Having regained his legs, the minister stood for a moment, confused and half-blinded. The first thing he saw was a drop of blood stealing down Gibbie’s forehead. He was shocked at what he had done. In truth he had been frightfully provoked, but it was not for a clergyman so to avenge an insult, and as mere chastisement it was brutal. What would Mrs. Sclater say to it? The rascal was sure to make his complaint to her! And there too was his friend, the herd-lad, in the drawing-room with her!
“Go and wash your face,” he said, “and come back again directly.”
Gibbie put his hand to his face, and feeling something wet, looked, and burst into a merry laugh.
“I am sorry I have hurt you,” said the minister, not a little relieved at the sound; “but how dared you write such a—such an insolence? A clergyman never gets drunk.”
Gibbie picked up the frame which the minister had dropped in his fall: a piece of the slate was still sticking in one side, and he wrote upon it:
I will kno better the next time. I thout it was alwais whisky that made peeple like that. I begg your pardon, sir.
He handed him the fragment, ran to his own room, returned presently, looking all right, and when Mr. Sclater would have attended to his wound, would not let him even look at it, laughing at the idea. Still further relieved to find there was nothing to attract observation to the injury, and yet more ashamed of himself, the minister made haste to the refuge of their work; but it did not require the gleam of the paper substituted for the slate, to keep him that morning in remembrance of what he had done; indeed it hovered about him long after the gray of the new slate had passed into a dark blue.
From that time, after luncheon, which followed immediately upon lessons, Gibbie went and came as he pleased. Mrs. Sclater begged he would never be out after ten o’clock without having let them know that he meant to stay all night with his friend: not once did he neglect this request, and they soon came to have perfect confidence not only in any individual promise he might make, but in his general punctuality. Mrs. Sclater never came to know anything of his wounded head, and it gave the minister a sharp sting of compunction, as well as increased his sense of moral inferiority, when he saw that for a fortnight or so he never took his favourite place at her feet, evidently that she should not look down on his head.
The same evening they had friends to dinner. Already Gibbie was so far civilized, as they called it, that he might have sat at any dining-table without attracting the least attention, but that evening he attracted a great deal. For he could scarcely eat his own dinner for watching the needs of those at the table with him, ready to spring from his chair and supply the least lack. This behaviour naturally harassed the hostess, and at last, upon one of those occasions, the servants happening to be out of the room, she called him to her side, and said,
“You were quite right to do that now, Gilbert, but please never do such a thing when the servants are in the room. It confuses them, and makes us all uncomfortable.”