Rab and His Friends and Other Papers. Brown John

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СКАЧАТЬ haud on." I never once sighted him, but on coming into Juniper Green there was his steaming chestnut at the gate, neighing cheerily to Goliath. I went in, he was at the bedside of his friend, and in the midst of prayer; his words as I entered were, "When thou passest through the waters I will be with thee, and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee;" and he was not the less instant in prayer that his blood was up with his ride. He never again saw Mrs. Robertson, or as she was called when they were young, Sibbie (Sibella) Pirie. On coming out he said nothing, but took the chestnut, mounted her, and we came home quietly. His heart was opened; he spoke of old times and old friends; he stopped at the exquisite view at Hailes into the valley, and up the Pentlands beyond, the smoke of Kate's Mill rising in the still and shadowy air, and broke out into Cowper's words: Yes,

      "He sets the bright procession on its way,

      And marshals all the order of the year;

      And ere one flowery season fades and dies,

      Designs the blooming wonders of the next."

      Then as we came slowly in, the moon shone behind Craiglockhart hill among the old Scotch firs; he pulled up again, and gave me Collins' Ode to Evening, beginning —

      "If aught of oaten stop, or pastoral song,

      May hope, chaste Eve, to soothe thy modest ear,

      Thy springs, and dying gales

      repeating over and over some of the lines, as

      "Thy modest ear,

      Thy springs, and dying gales."

      " – And marks o'er all

      Thy dewy fingers draw

      The gradual dusky veil."

      And when she looked out on us clear and full, "Yes —

      "The moon takes up the wondrous tale,

      And nightly to the listening earth

      Repeats the story of her birth."

      As we passed through Slateford, he spoke of Dr. Belfrage, his great-hearted friend, of his obligations to him, and of his son, my friend, both lying together in Colinton churchyard; and of Dr. Dick, who was minister before him, of the Coventrys, and of Stitchel and Sprouston, of his mother, and of himself, – his doubts of his own sincerity in religion, his sense of sin, of God – reverting often to his dying friend. Such a thing only occurred to me with him once or twice all my life; and then when we were home, he was silent, shut up, self-contained as before. He was himself conscious of this habit of reticence, and what may be called selfism to us, his children, and lamented it. I remember his saying in a sort of mournful joke, "I have a well of love; I know it; but it is a well, and a draw-well, to your sorrow and mine, and it seldom overflows, but," looking with that strange power of tenderness as if he put his voice and his heart into his eyes, "you may always come hither to draw;" he used to say he might take to himself Wordsworth's lines —

      "I am not one who much or oft delights

      To season my fireside with personal talk."

      And changing "though" into "if:"

      "A well of love it may be deep,

      I trust it is, and never dry;

      What matter, though its waters sleep

      In silence and obscurity?"

      The expression of his affection was more like the shock of a Leyden jar, than the continuous current of a galvanic circle.

      There was, as I have said, a permanent chill given by my mother's death, to what may be called the outer surface of his nature, and we at home felt it much. The blood was thrown in upon the centre, and went forth in energetic and victorious work, in searching the Scriptures and saving souls; but his social faculty never recovered that shock! it was blighted; he was always desiring to be alone and at his work. A stranger who saw him for a short time, bright, animated, full of earnest and cordial talk, pleasing and being pleased, the life of the company, was apt to think how delightful he must always be, – and so he was; but these times of bright talk were like angels' visits; and he smiled with peculiar benignity on his retiring guest, as if blessing him not the less for leaving him to himself. I question if there ever lived a man so much in the midst of men, and in the midst of his own children, 20 in whom the silences, as Mr. Carlyle would say, were so predominant. Every Sabbath he spoke out of the abundance of his heart, his whole mind; he was then communicative and frank enough: all the week, before and after, he would not unwillingly have never opened his mouth. Of many people we may say that their mouth is always open except when it is shut; of him that his mouth was always shut except when it was opened. Every one must have been struck with the seeming inconsistency of his occasional brilliant, happy, energetic talk, and his habitual silentness – his difficulty in getting anything to say. But, as I have already said, what we lost, the world and the church gained.

      When travelling he was always in high spirits and full of anecdote and fun. Indeed I knew more of his inner history in this one way, than during years of living with him. I recollect his taking me with him to Glasgow when I must have been about fourteen; we breakfasted in The Rain's Horn Tavern, and I felt a new respect for him at his commanding the waiters. He talked a great deal during our short tour, and often have I desired to recal the many things he told me of his early life, and of his own religious crises, my mother's death, his fear of his own death, and all this intermingled with the drollest stories of his boy and student life.

      We went to Paisley and dined, I well remember, we two alone, and, as I thought, magnificently, in a great apartment in The Saracen's Head, at the end of which was the county ball-room. We had come across from Dunoon and landed in a small boat at the Water Neb along with Mrs. Dr. Hall, a character Sir Walter or Galt would have made immortal. My father with characteristic ardour took an oar, for the first time in his life, and I believe for the last, to help the old boatman on the Cart, and wishing to do something decided, missed the water, and went back head over heels to the immense enjoyment of Mrs. Hall, who said, "Less pith, and mair to the purpose, my man." She didn't let the joke die out.

      Another time – it was when his second marriage was fixed on, to our great happiness and his – I had just taken my degree of M. D., and he took Isabella, William, and myself to Moffat. By a curious felicity we got into Miss Gedde's lodgings, where the village circulating library was kept, the whole of which we aver he read in ten days. I never saw him so happy, so open and full of mirth, reading to us, and reciting the poetry of his youth. On these rare but delightful occasions he was fond of exhibiting, when asked, his powers of rapid speaking, in which he might have rivalled old Matthews or his son. His favourite feat was repeating, "Says I to my Lord, quo' I – what for will ye no grund ma barleymeal mouterfree, says I to my Lord, quo' I, says I, I says." He was brilliant upon the final "I says." Another chef-d'oeuvre was, "On Tintock tap there is a mist, and in the mist there is a kist (a chest), and in the kist there is a cap (a wooden bowl), and in the cap there is a drap, tak' up the cap, and sup the drap, and set the cap on Tintock tap." This he could say, if I mistake not, five times without drawing breath. It was a favourite passage this, and he often threatened to treat it exegetically; laughing heartily when I said, in that case, he would not have great trouble with the context, which in others cost him a good deal.

      His manners to ladies, and indeed to all women, were those of a courtly gentleman; they could be romantic in their empressement and devotion, and I used to think Sir Philip Sydney, or Ariosto's knights and the Paladins of old, must have looked and moved as he did. He had great pleasure in the company of high-bred, refined, thoughtful women; and he had a peculiar sympathy with the sufferings, the necessary mournfulness of women, and with all in their lot connected with the fruit of that forbidden tree – their loneliness, the sorrows of their time, and their pangs in travail, their peculiar relation to their СКАЧАТЬ