“Sae you lose the half o’ your life, James. I’m sorry for you. I shall dream o’ the three happy bairns, and their prizes. Say, you might hae picked out another lassie; twa lads to one lass is o’erganging what’s fair. I’m awa’ to sleep—you needna answer.”
It was trying to the village that Sabbath had to come and go, before the school examination. But everything waited for arrives in its time. And this was a Monday worth waiting for. It was a perfect June day, and the sea, and the sun, and the wind held rejoicing with the green earth and the mortals on it. If there was envy, or jealousy, or bad temper among the villagers, they forgot it, or put it aside for future consideration. Everyone was in his best clothes, the boys and girls being mostly in white, and the little place looked as if there were a great wedding on hand. Christine had made an attempt to decorate the room a little. The boys cut larch boughs and trailing branches, the men loaned the flags of the boats, the women gave the few flowers from their window pots, and strips of garden, and Margot, a little sadly, cut her roses, and gave permission to 195 Christine to add to them a few laburnum branches, now drooping with their golden blossoms.
The room looked well. The flowers and the flags did not hide the globe and the maps. And the blackboard kept its look of authority, though a branch of laburnum bent over it. The schoolmaster was playing a merry Fantasia as the company gathered, but at a given signal from Christine he suddenly changed it to the children’s marching song, and the rapid, orderly manner in which it led each class to its place was a wonderful sight to the men and women who had never seen children trained to obedience by music.
The Domine opened the examination by reading, in the intense silence that followed the cessation of the music, three verses from the eighteenth chapter of St. Luke:
“And they brought unto him infants that he would touch them, but when his disciples saw it, they rebuked them.
“But Jesus called them unto him, and said, ‘Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the Kingdom of God.
“‘Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the Kingdom of God as a little child, shall in no wise enter therein.’”
Then the schoolmistress touched a hand bell and a crowd of little children, none over five years old, gathered round her. Contrary to the usual practice of children, their behavior and recitals were better 196 than usual, and laughter and hand-clapping followed all their simple efforts. Polly Craig was their evident leader, and when she had told a charming story about a little girl who would do what she ought not to do, the records of the class were read by the Domine, and the prize awarded to Polly.
Willie Tamsen and Jamie Ruleson’s classes were treated in a similar way, and were equally successful in their recitations and equally delighted with their gifts. Now, the real joy in giving gifts is found in giving them to children, for the child heart beats long after we think it has outgrown itself. The perfect charm of this gathering lay in the fact that men and women became for a few hours little children again. It was really a wonderful thing to see the half-grown girls, the married women, and even old Judith Macpherson, crowding round Polly to admire the waxen beauty and the long fair curls of her prize doll.
After the school exercises the adults slowly scattered, sauntering home with their wives, and carrying their babies as proudly as Polly carried her new treasure. Truly both men and women receive the kingdom of God and Love, when they become as little children. The children remained for two hours longer in the school room. For the entertainment of their parents the youngest ones had danced some of those new dances just at that period introduced into Scotland, called polkas and mazurkas, and now, to please themselves, they began a series of those 197 mythic games which children played in the world’s infancy, and which, thank God, have not yet perished from off the face of the earth. “How many miles to Babylon?” “Hide and seek,” “In and out,” “Blind man’s buff,” and so forth, and in this part of the entertainment, everything and everyone depended upon Christine. Mothers, going home, called to her, “Christine, look after my bairn,” and then went contentedly away.
They might contentedly do so, for whoever saw Christine Ruleson that afternoon, in the midst of those forty or fifty children, saw something as near to a vision of angels, as they were likely to see on this earth. She stood among them like some divine mother. A little one three years old was on her right arm. It pulled her earrings, and rumpled her hair, and crushed her lace collar, and she only kissed and held it closer. A little lad with a crooked spine, and the seraphic face which generally distinguishes such sufferers, held her tightly by her right hand. Others clung to her dress, and called her name in every key of love and trust. She directed their games, and settled their disputes, and if anything went wrong, put it right with a kiss.
The Domine watched her for ten or fifteen minutes, then he went slowly up the hill. “Where at a’ is Christine, Domine?” asked Margot. “I’m wanting her sairly.”