Geordie's Tryst: A Tale of Scottish Life

by Janet Milne Rae

ll tell you what it is, Grace; that scholar of yours is far too fine a fellow to be left to tie companionship of old Gowrie's cattle any longer."

The speaker was a bright, breezy-looking lad in midshipman's dress, who was sauntering up and down the old terrace at Kirklands, in company with our friend Grace. She is a year older than when we saw her last at the garden-gate, parting with her two scholars after their first Sunday together. They have had a great many afternoons in company since then. Grace had remained in her summer home all through the long Scotch winter, and now autumn had come, bringing with it her brother Walter on a delightful holiday of six weeks, after an absence of years.

Miss Hume had got so frail the previous year, that she was unfit for the return journey to her house in Edinburgh, and the following months had only brought an increase of weakness. She now lay in her darkened room, with, her flickering lamp of life burning slowly to. its socket, while some young lives beside her were being kindled by glowing fires which would cause their hearts to burn long after the "glow of early thought declines in feeling's dull decay."

The little company in the still-room had somewhat increased, four others haying been added to the two first scholars. One of them was Elsie Gray, the forester's daughter, a pretty little girl with a sweet voice, and able to sing a great many hymns, so that Grace had no longer to perform solos to the still-room audience, but was accompanied by more than one voice timidly following Elsie's example, and joining in the singing. There were three other scholars from the borders of the next parish, and a very happy party they all made together. But it must be confessed that the warmest place in Grace's heart was reserved for the first scholar whom she had found that chilly spring day among the pasture lands which sloped down to the little stream. Judged by an educational standard, Geordie was certainly, with the exception of the little Jean, the most deficient of the company, in spite of his having manfully conquered the last pages of the "Third Primer," and got at last "intil the Bible." The other boys and girls still attended the parish school on week days, and seemed more or less very fairly in possession of the rudiments of education. Some things, however, which they read and heard in the little quiet room at Kirklands sank into their hearts as they had never done when they read them as the stereotyped portion of the Bible-reading lesson amid the mingled jangle of slates and pencils and pattering feet, with the hum of rough northern tongues, which prevailed in the parish school-room.

To Geordie even this discordant medium of education had been denied. Grace had set her heart on having him sent to school during the past winter. She saw what a precious boon such an opportunity appeared in Geordie's eyes when she suggested it to him. But Farmer Gowrie had to be consulted, and finding the herd-boy useful in winter as well as during the summer months, he decided that he could not possibly spare Geordie. And as for Granny Baxter, she could not understand what anybody could want with more learning who was, able to earn money. So Geordie had one day lingered behind the other scholars to tell Grace that the idea of going to school even during the winter quarter must be given up. There was always a manly reticence about the boy which made one feel that words of sympathy would be patronising; but Grace could see what a bitter disappointment it was, though he appeared quite unalterable in his decision that he "belonged to Gowrie," when Grace tried to arrange the matter by an interview with the farmer. He could only claim the boy week by week, and the young teacher did not see the necessity for such self-denial on Geordie's part.

Then Grace's store of pocket-money had been devoted to sending little Jean to school. This arrangement had been a source of great delight to Geordie—much more of an event to him, indeed, than to the phlegmatic little Jean, to whom the primer did not contain such precious possibilities as it did to her brother's eyes. Grace had arranged that she should go to a girls' school lately opened in the parish. It was the one to which Elsie Gray, the forester's daughter, went. On her way to school she had to pass Granny Baxter's cottage, and after Jean was installed as her fellow-scholar, Elsie used generally to call and see if the little girl was ready to start, so that they might walk along the road together.

Elsie was a pale, fragile-looking girl, who looked as if she had grown among crowded streets, rather than blossomed in the open valley, with its flowing river and breezy hillsides. She was a very silent child, too, with a meek grace about all her movements; her large grey eyes shone out of her face with a luminous, dreamy light in them, which distressed her practical, rosy-faced mother, who used to say that she did not know where Elsie had come by "those ghaist-like eyes o' hers," and as for those washed-out cheeks, "there was no accountin' for them neither;" and the worthy matron would go on to narrate with what abundance and amplitude Elsie had been ministered to all her life; and yet Elsie glided about still and pale, with her large eyes shining like precious stones, generally hungrily possessed by some book which she held in her hand. She had an insatiable appetite for reading, and had long ago exhausted the juvenile library attached to the church, while the few books which comprised the forester's collection had been read and re-read by her many times. The farmer librarian, who remained half an hour after the congregation was dismissed on Sundays to dispense books for any that might wish them, in the room behind the church, had been obliged to give Elsie entrance to the shelves reserved for older people, after she had exhausted the youthful library. It is not to be supposed, however, that by this admission Elsie was allowed to plunge chartless into light literature. The shelves contained only books of the most sober kind, the lightest admixture being narratives of the persecutions of the Waldenses and stories of the Covenanting struggles. These Elsie read and pondered with intense interest, interweaving the scenes in her imagination with the familiar places and people round her, and living a far-away dreamy life of her own in the forester's cozy little nest, while her active-minded, busy-fingered mother made her cheese and butter, and reared her poultry, and was withal so very capable of performing her own duties, that the forester sometimes ventured to think, when Mrs. Gray complained of Elsie's "handlessness," that seeing the mistress was so well able for "her own turn," it was fortunate his little daughter chanced to be of a more contemplative disposition.

Mrs. Gray had heard from Margery of the Sunday class which her young mistress had opened at Kirklands, and though, as the forester's wife remarked, "Elsie had enough and to spare of schoolin' already," yet it would only be a suitable mark of respect to the lady of Kirklands to send her there on Sunday afternoons; and so it happened that Elsie became one of Grace's scholars, sitting in the little still-room on Sunday afternoons, her large tender eyes answering in sympathetic flashes as the young teacher talked with the little company of those wonderful days when the Son o Man lived upon the earth, or told them some story of the earlier times of the world, when God's voice was heard in the beautiful garden in the cool of the day, or when he guided his chosen people by signs and wonders.

In those days, however, the gospel tidings were not more to Elsie than many another pathetic story which she knew, and served simply as food for her imagination, though Grace's earnest words did throw a halo round the familiar incidents which the daily reading of a chapter in the New Testament had failed to do. Yet it was not till some of the sharp sorrows of life had fallen upon Elsie that those words which she heard in the still-room came with living power to her heart, and became to her a light in dark days, a joy in sorrowful times, which nothing was able to take away from her.