Chapter 42

Sister or brother of her own had she none--and often both her parents--who lived in a hut by itself up among the mossy stumps of the old decayed forest--had to leave her alone--sometimes even all the day long from morning till night. But she no more wearied in her solitariness than does the wren in the wood. All the flowers were her friends--all the birds. The linnet ceased not his song for her, though her footsteps wandered into the green glade among the yellow broom, almost within reach of the spray from which he poured his melody--the quiet eyes of his mate feared her not when her garments almost touched the bush where she brooded on her young. Shyest of the winged sylvans, the cushat clapped not her wings away on the soft approach of such harmless footsteps to the pine that concealed her slender nest. As if blown from heaven, descended round her path the showers of the painted butterflies, to feed, sleep, or die--undisturbed by her--upon the wildflowers--with wings, when motionless, undistinguishable from the blossoms. And well she loved the brown, busy, blameless bees, come thither for the honey-dews from a hundred cots sprinkled all over the parish, and all high overhead sailing away at evening, laden and wearied, to their straw-roofed steps in many a hamlet garden. The leaf of every tree, shrub, and plant, she knew familiarly and lovingly in its own characteristic beauty; and she was loth to shake one dewdrop from the sweetbrier rose. And well she knew that all nature loved in return--that they were dear to each other in their innocence--and that the very sunshine, in motion or in rest, was ready to come at the bidding of her smiles. Skilful those small white hands of hers among the reeds and rushes and osiers--and many a pretty flower-basket grew beneath their touch, her parents wondering on their return home to see the handiwork of one who was never idle in her happiness. Thus early--ere yet but five years old--did she earn her mite for the sustenance of her own beautiful life. The russet garb she wore she herself had won--and thus Poverty, at the door of that hut, became even like a Guardian Angel, with the lineaments of heaven on her brow, and the quietude of heaven beneath her feet.

But these were but her lonely pastimes, or gentle taskwork self-imposed among her pastimes, and itself the sweetest of them all, inspired by a sense of duty that still brings with it its own delight, and hallowed by religion, that even in the most adverse lot changes slavery into freedom--till the heart, insensible to the bonds of necessity, sings aloud for joy. The life within the life of the "Holy Child," apart from even such innocent employments as these, and from such recreations as innocent, among the shadows and the sunshine of those sylvan haunts, was passed--let us fear not to say the truth, wondrous as such worship was in one so very young--was passed in the worship of God; and her parents--though sometimes even saddened to see such piety in a small creature like her, and afraid, in their exceeding love, that it betokened an early removal from this world of one too perfectly pure ever to be touched by its sins and sorrows--forbore, in an awful pity, ever to remove the Bible from her knees, as she would sit with it there, not at morning and at evening only, or all the Sabbath long, as soon as they returned from the kirk, but often through all the hours of the longest and sunniest weekdays, when, had she chosen to do so, there was nothing to hinder her from going up the hill-side, or down to the little village, to play with the other children, always too happy when she appeared--nothing to hinder her but the voice she heard speaking in that Book, and the hallelujahs that, at the turning over of each blessed page, came upon the ear of the "Holy Child" from white-robed saints all kneeling before His throne in heaven.

Her life seemed to be the same in sleep. Often at midnight, by the light of the moon shining in upon her little bed beside theirs, her parents leant over her face, diviner in dreams, and wept as she wept, her lips all the while murmuring, in broken sentences of prayer, the name of Him who died for us all. But plenteous as were her penitential tears--penitential in the holy humbleness of her stainless spirit, over thoughts that had never left a dimming breath on its purity, yet that seemed in those strange visitings to be haunting her as the shadows of sins--soon were they all dried up in the lustre of her returning smiles. Waking, her voice in the kirk was the sweetest among many sweet, as all the young singers, and she the youngest far, sat together by themselves, and within the congregational music of the psalm uplifted a silvery strain that sounded like the very spirit of the whole, even like angelic harmony blent with a mortal song. But sleeping, still more sweetly sang the "Holy Child;" and then, too, in some diviner inspiration than ever was granted to it while awake, her soul composed its own hymns, and set the simple scriptural words to its own mysterious music--the tunes she loved best gliding into one another, without once ever marring the melody, with pathetic touches interposed never heard before, and never more to be renewed! For each dream had its own breathing, and many-visioned did then seem to be the sinless creature's sleep.

The love that was borne for her all over the hill-region, and beyond its circling clouds, was almost such as mortal creatures might be thought to feel for some existence that had visibly come from heaven. Yet all who looked on her, saw that she, like themselves, was mortal, and many an eye was wet, the heart wist not why, to hear such wisdom falling from such lips; for dimly did it prognosticate, that as short as bright would be her walk from the cradle to the grave. And thus for the "Holy Child" was their love elevated by awe, and saddened by pity--and as by herself she passed pensively by their dwellings, the same eyes that smiled on her presence, on her disappearance wept.

Not in vain for others--and for herself, oh! what great gain!--for those few years on earth did that pure spirit ponder on the word of God! Other children became pious from their delight in her piety--for she was simple as the simplest among them all, and walked with them hand in hand, nor declined companionship with any one that was good. But all grew good by being with her--and parents had but to whisper her name, and in a moment the passionate sob was hushed--the lowering brow lighted--and the household in peace. Older hearts owned the power of the piety so far surpassing their thoughts; and time-hardened sinners, it is said, when looking and listening to the "Holy Child," knew the error of their ways, and returned to the right path as at a voice from heaven.

Bright was her seventh summer--the brightest, so the aged said, that had ever, in man's memory, shone over Scotland. One long, still, sunny, blue day followed another, and in the rainless weather, though the dews kept green the hills, the song of the streams was low. But paler and paler, in sunlight and moonlight, became the sweet face that had been always pale; and the voice that had been always something mournful, breathed lower and sadder still from the too perfect whiteness of her breast. No need--no fear--to tell her that she was about to die. Sweet whispers had sung it to her in her sleep--and waking she knew it in the look of the piteous skies. But she spoke not to her parents of death more than she had often done--and never of her own. Only she seemed to love them with a more exceeding love--and was readier, even sometimes when no one was speaking, with a few drops of tears. Sometimes she disappeared--nor, when sought for, was found in the woods about the hut. And one day that mystery was cleared; for a shepherd saw her sitting by herself on a grassy mound in a nook of the small solitary kirkyard, a long mile off among the hills, so lost in reading the Bible, that shadow or sound of his feet awoke her not; and, ignorant of his presence, she knelt down and prayed--for a while weeping bitterly--but soon comforted by a heavenly calm--that her sins might be forgiven her!

One Sabbath evening, soon after, as she was sitting beside her parents at the door of their hut, looking first for a long while on their faces, and then for a long while on the sky, though it was not yet the stated hour of worship, she suddenly knelt down, and leaning on their knees, with hands clasped more fervently than her wont, she broke forth into tremulous singing of that hymn which from her lips they never heard without unendurable tears:

"The hour of my departure's come, I hear the voice that calls me home; At last, O Lord, let trouble cease, And let thy servant die in peace!"

They carried her fainting to her little bed, and uttered not a word to one another till she revived. The shock was sudden, but not unexpected, and they knew now that the hand of death was upon her, although her eyes soon became brighter and brighter, they thought, than they had ever been before. But forehead, cheeks, lips, neck, and breast, were all as white, and, to the quivering hands that touched them, almost as cold, as snow. Ineffable was the bliss in those radiant eyes; but the breath of words was frozen, and that hymn was almost her last farewell. Some few words she spake--and named the hour and day she wished to be buried. Her lips could then just faintly return the kiss, and no more--a film came over the now dim blue of her eyes--the father listened for her breath--and then the mother took his place, and leaned her ear to the unbreathing mouth, long deluding herself with its lifelike smile; but a sudden darkness in the room, and a sudden stillness, most dreadful both, convinced their unbelieving hearts at last, that it was death.

All the parish, it may be said, attended her funeral--for none stayed away from the kirk that Sabbath--though many a voice was unable to join in the Psalm. The little grave was soon filled up--and you hardly knew that the turf had been disturbed beneath which she lay. The afternoon service consisted but of a prayer--for he who ministered had loved her with love unspeakable--and, though an old grey-haired man, all the time he prayed he wept. In the sobbing kirk her parents were sitting, but no one looked at them--and when the congregation rose to go, there they remained sitting--and an hour afterwards, came out again into the open air, and parting with their pastor at the gate, walked away to their hut, overshadowed with the blessing of a thousand prayers.

And did her parents, soon after she was buried, die of broken hearts, or pine away disconsolately to their graves? Think not that they, who were Christians indeed, could be guilty of such ingratitude. "The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away--blessed be the name of the Lord!" were the first words they had spoke by that bedside; during many, many long years of weal or woe, duly every morning and night, these same blessed words did they utter when on their knees together in prayer--and many a thousand times besides, when they were apart, she in her silent hut, and he on the hill--neither of them unhappy in their solitude, though never again, perhaps, was his countenance so cheerful as of yore--and though often suddenly amidst mirth or sunshine their eyes were seen to overflow. Happy had they been--as we mortal beings ever can be happy--during many pleasant years of wedded life before she had been born. And happy were they--on to the verge of old age--long after she had here ceased to be. Their Bible had indeed been an idle Book--the Bible that belonged to "the Holy Child,"--and idle all their kirk-goings with "the Holy Child," through the Sabbath-calm--had those intermediate years not left a power of bliss behind them triumphant over death and the grave.

OUR PARISH.

Nature must be bleak and barren indeed to possess no power over the young spirit daily expanding on her breast into new susceptibilities, that ere long are felt to fill life to overflowing with a perpetual succession--an infinite series--of enjoyments. Nowhere is she destitute of that power--not on naked sea-shores--not in central deserts. But our boyhood was environed by the beautiful--its home was among moors and mountains, which people in towns and cities called dreary, but which we knew to be the cheerfullest and most gladsome parish in all braid Scotland--and well it might be, for it was in her very heart. Mountains they seemed to us in those days, though now we believe they are only hills. But such hills!--undulating far and wide away till the highest even on clear days seemed to touch the sky, and in cloudy weather were verily a part of heaven. Many a valley, and many a glen--and many a hollow that was neither valley nor glen--and many a flat, of but a few green acres, which we thought plains--and many a cleft waterless with its birks and breckans, except when the rains came down, and then they all sang a new song in merry chorus--and many a wood, and many a grove, for it takes no great number of trees to make a wood, and four firs by themselves in a lonesome place are a grove--and many a single sycamore, and many a single ash, kenned afar-off above its protected cottage--and many an indescribable spot of scenery at once pastoral and agricultural and sylvan, where, if house there was, you hardly knew it among the rocks;--so was Our Parish, which people in towns and cities called dreary, composed; but the composition itself,--as well might we hope thus to show it to your soul's eye, as by a few extracts however fine, and a few criticisms however exquisite, to give you the idea of a perfect poem.

But we have not given you more than a single hint of a great part of our Parish--the Moor. It was then ever so many miles long, and ever so many miles broad, and nobody thought of guessing how many miles round--but some twenty years ago it was absolutely measured to a rood by a landlouper of a land-surveyor--distributed--drained--enclosed--utterly ruined for ever. No, not for ever. Nature laughs to scorn acts of Parliament, and we predict that in a quarter of a century she will resume her management of that moor. We rejoice to hear that she is beginning already to take lots of it into her own hands. Wheat has no business there, and should keep to the carses. In spring, she takes him by the braird till he looks yellow in the face long before his time--in summer, by the cuff of the neck till he lies down on his back and rots in the rain--in autumn, by the ears, and rubs him against the grain till he expires as fushionless as the windle-straes with which he is interlaced--in winter, she shakes him in the stook till he is left but a shadow which pigeons despise. See him in stack at Christmas, and you pity the poor straw. Here and there bits of bear or big, and barley, she permits to flourish--nor is she loth to see the flowers and shaws and apples on the poor man's plant, the life-sustaining potato--which none but political economists hate and all Christians love. She is not so sure about turnips, but as they are a green crop she leaves them to the care of the fly. But where have her gowans gone? There they still are in flocks, which no cultivation can scatter or eradicate--inextinguishable by all the lime that was ever brought unslokened from all the kilns that ever glowed--by all the dung that was ever heaped up fresh and fuming from all the Augean stables in the land. Yet her heart burns within her to behold, even in the midst of what she abhors, the large dew-loved heads of clover whitening or reddening, or with their rival colours amicably intermingled, a new birth glorious in the place of reedy marish or fen where the catspaws nodded--and them she will retain unto herself when once more she shall rejoice in her Wilderness Restored.

And would we be so barbarous as to seek to impede the progress of improvement, and to render agriculture a dead letter? We are not so barbarous, nor yet so savage. We love civilised life, of which we have long been one of the smaller but sincerest ornaments. But agriculture, like education, has its bounds. It is, like it, a science, and woe to the country that encourages all kinds of quacks. Cultivate a moor! educate a boor! First understand the character of Clods and Clodhoppers. To say nothing now of the Urbans and Suburbans--a perilous people--yet of great capabilities; for to discuss that question would lead us into lanes; and as it is a long lane that has never a turning, for the present we keep in the open air, and abstain from wynds. We are no enemies to poor soils, far less to rich ones ignorantly and stupidly called poor, which under proper treatment effuse riches; but to expect to extract from paupers _a return_ for the expenditure squandered by miserly greed on their reluctant bottoms, cold and bare, is the insanity of speculation, and such schemers deserve being buried along with their capital in quagmires. Heavens! how they--the quagmires--suck in the dung! You say they don't suck it in--well, then, they spew it out--it evaporates--and what is the worth of weeds? Lime whitens a moss, that is true, but so does snow. Snow melts--what becomes of lime no mortal knows but the powheads--them it poisons, and they give up the ghost. Drains are dug deep nowadays--and we respect Mr Johnstone. So are gold mines. But from gold mines that precious metal--at a great expense, witness its price--is exterred; in drains that precious metal, witness wages, is interred, and then it becomes _squash_. Stirks starve--heifers are hove with windy nothing--with oxen frogs compete in bulk with every prospect of a successful issue, and on such pasturage where would be the virility of the Bulls of Bashan?

If we be in error, we shall be forgiven at least by all lovers of the past, and what to the elderly seems the olden time. Oh, misery for that Moor! Hundreds, thousands, loved it as well as we did; for though it grew no grain, many a glorious crop it bore--shadows that glided like ghosts--the giants stalked--the dwarfs crept; yet sometimes were the dwarfs more formidable than the giants, lying like blackamoors before your very feet, and as you stumbled over them in the dark, throttling as if they sought to strangle you, and then leaving you at your leisure to wipe from your mouth the mire by the light of a straggling star;--sunbeams that wrestled with the shadows in the gloom--sometimes clean flung, and then they cowered into the heather, and insinuated themselves into the earth; sometimes victorious, and then how they capered in the lift, ere they shivered away--not always without a hymn of thunder--in behind the clouds, to refresh themselves in their tabernacle in the sky.

Won't you be done with this Moor, you monomaniac? Not for yet a little while--for we see Kitty North all by himself in the heart of it, a boy apparently about the age of twelve, and happy as the day is long, though it is the Longest Day in all the year. Aimless he seems to be, but all alive as a grasshopper, and is leaping like a two-year-old across the hags. Were he to tumble in, what would become of the personage whom Kean's Biographer would call "the future Christopher the First?" But no fear of that--for at no period of his life did he ever overrate his powers--and he knows now his bound to an inch. Cap, bonnet, hat, he has none; and his yellow hair, dancing on his shoulders like a mane, gives him the look of a precocious lion's whelp. Leonine too in his aspect, yet mild withal; and but for a certain fierceness in his gambols, you would not suspect he was a young creature of prey. A fowling-piece is in his left hand, and in his right a rod. And what may he be purposing to shoot? Anything full-fledged that may play whirr or sugh. Good grouse-ground this; but many are yet in the egg, and the rest are but cheepers--little bigger than the small brown moorland bird that goes birling up with its own short epithalamium, and drops down on the rushes still as a stone. Them he harms not on their short flight--but marking them down, twirls his piece like a fugleman, and thinks of the Twelfth. Safer methinks wilt thou be a score or two yards further off, O Whaup! for though thy young are yet callow, Kit is beginning to think they may shift for themselves; and that long bill and that long neck, and those long legs and that long body--the _tout-ensemble_ so elegant, so graceful, and so wild--are a strong temptation to the trigger;--click-- clack--whizz--phew--fire--smoke and thunder--head-over-heels topsy-turvy goes the poor curlew--and Kit stands over him leaning on his single-barrel, with a stern but somewhat sad aspect, exulting in his skill, yet sorry for the creature whose wild cry will be heard no more.

'Tis an oasis in the desert. That green spot is called a quagmire--an ugly name enough--but itself is beautiful; for it diffuses its own light round about it, like a star vivifying its halo. The sward encircling it is firm--and Kit lays him down, heedless of the bird, with eyes fixed on the oozing spring. How fresh the wild cresses! His very eyes are drinking! His thirst is at once excited and satisfied by looking at the lustrous leaves--composed of cooling light without spot or stain. What ails the boy? He covers his face with his hands, and in the silence sighs. A small white hand, with its fingers spread, rises out of the spring, as if it were beckoning to heaven in prayer--and then is sucked slowly in again out of sight with a gurgling groan. The spring so fresh and fair--so beautiful with its cresses and many another water-loving plant beside--is changed into the same horrid quagmire it was that day--a holiday--three years ago--when racing in her joy Amy Lewars blindly ran into it, among her blithe companions, and suddenly perished. Childhood, they say, soon dries its tears, and soon forgets. God be praised for all his goodness! true it is that on the cheek of childhood tears are dried up as if by the sunshine of joy stealing from on high--but, God be praised for all his goodness! false it is that the heart of childhood has not a long memory, for in a moment the mournful past revives within it--as often as the joyful--sadness becomes sorrow, sorrow grief, and grief anguish, as now it is with the solitary boy seated by that ghastly spot in the middle of the wide moor.