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I

THE LAST ANDERSON OF DEESIDE

Pleasant is sunshine after rain,

Pleasant the sun;

To cheer the parched land again,

Pleasant the rain.

Sweetest is joyance after pain,

Sweetest is joy;

Yet sorest sorrow worketh gain,

Sorrow is gain.

” As in the Days of Old.”

“Weel, he’s won awa’!”

“Ay, ay, he is that!”

The minister’s funeral was winding slowly out of the little manse loaning. The window-blinds were all down, and their bald whiteness, like sightless eyes looking out of the white-washed walls and the trampled snow, made the Free Church manse of Deeside no cheerful picture that wild New Year’s Day. The green gate which had so long hung on one hinge, periodically mended ever since the minister’s son broke the other swinging on it the summer of the dry year before he went to college, now swayed forward with a miserably forlorn lurch, as though it too had tried to follow the funeral procession of the man who had shut it carefully the last thing before he went to bed every night for forty years.

Andrew Malcolm, the Glencairn joiner, who was conducting the funeral–if, indeed, Scots funerals can ever be said to be conducted–had given it a too successful push to let the rickety hearse have plenty of sea-room between the granite pillars. It was a long and straggling funeral, silent save for the words that stand at the opening of this tale, which ran up and down the long black files like the irregular fire of skirmishers.

“Ay, man, he’s won awa’!”

“Ay, ay, he is that!”

This is the Scottish Lowland “coronach,” characteristic and expressive as the wailing of the pipes to the Gael or the keening of women among the wild Eirionach.

“We are layin’ the last o’ the auld Andersons o’ Deeside amang the mools the day,” said Saunders M’Quhirr, the farmer of Drumquhat, to his friend Rob Adair of the Mains of Deeside, as they walked sedately together, neither swinging his arms as he would have done on an ordinary day. Saunders had come all the way over Dee Water to follow the far-noted man of God to his rest.

“There’s no siccan men noo as the Andersons o’ Deeside,” said Rob Adair, with a kind of pride and pleasure in his voice. “I’m a dale aulder than you, Saunders, an’ I mind weel o’ the faither o’ him that’s gane.” (Rob had in full measure the curious South-country disinclination to speak directly of the dead.)

“Ay, an angry man he was that day in the ’43 when him that’s a cauld corp the day, left the kirk an’ manse that his faither had pitten him intil only the year afore. For, of coorse, the lairds o’ Deeside were the pawtrons o’ the pairish; an’ when the auld laird’s yae son took it intil his head to be a minister, it was in the nature o’ things that he should get the pairish.

“Weel, the laird didna speak to his son for the better part o’ twa year; though mony a time he drave by to the Pairish Kirk when his son was haudin’ an ootdoor service at the Auld Wa’s where the three roads meet. For nae sicht could they get on a’ Deeside for kirk or manse, because frae the Dullarg to Craig Ronald a’ belanged to the laird. The minister sent the wife an’ bairns to a sma’ hoose in Cairn Edward, an’ lodged himsel’ amang sic o’ the farmers as werena feared for his faither’s factor. Na, an’ speak to his son the auld man wadna, for the very dourness o’ him. Ay, even though the minister wad say to his faither, ‘Faither, wull ye no’ speak to yer ain son?’ no’ ae word wad he answer, but pass him as though he hadna seen him, as muckle as to say–‘Nae son o’ mine!’