Christie Johnstone Part 6

Then she returned the one-pound note, a fresh settlement was effected, and she left him. At the door she said: "And I am muckle obleeged to ye for your story and your goodness."

While uttering these words, she half kissed her hand to him, with a lofty and disengaged gesture, such as one might expect from a queen, if queens did not wear stays; and was gone.

When his lords.h.i.+p, a few minutes after, sauntered out for a stroll, the first object he beheld was an exact human square, a handsome boy, with a body swelled out apparently to the size of a man's, with blue flannel, and blue cloth above it, leaning against a wall, with his hands in his pockets--a statuette of _insouciance._

This marine puff-ball was Flucker Johnstone, aged fourteen.

Stain his sister's face with diluted walnut-juice, as they make the stage gypsy and Red Indian (two animals imagined by actors to be one), and you have Flucker's face.

A slight moral distinction remains, not to be so easily got over.

She was the best girl in the place, and he a baddish boy.

He was, however, as sharp in his way as she was intelligent in hers.

This youthful mariner allowed his lords.h.i.+p to pa.s.s him, and take twenty steps, but watched him all the time, and compared him with a description furnished him by his sister.

He then followed, and brought him to, as he called it.

"I daur say it's you I'm to convoy to yon auld f.a.ggitt!" said this baddish boy.

On they went, Flucker rolling and pitching and yawing to keep up with the lordly galley, for a fisherman's natural waddle is two miles an hour.

At the very entrance of Newhaven, the new pilot suddenly sung out, "Starboard!"

Starboard it was, and they ascended a filthy "close," or alley they mounted a staircase which was out of doors, and, without knocking, Flucker introduced himself into Jess Rutherford's house.

"Here a gentleman to speak till ye, wife."

CHAPTER III.

THE widow was weather-beaten and rough. She sat mending an old net.

"The gentleman's welcome," said she; but there was no gratification in her tone, and but little surprise.

His lords.h.i.+p then explained that, understanding there were worthy people in distress, he was in hopes he might be permitted to a.s.sist them, and that she must blame a neighbor of hers if he had broken in upon her too abruptly with this object. He then, with a blush, hinted at ten s.h.i.+llings, which he begged she would consider as merely an installment, until he could learn the precise nature of her embarra.s.sments, and the best way of placing means at her disposal.

The widow heard all this with a lackl.u.s.ter mind.

For many years her life had been unsuccessful labor; if anything had ever come to her, it had always been a misfortune; her incidents had been thorns--her events, daggers.

She could not realize a human angel coming to her relief, and she did not realize it, and she worked away at her net.

At this, Flucker, to whom his lords.h.i.+p's speech appeared monstrously weak and pointless, drew nigh, and gave the widow, in her ear, his version, namely, his sister's embellished. It was briefly this: That the gentleman was a daft lord from England, who had come with the bank in his breeks, to remove poverty from Scotland, beginning with her. "Sae speak loud aneuch, and ye'll no want siller," was his polite corollary.

His lords.h.i.+p rose, laid a card on a chair, begged her to make use of him, et cetera; he then, recalling the oracular prescription, said, "Do me the favor to apply to me for any little sum you have a use for, and, in return, I will beg of you (if it does not bore you too much) to make me acquainted with any little troubles you may have encountered in the course of your life."

His lords.h.i.+p, receiving no answer, was about to go, after bowing to her, and smiling gracefully upon her.

His hand was on the latch, when Jess Rutherford burst into a pa.s.sion of tears.

He turned with surprise.

"My _troubles,_ laddie," cried she, trembling all over. "The sun wad set, and rise, and set again, ere I could tell ye a' the trouble I hae come through.

"Oh, ye need na vex yourself for an auld wife's tears; tears are a blessin', lad, I shall a.s.sure ye. Mony's the time I hae prayed for them, and could na hae them Sit ye doon! sit ye doon! I'll no let ye gang fra my door till I hae thankit ye--but gie me time, gie me time. I canna greet a' the days of the week."

Flucker, _aetat._ 14, opened his eyes, unable to connect ten s.h.i.+llings and tears.

Lord Ipsden sat down, and felt very sorry for her.

And she cried at her ease.

If one touch of nature make the whole world kin, methinks that sweet and wonderful thing, sympathy, is not less powerful. What frozen barriers, what ice of centuries, it can melt in a moment!

His bare mention of her troubles had surprised the widowed woman's heart, and now she looked up and examined his countenance; it was soon done.

A woman, young or old, high or low, can discern and appreciate sensibility in a man's face, at a single glance.

What she saw there was enough. She was sure of sympathy. She recalled her resolve, and the tale of her sorrows burst from her like a flood.

Then the old fishwife told the young aristocrat how she had borne twelve children, and buried six as bairns; how her man was always unlucky; how a mast fell on him, and disabled him a whole season; how they could but just keep the pot boiling by the deep-sea fis.h.i.+ng, and he was not allowed to dredge for oysters, because his father was not a Newhaven man. How, when the herring fis.h.i.+ng came, to make all right, he never had another man's luck; how his boat's crew would draw empty nets, and a boat alongside him would be gunwale down in the water with the fish.

How, at last, one morning, the 20th day of November, his boat came in to Newhaven Pier without him, and when he was inquired for, his crew said, "He had stayed at home, like a lazy loon, and not sailed with them the night before." How she was anxious, and had all the public houses searched. "For he took a drop now and then, nae wonder, and him aye in the weather." Poor thing! when he was alive she used to call him a drunken scoundrel to his face. How, when the tide went down, a mad wife, whose husband had been drowned twenty years ago, pointed out something under the pier that the rest took for sea-weed floating--how it was the hair of her man's head, washed about by the water, and he was there, drowned without a cry or a struggle, by his enormous boots, that kept him in an upright position, though he was dead; there he stood--dead--drowned by slipping from the slippery pier, close to his comrades' hands, in a dark and gusty night; how her daughter married, and was well to do, and a.s.sisted her; how she fell into a rapid decline, and died, a picture of health to inexperienced eyes. How she, the mother, saw and knew, and watched the treacherous advance of disease and death; how others said gayly, "Her daughter was better," and she was obliged to say, "Yes." How she had worked, eighteen hours a day, at making nets; how, when she let out her nets to the other men at the herring fis.h.i.+ng, they always cheated her, because her man was gone. How she had many times had to choose between begging her meal and going to bed without it, but, thank Heaven! she had always chosen the latter.

She told him of hunger, cold, and anguish. As she spoke they became real things to him; up to that moment they had been things in a story-book.

And as she spoke she rocked herself from side to side.

Indeed, she was a woman "acquainted with grief." She might have said, "Here I and sorrow sit. This is my throne, bid kings come and bow to it!"

Her hearer felt this, and therefore this woman, poor, old, and ugly, became sacred in his eye; it was with a strange sort of respect that he tried to console her. He spoke to her in tones gentle and sweet as the south wind on a summer evening.

"Madam," said he, "let me be so happy as to bring you some comfort. The sorrows of the heart I cannot heal; they are for a mightier hand; but a part of your distress appears to have been positive need; that we can at least dispose of, and I entreat you to believe that from this hour want shall never enter that door again. Never! upon my honor!"

The Scotch are icebergs, with volcanoes underneath; thaw the Scotch ice, which is very cold, and you shall get to the Scotch fire, warmer than any sun of Italy or Spain.

His lords.h.i.+p had risen to go. The old wife had seemed absorbed in her own grief; she now dried her tears.

"Bide ye, sirr," said she, "till I thank ye."

So she began to thank him, rather coldly and stiffly.

"He says ye are a lord," said she; "I dinna ken, an' I dinna care; but ye're a gentleman, I daur say, and a kind heart ye hae."

Then she began to warm.

"And ye'll never be a grain the poorer for the siller ye hae gien me; for he that giveth to the poor lendeth to the Lord."