Very soon after going to the Promoters he procured himself some suits of fishers’ clothing; and Maggie often thought when he came in from the sea, rosy and glowing, with his brown hair wet with the spindrift, nets on his shoulders, or lines in his hands, that he was the handsomest fisher-lad that ever sailed the Frith of Forth. David and Allan were much together, for David had gone back to the boats as the minister bade him, yet the duty had been made far easier than he expected. For when Allan understood how the Promoters’ boat had failed them, he purchased a fishing skiff of his own, and David, and the men whom David hired, sailed her for her owner. David had his certain wage, the men had the fish, and Allan had a delight in the whole situation far greater than any mere pleasure yacht could possibly have given him.
Where there is plenty of money, events do not lag. In a couple of months the Promoters’ cottage was apparently as settled to its new life as ever it had been to the old one. The “Allan Campbell” was a recognized craft in the fishing fleet, and generally Allan sailed with her as faithfully as if his life depended upon the catching of the gray fish. And when the sea-mood was not on him, he had another all-sufficing occupation. For he was a good amateur painter, and he was surrounded by studies almost irresistible to an artistic soul.
The simple folk of Pittenloch looked dubiously at him when he stood before his easel. There was to them something wonderful, mysterious, almost uncanny, in the life-like reproduction of themselves and their boats, their bits of cottages, and their bare-footed bairns—in the painted glimpses of the broad-billowed ocean; and the desolate old hills, with such forlorn lights on their scarps, as the gloom of primeval tempests might have cast.
The controversy about these bits of painted canvas interested every one in the village; for though Allan talked beautifully about “looking up” through nature unto nature’s God, it was a new doctrine to the Fife fishers; who had always looked for God in their Bibles, and their consciences. Except in rare cases, it was impossible for them to conceive how painting might be a Gate Beautiful to the temple.
Indeed Elder John Mackelvine, a dour, stern, old Calvinist, was of opinion that every picture was a breaking of the second commandment—“A makin’ o’ an image and likeness o’ the warks o’ God, and sae, neither mair nor less than idolatry. Forbye, pictur’s are pairfectly ridic’lus,” he continued; “what for, will you want the image o’ a thing, when you hae the thing itsel’? John Knox kent weel what he was doing when he dinged doon a’ the pictur’s and images in thae auld kirks. He kent men were aye mair pleased to worship their ain handywark, than the Creator’s.”
David listened with many misgivings, but he ventured to say that, “there was nae thocht o’ idolatry in Allan Campbell’s heart.”
“You’ll dootless ken a’ aboot it, Davie,” answered Mackelvine scornfully; “but you’ll no deny that he was sae set up wi’ the pictur’ he made o’ Largo Bay, that he might just as weel hae bowed doon to it. The Everlasting hills! The everlasting seas!” said the old fisher, man, rising And stretching upward and outward his bare, brown arm, “put them in a paintin’! Pairfect nonsense! Even-down sin!”
From this conversation David went directly home. It was Saturday night and the boats all in harbor for the Sabbath day. The house place was spotlessly clean, the evening meal waiting. As soon as David spoke to his sister, Allan opened his door and called him. “Come here, David Promoter, I want to show you something.”
David guessed that it was a new picture, and he went a little reluctantly.
“This is an ‘interior’, David,” he said excitedly; “it is the first I have ever tried, and I am so pleased with the result;—what do you think of it?”