Geordie's Tryst: A Tale of Scottish Life

by Janet Milne Rae

"And what would my little girl like to see —the toys mamma used to play with when she was a little girl like Gracie? I believe I've carried the key of the chest where they lie buried about with me all these years;" and Mrs. Foster began to look in the little basket she held in her hand for a shining bunch of keys.

"It wasn't the toys I meant, though I should like to see them very much," replied the little girl, who was more timid and gentle than her brothers and sisters, and generally required more encouragement to unburden her small mind, "it is the room where you taught Geordie that I want to see—and Geordie's grave among the heather."

Some quick ears had caught a name that seemed to be a household word, and louder voices said, as the boy's clustered round their mother, "Oh yes, mamma, do show us where you taught Geordie and little Jean."

So Grace led the way through the dim passages that had once frightened little Jean, and whose gloom now made the small Grace cling close to her mother's side. The still-room was dark and unopened, for the servants had not thought it necessary to include it in their preparations. Grace went to the window and undid the fastenings, and the yellow afternoon sun streamed on the dusty wooden bench where Geordie, and Jean, and Elsie used to sit.

The merry voices were hushed for a moment, and the children looked in awed silence into the little room, as if it had been a shrine.

After they had gazed long and silently, and their mother went to fasten the window again, she said, "Children, we will come here and read God's Word on Sunday afternoons, as the little company you know about used to do long ago; and I hope you will all listen to the Good Shepherd's voice, and follow it as Geordie did;" and presently the children trooped quietly away along the dark vaulted passages.

There was no faithful Margery now to be trusted with everything, and able to put things straight in the twinkling of an eye, as her young mistress used to declare she alone was capable of doing, so Mrs. Foster had some unpacking and arranging preliminaries to superintend before she could join her eager little party out of doors. But when tea was over, and the sun had begun to scatter its orange and crimson tints over the Kirklands valley, Grace thought she would like to take a stroll among some familiar places before the darkness came.

After lingering on the old terrace for a little, she gathered her boys and girls round her, and said she was going to take them across the park. She wanted to visit a place she remembered well, a pleasant angle of a rising glade of birches, where she once stood mourning over the traces of an uprooted cottage. But Grace knew that another home had grown on the ruins of the former dwelling, and to it she bent her steps now, for there was one of its inmates whom she longed to see. There was something of the mingled feeling of interest and romance with which her children wore viewing these now yet familiar scenes, in Grace's desire to look on a face she had not seen for many years. Its image would rise before her, chubby, smiling, and childlike, as of old; and then she remembered the evening when she had first seen it tear-stained and sad, as she crossed this path with the little fat hand in hers, as her own Grace's was now.

But Joan had not shed many tears since then. There was no happier home in all the valley than the white cottage, over which the birch-trees lovingly stretched their delicate fringes, her husband, the village carrier, used to think when he came within sight of it, after his day's journey was over, his parcels all delivered, and his horses "suppered" for the night. Generally his bright-looking wife was hovering near the door, waiting his coming with a little group round her as merry as the one that was now making the woods of Kirklands ring with their light-hearted laughter.

Grace had not told the children that she meant to take them to see little Jean that evening. She wanted first to go alone to the cottage and see her quietly there, for she had many things to hear and ask. Still, Grace had not been altogether a stranger to the home life there. Sometimes a letter, written and addressed with laborious carefulness, had followed her to remote foreign stations, and brought pleasant memories of dewy heather and fragrant birches as she read it among waving oleanders and palms. During all those years Grace had watched over Jean's welfare, and many things in her pretty home told of her thoughtful remembrance of Geordie's sister.