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It was to a herd's house, shining white on a hillside, a burnie trilling below, the red heather surging about the garden dyke on all sides, that Alexander McQuhirr took his wife Mary, a year later. And there in the fulness of time my brother Willie was born—the child of the cot-house and of the kailyaird. In time followed other, if not better things—first a small holding, then a farm—then I, Alexander the second. And still, thank God, we, the children of Mary McArthur, run with our cut fingers to that steadfast, loving, silent man, Saunders McQuhirr, son of Yabel, the Man of Violence and Wrath.
THE MAN OF WRATH
A man of wrath was my grandfather, Yabel McQuhirr, from his youth up. And I am now going to tell the story of how by a strange providence he was turned aside from the last sin of Judas, and how he became in his latter days a man of peace and a lover of young children.
He was my father's father, and I have already told how that son of his to whom I owe my life, went forth to make a new hearthstone warm and bright for the girl who was to be my mother. But after the departure of that third son, darker and darker descended the gloom upon the lonely uplying farm. Fiercer and ever fiercer fell the angers of Yabel McQuhirr upon his remaining children, Thomas and Abel—the latter named after his father, but whose Christian name never acquired the antique and preliminary "Y" that marks the border-line between the old and the new.
One dismal Monday morning in the back-end of the year there were bitter words spoken in the barn at the threshing, between Thomas and his father. Retort followed retort, till, with knotted fist, the father savagely felled the youth to the ground. There was blood upon the clean yellow straw when he rose. Thomas went indoors, opened his little chest, took from it all the money he had, shook hands silently with his mother, and took his way over the Rig of Bennanbrack, never to be heard of more.
And after this ever closer and closer Yabel McQuhirr shut the door of his heart. He hardened himself under the weight of his wife's gentle sufferance and reproachful silences. He gripped his hands together when, with the corner of an eye that would not humble itself to look, he saw the tear trickling down the wasted cheek. He uttered no word of sorrow for the past, nor did the name of either of his departed sons pass his lips.
Nevertheless, he grew markedly kinder in deed to Abel, the one son who remained—not much kinder in word perhaps, for still that loud and angry voice could be heard coming from field and meadow, barn or byre, till the fearful mother would steal silent-footed to the kitchen-door lest the last part of her threefold sorrow should indeed have come upon her. But not in this manner was the blow to fall.
Abel was the least worthy but greatly the handsomest of the sons of Yabel McQuhirr. He had a large visiting acquaintance among the farm-towns, and often did not seek his garret-bed till the small hours of the morning. Then his mother, awake and vigilant, would incline her ear on the pillow to hear whether her husband was asleep beside her.
Now, oftentimes Yabel, her husband, slept not, yet for his wife's sake, and perhaps because Abel, with his bright smile and clean-limbed figure, reminded him of a wild youth he had long put behind him, he bore with the lad, even to giving him in one short year more money to spend than had been his brothers' portion during all the time they had faithfully served their father.