The Dew of Their Youth

by S. R. Crockett

How they must get to a place where they could hide, a place with water, where they could restore their beasts and repose themselves, a place of great shadowing rocks in a weary land. For of a certainty the sun would smite by day, even if the moon afforded them guidance over the waste by night.

Or Boyd Connoway would tell of the Golden Hind having been seen out in the channel, of rafts of “buoyed” casks sunk to within three foot of the bottom, to be fished up when on a dark night the herring craft slipped out of Balcary or the Scaur, silent as a shadow.

Or mayhap (and this, married or single, Irma liked best of all) there came in some shy old farmer from the uplands, or perhaps a herd, to whose boy or girl “out at service” the mistress of Heathknowes had brought home a Bible. These had come to thank Mary Lyon, but could not get a word out. They sipped their currant wine as if it were medicine and moved uneasily on the edges of their chairs. They had excellent manners stowed away somewhere—the natural well-bredness of the hill and the heather, but in a place like that, with so many folk, it seemed as if they had somehow mislaid them.

Then was Irma’s time. She would glide in, her face still pale, of course, but with such a gracious sweetness upon it that the shyest was soon at his ease. Here was a cup, an embarrassment to the hand. She would fill its emptiness, not with Aunt Jen’s currant wine, but with good Hollands—not to the brim, because the owner would spill it over and so add the finishing touch to his bashfulness. She sat down by the oldest, the shaggiest, the roughest, and in a moment (as if, like a fairy of Elfland, she had waved her wand) old Glencross of Saltflats, who only talked in monosyllables to his own wife, was telling Irma all about the prospects of his hay crop, and the bad look-out there was along the Colvend shore owing to the rabbits breeding on the green hill pastures.

“Oh, but I’ll thin them, missie,” he affirmed, in response to her look of sympathy, “ow aye, there are waur things than hare soup and rabbit pie. Marget” (his wife) “is a great hand at the pie. Ye maun come ower some day and taste—you and your guidman. I will send ye word by that daft loon Davie.”

Then with hardly an effort, now that the ice was broken, turning to my grandmother, “Eh, mistress, but it was awesome kind and mindfu’ o’ you to fetch the laddie a Bible a’ the road frae Enbra. I hae juist been promising him a proper doing, a regular flailing if he doesna read in it every nicht afore he says his prayers.”

Needless to say Davie had promised—but as to Davie’s after performance no facts have been put on record. Still, he had his Bible and was proud of it.

Then Irma, safe in her married state, would set herself down by some shy, horny-fisted fellow, all nose and knuckles. She would draw him away from his consciousness of the Adam’s apple in his throat (which he privately felt every one must be looking at) and give him a good sympathetic quarter of an hour all to himself. She would smile and smile and be a villain to her heart’s content, till the lad’s tongue would at last be loosened, and he would tell how he tried for first prize at the last ploughing match, and boast how he would have been first only for his “coulter blunting on a muckle granite stane.” He would relate with exactness how many queys his father had, the records of mortality among the wintering sheep, the favourable prospects of the spring lambs—“abune the average—aye, I will not deny, clean abune the average.”

So he would sit and talk, and gaze and gaze, till there entered into his soul the strong desire to work, to rise up and conquer fate and narrow horizons—so that in time, like a certain Duncan MacAlpine (whom very likely, as a big country fellow, he had thrashed at school), it might happen to him to have by his fireside something dainty and sweet and with great sympathetic eyes and a smile—like that!

We had only a little while of this, however, for on the morrow Louis was to arrive from school, safely escorted by Freddy Esquillant and half-a-dozen students, who had made a jovial party all the way from Edinburgh.