# Davit Lunnan

Extracted from Home Chimes, Vol 2, 1885, pp. 514–518.
DAVIT LUNAN.
An Auld Licht Idyl.
BY J. M. BARRIE
HIS grizzled head strained in its socket against a cramped left arm that sprawled over the paper, Davit Lunan added his signature to the laboured letter, transcribing both it and the fancy flourish beneath from a slate-pencil scroll. With a complacent tightening of his lips he corked the ink-bottle, and retreating cautiously from the table, as if to take the letter unawares, breathed more freely, the while he regarded his handiwork with a satisfaction that was not unmixed with awe. The bairn, Effie, looked on open-eyed, and when he balanced his pen on the unaccustomed ear that would not grip it of its own accord, the solemnity of her little face reflected his. After a momentary struggle an obstinate sunbeam asserted its right of rule, and tumbled all the puckers into a chubby dimple.
The four-year-old lassie crowed gleefully, and with one roguish eye on the pen made a strenuous attempt to scale her father's legs. A dull, vacant face was Davit Lunan's, but a light came into it when his horny hand trembled through her yellow hair, and he struggled nervously with his wistful mouth. The jaws that had opened stiffly refused to close, and Davit sat helpless as the mite of a bairn hung on to his knees, and climbed merrily into his lap. He looked furtively toward the door that separated the kitchen from his saw-mill, but there was no one there to smile. He strained his motherless child to his breast and then there slunk down his brave old cheek the last tear that Davit ever shed. Shamefacedly he kissed the laughing "litlin." I don't know why, unless God told him to do it, for it was not like a severe Old Light.
Davit had "redd" up his but and ben, sweeping the lumpy earthen floor and scraping the potatoes for a twelve o'clock dinner, as he had done every day, except on the Sabbath, since Effie's mother died. The splashing stream that the old man had brought into the house to rock her cradle and close the infant's drowsy eyes to its purring lullaby, was buffeted by the great mill-wheel, that had a hard time of it to keep its ground, not to speak of climbing the bouncing burn, and the ill-fitting knotted window-bole rattled peevishly to an occasional rush of wind. The bairn could hear her father's saw puling and rasping through the white wood in the mill, and his back-bent frame showed through the doorway in a shower of flying sawdust. Davit was gay, and the sparkling drops of water leapt high from the wheel to catch a glimpse of him humming or whistling at his work—
Come ower the watter, Come ower the watter, Come ower the watter, for Chair-lie.
Effie's fascinated eyes were on the "chimley," where the lordly letter stood, and she sat solemnly blinking at it from her three-legged stool. It was the only letter she had ever seen her father write, but she knew all about them. It should be posted, and there was no one to drop it into the hole. "Yallowchy"-haired Effie stood up on her stool, stretching forth her dimpled arm for the letter. With a giggle of delight, quickly suppressed lest the sound should bring her father ben, she clutched it triumphantly, and tripping noiselessly over the sand with which Davit had strewn the floor, slipped out of the house, a knowing smile on her important face. There was music in her father's squealing saw, but she had to go to the post. Across the brig of planks and into the Tenements the litlin trotted, glancing neither to right nor left, her lips puckered into an elated chuckle. Down the straggling wynd, and across the square, and through Andra Allardice's close, grasping the letter in her hand. The life had faded from her wee baby face now, but her mouth was firm set, and her bewildered eyes fixed straight ahead. The letter had to be dropped down the hole. Hendry, the dummy, on his way to the woods with his empty barrow to dig out resiny roots for firewood, met her at the brae head. Then she toddled past Davie Haggart, breaking stones on the Whunny road, and was seen no more.
By-and-by the flapping mill-wheel came to rest, its sodden green boards showing rotten when they got the chance, and Davit Lunan, the sawdust still sticking to his patched and faded corduroys, came ben the house. He looked expectant as he sidled through the narrow doorway, but when his eyes realized the empty stool, the expression died from his patient face. That was all. Davit's bones creaked as he sank with an effort into his old-fashioned arm-chair, bought at a "roup" half a century before, and "wraxed" over his arm to the pot on the fire to lift it a link higher up the joist. The bairn liked her potatoes "birstled." Then he rose stiffly, and went bareheaded to look slowly over the burn in the direction of the Tenements. There were children playing round the old wooden pump, chasing their scampering rabbits through the bits of gardens, but do you think Davit had to look twice to know that Effie was not there?
"Ye'll cry in at Janet Gow's," he asked of a passing neighbour, "and tell Effie to come till her dinner."
But Effie was not at Janet Gow's.
Lang Tammas paused, wob on back, to inquire after the bit lassie, and Davit answered without a quiver in his voice.
"I'se warrant her at Bell Dundas's," said Tammas, passing on. And Davit answered—
"Ay," as if he knew she was with Bell Dundas.
A barefooted, mischievous laddie whom he saw climbing into the saw-mill by the dark hole through which went the axle of the dripping wheel, he accosted cheerily, as though this was the usual mode of entering his workshop. One of the rogues who made capital out of Davit's laughable affection for his child. The bantam cock that had crowed on his kitchen rafters almost since Effie's birth was offered freely to the boy, and cunning Davit opened a way to his heart by talking of yellow yites' eggs and destructive flies. Then his voice grew husky all at once.
"She's been sae muckle wi' me, Archie," he said apologetically; "an' I've nae mair. It's—it's Effie, ye ken. Ye'll hae her hodden some gait?"
But Archie knew nothing of the child.
"Maybe," he said, "she'll hae fa'en into the burn."
Lunan returned to the house to mend the fire, and, forgetting his errand, wandered out again into the Tenements, the peat in his hand, a shabby old saw-miller, nodding genially to all he met, to induce them to give him back his bairn.
"If we had haen ony mair," he repeated timidly; "but her mither's died, an'—an' she was so sma'."
The strength went gradually from Davie Haggart's shrivelled arm, and, resting deliberately on his hammer, he removed his spectacles and wiped them on his grimy "brot." He took a slow, comprehensive glance around at the fields and dykes, as if he now had an opportunity of seeing them for the first time during his fifty years' pilgrimage in those parts, and his eyes wandered aimlessly from the sombre firs and laughing yellow beeches of the three-cornered wood to the white-washed farms that dotted the valley. In the foreground two lazy colts, surveying him critically over a broken stile; in the distance, the frowning Whunny hill with a white scarf round its neck.
But though Davie looked long, he saw nothing of the infant that had toddled by him two hours before.
"Davit Lunan's lassieky," he said to himself, thinking he had at last solved the mystery that had troubled him.
He untied the red handkerchief that served as his provision-basket on week days, and was carried to the kirk in his hat on the Sabbath, and seating himself cautiously on the stones, dawdled over his dinner. When he had smacked his lips over his flagon of cold kail, and seen the last of his crumbling oatmeal cake and cheese, his uneasiness returned, and he looked long and thoughtfully down the road.
"I maun turn the crittur," was his reflection; but though the sun was his watch, he felt that it most be a long time now since Effie passed his cairn.
He lifted his hammer again, puzzling what he ought to do between the strokes, but soon let it drop from his hands. Tightening the cords that bound his legs below the knee, like garters outside his trousers, he slowly worked his way into his coat and waistcoat, the latter uppermost, and gathering his things over his shoulder, with a final dog-like look down the road, hobbled back to the village.
It was market-day, and the poor square had made its weekly attempt at bustle. Half a dozen ramshackle vegetable carts resting in line on their clumsy shafts; a dozen farmers' wives, in the douce costumes of their mothers, hunkering under the shadow of the town-house, between walls of unhappy chickens and new-laid eggs, and rolls of butter spread temptingly on cabbage-leaves; the "dulse-man" vociferating beside his barrow; two rowdy fish«cadgers screaming libels at each other over a street array of crockery.
As Davie dandered into the square by the kirk brae, Snecky Hobart's cracked bell tinkled up the back-wynd, and the bellman immediately afterwards took his stand by the side of Tam Alexander's (pronounced Elshioner) fish-cart, half a dozen startled boys at his heels.
Snecky gave them time to gather, tinkling approval when the farmers' wives left their baskets to squeeze and hirstle nearer the bell; but too full of his official duties to return the familiar nod of the yarn-covered weavers who hurried to him down the dark closes that gaped all round the square.
Davie Haggart stood on the outskirt of the crowd with gradually opening mouth.
Not every day was it given to Snecky to "cry" a lost bairn, and the pitiful words fell slowly from his reluctant lips. Before he spoke he was the observed of all eyes, the possessor of exclusive news, but his tongue had hardly ceased to roll round the concluding sentence when the fickle crowd took up the cry itself. All that was left for Hobart was to bustle into another street with his doleful news, to find that it had clattered there before him. Wives flung up their windows to shout their fears shrilly across the wynd; the racket of the looms was hushed, and the laddies put their humming "peeries" in their pockets. It was Effie Lunan that had wandered from the saw-mill—Davit's bairn. What could Davit be thinking of to let her out of his sight? Was he taking on terrible?
Of one accord the men gathered on the saw-mill brig, and looked perplexedly into the face of the laughing burn that swivelled, a sawdust colour, between wooden banks; but the women pressed their bairns closely to their wrappers, and stared in each other's whitening faces.
Davie Haggart was one of the last to leave the square, and when he moved slowly from it, it was in the direction of his own house. Both leaves of its door were open, and when Davie had entered and sat down, he saw that his wife was out. The porridge, that should have awaited him on his return home in the gloaming, hung from no link on the joist over the fire, nor did the "porter," which he took with it in lieu of milk, stand on the well-scoured dresser. For some minutes Davie felt uneasy, but his dull face took some animation as he remembered that he had left his work earlier than usual. Putting on his old glengarry bonnet, he stumbled to the door, and gaping up and down the Tenements, moved off to the saw-mill, his face troubled and perplexed.
A log of wood, with which some one had sought to improvise a fire between the bricks that narrowed Davit Lunan's grate, turned peevishly to charcoal without casting any light on the faces of the men and women gathered gloomily in the saw-mill kitchen. Already the burn near the mill had been carefully searched, with Davit Lunan's white face staring at the searchers from his door; and not even the minister could suggest another step. The room was small and close. A closet bed with the door off afforded sitting room for more than one Auld Licht, and the worn dresser, the "little table," and the "big table," had been similarly utilized. A great eight-day clock solemnly ticked away Davit's life in a dingy corner, and over the mantelpiece hung a gaudy sampler in many colours, the work of Effie's mother. The narrow "chimley" supported nothing heavier than two China figures, both of which had lost their heads, and the half of an unframed looking-glass clung to the peeling wall. Overhead the heavy rafters were crossed with old sticks and saws, and a pitcher and a pan of water—such as no village home in the North showed separately—stood together in the narrow passage. Over the cage of the canary at the small window an Auld Licht anticipating the worst had flung an empty sack, and the bird, which had scandalized the minister by trilling forth on the Sabbath, had ceased to sing.
Davie Haggart hesitated on the threshold, and then dandering in, drew attention to himself by a laboured "pech," and looked around him for a seat. It would have been poor manners to fling to the door behind him.
"Fine growin' day, Davit," he said deliberately.
"It is so, Davie," answered hospitable Davit Lunan.
"No muckle drouth, I'm thinkin'," said the Wright, as if much relieved by the turn taken by the conversation.
After that there was silence, and Davie sat him down on a three-legged stool. All the company turned their eyes on Lunan.
"Ye'll maybe tak' anither seat, Davie," he said humbly—he could not help it. "That's her stool, an' she was on't when I gae'd ben i' mornin'."
He looked imploringly round the room at the stern Auld Licht faces he had known all his weak, unselfish life.
"It's oncommon foolish," he said, with rattling jaws, "but the twa 'ose bein' sae muckle thegither, an—an——"
Poor Davit Lunan broke down utterly.
"Oh, Davie, man," he cried, "she was michty sma'."
Haggart looked perplexedly before him.
"She was juist a bairnie," Easie Whamond said.
Then Davie found his tongue.
"Juist a bairnie," he repeated cheerily.
"That's hit," Davit said wistfully. "There was naething o' her ava."
The saw-miller turned away his head, and as Davie saw the others gathering round the minister at the door, he moved restlessly on his chair.
"Hoo's Effie?" he said at last.
"Did ye no ken she was tint, Davie?" Davit asked in a voice that was not his own.
"Ay, I kint," Davie said. "She's upi' Whunny road."
Lunan drew a long breath and stepped forward, but the minister was before him.
"Tell us what you know at once, Haggart," he said, taking Davie by the shoulder. Only a growing boy in broadcloth was the minister, but out of the pulpit he had a heart. Yet was it a sad tale Davie had to tell, and not an Auld Licht there but shook his head when he heard it.
"The Whunny road!" they exclaimed solemnly, and when Davit Lunan heard them he covered his face with his hands.
"I meant to turn her," Davie said to the bairn's father in the kitchen, while the minister hurriedly organized a search party on the saw' mill brig, "but she was ower quick for 's."
The brig that Lunan had floored anew but the other day, because the bairn's little boot had caught in a worn plank! The brig from which she had crowed to see the whirls of sawdust cloud the burn with Davit Lunan looking on entranced. Ah, Lunan, the rotten old planks would have served your turn.
"It's—it's a kin' o' peety," was all the reproach the saw-miller spoke; and he staggered feebly to the door.
"The Whunny road," were the words passed from mouth to month, and the driblet of weavers fell into line. Impetuous is youth, nor was the minister perhaps much to blame for starting at once. But Lang Tammas, his chief elder, paused on the threshold.
"The Lord giveth," he said solemnly, raising his hand, "and the Lord taketh away; blessed be the name of the Lord."
Lunan bravely opened his mouth, but the "Amen" stuck in his throat.
"Ye'll excyeuse me, Tammas," he said.
The little party of searchers, back-bent weavers for the most part, filed as quickly as their stiff limbs would allow them up the brae head, and took the Whunny road. Out of respect to Davit several of them had donned their most funereal garments, and their threadbare "blacks" gleamed in the sun. Hobart's bell tinkled in the van, until inverting it, he carried it by the tongue; and Lang Tammas had his proper place by the minister's side. Thrummy Cable was there, an unfathomable man, who had been discovered in tears on the morning of his wedding—no Auld Licht could say why; and Sandy Dundas, who had once been the minister's right hand, but had fallen from his high estate; and Finny's grieve, with an unenviable notoriety for sleeping in church; and Sam'l Todd, who was said to do as he liked with the women. The wright had attended so many very similar processions before (in the interests of the coffin) that he may be excused for now and then mistaking this for a funeral; and between him and Davie Haggart tottered Davit Lunan, his worn face looking old and done, and his mean limbs cracking in their corduroys. Shabby showed his patched trousers against the wright's shining blacks; but what sarcastic tongue would ridicule the legs browned by an old man as he hunkered over a dying fire mending a bairn's frock. Easie Haggart and Mag Whamond and Eppie Allardice were all famous housewives, but they did not titter to see Davit sewing on baby buttons with cord and a gully knife.
The day was fresh and bright, the clover lands lazily returning the salute of the beaming sun, and violets tipping the bleating meadows with a frame of blue. The smell of flowers was in the air, flowers in holiday garments that smiled indifference to the fate of Effie Lunan. Ah! the fickle flowers that had clustered round her, and nestled on the bairnie's neck on the long Saturday afternoons when prattling Effie's wee hand drew Davit Lunan through the woods. Electricity, they say, was only discovered the other day, but there have been baby fists since the beginning of time. The wizened saw-miller, ashamed to look so young and happy, told you in an imploring look not to smile when you met him trotting gaily behind his litlin, and took you so timidly aside to offer his snuffmull, and say that she was all he had. Even the yellow buttercups that had twined themselves into garlands as they cuddled in her lap, that her father had never known the wonder of till they were laid by the bairn in his hand or showered on his frosty brow, smiled heartlessly on Davit when he came alone. Glazed might be Effie's eyes to-day, but her old friends the bluebells by the roadside, that look like bits of the heavens, nodded brightly to every passer-by. All but the daisies. The daisies that never played wee Effie false had stretched out their stems after her to call her back as she tripped over them, and bowed their sad little heads when she heedlessly toddled on. It was from them we learned the bairn's track after she wandered from the Whunny road, and wistfully they looked after us when we left them on the skirt of the Bruckle Wood.
The hills had ceased to echo back their wailing response to Hobart's cracked bell, weary, as even, so-called inanimate things may be, of taking up a cry that led to nothing. Far in the rear of the more eager searchers, the bellman and the wright had found a seat among the mossy stones of a broken dyke, and others, footsore and depressed, had fallen oat of the ranks at various bends in the road. Even the sun looked weary in the heavens. But the minister and his little band of followers scattered over the fields and on the hill-sides, despondent of visage, but daring not to lag. As night dame on, strange looking women in short petticoats and men's coats, appeared on the edges of the thin woods, cutty pipe in mouth; and in the meadows, the mole-catcher ceased his labours. Dummy left the roots of the trees in peace, tinkers cowered round their kettles under overhanging banks, and the squirrels were shadows gliding ghost-like from tree to tree. At a distant farm-town on the hill a fitful light, winking to the wind, blinked itself to death, and all the land was hushed. But no one had seen Davit Lunan's bairn, not even the ragged angler on his way homeward from the Whunny burn. It was gloaming, and the search party moved silently like a funeral procession of the dead. The buttercups and the bluebells closed their petals, and the daisies grew heavy on their stems.
Old and feeble was Davit Lunan, nor the heaven-sent gift of tears for such as he. Blessed the moaning mother by the cradle of her eldest-born; and the maid in tears for the lover who went out so brave in the morning, and was not at evenfall; and the weeping parents who can pray for soldier sons; and the wife on her husband's bosom. But Effie was Davit's bond to earth; and Lisbeth, her mother, who had given a life for a life, lay dead in the crammed kirkyard. No sun nor flower for him as he hobbled along the base of the Whunny hill, nodding patiently to what the minister said, and forcing to his reluctant face a kindly smile that would have made a dumb animal turn away its head.
Only the laddies who had fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers, jeered when Davit, at the rumble of an approaching cart, would stop short in the middle of a plank, and hurrying out snatch his babbling treasure in his arms, and bear her jealously to her seat beside him in the saw-mill. The bairn, sunk in a bed of shavings, crowed to see the sawdust buzzing like flies about her father's head, and Davit, too, would laugh and make merry for her edification, and whistle "Ower the Watter for Chairlie." The knowing litlin, who lifted her father's saws to within an inch of her baby-face, and held them there till, petrified, Davit looked, when she let them fall with a wicked dimple of delight, and fled gleefully to his arms, as sure of her lover as ever maiden was of man.
Hardly old enough were Effie's playmates to smile when two darned stockings suggested Davit's needle. The kersecky made from his bairn's shawl saved his spending money on himself, and there was nothing very diverting in a dull old man surrendering the luxury of tobacco for a lassie's sake. The time had come when he looked wistfully back to a fevered litlin tossing in his closet bed, the time when a feeble light burned through the silent night in Davit Lunan's dwelling, and a trembling, heavy-eyed man sat motionless on a high-backed chair. How noiselessly he approached the bonny mite, and replaces the hot arm that had wandered from beneath the coverlet of many colours. The love that surged up to his mouth as he bent imploringly over the bed! How pitiful the fond old man, whose years reach their close, crawling with a peat to the fire on his hands and knees that his shadow may not come between his sickly bairn and the light. Restless and fevered she, but Effie never in all that nightmare time heard her father rake the fire. Ah, for the old time when imperious Effie told her father to lie down beside her, and he climbed shamefacedly into the bed, looking so timidly at the minister as who would say he would not, but he could not help it. And Mr. Dishart put his hat over his eyes. But such things are not to be told. They are between a man and his God.
It was far up the Whunny hill that we got Effie's little shoe, one of the pair her father had found it so hard to make with the laughing bairn making off mischievously with the leather. Davit took it in his hands, the muddy worn shoe, with its gay lining sadly draggled, and looked up, oh, so pitifully on the faces that had aged and wrinkled with his own. His jaws cracked, the feeble head swung loose, and the glazed eyes wandered all round the little group till they rested on Davie Haggart.
"I'm dootin' she's died, Davie," he said.
The Auld Lichts grouped severely round him, trouble in their furrowed cheeks, and Davit stood still among the brackens, looking rather helpless. He held the soiled little shoe tenderly in both hands, and it almost looked as if he mistook it for a bairn.
"I'd'na ken," Davie Haggart said, after a pause, to the others, "but what its kin' o' nat'ral."
Lunan looked into Haggart's face, and then every eye was turned away. He laid his shaking head on the shoulder of the friend of his youth, and the soul of Davie Haggart went out to Davit Lunan. It was no longer the gloomy Whunny hill peopled with sombre shadows, but two bare-footed herd-laddies wiling away the days with "knifey" on the green fields of two adjoining farms, and sharing the early swede, and guddling for trout in the bubbling burn' The moon peeping over the hills had found them on their ragged backs with the cattle mowing around in a narrowing circle. They had grown different boys, nor known why, among the wild roses of red and white, and trampling breast-high among the ferns. The raspberry bushes they had stripped together into flagons gleaming in the grass, and how often their lips had shown the blackberry juice! Davie had provided the bent pin with which Davit first lured a trusting trout to its undoing, and Davit in return had let him thraw the neck of a condemned farm hen. They had climbed together up the dark sides of a dank and frowning den, through which a rush of water passionately flings itself against jagged cliffs and boulders, and breathlessly they had held each others hands to look down in awe at the foaming sing, where the water gathers solid between banks so close that the farmers can spring across, before taking a blind appalling leap that carries it over the trees, tearing themselves out by the root in their effort to bridge the torrent, to turn somersaults in the air, and fall lifeless in the sunless depths below. They had wandered knee-deep through thirsty hay when sweeping scythes sang in the cornfields, and larks trilled in the blue sky, and all the braes were golden with the yellow broom.
The flashing shuttle rattles along the loom, and two broad-shouldered men toil from misty morn till gloaming at the wob. Their backs round together as they bow their heads among the thrums of thread, and peddles groan under their heavy boots. Broken threads of yarn gather on the festering looms, on the bumpy earthen floor, and on the walls and window, as if a monster spider had gripped them in its crafty web. The place smells of yarn, and the less stolid of the two men is beginning to learn "Come ower the Watter for Chairlie." They are stoitering down the Tenements under a load of crashing wobs that bear them to the ground, or that rest on barrows, supported by ropes of yarn from their drooping shoulders; or it is Saturday night, and they are in the square, clean and dapper, talking with other gallants about lassies. They are courting the same maid, Cree Dundas's daughter, and she sits on a stool by the door, working a stocking, with a lover on each side. They drop in upon her mother, straining the marmalade juice through a bag suspended between two chairs; they sheepishly admire while Bell singes the well-plucked hen; for love of her they help Cree to pit his potatoes, and then for love of the other each gives her up.
It is a Friday night, and from a but and ben around which the rabble fling themselves, shouting for largess, like a roaring sea in a dark night dashing against a lighthouse, Auld Licht couples emerge in strangely gay and bright apparel.
Davit Lunan leads the way with a self-conscious lass, and Davie is at his heels with another. It must be Lunan's wedding-day, and this the procession from the bride's old home to her new one. Many a year rolls on. Davit is at the saw-mill now, and by-and-by the grumpy gravedigger goes out to dig a grave. A handful of sober, emotionless mourners wind their slow way up a steep brae through beds of fallen leaves, with something black on their shoulders; the white cords are dropped silently on the lowered coffin, and Davit Lunan returns to the old home that will know his wife no more. Ay, with an unbecoming haste, for Lisbeth has not gone away without leaving a legacy behind, and he thinks that Effie can pick him out already.
A dingy, comfortless kirk, with a solemn saw-miller in black standing on the pulpit-stairs; a minister whirling like a teetotum above him; a congregation rising from its seat as one man, not to miss the heckling, and a blotch of white in a proud godmother's arms. In true Auld Licht fashion Effie is christened on the Sabbath following her birth; and after that—ah, to look back upon it!—the saw whistles once more through the wood, the water glides beneath the cradle's peddles, and Effie winds and winds herself round poor old Davit's heart. He sings her to sleep with no more manliness than a woman. He tells her the wonderful story of how she was first found in a cabbage-blade, and when Effie can toddle down the wynd with her exulting father it is the bairn leads.
Alas! for the flash into bygone days that sorrow gives! As Davit Lunan and Davie Haggart hold each other's hands, the light dies from their eyes, backs grow round and bent; silvered the hair that lay in tousled locks on laddies' heads, and shrunken limbs mock the lustiness of youth. In the morning Davit Lunan had a bairn, but where is she now?
The day was closing in, and obscured the tree-tops on the Whunny hill. The weary searchers might have been smugglers laden with whisky-casks, such as haunted the mountains in the dim days of the past, and no one knew where to turn. Far away in the Tenements, mothers still wrung their hands for Effie, but the rest of the village grew drowsy, and candles went out A nipping wind cut the search party, and fled from them down the hill, by-and-by to bear into the valley the solemn drone of a clerical voice raised in prayer. Bared were the Auld Licht, the breeze even lifting Davit Lunan's scant locks, and bowed their reverent heads. Then they glanced at the minister, and raised aloft a fallen rowan tree, from which all the sap had gone. One of the old-world psalms of David trembled straight to heaven:—
Yea, though I wa-aak in dith's dark va-ale, Yit wull I fear none ill-ill; For Thou art with me-me; and Thy rod-od. And staff-aff me comfort still-ill.
Mr. Dishart gave the solemn signal, and the tree was allowed to fall as it listed. Straight down the hill it pointed. It was the last attempt, but when the others turned to follow the minister down hill, Davit Lunan was standing still with the draggled shoe in his arms. Not his the blame. He could not move, only smiled helplessly in response to the minister's beckoning, and there was agony in his face, and still there came no tears.
Davie Haggart took him by the hand.
"Davit, man—Davit Lunan," he said, "she was but fower year auld!"
Davit did not speak. Hardly he seemed to hear, but with slow and shaking hand he unbuttoned his trouser pocket, and drew from it a worn snuffmull. With a gaping mouth he handed it to Davie, but the wind carried away its contents, and the mull fell among the heather.
"Keep yourselves from idols," said Lang Tammas sternly.
But the minister was young, and children lisped his name at the white manse among the trees at home. They would be saying their prayers by their white bedsides now. He took the gay, bespattered shoe gently from Davit's hands, and went down the hill, the old man following him like a dog that has lost his bone.
A bonny wee bairn with closed eyes lay cold and stiff on the brink of the burn that gurgled on to the old saw-mill, one little bare foot washed by the running stream. So the Whunny of her baby days had rocked Effie to sleep alter all. Half-covered with white daisies, the chubby hand clutched a letter; and when Davit Lunan saw her, he sat down beside her.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1930.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1937, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 87 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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