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Only one small voice broke the stillness. "Oh, the feelin' man! He should git a reduction o' rent for sic a display o' proper speerit. I'll mind Mr. Hornbut to let auld Sylvester ken o't." Which he did, and would have got a thrashing for his pains had not Cyril Gilbraith thrown him out of the parsonage before the angry cleric could lay hands upon him. TAMMAS had but told the melancholy truth.
"I'll only say one thing more," he called slowly. "When your wife, whom I think we all loved, lay dying in that room above you, she said to you in my presence " It was M'Adam's turn to be angry. He made a step forward with burning face. "Aince and for a', Mr. Hornbut," he cried passionately, "onderstand I'll not ha' you and yer likes lay yer tongues on ma wife's memory whenever it suits ye.
Hornbut! ye 'ford me vast diversion, ye do indeed, 'my loved, my honored, much-respected friend." "If you paid as much heed to your boy's welfare as you do to the bad poetry of that profligate ploughman " An angry gleam shot into the other's eyes. "D'ye ken what blasphemy is, Mr. Hornbut?" he asked, shouldering a pace forward.
The conversation had not been in progress two minutes, however, before he knew that, where he had meant to be calmly persuasive, he was fast become hotly abusive. "You, Mr. Hornbut, wi' James Moore to help ye, look after the lad's soul, I'll see to his body," the little man was saying. The parson's thick gray eyebrows lowered threateningly over his eyes.
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself to talk like that. Which d'you think the more important, soul or body? Oughtn't you, his father, to be the very first to care for the boy's soul? If not, who should? Answer me, sir." The little man stood smirking and sucking his eternal twig, entirely unmoved by the other's heat. "Ye're right, Mr. Hornbut, as ye aye are.
"Ye swallered it all down like best butter. Dear, dear! to think o' that!" Then, stretching forward: "Mr. Hornbut, I was playin' wi' ye." The parson's face, as he listened, was ugly to watch. He shot out a hand and grabbed the scoffer by his coat; then dropped it again and turned abruptly away. As he passed through the door a little sneering voice called after him: "Mr.
So the business of life began for that dog of whom the simple farmer-folk of the Daleland still love to talk, Bob, son of Battle, last of the Gray Dogs of Kenmuir. It is a lonely country, that about the Wastrel-dale. Parson Leggy Hornbut will tell you that his is the smallest church in the biggest parish north of the Derwent, and that his cure numbers more square miles than parishioners.
Hornbut, I ask ye hoo you, a minister o' the Church of England, can reconcile it to yer conscience to think though it be but for a minute that there can be ony good in a man and him no churchgoer? Sir, ye're a heretic not to say a heathen!" He sniggered to himself, and his hand crept to a half-emptied wine decanter.
The little man tilted back his chair, and raised his head. It was the old M'Adam who looked up. The thin lips were curled; a grin was crawling across the mocking face; and he wagged his head gently, as he looked at the speaker through the slits of his half-closed eyes. "Mr. Hornbut, I believe ye thocht me in earnest, 'deed and I do!" He leaned back in his chair and laughed softly.
"Gentlemen," he began, "I've bin amang ye noo a score years, and I can truly say there's not a man in this room I can ca' 'Friend." He looked along the ranks of upturned faces. "Ay, David, I see ye, and you, Mr. Hornbut, and you, Mr. Sylvester ilka one o' you, and not one as'd back me like a comrade gin a trouble came upon me."
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