The Right Stuff | Page 5

examination,--if he won the Bursary, the money, together with the precious hoard which his father and mother had been accumulating for him for ten years, would just suffice to keep him at the University,--no one discussed the matter. It was in the hands of God, and prognostication could only be vain and unprofitable. His mother and sister, indeed, questioned him covertly when his father and brother were out of hearing; but that was chiefly about Edinburgh, and the shops, and the splendours of the Dalry Road. The Bursary was never mentioned.
On the day on which the result was to be announced their father took Robin and David away to a distant hillside to assist at the sheep-dipping. The news would come by letter, which might or might not get as far as Strathmyrtle Post Office, seven miles away, that very afternoon. In the morning it would be delivered by the postman.
But there are limits to human endurance, none the less definite because that endurance appears illimitable. When father and sons tramped back to the farm that evening, just in time for supper, it was discovered that Margaret was absent. John Fordyce, grim old martinet that he was, looked round the table inquiringly; but a glance at his wife's face caused him to go on with his meal.
At nine o'clock precisely the table was cleared. The herdman and two farm lasses came into the kitchen from their final tasks in the yard, and the great Bible was put down on the table for evening "worship."
John Fordyce, having looked up the "portion" which he proposed to read, then turned to the Metrical Psalms. These were sung night by night in unswerving rotation throughout the year, a custom which, while it offered the pleasing prospect of variety, occasionally left something to be desired on the score of appropriateness.
All being seated, the old man, after a final fleeting glance at his daughter's empty chair, gave out the Psalm.
"Let us worship God," he said, "by singing to His praise in the Hundred and Twenty-first Psalm. Psalm a Hundred and Twenty-one--
'I to the hills will lift mine eyes, From whence doth come----'"
The door opened, and Margaret entered. She was dusty and tired, for she had walked fourteen miles since milking-time; but in her hand she held a letter.
She glanced timidly at the clock, and was for slipping quietly into her seat; but her father said--
"You had best give it to him now. A man cannot worship God while his mind is distracted with other things."
Robin took the letter, and after a glance in the direction of his father and the waiting Bible, opened and read it amidst a tense silence. Finally he looked up.
"Well?" said the old man.
"They have given me the First Bursary, father," said Robin.
No one spoke, but Robin saw tears running down his mother's face. John Fordyce deliberately turned back several pages of the Bible.
"We will sing," he said in a clear voice, "in the Twenty-third Psalm--the whole of it!--
'The Lord's my Shepherd, I'll not want----'"
* * * * *
The Psalms of David, as rendered into English verse by Nahum Tate and others, are not remarkable for poetic merit; neither does the old Scottish fashion of singing the same, seated and without accompaniment, conduce to a concord of sweet sounds. But there are no tunes like old tunes, and there are no hearts like full hearts. If ever a song went straight up to heaven, the Twenty-third Psalm, borne up on the wings of "Martyrdom," did so that night.
CHAPTER TWO.
INTRODUCES A PILLAR OF STATE AND THE APPURTENANCES THEREOF.
The time had undoubtedly arrived when I must have a Private Secretary.
Kitty, for one, insisted on it. She said that I was ruining my health in the service of an ungrateful country, and added that she, personally, declined to be left a widow at twenty-eight-and-a-half to oblige anybody.
"It is exactly the wrong age," she said. "If it had happened four or five years ago, I could have done pretty well for myself. Now, I should be out of the running among the débutantes, and a little too young and flighty to suit a middle-aged bachelor."
I may add that my wife does not often talk in this unfeeling manner. But she suffers at times from a desire to live up to a sort of honorary reputation for sprightly humour, conferred upon her by undiscriminating admirers in the days before she became engaged to me. As a matter of fact, her solicitude on my behalf was largely due to an ambition to see a little paragraph in the newspapers, announcing that "Mr Adrian Inglethwaite, M.P., Director of the Sub-Tropical and Arctic Department at the Foreign Office, has appointed Mr Blankley Dash to be his Private Secretary."
Dolly and Dilly seconded the motion. They had not the effrontery to wrap