FullReads

The minister was his own precentor, as, according to the law and regulation of the kirks of Scotland, he always is in the last resort, however he may choose to delegate his authority. He gave out from his swallow’s nest the Twenty-third Psalm, and led it off himself in a powerful and expressive voice, which sounded strangely in the empty church. The tune was taken up from the manse pew, in the dusk under the little gallery, by a quavering, uncertain pipe–as dry and unsympathetic as, contrariwise, the singer was warm-hearted and full of the very sap of human kindness. The minister was so absorbed in his own full-hearted praise that he was scarce conscious that he was almost alone in the chill emptiness of the church. Indeed, a strange feeling stole upon him, that he heard his wife’s voice singing the solemn gladness of the last verse along with him, as they had sung it together near forty years ago when she had first come to the hill kirk of Cauldshields.

“Goodness and mercy all my life
Shall surely follow me:
And in God’s house for evermore
My dwelling-place shall be.”

Then the prayer echoed along the walls, bare like a barn before the harvest. Nevertheless, I doubt not that it went straight to the throne of God as the minister pleaded for the weary and the heavy-laden, the fatherless and the oppressed, for the little children and those on whom the Lord has special pity–“for to Thee, O Lord, more are the children of the desolate than the children of the married wife, saith the Lord.” And the minister seemed to hear somewhere a sound of silent weeping, like that which he had hearkened to in the night long ago, when his wife sorrowed by his side and wept in the darkness for the loss of their only man-bairn.

The minister gave out his text. There was silence within, and without the empty church only the whistling sough of the snowdrift. “And when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck and kissed him.”

There was a moment’s pause, and a strange, unwonted sound came from the manse seat under the dark of the gallery. It was the creak of the housekeeper opening the door of the pew. The minister paused yet a moment in his discourse, his dim eyes vaguely expectant. But what he saw, stilled for ever the unspoken opening of his sermon. A girlish figure came up the aisle, and was almost at the foot of the pulpit-steps before the minister could move. And she carried something tenderly in her arms, as a bairn is carried when it is brought forward for the baptizing.

“My father!” she said.

Nobody knows how the minister got out of the pulpit except Euphemia Kerr, and it is small use asking her; but it is currently reported that it was in such fashion as never minister got out of pulpit before. And, at the door of the manse seat stood Euphemia, the wise woman of Tekoa, her tears falling pat-pat like raindrops on the narrow book-board; but with a smile on her face, as who would say, “Now, Lord, let Thy servant depart in peace,” when she saw the minister fall on the neck of his well-beloved daughter and kiss her, having compassion on her.

But this is what Sophia M’Diarmid that was, said when she heard of the home-coming of her sister Elsie.

“It was like her brazen face to come back when she had shut every other door. My father never made ony sic wark wi’ me that bade wi’ him respectable a’ my days; but hear ye to me, Mistress Colville, I will never darken their doorstep till the day of my death.” So she would not go in.