KILBOGIE MANSE
Ministers there were in the great strath so orderly that they kept their sealing-wax in one drawer and their string in another, while their sermons were arranged under the books of the Bible, and tied with green silk. Dr. Dowbiggin, though a dull man and of a heavy carriage, could find in an instant the original draft of a motion on instrumental music he made in the Presbytery of Muirtown in the year '59, and could also give the exact page in the blue-books for every word he had uttered in the famous case when he showed that the use of an harmonium to train MacWheep's choir was a return to the bondage of Old Testament worship. His collection of pamphlets was supposed to be unique, and was a terror to controversialists, no man knowing when a rash utterance on the bottomless mystery of "spiritual independence" might not be produced from the Doctor's coat-tail pocket. He retired to rest at 10.15, and rose at six, settling the subject of his next sermon on Sabbath evening, and finishing the first head before breakfast on Monday morning. He had three hats—one for funerals, one for marriages, one for ordinary occasions—and has returned from the Presbytery door to brush his coat. Morning prayers in Dr. Dowbiggin's house were at 8.5, and the wrath of the Doctor was so dangerous that one probationer staying at the manse, and not quite independent of influence, did not venture to undress, but snatched a fearful doze sitting upright on a cane-bottomed chair, lest he should not be in at the psalm. Young ministers of untidy habits regarded Dr. Dowbiggin's study with despair, and did not recover their spirits till they were out of Muirtown. Once only did this eminent man visit the manse of Kilbogie, and in favourable moments after dinner he would give his choicer experiences.
"It is my invariable custom to examine the bed to see that everything is in order, and any one sleeping in Kilbogie Manse will find the good of such a precaution. I trust that I am not a luxurious person—it would ill become one who came out in '43—but I have certainly become accustomed to the use of sheets. When I saw there were none on the bed, I declined to sleep without them, and I indicated my mind very distinctly on the condition of the manse.
"Would you believe it?" the Doctor used to go on. "Saunderson explained, as if it were a usual occurrence, that he had given away all the spare linen in his house to a girl that had to marry in … urgent circumstances, and had forgotten to get more. And what do you think did he offer as a substitute for sheets?" No one could even imagine what might not occur to the mind of Saunderson.
"Towels, as I am an honourable man; a collection of towels, as he put it, 'skilfully attached together, might make a pleasant covering.' That is the first and last time I ever slept in the Free Church Manse of Kilbogie. As regards Saunderson's study, I will guarantee that the like of it cannot be found within Scotland;" and at the very thought of it that exact and methodical ecclesiastic realized the limitations of language.
His boys boasted of the Rabbi's study as something that touched genius in its magnificent disorderliness, and Carmichael was so proud of it that he took me to see it as to a shrine. One whiff of its atmosphere as you entered the door gave an appetite and raised the highest expectations. For any bookman can estimate a library by scent—if an expert he could even write out a catalogue of the books and sketch the appearance of the owner. Heavy odour of polished mahogany, Brussels carpets, damask curtains, and tablecloths; then the books are kept within glass, consist of sets of standard works in half calf, and the owner will give you their cost wholesale to a farthing. Faint fragrance of delicate flowers, and Russia leather, with a hint of cigarettes; prepare yourself for a marvellous wall-paper, etchings, bits of oak, limited editions, and a man in a velvet coat. Smell of paste and cloth binding and general newness means yesterday's books and a reviewer racing through novels with a paper-knife. Those are only book-rooms by courtesy, and never can satisfy any one who has breathed the sacred air. It is a rich and strong spirit, not only filling the room, but pouring out from the door and possessing the hall, redeeming an opposite dining-room from grossness, and a more distant drawing-room from frivolity, and even lending a goodly flavour to bedrooms on upper floors. It is distilled from curious old duodecimos packed on high shelves out of sight, and blows over folios, with large clasps, that once stood in monastery libraries, and gathers a subtle sweetness from parchments that were illuminated in ancient scriptoriums that are now grass-grown, and it is fortified with good old musty calf. The wind was from the right quarter on the first day I visited Kilbogie Manse, and as we went up the garden walk the Rabbi's library already bade us welcome, and assured us of our reward for a ten-miles' walk.
Saunderson was perfectly helpless in all manner of mechanics—he could not drive a tack through anything except his own fingers, and had given up shaving at the suggestion of his elders—and yet he boasted, with truth, that he had got three times as many books into the study as his predecessor possessed in all his house. For Saunderson had shelved the walls from the floor to the ceiling, into every corner, and over the doors and above the windows, as well as below them. The wright had wished to leave the space clear above the mantelpiece.
"Ye'll be hanging Dr. Chalmers there, or maybe John Knox, and a bit clock'll be handy for letting ye ken the 'oors on Sabbath."
The Rabbi admitted that he had a Knox, but was full of a scheme for hanging him over his own history, which he considered both appropriate and convenient. As regards time, it was the last thing of which that worthy man desired to be reminded—going to bed when he could no longer see for weariness, and rising as soon as he awoke, taking his food when it was brought to him, and being conducted to church by the beadle after the last straggler was safely seated. He even cast covetous eyes upon the two windows, which were absurdly large, as he considered, but compromised matters by removing the shutters and filling up the vacant space with slender works of devotion. It was one of his conceits that the rising sun smote first on an À'Kempis, for this he had often noticed as he worked of a morning.
Book-shelves had long ago failed to accommodate Rabbi's treasures, and the floor had been bravely utilised. Islands of books, rugged and perpendicular, rose on every side; long promontories reached out from the shore, varied by bold headlands; and so broken and varied was that floor that the Rabbi was pleased to call it the Aegean Sea, where he had his Lesbos and his Samos. It is absolutely incredible, but it is all the same a simple fact, that he knew every book and its location, having a sense of the feel as well as the shape of his favourites. This was not because he had the faintest approach to orderliness, for he would take down twenty volumes and never restore them to the same place by any chance. It was a sort of motherly instinct by which he watched over them all, and even loved prodigals who wandered over all the study and then set off on adventurous journeys into distant rooms. The restoration of an emigrant to his lawful home was celebrated by a feast, in which, by a confusion of circumstances, the book played the part of the fatted calf, being read afresh from beginning to end. During his earlier and more agile years the Rabbi used to reach the higher levels of his study by wonderful gymnastic feats, but after two falls—one with three Ante-Nicene fathers in close pursuit—he determined to call in assistance. This he did after an impressive fashion. When he attended the roup at Pitfoodles—a day of historical prices—and purchased in open competition, at three times its value, a small stack ladder, Kilbogie was convulsed, and Mains had to offer explanations.
"He's cuttit aff seevin feet, and rins up it tae get his tapmaist bukes, but that's no' a'," and then Mains gave it to be understood that the rest of the things the minister had done with that ladder were beyond words. For in order that the rough wood might not scar the sensitive backs of the fathers, the Rabbi had covered the upper end with cloth, and for that purpose had utilised a pair of trousers. It was not within his ability in any way to reduce or adapt his material, so that those interesting garments remained in their original shape, and, as often as the ladder stood reversed, presented a very impressive and diverting spectacle. It was the inspiration of one of Carmichael's most successful stories—how he had done his best to console a woman on the death of her husband, and had not altogether failed, till she caught sight of the deceased's nether garments waving disconsolately on a rope in the garden, when she refused to be comforted. "Toom (empty) breeks tae me noo," and she wept profusely, "toom breeks tae me."
One of the great efforts of the Rabbi's life was to seat his visitors, since, beyond the one chair, accommodation had to be provided on the table, wheresoever there happened to be no papers, and on the ledges of the bookcases. It was pretty to see the host suggesting from a long experience those coigns of vantage he counted easiest and safest, giving warnings also of unsuspected danger in the shape of restless books that might either yield beneath one's feet or descend on one's head. Carmichael, however, needed no such guidance, for he knew his way about in the marvellous place, and at once made for what the boys called the throne of the fathers. This was a lordly seat, laid as to its foundation in mediaeval divines of ponderous content, but excellently finished with the Benedictine edition of St. Augustine, softened by two cushions, one for a seat and another for a back. Here Carmichael used to sit in great content, smoking and listening while the Rabbi hunted an idea through Scripture with many authorities, or defended the wildest Calvinism with strange, learned arguments; from this place he would watch the Rabbi searching for a lost note on some passage of Holy Writ amid a pile of papers two feet deep, through which he burrowed on all-fours, or climbing for a book on the sky-line, to forget his errand and to expound some point of doctrine from the top of the ladder.
[Illustration: SEARCHING FOR A LOST NOTE]
"You're comfortable, John, and you do not want to put off your boots after all that travelling to and fro? Then I will search for Barbara, and secure some refreshment for our bodies"; and Carmichael watched the Rabbi depart with pity, for he was going on a troublous errand.
Housekeepers are, after beadles, the most wonderful functionaries in the ecclesiastical life of Scotland, and every species could be found within a day's journey of Drumtochty. Jenkins, indeed, suggested that a series of papers on Church institutions read at the clerical club should include one on housekeepers, and offered to supply the want, which was the reason why Dr. Dowbiggin refused to certify him to a vacancy, speaking of him as "frivolous and irresponsible." The class ranged from Sarah of Drumtochty, who could cook and knew nothing about ecclesiastical affairs, to that austere damsel, Margaret Meiklewham of Pitscowrie, who had never prepared an appetising meal in her life, but might have sat as an elder in the Presbytery.
Among all her class, Barbara MacCluckie stood an easy worst, being the most incapable, unsightly, evil-tempered, vexatious woman into whose hands an unmarried man had ever been delivered. MacWheep had his own trials, but his ruler saw that he had sufficient food and some comfort, but Barbara laid herself out to make the Rabbi's life a misery. He only obtained his meals as a favour, and an extra blanket had to be won by a week's abject humiliation. Fire was only allowed him at times, and he secured oil for his lamp by stratagem. Latterly he was glad to send strange ministers to Mains, and his boys alone forced lodgment in the manse. The settlement of Barbara was the great calamity of the Rabbi's life, and was the doing of his own good-nature. He first met her when she came to the manse one evening to discuss the unlawfulness of infant baptism and the duty of holding Sunday on Saturday, being the Jewish Sabbath. His interest deepened on learning that she had been driven from twenty-nine situations through the persecution of the ungodly; and on her assuring him that she had heard a voice in a dream bidding her take charge of Kilbogie Manse, the Rabbi, who had suffered many things at the hands of young girls given to lovers, installed Barbara, and began to repent that very day. A tall, bony, forbidding woman, with a squint, and a nose turning red as she stated from chronic indigestion, let it be said for her that she did not fall into the sins of her predecessors. It was indeed a pleasant jest in Kilbogie for four Sabbaths that she allowed a local Romeo, who knew not that his Juliet was gone, to make his adventurous way to her bedroom window, and then showed such an amazing visage that he was laid up for a week through the suddenness of his fall. What the Rabbi endured no one knew, but his boys understood that the only relief he had from Barbara's tyranny was on Sabbath evening when she stated her objections to his sermons, and threatened henceforward to walk into Muirtown in order to escape from unsound doctrine. On such occasions the Rabbi laid himself out for her instruction with much zest, and he knew when he had produced an impression, for then he went supperless to bed. Between this militant spirit and the boys there was an undying feud, and Carmichael was not at all hurt to hear her frank references to himself.
[Illustration: THE SUDDENNESS OF HIS FALL]
"What need he come stravagin' doon frae Drumtochty for? it wud set him better tae wait on his ain fouk. A licht-headed fellow, they say as kens; an' as for his doctrine—weel, maybe it'll dae for Drumtochty.
"Tea? Did ye expect me tae hae biling water at this 'oor o' the nicht? My word, the money wud flee in this hoose gin a' wesna here. Milk'll dae fine for yon birkie: he micht be gled tae get onything, sorning on a respectable manse every ither week."
"You will pardon our humble provision"—this is how the Rabbi prepared Carmichael; "we have taken my worthy Abigail unawares, and she cannot do for us what in other circumstances would be her desire. She has a thorn in the flesh which troubles her, and makes her do what she would not, but I am convinced that her heart is right."
That uncompromising woman took no notice of Drumtochty, but busied herself in a search for the Rabbi's bag, which he insisted had been brought home from Muirtown that morning, and which was at last found covered with books.
"Do not open it at present, Barbara; you can identify the contents later if it be necessary, but I am sure they are all right"; and the Rabbi watched Barbara's investigations with evident anxiety.
"Maybe ye hae brocht back what ye started wi', but gin ye hev, it's the first time a' can mind. Laist sacrament at Edinburgh ye pickit up twal books, ae clothes-brush, an' a crochet cover for a chair, an' left a'thing that belonged tae ye."
"It was an inadvertence; but I obtained a drawer for my own use this time, and I was careful to pack its contents into the bag, leaving nothing." But the Rabbi did not seem over-confident.
"There's nae question that ye hev filled the pack," said Barbara, with much deliberation and an ominous calmness; "but whether wi' yir ain gear or some ither body's, a'll leave ye tae judge yirsel. A'll juist empty the bag on the bukes"; and Barbara selected a bank of Puritans for the display of her master's spoil.
"Ae slipbody (bodice), weel hemmed and gude stuff—ye didna tak' that wi' ye, at ony rate; twa pillow-slips—they'll come in handy, oor ain are wearin' thin; ae pair o' sheets—'ll just dae for the next trimmie that ye want tae set up in her hoose; this'll be a bolster-slip, a'm judgin'——"
"It must be the work of Satan," cried the poor Rabbi, who constantly saw the hand of the great enemy in the disorder of his study. "I cannot believe that my hands packed such garments in place of my own."
"Ye'll be satisfied when ye read the name; it's plain eneuch; ye needna gang dodderin' aboot here and there lookin' for yir glasses; there's twa pair on your head already"; for it was an hour of triumph to Barbara's genial soul.
"It's beyond understanding," murmured the Rabbi. "I must have mistaken one drawer for another in the midst of meditation"; and then, when Barbara had swept out of the room with the varied linen on her arm, "This is very humiliating, John, and hard to bear."
"Nonsense, Rabbi; it's one of the finest things you have ever done. Half a dozen journeys of that kind would refurnish the manse; it's just a pity you can't annex a chair"; but he saw that the good man was sorely vexed.
"You are a good lad, John, and it is truly marvellous what charity I have received at the hands of young men who might have scorned and mocked me. God knows how my heart has been filled with gratitude, and I … have mentioned your names in my unworthy prayers, that God may do to you all according to the kindness ye have shown unto me."
It was plain that this lonely, silent man was much moved, and Carmichael did not speak.
"People consider that I am ignorant of my failings and weaknesses, and I can bear witness with a clear conscience that I am not angry when they smile and nod the head; why should I be? But, John, it is known to myself only, and Him before whom all hearts are open, how great is my suffering in being among my neighbours as a sparrow upon the house-top.
"May you never know, John, what it is to live alone and friendless till you lose the ways of other men and retire within yourself, looking out on the multitude passing on the road as a hermit from his cell, and knowing that some day you will die alone, with none to … give you a draught of water!"
"Rabbi, Rabbi,"—for Carmichael was greatly distressed at the woe in the face opposite him, and his heart was tender that night,—"why should you have lived like that? Do not be angry, but … did God intend … it cannot be wrong … I mean … God did give Eve to Adam."
"Laddie, why do ye speak with fear and a faltering voice? Did I say aught against that gracious gift or the holy mystery of love, which is surely the sign of the union betwixt God and the soul, as is set forth after a mystical shape in the Song of Songs? But it was not for me—no, not for me. I complain not, neither have I vexed my soul. He doeth all things well."
"But, dear Rabbi"—and Carmichael hesitated, not knowing where he stood.
"Ye ask me why"—the Rabbi anticipated the question—"and I will tell you plainly, for my heart has ever gone forth to you. For long years I found no favour in the eyes of the Church, and it seemed likely I would be rejected from the ministry as a man useless and unprofitable. How could I attempt to win the love of any maiden, since it did not appear to be the will of God that I should ever have a place of habitation? It consisted not with honour, for I do hold firmly that no man hath any right to seek unto himself a wife till he have a home."
"But …"
"Afterwards, you would say. Ah, John! then had I become old and unsightly, not such a one as women could care for. It would have been cruel to tie a maid for life to one who might only be forty years in age, but was as seventy in his pilgrimage, and had fallen into unlovely habits."
Then the Rabbi turned on Carmichael his gentle eyes, that were shining with tears.
"It will be otherwise with you, and so let it be. May I live to see you rejoicing with the wife of your youth!"
So it came to pass that it was to this unlikely man Carmichael told his love for Kate Carnegie and what like Kate was, and he was amazed at the understanding of the Rabbi, as well as his sympathy and toleration.
"A maid of spirit—and that is an excellent thing; and any excess will be tamed by life. Only see to it that ye agree in that which lieth beneath all churches and maketh souls one in God. May He prosper you in your wooing as He did the patriarch Jacob, and far more abundantly!"
Very early in the morning Carmichael awoke, and being tempted by the sunrise, arose and went downstairs. As he came near the study door he heard a voice in prayer, and knew that the Rabbi had been all night in intercession.
"Thou hast denied me wife and child; deny me not Thyself.… A stranger Thou hast made me among men; refuse me not a place in the City.… Deal graciously with this lad who has been to me as a son in the Gospel.… He has not despised an old man; put not his heart to confusion.…"
Carmichael crept upstairs again, but not to sleep, and at breakfast he pledged the Rabbi to come up some day and see Kate Carnegie.