The House With the Green Shutters by George Douglas Brown Page A

courage changed that feeling to another of
admiring awe: a man so defiant of the angry heavens might do anything.
And so with the others; they hated Gourlay, but his bravery was a fact
of nature which they could not disregard; they knew themselves smaller,
and said nothing for a while. Tam Brodie, the most brutal among them,
was the first to recover. Even he did not try to belittle at once, but
he felt the subtle discomfort of the situation, and relieved it by
bringing the conversation back to its usual channel.
    "That was at the boy's birth, Mr. Coe?" said he.
    "Ou ay, just the laddie. It was a' richt when the lassie came. It was
Doctor Dandy brocht
her
hame, for Munn was deid by that time, and
Dandy had his place."
    "What will Gourlay be going to make of him?" the Provost asked. "A
doctor or a minister or wha-at?"
    "Deil a fear of that," said Brodie; "he'll take him into the business!
It's a' that he's fit for. He's an infernal dunce, just his father owre
again, and the Dominie thrashes him remorseless! I hear my own weans
speaking o't. Ou, it seems he's just a perfect numbskull!"
    "Ye couldn't expect ainything else from a son of Gourlay," said the
Provost.
    Conversation languished. Some fillip was needed to bring it to an easy
flow, and the simultaneous scrape of their feet turning round showed the
direction of their thoughts.
    "A dram would be very acceptable now," murmured Sandy Toddle, rubbing
his chin.
    "Ou, we wouldna be the waur o't," said Tam Wylie.
    "We would all be the better of a little drope," smirked the Deacon.
    And they made for the Red Lion for the matutinal dram.

Chapter VII
*
    John Gourlay the younger was late for school, in spite of the nervous
trot he fell into when he shrank from the bodies' hard stare at him.
There was nothing unusual about that; he was late for school every
other day. To him it was a howling wilderness where he played a
most appropriate
rôle
. If his father was not about he would hang
round his mother till the last moment, rather than be off to old
"Bleach-the-boys"—as the master had been christened by his scholars.
"Mother, I have a pain in
my
heid," he would whimper, and she would
condole with him and tell him she would keep him at home with her—were
it not for dread of her husband. She was quite sure he was ainything but
strong, poor boy, and that the schooling was bad for him; for it was
really remarkable how quickly the pain went if he was allowed to stay at
home; why, he got better just directly! It was not often she dared to
keep him from school, however; and if she did, she had to hide him from
his father.
    On school mornings the boy shrank from going out with a shrinking that
was almost physical. When he stole through the green gate with his bag
slithering at his hip (not braced between the shoulders like a birkie
scholar's), he used to feel ruefully that he was in for it now—and the
Lord alone knew what he would have to put up with ere he came home! And
he always had the feeling of a freed slave when he passed the gate on
his return, never failing to note with delight the clean smell of the
yard after the stuffiness of school, sucking it in through glad
nostrils, and thinking to himself, "O crickey, it's fine to be home!" On
Friday nights, in particular, he used to feel so happy that, becoming
arrogant, he would try his hand at bullying Jock Gilmour in imitation of
his father. John's dislike of school, and fear of its trampling bravoes,
attached him peculiarly to the House with the Green Shutters; there was
his doting mother, and she gave him stories to read, and the place was
so big that it was easy to avoid his father and have great times with
the rabbits and the doos. He was as proud of the sonsy house as Gourlay
himself, if for a different reason, and he used to boast of it to his
comrades. And he never left it, then or after, without a foreboding.
    As he crept along the School Road with a rueful face, he was alone, for
Janet, who was cleverer than he, was always