THE PUNISHMENT.
The house he was approaching, had a little the look of a prison.Of the more ancient portion the windows were very small, and every corner had a turret with a conical cap-roof.That part was all rough-cast, therefore grey, as if with age.The more modern part was built of all kinds of hard stone, roughly cloven or blasted from the mountain and its boulders.Granite red and grey, blue whinstone, yellow ironstone, were all mingled anyhow, fitness of size and shape alone regarded in their conjunctions; but the result as to colour was rather pleasing than otherwise, and Gibbie regarded it with some admiration.Nor, although he had received from Fergus such convincing proof that he was regarded as a culprit, had he any dread of evil awaiting him.The highest embodiment of the law with which he had acquaintance was the police, and from not one of them in all the city had he ever had a harsh word; his conscience was as void of offence as ever it had been, and the law consequently, notwithstanding the threats of Fergus, had for him no terrors.
The laird was an early riser, and therefore regarded the mere getting up early as a virtue, altogether irrespective of how the time, thus redeemed, as he called it, was spent.This morning, as it turned out, it would have been better spent in sleep.He was talking to his gamekeeper, a heavy-browed man, by the coach-house door, when Fergus appeared holding the dwindled brownie by the huge collar of his tatters.A more innocent-looking malefactor sure never appeared before awful Justice! Only he was in rags, and there are others besides dogs whose judgments go by appearance.Mr.
Galbraith was one of them, and smiled a grim, an ugly smile.
"So this is your vaunted brownie, Mr.Duff!" he said, and stood looking down upon Gibbie, as if in his small person he saw superstition at the point of death, mocked thither by the arrows of his contemptuous wit.
"It's all the brownie I could lay hands on, sir," answered Fergus.
"I took him in the act."
"Boy," said the laird, rolling his eyes, more unsteady than usual with indignation, in the direction of Gibbie, "what have you to say for yourself?"Gibbie had no say--and nothing to say that his questioner could either have understood or believed; the truth from his lips would but have presented him a lying hypocrite to the wisdom of his judge.
As it was, he smiled, looking up fearless in the face of the magistrate, so awful in his own esteem.
"What is your name?" asked the laird, speaking yet more sternly.
Gibbie still smiled and was silent, looking straight in his questioner's eyes.He dreaded nothing from the laird.Fergus had beaten him, but Fergus he classed with the bigger boys who had occasionally treated him roughly; this was a man, and men, except they were foreign sailors, or drunk, were never unkind.He had no idea of his silence causing annoyance.Everybody in the city had known he could not answer; and now when Fergus and the laird persisted in questioning him, he thought they were making kindly game of him, and smiled the more.Nor was there much about Mr.
Galbraith to rouse a suspicion of the contrary; for he made a great virtue of keeping his temper when most he caused other people to lose theirs.
"I see the young vagabond is as impertinent as he is vicious," he said at last, finding that to no interrogation could he draw forth any other response than a smile."Here Angus,"--and he turned to the gamekeeper--"take him into the coach-house, and teach him a little behaviour.A touch or two of the whip will find his tongue for him."Angus seized the little gentleman by the neck, as if he had been a polecat, and at arm's length walked him unresistingly into the coach-house.There, with one vigorous tug, he tore the jacket from his back, and his only other garment, dependent thereupon by some device known only to Gibbie, fell from him, and he stood in helpless nakedness, smiling still: he had never done anything shameful, therefore had no acquaintance with shame.But when the scowling keeper, to whom poverty was first cousin to poaching, and who hated tramps as he hated vermin, approached him with a heavy cart whip in his hand, he cast his eyes down at his white sides, very white between his brown arms and brown legs, and then lifted them in a mute appeal, which somehow looked as if it were for somebody else, against what he could no longer fail to perceive the man's intent.
But he had no notion of what the thing threatened amounted to.He had had few hard blows in his time, and had never felt a whip.
"Ye deil's glaur!" cried the fellow, clenching the cruel teeth of one who loved not his brother, "I s' lat ye ken what comes o'
brakin' into honest hooses, an' takin' what's no yer ain!"A vision of the gnawed cheese, which he had never touched since the idea of its being property awoke in him, rose before Gibbie's mental eyes, and inwardly he bowed to the punishment.But the look he had fixed on Angus was not without effect, for the man was a father, though a severe one, and was not all a brute: he turned and changed the cart whip for a gig one with a broken shaft, which lay near.It was well for himself that he did so, for the other would probably have killed Gibbie.When the blow fell the child shivered all over, his face turned white, and without uttering even a moan, he doubled up and dropped senseless.A swollen cincture, like a red snake, had risen all round his waist, and from one spot in it the blood was oozing.It looked as if the lash had cut him in two.
The blow had stung his heart and it had ceased to beat.But the gamekeeper understood vagrants! the young blackguard was only shamming!
"Up wi' ye, ye deevil! or I s' gar ye," he said from between his teeth, lifting the whip for a second blow.
Just as the stroke fell, marking him from the nape all down the spine, so that he now bore upon his back in red the sign the ass carries in black, a piercing shriek assailed Angus's ears, and his arm, which had mechanically raised itself for a third blow, hung arrested.