The Dew of Their Youth - Samuel Rutherford Crockett (chromebook ebook reader TXT) 📗

go--let her put her hand to the work. The burden cannot be too soon laid on young shoulders--that is, if they are strong enough."
Mary Lyon stared, as if both he and his daughter had suddenly taken leave of their senses.
"Why, what can the lassie _do_?" she cried; "I thought you were making her nothing but a don in the dead languages!"
"I can bake, and brew, and wash, and keep a house clean," said Agnes Anne, putting in her testimonials, since there was no one so well acquainted with them. My father nodded. He was not so blind as many might suppose. My mother said, "Aye, 'deed, she can that. Agnes Anne is a good lass. I know not what I should do without her!"
My grandmother looked about at the new air of tidiness, and for the first time a suspicion crossed her mind that, out of a pit from which she was expecting no such treasure, some one in her own image might possibly have been digged among her descendants of the second generation. She looked at Agnes Anne with a ray of hope. Agnes Anne stood the awful searching power of that eye. Agnes Anne did not flinch. Mary Lyon nodded her head with its man's close-cropped locks of rough white hair in lyart locks about her ears.
"You'll do, Agnes Anne, you'll do," she said, adding cautiously, "that is, after a time"--so as not to exalt the girl above measure. It was, however, recognized by all as a definite triumph for my sister. My grandmother, a rigid Calvinist, who believed in Election with all her intellect, and acted Free Will with all her heart, elected Agnes Anne upon the spot. Had the girl not willed to rise out of the pit of sloth and mere human learning? And lo! she had arisen. Thenceforth Agnes Anne stood on a pedestal, and for a while one sturdy disciple of Calvin's thought heretically of the pure doctrine. Here was a human being who had willed, and, according to my grandmother, had made of herself a miracle of grace.
But she recalled herself to more orthodox sentiments. The steel was out of the sheath, indeed, but it had to be tried. Even yet Agnes Anne might be found wanting.
"When will you be ready to start?" she said, turning her black twinkling eyes upon her granddaughter.
"In five minutes," said Agnes Anne boldly.
"And you are not frightened?"
"Of what?"
"Of these vain tales--ghosts, hauntings, and so forth. Our Meg Simprin (silly maid!) would not move a foot, and you are far younger."
"I am no younger than those who are in the house already," said Agnes Anne, with great sense, which even I would hardly have expected from her, "and if ghosts are spirits, as the Bible says, I do not see that they can interfere with housework!"
My grandmother rose solemnly from her seat, patted Agnes Anne on the top-knot of her hair, shook hands with John MacAlpine, nodded meaningly at my mother, and said, "Come along, young lass," in a tone which showed that the aged shepherdess had unexpectedly found a lamb whom she long counted lost absolutely butting against the door of the sheep-fold.
This was the apotheosis of Agnes Anne. Her life dates from that evening in our kitchen, even as mine did from the afternoon when one half the fools of Eden Valley were letting off shot-guns at the back windows of Marnhoul Great House, while Miss Irma withstood the others on the threshold of the front door.


CHAPTER VII
THE DOCTOR'S ADVENT
The firm of lawyers in Dumfries, the agents for the Maitland properties, did not seem to be taking any measures to dispossess Miss Irma and young Sir Louis. Perhaps they, too, had private information. Perhaps those who had brought the children to Marnhoul may have been in the confidence of that notable firm of Smart, Poole & Smart in the High Street. At any rate they made no move towards ejection. They may also have argued that any one who could dispossess the ghosts and make Marnhoul once more a habitable mansion, was welcome to the tenancy.
It was the Reverend Doctor Gillespie who, first of all the distinguished men of the parish, received in some slight degree the confidence of Miss Irma. Grandmother knew more, of course, and perhaps, also, Agnes Anne. But, with the feeling of women towards those whom they approve, they became Irma's accomplices. Women are like that. When you tell them a secret, if they don't like you, they become traitors. If they do, they are at once confederates. But the Doctor visited Marnhoul as a deputation, officially, and also for the purpose of setting the minds of the genteel at rest.
The Doctor's lady gave him no peace till he did his duty. The General's womenfolk at the Bungalow were clamorous. It was not seemly. Something must be done, and since the action of Mr. Shepstone Oglethorpe on the occasion of the assault on the house had put _him_ out of the question, and as the General flatly refused to have anything to do with the affair, it was obvious that the duty must fall to the Doctor.
Nor could a better choice have been made. Eden Valley has known many preachers, but never another such pastor--never a shepherd of the sheep like the Doctor. I can see him yet walking down the manse avenue--it had been just "the Loaning" in the days before the advent of the second Mrs. Doctor Gillespie--a silver-headed cane in his hand, everything about him carefully groomed, and his very port breathing a peculiarly grave and sober dignity. Grey locks, still plentiful, clustered about his head. His cocked hat (of the antique pattern which, early in his ministry, he had imported by the dozen from Versailles) never altered in pattern. Buckles of unpolished silver shone dully at his knee and bent across his square-toed shoes.
Above all spread his neckcloth, spotless, enveloping, cumbrous, reverence-compelling, a cravat worthy of a Moderator. And indeed the Doctor--our Doctor, parish minister of Eden Valley, had "passed the Chair" of the General Assembly. We were all proud of the fact, even top-lofty Cameronians like my grandmother secretly delighting in the thought of the Doctor in his robes of office.
"There would be few like him away there in Edinburgh," she would say. "The Doctor's a braw man, and does us credit afore the great of the land--for a' that he's a Moderate!"
And had he been the chief of all the Moderates, the most volcanic and aggressive of Moderates, my grandmother would have found some good thing to say of a fellow-countryman of so noble a presence--"so personable," and "such a credit to the neighbourhood."
Wisdom, grave and patient, was in every line of his kindly face. Something boyish and innocent told that the shades of the prison-house had never wholly closed about him. It was good to lift the hat to Dr. Gillespie as he went along--hat a little tip-tilted off the broadly-furrowed brow. In the city he is very likely to stop and regard the most various wares--children's dolls or ladies' underpinnings. But think not that the divine is interested in such things. His mind is absent--in communion with things very far away. Lift your hat and salute him. He will not see you, but--it will do _you_ good!
William Gillespie was the son of a good ministerial house. His father had occupied the same pulpit. He himself had been born in his own manse--which is to say, in all the purple of which our grey Puritan land can boast. We were proud of the Doctor, and had good reason therefor. I have said that even my field-preaching grandmother looked upon the Erastian with a moisture quasi-maternal in her eyes, and as for us who "sat under him and listened to his speech," we came well-nigh to worship him.
Yet "the Doctor" was self-effacing beyond many, and only our proper respect for the "Lady of the Manse" kept the parishioners in their places. Discourses which he had preached in the callow days of his youth on the "Book of the Revelation" had brought hearers from many distant parishes, and at that time the Doctor had had several "calls" and "offers" to proceed to other spheres on account of their fame. But he had always refused to repeat any of them.
"I have changed my mind about many things since then," he would say; "young men are apt to be hasty! The greatest of all heresies is dogmatism."
But among the older saints of the parish that "series of expositions" was not forgotten. "It was" (they averred) "like the licht o' anither world to look on his face--just heeven itsel' to listen to him. Sirce me, there are no such discourses to be heard now-a-days--not even from _himsel'_!"
And be it remembered that our dear Doctor could unbend--that is, in fitting time and place. From the seats of the mighty, from Holyrood and the Moderator's chair our Cincinnatus returned to shepherd his quiet flock among the bosky silences of Eden Valley. He wore his learning, all his weight of honour lightly--with a smile, even with a slight shrug of the shoulder. The smile, even the jest, rose continually to his lips, especially when his wife was not present. But at all times he remembered his office, and often halted with the ancient maxim at the sight of some intruder, "Let us be sober--yonder comes a fool!" And many of his visitors noticed this sudden sobriety without once suspecting its cause.
Even the Cameronians agreed that there was "unction" in the Doctor. For his brave word's sake they forgave the heresies of his church about the Civil Magistrate, and said freely among themselves that if in every parish there was such a minister as Dr. Gillespie, the civil magistrate would be compelled to take a very back seat indeed. But it was on Communion Sabbath days that the Doctor became, as it were, transfigured, the face of him shining, though he wist not of it.
Something of the spirit of the Crucified was poured forth that day upon men and women humbly bowing their heads over the consecrated memorials of His love.
A silence of a rare and peculiar sanctity filled the little bare, deep-windowed kirk. The odour of the flowering lilacs came in like Nature's own incense, and the plain folk of Eden Valley got a foretaste, faint and dim, but sufficient, of the Land where the tables shall never be withdrawn.
Better preachers than the Doctor?--We grant it you, though there are many in the Valley who will not agree, but not one more fitted to break the bread of communion before the white-spread tables.
It was Agnes Anne who opened the door of Marnhoul, and stood a moment astonished at the sight of the Doctor all in black and silver--hat, coat, knee-breeches, silken hose and leathern shoes of the first, locks, studs, knee-buckles, shoe-buckles all of the second.
But our Agnes Anne was truly of the race of Mary Lyon, so in a moment she said, "Pray come in, sir!" with the self-respect of the daughter of a good house, as well as the dutifulness which she owed to one so reverend and so revered.
The Doctor was not surprised. He smiled as he recognized the school-master's daughter. But he betrayed nothing. He laid his hand as usual on her smooth locks by way of a blessing, and inquired if Miss Maitland and Sir Louis were at home.
"They are in the school-room," said Agnes Anne, in the most business-like tone in the world; "come this way, sir."
It was a very different house--that which Agnes Anne showed the Doctor--from the cobweb-draped, dust-strewn, deserted mansion of a few weeks ago. Simply considering them as caretakers, the Dumfries lawyers ought to have welcomed their new tenants. So far as