And this was not good for a young man.
So that early one spring, the wild oat crop that Abel had been sowing began to appear with braird and luxuriant shoot. A whisper overran the parish swifter than the moor-burn when the heather is dry on the moors. Two names were coupled, not unto honour. And on a certain wild March morning, Yabel McQuhirr, having called his son three times, clambered fiercely up to the little garret stair to find an open skylight, a pallet-bed not slept in, and a home that was now childless from flagged hearth to smoke-browned roof-tree.
* * * * *
Yabel rode to market upon Mary Grey, his old rough-fetlocked mare, once badger-grey, but now white as the sea-gulls that fluttered and settled upon his springtime furrows. He heard no word of the story of Abel his son and the gypsy lass, for none durst tell him—till one Rob Girmory of Barscob, bolder or drunker than the rest, blurted it out with an oath and a scurvy jest. The next moment he was smitten down, and Yabel McQuhirr stood over him with his riding-whip clubbed in his hand, the fierce irascible eyebrows twitching, and wide nostrils blown out with the breath of the man's wrath.
But certain good friends, strong-armed men of peace, held him back, and got Girmory away to a quiet cartshed, where, on a heap of straw, he could sleep off his stupor and awake to wonder what had given him that lump, great as a hen's egg, over his right eye.
As for Yabel McQuhirr he saddled Mary Grey and took the road homeward lest any should bring the story first to his wife. For Jen, his Jen, was the kernel of that rough-husked, hard-shelled heart. And as he rode, he cursed Girmory with the slow studied anathema of the Puritan which is not swearing, but something sterner, solemner, more enduring. Sometimes he would cheat himself by saying over and over that there was nothing in the story. Abel had gone in his best clothes to a neighbouring town—he knew the lad had a pound or two that burnt a hole in his spendthrift pocket. He would return penitent when it was finished. And the old man found himself already "birsing" with anger, and thinking of what he would say to the returned prodigal when he caught sight of him—a greeting which would certainly not have run upon the lines of the parable.
Yet, as he went on and on, fear began to enter in, and he set his spurless heels grimly to Mary Grey's well-padded ribs. Never had that sober steed gone home at such a pace, and on brown windy braefaces ploughmen stood wiping their brows and watching and wondering. Shepherds, high on the hills, set their palms horizontally above their brows and murmured, "What's takin' auld Yabel hame at sic a pelt this day, as if the Ill Yin himsel' were after him?"
But for all his haste, some one had forestalled him. The busybody in other men's matters, the waspish gossip to whom the carrying of ill tidings is a chief joy, had been before him. Mary Grey had sweated in vain. There was no one to be heard stirring as he tramped eagerly in—no one flitting softly to and fro in milk-house or dairy.
But within Yabel McQuhirr found his wife fallen by the bake-board near the window, where she had been at work when the Messenger of Evil entered to do her fell work. Her eyes were closed, her hands limp and numb. With a hoarse inarticulate cry of rage Yabel raised his wife and carried her to the neatly-made bed with the patchwork quilt upon it. There he laid her down.
"Jen," he said, more gently than one could have believed the rough harsh man of wrath could have spoken, "Jen, waken, lassie. It's maybe no true. I tak' it on my soul it's no true!"