“What was’t ye thocht ye saw, as we cam
frae the kirk, daddy?” asked Malcolm when they
were seated at their dinner of broiled mackerel and
boiled potatoes.
“In other times she’ll pe hafing such
feeshions often, Malcolm, my son,” he returned,
avoiding an answer. “Like other pards of
her race she would pe seeing—in the speerit,
where old Tuncan can see. And she’ll pe
telling you, Malcolm—peware of tat voman;
for ta voman was thinking pad thoughts; and tat will
pe what make her shutter and shake, my son, as she’ll
pe coing py.”
On Sundays, Malcolm was always more or less annoyed
by the obtrusive presence of his arms and legs, accompanied
by a vague feeling that, at any moment, and no warning
given, they might, with some insane and irrepressible
flourish, break the Sabbath on their own account,
and degrade him in the eyes of his fellow townsmen,
who seemed all silently watching how he bore the restraints
of the holy day. It must be conceded, however,
that the discomfort had quite as much to do with his
Sunday clothes as with the Sabbath day, and that it
interfered but little with an altogether peculiar calm
which appeared to him to belong in its own right to
the Sunday, whether its light flowed in the sunny
cataracts of June, or oozed through the spongy clouds
of November. As he walked again to the Alton,
or Old Town in the evening, the filmy floats of white
in the lofty blue, the droop of the long dark grass
by the side of the short brown corn, the shadows pointing
like all lengthening shadows towards the quarter of
hope, the yellow glory filling the air and paling
the green below, the unseen larks hanging aloft—like
air pitcher plants that overflowed in song—like
electric jars emptying themselves of the sweet thunder
of bliss in the flashing of wings and the trembling
of melodious throats; these were indeed of the summer
but the cup of rest had been poured out upon them;
the Sabbath brooded like an embodied peace over the
earth, and under its wings they grew sevenfold peaceful—with
a peace that might be felt, like the hand of a mother
pressed upon the half sleeping child. The rusted
iron cross on the eastern gable of the old church
stood glowing lustreless in the westering sun; while
the gilded vane, whose business was the wind, creaked
radiantly this way and that, in the flaws from the
region of the sunset: its shadow flickered soft
on the new grave, where the grass of the wounded sod
was drooping. Again seated on a neighbour stone,
Malcolm found his friend.
“See,” said the schoolmaster as the fisherman
sat down beside him, “how the shadow from one
grave stretches like an arm to embrace another!
In this light the churchyard seems the very birthplace
of shadows: see them flowing out of the tombs
as from fountains, to overflow the world! Does
the morning or the evening light suit such a place
best, Malcolm?”
