asked for it; if payment was omitted, never even hinted
at it; received what was given him thankfully; and
was regarded with kindness, and, indeed, respect,
by all. Even Mrs Partan, as he alone called her,
was his true friend: no intensity of friendship
could have kept her from scolding. I believe
if we could thoroughly dissect the natures of scolding
women, we should find them in general not at all so
unfriendly as they are unpleasant.
A small trade in oil arose from his connection with
the lamps, and was added to the list of his general
dealings. The fisher folk made their own oil,
but sometimes it would run short, and then recourse
was had to Duncan’s little store, prepared by
himself of the best; chiefly, now, from the livers
of fish caught by his grandson. With so many
sources of income, no one wondered at his getting on.
Indeed no one would have been surprised to hear, long
before Malcolm had begun to earn anything, that the
old man had already laid by a trifle.
CHAPTER XV: THE SLOPE OF THE DUNE
Looking at Malcolm’s life from the point of
his own consciousness, and not from that of the so
called world, it was surely pleasant enough.
Innocence, devotion to another, health, pleasant labour
with an occasional shadow of danger to arouse the energies,
leisure, love of reading, a lofty minded friend, and,
above all, a supreme presence, visible to his heart
in the meeting of vaulted sky and outspread sea, and
felt at moments in any waking wind that cooled his
glowing cheek and breathed into him anew of the breath
of life, —lapped in such conditions, bathed
in such influences, the youth’s heart was swelling
like a rosebud ready to burst into blossom.
But he had never yet felt the immediate presence of
woman in any of her closer relations. He had
never known mother or sister; and, although his voice
always assumed a different tone and his manner grew
more gentle in the presence, of a woman, old or young,
he had found little individually attractive amongst
the fisher girls. There was not much in their
circumstances to bring out the finer influences of
womankind in them: they had rough usage, hard
work at the curing and carrying of fish and the drying
of nets, little education, and but poor religious
instruction. At the same time any failure in
what has come to be specially called virtue, was all
but unknown amongst them; and the profound faith in
women, and corresponding worship of everything essential
to womanhood which essentially belonged to a nature
touched to fine issues, had as yet met with no check.
It had never come into Malcolm’s thoughts that
there were live women capable of impurity. Mrs.
Catanach was the only woman he had ever looked upon
with dislike—and that dislike had generated
no more than the vaguest suspicion. Let a woman’s
faults be all that he had ever known in woman; he yet
could look on her with reverence—and the
very heart of reverence is love, whence it may be
