The Doctor’s lady gave him no peace till he did his duty. The General’s womenfolk at the Bungalow were clamorous. It was not seemly. Something must be done, and since the action of Mr. Shepstone Oglethorpe on the occasion of the assault on the house had put him out of the question, and as the General flatly refused to have anything to do with the affair, it was obvious that the duty must fall to the Doctor.
Nor could a better choice have been made. Eden Valley has known many preachers, but never another such pastor—never a shepherd of the sheep like the Doctor. I can see him yet walking down the manse avenue—it had been just “the Loaning” in the days before the advent of the second Mrs. Doctor Gillespie—a silver-headed cane in his hand, everything about him carefully groomed, and his very port breathing a peculiarly grave and sober dignity. Grey locks, still plentiful, clustered about his head. His cocked hat (of the antique pattern which, early in his ministry, he had imported by the dozen from Versailles) never altered in pattern. Buckles of unpolished silver shone dully at his knee and bent across his square-toed shoes.
Above all spread his neckcloth, spotless, enveloping, cumbrous, reverence-compelling, a cravat worthy of a Moderator. And indeed the Doctor—our Doctor, parish minister of Eden Valley, had “passed the Chair” of the General Assembly. We were all proud of the fact, even top-lofty Cameronians like my grandmother secretly delighting in the thought of the Doctor in his robes of office.
“There would be few like him away there in Edinburgh,” she would say. “The Doctor’s a braw man, and does us credit afore the great of the land—for a’ that he’s a Moderate!”
And had he been the chief of all the Moderates, the most volcanic and aggressive of Moderates, my grandmother would have found some good thing to say of a fellow-countryman of so noble a presence—“so personable,” and “such a credit to the neighbourhood.”
Wisdom, grave and patient, was in every line of his kindly face. Something boyish and innocent told that the shades of the prison-house had never wholly closed about him. It was good to lift the hat to Dr. Gillespie as he went along—hat a little tip-tilted off the broadly-furrowed brow. In the city he is very likely to stop and regard the most various wares—children’s dolls or ladies’ underpinnings. But think not that the divine is interested in such things. His mind is absent—in communion with things very far away. Lift your hat and salute him. He will not see you, but—it will do you good!
William Gillespie was the son of a good ministerial house. His father had occupied the same pulpit. He himself had been born in his own manse—which is to say, in all the purple of which our grey Puritan land can boast. We were proud of the Doctor, and had good reason therefor. I have said that even my field-preaching grandmother looked upon the Erastian with a moisture quasi-maternal in her eyes, and as for us who “sat under him and listened to his speech,” we came well-nigh to worship him.
Yet “the Doctor” was self-effacing beyond many, and only our proper respect for the “Lady of the Manse” kept the parishioners in their places. Discourses which he had preached in the callow days of his youth on the “Book of the Revelation” had brought hearers from many distant parishes, and at that time the Doctor had had several “calls” and “offers” to proceed to other spheres on account of their fame. But he had always refused to repeat any of them.
“I have changed my mind about many things since then,” he would say; “young men are apt to be hasty! The greatest of all heresies is dogmatism.”
But among the older saints of the parish that “series of expositions” was not forgotten. “It was” (they averred) “like the licht o’ anither world to look on his face—just heeven itsel’ to listen to him. Sirce me, there are no such discourses to be heard now-a-days—not even from himsel’!”