Stories by English Authors: Scotland

Оглавление

Коллектив авторов. Stories by English Authors: Scotland

THE COURTING OF T’NOWHEAD’S BELL, By J. M. Barrie

“THE HEATHER LINTIE”, By S. R. Crockett

A DOCTOR OF THE OLD SCHOOL, By Ian Maclaren

WANDERING WILLIE’S TALE, By Sir Walter Scott

THE GLENMUTCHKIN RAILWAY, By Professor Aytoun

THRAWN JANET, By Robert Louis Stevenson

Отрывок из книги

Janet Balchrystie lived in a little cottage at the back of the Long Wood of Barbrax. She had been a hard-working woman all her days, for her mother died when she was but young, and she had lived on, keeping her father’s house by the side of the single-track railway-line. Gavin Balchrystie was a foreman plate-layer on the P.P.R., and with two men under him, had charge of a section of three miles. He lived just where that distinguished but impecunious line plunges into a moss-covered granite wilderness of moor and bog, where there is not more than a shepherd’s hut to the half-dozen miles, and where the passage of a train is the occasion of commotion among scattered groups of black-faced sheep. Gavin Balchrystie’s three miles of P.P.R. metals gave him little work, but a good deal of healthy exercise. The black-faced sheep breaking down the fences and straying on the line side, and the torrents coming down the granite gullies, foaming white after a water-spout, and tearing into his embankments, undermining his chairs and plates, were the only troubles of his life. There was, however, a little public-house at The Huts, which in the old days of construction had had the license, and which had lingered alone, license and all, when its immediate purpose in life had been fulfilled, because there was nobody but the whaups and the railway officials on the passing trains to object to its continuance. Now it is cold and blowy on the west-land moors, and neither whaups nor dark-blue uniforms object to a little refreshment up there. The mischief was that Gavin Balchrystie did not, like the guards and engine-drivers, go on with the passing train. He was always on the spot, and the path through Barbrax Wood to the Railway Inn was as well trodden as that which led over the bog moss, where the whaups built, to the great white viaduct of Loch Merrick, where his three miles of parallel gleaming responsibility began.

When his wife was but newly dead, and his Janet just a smart elf-locked lassie running to and from the school, Gavin got too much in the way of “slippin’ doon by.” When Janet grew to be woman muckle, Gavin kept the habit, and Janet hardly knew that it was not the use and wont of all fathers to sidle down to a contiguous Railway Arms, and return some hours later with uncertain step, and face pricked out with bright pin-points of red – the sure mark of the confirmed drinker of whisky neat.

.....

“This is a perfect treasure. This is a find indeed. Here is my chance ready to my hand.”

His paper was making a specialty of “exposures.” If there was anything weak and erring, anything particularly helpless and foolish which could make no stand for itself, the “Night Hawk” was on the pounce. Hitherto the junior reporter had never had a “two-column chance.” He had read – it was not much that he had read – Macaulay’s too famous article on “Satan” Montgomery, and, not knowing that Macaulay lived to regret the spirit of that assault, he felt that if he could bring down the “Night Hawk” on “The Heather Lintie,” his fortune was made. So he sat down and he wrote, not knowing and not regarding a lonely woman’s heart, to whom his word would be as the word of a God, in the lonely cottage lying in the lee of the Long Wood of Barbrax.

.....