The Betrayal of Maggie Blair - By Elizabeth Laird Page 0,65

enthusiastically. He stood up, turned his back to the minister, and put up his hands to call for silence.

"Neighbors! Friends!" he bawled. "Jesus said, 'Let the little children come unto me,' and I say, teach them to do what's right, for decency's sake!"

Behind his back, Mr. Irving was nodding, but I could see what he could not. There was a broad, encouraging grin on my uncle's face, and he was winking again, at one grinning mother after another.

"Well, Mr. Irving, carry on with your duty," he said, turning back to face the minister, then settling himself down on his stool again. "But you'll never get far with that list of yours. Best to proceed to a psalm, don't you think? The singing will quiet the little ones."

Without waiting for the minister's permission he began to sing, in his rich bass voice:

"All people that on earth do dwell,

Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice..."

The women began to sing with him, as loudly as they could, but they sang all in a different key, out of time and out of tune. Their voices cracked with the effort, and they kept their faces straight with difficulty as the noise in the little church, bouncing back off the stone walls, grew so terrible that I had to clap my hands over my ears.

Mr. Irving's face had gone from red to white.

"Enough, I say! You generation of vipers! Enough!"

"But the psalm, Mr. Irving, you cannot stop us from singing the psalm," bellowed my uncle.

For a long moment, Mr. Irving stared at him, scarcely able to control the shaking that convulsed him. Then he stumbled down from his pulpit and, pushing through the throng of women and children, fled to the door. Ritchie and the other young men, standing solidly together, bowed low as he approached, so low, in fact, that they blocked his way. He hit out at them with his hat and fists, and then he was through them and gone, his long black legs carrying him at a gallop back to the safety of his manse.

"Martha! Nanny! Stop that at once!" Aunt Blair shouted, glaring at the little girls as she jiggled the now-hysterical Andrew up and down against her shoulder. "I've never been so ashamed in my life!"

But Uncle Blair had picked up his daughters and, sitting with one on each broad knee, he kissed their tears and rage away.

"The Lord spoke out of the mouths of babes," he said. "Take the poor wee man outside and feed him, Isobel, before he cries himself into a fit."

The church was emptying fast. Outside, there was a most un-Sabbath-like atmosphere of festival as the excited children were allowed, for once, to run around the churchyard. The women, settling themselves on gravestones, unbuttoned their gowns to feed their squalling babies, and the men, their laughter now over, talked in small urgent groups.

"Did you see the minister's face, Father?" Ritchie said eagerly, as we set off down the long lane toward home. "Stop lurching about like that, Nanny."

He shifted Nanny, who was riding on his shoulders. Nanny had not forgotten her quarrel with her sister and was leaning sideways to pinch Martha, who was sitting behind her mother on the horse.

"Of course I did." Uncle Blair allowed himself a crack of laughter, but then his tender conscience made him say, "It was a terrible thing to see, though, a man so humiliated. I almost felt sorry for him, instrument of the Evil One though he is."

"Sorry!" retorted Aunt Blair. "You'll be sorry when the Black Cuffs come and force you to pay the fine. A year's income! It means ruin for us, Hugh."

"Where's your faith, woman?" Uncle Blair said peaceably. "The Lord will provide. Look, Ritchie! There! A hawk! It's going to dive!"

He caught Ritchie's arm, and they stood still to watch the great bird fold its wings and plunge to the earth, to rise a moment later with a baby hare in its talons.

But I was watching my uncle and my cousin, and not the bird.

My father and I would have loved each other like that, I thought.

"Did you hear any news there in the churchyard, Father?" Ritchie asked in a low voice as we plodded on.

"About what, son?"

"The man. The preacher. Mr. Renwick."

The name meant nothing to me, and knowing that I wasn't meant to hear, I hurried on.

The early morning had been bright, but a bank of black clouds was building in the west, promising a storm. We could see rain fall in