The Stickit Minister's Wooing and Other Galloway Stories

And Gilbert took in the whole front of the manse with his glance. It certainly was very pretty, covered from top to bottom with rambler roses and Virginia cress.

Gilbert entered, and as they passed in front of the minister's study door Miss Girnigo almost skittishly made a sign for silence, and Gilbert tip-toed past with an exaggeration of caution which made his companion laugh. They found themselves presently in the drawing-room, where again the flower-pots were everywhere, but specially banked round the oriel window. Gilbert named them one after the other like children at a baptism, with a sort of easy certainty and familiarity. His friend the nurseryman's clerk had not failed him. Miss Girnigo was delighted.

"Well," she said, "it is pleasant to have some one who knows Ceterach Officinarum from a kail-stock. We shall go botanising together!"

"Ye-es," said Gilbert, a little uncertainly, and with less enthusiasm than might have been expected.

"Good heavens," he was saying, "how shall I grind up the beastly thing if I have to live up to all this?"

But Miss Girnigo was in high good-humour, though her pleasure was sadly marred by the incipient cold in her head, which she was conscious prevented her from doing herself justice. At forty, eyes that water and a nose tipped with pink do not make for maiden beauty.

"I have a dreadful cold coming on, Mr. Denholm," she said; "I really am not fit to be seen. I wonder what I was thinking of to ask you in!"

"Try this," said Gilbert, pulling a kind of india-rubber puff-ball out of his pocket; "it is quite good. It makes you sneeze like the very – ahem – like anything. Stops a cold in no time – won't be happy till you get it!"

"I don't dare to – how does it work?" demurred Miss Girnigo.

Gilbert illustrated, and began to sneeze promptly, as the snuff titillated his air passages.

"Now you try!" he said, and smiled.

Gilbert held it insinuatingly to the lady's nostrils and pumped vigorously.

"A-tish – shoo!" remarked the lady, as if he had touched a spring.

"A-tish – shoo-oo-ooh!" replied Gilbert.

After that they responded antiphonally, like Alp answering Alp, till the door opened and Dr. Girnigo appeared with a half-written sheet of sermon paper in his hand.

The guilty pair stood rooted to the ground – at least, spasmodically so, for every other moment a sneeze lifted one of them upon tiptoe.

"What is this, Arabella, what is this? What is this young man doing here?"

"Don't be —a-tish – oo– stupid, papa! You know very well —shoo– it is Mr. Denholm, the new Assist —aroo!"

"Sir!" said Dr. Girnigo, turning upon his junior and angrily stamping his foot.

Gilbert held out his hand, and as the Doctor did not take it he waggled it feebly in the air with a sort of impotent good-fellowship.

"All right," he said; "better presently – only c-curing Miss – Miss Girni —goo-ahoo – arish-chee-hoo– of a cold!"

"I do not know any one of that name, sir!" thundered the Doctor, not wholly unreasonably.

"No?" said Gilbert, anxiously; "I understood that this —a-tishoo– lady was Miss Girnigo, though I thought she was too young for a daughter – your granddaughter, perhaps, Doctor?"

And the smile once more took in Miss Girnigo as if she had been a beautiful picture.

By this time Miss Girnigo had somewhat recovered.

"Papa," she said, sharply, "Mr. Denholm is going to be such an acquisition. He is a botanist – a Fellow of the Linnæan Society, I understand – "

"Of Pittenweem," muttered Gilbert between his teeth.

"And he is going to preach on Sunday. You have had a lot to worry you this week and need a rest. Besides, your best shirts are not ironed – not dry indeed. The weather has been so bad!"

"I had made up my mind to preach on Sabbath myself," said Dr. Girnigo, who, though a tyrant untamed without, was held in considerable subjection to the higher power within the bounds of his own house.

"Nonsense, papa – I will not allow you to think of such a thing!" cried Miss Girnigo. "Besides, Mr. Denholm is coming to supper to-night, and we will talk botany all the time!"

* * * * *

Which was why the Eel, falling off his bicycle at 1.45 p.m. that same day in front of my house in Cairn Edward (sixteen miles away), burst into my consulting-room with the following demand, proclaimed in frenzied accents: "Lend me your Bentley's Botany, or something – not that beastly jaw-breaking German thing you are so fond of, but something plain and easy, with the names of all the plants in. I have the whole thing to get up by eight o'clock to-night, and I'll eat my head if I can remember what a cotyledon is!"

It is believed that on the way back the Eel studied Bentley, cunningly adjusted on the handlebar, with loops of string to keep the pages from fluttering. (He was a trick-rider of repute.) At any rate, he did not waste his time, and arrived at the manse so full of botanical terms that he had considerable difficulty in making himself intelligible to the maid, who on this occasion, being cleaned up, opened the door to him in state.

This was the beginning of the taming of the tiger. Gilbert preached the next forenoon, and pleased the Doctor greatly by the excellent taste of his opening remarks upon his text, which was, "To preach the gospel … and not to boast in another man's line of things made ready to our hand."

The preacher, as a new and original departure, divided his subject into three heads, as followeth: First, "The Duty of Respect for Ecclesiastical Superiors"; second, "The Duty of Christian Liberality" (he had to drag this in neck and crop); and thirdly, "The Supreme Duty of Humility in the Young with respect to their Elders."

While he was looking it over on Sunday morning Gilbert heartily confounded his friend Begg for forgetting the other fifteen divisions of Dr. Girnigo's sermons.

"I could have made a much better appearance if that fellow Begg had had any sense!" he said to himself. "But" (with a sigh) "I must just do the best I can with these."

Nevertheless, Dr. Girnigo considered that Gibby had surpassed himself in his application. He showed how any good that he might do in the parish must not be set down to his credit, but to that of Another who had so long laboured among them; and how that he (the preacher), being but "as one entering upon another man's line of things," it behoved him above all things not to be boastful.

"A very sound address – quite remarkable in one so young!" was the Doctor's verdict as he met the Session after the close of Gilbert's first service.

The Session and congregation, however, did not approve quite so highly, having had a surfeit of similar teaching during the past forty years.

But Walter Learmont, senior (sad to tell it of an Elder), winked the sober eye and remarked to his intimates: "Bide a wee – he kens his way aboot, thon yin. He wad juist be drawin' the auld man's leg!"

At any rate, certain it is that after this auspicious beginning Gibby the Eel (M.A.) remained longer in Rescobie than all his predecessors put together.

But it was to Jemima Girnigo that he owed this.

THE GATE OF THE UPPER GARDEN

For the first six months that Gibby the Eel, otherwise the Reverend Gilbert Denholm, M.A., acted as "helper" to Dr. Joseph Girnigo in the parish of Rescobie, he was much pleased with himself. He laughed with his friend and classmate, Robertland, over the infatuation of the doctor's old maid daughter. The parish, reading the situation like a book, smiled broadly when the "helper" and Miss Jemima Girnigo were discerned on an opposite braeface, botanising together, or, with heads bent over some doubtful bloom, stood silhouetted against the sunlit green of some glade in Knockandrews wood.

During this period Gibby hugged himself upon his cleverness, but the time came when he began to have his doubts. What to him was a lightheart prank, an "Eel's trick," like his college jest of squirming secretly under class-room benches, was obviously no jest to this pale-eyed, sharp-featured maiden of one-and-forty.

Jemima Girnigo had never been truly young. Repressed and domineered over as a child, she had been suddenly promoted by her mother's death to the care of a household and the responsibility of training a bevy of younger brothers, all now out in the world and doing for themselves. Her life had grown more and more arid and self-contained. She had nourished her soul on secret penances, setting herself hard household tasks, and doing with only one small, untaught, slatternly maid from the village, in order that her father might be able to assist his sons into careers. She read dry theology to mortify a liking for novels, and shut up her soul from intercourse with her equals, conscious, perhaps, that visitors would infallibly discover and laugh at her father's meannesses and peculiarities.

Only her flowers kept her soul sweet and a human heart beating within that buckram-and-whalebone-fenced bosom.

Then, all suddenly came Gilbert Denholm with his merry laugh, his light-heart ways (which she openly reproved, but secretly loved), his fair curls clustering about his brow, and his way of throwing back his head as if to shake them into place. Nothing so young, so winsome, or so gay had ever set foot within that solemn dreich old manse. It was like a light-heart city beauty coming to change the life and disturb the melancholy of some stern woman-despising hermit. But Jemima Girnigo's case was infinitely worse, in that she was a woman and the disturber of her peace little better than a foolish boy.

But Gilbert Denholm, kindly lad though he was, saw no harm. He was only, he thought, impressing himself upon the parish. He saw himself daily becoming more popular. No farmer's party was considered to be anything which wanted his ready wit and contagious merriment. Already there was talk among the Session of securing him as permanent assistant and successor. There were fairways and clear sunlit vistas before Gilbert Denholm; and he liked his professional prospects all the better that he owed them to his own wit and knowledge of the world. He was a good preacher. He made what is called an excellent appearance in the pulpit. He did not "read." His fluency of utterance held sleepy ploughmen in a state of blinking attention for the better part of an hour. Even Dr. Girnigo commended, and Gibby who had no more abundant or direct "spiritual gifts" than are the portion of most kind-hearted, well-brought-up Scottish youths, was unconscious of his lack of any higher qualifications for the Christian ministry.