“But ye’re a Christian,” was the ready rejoinder; “and what’s mair, a Calvinist.”
“As if a body could be a Christian without being a Calvinist,” said she. “But what do ye mean, David—are ye crazy? Why should I kiss another man because I’m a Calvinist?”
“Nae sin, nae salvation,” said he.
Whereupon the worthy couple laughed at a tenet which, being liable to a double construction, has always been dangerous to the common people of Scotland. And what was worse, this laugh was only the prelude to a further conversation so deep and mysterious, and withal conducted in so low a train of whispers and re-whispers, that even our familiar, endowed as he is with the power of going through stone walls, could carry off no more than smiles and nods and winks, and more and more of the same kind of laughs. But as the son of Sirach says, “There is an exquisite subtlety, and the same is unjust;” and “Wrath will surely search it.” Nor was there in this case much time required for the retribution, for the very next day a man rushed into the house of Mrs Dempster with the intelligence on his tongue that David Dempster was drowned at Granton. The dreadful story was indeed corroborated into a certainty by a bundle of clothes which the messenger of evil tidings laid on the table, no other than the suit which David had put on that morning, including the linen shirt which Dorothy’s own fingers had adorned with the breast-ruffle, and identified with the beloved initials, D. D., more precious to her than the symbols of ecclesiastical honours. All were there as he had left them on the beach before the plunge which was to be unto death—yea, something after death, and more terrible, for had not David been a scoffer? If Mrs Dempster had at first been able to collect her scattered senses, she would have been satisfied even with the look of the clothes, for she had heard her husband say, with a blithe look, that he was to go to Granton to bathe, and she would, moreover, have had some minutes sooner the melancholy satisfaction that one so dear to her had not committed suicide.
But the sudden impression left no room for consolations of any kind. Struggling nature could do no more than work itself out of one swoon to fall into another, and how long it was before she could listen to the inrushing neighbours with their news that he had been boated for, and dived for, and hooked for, and searched for, no record remains to tell. But that all these efforts had been made there was no doubt, and as the hours passed bringing as yet no assuagement of a grief which is only amenable to time, it came to be known that the coast had been examined all about the fatal spot with no return but the inevitable non inventus; nor did it require many days to satisfy the unfortunate widow that the catastrophe was of that complete kind where the remaining victim is not only deprived of a husband, but denied the poor consolation of seeing his dead body.
Yet how true it is that the kingdom of Death is in the land of forgetfulness, not only to the ghostly denizens who there dwell, but also to those who are left in this region of quick memories. Wherein surely there is a kindness in the cruelty; for assuredly there is no one who could suffer for a protracted period the intensity of the first onset of a grief of a privation which is to be for ever in this world and be able to live. And this kindliness of the fates was experienced by Mrs Dorothy Dempster, who, after a decent period, and amidst the consolations of friends, felt herself in a condition to be able to wait upon the creditors of her husband and get them to be contented with the small stock left by him, and give her acquittances of their debts; nay, so heartrending were her appeals, and so miserable she appeared in her weeds, that these good men even voted her a small sum out of the wreck as a beautiful tribute to pity and humanity. All which went for its value, so creditable as it is to human nature, and we need hardly add that the frequent reading of the encomium in the Mercury on the merits of the deceased—which, of course, proceeded on the inevitable rule that a man is only good provided he is dead—heaped up the consolation even to a species of melancholy pleasure.
And, surely, if on this occasion there was any one ipsis charitibus humanior, it was Mr Thomas Snoddy, the good laird of Rubbledykes. Nor were his attentions merely empty-handed visits to the house of the widow, for he brought her money, often, after all, the chief of consolations. Of the manner in which that might be accepted he probably suspected there was nothing to be feared; but there was another gift he had in store, in regard to the acceptability of which he was not quite so sure—and that was his old love kindled up into a new flame—probably enough he had never heard or read the lines to the effect that—
“Cupid can his wings apply,
To other uses than to fly;
Serving as a handkerchief