"Thrones, dominations, princedoms, vertues, powers!"
It was years after when first I read it, but instantly I thought of that wet summer day in Lammastide, when my father wrestled with his peers concerning the deep things of eternity, and was not overcome.
My mother has often told me that he never slept all that night—how waking in the dawn and finding his place vacant, she had hastily thrown on a gown and gone out to look for him. He was walking up and down in the little orchard behind the barn, his hands clasped behind his back. And all he said in answer to her reproaches was: "It's vexin', Mary, to think that I only minded that text in Ephesians about being 'sealed unto the day of redemption' after he was ower the hill. It wad hae ta'en the feet clean frae him if I had gotten hand o' it in time."
"What can ye do wi' a man like that?" she would conclude, summing up her husband's character, mostly in his hearing.
"But remember, Mary, the pit from which I was digged!" he would reply, reaching down the worn old leather-bound copy of Boston's Fourfold State out of the wall-press and settling himself to re-peruse a favourite chapter.
* * * * *
My father's father, Yabel McQuhirr, was a fierce hard man, and seldom showed his heart, ruling his house with a rod of iron, setting each in his place, wife, child, man-servant and maid-servant, ox and ass—aye, and the stranger within his gates.
My father does not talk of these things, but my mother has often told me of that strange household up among the granite hills, to which, as a maid of nineteen, she went to serve. In those days in all the Galloway farm-towns, master and servant sat down together to meals. The head of the house was lawgiver and potentate, priest and parent to all beneath his roof. And if Yabel McQuhirr of Ardmannoch did not exercise the right of pit and gallows, it was about all the authority he did not claim over his own.
Yabel had a family of strong sons, silent, dour—the doctrine of unquestioning obedience driven into them by their father's right arm and oaken staff. But their love was for their mother, who drifted through the house with a foot light as a falling leaf, and a voice attuned to the murmuring of a hill stream. There was no daughter in the household, and Mary McArthur had come partly to supply the want. She had brought a sore little heart with her, all because of a certain ship that had gone over the sea, and the glint of a sailor lad's merry blue eyes she would see no more.
She had therefore no mind for love-making, and Thomas and Abel, the two eldest sons, got very short answers for their pains when they "tried their hand" on their mother's new house-lass. Tom, the eldest, took it well enough, and went elsewhere; but Abel was a bully by nature, and would not let the girl alone. Once he kissed her by force as, hand-tied, she carried in the peats from the stack. Whereupon Alexander, the silent third brother, found out the reason of Mary's red eyes, and interviewed his brother behind the barn to such purpose that his face bore the marks of fraternal knuckles for a week. Also Alexander had his lip split.