Walkinshaw was petrified, but did as he was desired; and, having given her the pocket-book, sewed by his aunt, Mrs. Milrookit, at the boarding-school, she took several of Robin’s promissory-notes out, and looking them over, presented him with one for fifty pounds.
‘Now, Jamie Walkinshaw,’ said she, ‘if ye spend ae plack o’ that like a prodigal son,—it’s no to seek what I will say whan ye come back,—but I doot, I doot, lang before that day I’ll be deep and dumb aneath the yird, and naither to see nor hear o’ thy weel or thy woe.’
So extraordinary and unlooked-for an instance of liberality on the part of his grandmother, together with the unfeigned feeling by which she was actuated, quite overwhelmed Walkinshaw, and he stood holding the bill in his hand, unable to speak. In the meantime, she was putting up her other bills, and, in turning them over, seeing one for forty-nine pounds, she said, ‘Jamie, forty-nine pounds is a’ the same as fifty to ane that pays his debts by the roll of a drum, so tak this, and gie me that back.’
CHAPTER LXXXIV
The time between the visit to Glasgow and the departure of Walkinshaw for Glengael was the busiest period that had occurred in the annals of Camrachle from the placing of Mr. Eadie in the cure of the parish. To the young men belonging to the hamlet, who had grown up with Walkinshaw, it was an era of great importance; and some of them doubted whether he ought not to have beaten up for recruits in a neighbourhood where he was known rather than in the Highlands. But the elder personages, particularly the matrons, were thankful that the Lord was pleased to order it differently.
His mother and sister, with the assistance of Ellen Frazer, were more thriftily engaged in getting his baggage ready; and although the sprightliness of Ellen never sparkled more brilliantly for the amusement of her friends, there were moments when her bosom echoed in a low soft murmur to the sigh of anxiety that frequently burst from his mother’s breast.
Mr. Eadie was not the least interested in the village. He seemed as if he could not give his pupil advice enough, and Walkinshaw thought he had never before been so tiresome. They took long walks together, and ever and anon the burden of the worthy minister’s admonition was the sins and deceptions of the world, and the moral perils of a military life.
But no one—neither tutor, mother, nor amorosa—appeared so profoundly occupied with the event as Mrs. Eadie, whose majestic intellect was evidently touched with the fine frenzy of a superstition at once awful and elevated. She had dreams of the most cheering augury, though all the incidents were wild and funereal; and she interpreted the voices of the birds and the chattering of the magpies in language more oriental and coherent than Macpherson’s Ossian.
The moon had changed on the day on which Walkinshaw went into Glasgow, and she watched the appearance of its silver rim with the most mysterious solicitude. Soon after sunset on the third evening, as she was sitting on a tombstone in the churchyard with Mr. Eadie, she discovered it in the most favourable aspect of the Heavens, and in the very position which assured the most fortunate issues to all undertakings commenced at its change.