Free The House With the Green Shutters by George Douglas Brown Page B

was
that of a forward tenant who thinks it a great thing to pass remarks on
the weather with his laird.
    Gourlay cast a look at the dropping heavens.
    "Is that
your
opinion?" said he. "I fail to see't mysell."
    It was not in Gourlay to see the beauty of that gray, wet dawn. A fine
morning to him was one that burnt the back of your neck.
    The stranger laughed: a little deprecating giggle. "I meant it was fine
weather for the fields," he explained. He had meant nothing of the kind,
of course; he had merely been talking at random in his wish to be civil
to that important man, John Gourlay.
    "Imphm," he pondered, looking round on the weather with a wise air;
"imphm; it's fine weather for the fields."
    "Are
you
a farmer, then?" Gourlay nipped him, with his eye on the
white waistcoat.
    "Oh—oh, Mr. Gourlay! A farmer, no. Hi—hi! I'm not a farmer. I dare
say, now, you have no mind of
me
?"
    "No," said Gourlay, regarding him very gravely and steadily with his
dark eyes. "I cannot say, sir, that I have the pleasure of remembering
you
."
    "Man, I'm a son of auld John Wilson of Brigabee."
    "Oh, auld Wilson, the mole-catcher!" said contemptuous Gourlay. "What's
this they christened him now? 'Toddling Johnnie,' was it noat?"
    Wilson coloured. But he sniggered to gloss over the awkwardness of the
remark. A coward always sniggers when insulted, pretending that the
insult is only a joke of his opponent, and therefore to be laughed
aside. So he escapes the quarrel which he fears a show of displeasure
might provoke.
    But though Wilson was not a hardy man, it was not timidity only that
caused his tame submission to Gourlay.
    He had come back after an absence of fifteen years, with a good deal of
money in his pocket, and he had a fond desire that he, the son of the
mole-catcher, should get some recognition of his prosperity from the
most important man in the locality. If Gourlay had said, with solemn and
fat-lipped approval, "Man, I'm glad to see that you have done so well,"
he would have swelled with gratified pride. For it is often the
favourable estimate of their own little village—"What they'll think of
me at home"—that matters most to Scotsmen who go out to make their way
in the world. No doubt that is why so many of them go home and cut a
dash when they have made their fortunes; they want the cronies of their
youth to see the big men they have become. Wilson was not exempt from
that weakness. As far back as he remembered Gourlay had been the big man
of Barbie; as a boy he had viewed him with admiring awe; to be received
by him now, as one of the well-to-do, were a sweet recognition of his
greatness. It was a fawning desire for that recognition that caused his
smirking approach to the grain merchant. So strong was the desire that,
though he coloured and felt awkward at the contemptuous reference to his
father, he sniggered and went on talking, as if nothing untoward had
been said. He was one of the band impossible to snub, not because they
are endowed with superior moral courage, but because their easy
self-importance is so great that an insult rarely pierces it enough to
divert them from their purpose. They walk through life wrapped
comfortably round in the wool of their own conceit. Gourlay, though a
dull man—perhaps because he was a dull man—suspected insult in a
moment. But it rarely entered Wilson's brain (though he was cleverer
than most) that the world could find anything to scoff at in such a fine
fellow as James Wilson. A less ironic brute than Gourlay would never
have pierced the thickness of his hide. It was because Gourlay succeeded
in piercing it that morning that Wilson hated him for ever—with a hate
the more bitter because he was rebuffed so seldom.
    "Is business brisk?" he asked, irrepressible.
    Business! Heavens, did ye hear him talking? What did Toddling Johnny's
son know about business? What was the world coming to? To hear him
setting up his face there, and asking the best merchant in the town
whether business