I learned afterwards that the laird, from being a spendthrift in his youth, had become a miser in his age, and that every household arrangement was on the narrowest scale. From wasting righteous pounds, he had come to scraping unrighteous farthings.
After we had remained standing for some time, the housekeeper returned, and invited my father to go to the laird’s room. As they went, he requested her to take me to the kitchen, which, after conducting him, she did. The sight of the fire, although it was of the smallest, was most welcome. She laid a few more peats upon it, and encouraged them to a blaze, remarking, with a sidelong look: “We daren’t do this, you see, sir, if the laird was about. The honest man would call it waste.”
“Is he dying?” I asked, for the sake of saying something; but she only shook her head for reply, and, going to a press at the other end of the large, vault-like kitchen, brought me some milk in a basin, and some oatcake upon a platter, saying,
“It’s not my house, you see, or I would have something better to set before the minister’s son.”
I was glad of any food however, and it was well for me that I ate heartily. I had got quite warm also before my father stepped into the kitchen, very solemn, and stood up with his back to the fire. The old woman set him a chair, but he neither sat down nor accepted the refreshment which she humbly offered him.
“We must be going,” he objected, “for it looks stormy, and the sooner we set out the better.”
“I’m sorry I can’t ask you to stop the night,” she said, “for I couldn’t make you comfortable. There’s nothing fit to offer you in the house, and there’s not a bed that’s been slept in for I don’t know how long.”
“Never mind,” said my father cheerfully. “The moon is up already, and we shall get home I trust before the snow begins to fall. Will you tell the man to get the horses out?”
When she returned from taking the message, she came up to my father and said, in a loud whisper,
“I know that,” she returned. “He’ll be gone before the morning. But that’s not what I meant. Is he in a bad way for the other world? That’s what I meant, sir.”
“Well, my good woman, after a life like his, we are only too glad to remember what our Lord told us--not to judge. I do think he is ashamed and sorry for his past life. But it’s not the wrong he has done in former time that stands half so much in his way as his present fondness for what he counts his own. It seems like to break his heart to leave all his little bits of property--particularly the money he has saved; and yet he has some hope that Jesus Christ will be kind enough to pardon him. I am afraid he will find himself very miserable though, when he has not one scrap left to call his own--not a pocket-knife even.”