The oversman shook his head as he went out through the manse gate.
"And I am some dootfu' that we hae made a mistak'!"
"If we hae," rejoined Naysmith, the strong man, "we maun keep it frae the knowledge o' Drowdle. But the lad is young—young. And when he has served his 'prenticeship to sorrow, he will maybes come oot o' the furnace as silver that is tried!"
* * * * *
Now, neither Drowdle nor its inhabitants meant to be unkind. In case of illness or accident among themselves, none gave material help more liberally. What belonged to one was held in a kindly communism to be the right of all. But Drowdle was not to be handled delicately. It was a nettle to be grasped with gloves of untanned leather.
Dairsie Gordon opened his first Sunday-school at three in the afternoon. At a quarter to four as he stood up on the platform to give his closing address, he found boys scuttling and playing "tig" between his legs. He laid down his hymn-book, and on lifting it to read the closing verses, discovered that a certain popular bacchanalian collection entitled "Songs of the Red, White, and Blue," had mysteriously taken its place.
The young minister had other and graver trials also. The pitmen passed him on the road with a surly grunt, and he did not know it was only because they were trudging home dog-tired from their long shift. The hard-driving managers and sub-managers, men without illusions and as blatantly practical as a Scottish daily paper, passed him by contemptuously, as if he had been a tract thrust under their doors. The schoolmaster, a cleverish machine-made youth of inordinate conceit, openly scoffed. He was a weakling, this minister, and he had better know it.
And, indeed, in these days, Dairsie gave them plenty of scope for complaint. His sermons might possibly have edified a company of the unfallen angels, if we can fancy such being interested in heathen philosophy and the interpretation of the more obscure Old Testament Scriptures. But to this gritty, ungodly, crass-natured, rasp-surfaced village of Drowdle, the young man merely babbled in his pulpit as the summer brooks do over the pebbles.
An itinerant evangelist, who shook the fear of hell-fire under their noses with the fist of a pugilist, and claimed in ancient style the power to bind and the power to loose, might conceivably have succeeded in Drowdle, but as it was, Dairsie Gordon proved a failure of the most absolute sort. And Drowdle, having no false modesty, told him plainly of it. At informal meetings of Session the question of their minister's shortcomings was discussed with freedom and point, only the overs-man and Robin Naysmith pleading suspension of judgment on account of the young man's years.
For there were sympathetic hearts here and there among the folk of Drowdle. Women with the maternal instinct yet untrampled out of them, came to their doors to look after the tall slim "laddie" who was so like the sons they had dreamed of when the maiden's blush still tinged their cheeks.