The love-light.
Long ago, in the days when our caged blackbirds never
saw a king’s soldier without whistling impudently,
“Come ower the water to Charlie,” a minister
of Thrums was to be married, but something happened,
and he remained a bachelor. Then, when he was
old, he passed in our square the lady who was to have
been his wife, and her hair was white, but she, too,
was still unmarried. The meeting had only one
witness, a weaver, and he said solemnly afterwards,
“They didna speak, but they just gave one another
a look, and I saw the love-light in their een.”
No more is remembered of these two, no being now living
ever saw them, but the poetry that was in the soul
of a battered weaver makes them human to us for ever.
It is of another minister I am to tell, but only to
those who know that light when they see it. I
am not bidding good-bye to many readers, for though
it is true that some men, of whom Lord Rintoul was
one, live to an old age without knowing love, few of
us can have met them, and of women so incomplete I
never heard.
Gavin Dishart was barely twenty-one when he and his
mother came to Thrums, light-hearted like the traveller
who knows not what awaits him at the bend of the road.
It was the time of year when the ground is carpeted
beneath the firs with brown needles, when split-nuts
patter all day from the beech, and children lay yellow
corn on the dominie’s desk to remind him that
now they are needed in the fields. The day was
so silent that carts could be heard rumbling a mile
away. All Thrums was out in its wynds and closes—
a few of the weavers still in knee-breeches—to
look at the new Auld Licht minister. I was there
too, the dominie of Glen Quharity, which is four miles
from Thrums; and heavy was my heart as I stood afar
off so that Gavin’s mother might not have the
pain of seeing me. I was the only one in the
crowd who looked at her more than at her son.
Eighteen years had passed since we parted. Already
her hair had lost the brightness of its youth, and
she seemed to me smaller and more fragile; and the
face that I loved when I was a hobbledehoy, and loved
when I looked once more upon it in Thrums, and always
shall love till I die, was soft and worn. Margaret
was an old woman, and she was only forty-three:
and I am the man who made her old. As Gavin put
his eager boyish face out at the carriage window,
many saw that he was holding her hand, but none could
be glad at the sight as the dominie was glad, looking
on at a happiness in which he dared not mingle.
Margaret was crying because she was so proud of her
boy. Women do that. Poor sons to be proud
of, good mothers, but I would not have you dry those
tears.
