style="font-size:15px;"> 'My colonel has the glory,' Barclay said once, and but once, to his sister, 'but, puir fallow, I hae the wife!' And truly the wife at the farm had in her material enough, both moral and intellectual, for ten ladies better than the wife at the castle.
David's wife brought him a son the first year of their marriage, and the next year came a son to the colonel and a daughter to the sergeant. One night, as the two fathers sat together at the farm, some twelve hours after the birth of David's girl, they mutually promised that the survivor would do his best for the child of the other. Before he died the colonel would gladly have taken his boy from his wife and given him to his old comrade.
As to Steenie, the elder of David's children, he was yet unborn when his father, partly in consequence of a wound from which he never quite recovered, met with rather a serious accident through a young horse in the harvest-field, and the report reached his wife that he was killed. To the shock she thus received was generally attributed the peculiarity of the child, prematurely born within a month after. He had long passed the age at which children usually begin to walk, before he would even attempt to stand, but he had grown capable of a speed on all-fours that was astonishing. When at last he did walk, it was for more than two years with the air of one who had learned a trick; and throughout his childhood and a great part of his boyhood, he continued to go on all-fours rather than on his feet.
CHAPTER VI
MAN-STEENIE
The sleeping youth began at length to stir: it was more than an hour before he quite woke up. Then all at once he started to his feet with his eyes wide open, putting back from his forehead the long hair which fell over them, and revealing a face not actually looking old, but strongly suggesting age. His eyes were of a pale blue, with a hazy, mixed, uncertain gleam in them, reminding one of the shifty shudder and shake and start of the northern lights at some heavenly version of the game of Puss in the Corner. His features were more than good; they would have been grand had they been large, but they were peculiarly small. His head itself was very small in proportion to his height, his forehead, again, large in proportion to his head, while his chin was such as we are in the way of calling strong. Although he had been all day acting a dog in charge of sheep, and treating the collie as his natural companion, there was, both in his countenance and its expression, a remarkable absence of the animal. He had a kind of exaltation in his look; he seemed to expect something, not at hand, but sure to come. His eyes rested for a moment, with a love of absolute devotion, on the face of his sister; then he knelt at her feet, and as if to receive her blessing, bowed his head before her. She laid her hand upon it, and in a tone of unutterable tenderness said, 'Man-Steenie!' Instantly he rose to his feet. Kirsty rose also, and they went out of the hut.
The sunlight had not left the west, but had crept round some distance toward the north. Stars were shining faint through the thin shadow of the world. Steenie stretched himself up, threw his arms aloft, and held them raised, as if at once he would grow and reach toward the infinite. Then he looked down on Kirsty, for he was taller than she, and pointed straight up, with the long lean forefinger of one of the long lean arms that had all day been legs to the would-be dog—into the heavens, and smiled. Kirsty looked up, nodded her head, and smiled in return. Then they started in the direction of home, and for some time walked in silence. At length Steenie spoke. His voice was rather feeble, but clear, articulate, and musical.
'My feet's terrible heavy the nicht, Kirsty!' he said. 'Gien it wasna for them, the lave o' me wud be up and awa. It's terrible to be hauden doon by the feet this gait!'
'We're a' hauden doon the same gait, Steenie. Maybe it's some waur for you 'at wud sae fain gang up, nor for the lave o' 's 'at's mair willin to bide a wee; but it 'll be the same at the last whan we're a' up there thegither.'
'I wudna care sae muckle gien he didna grip me by the queets (ankles), like! I dinna like to be grippit by the queets! He winna lat me win at the thongs!'
'Whan the richt time comes,' returned Kirsty solemnly, 'the bonny man 'll lowse the thongs himsel.'
'Ay, ay! I ken that weel. It was me 'at tellt ye. He tauld me himsel! I'm thinkin I'll see him the nicht, for I'm sair hauden doon, sair needin a sicht o' 'im. He's whiles lang o' comin!'
'I dinna won'er 'at ye're sae fain to see 'im, Steenie!' 'I am that; fain, fain!'
'Ye'll see 'im or lang. It's a fine thing to hae patience.'
'Ye come ilka day, Kirsty: what for sudna he come ilka nicht?'
'He has reasons, Steenie. He kens best.'
'Ay, he kens best. I ken naething but him—and you, Kirsty!'
Kirsty said no more. Her heart was too full.
Steenie stood still, and throwing back his head, stared for some moments up into the great heavens over him. Then he said:
'It's a bonny day, the day the bonny man bides in! The ither day—the day the lave o' ye bides in—the day whan I'm no mysel but a sair ooncomfortable collie—that day's ower het—and sometimes ower cauld; but the day he bides in is aye jist what a day sud be! Ay, it's that! it's that!'
He threw himself down, and lay for a minute looking up into the sky. Kirsty stood and regarded him with loving eyes.
'I hae a' the bonny day afore me!' he murmured to himself. 'Eh, but it's better to be a man nor a beast Snootie's a fine beast, and a gran' collie, but I wud raither be mysel—a heap raither—aye at han' to catch a sicht o' the bonny man! Ye maun gang hame to yer bed, Kirsty!– Is't the bonny man comes til ye i' yer dreams and says, "Gang til him, Kirsty, and be mortal guid til him"? It maun be surely that!'
'Willna ye gang wi' me, Steenie, as far as the door?' rejoined Kirsty, almost beseechingly, and attempting no answer to what he had last said.
It was at times such as this that Kirsty knew sadness. When she had to leave her brother on the hillside all the long night, to look on no human face, hear no human word, but wander in strangest worlds of his own throughout the slow dark hours, the sense of a separation worse than death would wrap her as in a shroud. In his bodily presence, however far away in thought or sleep or dreams his soul might be, she could yet tend him with her love; but when he was out of her sight, and she had to sleep and forget him, where was Steenie, and how was he faring? Then he seemed to her as one forsaken, left alone with his sorrows to an existence companionless and dreary. But in truth Steenie was by no means to be pitied. However much his life was apart from the lives of other men, he did not therefore live alone. Was he not still of more value than many sparrows? And Kirsty's love for him had in it no shadow of despair. Her pain at such times was but the indescribable love-lack of mothers when their sons are far away, and they do not know what they are doing, what they are thinking; or when their daughters seem to have departed from them or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl broken. And yet how few, when the air of this world is clearest, ever come into essential contact with those they love best! But the triumph of Love, while most it seems to delay, is yet ceaselessly rushing hitherward on the wings of the morning.
'Willna ye gang as far as the door wi' me, Steenie?' she said.
'I wull do that, Kirsty. But ye're no feart, are ye?'
'Na, no a grain! What would I be feart for?'
'Ow, naething! At this time there's naething oot and aboot to be feart at. In what ye ca' the daytime, I'm a kin' o' in danger o' knockin mysel again things; I never du that at nicht.'
As he spoke he sprang to his feet, and they walked on. Kirsty's heart seemed to swell with pain; for Steenie was at once more rational and more strange than usual, and she felt the farther away from
