Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood Part 3

"Except the lambs of the flock, Mrs. Mitch.e.l.l.--I like you for standing up for your friend; but is a woman, because she is lone and a widow, to make a Moloch of herself, and have the children sacrificed to her in that way? It's enough to make idiots of some of them. She had better see to it. You tell her that--from me, if you like. And don't you meddle with school affairs. I'll take my young men," he added with a smile, "to school when I see fit."

"I'm sure, sir," said Mrs. Mitch.e.l.l, putting her blue striped ap.r.o.n to her eyes, "I asked your opinion before I took him."

"I believe I did say something about its being time he were able to read, but I recollect nothing more.--You must have misunderstood me,"

he added, willing to ease her descent to the valley of her humiliation.

She walked away without another word, sniffing the air as she went, and carrying her hands folded under her ap.r.o.n. From that hour I believe she hated me.

My father looked after her with a smile, and then looked down on me, saying--

"She's short in the temper, poor woman! and we mustn't provoke her."

I was too well satisfied to urge my victory by further complaint. I could afford to let well alone, for I had been delivered as from the fiery furnace, and the earth and the sky were laughing around me. Oh!

what a suns.h.i.+ne filled the world! How glad the larks, which are the praisers amongst the birds, were that blessed morning! The demon of oppression had hidden her head ashamed, and fled to her den!

CHAPTER VIII

A New Schoolmistress

"But, Ra.n.a.ld," my father continued, "what are we to do about the reading? I fear I have let you go too long. I didn't want to make learning a burden to you, and I don't approve of children learning to read too soon; but really, at your age, you know, it is time you were beginning. I have time to teach you some things, but I can't teach you everything. I have got to read a great deal and think a great deal, and go about my parish a good deal. And your brother Tom has heavy lessons to learn at school, and I have to help him. So what's to be done, Ra.n.a.ld, my boy? You can't go to the parish school before you've learned your letters."

"There's Kirsty, papa," I suggested.

"Yes; there's Kirsty," he returned with a sly smile. "Kirsty can do everything, can't she?"

"She can speak Gaelic," I said with a tone of triumph, bringing her rarest accomplishment to the forefront.

"I wish you could speak Gaelic," said my father, thinking of his wife, I believe, whose mother tongue it was. "But that is not what you want most to learn. Do you think Kirsty could teach you to read English?"

"Yes, I do."

My father again meditated.

"Let us go and ask her," he said at length, taking my hand.

I capered with delight, nor ceased my capering till we stood on Kirsty's earthen floor. I think I see her now, dusting one of her deal chairs, as white as soap and sand could make it, for the minister to sit on. She never called him _the master_, but always _the minister_.

She was a great favourite with my father, and he always behaved as a visitor in her house.

"Well, Kirsty," he said, after the first salutations were over, "have you any objection to turn schoolmistress?"

"I should make a poor hand at that," she answered, with a smile to me which showed she guessed what my father wanted. "But if it were to teach Master Ra.n.a.ld there, I should like dearly to try what I could do."

She never omitted the _Master_ to our names; Mrs. Mitch.e.l.l by no chance prefixed it. The natural manners of the Celt and Saxon are almost diametrically opposed in Scotland. And had Kirsty's speech been in the coa.r.s.e dialect of Mrs. Mitch.e.l.l, I am confident my father would not have allowed her to teach me. But Kirsty did not speak a word of Scotch, and although her English was a little broken and odd, being formed somewhat after Gaelic idioms, her tone was pure and her phrases were refined. The matter was very speedily settled between them.

"And if you want to beat him, Kirsty, you can beat him in Gaelic, and then he won't feel it," said my father, trying after a joke, which was no common occurrence with him, whereupon Kirsty and I laughed in great contentment.

The fact was, Kirsty had come to the manse with my mother, and my father was attached to her for the sake of his wife as well as for her own, and Kirsty would have died for the minister or any one of his boys. All the devotion a Highland woman has for the chief of her clan, Kirsty had for my father, not to mention the reverence due to the minister.

After a little chat about the cows and the calves, my father rose, saying--

"Then I'll just make him over to you, Kirsty. Do you think you can manage without letting it interfere with your work, though?"

"Oh yes, sir--well that! I shall soon have him reading to me while I'm busy about. If he doesn't know the word, he can spell it, and then I shall know it--at least if it's not longer than Hawkie's tail."

Hawkie was a fine milker, with a bad temper, and a comically short tail. It had got chopped off by some accident when she was a calf.

"There's something else short about Hawkie--isn't there, Kirsty?" said my father.

"And Mrs. Mitch.e.l.l," I suggested, thinking to help Kirsty to my father's meaning.

"Come, come, young gentleman! We don't want your remarks," said my father pleasantly.

"Why, papa, you told me so yourself, just before we came up."

"Yes, I did; but I did not mean you to repeat it. What if Kirsty were to go and tell Mrs. Mitch.e.l.l?"

Kirsty made no attempt at protestation. She knew well enough that my father knew there was no danger. She only laughed, and I, seeing Kirsty satisfied, was satisfied also, and joined in the laugh.

The result was that before many weeks were over, Allister and wee Davie were Kirsty's pupils also, Allister learning to read, and wee Davie to sit still, which was the hardest task within his capacity.

They were free to come or keep away, but not to go: if they did come, Kirsty insisted on their staying out the lesson. It soon became a regular thing. Every morning in summer we might be seen perched on a form, under one of the tiny windows, in that delicious brown light which you seldom find but in an old clay-floored cottage. In a fir-wood I think you have it; and I have seen it in an old castle; but best of all in the house of mourning in an Arab cemetery. In the winter, we seated ourselves round the fire--as near it as Kirsty's cooking operations, which were simple enough, admitted. It was delightful to us boys, and would have been amusing to anyone, to see how Kirsty behaved when Mrs. Mitch.e.l.l found occasion to pay her a visit during lesson hours. She knew her step and darted to the door.

Not once did she permit her to enter. She was like a hen with her chickens.

"No, you'll not come in just now, Mrs. Mitch.e.l.l," she would say, as the housekeeper attempted to pa.s.s. "You know we're busy."

"I want to hear how they're getting on."

"You can try them at home," Kirsty would answer.

We always laughed at the idea of our reading to her. Once I believe she heard the laugh, for she instantly walked away, and I do not remember that she ever came again.

CHAPTER IX

We Learn Other Things

We were more than ever at the farm now. During the summer, from the time we got up till the time we went to bed, we seldom approached the manse. I have heard it hinted that my father neglected us. But that can hardly be, seeing that then his word was law to us, and now I regard his memory as the symbol of the love unspeakable. My elder brother Tom always had his meals with him, and sat at his lessons in the study. But my father did not mind the younger ones running wild, so long as there was a Kirsty for them to run to; and indeed the men also were not only friendly to us, but careful over us. No doubt we were rather savage, very different in our appearance from town-bred children, who are washed and dressed every time they go out for a walk: that we should have considered not merely a hards.h.i.+p, but an indignity. To be free was all our notion of a perfect existence. But my father's rebuke was awful indeed, if he found even the youngest guilty of untruth, or cruelty, or injustice. At all kinds of escapades, not involving disobedience, he smiled, except indeed there were too much danger, when he would warn and limit.

A town boy may wonder what we could find to amuse us all day long; but the fact is almost everything was an amus.e.m.e.nt, seeing that when we could not take a natural share in what was going on, we generally managed to invent some collateral employment fict.i.tiously related to it. But he must not think of our farm as at all like some great farm he may happen to know in England; for there was nothing done by machinery on the place. There may be great pleasure in watching machine-operations, but surely none to equal the pleasure we had. If there had been a steam engine to plough my father's fields, how could we have ridden home on its back in the evening? To ride the horses home from the plough was a triumph. Had there been a thras.h.i.+ng-machine, could its pleasures have been comparable to that of lying in the straw and watching the grain dance from the sheaves under the skilful flails of the two strong men who belaboured them? There was a winnowing-machine, but quite a tame one, for its wheel I could drive myself--the handle now high as my head, now low as my knee--and watch at the same time the storm of chaff driven like drifting snowflakes from its wide mouth. Meantime the oat-grain was flowing in a silent slow stream from the shelving hole in the other side, and the wind, rus.h.i.+ng through the opposite doors, aided the winnower by catching at the expelled chaff, and carrying it yet farther apart. I think I see old Eppie now, filling her sack with what the wind blew her; not with the grain: Eppie did not covet that; she only wanted her bed filled with fresh springy chaff, on which she would sleep as sound as her rheumatism would let her, and as warm and dry and comfortable as any d.u.c.h.ess in the land that happened to have the rheumatism too. For comfort is inside more than outside; and eider down, delicious as it is, has less to do with it than some people fancy. How I wish all the poor people in the great cities could have good chaff beds to lie upon! Let me see: what more machines are there now? More than I can tell. I saw one going in the fields the other day, at the use of which I could only guess.

Strange, wild-looking, mad-like machines, as the Scotch would call them, are growling and snapping, and clinking and clattering over our fields, so that it seems to an old boy as if all the sweet poetic twilight of things were vanis.h.i.+ng from the country; but he reminds himself that G.o.d is not going to sleep, for, as one of the greatest poets that ever lived says, _he slumbereth not nor sleepeth_; and the children of the earth are his, and he will see that their imaginations and feelings have food enough and to spare. It is his business this--not ours. So the work must be done as well as it can. Then, indeed, there will be no fear of the poetry.

I have just alluded to the pleasure of riding the horses, that is, the work-horses: upon them Allister and I began to ride, as far as I can remember, this same summer--not from the plough, for the ploughing was in the end of the year and the spring. First of all we were allowed to take them at watering-time, watched by one of the men, from the stable to the long trough that stood under the pump. There, going hurriedly and stopping suddenly, they would drop head and neck and shoulders like a certain toy-bird, causing the young riders a vague fear of falling over the height no longer defended by the uplifted crest; and then drink and drink till the riders' legs felt the horses' bodies swelling under them; then up and away with quick refreshed stride or trot towards the paradise of their stalls. But for us came first the somewhat fearful pa.s.s of the stable door, for they never stopped, like better educated horses, to let their riders dismount, but walked right in, and there was just room, by stooping low, to clear the top of the door. As we improved in equitation, we would go afield, to ride them home from the pasture, where they were fastened by chains to short stakes of iron driven into the earth. There was more of adventure here, for not only was the ride longer, but the horses were more frisky, and would sometimes set off at the gallop. Then the chief danger was again the door, lest they should dash in, and knock knees against posts and heads against lintels, for we had only halters to hold them with. But after I had once been thrown from back to neck, and from neck to ground in a clumsy but wild gallop extemporized by Dobbin, I was raised to the dignity of a bridle, which I always carried with me when we went to fetch them. It was my father's express desire that until we could sit well on the bare back we should not be allowed a saddle. It was a whole year before I was permitted to mount his little black riding mare, called Missy. She was old, it is true--n.o.body quite knew how old she was--but if she felt a light weight on her back, either the spirit of youth was contagious, or she fancied herself as young as when she thought nothing of twelve stone, and would dart off like the wind. In after years I got so found of her, that I would stand by her side flacking the flies from her as she grazed; and when I tired of that, would clamber upon her back, and lie there reading my book, while she plucked on and ground and mashed away at the gra.s.s as if n.o.body were near her.

Then there was the choice, if nothing else were found more attractive, of going to the field where the cattle were grazing. Oh! the rich hot summer afternoons among the gra.s.s and the clover, the little lamb-daisies, and the big horse-daisies, with the cattle feeding solemnly, but one and another straying now to the corn, now to the turnips, and recalled by stern shouts, or, if that were unavailing, by vigorous pursuit and even blows! If I had been able to think of a mother at home, I should have been perfectly happy. Not that I missed her then; I had lost her too young for that. I mean that the memory of the time wants but that to render it perfect in bliss. Even in the cold days of spring, when, after being shut up all the winter, the cattle were allowed to revel again in the springing gra.s.s and the venturesome daisies, there was pleasure enough in the company and devices of the cowherd, a freckle-faced, white-haired, weak-eyed boy of ten, named--I forget his real name: we always called him Turkey, because his nose was the colour of a turkey's egg. Who but Turkey knew mushrooms from toadstools? Who but Turkey could detect earth-nuts--and that with the certainty of a truffle-hunting dog? Who but Turkey knew the note and the form and the nest and the eggs of every bird in the country? Who but Turkey, with his little whip and its lash of bra.s.s wire, would encounter the angriest bull in Christendom, provided he carried, like the bulls of Scotland, his most sensitive part, the nose, foremost? In our eyes Turkey was a hero. Who but Turkey could discover the nests of hens whose maternal anxiety had eluded the _finesse_ of Kirsty? and who so well as he could roast the egg with which she always rewarded such a discovery? Words are feeble before the delight we experienced on such an occasion, when Turkey, proceeding to light a fire against one of the earthen walls which divided the fields, would send us abroad to gather sticks and straws and whatever outcast combustibles we could find, of which there was a great scarcity, there being no woods or hedges within reach. Who like Turkey could rob a wild bee's nest? And who could be more just than he in distributing the luscious prize? In fine, his accomplishments were innumerable. Short of flying, we believed him capable of everything imaginable.