Jack Ballington, Forester

by John Trotwood Moore

How restful and natural Tammas's cottage looked! I could see Marget bestirring herself for greater cleanliness of an already over-clean cottage. She was humming, and I guessed it was one of her old kirk hymns or maybe Bobbie Burns. For it was Marget who could read Bobbie Burns! How rich and grand the lines came in her broad dialect! I was a child when she had begun to read Bobbie Burns to me; and though I knew not what she said I hung upon her numbers, and a queer, fine feeling swept over me. I was nearly grown before I learned the dialect myself, from hearing them talk to each other, and knew the greatness of Bobbie Burns in the original.

Tammas and Marget were good people, as genuine as the rocksalt they gave the herd to lick, hiding it in the deep grasses of the meadow, where the thirsty cows would come upon it in unexpected places. Once when I found a cube of it, gleaming in the grass for the cows, I thought how much their own lives were like that pure cube of comfort, doing their work in kindliness and obscurity. Then the clamoring tongues of the beagles thrilled me as of old, as the game little fellows came down the slope of the hill. They had followed me from the house and struck the trail of an early stray rabbit. Across the hills they went, their little piping tongues echoing slowly as they nosed along.

For many years Tammas and Marget had run my Aunt's dairy in the hollow where the great stream came tumbling down from the hills. I looked at it there in the valley, and I tasted again in anticipation the cottage cheese, the buttermilk, and the Scotch rye bread.

Now I saw Marget bestirring herself and again up the valley I heard the call, "Coom, lassies, coom, noo!"

In changing their home, Tammas and Marget had changed little else. Even after twenty-five years of life at The Home Stretch they still spoke to each other in their native tongue, though to others they often spoke English with their broad brogue. Even then, Scotch words would break in on their English with the suddenness and sweep of a tidal wave flowing in from the firth. Though they could speak English purely, and were well read in their way, their earnestness might always be gauged by the number of Scotch words which crept into their talk.

Marget had not yet seen me. I went up the path to the little cottage porch, over which wisteria, in full bloom, hung in purple bunches, and whorls of clustering chimes. As I stood there listening, I seemed to hear their chimes, for the odor of the wisteria is a chime of memory. I heard the melody of other days, faint and yet so clear, memories that were almost legendary, of the little boy, motherless, and who had never seen his father, always a nature-worshiper, and a tree-lover; of his Aunt Lucretia; of his adopted sister, Eloise; of his fighting old grandsire, who had been the right hand to Stonewall Jackson when he swept clean the valley of the Shenandoah; and of these two good Scotch people who had taken him to their hearts even as their own. Here had he dreamed and grown up, loving them and the things they loved, and his dreams had been of writing, of poetry, of music; and not of war, as his grandsire had wished. Young as he was he had seen war with clear eyes. How it took the bravest and the best,—and left the weaklings to reproduce themselves. It reversed all the laws of Nature. If Nature had done the same thing for the flowers, not a larkspur purpling the meadows in blossoming ladders, not a wild lupine in whorls of stars, not a nodding head of clover blossom, not a stone-crop of the early spring, nor the flushes of wild hepatica would have survived to-day.

Dog fennel alone would inherit the earth!

Marget, her keen black eyes lighting up with that joy I knew so well, came to meet me. She seized my hands in both of hers, and shouted to Tammas: "Tammas, whaur are ye, Tammas? Come quick an' see whit I hae to show ye!"

"Weel, weel, I'm comin', wumman," said Tammas, wobbling up in his great awkward way, his broad mouth smiling. He grasped both my hands in his. "It's Jack, oor Jack! Whit wey did ye no' tell me ye were here? Eh, Marget, but jist see whit a man oor Jack is!"

I felt Marget's keen eyes sweep over me. "Ay, Tammas, but is na he a wee bit shilpit like? I dinna like to see him sae pale like."