Sir Gibbie by George MacDonald (top 100 novels .txt) 📕

the tasks he set him, was more than respectful, and always ready; yet somehow Mr. Sclater could never feel that the lad was exactly obeying him. He thought it over, but could not understand it, and did not like it, for he was fond of authority. Gibbie in fact did whatever was required of him from his own delight in meeting the wish expressed, not from any sense of duty or of obligation to obedience. The minister had no perception of what the boy was, and but a very small capacity for appreciating what was best in him, and had a foreboding suspicion that the time would come when they would differ.

He had not told him that he was going to meet the coach, but Gibbie was glad to learn from Mrs. Sclater that such was his intention, for he preferred meeting Donal at his lodging. He had recognized the place at once from the minister's mention of it to his wife, having known the shop and its owner since ever he could remember himself. He loitered near until he saw Donal arrive, then crept after him and the porter up the stair, and when Donal sat down by the fire, got into the room and behind the curtain.

The boys had then a jolly time of it. They made their tea, for which everything was present, and ate as boys know how, Donal enjoying the rarity of the white bread of the city, Gibbie, who had not tasted oatmeal since he came, devouring "mother's cakes." When they had done, Gibbie, who had learned much since he came, looked about the room till he found a bell-rope, and pulled it, whereupon the oddest-looking old woman, not a hair altered from what Gibbie remembered her, entered, and, with friendly chatter, proceeded to remove the tray. Suddenly something arrested her, and she began to regard Gibbie with curious looks; in a moment she was sure of him, and a torrent of exclamations and reminiscences and appeals followed, which lasted, the two lads now laughing, now all but crying for nearly an hour, while, all the time, the old woman kept doing and undoing about the hearth and the tea table. Donal asked many questions about his friend, and she answered freely, except as often as one approached his family, when she would fall silent, and bustle about as if she had not heard. Then Gibbie would look thoughtful and strange and a little sad, and a far-away gaze would come into his eyes, as if he were searching for his father in the other world.

When the good woman at length left them, they uncorded Donal's kist, discovered the cause of its portentous weight, took out everything, put the provisions in a cupboard, arranged the few books, and then sat down by the fire for "a read" together.

The hours slipped away; it was night; and still they sat and read. It must have been after ten o' clock when they heard footsteps coming through the adjoining room; the door opened swiftly; in walked Mr. Sclater, and closed it behind him. His look was angry - severe enough for boys caught card-playing, or drinking, or reading something that was not divinity on a Sunday. Gibbie had absented himself without permission, had stayed away for hours, had not returned even when the hour of worship arrived; and these were sins against the respectability of his house which no minister like Mr. Sclater could pass by. It mattered nothing what they were doing! it was all one when it got to midnight! then it became revelling, and was sinful and dangerous, vulgar and ungentlemanly, giving the worst possible example to those beneath them! What could their landlady think? - the very first night? - and a lodger whom he had recommended? Such was the sort of thing with which Mr. Sclater overwhelmed the two boys. Donal would have pleaded in justification, or at least excuse, but he silenced him peremptorily. I suspect there had been some difference between Mrs. Sclater and him just before he left: how otherwise could he have so entirely forgotten his wise resolves anent Gibbie's gradual subjugation?

When first he entered, Gibbie rose with his usual smile of greeting, and got him a chair. But he waved aside the attention with indignant indifference, and went on with his foolish reproof - unworthy of record except for Gibbie's following behaviour. Beaten down by the suddenness of the storm, Donal had never risen from his chair, but sat glowering into the fire. He was annoyed, vexed, half-ashamed; with that readiness of the poetic nature to fit itself to any position, especially one suggested by an unjust judgment, he felt, with the worthy parson thus storming at him, almost as if guilty in everything laid to their joint charge. Gibbie on his feet looked the minister straight in the face. His smile of welcome, which had suddenly mingled itself with bewilderment, gradually faded into one of concern, then of pity, and by degrees died away altogether, leaving in its place a look of question. More and more settled his countenance grew, while all the time he never took his eyes off Mr. Sclater's, until its expression at length was that of pitiful unconscious reproof, mingled with sympathetic shame. He had never met anything like this before. Nothing low like this - for all injustice, and especially all that sort of thing which Janet called "dingin' the motes wi' the beam," is eternally low - had Gibbie seen in the holy temple of Glashgar! He had no way of understanding or interpreting it save by calling to his aid the sad knowledge of evil, gathered in his earliest years. Except in the laird and Fergus and the gamekeeper, he had not, since fleeing from Lucky Croale's houff, seen a trace of unreasonable anger in any one he knew. Robert or Janet had never scolded him. He might go and come as he pleased. The night was sacred as the day in that dear house. His father, even when most overcome by the wicked thing, had never scolded him!

The boys remaining absolutely silent, the minister had it all his own way. But before he had begun to draw to a close, across the blinding mists of his fog-breeding wrath he began to be aware of the shining of two heavenly lights, the eyes, namely, of the dumb boy fixed upon him. They jarred him a little in his onward course; they shook him as if with a doubt; the feeling undefined slowly grew to a notion, first obscure, then plain: they were eyes of reproof that were fastened upon his! At the first suspicion, his anger flared up more fierce than ever; but it was a flare of a doomed flame; slowly the rebuke told, was telling; the self-satisfied in-the-rightness - a very different thing from righteousness - of the man was sinking before the innocent difference of the boy; he began to feel awkward, he hesitated, he ceased: for the moment Gibbie, unconsciously, had conquered; without knowing it, he was the superior of the two, and Mr. Sclater had begun to learn that he could never exercise authority over him. But the wordly-wise man will not seem to be defeated even where he knows he is. If he do give in, he will make it look as if it came of the proper motion of his own goodness. After a slight pause, the minister spoke again, but with the changed tone of one who has had an apology made to him, whose anger is appeased, and who therefore acts the Neptune over the billows of his own sea. That was the way he would slide out of it.

"Donal Grant," he said, "you had better go to bed at once, and get fit for your work to-morrow. I will go with you to call upon the principal. Take care you are not out of the way when I come for you. - Get your cap, Sir Gilbert, and come. Mrs. Sclater was already very uneasy about you when I left her."

Gibbie took from his pocket the little ivory tablets Mrs. Sclater had given him, wrote the following words, and handed them to the minister:

"Dear sir, I am going to slepe this night with Donal. The bed is bigg enuf for 2. Good night, sir."

For a moment the minister's wrath seethed again. Like a volcano, however, that has sent out a puff of steam, but holds back its lava, he thought better of it: here was a chance of retiring with grace - in well-conducted retreat, instead of headlong rout.

"Then be sure you are home by lesson-time," he said. "Donal can come with you. Good night. Mind you don't keep each other awake."

Donal said "Good night, sir," and Gibbie gave him a serious and respectful nod. He left the room, and the boys turned and looked at each other. Donal's countenance expressed an indignant sense of wrong, but Gibbie's revealed a more profound concern. He stood motionless, intent on the receding steps of the minister. The moment the sound of them ceased, he darted soundless after him. Donal, who from Mr. Sclater's reply had understood what Gibbie had written, was astonished, and starting to his feet followed him. By the time he reached the door, Gibbie was past the second lamp, his shadow describing a huge half-circle around him, as he stole from lamp to lamp after the minister, keeping always a lamp-post still between them. When the minister turned a corner, Gibbie made a soundless dart to it, and peeped round, lingered a moment looking, then followed again. On and on went Mr. Sclater, and on and on went Gibbie, careful constantly not to be seen by him; and on and on went Donal, careful to be seen of neither. They went a long way as he thought, for to the country boy distance between houses seemed much greater than between dykes or hedges. At last the minister went up the steps of a handsome house, took a key from his pocket, and opened the door. From some impulse or other, as he stepped in, he turned sharp round, and saw Gibbie.

"Come in," he said, in a loud authoritative tone, probably taking the boy's appearance for the effect of repentance and a desire to return to his own bed.

Gibbie lifted his cap, and walked quietly on towards the other end of Daur-street. Donal dared not follow, for Mr. Sclater stood between, looking out. Presently however the door shut with a great bang, and Donal was after Gibbie like a hound. But Gibbie had turned a corner, and was gone from his sight. Donal turned a corner too, but it was a wrong corner. Concluding that Gibbie had turned another corner ahead of him, he ran on and on, in the vanishing hope of catching sight of him again; but he was soon satisfied he had lost him, - nor him only, but himself as well, for he had not the smallest idea how to return, even as far as the minister's house. It rendered the matter considerably worse that, having never heard the name of the street where he lodged but once - when the minister gave direction to the porter, he had utterly forgotten it. So there he was, out in the night, astray in the streets of a city of many tens of thousands, in which he