Allan took a taper and lit every gas-jet in the room. “Look around, father, you will see her everywhere.” He led him first to the picture still upon his easel—Maggie, in her long, brown merino kirk dress; with linen cuffs folded back over the tight, plain sleeves! and a small, turned down linen collar at the throat. She had a sea-shell in her open left palm, and she was looking at it, with that faint melancholy smile Allan always chose for her face! He asked for no criticism, and John Campbell made none. Silently the two men passed from picture to picture. Maggie always. Maggie baking the oat cakes. Maggie at the wheel. Maggie mending the nets. Maggie peering through misty gloom for the boats, out on the angry sea. Maggie bending over the open Bible. Maggie with a neighbor’s baby cuddled up to her breast. Maggie rowing, with the wind blowing her fine hair like a cloud around her. Maggie knitting by the fireside, her face beaming with sisterly love on the pale dark face of her brother David. As Allan had said, “Maggie everywhere.”
The elder man went back to look at several of the pictures; he stood long before the one on the easel. He sat down again, still silent; but Allan saw that there was no anger on his face.
“Well, father?”
“She is a grand looking woman. No one can deny that. A peasant woman, though?”
“Yes, sir, a peasant woman; the daughter of a Fife fisherman.”
“She is not a common peasant woman. You could not believe that she would ever kick her heels in a ‘foursome reel,’ or pass coarse jokes with the lads. Yet she must be uneducated, and perhaps vulgar.”
“She is never vulgar, sir. She has a soul, and she is conscious of it. She had parents, grave and thoughtful, who governed by a look, without waste of words. Though she lives on the wild Fife coast, she has grown up beneath the shade of Judea’s palms; for the Bible has blended itself with all her life. Sarah, Moses, Joshua, Ruth, and David, are far more real people to her than Peel or Wellington, or Jenny Lind, or even Victoria. She has been fed upon faith, subjected to duty, and made familiar with sorrow and suffering and death. The very week I met her, she had lost her father and three eldest brothers in a sudden storm. If you could see her eyes, you could look into her pure soul. A woman like that is never vulgar, father.”
“A lover is allowed to exaggerate, Allan.”
“But I do not exaggerate. Uneducated she certainly is. She can write a little; and in the long stormy days and evenings, I read aloud to her and to her brother. But Scott and Burns and Leigh Hunt are not an education. Her Bible has really been her only teacher.”
“It is His Word,” said John Campbell, reverently. “It is the best of teachers. The generations to whom Scotland owes everything, had no other book. It made her men calm, reflective, courageous unto death. It made her women gentle, faithful, pure, ideal. I remember my mother, Allan; she came from the same school. Her soul lived so much in the Book, that I am sure if an angel had suddenly appeared to her, she would scarcely have been surprised. What domestic women those were! How peaceful and smiling! How fond of the children! How dear to the children!” He had wandered a few moments back into his own past; and though he hastily recalled himself, the influence was upon him.