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GIBBIE'S CALLING.
I am not sure that his father's neglect was not on the whole better
for Gibbie than would have been the kindness of such a father
persistently embodying itself. But the picture of Sir George, by
the help of whisky and the mild hatching oven of Mistress Croale's
parlour, softly breaking from the shell of the cobbler, and floating
a mild gentleman in the air of his lukewarm imagination, and poor
wee Gibbie trotting outside in the frosty dark of the autumn night,
through which the moon keeps staring down, vague and disconsolate,
is hardly therefore the less pathetic. Under the window of the
parlour where the light of revel shone radiant through a red
curtain, he would stand listening for a moment, then, darting off a
few yards suddenly and swiftly like a scared bird, fall at once into
his own steady trot -- up the lane and down, till he reached the
window again, where again he would stand and listen. Whether he
made this departure and return twenty or a hundred times in a night,
he nor any one else could have told. Sometimes he would for a
change extend his trot along the Widdiehill, sometimes along the
parallel Vennel, but never far from Jink Lane and its glowing
window. Never moth haunted lamp so persistently. Ever as he ran,
up this pavement and down that, on the soft-sounding soles of his
bare feet, the smile on the boy's face grew more and more sleepy,
but still he smiled and still he trotted, still paused at the
window, and still started afresh.
He was not so much to be pitied as my reader may think. Never in
his life had he yet pitied himself. The thought of hardship or
wrong had not occurred to him. It would have been
difficult -- impossible, I believe -- to get the idea into his head that
existence bore to him any other shape than it ought. Things were
with him as they had always been, and whence was he to take a fresh
start, and question what had been from the beginning? Had any
authority interfered, with a decree that Gibbie should no more scour
the midnight streets, no more pass and repass that far-shining
splendour of red, then indeed would bitter, though inarticulate,
complaint have burst from his bosom. But there was no evil power to
issue such a command, and Gibbie's peace was not invaded.
It was now late, and those streets were empty; neither carriage nor
cart, wheelbarrow nor truck, went any more bumping and clattering
over their stones. They were well lighted with gas, but most of the
bordering houses were dark. Now and then a single foot-farer passed
with loud, hollow-sounding boots along the pavement; or two girls
would come laughing along, their merriment echoing rude in the wide
stillness. A cold wind, a small, forsaken, solitary wind, moist
with a thin fog, seemed, as well as wee Gibbie, to be roaming the
night, for it met him at various corners, and from all directions.
But it had nothing to do, and nowhere to go, and there it was not
like Gibbie, the business of whose life was even now upon him, the
mightiest hope of whose conscious being was now awake.
All he expected, or ever desired to discover, by listening at the
window, was simply whether there were yet signs of the company's
breaking up; and his conclusions on that point were never mistaken:
how he arrived at them it would be hard to say. Seldom had he there
heard the voice of his father, still seldomer anything beyond its
tone. This night, however, as the time drew near when they must go,
lest the Sabbath should be broken in Mistress Croale's decent house,
and Gibbie stood once more on tiptoe, with his head just on the
level of the windowsill, he heard his father utter two words: "Up
Daurside" came to him through the window, in the voice he loved,
plain and distinct. The words conveyed to him nothing at all; the
mere hearing of them made them memorable. For the time, however, he
forgot them, for, by indications best known to himself, he perceived
that the company was on the point of separating, and from that
moment did not take his eyes off the door until he heard the first
sounds of its opening. As, however, it was always hard for Gibbie
to stand still, and especially hard on a midnight so cold that his
feet threatened to grow indistinguishable from the slabs of the
pavement, he was driven, in order not to lose sight of it, to
practise the art, already cultivated by him to a crab-like
perfection, of running first backwards, then forwards with scarcely
superior speed. But it was not long ere the much expected sound of
Mistress Croale's voice heralded the hour for patience to blossom
into possession. The voice was neither loud nor harsh, but clear
and firm; the noise that followed was both loud and strident.
Voices had a part in it, but the movement of chairs and feet and
the sudden contact of different portions of the body with walls and
tables, had a larger. The guests were obeying the voice of their
hostess all in one like a flock of sheep, but it was poor
shepherd-work to turn them out of the fold at midnight. Gibbie
bounded up and stood still as a statue at the very door-cheek, until
he heard Mistress Croale's hand upon the lock, when he bolted,
trembling with eagerness, into the entry of a court a few houses
nearer to the Widdiehill.
One after one the pitiable company issued from its paradise, and
each stumbled away, too far gone for leave-taking. Most of them
passed Gibbie where he stood, but he took no heed; his father was
always the last -- and the least capable. But, often as he left her
door, never did it close behind him until with her own eyes Mistress
Croale had seen Gibbie dart like an imp out of the court -- to take
him in charge, and, all the weary way home, hover, not very like a
guardian angel, but not the less one in truth, around the unstable
equilibrium of his father's tall and swaying form. And thereupon
commenced a series of marvellous gymnastics on the part of wee
Gibbie. Imagine a small boy with a gigantic top, which, six times
his own size, he keeps erect on its peg, not by whipping it round,
but by running round it himself, unfailingly applying, at the very
spot and at the very moment, the precise measure of impact necessary
to counterbalance its perpetual tendency to fall in one direction or
another, so that the two have all the air of a single
invention -- such an invention as one might meet with in an ancient
clock, contrived when men had time to mingle play with earnest -- and
you will have in your mind's eye a real likeness of Sir George
attended, any midnight in the week, by his son Gilbert. Home the
big one staggered, reeled, gyrated, and tumbled; round and round him
went the little one, now behind, now before, now on this side, now
on that, his feet never more than touching the ground but dancing
about like those of a prize-fighter, his little arms up and his
hands well forward, like flying buttresses. And such indeed they
were -- buttresses which flew and flew all about a universally leaning
tower. They propped it here, they propped it there; with wonderful
judgment and skill and graduation of force they applied themselves,
and with perfect success. Not once, for the last year and a half,
during which time wee Gibbie had been the nightly guide of Sir
George's homeward steps, had the self-disabled mass fallen prostrate
in the gutter, there to snore out the night.
The first special difficulty, that of turning the corner of Jink
Lane and the Widdiehill, successfully overcome, the twain went
reeling and revolving along the street, much like a whirlwind that
had half forgotten the laws of gyration, until at length it spun
into the court, and up to the foot of the outside stair over the
baronet's workshop. Then commenced the real struggle of the evening
for Gibbie -- and for his father too, though the latter was aware of
it only in the momentary and evanescent flashes of such
enlightenment as made him just capable of yielding to the pushes and
pulls of the former. All up the outside and the two inside stairs,
his waking and sleeping were as the alternate tictac of a pendulum;
but Gibbie stuck to his business like a man, and his resolution and
perseverance were at length, as always, crowned with victory.
The house in which lords and ladies had often reposed was now filled
with very humble folk, who were all asleep when Gibbie and his
father entered; but the noise they made in ascending caused no great
disturbance of their rest; for, if any of them were roused for a
moment, it was but to recognize at once the cause of the tumult, and
with the remark, "It's only wee Gibbie luggin' hame Sir George," to
turn on the other side and fall asleep again.
Arrived at last at the garret door, which stood wide open, Gibbie
had small need of light in the nearly pitch darkness of the place,
for there was positively nothing to stumble over or against between
the door and the ancient four-post bed, which was all of his
father's house that remained to Sir George. With heavy shuffling
feet the drunkard lumbered laboriously bedward; and the bare posts
and crazy frame groaned and creaked as he fell upon the oat-chaff
that lay waiting him in place of the vanished luxury of feathers.
Wee Gibbie flew at his legs, nor rested until, the one after the
other, he had got them on the bed; if then they were not very
comfortably deposited, he knew that, in his first turn, their owner
would get them all right.
And now rose the culmen of Gibbie's day! its cycle, rounded through
regions of banishment, returned to its nodus of bliss. In triumph
he spread over his sleeping father his dead mother's old plaid of
Gordon tartan, all the bedding they had, and without a moment's
further delay -- no shoes even to put off -- crept under it, and nestled
close upon the bosom of his unconscious parent. A victory more!
another day ended with success! his father safe, and all his own!
the canopy of the darkness and the plaid over them, as if they were
the one only two in the universe! his father unable to leave
him -- his for whole dark hours to come! It was Gibbie's paradise
now! His heaven was his father's bosom, to which he clung as no
infant yet ever clung to his mother's. He never thought to pity
himself that the embrace was all on his side, that no answering
pressure came back from the prostrate form. He never said to
himself, "My father is a drunkard, but I must make the best of it;
he is all I have!" He clung to his one possession -- only clung: this
was his father -- all in all to him. What must be the bliss of such a
heart -- of any heart, when it comes to know that there is a father of
fathers, yea, a father of fatherhood! a father who never slumbers
nor sleeps, but holds all the sleeping in his ever waking bosom -- a
bosom whose wakefulness is the sole fountain of their slumber!
The conscious bliss of the child was of short duration, for in a few
minutes he was fast asleep; but for the gain of those few minutes
only, the day had been well spent.
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