The Dew of Their Youth

by S. R. Crockett

The morning had opened rather desolately. With the dawn the slate-grey fingers of the rain clouds had reached down, spanning from Criffel to Screel. The sea mist did what faith also can do. It removed mountains. One after another they faded and were not. A chillish wind began to blow up from the Solway, and even in Eden Valley was heard the distant roar of the surf, through the low pass which is called the Nick of Benarick. The long grass first stood in beads and then began to trickle. Flowers drooped their heads if of the harebell sort, or stood spikily defiant like the yellow whin and the pink thistle.

I had got ready cloaks and hoods, you may be sure. I was on the spot at my grandmother’s door a full hour before the time. Within I found Mary Lyon raging. Neither of the bairns should go out of her house on such a day! What for could they not be content to take their learning from Duncan and Agnes Anne? Miss Irma, she was sure, was well able to teach the bairn. It was all a foolishness, and very likely would end in something uncanny. If it did—well, let nobody blame her. She had lifted up her testimony, and thrown away her wisdom on deaf ears.

Which, indeed, was something not unlike the case.

For just then the sun shone out. The clouds divided to right and left, following the steep purpling ridges on either side of Eden Valley—and in the middle opening out a long sweet stream of brightness. Little Louis clapped his hands. He ached for the company of his kind. He talked “boys.” He dreamed “boys”—not grown-up boys like me, but children of his own age. He despised Irma because she was a girl. Only Agnes Anne could anyways satisfy him, when she put on over her dress a pair of her grandfather’s corduroy trousers, buttoned them above her shoulder, and pretended to give orders as in the pirn-mill. Even then, after a happy hour with the toys which Agnes Anne contrived for him, all at once Louis grew whimpering disappointedly, stared at her and said, “You are not a real little boy.”

And I, who had the pick of the Eden Valley boys on my hand every time I went near my father’s (and knew them for little beasts), wondered at his taste, when he could have Irma’s company, not to speak of Agnes Anne’s. But I resolved that I should keep a bright look-out and make the little villains behave. For at an early age our Eden Valley boys were just savages, ready to mock and rend any one of themselves who was a little better dressed, who wore boots instead of clogs with birch-wood soles, or dared to speak without battering the King’s English out of all recognition.

My father and Miss Huntingdon would, of course, be ready to protect our small man as far as was in their power. But they, especially my father, were often far removed in higher spheres of work, while Miss Huntingdon was never in the boys’ playground at all. But I had none of these disabilities. I was instructed, sharp-eyed, always on the spot, with fists in good repair—armed, too, with a certain authority and the habit of using it to the full.

So little Louis found himself among his boys. I picked him out half-a-dozen of the most peaceable to play with, after he had received his first lesson from a very proud and smiling Miss Huntingdon. Miss Irma, after being formally introduced to the school, left the sort of throne which had been set for her beside my father, to go and sit beside Agnes Anne at the top of the highest form of girls.

Her presence made a hush among the elder boys, and such of the young men as happened to be there that day. For though we had scholars up to the age of twenty, most of these were at work during the summer and came only in the winter season—though in the interval betwixt sowing and hay-harvest and between that again and the ripening of the corn we would receive stray visits from them, especially in the long wet spells of weather.

It was at noon and the girls were walking in their playground talking with linked arms, apart from the noisy sportings of the boys, when I caught my first glimpse of Uncle Rob. He was standing right opposite the school in the big door of the Eden Valley Mill. I wondered what he was doing there, for it was not the season for grinding much corn. Besides, it would have been handier to send it down and call for it again during such a busy season on the farm.

So I ran across and asked him what he was doing there. I could hardly hear his answer, for the loud plash-plash of the buckets of water as they fell into the great pool underneath the wheel.