Salted With Fire | Page 4

still just as the sun
touched the meridian; the hour of repose and food was come, and he
knew it; and at the same moment the girl, passing one of the
green-painted doors of the farm house, stopped at the other, the kitchen
one. It stood open, and in answer to her modest knock, a ruddy maid
appeared, with a question in her eyes, and a smile on her lips at sight of
the shoemaker's Maggie, whom she knew well. Maggie asked if She
might see the mistress.
"Here's soutar's Maggie wanting ye, mem!" said the maid and Mistress
Blatherwick who was close at hand, came; to which Maggie humbly
but confidently making her request had it as kindly granted, and
followed her to the barn to fill her pock with the light plumy covering
of the husk of the oats, the mistress of Stonecross helping her the while
and talking to her as she did so--for the soutar and his daughter were
favourites with her and her husband, and they had not seen either of
them for some while.
"Ye used to ken oor Maister Jeames I' the auld land-syne, Maggie!" for
the two has played together as children in the same school although
growth and difference in station had gradually put and end to their
intimacy so that it became the mother to refer to him with
circumspection, seeing that, in her eyes at least, Maister Jeames was
now far on the way to becoming a great man, being a divinity student;
for in the Scotch church, although it sets small store on apostolitic
descent, every Minister, until he has shown himself eccentic or
incapable of interesting a congregation, is regarded with quite as much
respect as in England is accorded to the claimant of a
phantom-priesthood; and therefore, prospectively, Jeames was to his
mother a man of no little note. Maggie remembered how, when a boy,
he had liked to talk with her father; and how her father would listen to
him with a curious look on his rugged face, while the boy set forth the

commonplaces of a lifeless theology with an occasional freshness of
logical presentation that at least interested himself. But she
remembered also that she had never heard the soutar on his side make
any attempt to lay open to the boy his stores of what one or two in the
place, one or two only, counted wisdom and knowledge.
"He's a gey clever laddie," he had said once to Maggie, "and gien he
gets his een open i' the coorse o' the life he's hardly yet ta'en hand o',
he'll doobtless see something; but he disna ken yet that there's onything
rael to be seen, ootside or inside o' him!" When he heard that he was
going to study divinity, he shook his head, and was silent.
"I'm jist hame frae peyin him a short veesit," Mrs. Blatherwick went on.
"I cam hame but twa nichts ago. He's lodged wi' a dacent widow in
Arthur Street, in a flat up a lang stane stair that gangs roun and roun till
ye come there, and syne gangs past the door and up again. She taks in
han' to luik efter his claes, and sees to the washin o' them, and does her
best to hand him tidy; but Jeamie was aye that partic'lar aboot his
appearance! And that's a guid thing, special in a minister, wha has to
set an example! I was sair pleased wi' the auld body."
There was one in the Edinburgh lodging, however, of whom Mrs.
Blatherwick had but a glimpse, and of whom, therefore, she had made
no mention to her husband any more than now to Maggie MacLear;
indeed, she had taken so little notice of her that she could hardly be
said to have seen her at all --a girl of about sixteen, who did far more
for the comfort of her aunt's two lodgers than she who reaped all the
advantage. If Mrs. Blatherwick had let her eyes rest upon her but for a
moment, she would probably have looked again; and might have
discovered that she was both a good-looking and graceful little creature,
with blue eyes, and hair as nearly black as that kind of hair, both fine
and plentiful, ever is. She might then have discovered as well a certain
look of earnestness and service that would at first have attracted her for
its own sake, and then repelled her for James's; for she would assuredly
have read in it what she would have counted dangerous for him; but
seeing her poorly dressed, and looking untidy, which at the moment she
could not help, the mother took her for an ordinary maid-of-all-work,

and never for a moment doubted that her son must see her