to get the grand room of the house prepared for the occasion. He supposed her to belong to the household, till, one day, feeling compelled to go out for a stroll, he caught sight of her so occupied at the door of her father’s cottage, that he perceived at once that must be her home: she was, in fact, seated upon a stool, paring potatoes. She saw him as well, and, apparently ashamed at the recollection of having been discovered idling in the drawing-room, rose and went in. He had met David once or twice about the house, and, attracted by his appearance, had had some conversation with him; but he did not know where he lived, nor that he was the father of the girl whom he had seen.

CHAPTER III. THE DAISY AND THE PRIMROSE

It was, of course, quite by accident that Sutherland had met Margaret in the fir-wood. The wind had changed during the night, and swept all the clouds from the face of the sky; and when he looked out in the morning, he saw the fir-tops waving in the sunlight, and heard the sound of a south-west wind sweeping through them with the tune of running waters in its course. It is a well-practised ear that can tell whether the sound it hears be that of gently falling waters, or of wind flowing through the branches of firs. Sutherland’s heart, reviving like a dormouse in its hole, began to be joyful at the sight of the genial motions of Nature, telling of warmth and blessedness at hand. Some goal of life, vague but sure, seemed to glimmer through the appearances around him, and to stimulate him to action. Be dressed in haste, and went out to meet the Spring. He wandered into the heart of the wood. The sunlight shone like a sunset upon the red trunks and boughs of the old fir-trees, but like the first sunrise of the world upon the new green fringes that edged the young shoots of the larches. High up, hung the memorials of past summers in the rich brown tassels of the clustering cones; while the ground under foot was dappled with sunshine on the fallen fir-needles, and the great fallen cones which had opened to scatter their autumnal seed, and now lay waiting for decay. Overhead, the tops whence they had fallen, waved in the wind, as in welcome of the Spring, with that peculiar swinging motion which made the poets of the sixteenth century call them “sailing pines.” The wind blew cool, but not cold; and was filled with a delicious odour from the earth, which Sutherland took as a sign that she was coming alive at last. And the Spring he went out to meet, met him. For, first, at the foot of a tree, he spied a tiny primrose, peeping out of its rough, careful leaves; and he wondered how, by any metamorphosis, such leaves could pass into such a flower. Had he seen the mother of the next spring-messenger he was about to meet, the same thought would have returned in another form. For, next, as he passed on with the primrose in his hand, thinking it was almost cruel to pluck it, the Spring met him, as if in her own shape, in the person of Margaret, whom he spied a little way off, leaning against the stem of a Scotch fir, and looking up to its top swaying overhead in the first billows of the outburst ocean of life. He went up to her with some shyness; for the presence of even a child-maiden was enough to make Sutherland shy—partly from the fear of startling her shyness, as one feels when drawing near a couching fawn. But she, when she heard his footsteps, dropped her eyes slowly from the tree-top, and, as if she were in her own sanctuary, waited his approach. He said nothing at first, but offered her, instead of speech, the primrose he had just plucked, which she received with a smile of the eyes only, and the sweetest “thank you, sir,” he had ever heard. But while she held the primrose in her hand, her eyes wandered to the book which, according to his custom, Sutherland had caught up as he left the house. It was the only well-bound book in his possession; and the eyes of Margaret, not yet tutored by experience, naturally expected an entrancing page within such beautiful boards; for the gayest bindings she had seen, were those of a few old annuals up at the house—and were they not full of the most lovely tales and pictures? In this case, however, her expectation was not vain; for the volume was, as I have already disclosed, Coleridge’s Poems.

Seeing her eyes fixed upon the book—“Would you like to read it?” said he.

“If you please, sir,” answered Margaret, her eyes brightening with the expectation of deliglit.

“Are you fond of poetry?”

Her face fell. The only poetry she knew was the Scotch Psalms and Paraphrases, and such last-century verses as formed the chief part of the selections in her school-books; for this was a very retired parish, and the newer books had not yet reached its school. She had hoped chiefly for tales.

“I dinna ken much about poetry,” she answered, trying to speak English. “There’s an old book o’t on my father’s shelf; but the letters o’t are auld-fashioned, an’ I dinna care aboot it.”

“But this is quite easy to read, and very beautiful,” said Hugh.

The girl’s eyes glistened for a moment, and this was all her reply.

“Would you like to read it?” resumed Hugh, seeing no further answer was on the road.

She held out her hand towards the volume. When he, in his turn, held the volume towards her hand, she almost snatched it from him, and ran towards the house, without a word of thanks or leave-taking—whether from eagerness, or doubt of the propriety of accepting the offer, Hugh could not conjecture. He stood for some moments looking after her, and then retraced his steps towards the house.

It would have been something, in the monotony of one of the most trying of positions, to meet one who snatched at the offered means of spiritual growth, even if that disciple had not been a lovely girl, with the woman waking in her eyes. He commenced the duties of the day with considerably more of energy than he had yet brought to bear on his uninteresting pupils; and this energy did not flag before its effects upon the boys began to react in fresh impulse upon itself.

CHAPTER IV. THE COTTAGE