Chapter 36

STORY OF THE DOMINIE.

When I spoke next, I was back in the school-house, sitting there
with my bonnet on my head, Gavin looking at me. We had forgotten
the cannon at last.

In that chair I had anticipated this scene more than once of late.
I had seen that a time might come when Gavin would have to be told
all, and I had even said the words aloud, as if he were indeed
opposite me. So now I was only repeating the tale, and I could
tell it without emotion, because it was nigh nineteen years old;
and I did not look at Gavin, for I knew that his manner of taking
it could bring no change to me.

"Did you never ask your mother," I said, addressing the fire
rather than him, "why you were called Gavin?"

"Yes," he answered, "it was because she thought Gavin a prettier
name than Adam."

"No," I said slowly, "it was because Gavin is my name. You were
called after your father. Do you not remember my taking you one
day to the shore at Harvie to see the fishermen carried to their
boats upon their wives' backs, that they might start dry on their
journey?"

"No," he had to reply. "I remember the women carrying the men
through the water to the boats, but I thought it was my father
who--I mean---"

"I know whom you mean," I said. "That was our last day together,
but you were not three years old. Yet you remembered me when you
came to Thrums. You shake your head, but it is true. Between the
diets of worship that first Sabbath I was introduced to you, and
you must have had some shadowy recollection of my face, for you
asked, 'Surely I saw you in church in the forenoon, Mr. Ogilvy?' I
said 'Yes,' but I had not been in the church in the forenoon. You
have forgotten even that, and yet I treasured it."

I could hear that he was growing impatient, though so far he had
been more indulgent than I had any right to expect.

"It can all be put into a sentence," I said calmly. "Margaret
married Adam Dishart, and afterwards, believing herself a widow,
she married me. You were born, and then Adam Dishart came back."

That is my whole story, and here was I telling it to my son, and
not a tear between us. It ended abruptly, and I fell to mending
the fire.

"When I knew your mother first," I went on, after Gavin had said
some boyish things that were of no avail to me, "I did not think
to end my days as a dominie. I was a student at Aberdeen, with the
ministry in my eye, and sometimes on Saturdays I walked forty
miles to Harvie to go to church with her. She had another lover,
Adam Dishart, a sailor turned fisherman; and while I lingered at