MACPHERSON’S LOVE STORY.
BY C. H. D. STOCKER.

It was on a summer Sunday morning that the story began—or let me rather say, that I take up the story, for who shall mark the real beginning of those events that mightily color and disturb, and even turn the course of our lives?

In the early sunshine, while the dew was still heavy on the grass, Ian Macpherson had been away three miles up the valley with a dying shepherd. Following the course of the broad, brawling, shallow Riach river; now clambering along steep slate-colored banks of shifting flakes and chips of stone, that looked as if they had swept in avalanches down the abrupt hillside; now springing with the sure, agile step of a born Highlander from one boulder to another as he crossed a streamlet or took a short cut across a bend of the river; now walking quickly over narrow, level reaches of meadow-ground, or amongst springy heather under the birches that overhung the broken gravel banks above the water,—his whole heart was overflowing with that exultation which breathes in the very early hours of morning when the days are long. The earth in that hour was very Paradise, not for anything it had given or ever could give him, but because it was so beautiful, and in its glorious undesecrated solitude seemed still fresh from the hand of God.

The home of the dying man was a mere hovel of peat-sods covered with moss-grown thatch, built on one of those fertile reaches of soil brought down and left here and there in these wild Scotch valleys by floods of long ago. It stood just above the river—all too perilously near in time of storm and flood, you would have thought—and round it towered the rugged hills, echoing unceasingly the murmur of the water and the wind—a murmur, at least, in summer. In winter many a wild storm raged up there, darkening the air with heavy snow and sleet, bowing and breaking and uprooting whole tracts of pines and larch; raving down the shrouded peaks and narrow, dim ravines, and making to tremble the little peat hut and the stout hearts within. And then, when the storm was spent, would be a silence as of death; snowy steeps and glittering peaks rising up on all sides motionless against a motionless sky, and down below the dark water creeping slow and quiet under masses of ice.

Macpherson could see it all in memory even as he stepped across the summer flowers, for the poor shepherds in the lone huts scattered here and there in the long valley needed him in winter as well as in summer, in foul weather no less than in fair. But to-day, as he grew accustomed to the half-light in the hut, and the wan face of the dying man became clearer in the shadow of the berth in the wall where he was lying, the minister saw well enough that he would know no more an earthly winter, nor ever see the snow come down upon the hills again. There was only one window in the hut, a single unmovable pane a foot square, let into the sod wall at one end, and rendered even less useful by a strip of rag pinned across it by way of a blind. Most of the light came in dusty beams down the wide chimney, slanting across the background of smoke-blackened wall and rafter, and lying in patches on the uneven mud floor.

As the day was warm the minister set the door wide open, and the dim, dying eyes looked out wistfully at the sunny summer weather and the beautiful wooded slopes where the foot of the opposite hill came down to the river. But he was tired now; all this was passing from him, and his eyes came back to Ian Macpherson’s face, where, as he dimly felt, dwelt something that could not pass away—something that death itself would have no power to disturb or change. Light kindled faintly on his rugged, wasted features when Macpherson came and took the toil-worn hand—so powerless now—in his, for in the young minister’s life this poor shepherd had seen and understood what no words could have brought home to him—the reality and power of love. He knew that Macpherson counted not his life his own, nor any of the things that he possessed. Year by year he had felt the subtle influence deepening, and had seen the spirit burning clearer in the eyes, so that to meet him—to the ignorant, simple shepherd—was like meeting an angel. In Macpherson he saw and knew a man in the very prime of manhood, clever, as those said who knew best, and with the world before him; who yet could let the world go by; who sought no preferment, whose whole life and soul and energy were devoted to his people without a thought for himself, and who had ever a kind word and a happy smile for one and all.

These poor people could perhaps not have explained what their young minister was to them; what he really was beyond what they saw they could never know; and yet they did feel that he had sacrificed himself for their sake in staying there, that this sacrifice was no grudging martyrdom, but a glad free-will offering to the Lord he loved and to them. It shed more light upon their hearts than a thousand sermons; it had power to draw aside for them now and again the gross veil of material aims, and to give them as in a mirror a glimpse of eternal love.

This dying man could believe in the great love of the Lord who died for him when he had seen its living power in his minister’s life; and, though the comparison is but as of a spark to the sun itself, the selfless brotherhood of one whom he knew very far above him in ways which he could not understand brought home to him the brotherhood of Christ. With his hand in Macpherson’s, listening with fast-closing ears to his earnest words, following his childlike, simple prayers, it seemed as if earth and its soul-chains of sin and sorrow faded and fell away; as if the gates of heaven opened wide and wider, and the light shone out more and more perfect, till at last the call came down, “Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord;” and then the spirit went up out of the darkness and ignorance and poverty of the hard shepherd life, and Macpherson was kneeling alone on the mud floor in the dim hovel beside the dead.

An hour later the solitary bell of the kirk on the wooded knoll overlooking Loch Riach was ringing thin and clear across lake and meadow for morning prayer, and Macpherson hurried up the steep footpath that wound upwards to the kirk between Scotch firs from the flat grass land about the water.

A group of strangers stood at the kirkyard gate, a young fellow of two or three-and-twenty, a lady who looked about the same age, tall and very fair, and a lad in an Eton jacket with a top hat and broad white collar. No doubt they belonged to the English family who had been expected at the villa near the railway station and the store—the only villa within half a dozen miles.

Macpherson, with the courtesy that is natural to even the shyest Highlander, lifted his hat to them as a matter of course, and would have passed on, but the young man stepped forward and asked if they might go into the church, and whether it mattered where they sat.

“Oh! There’s only too much room,” he said, when he understood what they wanted, which was not all at once, for the Gaelic was his native tongue and his ears were utterly unfamiliar with English as spoken by English people. He led the way through long rank grass and nettles, across sunken graves and flat tombstones where the inscriptions were worn away, more, surely, by wild winter storms than by church-going feet, for there was no trace of any path from the gate to the door.

“Rummiest hole ’t ever I saw, Lily,” poor Macpherson heard the boy say in an undertone, as he ushered the strangers into as curious a place of worship as perhaps this nineteenth century can show.

The floor was all uneven and rudely paved with round cobble stones, glistening and dark with perpetual damp; a gallery, sagging rather alarmingly towards the middle, ran across either end; on the front panel of the eastern one was branded in irregular characters,

“I. M. Fecit. Aug. 17, 1771,”