S. R. CROCKETT.
THE STICKIT MINISTER'S WOOING
A dour, grippy back-end it was, the soil stubborn and untoward with early frost. And a strange sound it was to hear as I (Alexander McQuhirr) came down the Lang Brae, the channel stones droning and dinnelling on the ice by the third of November; a thing which had not happened in our parts since that fell year of the Sixteen Drifty Days, which has been so greatly talked about.
I walked over to the Dullarg the very night I arrived from Edinburgh. I had a new volume of Tennyson with me, which I had bought with the thought that he would be pleased with it. For I loved Robert Fraser, and I will not deny that my heart beat with expectation as I went up the little loaning with the rough stone dyke upon either side aye, as if it had been the way to Nether Neuk, and I going to see my sweetheart.
"Come your ways in, Alec, man," his voice came from the inner room, as he heard me pause to exchange banter of a rural sort with the servant lasses in the kitchen; "I have been waitin' for ye. I kenned ye wad come the nicht!"
I went in. And there by the little peat fire, drowsing red and looking strangely out of place behind the ribs of the black-leaded "register" grate, I saw the Stickit Minister with a black-and-white check plaid about his knees. He smiled a strange sweet smile, at once wistful and distant, as I entered like one who waves farewell through a mist of tears as the pier slides back and the sundering water seethes and widens about the
ship.
"You are better, Robert!" I said, smiling too. Dully, and yet with dogged cheerfulness, I said it, as men lie to the dying and are not believed.
He stretched out his thin hand, the ploughman's horn clean gone from it, and the veins blue and convex upon the shrunk wrist.
"Ave atque vale , Alec, lad!" he answered. "That is what it has come to with Robert Fraser. But how are all at Drumquhat? Ye will be on your road ower to the Nether Neuk?"
This he said, though he knew different.
"I have brought you this from Edinburgh," I said, giving him the little, thin, green volume of Tennyson. I had cut it to save him trouble, and written his name on the blank page before the title.
I shall never forget the way he looked at it. He opened it as a woman unfolds a new and costly garment, with a lingering caress of the wasted finger-tips through which I could almost see the white of the paper, and a slow soft intake of the breath, like a lover's sigh.
His eyes, of old blue and clear, had now a kind of glaze over them, a veiling Indian summer mist through which, however, still shone, all undimmed and fearless, the light of the simplest and manfulest spirit I have ever known. He turned the leaves and read a verse here and there with evident pleasure. He had a way of reading anything he loved as it listening inly to the cadences a little half-turn of the head aside, and a still contented smile hovering about the lips, like one who catches the first returning fall of beloved footsteps.
But all at once Robert Fraser shut the book and let his hands sink wearily down upon his knee. He did not look at me, but kept his eyes on the red peat ash in the "register" grate.
"It's bonnie," he murmured softly; "and it was a kind thing for you to think on me. But it's gane frae me, Alec it's a' clean gane. Tak' you the book, Alec. The birdies will never sing again in ony spring for me to hear. I'm back upon the Word, Alec. There's nocht but That for me noo!"
He laid his hand on a Bible that was open beside him on the stand which held his medicine bottles, and a stocking at which his wearied fingers occasionally knitted for a moment or two at a time.
Then he gave the little green-clad Tennyson back to me with so motherly and lingering a regard that, had I not turned away, I declare I know not but that I had been clean done for.
"Yet for a' that, Alec," he said, "do you take the book for my sake. And see cut out the leaf ye hae written on and let me keep it here beside me."
I did as he asked me, and with the leaf in his hand he turned over the pages of his Bible carefully, like a minister looking for a text. He stopped at a yellowing envelope, as if uncertain whether to deposit the inscription in it. Then he lifted the stamped oblong and handed it to me with a kind of smile.
"There, Alec," he said, "you that has (so they tell me) a sweetheart o' your ain, ye will like to see that. This is the envelope that held the letter I gat frae Jessie Loudon the nicht Sir James telled me at the Infirmary that my days were numbered!"
"Oh, Robert!" I cried, all ashamed that he should speak thus to a young man like me, "dinna think o' that. You will excite yourself you may do yourself a hurt "