Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood. George MacDonald
but I can’t teach you everything. I have got to read a great deal and think a great deal, and go about my parish a good deal. And your brother Tom has heavy lessons to learn at school, and I have to help him. So what’s to be done, Ranald, my boy? You can’t go to the parish school before you’ve learned your letters.”
“There’s Kirsty, papa,” I suggested.
“Yes; there’s Kirsty,” he returned with a sly smile. “Kirsty can do everything, can’t she?”
“She can speak Gaelic,” I said with a tone of triumph, bringing her rarest accomplishment to the forefront.
“I wish you could speak Gaelic,” said my father, thinking of his wife, I believe, whose mother tongue it was. “But that is not what you want most to learn. Do you think Kirsty could teach you to read English?”
“Yes, I do.”
My father again meditated.
“Let us go and ask her,” he said at length, taking my hand.
I capered with delight, nor ceased my capering till we stood on Kirsty’s earthen floor. I think I see her now, dusting one of her deal chairs, as white as soap and sand could make it, for the minister to sit on. She never called him the master, but always the minister. She was a great favourite with my father, and he always behaved as a visitor in her house.
“Well, Kirsty,” he said, after the first salutations were over, “have you any objection to turn schoolmistress?”
“I should make a poor hand at that,” she answered, with a smile to me which showed she guessed what my father wanted. “But if it were to teach Master Ranald there, I should like dearly to try what I could do.”
She never omitted the Master to our names; Mrs. Mitchell by no chance prefixed it. The natural manners of the Celt and Saxon are almost diametrically opposed in Scotland. And had Kirsty’s speech been in the coarse dialect of Mrs. Mitchell, I am confident my father would not have allowed her to teach me. But Kirsty did not speak a word of Scotch, and although her English was a little broken and odd, being formed somewhat after Gaelic idioms, her tone was pure and her phrases were refined. The matter was very speedily settled between them.
“And if you want to beat him, Kirsty, you can beat him in Gaelic, and then he won’t feel it,” said my father, trying after a joke, which was no common occurrence with him, whereupon Kirsty and I laughed in great contentment.
The fact was, Kirsty had come to the manse with my mother, and my father was attached to her for the sake of his wife as well as for her own, and Kirsty would have died for the minister or any one of his boys. All the devotion a Highland woman has for the chief of her clan, Kirsty had for my father, not to mention the reverence due to the minister.
After a little chat about the cows and the calves, my father rose, saying—
“Then I’ll just make him over to you, Kirsty. Do you think you can manage without letting it interfere with your work, though?”
“Oh yes, sir—well that! I shall soon have him reading to me while I’m busy about. If he doesn’t know the word, he can spell it, and then I shall know it—at least if it’s not longer than Hawkie’s tail.”
Hawkie was a fine milker, with a bad temper, and a comically short tail. It had got chopped off by some accident when she was a calf.
“There’s something else short about Hawkie—isn’t there, Kirsty?” said my father.
“And Mrs. Mitchell,” I suggested, thinking to help Kirsty to my father’s meaning.
“Come, come, young gentleman! We don’t want your remarks,” said my father pleasantly.
“Why, papa, you told me so yourself, just before we came up.”
“Yes, I did; but I did not mean you to repeat it. What if Kirsty were to go and tell Mrs. Mitchell?”
Kirsty made no attempt at protestation. She knew well enough that my father knew there was no danger. She only laughed, and I, seeing Kirsty satisfied, was satisfied also, and joined in the laugh.
The result was that before many weeks were over, Allister and wee Davie were Kirsty’s pupils also, Allister learning to read, and wee Davie to sit still, which was the hardest task within his capacity. They were free to come or keep away, but not to go: if they did come, Kirsty insisted on their staying out the lesson. It soon became a regular thing. Every morning in summer we might be seen perched on a form, under one of the tiny windows, in that delicious brown light which you seldom find but in an old clay-floored cottage. In a fir-wood I think you have it; and I have seen it in an old castle; but best of all in the house of mourning in an Arab cemetery. In the winter, we seated ourselves round the fire—as near it as Kirsty’s cooking operations, which were simple enough, admitted. It was delightful to us boys, and would have been amusing to anyone, to see how Kirsty behaved when Mrs. Mitchell found occasion to pay her a visit during lesson hours. She knew her step and darted to the door. Not once did she permit her to enter. She was like a hen with her chickens.
“No, you’ll not come in just now, Mrs. Mitchell,” she would say, as the housekeeper attempted to pass. “You know we’re busy.”
“I want to hear how they’re getting on.”
“You can try them at home,” Kirsty would answer.
We always laughed at the idea of our reading to her. Once I believe she heard the laugh, for she instantly walked away, and I do not remember that she ever came again.
CHAPTER IX
We Learn Other Things
We were more than ever at the farm now. During the summer, from the time we got up till the time we went to bed, we seldom approached the manse. I have heard it hinted that my father neglected us. But that can hardly be, seeing that then his word was law to us, and now I regard his memory as the symbol of the love unspeakable. My elder brother Tom always had his meals with him, and sat at his lessons in the study. But my father did not mind the younger ones running wild, so long as there was a Kirsty for them to run to; and indeed the men also were not only friendly to us, but careful over us. No doubt we were rather savage, very different in our appearance from town-bred children, who are washed and dressed every time they go out for a walk: that we should have considered not merely a hardship, but an indignity. To be free was all our notion of a perfect existence. But my father’s rebuke was awful indeed, if he found even the youngest guilty of untruth, or cruelty, or injustice. At all kinds of escapades, not involving disobedience, he smiled, except indeed there were too much danger, when he would warn and limit.
A town boy may wonder what we could find to amuse us all day long; but the fact is almost everything was an amusement, seeing that when we could not take a natural share in what was going on, we generally managed to invent some collateral employment fictitiously related to it. But he must not think of our farm as at all like some great farm he may happen to know in England; for there was nothing done by machinery on the place. There may be great pleasure in watching machine-operations, but surely none to equal the pleasure we had. If there had been a steam engine to plough my father’s fields, how could we have ridden home on its back in the evening? To ride the horses home from the plough was a triumph. Had there been a thrashing- machine, could its pleasures have been comparable to that of lying in the straw and watching the grain dance from the sheaves under the skilful flails of the two strong men who belaboured them? There was a winnowing-machine, but quite a tame one, for its wheel I could drive myself—the handle now high as my head, now low as my knee—and watch at the same time the storm of chaff driven like drifting snowflakes from its wide mouth. Meantime the oat-grain was flowing in a silent slow stream from the shelving hole in the other side, and the wind, rushing through the opposite doors, aided the winnower by catching at the expelled chaff, and carrying it yet farther apart. I think I see old Eppie now, filling her sack with what the wind blew her; not with the grain: Eppie did not covet that; she only wanted her bed filled with fresh springy chaff, on which she would sleep as sound as her rheumatism would let her, and as warm and dry and comfortable as any duchess in the land that happened to have the rheumatism too. For comfort is inside more than outside;