Stories by English Authors: Scotland

Almost every second or third day Janet trod that long lochside road to New Dalry for her proof-sheets, and returned them on the morrow corrected in her own way. Sometimes she got a lift from some farmer or carter, for she had worn herself with anxiety to the shadow of what she had once been, and her dry bleached hair became gray and grayer with the fervour of her devotion to letters.

By April the book was published, and at the end of this month, laid aside by sickness of the vague kind called locally “a decline,” she took to her bed, rising only to lay a few sticks upon the fire from her store gathered in the autumn, or to brew herself a cup of tea. She waited for the tokens of her book’s conquests in the great world of thought and men. She had waited so long for her recognition, and now it was coming. She felt that it would not be long before she was recognised as one of the singers of the world. Indeed, had she but known it, her recognition was already on its way.

In a great city of the north a clever young reporter was cutting open the leaves of “The Heather Lintie” with a hand almost feverishly eager.

“This is a perfect treasure. This is a find indeed. Here is my chance ready to my hand.”

His paper was making a specialty of “exposures.” If there was anything weak and erring, anything particularly helpless and foolish which could make no stand for itself, the “Night Hawk” was on the pounce. Hitherto the junior reporter had never had a “two-column chance.” He had read – it was not much that he had read – Macaulay’s too famous article on “Satan” Montgomery, and, not knowing that Macaulay lived to regret the spirit of that assault, he felt that if he could bring down the “Night Hawk” on “The Heather Lintie,” his fortune was made. So he sat down and he wrote, not knowing and not regarding a lonely woman’s heart, to whom his word would be as the word of a God, in the lonely cottage lying in the lee of the Long Wood of Barbrax.

The junior reporter turned out a triumph of the new journalism. “This is a book which may be a genuine source of pride to every native of the ancient province of Galloway,” he wrote. “Galloway has been celebrated for black cattle and for wool, as also for a certain bucolic belatedness of temperament, but Galloway has never hitherto produced a poetess. One has arisen in the person of Miss Janet Bal – something or other. We have not an interpreter at hand, and so cannot wrestle with the intricacies of the authoress’s name, which appears to be some Galwegian form of Erse or Choctaw. Miss Bal – and so forth – has a true fount of pathos and humour. In what touching language she chronicles the death of two young lambs which fell down into one of the puddles they call rivers down there, and were either drowned or choked with the dirt:

“‘They were two bonny, bonny lambs,
That played upon the daisied lea,
And loudly mourned their woolly dams
Above the drumly flowing Dee.’

“How touchingly simple!” continued the junior reporter, buckling up his sleeves to enjoy himself, and feeling himself born to be a “Saturday Reviewer.”

“Mark the local colour, the wool and the dirty water of the Dee – without doubt a name applied to one of their bigger ditches down there. Mark also the over-fervency of the touching line,

“‘And loudly mourned their woolly dams,’

“Which, but for the sex of the writer and her evident genius, might be taken for an expression of a strength hardly permissible even in the metropolis.”

The junior reporter filled his two columns and enjoyed himself in the doing of it. He concluded with the words: “The authoress will make a great success. If she will come to the capital, where genius is always appreciated, she will, without doubt, make her fortune. Nay, if Miss Bal – but again we cannot proceed for the want of an interpreter – if Miss B., we say, will only accept a position at Cleary’s Waxworks and give readings from her poetry, or exhibit herself in the act of pronouncing her own name, she will be a greater draw in this city than Punch and Judy, or even the latest American advertising evangelist, who preaches standing on his head.”

The junior reporter ceased here from very admiration at his own cleverness in so exactly hitting the tone of the masters of his craft, and handed his manuscript in to the editor.

It was the gloaming of a long June day when Rob Affleck, the woodman over at Barbrax, having been at New Dalry with a cart of wood, left his horse on the roadside and ran over through Gavin’s old short cut, now seldom used, to Janet’s cottage with a paper in a yellow wrapper.

“Leave it on the step, and thank you kindly, Rob,” said a weak voice within; and Rob, anxious about his horse and his bed, did so without another word. In a moment or two Janet crawled to the door, listened to make sure that Rob was really gone, opened the door, and protruded a hand wasted to the hard, flat bone – an arm that ought for years to have been full of flesh and noble curves.

When Janet got back to bed it was too dark to see anything except the big printing at the top of the paper.

“Two columns of it!” said Janet, with great thankfulness in her heart, lifting up her soul to God who had given her the power to sing. She strained her prematurely old and weary eyes to make out the sense. “A genuine source of pride to every native of the ancient province,” she read.

“The Lord be praised!” said Janet, in a rapture of devout thankfulness; “though I never really doubted it,” she added, as though asking pardon for a moment’s distrust. “But I tried to write these poems to the glory of God and not to my own praise, and He will accept them and keep me humble under the praise of men as well as under their neglect.”