The Stickit Minister's Wooing and Other Galloway Stories

"The mere choice of this place showed their spite against me, but that is not the worst. Ever since that day they have devoted themselves to discrediting me in my profession. And you, who know these people, know to what an extent they have succeeded. My practice has shrunk to nothing – almost. Even the patients I have, when they do call me in, send secretly for my enemy before my feet are cold off the doorstep. Yet I have no redress, for I have never been able to bring a case of taking fees home to him. Ah! if only I could!"

Dr. Ignatius fell back exhausted, for towards the last he had been talking with a vehemence that shook the casements and set the prisms of the little old chandelier a-tingling.

"And that is why I say you must choose between us," he said. "Is it not enough? Have I asked too much?"

"It is enough for me," I said; "I will do as you wish!"

Now I did not see anything in his story very much against the young man; but, after all, the lad was nothing to me, and I had known Dr. Ignatius a long time.

So I asked him how it came that the young man was called Roger and not Campbell.

"Oh!" he said, "that is the one piece of decent feeling he has shown in the whole affair. He called himself Campbell Roger when he came here. You are the only person who knows that he is my nephew."

* * * * *

I was glad afterwards that I had made him the promise he asked for. I never saw him in life again. Dr. Ignatius Campbell died two days after, being found dead in bed with his tiny pipe clutched in his hand. I went up that same day, and in conjunction with Dr. John Thoburn Brown of Drumfern, found that our colleague had long suffered from an acute form of heart disease, and that it was wonderful how he had survived so long. The body was lying at the time in the room where he died. The maid-servant had gone to stay with relatives in the village, not being willing to remain all night in the house alone; for which, all things considered, I did not greatly blame her. I asked if there was anything I could do, but was informed that all arrangements for the funeral had been made. It was to be on the Friday, two days after.

I drove up the glen early that morning, and found a tall young man in the house, opening drawers and rummaging among papers. I understood at once that this was Mr. Archibald Campbell of Inchtaggart. I greeted him by that name, and he responded heartily enough.

"You are Dr. McQuhirr," he said; "my father-in-law often spoke about you and how kind you were to him. You know that he has left all his books, papers, and scientific apparatus to you?"

"I did not know," I said; "that is as unexpected as it is undeserved, and I hope you will act precisely as if such a bequest had not existed. You must take all that either you or your wife would care to possess."

"Oh!" he cried lightly, "Ailie could not come. She has been ill lately, and as for me, I would not touch one of the beastly things with a ten-foot pole. Come into the garden and have a smoke."

There Mr. Archibald Campbell told me that he had arranged for a sale of the doctor's house and all his effects as soon as possible.

"Better to have it over," he said, "so you had as well bring up a conveyance and cart off all the scientific rubbish you care about. I want all settled up and done with within the month."

He departed the night after the funeral, leaving the funeral expenses unpaid. He was a hasty, though well-meaning young man, and no doubt he forgot. When I came up on the Monday of the week following, I discovered that the account had been paid.

* * * * *

After I had made my selection of books and instruments, besides taking all the manuscripts (watched from room to room by the Drumfern lawyer's sharp eye), I strolled out, and my steps turned involuntarily towards the little house covered with creepers where I had seen the young man Roger. I felt that death had absolved me from my promise, and with a quick resolve I turned aside.

The same woman opened the door an inch or two. I lifted my hat and asked if her son was in. She held the door open for me without speaking a word and ushered me into the model-strewn little parlour. I cast my eyes about. On the table lay the discharged account for the funeral expenses of Dr. Ignatius Campbell!

In another moment the door opened and the young man came in, paler than before, and with the slight halt in his gait exaggerated.

"How do you do, Mr. Campbell?" I said quietly, holding out my hand.

He gave back a step, almost as if I had struck him. Then he smiled wanly. "Ah! he told you. I expected he would; and yet you have come?" He spoke slowly, the words coming in jerks.

I held out my hand and said heartily: "Of course I came."

I did not think it necessary to tell him anything about my agreement with Dr. Campbell. He, on his part, had quietly possessed himself of John Ewart's bill for the funeral expenses. We had a long talk, and I stayed so late that Nance had begun to get anxious about me before I arrived home. But not one word, either in justification of himself or of accusation against his uncle, did he utter, though he must have known well enough what his uncle had said of him.

Nor was it till a couple of months afterwards that Roger Campbell adverted again to the subject. I had been to the churchyard to look at the headstone which had been erected, as I knew, at his expense. He had asked me to write the inscription for it, and I had done so.

Coming home, he had to stop several times on the hill to take breath. When we got to the door he said: "I have but one thing to pray for now, Dr. McQuhirr, and that is that I may outlive my mother. Give me your best skill and help me to do that."

His prayer was answered. He lived just two days after his mother. And I was with him most of the time, while Nance stayed with my people at Drumquhat. It was a beautiful Sabbath evening, and the kirk folk were just coming home. Most who suffer from his particular form of phthisis imagine themselves to be getting better to the very last, but he knew too much to have any illusions. I had put the pillows behind him, and he was sitting up making kindly comment on the people as they passed by, Bible in hand. He stopped suddenly and looked at me.

"Doctor," he said, "what my uncle told you about me never made any difference to you?"

"No," I said, rather shamefacedly, "no difference at all!"

"No," he went on, meditatively, "no difference. Well, I want you to burn two documents for me, lest they fall into the wrong hands – as they might before these good folk go back kirkward again."

He directed me with his finger, at the same time handing me a key he wore upon his watch-chain.

"Even my poor mother up there," he said, pointing to the room above, "has never set eyes on what I am going to show you. It is weak of me; I ought not to do it, doctor, but I will not deny that it is some comfort to set myselt right with one human soul before I go."

I took out of a little drawer in a bureau a miniature, a bundle of letters, and a broadly folded legal-looking document.

I offered them to Roger, but he waved them away.

"I do not want to look upon them – they are here!" He touched his forehead. "And one of them is here!" He laid his hand on his heart with that freedom of gesture which often comes to the dying, especially to those who have repressed themselves all their lives.

I looked down at the miniature and saw the picture of a girl, very pretty, beautiful indeed, but with that width between the eyes which, in fair women, gives a double look.

"Ailie, my brother's wife!" he said, in answer to my glance. "These are her letters. Open them one by one and burn them."

I did as he bade me, throwing my eyes out of focus so that I might not read a word. But out of one fluttered a pressed flower. It was fixed on a card with a little lock of yellow hair arranged about it for a frame, fresh and crisp. And as I picked it up I could not help catching the prettily printed words:

"TO DARLING ROGER, FROM HIS OWN AILIE."

There was also a date.

"Let me look at that!" he said quickly. I gave it to him. He looked at the flower – a quick painful glance, but as he handed me back the card he laughed a little.

"It is a 'Forget-me-not,'" he said. Then in a musing tone he added: "Well, Ailie, I never have!"

So one by one the letters were burnt up, till only a black pile of ashes remained, in ludicrous contrast to the closely packed bundle I had taken from the drawer.

"Now burn the ribbon that kept them together, and look at the other paper."

I unfolded it. It was a will in holograph, the characters clear and strong, signed by Archibald Ruthven Campbell, of Inchtaggart, Argyleshire, devising all his estate and property to his son Roger, with only a bequest in money to his elder son!

I was dazed as I looked through it, and my lips framed a question. The young man smiled.

"My father's last will," he said, "dated a month before his death. She never knew it." (Again he indicated the upper room where his mother's body lay.) "They never knew it." (He looked at the girl's picture as it smiled up from the table where I had laid it.) "My brother Archie succeeded on a will older by twenty years. But when I lost Ailie, I lost all. Why should she marry a failure? Besides, I truly believe that she loves my brother, at least as well as ever she loved me. It is her nature. That she is infinitely happier with him, I know."

"Then you were the heir all the time and never told it – not to any one!" I cried, getting up on my feet. He motioned me towards the grate again.

"Burn it," he said, "I have had a moment of weakness. It is over. I ought to have been consistent and not told even you. No, let the picture lie. I think it does me good. God bless you, Alec! Now, good-night; go home to your Nance."

* * * * *

He died the next forenoon while I was still on my rounds. And when I went in to look at him, the picture had disappeared. I questioned the old crone who had watched his last moments and afterwards prepared him for burial.

"He had something in his hand," she answered, "but I couldna steer it. His fingers grippit it like a smith's vice."

I looked, and there from between the clenched fingers of the dead right hand the eyes of Ailie Campbell smiled out at me – blue and false as her own Forget-me-not.

LOWE'S SEAT

Elspeth did not mean to go to Lowe's Seat. She had indeed no business there. For she was the minister's daughter, and at this time of the day ought to have been visiting the old wives in the white-washed "Clachan" on the other side of the river, showing them how to render their patchwork quilts less hideous, compassionating them on their sons' ungrateful silence (letters arrive so seldom from the "States"). Yet here was Elspeth Stuart under the waving boughs, seated upon the soft grassy turf, and employed in nothing more utilitarian than picking a gowan asunder petal by petal. It was the middle of an August afternoon, and as hot as it ever is in Scotland.

Why then had Elspeth gone to Lowe's Seat? It seemed a mystery. It was to the full as pleasant on the side of the river where dwelt her father, where complained her maiden aunt, and where after their kind racketed and stormed her roving vagabond bird-nesting brothers. On the Picts' Mound beside the kirk (an ancient Moothill, so they say, upon which justice of the rudest and readiest was of old dispensed) there were trees and green depths of shade. She might have stayed and read there – the "Antiquary" perhaps, or "Joseph Andrews," or her first favourite "Emma," all through the long sweet drowsing summer's afternoon. But somehow up at Lowe's Seat, the leaves of the wood laughed to a different tune and the Airds woods were dearer than all sweet Kenside.

So in spite of all Elspeth Stuart had crossed in her father's own skiff, which he used for his longer ministerial excursions "up the water," and her brothers Frank and Sandy for perch-fishing and laying their "ged" lines. There was indeed a certain puddock in a high state of decomposition in a locker which sadly troubled Elspeth as she bent to the oars. And now she was at Lowe's Seat.

It is strange to what the love of poetry will drive a girl. Elspeth tossed back the fair curls which a light wind persisted in flicking ticklingly over her brow. With a coquettish, blushful, half-indignant gesture she thrust them back with her hand, as if they ought to have known better than to intrude upon a purpose so serious as hers in coming to Lowe's Seat.

"Here was the place," she murmured to herself, explanatorily, "where the poor boy hid himself to write his poem – a hundred years ago! Was it really a hundred years ago?"

She looked about her, and the wind whispered and rustled and laughed a little down among the elms and the hazels, while out towards the river and on a level with her face the silver birches shook their plumes daintily as a pretty girl her wandering tresses, bending saucily toward the water as they did so. Then Elspeth said the first two verses of "Mary's Dream" over to herself. The poem was a favourite with her father, a hard stern man with a sentimental base, as is indeed very common in Scotland.

"The moon had climbed the highest hillThat rises o'er the source of Dee,And from the eastern summit shedHer silver light on tower and tree.When Mary laid her down to sleep,Her thoughts on Sandy far at sea,There soft and low a voice was heard,Saying, 'Mary, weep no more for me!'"

Elspeth was young and she was not critical. Lowe's simple and to the modern mind somewhat obvious verse, seemed to her to contain the essence of truth and feeling. But on the other hand she looked adorable as she said them. For, strangely enough, a woman's critical judgment is generally in inverse ratio to her personal attractions – though doubtless there are exceptions to the rule.

As has been said, she did not go to Lowe's Seat for any particular purpose. She said so to herself as many as ten times while she was crossing in the skiff, and at least as often when she was pulling herself up the steep braeface by the supple hazels and more stubborn young oaks.

So Elspeth Stuart continued to hum a vagrant tune, more than half of the bars wholly silent, and the rest sometimes loud and sometimes soft, as she glanced downwards out of her green garret high among the leaves.

More than once she grew restive and pattered impatiently with her fingers on her lap as if expecting some one who did not come. Only occasionally she looked down towards the river. Indeed, she permitted her eyes to rove in every direction except immediately beneath her, where through a mist of leaves she could see the Dee kissing murmuringly the rushes on its marge.

A pretty girl – yes, surely. More than that, one winsome with the wilful brightness which takes men more than beauty. And being withal only twenty years of her age, it may well be believed that Elspeth Stuart, the only daughter of the parish minister of Dullarg, did not move far without drawing the glances of men after her as a magnet attracts steel filings.

Yet a second marvel appeared beneath. There was a young man moving along by the water's edge and he did not look up. To all appearance Lowe's Seat might just as well not have existed for him, and its pretty occupant might have been reading Miss Austen under the pines of the Kirk Knowe on the opposite side of Dee Water.

Elspeth also appeared equally unconscious. Of course, how otherwise? She had plucked a spray of bracken and was peeling away the fronds, unravelling the tough fibres of the root and rubbing off the underleaf seeds, so that they showed red on her fingers like iron rust. Wondrous busy had our maid become all suddenly. But though she had not smiled when the youth came in sight, she pouted when he made as if he would pass by without seeing her. Which is a strange thing when you come to think of it, considering that she herself had apparently not observed him.

Suddenly, however, she sang out loudly, a strong ringing stave like a blackbird from the copse as the sun rises above the hills. Whereat the young man started as if he had been shot. Hitherto he had held a fishing-rod in his hand and seemed intent only on the stream. But at the sound of Elspeth's voice he whirled about, and catching a glimpse of bright apparel through the green leaves, he came straight up through the tangle with the rod in his hand. Even at that moment it did not escape Elspeth's eye that he held it awkwardly, like one little used to Galloway burn-sides. She meant to show him better by-and-by.

Having arrived, the surprise and mutual courtesies were simply overpowering. Elspeth had not dreamed – the merest impulse had led her – she had been reading Lowe's poem the night before. It was really the only completely sheltered place for miles, where one could muse in peace. He knew it was, did he not?

But we must introduce this young man. If he had possessed a card it would have said: "The Rev. Allan Syme, B.A."

He was the new minister of the Cameronian Kirk at Cairn Edward. He has just been "called," chiefly because the other two on the short leet had not been considered sufficiently "firm" in their views concerning an "Erastian Establishment," as at the Kirk on the Hill they called the Church of Scotland nationally provided for by the Revolution Settlement.

In his trial discourses, however, Mr. Syme had proved categorically that no good had ever come out of any state-supported Church, that the ministers of the present establishment were little better than priests of the Scarlet Woman who sitteth on the Seven Hills, and that all those who trusted in them were even as the moles and the bats, children of darkness and travellers on the smoothly macadamised highway to destruction.

Nevertheless, at that free stave of Elspeth's carol Allan Syme went up hill as fast as if he had never preached a sermon on the text, "And Elijah girded up his loins and ran before Ahab unto the entering in of Jezreel."

At half-past eleven by the clock the minister of the Cameronian Kirk sat down beside this daughter of an Erastian Establishment.

Have you heard the leaves of beech and birch laugh as they clash and rustle? That is how the wicked summer woods of Airds laughed that day about Lowe's Seat.

* * * * *

Half a mile down the river there is a ferry boat which at infrequent intervals pushes a flat duck's bill across Dee Water. It is wide enough to take a loaded cart of hay, and long enough to accommodate two young horses tail to tail and yet leave room for the statutory flourishing of heels.

Bess MacTaggart could take it across with any load upon it you pleased, pushing easily upon an iron lever. They use a wheel now, but it was much prettier in the old days when all for a penny you could watch Bess lift the toothed lever with a sharp movement of her shapely arm, wet and dripping from the chain, as it slowly dredged itself up from the river bed.

It was half-past four when, in reply to repeated hails, the boat left the Dullarg shore with a company of three men on board, and in addition the sort of person who is called a "single lady."

Two of the men stood together at one end of the ferry-boat, and after Bess had bidden one of them sharply to "get out of her road," she called him "Drows" to make it up, and asked him if he were going over to the lamb sale at Nether Airds.

"If it's the Lord's wull!" Drows replied, with solemnity.

Both he and his companion had commodious, clean-shaven "horse" faces, with an abundance of gray hair standing out in a straggling semi-circular aureole underneath the chin. Cameronian was stamped upon their faces with broad strong simplicity. The blue bonnet, already looking old-world among the universal "felts" common to most adult manhood – the deep serious eyes, as it were withdrawn under the penthouse of bushy brows, and looking upon all things (even lamb sales) as fleeting and transitory – the long upper lip and the mouth tightly compressed – these marked out John Allanson of Drows and Matthew Carment of Craigs as pillars of that Kirk which alone of all the fragments of Presbytery is senior to the Established Church of Scotland.

On the other side of the boat and somewhat apart stood Dr. Hector Stuart, gazing gloomily at the black water as it rippled and clappered under the broad lip of the ferry-boat. A proud man, a Highland gentleman of old family, was the minister of Dullarg. He kept his head erect, and for any notice he had taken of the Cameronian elders, they might just as well not have been on the boat at all. And in their turn the elders of the Cameronian Kirk compressed their lips more firmly and their eyes seemed deeper set in their heads when their glances fell on this pillar of Erastianism. For nowhere is the racial antipathy of north and south so strong as in Galloway. There, and there alone, the memory of the Highland Host has never died out, and every autumn when the hills glow red with heather from horizon to horizon verge, the story is told to Galloway childhood of how Lag and Clavers wasted the heritage of the Lord, and how from Ailsa to Solway all the west of Scotland is "flowered with the blood of the Martyrs."

The thin nervous woman kept close to the minister's elbow.

"I tell you I saw her cross the water, Hector," she was saying as Dr. Stuart looked ahead, scanning keenly the low sandy shores they were nearing.

"The boat is gone and she has not returned. It is a thing not proper for a young lady and a minister's daughter to be so long absent from home!"

"My daughter has been too well brought up to do aught that is improper!" said Dr. Stuart, with grave sententious dignity. "You need not pursue the subject, Mary!"

There was just enough likeness between them to stamp the pair as brother and sister. As the boat touched the edge of the sharply sloping shingle bank, the hinged gang-plank tilted itself up at a new angle. The passengers paid their pennies to Bess MacTaggart and stepped sedately on shore. The boat-house stands in a water-girt peninsula, the Ken being on one side broad and quiet, the Black Water on the other, sulky and turbulent. So that for half a mile there was but one road for this curiously assorted pair of pairs.

And as they approached them the woods of Airds laughed even more mockingly, with a ripple of tossing birch plumes like a woman when she is merry in the night and dares not laugh aloud. And the beeches responded with a dryish cackle that had something of irony in it. Listen and you will hear how it was the next time a beech-tree shakes out his leaves to dry the dew off them.

The two elders came to a quick turn of the road. There was a stile just beyond. A moment before a young man had overleaped it, and now he was holding up his hands encouragingly to a girl who smiled down upon him from above. It was a difficult stile. The dyke top was shaky. Two of the bottom steps; were missing altogether. All who have once been young know the kind of stile – verily, a place of infinite danger to the unwary.

So at least thought Elspeth Stuart, as for a long moment she stood daintying her skirts about her ankles on the perilous copestone, and drawing her breath a little short at the sight of the steep descent into the road.

The elders also stood still, and behind them the other pair came slowly up. And surely some wicked tricksome Puck laughed unseen among the beech leaves.

Elspeth Stuart had taken the young man's hand now. He was lifting her down. There – it was done. And – yes, you are right – something else happened – just what would have happened to you and me, twenty, thirty, or is it forty years ago?

Then with a clash and a rustle the beeches told the tale to the birches over all the wooded slopes of the hill of Airds.

* * * * *

"Elspeth!"

"Elspeth Stuart!"

"Maister Syme!"

The names came from four pairs of horrified lips as the parties to the above mentioned transaction fell swiftly asunder, with sudden stricken horror on their faces. The first cry came shrill and keen, and was accompanied by an out-throwing of feminine hands. The second fell sternly from the mouth of one who was at once a parent and a minister of the Establishment outraged in his tenderest feelings. But indubitably the elders had it. For one thing, they were two to one, and as they said for the second time with yet deeper gravity "Maister Syme!" it appeared at once that they, and only they, were able adequately to deal with the unprecedented situation. But the others did what they could.