The Stickit Minister's Wooing/The Gate of the Upper Garden
THE GATE OF THE UPPER GARDEN
For the first six months that Gibby the Eel, otherwise the Reverend Gilbert Denholm, M.A., acted as "helper" to Dr. Joseph Girnigo in the parish of Rescobie, he was much pleased with himself. He laughed with his friend and classmate, Robertland, over the infatuation of the doctor's old maid daughter. The parish, reading the situation like a book, smiled broadly when the "helper" and Miss Jemima Girnigo were discerned on an opposite braeface, botanising together, or, with heads bent over some doubtful bloom, stood silhouetted against the sunlit green of some glade in Knockandrews wood.
During this period Gibby hugged himself upon his cleverness, but the time came when he began to have his doubts. What to him was a light-heart prank, an "Eel's trick," like his college jest of squirming secretly under class-room benches, was obviously no jest to this pale-eyed, sharp-featured maiden of one-and-forty.
Jemima Girnigo had never been truly young. Repressed and domineered over as a child, she had been suddenly promoted by her mother's death to the care of a household and the responsibility of training a bevy of younger brothers, all now out in the world and doing for themselves. Her life had grown more and more arid and self-contained. She had nourished her soul on secret penances, setting herself hard household tasks, and doing with only one small, untaught, slatternly maid from the village, in order that her father might be able to assist his sons into careers. She read dry theology to mortify a liking for novels, and shut up her soul from intercourse with her equals, conscious, perhaps, that visitors would infallibly discover and laugh at her father's meannesses and peculiarities.
Only her flowers kept her soul sweet and a human heart beating within that buckram-and-whalebone-fenced bosom.
Then, all suddenly came Gilbert Denholm with his merry laugh, his light-heart ways (which she openly reproved, but secretly loved), his fair curls clustering about his brow, and his way of throwing back his head as if to shake them into place. Nothing so young, so winsome, or so gay had ever set foot within that solemn dreich old manse. It was like a light-heart city beauty coming to change the life and disturb the melancholy of some stern woman-despising hermit. But Jemima Girnigo's case was infinitely worse, in that she was a woman and the disturber of her peace little better than a foolish boy.
But Gilbert Denholm, kindly lad though he was, saw no harm. He was only, he thought, impressing himself upon the parish. He saw himself daily becoming more popular. No farmer's party was considered to be anything which wanted his ready wit and contagious merriment. Already there was talk among the Session of securing him as permanent assistant and successor. There were fairways and clear sunlit vistas before Gilbert Denholm; and he liked his professional prospects all the better that he owed them to his own wit and knowledge of the world. He was a good preacher. He made what is called an excellent appearance in the pulpit. He did not "read." His fluency of utterance held sleepy ploughmen in a state of blinking attention for the better part of an hour. Even Dr. Girnigo commended, and Gibby who had no more abundant or direct "spiritual gifts" than are the portion of most kind-hearted, well-brought-up Scottish youths, was unconscious of his lack of any higher qualifications for the Christian ministry.
But Gibby was like hundreds, aye, thousands more, who break the bread and open unto men the Scriptures in all the churches. His office meant to him a career, not a call. His work was the expression of hearty human goodwill to all men—and so far helpful and godlike; but he had never tasted sorrow, never drunken of the cup of remorse as a daily beverage, never "dreed" the common weird of humanity. Sorely he needed a downsetting. He must endure hardness, be driven out of self to the knowledge that self is nowise sufficient for a sinful man.
Even Jemima Girnigo was a far better servant of God than the man who had spent seven years in preparation for that service. In the shut deeps of her heart there were locked up infinite treasures of self-sacrifice. Love was pitifully ready to look forth from those pale eyes at whose corners the crow's feet were already clutching. And so it came to pass that, knowing her folly (and yet, in a way, defying it), this old maid of forty-one loved the handsome youth of four-and-twenty, the only human love-compelling thing that had ever come into her sombre life.
Yet there were times when Jemima Girnigo's heart was bitter within her, even as there were seasons when the crowding years fell away and she seemed almost young and fair. Jemima had never been either very pretty or remarkably attractive, but now when the starved instincts of her lost youth awoke untimeously within her, she unconsciously smiled and tossed her head, to the full as coquettishly as a youthful beauty just becoming conscious of her own power.
It was all very pitiful. But Gibby passed on his heedless way and saw not, neither recked of his going.
*******
Yet a time came when his eyes were opened. A new paper-mill had come to Rescobie, migrating from somewhere in the East country, where the Messrs. Coxon had had a serious quarrel with their ground landlord. From being a quiet hamlet the village of Rescobie began rapidly to put on the airs of a growing town. Tall houses of three storeys, with many windows and outside stairs, usurped the place of little old-fashioned "but-and-bens." Red brick oblongs of mill frontage rose along the valley of the Rescobie Water, which, dammed and weired and carried along countless lades, changed the cheerful brown limpidity of its youthful stream for a frothy mud colour below the mills.
The new immigrants were mostly a sedate and sober folk, as indeed, nearly all paper-makers are. To the easy-going villagers their diligence seemed phenomenal. They were flocking into the mill gates by six in the morning. It was well-nigh six in the evening before the tide flowed back toward the village. Among the youths and men there was night-shift and day-shift, and a new and strange pallor began to pervade the street and show itself, carefully washed, in the gallery of Rescobie Kirk. The village girls, finding that they could make themselves early independent, took their places in the long "finishing saal," while elderly women, for whom there had been no outlook except the poorhouse, found easy work and a living wage in Coxon's rag-house.
The increase of the congregation in the second year of Gilbert Denholm's assistantship compelled the Session to bethink themselves of some more permanent and satisfactory arrangement. Finally, after many private meetings they resolved to beard the lion in his den and lay before Dr. Girnigo the proposal that Gilbert should be officially called and ordained as the old man's "colleague and successor."
It was the ruling elder, called, after the name of his farm, Upper Balhaldie, who belled the cat and made the fateful proposition. In so doing that shrewd and cautious man was considered to have excelled himself. But Dr. Girnigo was far from being appeased.
"Sirs," he said, "I have been sole minister of the parish of Rescobie for forty years, and sole minister of it I shall die!"
"Mr. Denholm will be to you as a son!" suggested Balhaldie.
"I have sons of my body," said the old minister, looking full at the quiet men before him, who sat on the edges of their several chairs fingering the brims of their hats; "did I make any of them a minister? Nay, sirs, and for this reason: because the parish of Rescobie has been so near my heart that I would not risk even the fruit of my body coming between me and it!"
"We have sounded Mr. Denholm," said Balhaldie, quietly ignoring the sentimental, "and you may rest assured that you will not be disturbed in your tenancy of the manse. Mr. Denholm has no thought at present of changing his condition, and is quite content with his lodging—and an eident carfu' woman is his landlady the doctor's weedow!"
"Aye, she is that!" concurred several of the Session, speaking for the first time. It was a relief to have something concrete to which they could assent.
Dr. Girnigo looked at his Session. They seemed to shrink before him. Nervousness quivered on their countenances. They tucked their heavily-booted feet beneath the chairs on which they sat, to be out of the way. The brims of their hats were rapidly wearing out. Surely such men could never oppose him.
But Dr. Girnigo knew better. Underneath that awkward exterior, in spite of those embarrassed manners, that air of anxious self-effacement, Dr. Girnigo was well aware that there abode inflexible determination, shrewd common sense and abounding humour—chiefly, however, of the ironic sort.
"Are ye all agreed on this?" he asked.
"I speak in name of the Session!" said Upper Balhaldie succinctly, looking around the circle. And as he looked each man nodded slightly, without, however, raising his eyes from the pattern on the worn study carpet.
The Doctor sighed a long sigh. He knew that at last his trial was come upon him, and nerved himself to meet it like a man.
"It is well," he said; "I shall offer no objection to the congregation calling Mr. Denholm, and I can only hope that he will serve you as faithfully as I have done! I wish you a very good day, gentlemen!"
And with these words the old minister went out, leaving the Session to find their way into the cold air as best they might.
The day after the interview between the Session and the Doctor, Gilbert Denholm called at the manse. He came bounding up the little avenue between the lilac and rhododendron bushes. Jemima Girnigo heard his foot long ere he had reached the porch. Nay, before he had set foot on the gravel she caught the click of the gate latch, which was loose and would only open one way. This Gibby always forgot and rattled it fiercely till he remembered the trick of it.
Then when she heard the rat-tat-tat of Gibby's ash-plant on the panels of the door, she caught her hand to her heart and stood still among her plants.
There was a bell, but Gibby was always in too great a hurry to ring it.
"Perhaps he has come to" She did not finish the sentence, but the blood, rising hotly to her poor withered cheeks, finished it for her.
"Oh, Miss Jemima!" cried Gibby, bursting in; "I came up to tell you first. I owe it all to you—every bit of it. They are going to call me to be colleague—and—and—we can botanise any amount. Isn't it glorious?"
He held her hand while he was speaking; and Jemima had been looking with hope into his frank, enkindled, boyish eyes. Her eyelids fell at his announcement.
"Yes," she faltered after a pause, "we can botanise!"
"And they wanted to know if I would like to have the manse—as if I would turn you out, who have been my best friend here ever since I came to Rescobie! Not very likely!"
Gilbert had an honest liking for Jemima Girnigo, a feeling, however, which was not in the least akin to love. Indeed, he would as soon have thought of marrying his grandmother or any other of the relationships in the table of prohibited degrees printed at the beginning of the Authorised Version, which he sometimes looked at furtively when Dr. Girnigo was developing his "fourteenthly."
"You are happy where you are?" said Jemima, smiling a little wistfully.
"Oh, yes," cried Gibby enthusiastically; "my landlady makes me perfectly comfortable. She thinks I am a lost soul, I am afraid, but in the meantime she comforts me with apples—first-rate they are in dumplings, too, I can tell you!"
While he spoke Jemima Girnigo was much absorbed over a plant in a remote corner, and more than one drop of an alien dew glistened upon its leaves ere she turned again to the window. Gibby's enthusiasm was a little damped by her seeming indifference.
"Are you not glad?" he asked anxiously; "I came to tell you first. I thought what good times we should have. We must go up Barstobrick Hill for the parsley fern before it gets too late."
"Oh, yes," said Jemima Girnigo, holding out her hand, "I am very glad. No one is as glad as I—I want you to believe that!"
"Of course I do!" cried Gibby; "you always were a good fellow, Jemima! We'll go up to Barstobrick to-morrow. Mind you are ready by nine. I have to be back for a meeting in the afternoon early. It is a hungry place. Put some 'prog' in the vasculum!"
And as from the parlour window she watched him down the gravel, he turned around and wrote "9 A.M." in large letters on the gravel with his ash-plant, tossed his hand up at her in a gay salute, and was gone.
*******
But Gilbert Denholm and Jemima Girnigo did not climb Barstobrick for parsley fern on the morrow, and the "9 a.m." stood long plain upon the gravel as a monument of the frail and futile intents of man.
For before the morrow's morn had dawned there had fallen upon Rescobie the dreaded scourge of all paper-making villages. Virulent small-pox had broken out. There were already four undoubted cases, all emanating from the rag-house of Coxon's mills.
About the streets and close-mouths stood awe-struck groups of girls, uncertain whether to go on with their work or return home. There was none of the usual horse-play among the lads of the day-shift as they went soberly mill-ward with their cans. Grave elders, machinemen and engineers, shook their heads and recalled the date at which (a fortnight before) a large consignment of Russian rags had been received and immediately put in hand.
It was whispered, on what authority did not appear, that the disease was of the malignant "black" variety, and that all smitten must surely die. Fear ran swift and chilly up each outside staircase and entered unbidden every "land" in Rescobie. It was the first time such a terror had been in the village, and those who had opposed the settlement of the mills, staid praisers of ancient quiet, lifted their hands with something of jubilation mixed with their fear. "Verily, the judgment of God has fallen," they said, "even as in a night it fell on Babylon—as in fire and brimstone it came upon the Cities of the Plain."
Dr. Girnigo retired to his study, feeling that if the Session had allowed him his own way, things would not have been as they were. He had a sermon to write. So he mended a quill pen, took out his sermon-paper (small quarto ruled in blue), and set to work to improve the occasion. He said to himself that since the parish had now a young and active minister, it was good for Gilbert Denholm to bear the yoke in his youth.
And, indeed, none was readier for the work than that same Gilbert. He was shaving when his landlady, the doctor's widow, cried in the information through the panels of his closed door.
"Thank God," murmured Gibby, "that I have none to mourn for me if I don't get through this!"
Then he thought of his father, but, as he well knew, that fine old Spartan was too staunch a fighter in the wars of grace to discourage his son from any duty, however dangerous. He thought next of—well, one or two girls he had known—and was glad now that it had gone no further.
He did not know yet what was involved in the outbreak or what might be demanded of him. Gilbert Denholm may have had few of the peculiar graces of spiritual religion, but he was a fine, manly, upstanding young fellow, and he resolved that he would do his duty as if he had been heading a rush of boarders or standing in the deadly imminent breach. More exactly, perhaps, he did not resolve at all. It never occurred to him that he could do anything else.
As soon as he had snatched a hasty breakfast and thrown on his coat, he hurried up to the house of Dr. Durie. A plain blunt man was John Durie—slim, pale, with keen dark eyes, and a pointed black beard slightly touched with gray. The doctor was not at home. He had not been in all night and the maid did not know where he was to be found.
To the right-about went Gilbert, asking all and sundry as he went where and when they had seen the doctor. Thomas Kyle, with his back against the angle of the Railway Inn, averred that he had seen him "an 'oor syne gangin' gye fast into Betty McGrath's—but they say Betty is deid or this!" he added, somewhat irrelevantly. Chairles Simson, tilting his bonnet over his brows in order to scratch his head in a new and attractive spot, deponed that about ten minutes before he had noticed "the tails o' the doctor's coat gaun roond the Mill-lands' corner like stoor on a windy day."
Gibby tried Betty McGrath's first. Yes, Dr. Durie had ordered everybody out except the sick woman, who was tossing on her truckle bed, calling on the Virgin and all the saints in a shrill Galway dialect, and her daughter Bridget, a heavy-featured girl of twenty, who stood disconsolately looking out at the window as if hope had wholly forsaken her heart.
Gibby inquired if the doctor had been there recently.
"Oh, yes," said Bridget; "as ye may see if ye'll be troubled lookin' in the corner. He tore down all thim curtains off the box-bed. It'll break the ould woman's heart, that it will, if ever the craitur gets over this."
At the door Gibby met Father Phil Kavannah, a tall young man with honest peasant's eyes and a humorous mouth.
"You and I, surr, will have to see this through between us," said Father Phil, grasping his hand.
"It is a bad business," responded Gilbert; "I fear it will run through the mills."
"Worse than ye think," said the priest very gravely, "ten times worse—three-fourths of the workers have no relatives here, and there will be no one to nurse them. They've talked lashin's about the new village hospital, and raised all Tipperary about where it is to stand and what it is to cost, but that's all that's done about it yet."
Gilbert whistled a bar of "Annie Laurie," which he kept for emergencies.
"Well," he said slowly, "it will be like serving a Sunday-school picnic with half a loaf and one jar of marmalade—but we'll just need to see how far we can make ourselves go round!"
"Right!" said Father Phil with a wave of his hand as he stood with his fingers on the latch of Betty McGrath's door.
Gilbert found the doctor in the great "saal" at the mills. He had his coat off and was scraping at bared arms for dear life. At each door stood a pair of stalwart sentinels, and several hundred mill workers were grouped about talking in low-voiced clusters. Only here and there one more diligent than the rest, or with quieter nerves, deftly passed sheets of white paper from hand to hand as if performing a conjuring trick.
The doctor spied Gilbert as he entered. They were excellent friends. "Man," he cried across the great room, looking down again instantly to his work, "run up to the surgery for another tube of vaccine like this. It is in B cabinet, shelf 6. And as you come back, wire for half-a-dozen more. You know where I get them!"
And Gilbert sped upon his first errand. After that he deserted his own lodgings, and he and Dr. Durie took hasty and informal meals when they could snatch a moment from work. Sundry cold edibles stood permanently on the doctor's oaken sideboard, and of these Gilbert and his host partook without sitting down. Then on a couch, or more often on a few rugs thrown on the floor, one or the other would snatch a hurried sleep.
There were twenty-six cases on Saturday—fifty-eight by the middle of the following week. Within the same period nine had terminated fatally, and there were others who could not possibly recover. Nurses came in from the great city hospitals, as they could be spared, but the demand far exceeded the supply, and Gilbert was indefatigable. Yet his laugh was cheery as ever, and even the delirious would start into some faint consciousness of pleasure at the sound of his voice.
But one day the young minister awoke with a racking head, a burning body, a dry throat, and the chill of ice in his bones.
"This is nothing—I will work it off," said Gibby; and, getting up, he dressed with haste and went out without touching food. The thought of eating was abhorrent to him. Nevertheless, he did his work all the forenoon, and went here and there with medicine and necessaries. He relieved a nurse who had been two nights on duty, while she slept for six hours. Then after that he set off home to catch Dr. Durie before he could be out again. For he had heard his host come in and throw himself down on the couch while he was dressing.
As he passed the front of Rescobie Manse, he looked up to wave a hand to Jemima, as he never forgot to do. Her father was still "indisposed," and Miss Girnigo was understood to be taking care of him. Yes, there she was among her flowers, and Gibby, hardly knowing what he did—being light-headed and racked with pain—openly kissed his hand to her within sight of half-a-score of Rescobie windows.
Then, his feet somehow tangling themselves and his knees failing him, he fell all his length in the hot dust of the highway.
*******
When Gilbert Denholm came to himself he found a white-capped nurse sitting by the window of a room he had never before seen. There was a smell of disinfectants all about, which somehow seemed to have followed him through all the boundless interstellar spaces across which he had been wandering.
"Where am I?" said Gibby, as the nurse came toward the bed. "I have not seen Betty McGrath this morning, and I promised Father Phil that I would."
"You must not ask questions," said the nurse quietly. "Dr. Durie will soon be here."
And after that with a curious readiness Gibby slipped back into a drowsy dream of gathering flowers with Jemima Girnigo; but somehow it was another Jemima—so young she seemed, so fair. Crisp curls glanced beneath her hat brim. Young blood mantled in changeful blushes on her cheeks. Her pale eyes, which had always been a little watery, were now blue and bright as a mountain tarn on a day without clouds. He had never seen so fair and joyous a thing.
"Jemima," he said, or seemed to himself to say, "what is the matter with you? You are different somehow."
"It is all because you love me, Gilbert," she answered, and smiled up at him. "Ever since you told me that, I have grown younger every hour; and, do you know, I have found the Grass of Parnassus at last. It grows by the Gate into the Upper Garden?"
*******
"Hello, Denholm, clothed and in your right mind, eh? That's right!"
It was the cheerful voice of his friend, Dr. Durie, as he stood by Gibby's bedside.
"What has been the matter with me, Durie?" said Gilbert, though in his heart he knew.
"You have had bad small-pox, my boy; and have had a hot chance to find out whether you have been speaking the truth in your sermons."
Gibby could hardly bring his lips to frame the next question. He was far from vain, but to a young man the thought was a terrible one.
"Shall I be much disfigured?"
"Oh, a dimple or two—nothing to mar you on your marriage day. You have been well looked after."
"You have saved my life, doctor."
And Gibby strove to reach a feeble hand outward, which, however, the doctor did not seem to see.
"Not I—you owe that to some one else."
"The nurse who went out just now?" queried Gibby.
"No, she has just been here a few days, after all danger had passed."
Gilbert strove to rise on his elbow and the red flushed his poor face.
The doctor restrained him with a strong and gentle hand.
"Lie back," he said, "or I will go away and tell you nothing."
He sat down by the bedside, and with a soft sponge touched the convalescent's brow. As he did so he spoke in a low and meditative tone as though he had been talking to himself.
"There was once a foolish young man who thought that he could take twenty shillings out of a purse into which he had only put half a sovereign. He fell down one day on the street. A woman carried him in and nursed him through a fortnight's delirium. A woman caught him as he ran, with only a blanket about him, to drown himself in the Black Pool of Rescobie Water. Night and day she watched him, sleepless, without weariness, without murmuring"
"And this woman—who saved my life—what was—her name?"
Gibby's voice was very hoarse.
"Jemima Girnigo!" said the doctor, sinking his voice also to a whisper.
"Where is she—I want to see her—I want to thank her?" cried Gibby. He was actually upon his elbow now.
Dr. Durie forced him gently back upon the pillows.
"Yes, yes," he said soothingly, "so you shall—if all tales be true; but for that you must wait."
"Why—why?" cried impatient Gibby. "Why cannot I see her now? She has done more for me than ever I deserved"
"That is the way of women," said the doctor, "but you cannot thank her now. She is dead."
"Dead—dead!" gasped Gilbert, stricken to the heart; "then she gave her life for me!"
"Something like it," said the doctor, a trifle grimly. For though he was a wise man, the ways of women were dark to him. He thought that Gilbert, though a fine lad, was not worth all this.
"Dead," muttered Gibby, "and I cannot even tell her—make it up to her"
"She left you a message," said the doctor very quietly.
"What was it?" cried Gibby, eagerly.
"Oh, nothing much," said Dr. Durie; "there was no hope from the first, and she knew it. Her mind was clear all the three days, almost to the last. She may have wandered a little then, for she told me to tell you"
"What—what—oh, what? Tell me quickly. I cannot wait."
"That the flowers were blooming in the Upper Garden, and that she would meet you at the Gate!"
*******
The Reverend Gilbert Denholm never married. He bears a scar or two on his open face—a face well beloved among his people. There is a grave in Rescobie kirkyard that he tends with his own hands. None else must touch it.
It is the resting-place of a woman whom love made young and beautiful, and about whose feet the flowers of Paradise are blooming, as, alone but not impatient, she waits his coming by the Gate.