It was to their music I fell asleep, and I slept like a little child. But I have come to think long since that the song and the psalm were not such distant relatives after all.
XIV
GIRDING ON THE ARMOUR
The year that followed Gordon's departure for the North was my growing year. It was the sweetest, dreariest, love-brightest, loneliest year of all my life—and it was, as I have said, my progress year. I mean, by that, it was the year which led me farthest in to the real secret of living and the real springs of life. Of course, it was a desolate twelvemonth; I never saw Gordon's face from its beginning to its close; and this was a new side of life to me, to discover that I could miss any one face so much. Nothing pleased me more than the sadness that used to settle down on me every now and then, especially in the twilight hour, when the dear absent one filled all my thought. There was a kind of royal state about my widowhood—if that sombre word can be applied to such a hopeful year—that made me feel I was set apart from all other girls, especially from those who had their happiness on tap right at their hands. Mine seemed to be fed from far-off fountains, farther up the hill; and I felt a kind of envious pity for those whose unromantic luxury it was to see their sweethearts every night. I walked by faith; but they by sight, I thought, paraphrasing a text of Scripture—which, it occurred to me, was the proper thing for a girl with such ministerial prospects as my own. But I suppose they pitied me in turn; which only goes to show what a self-rectifying world this is.
Besides, so far as my own household was concerned, I was deliciously alone. I learned, in this connection, something of the martyr's mysterious joy. If there was one thing beyond another that made me love Gordon more and more wildly every day, it was that my family hardly ever spoke his name. Excepting mother, of course; she was still my mother, if a disappointed and saddened one—and sometimes great freshets of tenderness and sympathy flowed from her heart over into mine. But uncle was so stern about it all, so consistently silent. If he had been a rejected lover himself he couldn't have handed me Gordon's daily letter more solemnly than he used to do when he came in with the mail.
These I always read alone in secret, putting them away afterwards with reverent hands—and I kept the key myself this time. And such letters as they were! I could be famous over all the world, if I chose to publish the love-letters of Gordon Laird—they were a combination of poetry and fire. Yet I had always read, and heard, that Scotchmen, even when in love, were as reserved and cold as their native mountains. Perhaps they are—but my Scotchman must have been a Vesuvius, with Eolian harp accompaniment, as the world would concede if they could once get their eyes upon his letters.
I valiantly renounced everything I thought questionable for a girl whose promised husband was a minister of the Gospel. I gave up cards, of course, though not without a pang. Sometimes I still went to card parties, but I never did anything worse than punch the score cards, which I could do quite dexterously. I never cared for the business though; if there's a mean occupation on earth, it's punching score cards while everybody else is having all the fun. I fancy I felt a good deal like those famous pugilists that drop down at last to holding a sponge, or something of that sort. I began, too, to take a faint interest in temperance; forswore claret punch forever; thought seriously, for several weeks, of giving up syllabubs; even went so far at table as to ask Aunt Agnes if she thought brandy sauce was quite the thing. Aunt said I didn't raise the question till after I had had two helpings. With regard to "the light fantastic," I never danced anything stronger than Sir Roger; used to play, sometimes, while the others waltzed—but that's deadly dry, like punching score cards, or holding a sponge when your fighting days are done.
About the brandy sauce, mother told me after that I needn't worry. Did I know how expensive brandy was, she said. And I had already told her how much salary Gordon was getting in his mission field in Canada. There is no need to mention it here—but it was mighty little. He had a country station, somewhere in the rural districts; of which, to my mind at least, Canada seemed to be almost entirely composed. For all I knew of that Dominion was from the geography we learned at school; it gave only a few paragraphs to our nearest neighbour nation—and these were clustered round a picture that would chill you to behold, the picture of a man without coat or vest, knee-deep in snow, lifting up his axe upon the trees of the forest.
Gordon's letters, of course, were full of his work and his people. And they didn't contain much that would likely attract a girl brought up as I had been. Little gatherings of people, mostly in country schoolhouses, deadly singing—which must have been hard on Gordon—rude companionship, humble lodgings and humbler fare, long rides and walks, scant results for all his toil. But he seemed to love his work and his people, and never complained. Once or twice he said they were woefully conservative in their theology, and that they were sternly set against all the views of modern scholarship, even though they didn't know what they were. To tell the truth, I didn't know myself, but I felt uneasy at the term; far from religious though I was, I yet always felt that there were no doctrines worth the name except the old ones—the older the better, thought I. And when I asked Mr. Furvell about it he said he hoped Gordon wasn't a disciple of Robertson Smith, and added something darkly about a "higher critic." I didn't know exactly what this last might be—the adjective might apply to Gordon all right, I reckoned, but I didn't like the noun.
Anyhow, we were going to be married; that was the principal thing to me, and I went bravely on making preparations for the greatest event of all my life. I hadn't much to bring Gordon as a dower—practically nothing, indeed—for my mother's modest income left no margin for that, and was so bequeathed that it could not survive her. But I wanted to bring him a good true heart and a sound body—with a few lovely things to clothe it. Every girl wants that, or ought to, at least.