It was like a voice heard in lonely, echoing places; his words seemed to linger in the air long after he had spoken, as a twig still trembles when the bird has flown.
There was something almost foreign in his appearance as he stood with his head to one side while he listened, smilingly attentive, to what papa had to say. It was some minutes before I traced this strangeness to his eyes and discovered that, while one was blue, the other was brown. This peculiarity lent him an unfamiliar look, as though he were some one from a different planet, or as though each of his eyes looked out on a different world.
The children rose to their feet when we entered and the dominie brought forward a chair for me. Evidently he had expected papa to bring one of us with him, for beside his desk, adorned with flowers and ferns, where the minister was to sit, stood a chair for Julia which had been made into a bower. Armfuls of flowers and ferns were arranged round the room and some drawings of birds and insects had been pinned to the blackboard beside a few lined maps, with herring-bone mountain ranges and eel-like rivers.
A vast dumbness had spread over the children, who watched our every movement, all except little Jinty MacPhee, the mole-catcher’s daughter, and her gaze was fixed to her drawing of a thrush on the blackboard as though she expected it to fly away. There were about a score sitting on the whittled forms before us, the girls with red buttons of noses and blunt mouths, the boys with their large knuckled hands, big knees and swinging, scratched bare legs.
The proceedings began with their singing several songs in unison, then Ian Malloch, at the dominie’s prompting, rose to give a short recitation. His voice came and went huskily, but he kept on until the end, while his elder sister Maggie, knotting her fingers together in her nervousness, leant forward on the bench and watched his face intently as she frantically lipped his words. The five members of the Gow family now delivered with gusto and appropriate gestures ‘The Bonnie House o’ Airlie’. They were all red- haired and had the same jutting-out underlip—Nannie was wont to say that ‘gash-gabbit’ children were usually forward and ‘quick on the uptak’’.
Ten bonny sons I have borne unto him,
The eleventh ne’er saw his daddy;
Although I had a hundred more,
I would give them all to Prince Charly,
they finished triumphantly. After them, the three smallest girls sang in high sweet voices a quaint little song about rocking a baby to sleep.
‘They’re some verses sung often in the parts from where I come, Miss Lockhart,’ the dominie announced suddenly, addressing Julia as though she had spoken. He stood behind me and as I listened to his voice I wondered from where it was he came. ‘If you should so desire it, I can write out the lines for you.’
Julia thanked him and declared they were so pretty she would indeed like to have them. More songs were sung and recitations delivered. I think the dominie hoped the minister would now examine some of the older boys, but papa made no such proposal; indeed he appeared anxious to be gone. Perhaps the dominie sensed the preoccupied tenseness which sometimes emanated from him, as though he had been interrupted in the midst of something vitally important; anyway he went with us most readily to the door and accompanied us across the playground. I thought papa had forgotten about my lessons and was swallowing my disappointment, but at the gate he turned to the dominie and said:
‘Mr Mac Donald, I want to arrange with you to teach my youngest daughter Latin. I propose that you give her two lessons a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays, and that she comes to you in the afternoon, when she would not impinge upon your other lessons. She could perhaps begin this coming Tuesday?’
‘Yes,’ Julia said suddenly, ‘Tuesday would be quite suitable.’
We left the dominie looking after us with his disconcerting eyes, one of his hands still holding open the gate through which we had passed.
BOOK ONE. CHAPTER SIX
Julia had a headache; at least it was not actually a headache but a feeling of torpor, caused probably by the thundery weather. Emily said she knew the sensation exactly. ‘You feel,’ she sympathised, ‘like a cottage that has a heavy fall of snow on its thatch.’ Julia said she could not bear to remain in the house, so would come with me for my first lesson from the dominie and perhaps the walk would do her good. Emmy would not accompany us; the next worse thing to being taught Latin yourself, she said, was hearing some one else taught it. She would stay at home and help mamma stitch the new braid on to her old tunic, but she came with us as far as the manse gate which opened on to the road.
Sound took long to carry on the air burdened with the heavy, sweet smells that herald a thunder-storm. A faint mist had crept amongst the trees, filling up the spaces between the branches, so that they looked like spectral things. Shadows dragged on the loch, the mountains bulked forebodingly near, heat smote down from the low sky, and mist unrolled like dust from under the feet of a vast invisible army. Everything looked dead and ghostly, only the human beings were real, alive inhabitants of a dream world—Emmy bidding us good-bye, Julia with her high cheek-bones set well apart, broadening her face, the carter’s boy whistling beside his steaming horse.
We set off briskly along the road towards Barnfingal. I took off my bonnet and felt the sun hot upon the nape of my neck. The darkened landscape was like an old Biblical print in one of papa’s books at home, for the rays of the sun shot down obliquely from behind accumulating clouds, and it was raining in a slanting sheet on the other side of the loch.
We met the Gow Farm children on the brae coming home from school, so knew we were not late. The dominie was waiting for us, with several books he had looked out to discover which was the most suitable for me. I had always taken a delight in Latin and, even when I was quite small, loved translating the simplest sentences. Balbus who built a wall, the humble queen who washed the feet of the sailors, the nameless explorer who set out on a journey, all became personalities to me, and even the bald statement that ground is arable filled me with pleasure. I enjoyed my lesson from the dominie, who was a patient and encouraging teacher, and who secretly gratified me by saying I was further on than he had expected.
While he sat beside me, Julia moved about the schoolroom, reading the initials carved on the benches and looking at the slates piled on the dominie’s desk. My lesson lasted an hour and by the end of that time she was quite ready to be talkative. For want of something better to do she had taken a yellow flower out of a jar and was blowing its tight little buds open.
‘Tell me, Mr MacDonald,’ she asked, her lips curving into her bewitching smile, ‘I have been wondering so much as I listened to your voice from where you come.’
‘My mother came from the Nordeneys,’ he answered as he rose and shut his books. ‘That’s a far cry from here. And my father was a native of Mhorben.’
‘He’s dead then?’
‘They’re both dead—my mother died at my birth and my father some years ago.’
She stood looking up into his face.
‘I feel you were an only child,’ she said, ‘and were brought up by your “lone self”, not in the rough and tumble of a large family.’ She was merely speaking her thoughts, for we all conjectured and made up stories about the people we met.
He smiled and shook his head at her.
‘I was the seventh,’ he said.
‘And your father,’ she questioned instantly, ‘was he a seventh child too?’
‘Yes,’ he replied uneasily. ‘Why do you ask that?’
‘Ah,’ Julia exclaimed triumphantly, ‘then you will have second sight. What is it Nannie calls it again?—“the vision of the two worlds”.’
He was palpably taken aback and repudiated it hurriedly.
‘But, Mr MacDonald,’ she insisted, ‘a curious thing happened when we were here the other day. You answered a question of mine before I asked it.’
‘Did I?’ he replied,