One day, then, at luncheon, Mrs. Sclater told Gibbie that some ladies were coming to tea, and they were going to have supper instead of dinner. He must put on his best clothes, she said. He did as she desired, was duly inspected, approved on the whole, and finished off by a few deft fingers at his necktie, and a gentle push or two from the loveliest of hands against his hair-thatch, and was seated in the drawing-room with Mrs. Sclater when the ladies arrived. Ginevra and he shook hands, she with the sweetest of rose-flushes, he with the radiance of delighted surprise. But, a moment after, when Mrs. Sclater and her guests had seated themselves, Gibbie, their only gentleman, for Mr. Sclater had not yet made his appearance, had vanished from the room. Tea was not brought until some time after, when Mr. Sclater came home, and then Mrs. Sclater sent Jane to find Sir Gilbert; but she returned to say he was not in the house. The lady's heart sank, her countenance fell, and all was gloom: her project had miscarried! he was gone!
who could tell whither?--perhaps to the baker's daughter, or to the horrid woman Croale!
The case was however very much otherwise. The moment Gibbie ended his greetings, he had darted off to tell Donal: it was not his custom to enjoy alone anything sharable.
The news that Ginevra was at that moment seated in Mrs. Sclater's house, at that moment, as his eagerness had misunderstood Gibbie's, expecting his arrival, raised such a commotion in Donal's atmosphere, that for a time it was but a huddle of small whirlwinds.
His heart was beating like the trample of a trotting horse. He never thought of inquiring whether Gibbie had been commissioned by Mrs. Sclater to invite him, or reflected that his studies were not half over for the night. An instant before the arrival of the blessed fact, he had been absorbed in a rather abstruse metaphysico-mathematical question; now not the metaphysics of the universe would have appeared to him worth a moment's meditation. He went pacing up and down the room, and seemed lost to everything.
Gibbie shook him at length, and told him, by two signs, that he must put on his Sunday clothes. Then first shyness, like the shroud of northern myth that lies in wait in a man's path, leaped up, and wrapped itself around him. It was very well to receive ladies in a meadow, quite another thing to walk into their company in a grand room, such as, before entering Mrs. Sclater's, he had never beheld even in Fairyland or the Arabian Nights. He knew the ways of the one, and not the ways of the other. Chairs ornate were doubtless poor things to daisied banks, yet the other day he had hardly brought himself to sit on one of Mrs. Sclater's! It was a moment of awful seeming. But what would he not face to see once more the lovely lady-girl! He bethought himself that he was no longer a cowherd but a student, and that such feelings were unworthy of one who would walk level with his fellows. He rushed to the labours of his toilette, performed severe ablutions, endued his best shirt--coarse, but sweet from the fresh breezes of Glashgar, a pair of trousers of buff-coloured fustian stamped over with a black pattern, an olive-green waistcoat, a blue tailcoat with lappets behind, and a pair of well-polished shoes, the soles of which in honour of Sunday were studded with small instead of large knobs of iron, set a tall beaver hat, which no brushing would make smooth, on the back of his head, stuffed a silk hankerchief, crimson and yellow, in his pocket, and declared himself ready.
Now Gibbie, although he would not have looked so well in his woolly coat in Mrs. Sclater's drawing-room as on the rocks of Glashgar, would have looked better in almost any other than the evening dress, now, alas! nearly European. Mr. Sclater, on the other hand, would have looked worse in any other because being less commonplace, it would have been less like himself; and so long as the commonplace conventional so greatly outnumber the simply individual, it is perhaps well the present fashion should hold. But Donal could hardly have put on any clothes that would have made him look worse, either in respect of himself or of the surroundings of social life, than those he now wore. Neither of the boys, however, had begun to think about dress in relation either to custom or to fitness, and it was with complete satisfaction that Gibbie carried off Donal to present to the guest of his guardians.
Donal's preparations had taken a long time, and before they reached the house, tea was over and gone. They had had some music; and Mrs.
Sclater was now talking kindly to two of the school-girls, who, seated erect on the sofa, were looking upon her elegance with awe and envy. Ginevra, was looking at the pictures of an annual. Mr.
Sclater was making Miss Kimble agreeable to herself. He had a certain gift of talk--depending in a great measure on the assurance of being listened to, an assurance which is, alas! nowise the less hurtful to many a clergyman out of the pulpit, that he may be equally aware no one heeds him in it.
