The Stickit Minister's Wooing/My Father's Love Story
MY FATHER'S LOVE STORY
When I am putting together family stories, new and old, I may as well tell my father's. Sometimes we of a younger day thought him stiff, silent, out of sympathy with our interests and amusements; but the saving salt of humour that was in him made this only seeming. In reality tolerance and kindliest understanding beaconed from under the covert of his bushy grey eyebrows.
There was the savour of an infinite discernment in the slow "Aye?" with which he was wont to receive any doubtful statement. My mother said ever ten words for his one, and it was his wont to listen to her gravely and unsmilingly, as if giving the subject the profoundest attention, while all the time his thoughts were far away—a fact well understood and much resented by his wife.
"What am I talkin' aboot, Saunders?" she would say, pausing in the midst of a commination upon some new and garish fashion in dress, or the late hours kept by certain young men not a thousand miles away.
"Oh, breaking the second commandment, as usual," he would reply; "discoursing of the heavens above, the earth beneath, and the waters under the earth!"
"Havers," she would reply, her face, however, glancing at him bright as a new-milled shilling, "your thochts were awa' on the mountains o' vainity! Naething richt waukens ye up but a minister to argue wi'!"
And, indeed, that was a true word. For though an unusually silent man, my father, Alexander (or Saunders) McQuhirr, liked nothing better than a minister to argue with—if one of the Kirk of Scotland, well and good. There was the Revolution Settlement, the Headship of Christ, the Power of the Civil Magistrate. My father enjoyed himself thoroughly, and if the minister chanced to be worthy, so did he. But it took a Cameronian or an Original Secession divine really to rouse within him, what my mother called "his bowels of wrath."
"There is a distinct Brownist strain in your opinions, Alexander," Mr. Osbourne would say—his own minister from the Kirk on the Hill. "Your father's name was not Abel for nothing!"[1]
Mr. Osbourne generally reminded him of this when he had got the worse of some argument on the true inwardness of the Marrow Controversy. He did not like to be beaten, and my father was a dour arguer. Once it is recorded that the minister brought all the way up to Drumquhat on a Communion Friday—the "off-day" as it were of the Scottish Holy Week—the great Dr. Marcus Lawton himself from Edinburgh. It happened to be a wettish day in the lull between hay and harvest. My father was doing something in the outhouse where he kept his joinering tools, and the two ministers joined him there early in the forenoon. They were well into "Freewill" before my father was at the end of the board he had been planing. "Predestination" was the overword of their conversation at the noonday meal, which all three seemed to partake of as dispassionately as if they had been stoking a fire—this to the great indignation of my mother, who having been warned of the proposed honour, had given herself even more completely to hospitality than was habitual with her.
Mr. Osbourne, indeed, made a pretext of talking to her about the price of butter, and how her hens were laying. But she saw through him even as he spoke.
For, as she said afterwards, describing the scene, "I saw his lug cockit for what the ither twa were saying, and if it hadna been for the restrainin' grace o' God, I declare I wad hae telled him that butter was a guinea a pound in Dumfries market, and that my hens were laying a score o' eggs apiece every day—he never wad hae kenned that I was tellin' him a lee!"
All day the great controversy went on. Even now I can remember the echoes of it coming to me through the wet green leaves of the mallows my mother had planted along the south-looking wall. To this day I can hear the drip of the water from the slates mingling with such phrases as "the divine sovereignty," the "Covenant of Works," "the Adamic dispensation." I see the purple of the flowers and smell the sweet smell of the pine shavings. They seemed to my childish mind like three Titans hurling the longest words in the dictionary at each other. I know nothing wherewith to express the effect upon my mind of this day-long conflict save that great line in the fifth book of Paradise Lost:
"Thrones, dominations, princedoms, vertues, powers!"
It was years after when first I read it, but instantly I thought of that wet summer day in Lammastide, when my father wrestled with his peers concerning the deep things of eternity, and was not overcome.
My mother has often told me that he never slept all that night—how waking in the dawn and finding his place vacant, she had hastily thrown on a gown and gone out to look for him. He was walking up and down in the little orchard behind the barn, his hands clasped behind his back. And all he said in answer to her reproaches was: "It's vexin', Mary, to think that I only minded that text in Ephesians about being 'sealed unto the day of redemption' after he was ower the hill. It wad hae ta'en the feet clean frae him if I had gotten hand o' it in time."
"What can ye do wi' a man like that?" she would conclude, summing up her husband's character, mostly in his hearing.
"But remember, Mary, the pit from which I was digged!" he would reply, reaching down the worn old leather-bound copy of Boston's Fourfold State out of the wall-press and settling himself to re-peruse a favourite chapter.
*******
My father's father, Yabel McQuhirr, was a fierce hard man, and seldom showed his heart, ruling his house with a rod of iron, setting each in his place, wife, child, man-servant and maid-servant, ox and ass—aye, and the stranger within his gates.
My father does not talk of these things, but my mother has often told me of that strange household up among the granite hills, to which, as a maid of nineteen, she went to serve. In those days in all the Galloway farm-towns, master and servant sat down together to meals. The head of the house was lawgiver and potentate, priest and parent to all beneath his roof. And if Yabel McQuhirr of Ardmannoch did not exercise the right of pit and gallows, it was about all the authority he did not claim over his own.
Yabel had a family of strong sons, silent, dour—the doctrine of unquestioning obedience driven into them by their father's right arm and oaken staff. But their love was for their mother, who drifted through the house with a foot light as a falling leaf, and a voice attuned to the murmuring of a hill stream. There was no daughter in the household, and Mary McArthur had come partly to supply the want. She had brought a sore little heart with her, all because of a certain ship that had gone over the sea, and the glint of a sailor lad's merry blue eyes she would see no more.
She had therefore no mind for love-making, and Thomas and Abel, the two eldest sons, got very short answers for their pains when they "tried their hand" on their mother's new house-lass. Tom, the eldest, took it well enough, and went elsewhere; but Abel was a bully by nature, and would not let the girl alone. Once he kissed her by force as, hand-tied, she carried in the peats from the stack. Whereupon Alexander, the silent third brother, found out the reason of Mary's red eyes, and interviewed his brother behind the barn to such purpose that his face bore the marks of fraternal knuckles for a week. Also Alexander had his lip split.
"Ye hae been fechtin' again, ye blakes," thundered their father. "Mind ye, if this happens again I will break every bane in your bodies. I will have you know that I am a man of peace! How did you get that black eye, Yabel?"
"I trippit ower the shaft o' a cairt!" said Abel, lying glibly in fear of consequences.
"And you, Alexander—where gat ye that lip?"
"I ran against something!" said the defender of innocence, succinctly. And stuck to it stubbornly, refusing all amplification.
"Well," said their father, grimly, "take considerably more heed to your going, both of ye, or you may run against something more serious still!"
Then he whistled on his dogs, and went up the dyke-side towards the hill.
*******
After this, Alexander always carried in the peats for Mary McArthur, and, in spite of the taunts and gibes of his brothers, did such part of her work as lay outside the house. On winter nights and mornings he lighted the stable lantern for her before she went to milk the kye, and then when she was come to the byre he took his mother's stool and pail and milked beside her cow for cow.
All these things he did without speaking a word of love, or, indeed, saying a word of anything beyond the commonplaces of a country life. He never told her whether or no he had heard about the sailor lad who had gone over seas.
Indeed, he never referred to the subject throughout a long lifetime. All the same, I think he must have suspected, and with natural gentleness and courtesy set himself to ease the girl's heart-sore burden.
Sometimes Mary would raise her eyes and catch him looking at her—that was all. And more often she was conscious of his grave staid regard when she did not look up. At first it fretted her a little. For, of course, she could never love again—never believe any man's word. Life was ended for her—ended at nineteen! So at least Mary McArthur told herself.
But all the same, there—a pillar for support, a buckler for defence, was Alexander McQuhirr, strong, undemonstrative, dependable. One day she had cut her finger, and he was rolling it up for her daintily as a woman. They were alone in the shearing field together. Alexander had the lint and the thread in his pocket. So, indeed, he anticipated her wants silently all his life.
It had hurt a good deal, and before he had finished the tears stood brimming in her eyes.
"I think you must get tired of me. I bring all my cut fingers to you, Alec!" she said, looking up at him.
He gave a kind of gasp, as if he were going to say something, as a single drop of salt water pearled itself and ran down Mary's cheek; but instead he only folded the lint more carefully in at the top, and went on rolling the thread round it.
"She is learnin' to love me!" he thought, with some pleasure, but he was too bashful and diffident to take advantage of her feeling. He contented himself with making her life easier and sweeter in that hard upland cantonment of more than military discipline, from whose rocky soil Yabel and his sons dragged the bare necessities of life, as it were, at the point of the bayonet.
All the time he was thinking hard behind his broad forehead, this quiet Alexander McQuhirr. He was the third son. His father was a poor man. He had nothing to look for from him. In time Tom would succeed to the farm. It was clear, then, that if he was ever to be anything, he must strike out early for himself. And, as many a time before and since, it was the tears in the eyes of a girl that brought matters to the breaking point.
Yes, just the wet eyes of a girl—that is, of Mary McArthur, as she looked up at him suddenly in the harvest-field among the serried lines of stocks, and said: "I bring all my cut fingers to you, Alec!"
Something, he knew not exactly what, appealed to him so strongly in that word and look, that resolve came upon him sudden as lightning, and binding as an oath—the man's instinct to be all and to do all for the woman he loves.
He was unusually silent during the rest of the day, so that Mary McArthur, walking beside him down the loaning to bring home the cows, said: "You are no vexed wi' me for onything, Alec?"
But it was the man's soul of Saunders McQuhirr which had come to him as a birthright—born out of a glance. He was a boy no longer. And that night, as his father Yabel stood looking over his scanty acres with a kind of grim satisfaction in the golden array of corn stooks, his son Alexander went quietly up to him.
"Father," he said, "next week I shall be one-and-twenty!" In times of stress they spoke the English of the schools and of the Bible.
His father turned a deep-set irascible eye upon him. The thick over-brooding brows lowered convulsively above him. A kind of illuminating flash like faint sheet lightning passed over the stern face. A week ago, nay, even twenty-four hours ago, Saunders McQuhirr would have trembled to have his father look at him thus. But he had bound up a girl's finger since then, and seen her eyes wet.
"Well, what of that?" The words came fiercely from Yabel, with a rising anger in them, a kind of trumpet blare heralding the storm.
"I am thinking of taking a herd's place at the term!" said Alexander, quietly.
Yabel lifted his great body off the dyke-top, on which he had been leaning with his elbows. He towered a good four inches above his son, though my father was always considered a tall man.
"You—you are going to take a herd's place—at the term—you?" he said, slowly and incredulously.
"Yes," answered his son; "you will not need me. There is no outgate for me here, and I have my way to make in the world."
"And what need have you of an outgate, sir?" cried his father. "Have I housed you and schooled you and reared you that, when at last you are of some use, you should leave your father and mother at a word, like a day-labourer on Saturday night?"
"A day-labourer on Saturday night gets his wages—I have not asked for any!"
At this answer Yabel stood tempestuously wrathful for a moment, his hand and arm uplifted and twitching to strike. Then all suddenly his mood changed. It became scornfully ironic.
"I see," he said, dropping his arm, "there's a lass behind this—that is the meaning of all the peat-carrying and byre-milking and handfasting in corners. Well, sirrah, I give you this one night. In the morning you shall pack. From this instant I forbid you to touch aught belonging to me, corn or fodder, horse or bestial. Ye shall tramp, lad, you and your madam with you. The day is not yet, thank the Lord, when Abel McQuhirr is not master in his own house!"
But the son that had been a boy was now a man. He stood before his father, giving him back glance for glance. And an observer would have seen a great similarity between the two, the same attitude to a line, the massive head thrown back, the foot advanced, the deep-set eye, the compressed mouth.
"Very well, father!" said Alexander McQuhirr, and he went away, carrying his bonnet in his hand.
*******
And on the morning that followed the sleepless night of thinking and planning, Alexander McQuhirr went forth to face the world, his plaid about his shoulders, his staff in his hand, his mother's blessing upon his head—and, what was most of all to a young man, his sweetheart's kiss upon his lips:
For in this part of his mandate Yabel had reckoned without his host. His wife, long trained to keep silence for the sake of peace, had turned and openly defied him—nay, had won the victory. The "Man of Wrath" knew exactly how far it was wise to push the doctrine of unquestioning wifely obedience. Mary McArthur was to bide still where she was, till—well, till another home was ready for her. And though her eyes were red, and there was no one to tie up her cut fingers any more, there was a kind of pride upon her face too. And the image of the young sailor-man over seas utterly faded away.
At ten by the clock, Yabel McQuhirr, down in his harvest-field, saw his son set out. He gave no farewell. He waved no hand. He said no word. All the same, he smiled grimly to himself behind the obedient backs of Tom and Abel the younger.
"There's the best stuff o' the lot in that fule laddie," he growled; "even so for a lass's sake left I my father's house!"
And of all his children, this dour, hard-mouthed, gnarl-fisted man loved best the boy who for the sake of a lass had outcasted himself without fear and without hesitation.
*******
It was to a herd's house, shining white on a hillside, a burnie trilling below, the red heather surging about the garden dyke on all sides, that Alexander McQuhirr took his wife Mary, a year later. And there in the fulness of time my brother Willie was born—the child of the cot-house and of the kailyaird. In time followed other, if not better things—first a small holding, then a farm—then I, Alexander the second. And still, thank God, we, the children of Mary McArthur, run with our cut fingers to that steadfast, loving, silent man, Saunders McQuhirr, son of Yabel, the Man of Violence and Wrath.
- ↑ "Abel," "Jacob," "Abraham" were not common names in Scotland, and such as occurred in families during last century might generally be traced to the time of Cromwellian occupation. David and Samuel were the only really common Old Testament names at that time.