“They a’ ken there will be something for them in the coffers at the Hewan,” said Janet; “but, mem, if ye will be guided by me, you will let it be no too much. If only one of these dishes had been stoppit off her wages it would have been a grand lesson: but ye will never hear a word! A set of chiney! they would a’ be broken afore ever she got them hame.”
“Let it be the silver spoons then, Janet; they are the things that last the best. And now, if you were to cry in Andrew, we might read our chapter, and get ready for our beds.”
This was the invariable conclusion of these evening colloquies. And Janet went “ben” to her kitchen and then to the garden door, and “cried upon” Andrew, still conversing with the pony in the stable. And then there was a great turning of keys and drawing of bolts, and the house was closed up for the night. And finally the pair went into the parlour, where Mrs Ogilvy, with her clear little educated voice read “the chapter,” usually from one of the Gospels, and read in sequence night by night. Janet was of opinion that she never understood so well as when her mistress read, and indeed Mrs Ogilvy had a little pride in her reading, which was very clear and distinct with its broad vowels. The little prayer which was read out of a book did not please Andrew so much, who was of opinion that prayers ought never to be previously invented and written, but come, as he said, “straught from the hairt.” He had himself indeed thought on occasion that he could have poured forth the sentiments that moved the family with more unction and expression than was in the sometimes faltering voice and pause for breath which affected his mistress when she read these “cauld words out of a book”; but Andrew knew his own place: or if he did not know, Janet did.
What was there to catch the breath, and make the voice falter, in the printed words and amid all that deep calm of waning life? It was at the prayer for the absent that Mrs Ogilvy for fifteen years past had always broken down. Nay, not broken down: she was too deeply sensible that to make an exhibition of private feeling while leading the family devotions would have been irreverent and unseemly, but she was not capable of going on quite smoothly without a pause over that petition, “Those who are absent of this family, be Thou with them to bless them, and bring them home in Thy good time if it be Thy blessed will.” Every night there came to Janet’s eyes as she knelt a secret tear; and every night it seemed to Andrew that if he might speak “straught from the hairt” instead of that cauld prayer that was printed, the Lord would hear. I need not say that even in a Scotch book of domestic worship the words were varied from day to day, but the meaning was always the same. They left the mistress of the house in a certain commotion of mind when her old servants had bidden her good night and withdrawn. She had a way then of walking about the room, sometimes pausing as if to listen. There was deep silence about the Hewan, uplifted on its little brae, and with few houses near,—nothing to be heard except the distant murmur of the Esk, and the rustling of the trees. But the night has strange mysteries of sound for which no one can account. Sometimes something came that seemed like a step on the gravel outside, sometimes, fainter in the distance, what might have been the swing of the gate, sometimes a muffled knock as at the door. She knew them all well, and had been deceived by them a thousand times; nor was she undeceived yet, but would stop and raise her head and hold her breath, waiting for perhaps some second sound to follow to give meaning to it. But there never came any second sound, or at least there never was, never had been, any meaning in them. She listened, holding up her head, and then drooped it again, going on upon her little measured walk. “At ainy moment!” she would say sometimes to herself.
Over the front door of the cottage, which was not without a little pretension, there was what we used to call a fanlight: and in this summer and winter every night a light burned till morning. People shook their heads at it as a piece of foolish sentiment and very extravagant; and Andrew grudged a little the trouble it caused him. But there it burned all the year round, every night through.
CHAPTER II.
In the summer evenings Mrs Ogilvy sat on the bench outside the parlour window. I have never forgotten the sort of rapture with which the long summer evenings in Scotland impressed my own mind when I rediscovered them, so to speak, after a long interval of absence. The people who know Scotland only in the autumn know them not. By that time all things have grown common, the surprises of the year are over; but in June those long, soft, pearly, rosy hours which are neither night nor day, which melt by indescribable degrees out of the glory of the sunset into everything that is soft and fair, through every tint and shining colour and mingling of lights, until they reach that which is inconceivable—surround us with a heavenly atmosphere all their own, the fusion of every radiance, the subdual of every shade. There are no shadows in that wonderful light any more than there is any sun. The midnight sun must be a very spectacular sort of performance in comparison. To people who live in it always, however, it will probably appear no such great thing.
Mrs Ogilvy was not aware that there was anything that was not most ordinary in these June nights. She loved them, but knew no reason why. She sat in the sweet air, in the silence, sometimes feeling herself as if suspended between air and sky, floating softly in space with the movement of the world: and in her thoughts she was able even sometimes to detach herself from Then and Now, those two dreadful limits of our consciousness, and to catch a glimpse of life as it is rounded out, and some consciousness of the beginning and the end, and the sequence and connection of all things. Sometimes: but perhaps not very often, for these gleams of discovery are but gleams, and fly like the flashes of lightning which suddenly reveal to us a broad country, a noble city lost in the darkness. On such occasions the great sphere overhead, the great landscape stretching into distance, the glimpses of houses, great and small, amid the warm surrounding of the trees, the murmur of the Esk low in the glen, filling all the air with sound, affected her with an extraordinary calm. She used to think sometimes that this was the Peace that passeth understanding which descended upon her, hushing all her thoughts, stilling every sigh. It came but seldom in that height of blessing, but often in a less perfect way, as she sat and pondered upon the great still world revolving round, and she an atom in the boundless breadth of being, which by-and-by would drop, while the world went on.
But at other times it appeared to her more strange still that in all these miles and miles of distance, of solid earth and growing trees, and the hopeful harvests that were coming, there was one little thing, so little in fact, so insignificant in the midst of all, that was throbbing and throbbing and disturbing the quiet, unmoved by the peace of the sky and the earth and all the beautiful things between them—thinking its own small thoughts, and troubling, and living—till all the quiet throbbed and thrilled with it, the one thing that was out of harmony. The centre of her thoughts, or rather the cause of them all, night and day, was a thing that had happened fifteen years ago, a thing that most people had forgotten—a small matter to the world—just the going away of a heedless young man. It was not that she was always thinking of him, for her thoughts rambled and wandered through all the heavens and earth; but that he was the centre of all, the pivot on which they turned, the beginning and the end of everything. He had gone away—he had left his home, having already erred and strayed—and he had been heard of no more. She was not complaining or finding fault with God for it: she would sometimes wonder with a little wistfulness why God never listened to her, did not somewhere seize that wandering boy and bring him back—to satisfy her before she died. But then there were many things to be considered, Mrs Ogilvy knew and acknowledged to herself in the philosophy that had grown out of her much thinking. Robert was not a bairn, nor was God a mere benevolent patron, to seize the lad without rhyme or reason, and set him back there, because she wearied Him with crying. She had wanted God to be that, many times in her long period of trouble; but by dint of time and thought a different sense of things had come to her. God was not a good fairy: He was the great God of heaven and earth. He had Robert to think of as well as his mother, and thousands and millions of other things. Often in the weariness of her heart she asked nothing for Robert, said nothing, but sat there before the Lord with the boy’s name on her heart put before Him. And that was all she was doing now.
Of all that landscape there was one point to which her eyes turned the oftenest, and, which drew her away out of herself, as if by some charm of movement and going. And that was the piece of road which lay at the foot of the brae, with her own garden-gate opening into it, and the two lines of the holly-hedges on either side. Often she would be drawn back from her thinking by the sight of a figure on the road, which turned out to be a very common figure,—sometimes a beggar, or a man with a pack, a travelling merchant, or, more familiar still than that, a postman on his way home, or a lad that had been working later than usual. But whatever the man was, the sight of him always gave Mrs Ogilvy a sharp sensation. “At any moment!” she had said to herself so long that it had entered into her very soul. “At any moment!”—she was conscious of this night and day. Through all that she was doing she had always one ear listening for any new step or sound. And you may think how much more strong that habitual watchfulness was when she looked out in the evening, the time when everybody comes home, upon the road by which he must come, if he ever came. A hundred times and a hundred more she had watched that road, with her eyes