The House With the Green Shutters (18 page)

"Maybe ye werena referring to me," said Gourlay slowly. "But if
I
had
been in your end o' the brake
ye
would have been in hell or this!"

He had said enough. There was silence in the brake till it reached
Skeighan. But the evil was done. Enough had been said to influence
Gourlay to the most disastrous resolution of his life.

"Get yourself ready for the College in October," he ordered his son that
evening.

"The College!" cried John aghast.

"Yes! Is there ainything in that to gape at?" snapped his father, in
sudden irritation at the boy's amaze.

"But I don't want to gang!" John whimpered as before.

"Want! what does it matter what
you
want? You should be damned glad of
the chance! I mean to make ye a minister; they have plenty of money and
little to do—a grand, easy life o't. MacCandlish tells me you're a
stupid ass, but have some little gift of words. You have every
qualification!"

"It's against
my
will," John bawled angrily.

"
Your
will!" sneered his father.

To John the command was not only tyrannical, but treacherous. There had
been nothing to warn him of a coming change, for Gourlay was too
contemptuous of his wife and children to inform them how his business
stood. John had been brought up to go into the business, and now, at the
last moment, he was undeceived, and ordered off to a new life, from
which every instinct of his being shrank afraid. He was cursed with an
imagination in excess of his brains, and in the haze of the future he
saw two pictures with uncanny vividness—himself in bleak lodgings
raising his head from Virgil, to wonder what they were doing at home
to-night; and, contrasted with that loneliness, the others, his cronies,
laughing along the country roads beneath the glimmer of the stars. They
would be having the fine ploys while he was mewed up in Edinburgh. Must
he leave loved Barbie and the House with the Green Shutters? must he
still drudge at books which he loathed? must he venture on a new life
where everything terrified his mind?

"It's a shame!" he cried. "And I refuse to go. I don't want to leave
Barbie! I'm feared of Edinburgh," and there he stopped in conscious
impotence of speech. How could he explain his forebodings to a rock of a
man like his father?

"No more o't!" roared Gourlay, flinging out his hand—"not another word!
You go to College in October!"

"Ay, man, Johnny," said his mother, "think o' the future that's before
ye!"

"Ay," howled the youth in silly anger, "it's like to be a braw future!"

"It's the best future you can have!" growled his father.

For while rivalry, born of hate, was the propelling influence in
Gourlay's mind, other reasons whispered that the course suggested by
hate was a good one on its merits. His judgment, such as it was,
supported the impulse of his blood. It told him that the old business
would be a poor heritage for his son, and that it would be well to look
for another opening. The boy gave no sign of aggressive smartness to
warrant a belief that he would ever pull the thing together. Better make
him a minister. Surely there was enough money left about the house for
tha-at! It was the best that could befall him.

Mrs. Gourlay, for her part, though sorry to lose her son, was so pleased
at the thought of sending him to college, and making him a minister,
that she ran on in foolish maternal gabble to the wife of Drucken
Webster. Mrs. Webster informed the gossips, and they discussed the
matter at the Cross.

"Dod," said Sandy Toddle, "Gourlay's better off than I supposed!"

"Huts!" said Brodie, "it's just a wheen bluff to blind folk!"

"It would fit him better," said the Doctor, "if he spent some money on
his daughter. She ought to pass the winter in a warmer locality than
Barbie. The lassie has a poor chest! I told Gourlay, but he only gave a
grunt. And 'oh,' said Mrs. Gourlay, 'it would be a daft-like thing to
send
her
away, when John maun be weel provided for the College.' D'ye
know, I'm beginning to think there's something seriously wrong with yon
woman's health! She seemed anxious to consult me on her own account, but
when I offered to sound her she wouldn't hear of it. 'Na,' she cried,
'I'll keep it to mysell!' and put her arm across her breast as if to
keep me off. I do think she's hiding some complaint! Only a woman whose
mind was weak with disease could have been so callous as yon about her
lassie."

"Oh, her mind's weak enough," said Sandy Toddle. "It was always that!
But it's only because Gourlay has tyraneezed her verra soul. I'm
surprised, however, that
he
should be careless of the girl. He was aye
said to be browdened upon
her
."

"Men-folk are often like that about lassie-weans," said Johnny Coe.
"They like well enough to pet them when they're wee, but when once
they're big they never look the road they're on! They're a' very fine
when they're pets, but they're no sae fine when they're pretty misses.
And, to tell the truth, Janet Gourlay's ainything but pretty!"

Old Bleach-the-boys, the bitter dominie (who rarely left the studies in
political economy which he found a solace for his thwarted powers),
happened to be at the Cross that evening. A brooding and taciturn man,
he said nothing till others had their say. Then he shook his head.

"They're making a great mistake," he said gravely, "they're making a
great mistake! Yon boy's the last youngster on earth who should go to
College."

"Ay, man, dominie, he's an infernal ass, is he noat?" they cried, and
pressed for his judgment.

At last, partly in real pedantry, partly with humorous intent to puzzle
them, he delivered his astounding mind.

"The fault of young Gourlay," quoth he, "is a sensory perceptiveness in
gross excess of his intellectuality."

They blinked and tried to understand.

"Ay, man, dominie!" said Sandy Toddle. "That means he's an infernal
cuddy, dominie! Does it na, dominie?"

But Bleach-the-boys had said enough. "Ay," he said dryly, "there's a
wheen gey cuddies in Barbie!" and he went back to his stuffy little room
to study "The Wealth of Nations."

The scion of the house of Gourlay was a most untravelled sprig when his
father packed him off to the University. Of the world beyond Skeighan he
had no idea. Repression of his children's wishes to see something of the
world was a feature of Gourlay's tyranny, less for the sake of the money
which a trip might cost (though that counted for something in his
refusal) than for the sake of asserting his authority. "Wants to gang to
Fechars, indeed! Let him bide at home," he would growl; and at home the
youngster had to bide. This had been the more irksome to John since most
of his companions in the town were beginning to peer out, with their
mammies and daddies to encourage them. To give their cubs a "cast o' the
world" was a rule with the potentates of Barbie; once or twice a year
young Hopeful was allowed to accompany his sire to Fechars or Poltandie,
or—oh, rare joy!—to the city on the Clyde. To go farther, and get the
length of Edinburgh, was dangerous, because you came back with a halo of
glory round your head which banded your fellows together in a common
attack on your pretensions. It was his lack of pretension to travel,
however, that banded them against young Gourlay. "Gunk" and "chaw" are
the Scots for a bitter and envious disappointment which shows itself in
face and eyes. Young Gourlay could never conceal that envious look when
he heard of a glory which he did not share; and the youngsters noted his
weakness with the unerring precision of the urchin to mark simple
difference of character. Now the boy presses fiendishly on an intimate
discovery in the nature of his friends, both because it gives him a new
and delightful feeling of power over them, and also because he has not
learned charity from a sense of his deficiencies, the brave ruffian
having none. He is always coming back to probe the raw place, and Barbie
boys were always coming back to "do a gunk" and "play a chaw" on young
Gourlay by boasting their knowledge of the world, winking at each other
the while to observe his grinning anger. They were large on the wonders
they had seen and the places they had been to, while he grew small (and
they saw it) in envy of their superiority. Even Swipey Broon had a crow
at him. For Swipey had journeyed in the company of his father to far-off
Fechars, yea even to the groset-fair, and came back with an epic tale of
his adventures. He had been in fifteen taverns, and one hotel (a
temperance hotel, where old Brown bashed the proprietor for refusing to
supply him gin); one Pepper's Ghost; one Wild Beasts' Show; one
Exhibition of the Fattest Woman on the Earth; also in the precincts of
one jail, where Mr. Patrick Brown was cruelly incarcerate for wiping the
floor with the cold refuser of the gin. "Criffens! Fechars!" said Swipey
for a twelvemonth after, stunned by the mere recollection of that home
of the glories of the earth. And then he would begin to expatiate for
the benefit of young Gourlay—for Swipey, though his name was the base
Teutonic Brown, had a Celtic contempt for brute facts that cripple the
imperial mind. So well did he expatiate that young Gourlay would slink
home to his mother and say, "Yah, even Swipey Broon has been to Fechars,
though my faither 'ull no allow
me
!" "Never mind, dear," she would
soothe him; "when once you're in the business, you'll gang a'where. And
nut wan o' them has sic a business to gang intill!"

But though he longed to go here and there for a day, that he might be
able to boast of it at home, young Gourlay felt that leaving Barbie for
good would be a cutting of his heart-strings. Each feature of it, town
and landward, was a crony of old years. In a land like Barbie, of quick
hill and dale, of tumbled wood and fell, each facet of nature has an
individuality so separate and so strong that if you live with it a
little it becomes your friend, and a memory so dear that you kiss the
thought of it in absence. The fields are not similar as pancakes; they
have their difference; each leaps to the eye with a remembered and
peculiar charm. That is why the heart of the Scot dies in flat southern
lands; he lives in a vacancy; at dawn there is no Ben Agray to nod
recognition through the mists. And that is why, when he gets north of
Carlisle, he shouts with glee as each remembered object sweeps on the
sight: yonder's the Nith with a fisherman hip-deep jigging at his rod,
and yonder's Corsoncon with the mist on his brow. It is less the
totality of the place than the individual feature that pulls at the
heart, and it was the individual feature that pulled at young Gourlay.
With intellect little or none, he had a vast, sensational experience,
and each aspect of Barbie was working in his blood and brain. Was there
ever a Cross like Barbie Cross? Was there ever a burn like the Lintie?
It was blithe and heartsome to go birling to Skeighan in the train; it
was grand to jouk round Barbie on the nichts at e'en! Even people whom
he did not know he could locate with warm sure feelings of superiority.
If a poor workman slouched past him on the road, he set him down in his
heart as one of that rotten crowd from the Weaver's Vennel or the
Tinker's Wynd. Barbie was in subjection to the mind of the son of the
important man. To dash about Barbie in a gig, with a big dog walloping
behind, his coat-collar high about his ears, and the reek of a
meerschaum pipe floating white and blue many yards behind him, jovial
and sordid nonsense about home—that had been his ideal. His father, he
thought angrily, had encouraged the ideal, and now he forbade it, like
the brute he was. From the earth in which he was rooted so deeply his
father tore him, to fling him on a world he had forbidden him to know.
His heart presaged disaster.

Old Gourlay would have scorned the sentimentality of seeing him off from
the station, and Mrs. Gourlay was too feckless to propose it for
herself. Janet had offered to convoy him, but when the afternoon came
she was down with a racking cold. He was alone as he strolled on the
platform—a youth well-groomed and well-supplied, but for once in his
life not a swaggerer, though the chance to swagger was unique. He was
pointed out as "Young Gourlay off to the College." But he had no
pleasure in the rôle, for his heart was in his boots.

He took the slow train to Skeighan, where he boarded the express. Few
sensational experiences were unknown to his too-impressionable mind, and
he knew the animation of railway travelling. Coming back from Skeighan
in an empty compartment on nights of the past, he had sometimes shouted
and stamped and banged the cushions till the dust flew, in mere joy of
his rush through the air; the constant rattle, the quick-repeated noise,
getting at his nerves, as they get at the nerves of savages and
Englishmen on Bank Holidays. But any animation of the kind which he felt
to-day was soon expelled by the slow uneasiness welling through his
blood. He had no eager delight in the unknown country rushing past; it
inspired him with fear. He thought with a feeble smile of what Mysie
Monk said when they took her at the age of sixty (for the first time in
her life) to the top of Milmannoch Hill. "Eh," said Mysie, looking round
her in amaze—"eh, sirs, it's a lairge place the world when you see it
all!" Gourlay smiled because he had the same thought, but feebly,
because he was cowering at the bigness of the world. Folded nooks in
the hills swept past, enclosing their lonely farms; then the open
straths, where autumnal waters gave a pale gleam to the sky. Sodden
moors stretched away in vast patient loneliness. Then a gray smear of
rain blotted the world, penning him in with his dejection. He seemed to
be rushing through unseen space, with no companion but his own
foreboding. "Where are you going to?" asked his mind, and the wheels of
the train repeated the question all the way to Edinburgh, jerking it out
in two short lines and a long one: "Where are you going to? Where are
you going to? Ha, ha, Mr. Gourlay, where are you going to?"