“I will never tell who flung the clod at Captain Halliwell.  But why did you fling it?  I will never tell that you allowed me to be called Mrs. Dishart before witnesses.  But is not this a Scotch marriage?  Signed, Babbie the Egyptian.”

CHAPTER XI.

Tells in A whisper of man’s fall during the curling season.

No snow could be seen in Thrums by the beginning of the year, though clods of it lay in Waster Lunny’s fields, where his hens wandered all day as if looking for something they had dropped.  A black frost had set in, and one walking on the glen road could imagine that through the cracks in it he saw a loch glistening.  From my door I could hear the roar of curling stones at Rashie-bog, which is almost four miles nearer Thrums.  On the day I am recalling, I see that I only made one entry in my diary, “At last bought Waster Lunny’s bantams.”  Well do I remember the transaction, and no wonder, for I had all but bought the bantams every day for a six months.

About noon the doctor’s dog-cart was observed by all the Tenements standing at the Auld Licht manse.  The various surmises were wrong.  Margaret had not been suddenly taken ill; Jean had not swallowed a darning-needle; the minister had not walked out at his study window in a moment of sublime thought.  Gavin stepped into the dog-cart, which at once drove off in the direction of Rashie-bog, but equally in error were those who said that the doctor was making a curler of him.

There was, however, ground for gossip; for Thrums folk seldom called in a doctor until it was too late to cure them, and McQueen was not the man to pay social visits.  Of his skill we knew fearsome stories, as that, by looking at Archie Allardyce, who had come to broken bones on a ladder, he discovered which rung Archie fell from.  When he entered a stuffy room he would poke his staff through the window to let in fresh air, and then fling down a shilling to pay for the breakage.  He was deaf in the right ear, and therefore usually took the left side of prosy people, thus, as he explained, making a blessing of an affliction.  “A pity I don’t hear better?” I have heard him say.  “Not at all.  If my misfortune, as you call it, were to be removed, you can’t conceive how I should miss my deaf ear.”  He was a fine fellow, though brusque, and I never saw him without his pipe until two days before we buried him, which was five-and-twenty years ago come Martinmas.

“We’re all quite weel,” Jean said apprehensively as she answered his knock on the manse door, and she tried to be pleasant, too, for well she knew that, if a doctor willed it, she could have fever in five minutes.

“Ay, Jean, I’ll soon alter that,” he replied ferociously.  “Is the master in?”

“He’s at his sermon,” Jean said with importance.

To interrupt the minister at such a moment seemed sacrilege to her, for her up-bringing had been good.  Her mother had once fainted in the church, but though the family’s distress was great, they neither bore her out, nor signed to the kirk-officer to bring water.  They propped her up in the pew in a respectful attitude, joining in the singing meanwhile, and she recovered in time to look up 2nd Chronicles, 21st and 7th.