Allison Bain; Or, By a Way She Knew Not

by Margaret M. Robertson

“I think, mem, if ye please, I will hae time for the scones I promised wee Marjorie.”

“Very well, Allison,” said her mistress quietly and with a sudden lightening of the heart, she bent down and kissed the lips of her little sleeping daughter. She was greatly relieved. She could not bear the thought that she had hurt that sore heart without having helped it by ever so little. When the time came for the meeting, Allison was in her place with the rest.

The kirk, which could not be heated, and only with difficulty lighted, was altogether too dismal a place for evening meetings in the winter-time. So the usual sitting-room of the family was on one evening of the week given up to the use of those who came to the prayer-meeting. This brought some trouble both to the mistress and the maid, for the furniture of the room had to be disarranged, and a good deal of it carried into the bedroom beyond; and the carpet, which covered only the middle of the room, had to be lifted and put aside till morning.

The boys, or it might be some early meeting-goer, helped to move the tables and the chairs, and to bring in the forms on which the folk were to sit, and sometimes they carried them away again when the meeting was over. All the rest fell on Allison. And truly, when morning came, the floor and the whole place needed special care before it was made fit for the occupation of the mother and Marjorie.

But to do all that and more was not so hard for Allison as just to sit still through the two hours during which the meeting lasted. It was at such times, when she could not fill her hands and her thoughts with other things, that her trouble, whatever it might be, came back upon her, and her mistress saw the gloom and heaviness of heart fall on her like a cloud. It was quite true, as she had said, at such times she heard nothing of what was going on about her, because “she wasna heedin’.” But to-night she heeded.

She had Marjorie on her lap for one thing, for the child’s sleep had rested her, and her mother had yielded to her entreaty to be allowed to sit up to the meeting. Allison could not fall into her usual dull brooding, with the soft little hand touching her cheek now and then, and the hushed voice whispering a word in her ear. So for the first time her attention was arrested by what was going on in the room, and some of the folk got their first good look at her sad eyes that night.

And if Allison had but known it, it was well worth her while both to look and to listen. The minister was the leader of the meeting, but it was open to all who had anything to say.

It was something else besides a prayer-meeting on most nights. There was usually a short exposition of some passage of Scripture by the minister, and frequently a conversational turn was given to this part of the exercise. The minister had “the knack” of putting questions judiciously, to the great help and comfort of those who had something to say, but who did not well know how to say it. And though it must be acknowledged, as Mrs Hume had admitted to Allison, that there were now and then things said which were not altogether for edification, on the whole, this method, in the minister’s hands, answered well. It kept up the interest of the meeting to some who would hardly have cared to listen to a sermon out of the kirk, or on a week night. A few who were only occasional hearers on the Sabbath liked these informal discussions of precept and doctrine, as they would have liked the discussion of any other matter, for the mere intellectual pleasure to be enjoyed, and, as may be supposed, opportunities for this kind of enjoyment did not often occur in Nethermuir.

And there were a few men of another stamp among them—men to whom Mr Hume and “his new doctrines,” as they were called, had come, as sunlight comes into a day of darkness. Even in that time which was already passing away when these men were children, the time which its friends have called “the dark days of the kirk of Scotland,” the Bible had been read and reverenced in all well-ordered households, and it was as true then as in the day when our Lord himself had said it: “The words which I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life.” And so, through much reading of the Word, had come a sense of sinfulness and ill-desert which a vain striving to work out a righteousness for themselves could not quiet or banish, a longing for pardon from Him whom they had offended, and for a sense of acceptance and friendship with Him who had promised to save.

With regard to all this, it was but “an uncertain sound” which was uttered by the greater number of the teachers of the day; and so when men like Mr Hume came preaching a free and full salvation through Jesus Christ, not only from the consequences of sin, but from the power and the love of it, there were many through all the land who “heard the word gladly.”