CHAPTER IV.

First coming of the Egyptian woman.

A learned man says in a book, otherwise beautiful with truth, that villages are family groups.  To him Thrums would only be a village, though town is the word we have ever used, and this is not true of it.  Doubtless we have interests in common, from which a place so near (but the road is heavy) as Tilliedrum is shut out, and we have an individuality of our own too, as if, like our red houses, we came from a quarry that supplies no other place.  But we are not one family.  In the old days, those of us who were of the Tenements seldom wandered to the Croft head, and if we did go there we saw men to whom we could not always give a name.  To flit from the Tanage brae to Haggart’s road was to change one’s friends.  A kirk-wynd weaver might kill his swine and Tillyloss not know of it until boys ran westward hitting each other with the bladders.  Only the voice of the dulsemen could be heard all over Thrums at once.  Thus even in a small place but a few outstanding persons are known to everybody.

In eight days Gavin’s figure was more familiar in Thrums than many that had grown bent in it.  He had already been twice to the cemetery, for a minister only reaches his new charge in time to attend a funeral.  Though short of stature he cast a great shadow.  He was so full of his duties, Jean said, that though he pulled to the door as he left the manse, he had passed the currant bushes before it snecked.  He darted through courts, and invented ways into awkward houses.  If you did not look up quickly he was round the corner.  His visiting exhausted him only less than his zeal in the pulpit, from which, according to report, he staggered damp with perspiration to the vestry, where Hendry Munn wrung him like a wet cloth.  A deaf lady, celebrated for giving out her washing, compelled him to hold her trumpet until she had peered into all his crannies, with the Shorter Catechism for a lantern.  Janet Dundas told him, in answer to his knock, that she could not abide him, but she changed her mind when he said her garden was quite a show.  The wives who expected a visit scrubbed their floors for him, cleaned out their presses for him, put diamond socks on their bairns for him, rubbed their hearthstones blue for him, and even tidied up the garret for him, and triumphed over the neighbours whose houses he passed by.  For Gavin blundered occasionally by inadvertence, as when he gave dear old Betty Davie occasion to say bitterly—­

“Ou ay, you can sail by my door and gang to Easie’s, but I’m thinking you would stop at mine too if I had a brass handle on’t.”

So passed the first four weeks, and then came the fateful night of the seventeenth of October, and with it the strange woman.  Family worship at the manse was over and Gavin was talking to his mother, who never crossed the threshold save to go to church (though her activity at home was among the marvels Jean sometimes slipped down to the Tenements to announce). when Wearyworld the policeman came to the door “with Rob Dow’s compliments, and if you’re no wi’ me by ten o’clock I’m to break out again.”  Gavin knew what this meant, and at once set off for Rob’s.