Gillespie by J. MacDougall Hay

Gillespie by J. MacDougall Hay

Author:J. MacDougall Hay [J. MacDougall Hay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781847675156
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 2009-08-15T00:00:00+00:00


Chapter Twenty-four

TIMES WERE SO HARD that Peter the jeweller closed his shop, and all his clocks were stopped. Every Saturday he used to wind the clock in the tower of the parish church with a big handle, climbing up among the droppings of windy birds to work at his inheritance; for his father, dead of an apoplexy while scaling the second flight of the narrow steep stair, had tamed Time there also within the gilt circle of the clock-face. Peter his son, having shut his shop, removed himself from the surging sea of the winds around the spire, and the clock by which Brieston set its time stopped. Men missed the solemn boom, and noticing the dead hands, concluded that religion, too, had perished in the blight that possessed Brieston. The gilt face of the clock in the turgid light was as the face of a corpse in candle-light. Men walked beneath it melancholy, bitter, darkened, morose, savage, without sanctuary, without hope. Old sorrows and old feuds were alike buried. People feared one thing—famine; watched one thing—the shop in the Square. Lowrie hinted to Gillespie that his shop would be looted.

‘I’m ready for them any hour o’ the day or night,’ and glancing up at the church he saw that the clock had stopped. He did not know the reason, for a certain tide of business still flowed in at his door, though it passed by the door of Peter the jeweller. Not even a queen can stave off grief with a necklace.

Despite the lifeless clock the hour came when the bottom of the meal barrel grinned up in irony in the face of Red Duncan. The men had scraped the very bottom of the Loch with sixty fathom string to the trawls. Heart-breaking work it was dragging them aboard empty from the ooze. No one from the Barracks to the ‘Ghost’ had bought so much as a pennyworth of salt with which to cure the winter’s herring, and they were burning heather in the Back Street. Kate of the Left Hand, Red Duncan’s wife, went and bowed herself before Gillespie, who stood rubicund before her, with feet firmly planted on the floor. This woman was of one of those unfortunate families in which one commonly looks for signs of trouble. It would not surprise any one at any time to find one of its members running distractedly down the stair, wailing because of a death that had just taken place. Even in their gayest moments an air of fatality or a foreboding of ill hovers over their house. Red Duncan’s family was such a target for sorrow. Of him it was a saying, ‘When the herring’s south, Red Duncan’s north’. Several years previously his house had been burned, and in the conflagration his wife had lost her right hand. Dr. Maclean had amputated the charred stump. Her left hand, as she now stood before Gillespie, was empty.

‘I’ve never wance compleened since I lost my all the night o’ the fire.



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