BOOK I
THE STUDENT AT HOME
FROM PLOUGHSHARE TO PULPIT
CHAPTER I
A DEATH THE MOST DREADFUL LOOMED BEFORE HIM
There was something well calculated to raise the spirits of such a man as Mackenzie on this balmy spring morning. Mackenzie was the minister of the parish of Belhaven, a parish that lies far up the winding Don, in a country that combines all the beauties of Lowland vegetation and treescape with the wilder scenery of the true Scottish Highlands.
Mac had been called to this parish when very young, but had remained here ever since, and he was now over forty, hale, handsome, and as straight as the ramrod of the old muzzle-loader he used when shooting rabbits; cheery also to a degree, and he seldom moved around anywhere without singing some old Scotch lilt or merry jig. Well, the fact is Mac’s life was a very easy one. His Church was the Established, not the Free Kirk, and he therefore was to all intents and purposes independent. He had not to depend upon the whims and caprices of the people for his salary, nor upon the state of the crops at harvest-time. Not only had he a good stipend “bound to his head,” as his parishioners phrased it, but a bonnie stretch of glebe land, quite a farm, in fact, that extended for over a mile along one bank of the river.
On this fair day in May, with its blue, blue sky and its fleecy cloudlets, against which, like little dots of darkness, the laverocks quivered and sang, the corn braird was waving green on the braes; the fields, in which sleek-coated kine were roaming, were yellow with buttercups, and starred over with gowans or mountain daisies—Burns’s “wee, modest, crimson-tippèd flower”—and a cool soft breeze went sighing through the lofty pine-trees. Here cawed the busy rooks, here the magpies chattered, and the cushats croodled and moaned; but elsewhere birds were seen and heard in every direction. In the thickets of spruce the blackbird and the mavis had their nests, and their musical rivalry was delightful to listen to, while high up in the lordly rowan-tree by the minister’s gate, the merry bold chaffinch chanted loud and long, and would not be denied. But it was away across the minister’s hill, perhaps, where spring was seen in its greatest beauty to-day. It was a heather hill and a blaeberry[1] hill, and it was gilded over here and there by great patches of golden whins or furze. These were now all in compact masses of bloom, and the rich delicious odour from their blossoms—Ah! surely there is no finer perfume in nature—filled the air on every side.
There would have been silence up there to-day, save for the plaintive bleating of lambs, the occasional barking of the shepherd’s collie, the hum of bees among the whins, and the sweet tender notes of the rose-linnet perched on a thorn twig above them.