University of Virginia Library

Off with you, wee Curly Pow; off, little kitten, to bed;
You'll not leave a beard on my chin, and you'll not leave a hair on my head,
If you kiss me and tousle me so—there; already it's bald on the crown,
And once it was thatched like a haystack, the fuzziest head in the town.
Will I kiss you in bed to-night? Of course, I will, when you're asleep;
And you'll know it, because you will dream of angels that stand and weep
O'er chatterboxes that won't go to bed when they ought to go,
And all these angels have beards that are three days old or so—
You do not believe that angels ever have beards; they fly
With beautiful wings, and their hair is like sunbeams up in the sky?
Oh, you're a learned wee maidie; but yet it may well be true
That I do not know about angels so well, my darling, as you.
There; off with you now; that's the last, the very last kiss you shall get,
And mind you, I will not be cheated, you're twenty at least, in my debt.

Draw your chair nearer the fire, friend; there is a storm in the air:
Hark! how the sea is moaning: God help the fisher-folk there
Out in their crazy old boats, for we shall have wind and snow
Soon from the north-east driving, if aught of the weather I know.
But the bickering log is pleasant, with the collie coiled on the rug,
And the kettle there on the hob to brew us a steaming mug.
What! no more brewing to-night? you would rather be still and brood?
So be it; and well I can guess what has started your thinking mood.

You are wondering who that child is, and what she can be to me,
A dull old bachelor here in the farmhouse down by the sea?
A niece, a cousin perhaps? you had no ill thoughts in your head:
If you had, you would only have thought what scores of people have said.
Nay, no apology; none is needed: I've learnt to bear
Harder suspicion than yours, sir, and never to turn a hair.
I've nothing to be ashamed of; if all the truth were known,
It may even go to my credit, when God and I reckon alone;
Only that, good folk tell me, is hardly an orthodox thought:—
Not that I care, in the least, sir, whether it be so or not;
People here are afraid to utter a word out of joint,
But for me, I am far and away beyond our minister's point:
Trouble has taught me, like Job, that sometimes the veriest lies
Get them a hiding beneath the well-ordered words of the wise;
And wee Curly Pow is my darling, wee Curly Pow is my bliss!
God gave me her in my sorrow, as one seals love with a kiss.

Oh, my Lizzie! my Lizzie! yet Lizzie never was mine,
Except as the thing that we love is ours by a right divine,
Except as the beauty of nature is his who has eyes to see,
Though not an acre he owns, nor so much as a bush or a tree;
And so my Lizzie is mine by the love which for her I bore,
Yea, a possession which nothing can rob me of evermore.

Perhaps I should tell you the story: it is an old one now,
And it calls up things that are best left sleeping, I think; for they grow
Into hard thoughts when you stir them, mudding your life again,
Just when it seems to be settling, and clearing off sorrow and pain.
No matter; you have a right to know what it all may mean,
For you are my friend, and a friend should see what there is to be seen:
One should have no dark closets locked in his heart to hide
Aught from the wife of his bosom, or from the friend he has tried.

It is some ten years now since Lizzie—Pet's mother, you know—
Came to be servant at Blavick—that's the next farm as you go
Landward, maybe a mile hence; perched on a bit of a hill
Down which brattles the brook that drives the wheel of our mill;
Worst farmed land hereabout, all scarred like a pock-pitted face
Grey and unwholesome to look at; poor soil it is at the best,
But starved too, for money is scarce there, and work not so pleasant as rest.
Anyhow Lizzie came there, at Lammas some ten years past,
As bonny a lass as you'd see, sir, and clever and merry and chaste;
At kirk or at market you could not meet such another, nor find
At kirn or wedding to dance with a partner so to your mind,
Always so tidy and neat, and always as blithe as a bird,
With a ready laugh for your joke, and as ready a word for your word.

Blavick's wife was a slut—or she had been, for now she was dead,
And Lizzie, you see, had come to keep house for him in her stead—
Sluttish women are mostly fat, of a rosy tint,
But she was a black-a-vised person, bony and hard as flint:
Yet such a house as she kept, sir! pigs and hens and dogs
Littered the floors along with the milk-pails, peats, and logs;
Hard to pick your way through, for the place was dark with smoke,
And that had been hard to breathe, but mostly a window was broke.
Oh the dust on the settle! oh the soot on the wall!
And oh the dirt in the dairy, that was the worst of all!
I wondered how she could live in it, not at all that she died;
But for long years she had lost all a woman's natural pride.
Blavick himself was always lounging about the place,
A hulking lump of a man, with a huge expanse of face:
And if talk could have done it, all would soon have come right.
How he did talk, to be sure, through the long day and the night!
Maundering on about lime and guanos, rotation of crops,
Soils and subsoils, and ploughs, and the makers of them and their shops,
And all the new-fangled ways! but none of the old-fashioned work
Ever he put his hands to: there was not a rake or a fork,
Plough or harrow that was not broken, and out of repair
Just when they needed it most, and waste was everywhere.

But Lizzie began at once to make everything nice and clean,
To put everything in the house in its place where it should have been;
Pity the pig that ventured to grunt inside of her door!
Pity the hen that entered where it used to cackle before!
The kitchen was like a parlour, none of them dared to tread
With mucky shoes on her earth-floor; for she had a tongue in her head.
Women need to be able to scourge a fool with speech;
That is their only weapon to punish him or to teach;
And it was worth while hearing her hit them off, one by one,
Every phrase just a picture, lit up with a touch of fun,
Making them all, shamefaced, to do her bidding at once,
Till, at the last, she needed no more than a hasty glance.
Blavick used to be hateful; but now it grew pleasant to me,
At first, I hardly knew why, but just that I liked to see
The change that Lizzie had wrought; for that I would sit for hours
And hear old Blavick's chatter, as if it were sweet as the flowers.
Many a time when I went out just to look over a field,
And see how the corn was ripening, or guess at the turnip yield;
Many a time when I came away from the thronging fair,
Pleading I must go home for the task that I had to do there;
Many a time when I left for the kirk on the Sabbath day,
It was not the kirk I went to, for Blavick was in my way:
Somehow or other, something was always drawing me there,
As the tide runs after the moon—and oh but my moon was fair!
Then I knew that I loved her—loved her with all my heart,
As only a strong man can whose love is his strongest part.
She was only a servant maiden, but oh she was my queen:
She was only a cottar's daughter, and I was the farmer of Plein;
My fathers had been here, sir, for five generations back,
And never a lease ran out but the laird would renew the tack,
For they had money to farm with, and they could farm with skill,
And never a lease ran out, but the land looked richer still.
Yet she seemed high above me—ever so high above!
It never came into my head that I honoured her with my love;
Nay, but she was my moon, my chaste and beautiful moon,
And I but the panting tide that followed her syne and soon;
She was so bright, quick-witted, and I so dull and slow,
She high up in the heaven, and I on the earth below.
Folk said that I might do better? I thought, if she'd condescend
To smile on me, I would follow her on to the wide world's end.

But there was one at Blavick—and he too the worst of the lot,
Partly a horse-couping black-leg, partly, moreover, a sot;
Fain to look like a jockey, wearing a jaunty hat;
Some folk called him good-looking,— I am not a judge of that—
But in his eye was a hot moist leer, and he had a chin
That dropt inside of his necktie, and a hard and tight-drawn skin.
Other folk called him clever, but I should say only smart—
I call a man smart when his head does not feel the want of a heart,
And works best when it has laid the conscience high on the shelf,
Regarding not God or man, and caring for none but himself.

What is it women can see in men assured and bold,
That they give their warm true hearts to hearts that are false and cold?
That they give their pure souls up to men that are foul with sin,
Nor shrink from the outward taint, nor dread what is hidden within?
I never could comprehend how such things come to be,
And now it is more than ever a mystery grown to me.
That Blavick's son was a scamp, sir, as all the country knew:
You could read it plain in his face, he neither was manly nor true;
He ought to have been ashamed to speak to an honest maid,
And she too ought to have known the weapon with which she played,
Ought to have known the fellow would lead her a devil's dance.
But now there was no getting speech of her—hardly I met her once;
Always you saw them together; he went with her to the kirk,
Chatted with her at the milking, sat with her in the mirk;
In harvest she was his bandster; she raked for him at the hay;
And wherever you happened to meet her, he never was far away.
Ay! and he made her tryste him beside the “Dancing Cairn,”
Although she had heard the story of Bessie Lusk and her bairn;
But she said it was all a lie; the sheriff had let him go,
And Bessie had fallen asleep, and died in the drifting snow;
And even the minister found no fault that he could blame,
And it was wicked to rob a man of his honest name.
All this I saw going on, and yet like a fool, one day—
Every man plays the fool, I suppose, sir, once in a way—
Finding her by herself, I asked her to be my wife;
And when she had said me nay, ere I turned to my lonely life,
Partly because I loved her, and partly because I feared
What might happen, if things went on as they now appeared,
I warned her of him, as none but a fool would have thought to do.
Of course, she blazed up fiercely: there was not a word of it true;
'Twas gossip of wicked people, and some folk's meaner spite;
And she would believe in him now, though I proved it clear as the light;
And she would hold to him now, and sink with him or swim.—
I felt there was something grand in her womanly faith in him,
Felt too that I had been little—at least, that I must look small,
Though I said no more than the truth, and had not said nearly it all;
But then I should just have taken mine answer, and gone my way.—
A weary way now it was, sir, of lifeless work all day,
And brooding by night o'er the fire, and eating my heart like a fool,
Till things grew over my mind, like the weeds in a standing pool,
And I scarce knew what I was doing, or heeded a word that was said,
Going to kirk and market, and never once turning my head;
Doing my job of business, doing my bit of prayer,
With a changeless thought in my heart, and a changeless aching there.
People, I daresay, wondered why I sat brooding alone;
What did it matter to me? I let them go wondering on.
I hated the talk of the market, the glee of the curling rink,
And the rough jokes of the smithy, the ale-house too and its drink;
Yea, and I hated my life so brightened once by her smile,
So haloed and hallowed to me by the dream of her love for a while,
For now it had all gone dark, and I did not seem to mind
What the clouds might be gathering, or what might be in the wind.
Maybe, sir, you have known, now a feeling something like that,
When there's nothing you fear or wish for, it is all so stale and flat,
Tasteless and dry as a rush-pith you chew, and you don't know why—
It's a bad way to be found in if the devil should hap to come by.

So the spring passed with the tender green of the sticky leaves,
The songs of the mating birds, and the swallows' nest in the eaves;
So too the glory of summer with the smell of clover and bean,
The hawthorn white in the hedge, and the daisies white on the green;
And autumn also went with its wealth of well-stooked corn,
And the kine that low for the milk-pail duly at even and morn.
Nature passed through her changes, but I was still the same:
I ne'er fished a pool for the trout, and I fired not a shot at the game:
People were wedded and buried, but I was not there to see,
At harvest-homes the lasses might none of them dance with me.
There was nothing I heeded, except to put cash in the bank—
Not that I cared for that either, at least not much; but I thank
Heaven that I grew not a miserly churl as I might have done,
But for my wee Curly Pow, and her laugh like a blink of the sun.

But there; I am going too fast—there was not a Curly Pow yet;
But I never can think of those days without thinking too of my pet,
And what she has saved me from, and how I am in her debt:
Perhaps she was given me for this, to keep me from being a churl,
For my heart was set on the gold, until it was set on the girl.
Well; one evening that winter—it had been snowing all day,
And now with the dry small drift the wind was making rough play,
Rolling it low o'er the earth, and tossing it high in the air,
And whirling it over the cliffs to toss up the white foam there.
Not a night to be out in; but I thought I must go and look
After a hirsel of sheep that were pasturing down by the brook
In the hollow there where the rocks have opened to let it through;
There the pasture is good, sir, and the pools for trouting too.
So; I had seen to the sheep, and was fighting my way again
Home through the blinding drift that smote with a stinging pain,
When something flitted close by me, and moaned as it made for the shore
Just where the rocks stand up, two hundred feet and more,
Out of the wild wan water, with only a narrow ledge,
Here and there, where the sea-gulls build, and their nestlings fledge.
Even in quiet weather it is perilous walking there
At night, for the cracks and fissures you come upon unaware,
Where the waves rush in so madly, tossing the white foam high:
But on a night like this, one who was not wishing to die
Would have kept far off from the wind-swept cliffs, and the drifting snow,
And the loud roar of the waves that were plunging down below.

What was it smote my heart, that the form, which dimly fell
White on my eyes through the snow, was the girl I had loved so well;
Why was I sure that I heard her moan, though the raving wind
Shrieked till my ears were as deaf as my eyes with the drift were blind?
Heaven only knows, for I had no reason to think that she
Was out of the house that night, or near to the rocks or me:
Yet I was certain of it, as if it had been revealed
Clear by the word of the Lord, and with miracle signed and sealed.
So in a moment I rushed off after the fading form
Into the pathless night that was dark with the blinding storm;
And not five yards from the cliff I passed her with labouring breath,
And stood in front of her there, stood between her and death.
Pallid she was as a ghost, with a wild gleam in her eye,
Gleam of the madness that drove her out that evening to die:
Ah, poor soul! so lately rich in a full-blooded life,
And merry as bird in the summer, or bee when the clover is rife,
Glowing and singing, and laughing all through the work of the day,
Ah! what anguish had broken a spirit so blithe and gay?
What cruel wrong had dethroned a reason so sharp and clear
That had not a moping doubt, and felt not a shadowy fear?
“What did I mean? Let her pass. And what right had I to ask
Whither she went, or why? And, forsooth, it was not my task
To be her keeper,” she said. It was not a time for speech:
Vain in the tumult of feeling to order your words and preach:
So then I tore off my plaid, and swathed her in it, ere she knew,
And lifted her up in my arms, and strode through the tempest that blew
Wilder, fiercer than ever; and after struggling a while,
She lay as one dead on my bosom for most part of a mile.
Ah! was it only thus I should bring my love to my home?
Only thus to my bosom now was she ever to come?
No gay bridal for us, no Kirk's blessing or bells?
But a dead weight on my arm, and something of sorrow that tells.
How I got home, I wot not: but I strode on, slow or swift,
With a great black fear on my heart, as I fought with the wind and drift.

My mother was living then; and when I laid down my load
There on the sofa beside her, saying that Woman and God
Must see to the rest of this gear; she gave me a sudden glance,
With plainly a question in it, and something of doubt, perchance,
As if she would say, There's something wrong here; can it be you
Has wrought this evil, my son? God help me if that be true.
Then, “Look you, mother,” I said, “there has been villainy here,
Double-damned villainy, sure, and the truth of it yet shall appear,
Ay! if I pluck his heart out to get at the secret within;—
Oh! I would have given my life to save her from sorrow and sin.
But something has to be done, or after all she will die.
Is she living? I thought that I half-heard a kind of shivering sigh.
She was making straight for the sea, when I found her close to the brink
Of the Kittywake Rock.—Ah! that was a moan of life, I think;
Can I do anything, mother? If he were here now! Well,
It would only be doing God's work to hurl the villain to Hell.”
Then she: “Leave God Himself to do His own work, my son;
Vengeance is His, and surely, if slowly, His judgments are done:
Do not the thing that you ought not, for so our worst sorrows are wrought,
And sorrow, I fear me, will come yet from doing this thing that ye ought.
But happen what may, ye did right: only now you must saddle and ride;
This will need doctor's skill. 'Tis a wild night, lad,” she cried.
“And you are down-hearted and cold; and yet it is better for you
Than sitting, helpless, at home, to have something set you to do.
So let not your horse's hoofs tarry, but mind the bridge and the shore,
And speed him as fast as you may, or death will be here before.”

Four miles' ride to the village, but the wind was then on my back;
Four miles home with a gale in our faces that did not slack
Once for a moment; a while to saddle the doctor's brute,
And get him into his shoes, as he growled at a gouty foot:
Yet we were back in the hour; ay, that was the staunchest mare
Ever yet stood in my stable, or ate from the manger there.
But we were not in time—Wee Curly Pow came that night,
Came from the sin and the shame to me as an angel of light.—
Strange that out of such evil such a blessing should rise,
That from the very heart-breaking came the heart-healing likewise.
But Lizzie was taken from me; she never looked on her child,
The troubled unhappy soul sped forth in the tempest wild,
Seeking to hide her with God, where hiding is found alone;
And oh so still as she lay now, trouble and tempest gone!

Mother looked sadly at me, and gravely the Doctor too
Hinted that tongues would be clacking or ever the day was through,
That the farmers of Plein had been always men of an honoured name
Which never till now had been smirched with a shadow of guilt or blame.
What was there now to smirch it? Drily he smiled at that,
Turned up his eyebrows, and said that the day would tell me what:
Meanwhile my heart within me was wroth at the villain's deed;
Meanwhile my heart was breaking to have failed her now in her need;
For I had loved her truly, and now I was left alone;
And oh so still as she lay there, trouble and tempest gone!

Not long had I to wait for what their foreboding feared;
One day quietly passed—the lull ere the storm appeared;
But on the next, like fire among burning ricks, it ran;
It was told by every woman, believed by every man,
How I had played the deceiver, how I had brought disgrace
On the good name that was honoured o'er every name in the place;
How Blavick's son had been blinded, and all his people beguiled;
And how in her shame she had fled to the father of her child;
And they say that he carried her home a mile through the drifting snow;
And who could have ever believed that Plein would have acted so?
I laughed as the tale was told, but I tried to be still and mute,
For the grief was more than the wrath, so the story had time to root:
And you cannot fight with a rumour which nobody stands to quite,
For that is like hitting at shadows, and beating the air at night.

Then it was that I found a blessing in Curly Pow:
She was all of my love that remained, all of Lizzie that I had now.
Every day she would lie for hours and hours on my knee:
I was but an uncouth nurse, but she learnt to trust in me;
And I got to love her somehow, and it would have broken my heart,
Had anything happened on earth to make me and the baby part.
They might think what thoughts they pleased, they might say of me what they list,
When she crowed up into my face, and learned to look up and be kissed.
It was all of my love that remained, it was all of my Lizzie I had,
And Lizzie had been my all. But, of course, they said everything bad.

Of course, they said everything bad. The minister once came in,
And vowed at my own fireside if I did not confess the sin,
He must cut me off from the Church; he was sorry, but what could he do?
Some one, I said, must confess, for that sin has been done is true—
Sin of the shamefulest kind, and covered with perjuring lies,
Sin that came nigh to murder, no art can ever disguise,
Sin malignant that shifted its guilt on the innocent too,
Sin that took up ill reports, and spread the false word for the true;
Verily sin all round. But for me I have nought to confess,
Save that in pity I saved a life in its great distress.
But may be the Priest and Levite blamed the Samaritan's sin
For binding the traveller's wounds, and bringing him home to his inn;
He saved an enemy's life, and it cost him money to do it;
It was not a prudent act, for only the Lord God knew it.
Who then did it? he asked. Enquire at your Elder's son,
The horse-couping scoundrel,—it's not the first of these jobs he has done;
You've had him through hands before. Yes! he swears he is not to blame?
But when you last had to deal with him, did he not swear the same?
Yet he was guilty, you know, and was held to have doubly sinned,
And sat on the stool of repentance, and stared at the girls and grinned.
What do you think, sir? It strikes me, that did not do him much good;
And who is the better because her babe is unchristened? or would
Be worse if it were baptized? It is nothing, of course, to me;
But if it is right that the babe, who has sinned no sin, should be
Brought to the water of God, then why should this little one bide
Like one who inherits a shame, while her father has none to hide?
See, I will hold her up before all the folk if you will,
I'll take all the vows on myself which I'll faithfully strive to fulfil,
Will toil for her, pray for her, teach her to walk in the way undefiled;
Though there's not one drop of the Plein blood flows in the veins of the child.
I cannot lie even to get you to bless the babe that I love:
It is not my child—but it's God's; and its name too is written above.

He was mightily scandalised, and flung right out of the house:
But I did not heed him; I knelt there down by my wee little mouse—
She was not my Curly Pow yet, for she had not a hair on her head,
But she always got some pretty name as I took her upstairs to her bed,
As Mousie, or Birdie, or Daisy, or anything dainty or sweet,
Or the Star, or the Song of my life, or my Lamb with its tender bleat—
So I knelt, and prayed to the Father to help me to train her for Him,
Since worse than orphan she was, and I felt that my eyes grew dim,
While I sought for the better baptism that she might be pure and good,
As no Kirk water could make her. And then in a happier mood
We crowed and played there together, until it was time for bed;
Where I lay and dreamt of my Lizzie, who lay with the silent dead.

Well; yes, the house now was lonely; but that I did not much mind:
People must go their own way; and for me I was never inclined
To mix with the folk round about here, who mostly have nothing to say,
Save about cattle and crops and the prices on market day.
Not to pleasure the like of them should my ways be changed:
So they might do as they listed; and most of them were estranged.
But I always had wee Curly Pow to help me to carry it through,
And life is as happy to-day as on ever a day that I knew.
Ay! neighbours leave us alone, and the Kirk has cast us away,
And every day of the week is as still as the Sabbath day:
Worse thing they had not to do; it was all the length they could go.
Baby don't mind, but at first I felt it a terrible blow
To be shut from the table of God, to be held as an outcast man,
To be looked at askance like a branded sinner and publican.
I went still to Church for a time, and sat on the square Plein pew,
And heard the old Psalms, and the prayers, and bits of the sermon too,
Meanwhile I wept like a child, as I thought of the happier days
When father and mother and all of us loved the old Kirk and its ways.
But I stayed here at home ere long; for I found more of God in the child,
As I looked on her sweet pure face no shadow of sin had defiled;
My Sundays were better with her than there where my neighbours gloomed,
As the minister preached at me sometimes, and I sat and fretted and fumed.
I don't say it's right, sir; but God seems nearer me here now than there,
My thoughts are sweeter and better with wee Curly Pow in her chair,
As we read in the old Book together, and kneel for a brief word of prayer.

What came of the horse-couping black-guard? I never cared much to know:
For I found it was best for myself just to let the thought of him go
Out of my mind altogether; it was a dead fly, do you see?
Spoiling the ointment, of course—working no good, sir, in me.
He left the place by and by, with the constable hard on his track,
Making it certain enough he would not be in haste to come back:
Then there were rumours about him; he had been killed, they said,
In the big Bull's Run affair, and found in the field 'mong the dead;
But others averred he was caught horse-stealing, and lynched on a tree.
Bah! he is out of the way, sir, and that is the best thing for me:
There was nothing I dreaded so much as to meet him some evening alone
Where I met poor Lizzie that night. Ay, it's well that the fellow is gone.