David Elginbrod

“But I canna help it,” she replied. “I suppose you can, sir, because ye’re a man. My father can understan’ things ten times better nor me an’ my mother. But nae sooner do I begin to read and think about it, than up comes ane o’ thae parallelograms, an’ nothing will driv’t oot o’ my head again, but a verse or twa o’ Coleridge or Wordsworth.”

Hugh immediately began to repeat the first poem of the latter that occurred to him:

“I wandered lonely as a cloud.”

She listened, walking along with her eyes fixed on the ground; and when he had finished, gave a sigh of delight and relief—all the comment she uttered. She seemed never to find it necessary to say what she felt; least of all when the feeling was a pleasant one; for then it was enough for itself. This was only the second time since their acquaintance, that she had spoken of her feelings at all; and in this case they were of a purely intellectual origin. It is to be observed, however, that in both cases she had taken pains to explain thoroughly what she meant, as far as she was able.

It was dark before they reached home, at least as dark as it ever is at this season of the year in the north. They found David looking out with some slight anxiety for his daughter’s return, for she was seldom out so late as this. In nothing could the true relation between them have been more evident than in the entire absence from her manner of any embarrassment when she met her father. She went up to him and told him all about finding Mr. Sutherland asleep on the hill, and waiting beside him till he woke, that she might walk home with him. Her father seemed perfectly content with an explanation which he had not sought, and, turning to Hugh, said, smiling:

“Weel, no to be troublesome, Mr. Sutherlan’, ye maun gie the auld man a turn as weel as the young lass. We didna expec ye the nicht, but I’m sair puzzled wi’ a sma’ eneuch matter on my sklet in there. Will you no come in and gie me a lift?”

“With all my heart,” said Sutherland. So there were five lessons in that week.

When Hugh entered the cottage he had a fine sprig of heather in his hand, which he laid on the table.

He had the weakness of being proud of small discoveries—the tinier the better; and was always sharpening his senses, as well as his intellect, to a fine point, in order to make them. I fear that by these means he shut out some great ones, which could not enter during such a concentration of the faculties. He would stand listening to the sound of goose-feet upon the road, and watch how those webs laid hold of the earth like a hand. He would struggle to enter into their feelings in folding their wings properly on their backs. He would calculate, on chemical and arithmetical grounds, whether one might not hear the nocturnal growth of plants in the tropics. He was quite elated by the discovery, as he considered it, that Shakspeare named his two officers of the watch, Dogberry and Verjuice; the poisonous Dogberry, and the acid liquor of green fruits, affording suitable names for the stupidly innocuous constables, in a play the very essence of which is Much Ado About Nothing. Another of his discoveries he had, during their last lesson, unfolded to David, who had certainly contemplated it with interest. It was, that the original forms of the Arabic numerals were these:

1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8.9. {original text has a picture}

the number for which each figure stands being indicated by the number of straight lines employed in forming that numeral. I fear the comparative anatomy of figures gives no countenance to the discovery which Hugh flattered himself he had made.

After he had helped David out of his difficulty, he took up the heather, and stripping off the bells, shook them in his hand at Margaret’s ear. A half smile, like the moonlight of laughter, dawned on her face; and she listened with something of the same expression with which a child listens to the message from the sea, inclosed in a twisted shell. He did the same at David’s ear next.

“Eh, man! that’s a bonny wee soun’! It’s jist like sma’ sheep-bells—fairy-sheep, I reckon, Maggy, my doo.”

“Lat me hearken as weel,” said Janet.

Hugh obeyed. She laughed.

“It’s naething but a reestlin’. I wad raither hear the sheep baain’, or the kye routin’.”

“Eh, Mr. Sutherlan’! but, ye hae a gleg ee an’ a sharp lug. Weel, the warld’s fu’ o’ bonny sichts and souns, doon to the verra sma’est. The Lord lats naething gang. I wadna wonner noo but there micht be thousands sic like, ower sma’ a’thegither for human ears, jist as we ken there are creatures as perfect in beowty as ony we see, but far ower sma’ for our een wintin’ the glass. But for my pairt, I aye like to see a heap o’ things at ance, an’ tak’ them a’ in thegither, an’ see them playin’ into ane anither’s han’ like. I was jist thinkin’, as I came hame the nicht in the sinset, hoo it wad hae been naewise sae complete, wi’ a’ its red an’ gowd an’ green, gin it hadna been for the cauld blue east ahint it, wi’ the twa-three shiverin’ starnies leukin’ through’t. An’ doubtless the warld to come ‘ill be a’ the warmer to them ‘at hadna ower muckle happin here. But I’m jist haverin’, clean haverin’, Mr. Sutherlan’,” concluded David, with a smile of apologetic humour.

“I suppose you could easily believe with Plato, David, that the planets make a grand choral music as they roll about the heavens, only that as some sounds are too small, so that is too loud for us to hear.”

“I cud weel believe that,” was David’s unhesitating answer. Margaret looked as if she not only could believe it, but would be delighted to know that it was true. Neither Janet nor Hugh gave any indication of feeling on the matter.

CHAPTER X. HARVEST

So a small seed that in the earth lies hid And dies, reviving bursts her cloddy side, Adorned with yellow locks, of new is born, And doth become a mother great with corn, Of grains brings hundreds with it, which when old Enrich the furrows with a sea of gold.

SIR WILLIAM DRUMMOND.—Hymn of the Resurrection.

Hugh had watched the green corn grow, and ear, and turn dim; then brighten to yellow, and ripen at last under the declining autumn sun, and the low skirting moon of the harvest, which seems too full and heavy with mellow and bountiful light to rise high above the fields which it comes to bless with perfection. The long threads, on each of which hung an oat-grain—the harvest here was mostly of oats—had got dry and brittle; and the grains began to spread out their chaff-wings, as if ready to fly, and rustled with sweet sounds against each other, as the wind, which used to billow the fields like the waves of the sea, now swept gently and tenderly over it, helping the sun and moon in the drying and ripening of the joy to be laid up for the dreary winter. Most graceful of all hung those delicate oats; next bowed the bearded barley; and stately and wealthy and strong stood the few fields of wheat, of a rich, ruddy, golden hue. Above the yellow harvest rose the purple hills, and above the hills the pale-blue autumnal sky, full of light and heat, but fading somewhat from the colour with which it deepened above the vanished days of summer. For the harvest here is much later than in England.

At length the day arrived when the sickle must be put into the barley, soon to be followed by the scythe in the oats. And now came the joy of labour. Everything else was abandoned for the harvest field. Books were thrown utterly aside; for, even when there was no fear of a change of weather to urge to labour prolonged beyond the natural hours, there was weariness enough in the work of the day to prevent even David from reading, in the hours of bodily rest, anything that necessitated mental labour.

Janet and Margaret betook themselves to the reaping-hook; and the somewhat pale face of the latter needed but a single day to change it to the real harvest hue—the brown livery of Ceres. But when the oats were attacked, then came the tug of war. The laird was in the fields from morning to night, and the boys would not stay behind; but, with their father’s permission, much to the tutor’s contentment, devoted what powers they had to the gathering of the fruits of the earth. Hugh himself, whose strength had grown amazingly during his stay at Turriepuffit, and who, though he was quite helpless at the sickle, thought he could wield the scythe, would not be behind. Throwing off coat and waistcoat, and tying his handkerchief tight round his loins, he laid hold on the emblematic weapon of Time and Death, determined likewise to earn the name of Reaper. He took the last scythe. It was desperate work for a while, and he was far behind the first bout; but David, who was the best scyther in the whole country side, and of course had the leading scythe, seeing the tutor dropping behind, put more power to his own arm, finished his own bout, and brought up Hugh’s before the others had done sharpening their scythes for the next.

“Tak’ care an’ nae rax yersel’ ower sair, Mr. Sutherlan’. Ye’ll be up wi’ the best o’ them in a day or twa; but gin ye tyauve at it aboon yer strenth, ye’ll be clean forfochten. Tak’ a guid sweep wi’ the scythe, ‘at ye may hae the weicht o’t to ca’ through the strae, an’ tak’ nae shame at bein’ hindmost. Here, Maggy, my doo, come an’ gather to Mr. Sutherlan’. Ane o’ the young gentlemen can tak’ your place at the binin’.”

The work of Janet and Margaret had been to form bands for the sheaves, by folding together cunningly the heads of two small handfuls of the corn, so as to make them long enough together to go round the sheaf; then to lay this down for the gatherer to place enough of the mown corn upon it; and last, to bind the band tightly around by another skilful twist and an insertion of the ends, and so form a sheaf. From this work David called his daughter, desirous of giving Hugh a gatherer who would not be disrespectful to his awkwardness. This arrangement, however, was far from pleasing to some of the young men in the field, and brought down upon Hugh, who was too hard-wrought to hear them at first, many sly hits of country wit and human contempt. There had been for some time great jealousy of his visits at David’s cottage; for Margaret, though she had very little acquaintance with the young men of the neighbourhood, was greatly admired amongst them, and not regarded as so far above the station of many of them as to render aspiration useless. Their remarks to each other got louder and louder, till Hugh at last heard some of them, and could not help being annoyed, not by their wit or personality, but by the tone of contempt in which they were uttered.

“Tak’ care o’ yer legs, sir. It’ll be ill cuttin’ upo’ stumps.”

“Fegs! he’s taen the wings aff o’ a pairtrick.”

“Gin he gang on that get, he’ll cut twa bouts at ance.”

“Ye’ll hae the scythe ower the dyke, man. Tak’ tent.”

“Losh! sir; ye’ve taen aff my leg at the hip!”

“Ye’re shavin’ ower close: ye’ll draw the bluid, sir.”

“Hoot, man! lat alane. The gentleman’s only mista’en his trade, an’ imaigins he’s howkin’ a grave.”

And so on. Hugh gave no further sign of hearing their remarks than lay in increased exertion. Looking round, however, he saw that Margaret was vexed, evidently not for her own sake. He smiled to her, to console her for his annoyance; and then, ambitious to remove the cause of it, made a fresh exertion, recovered all his distance, and was in his own place with the best of them at the end of the bout. But the smile that had passed between them did not escape unobserved; and he had aroused yet more the wrath of the youths, by threatening soon to rival them in the excellencies to which they had an especial claim. They had regarded him as an interloper, who had no right to captivate one of their rank by arts beyond their reach; but it was still less pardonable to dare them to a trial of skill with their own weapons. To the fire of this jealousy, the admiration of the laird added fuel; for he was delighted with the spirit with which Hugh laid himself to the scythe. But all the time, nothing was further from Hugh’s thoughts than the idea of rivalry with them. Whatever he might have thought of Margaret in relation to himself, he never thought of her, though labouring in the same field with them, as in the least degree belonging to their class, or standing in any possible relation to them, except that of a common work.

In ordinary, the labourers would have had sufficient respect for Sutherland’s superior position, to prevent them from giving such decided and articulate utterance to their feelings. But they were incited by the presence and example of a man of doubtful character from the neighbouring village, a travelled and clever ne’er-do-weel, whose reputation for wit was equalled by his reputation for courage and skill, as well as profligacy. Roused by the effervescence of his genius, they went on from one thing to another, till Hugh saw it must be put a stop to somehow, else he must abandon the field. They dared not have gone so far if David had been present; but he had been called away to superintend some operations in another part of the estate; and they paid no heed to the expostulations of some of the other older men. At the close of the day’s work, therefore, Hugh walked up to this fellow, and said:

“I hope you will be satisfied with insulting me all to-day, and leave it alone to-morrow.”

The man replied, with an oath and a gesture of rude contempt,

“I dinna care the black afore my nails for ony skelp-doup o’ the lot o’ ye.”

Hugh’s highland blood flew to his brain, and before the rascal finished his speech, he had measured his length on the stubble. He sprang to his feet in a fury, threw off the coat which he had just put on, and darted at Hugh, who had by this time recovered his coolness, and was besides, notwithstanding his unusual exertions, the more agile of the two. The other was heavier and more powerful. Hugh sprang aside, as he would have done from the rush of a bull, and again with a quick blow felled his antagonist. Beginning rather to enjoy punishing him, he now went in for it; and, before the other would yield, he had rendered his next day’s labour somewhat doubtful. He withdrew, with no more injury to himself than a little water would remove. Janet and Margaret had left the field before he addressed the man.

He went borne and to bed—more weary than he had ever been in his life. Before he went to sleep, however, he made up his mind to say nothing of his encounter to David, but to leave him to hear of it from other sources. He could not help feeling a little anxious as to his judgment upon it. That the laird would approve, he hardly doubted; but for his opinion he cared very little.

“Dawvid, I wonner at ye,” said Janet to her husband, the moment he came home, “to lat the young lad warstle himsel’ deid that get wi’ a scythe. His banes is but saft yet, There wasna a dry steek on him or he wan half the lenth o’ the first bout. He’s sair disjaskit, I’se warran’.”

“Nae fear o’ him, Janet; it’ll do him guid. Mr. Sutherland’s no feckless winlestrae o’ a creater. Did he haud his ain at a’ wi’ the lave?”

“Haud his ain! Gin he be fit for onything the day, he maun be pitten neist yersel’, or he’ll cut the legs aff o’ ony ither man i’ the corn.”

A glow of pleasure mantled in Margaret’s face at her mother’s praise of Hugh. Janet went on:

“But I was jist clean affronted wi’ the way ‘at the young chields behaved themselves till him.”

“I thocht I heard a toot-moot o’ that kin’ afore I left, but I thocht it better to tak’ nae notice o’t. I’ll be wi’ ye a’ day the morn though, an’ I’m thinkin’ I’ll clap a rouch han’ on their mou’s ‘at I hear ony mair o’t frae.”

But there was no occasion for interference on David’s part. Hugh made his appearance—not, it is true, with the earliest in the hairst-rig, but after breakfast with the laird, who was delighted with the way in which he had handled his scythe the day before, and felt twice the respect for him in consequence. It must be confessed he felt very stiff, but the best treatment for stiffness being the homoeopathic one of more work, he had soon restored the elasticity of his muscles, and lubricated his aching joints. His antagonist of the foregoing evening was nowhere to be seen; and the rest of the young men were shame-faced and respectful enough.

David, having learned from some of the spectators the facts of the combat, suddenly, as they were walking home together, held out his hand to Hugh, shook his hard, and said:

“Mr. Sutherlan’, I’m sair obleeged to ye for giein’ that vratch, Jamie Ogg, a guid doonsettin’. He’s a coorse crater; but the warst maun hae meat, an’ sae I didna like to refeese him when he cam for wark. But its a greater kin’ness to clout him nor to cleed him. They say ye made an awfu’ munsie o’ him. But it’s to be houpit he’ll live to thank ye. There’s some fowk ‘at can respeck no airgument but frae steekit neives; an’ it’s fell cruel to haud it frae them, gin ye hae’t to gie them. I hae had eneuch ado to haud my ain han’s aff o’ the ted, but it comes a hantle better frae you, Mr. Sutherlan’.”

Hugh wielded the scythe the whole of the harvest, and Margaret gathered to him. By the time it was over, leading-home and all, he measured an inch less about the waist, and two inches more about the shoulders; and was as brown as a berry, and as strong as an ox, or “owse,” as David called it, when thus describing Mr. Sutherland’s progress in corporal development; for he took a fatherly pride in the youth, to whom, at the same time, he looked up with submission, as his master in learning.

CHAPTER XI. A CHANGE AND NO CHANGE

Affliction, when I know it, is but this— A deep alloy, whereby man tougher is To bear the hammer; and the deeper still, We still arise more image of his will. Sickness—an humorous cloud ‘twist us and light; And death, at longest, but another night. Man is his own star; and that soul that can Be honest, is the only perfect Man.

JOHN FLETCHER.—Upon an Honest Man’s Fortune.

Had Sutherland been in love with Margaret, those would have been happy days; and that a yet more happy night, when, under the mystery of a low moonlight and a gathering storm, the crop was cast in haste into the carts, and hurried home to be built up in safety; when a strange low wind crept sighing across the stubble, as if it came wandering out of the past and the land of dreams, lying far off and withered in the green west; and when Margaret and he came and went in the moonlight like creatures in a dream—for the vapours of sleep were floating in Hugh’s brain, although he was awake and working.

“Margaret,” he said, as they stood waiting a moment for the cart that was coming up to be filled with sheaves, “what does that wind put you in mind of?”

“Ossian’s Poems,” replied Margaret, without a moment’s hesitation.

Hugh was struck by her answer. He had meant something quite different. But it harmonized with his feeling about Ossian; for the genuineness of whose poetry, Highlander as he was, he had no better argument to give than the fact, that they produced in himself an altogether peculiar mental condition; that the spiritual sensations he had in reading them were quite different from those produced by anything else, prose or verse; in fact, that they created moods of their own in his mind. He was unwilling to believe, apart from national prejudices (which have not prevented the opinions on this question from being as strong on the one side as on the other), that this individuality of influence could belong to mere affectations of a style which had never sprung from the sources of real feeling. “Could they,” he thought, “possess the power to move us like remembered dreams of our childhood, if all that they possessed of reality was a pretended imitation of what never existed, and all that they inherited from the past was the halo of its strangeness?”

But Hugh was not in love with Margaret, though he could not help feeling the pleasure of her presence. Any youth must have been the better for having her near him; but there was nothing about her quiet, self-contained being, free from manifestation of any sort, to rouse the feelings commonly called love, in the mind of an inexperienced youth like Hugh Sutherland.—I say commonly called, because I believe that within the whole sphere of intelligence there are no two loves the same.—Not that he was less easily influenced than other youths. A designing girl might have caught him at once, if she had had no other beauty than sparkling eyes; but the womanhood of the beautiful Margaret kept so still in its pearly cave, that it rarely met the glance of neighbouring eyes. How Margaret regarded him I do not know; but I think it was with a love almost entirely one with reverence and gratitude. Cause for gratitude she certainly had, though less than she supposed; and very little cause indeed for reverence. But how could she fail to revere one to whom even her father looked up? Of course David’s feeling of respect for Hugh must have sprung chiefly from intellectual grounds; and he could hardly help seeing, if he thought at all on the subject, which is doubtful, that Hugh was as far behind Margaret in the higher gifts and graces, as he was before her in intellectual acquirement. But whether David perceived this or not, certainly Margaret did not even think in that direction. She was pure of self-judgment—conscious of no comparing of herself with others, least of all with those next her.

At length the harvest was finished; or, as the phrase of the district was, clyack was gotten—a phrase with the derivation, or even the exact meaning of which, I am unacquainted; knowing only that it implies something in close association with the feast of harvest-home, called the kirn in other parts of Scotland. Thereafter, the fields lay bare to the frosts of morning and evening, and to the wind that grew cooler and cooler with the breath of Winter, who lay behind the northern hills, and waited for his hour. But many lovely days remained, of quiet and slow decay, of yellow and red leaves, of warm noons and lovely sunsets, followed by skies—green from the west horizon to the zenith, and walked by a moon that seemed to draw up to her all the white mists from pond and river and pool, to settle again in hoar-frost, during the colder hours that precede the dawn. At length every leafless tree sparkled in the morning sun, incrusted with fading gems; and the ground was hard under foot; and the hedges were filled with frosted spider-webs; and winter had laid the tips of his fingers on the land, soon to cover it deep with the flickering snow-flakes, shaken from the folds of his outspread mantle. But long ere this, David and Margaret had returned with renewed diligence, and powers strengthened by repose, or at least by intermission, to their mental labours, and Hugh was as constant a visitor at the cottage as before. The time, however, drew nigh when he must return to his studies at Aberdeen; and David and Margaret were looking forward with sorrow to the loss of their friend. Janet, too, “cudna bide to think o’t.”

“He’ll tak’ the daylicht wi’ him, I doot, my lass,” she said, as she made the porridge for breakfast one morning, and looked down anxiously at her daughter, seated on the creepie by the ingle-neuk.

“Na, na, mither,” replied Margaret, looking up from her book; “he’ll lea’ sic gifts ahin’ him as’ll mak’ daylicht i’ the dark;” and then she bent her head and went on with her reading, as if she had not spoken.

The mother looked away with a sigh and a slight, sad shake of the head.

But matters were to turn out quite different from all anticipations. Before the day arrived on which Hugh must leave for the university, a letter from home informed him that his father was dangerously ill. He hastened to him, but only to comfort his last hours by all that a son could do, and to support his mother by his presence during the first hours of her loneliness. But anxious thoughts for the future, which so often force themselves on the attention of those who would gladly prolong their brooding over the past, compelled them to adopt an alteration of their plans for the present.

The half-pay of Major Sutherland was gone, of course; and all that remained for Mrs. Sutherland was a small annuity, secured by her husband’s payments to a certain fund for the use of officers’ widows. From this she could spare but a mere trifle for the completion of Hugh’s university-education; while the salary he had received at Turriepuffit, almost the whole of which he had saved, was so small as to be quite inadequate for the very moderate outlay necessary. He therefore came to the resolution to write to the laird, and offer, if they were not yet provided with another tutor, to resume his relation to the young gentlemen for the winter. It was next to impossible to spend money there; and he judged that before the following winter, he should be quite able to meet the expenses of his residence at Aberdeen, during the last session of his course. He would have preferred trying to find another situation, had it not been that David and Janet and Margaret had made there a home for him.