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It was on a fierce and
howling day that I was crossing the dreary moor of Auchindown, on my way
to the manse of that parish—a solitary pedestrian. The snow, which had
been incessantly falling for a week past, was drifted into beautiful but
dangerous wreaths, far and wide, over the melancholy expanse ; and the
scene kept visibly shifting before I me, as the strong wind that blew
from every point of the compass struck the dazzling masses, and heaved
them up and down in endless transformation. There was something
inspiriting in the labour with which, in the buoyant strength of youth,
I forced my way through the storm ; and I could not but enjoy those
gleamings of sunlight that ever and anon burst through some unexpected
opening in the sky, and gave a character of cheerfulness, and even
warmth, to the sides or summits of the stricken hills. Sometimes the
wind stopped of a sudden, and then the air was as silent as the snow—not
a murmur to be heard from spring or stream, now all frozen up over those
high moorlands. As the momentary cessations of the sharp drift, allowed
my eyes to look onwards and around, I saw here and there, up the little
opening valleys, cottages just visible beneath the black stems of their
snow-covered clumps of trees, or beside some small spot of green pasture
kept open for the sheep. These intimations of life and happiness came
delightfully to me in the midst of the desolation; and the barking of a
dog, attending some shepherd in his quest on the hill, put fresh vigour
into my limbs, telling me that, lonely as I seemed to be, I was
surrounded by cheerful, though unseen company, and that I was not the
only wanderer over the snows. As I walked along, my mind was insensibly
filled with a crowd of pleasant images of rural winter life, that helped
me gladly onwards over many miles of moor. I thought of the severe but
cheerful labours of the barn—the mending of farm-gear by the
fireside—the wheel turned by the foot of old age less for gain than as a
thrifty pastime—the skilful mother making "auld claes look amaist as
weel’s the new” the ballad unconsciously listened to by the family all
busy at their own tasks round the singing maiden—the old traditionary
tale, told by some wayfarer hospitably housed till the storm should blow
by—the unexpected visit of neighbours on need or friendship—or the
footstep of lover undeterred by snow-drifts that have buried up his
flocks ;—but above all, I thought of those hours of religious worship
that have not yet escaped from the domestic life of the peasantry of
Scotland—of the sound of psalms that the depth of the snow cannot deaden
to the ear of Him to whom they are chanted—and of that sublime
Sabbath-keeping which, on days too tempestuous for the kirk, changes the
cottage of the shepherd into the temple of God.
With such glad and
peaceful images in my heart, I travelled along that dreary moor, with
the cutting wind in my face, and my feet sinking in the snow, or sliding
on the hard blue ice beneath it—as cheerfully as I ever walked in the
dewy warmth of a summer morning, through fields of fragrance and of
flowers. And now I could discern, within half an hour’s walk, before me,
the spire of the church, close to which stood the manse of my aged
friend and benefactor. My heart burned within me as a sudden gleam of
stormy sunlight tipped it with fire; and I felt, at that moment, an
inexpressible sense of the sublimity of the character of that grayheaded
shepherd who had, for fifty years, abode in the wilderness, keeping
together his own happy little dock.
As I was ascending a
knoll, I saw before me on horseback an old man, with his long white
hairs beaten against his face, who, nevertheless, advanced with a calm
countenance against the hurricane. It was no other than my father, of
whom I had been thinking—for my father had I called him for many years,
and for many years my father had he truly been. My surprise at meeting
him on such a moor—on such a day—was but momentary, for I knew that he
was a shepherd who cared not for the winter’s wrath. As he stopped to
take my hand kindly into his, and to give his blessing to his
long-expected visitor, the wind fell calm—the whole face of the sky was
softened, and brightness, like a smile, went over the blushing and
crimson snow. The very elements seemed then to respect the hoary head of
fourscore; and after our first greeting was over, when I looked around,
in my affection, I felt how beautiful was winter.
"I am going," said he,
"to visit a man at the point of death; a man whom you cannot have
forgotten; whose head will be missed in the kirk next Sabbath by all my
congregation; a devout man, who feared God all his days, and whom, on
this awful trial, God will assuredly remember. I am going, my son, to
the Hazel Glen."
I knew well in childhood
that lonely farmhouse, so far off among the beautiful wild green hills,
and it was not likely that I had forgotten the name of its possessor.
For six years' Sabbaths I had seen the Elder in his accustomed place
beneath the pulpit, and, with a sort of solemn fear, had looked on his
steadfast countenance during sermon, psalm, and prayer. On returning to
the scenes of my infancy, I now met the pastor going to pray by his
death-bed ; and, with the privilege which nature gives us to behold,
even in their last extremity, the loving and the beloved, I turned to
accompany him to the house of sorrow, resignation, and death.
And now, for the first
time, I observed walking close to the feet of his horse, a little boy of
about ten years of age, who kept frequently looking up in the pastor’s
face, with his blue eyes bathed in tears. A changeful expression of
grief hope, and despair, made almost pale cheeks that otherwise were
blooming in health and beauty; and I recognised, in the small features
and smooth forehead of childhood, a resemblance to the aged man whom we
understood was now lying on his death-bed. "They had to send his
grandson for me through the snow, mere child as he is," said the
minister to me, looking tenderly on the boy; "but love makes the young
heart bold—and there is One l who tempers the wind to the shorn lamb."
I again looked on the
fearless child with his rosy cheeks, blue eyes, and yellow hair, so
unlike grief or sorrow, yet now sobbing aloud as if his heart would
break. "I do not fear but that my grandfather will yet recover, as soon
as the minister has said one single prayer by his bedside. I had no
hope, or little, as I was running by myself to the manse over hill after
hill, but I am full of hopes, now that we are together; and oh! if God
suffers my grandfather to recover, I will lie awake all the long winter
nights blessing Him for His mercy. I will rise up in the middle of the
darkness, and pray to Him in the cold on my naked knees!” and here his
voice was choked, while he kept his eyes fixed, as if for consolation
and encouragement, on the solemn and pitying countenance of the
kind-hearted pious old man.
We soon left the main
road, and struck off through scenery that, covered as it was with the
bewildering snow, I sometimes dimly and sometimes vividly remembered;
our little guide keeping ever a short distance before us, and with a
sagacity like that of instinct, showing us our course, of which no trace
was visible, save occasionally his own little footprints as he had been
hurrying to the manse.
After crossing, for
several miles, morass and frozen rivulet, and drifted hollow, with here
and there the top of a stone-wall peeping through the snow, or the more
visible circle of a sheep-bucht, we descended into the Hazelglen, and
saw before us the solitary house of the dying Elder.
A gleam of days gone by
came suddenly over my soul. The last time that I had been in this glen
was on a day of June, fifteen years before,—a holiday, the birthday of
the king. A troop of laughing schoolboys, headed by our benign pastor,
we danced over the sunny braes, and startled the linnets from their
nests among the yellow broom. Austere as seemed to us the Elder's
Sabbath face when sitting in the kirk, we schoolboys knew that it had
its week-day smiles, and we flew on the wings of joy to our annual
festival of curds and cream in the farm-house of that little sylvan
world. We rejoiced in the flowers and the leaves of that long, that
interminable summer day; its memory was with our boyish hearts from June
to June; and the sound of that sweet name, "Hazel Glen," often came upon
us at our tasks, and brought too brightly into the school-room the
pastoral imagery of that mirthful solitude.
As we now slowly
approached the cottage through a deep snow-drift, which the distress
within had prevented the household from removing, we saw peeping out
from the door, brothers and sisters of our little guide, who quickly
disappeared, and then their mother showed herself in their stead,
expressing by her raised eyes, and arms, folded across her breast, how
thankful she was to see at last the pastor, beloved in joy and trusted
in trouble.
Soon as the venerable old
man dismounted from his horse, our active little guide led it away into
the humble stable, land we entered the cottage. Not a sound was heard
but the ticking of the clock. The matron, who had silently welcomed us
at the door, led us, with suppressed sighs and a face stained with
weeping, into her father’s sick room, which even in that time of sore
distress was as orderly as if health had blessed the house. I could not
help remarking some old china ornaments on the chimneypiece, and in the
window was an ever-blowing rose-tree, that almost touched the lowly
roof, and brightened that end of the apartment with its blossoms. There
was something tasteful in the simple furniture; and it seemed as if
grief could not deprive the hand of that matron of its careful elegance.
Sickness, almost hopeless sickness, lay there, surrounded with the same
cheerful and beautiful objects which health had loved ; and she, who had
arranged and adorned the apartment in her happiness, still kept it from
disorder and decay in her sorrow.
With a gentle hand she
drew the curtain of the bed, and there, supported by pillows as white as
the snow that lay without, reposed the dying Elder. It was plain that
the hand of God was upon him, and that his days on the earth were
numbered.
He greeted his minister
with a faint smile, and a slight inclination of the head—for his
daughter had so raised him on the pillows, that he was almost sitting up
in his bed. It was easy to see that he knew himself to be dying, and
that his soul was prepared for the great change; yet, along with the
solemn resignation of a Christian who had made his peace with God and
his Saviour, there was blended on his white and sunken countenance an
expression of habitual reverence for the minister of his faith; and I
saw that he could not have died in peace without that comforter to pray
by his death-bed.
A few words sufficed to
tell who was the stranger ;—and the dying man, blessing me by name, held
out to me his cold shrivelled hand, in token of recognition. I took my
seat at a small distance from the bedside, and left a closer station for
those who were more dear. The pastor sat down near his head ; and, by
the bed, leaning on it with gentle hands, stood that matron, his
daughter-in-law—a figure that would have graced and sainted a higher
dwelling, and whose native beauty was now more touching in its grief.
But religion upheld her whom nature was bowing down. Not now for the
first time were the lessons taught by her father to be put into
practice, for I saw that she was clothed in deep mourning and she
behaved like the daughter of a man whose life had been not only
irreproachable but lofty, with fear and hope fighting desperately but
silently in the core of her pure and pious heart.
While we thus remained in
silence, the beautiful boy, who, at the risk of his life, had brought
the minister of religion to the bedside of his beloved grandfather,
softly and cautiously opened the door, and with the hoar-frost yet
unmelted on his bright glistering ringlets, walked up to the pillow,
evidently no stranger there. He no longer sobbed—he no longer wept—for
hope had risen strongly within his innocent heart, from the
consciousness of love so fearlessly exerted, and from the presence of
the holy man in whose prayers he trusted, as in the intercession of some
superior and heavenly nature. There he stood, still as an image in his
grandfather’s eyes, that, in their dimness, fell upon him with delight.
Yet, happy as was the trusting child, his heart was devoured by fear,
and he looked as if one word might stir up the flood of tears that had
subsided in his heart. As he crossed the dreary and dismal moors, he had
thought of a corpse, a shroud, and a grave; he had been in terror, lest
death should strike in his absence the old man, with whose gray hairs he
had so often played; but now he raw him alive, and felt that death was
not able to tear him away from the clasps, and links, and fetters of his
grandchild’s embracing love.
"If the storm do not
abate," said the sick man, after a pause, "it will be hard for my
friends to carry me over the drifts to the kirkyard." This sudden
approach to the grave struck, as with a bar of ice, the heart of the
loving boy; and, with a long deep sigh, he fell down with his face like
ashes on the bed, while the old man’s palsied right hand had just
strength to lay itself upon his head. "Blessed be thou, my little Jamie,
even for His own name’s sake who died for us on the tree!" The mother,
without terror, but with an averted face, lifted up her loving-hearted
boy, now in a dead fainting-fit, and carried him into an adjoining room,
where he soon revived. But that child and the old man were not to be
separated. In vain he was asked to go to his brothers and sisters;—pale,
breathless, and shivering, he took his place as before, with eyes fixed
on his grandfather’s face, but neither weeping nor uttering a word.
Terror had frozen up the blood of his heart; but his were now the only
dry eyes in the room; and the pastor himself wept—albeit the grief of
fourscore is seldom vented in tears.
"God has been gracious to
me, a sinner," said the dying man. "During thirty years that I have been
an elder in your kirk, never have I missed sitting there one Sabbath.
When the mother of my children was taken from me—it was on a Tuesday she
died, and on Saturday she was buried—we stood together when my Alice was
let down into the narrow house made for all living; on the Sabbath I
joined in the public worship of God: she commanded me to do so the night
before she went away. I could not join in the psalm that sabbath, for
her voice was not in the throng. Her grave was covered up, and grass and
flowers grew there; so was my heart; but thou, whom, through the blood
of Christ, I hope to see this night in Paradise, knowest that, from that
hour to this day, never have I forgotten thee!"
The old man ceased
speaking, and his grandchild, now able to endure the scene (for strong
passion is its own support), glided softly to a little table, and
bringing a cup in which a cordial had been mixed, held it in his small
soft hands to his grandfather’s lips. He drank, and then said, "Come
closer to me, Jamie, and kiss me for thine own and thy father’s sake ;”
and as the child fondly pressed his rosy lips on those of his
grandfather, so white and withered, the tears fell over all the old
man’s face, and then trickled down on the golden head of the child, at
last sobbing in his bosom.
"Jamie, thy own father
has forgotten thee in thy infancy, and me in my old age; but, Jamie,
forget not thou thy father nor thy mother, for that thou knowest and
feelest is the commandment of God."
The broken-hearted boy
could give no reply. He had gradually stolen closer and closer unto the
old loving man, and now was lying, worn out with sorrow, drenched and
dissolved in tears, in his grandfathers bosom. His mother had sunk down
on her knees and hid her face with her hands. "Oh! if my husband knew
but of this—he would never, never desert his dying father!" and I now
knew that the Elder was praying on his death-bed for a disobedient and
wicked son.
At this affecting time
the minister took the family Bible on his knees, and said, "Let us sing
to the praise and glory of God, part of the fifteenth psalm ;" and he
read, with a tremulous and broken voice, those beautiful verses:—
"Within thy tabernacle,
Lord,
Who shall abide with thee?
And in Thy high and holy hill
Who shall a dweller be?
The man that walketh uprightly,
And worketh righteousness,
And as he thinketh in his heart,
So cloth he truth express."
The small congregation
sang the noble hymn of the psalmist to "plaintiff Martyrs, worthy of the
name." The dying man himself ever and anon, joined in the holy music;
and when it feebly died away on his quivering lips, he continued still
to follow the tune with the motion of his withered hand, and eyes
devoutly and humbly lifted up to heaven. Nor was the sweet voice of his
loving grandchild unheard; as if the strong fit of deadly passion had
dissolved in the music, he sang with a sweet and silvery voice, that, to
a passer-by, had seemed that of perfect happiness—a hymn sung in joy
upon its knees by gladsome childhood before it flew out among the green
hills, to quiet labour or gleesome play. As that sweetest voice came
from the bosom of the old man, where the singer lay in affection, and
blended with his own so tremulous, never had I felt so affectingly
brought before me the beginning and the end of life, the cradle and the
grave.
Ere the psalm was yet
over, the door was opened, and a tall fine-looking man entered, but with
a lowering and dark countenance, seemingly in sorrow, in misery, and
remorse. Agitated, confounded, and awe-struck by the melancholy and
dirge-like music, he sat down on a chair, and looked with a ghastly face
towards his father’s death-bed. When the psalm ceased, the Elder said
with a solemn voice, "My son, thou art come in time to receive thy
father’s blessing. May the remembrance of what will happen in this room
before the morning again shine over the Hazel Glen win thee from the
error of thy ways! Thou art here, to witness the mercy of thy God and
thy Saviour, whom thou hast forgotten."
The minister looked, if
not with a stern, yet with an upbraiding countenance, on the young man,
who had not recovered his speech, and said, " William! for three years
past your shadow has not darkened the door of the house of God. They who
fear not the thunder may tremble at the still small voice; now is the
hour for repentance, that your father’s spirit may carry up to heaven
tidings of a contrite soul saved from the company of sinners!"
The young man, with much
effort, advanced to the bedside, and at last found voice to say,
"Father, I am not without the affections of nature, and I hurried home
as soon as I heard that the minister had been seen riding towards our
house. I hope that you will yet recover, and if I have ever made you
unhappy, I ask your forgiveness; for though I may not think as you do on
matters of religion, I have a human heart. Father! I may have been
unkind, but I am not cruel. I ask your forgiveness."
"Come nearer to me,
William; kneel down by the bedside, and let my hand find the head of my
beloved son--for blindness is coming fast upon me. Thou wert my
first-born, and thou art my only living son. All thy brothers and
sisters are lying in the kirkyard, beside her whose sweet face thine
own, William, did once so much resemble. Long wert thou the joy, the
pride of my soul—ay, too much the pride, for there was not in all the
parish such a man, such a son, as my own William. If thy heart has since
been changed, God may inspire it again with right thoughts. Could I die
for thy sake—could I purchase thy salvation with the outpouring of thy
Father’s blood-but this the Son of God has done for thee, who hast
denied Him! I have sorely wept for thee—ay, William, when there was none
near me—even as David wept for Absalom, for thee, my son, my son! ”
A long deep groan was the
only reply; but the whole body of the kneeling man was convulsed; and it
was easy to see his sufferings, his contrition, his remorse, and his
despair. The pastor said, with a sterner voice and austerer countenance
than were natural to him, "Know you whose hand is now lying on your
rebellious head? But what signifies the word father to him who has
denied God, the Father of us all?”— "Oh! press him not so hardly," said
the weeping wife, coming forward from a dark corner of the room, where
she had tried to conceal herself in grief, fear, and shame. "Spare, oh!
Spare my husband. He has ever been kind to me;" and with that she knelt
down beside him, with her long, soft, white arms mournfully and
affectionately laid across his neck. "Go thou, likewise, my sweet little
Jamie," said the Elder, "go even out of my bosom, and kneel down beside
thy father and thy mother, so that I may bless you all at once, and with
one yearning prayer.’ The child did as that solemn voice commanded, and
knelt down somewhat timidly by his father’s side; nor did that unhappy
man decline encircling with his arm the child too much neglected, but
still dear to him as his own blood, in spite of the deadening and
debasing influence of infidelity.
"Put the Word of God into
the hands of my son, and let him read aloud to his dying father the
25th, 26th, and 27th verses of the eleventh chapter of the Gospel
according to St ]ohn." The pastor went up to the kneelers, and, with a
voice of pity, condolence, and pardon, said, "There was a time when
none, William, could read the Scriptures better than couldst thou—can it
be that the son of my friend hath forgotten the lessons of his youth?"
He had not forgotten them; there was no need for the repentant sinner to
lift up his eyes from the bedside. The sacred stream of the Gospel had
worn a channel in his heart, and the waters were again flowing. With a
choked voice he said, "]esus said unto her, I am the Resurrection and
the Life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he
live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die.
Believest thou this? She saith unto him, Yea, Lord; I believe that thou
art the Christ, the Son of God, which should come into the world."
"That is not an
unbelievers voice," said the dying man triumphantly; "nor, William, hast
thou an unbeliever’s heart. Say that thou believest in what thou hast
now read, and thy father will die happy!"—"I do believe; and as thou
forgivest me, so may I be forgiven by my Father who is in heaven.”
The Elder seemed like a
man suddenly inspired with a new life. His faded eyes kindled—his pale
cheeks glowed—his palsied hands seemed to wax strong—and his voice was
clear as that of manhood in its prime. "Into Thy hands, O God, I commit
my spiritl ” —and so saying, he gently sank back on his pillow; and I
thought I heard a sigh. There was then a long deep silence, and the
father, and mother, and child rose from their knees. The eyes of us all
were turned towards the white placid face of the figure now stretched in
everlasting rest ; and without lamentations, save the silent
lamentations of the resigned soul, we stood around the "Death-bed of the
Elder." |
