"MacDONALD, George - The Wow O' Riven aka The Bell" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacDonald George)

face more sad.
Indeed, so much did the persecution of this poor man affect her, that an
onlooker would have been compelled to seek the cause in some yet deeper sympathy
than that commonly felt for the oppressed, even by women. And such a sympathy
existed, strange as it may seem, between the beautiful girl (for many called her
a bonnie lassie) and this "tatter of humanity". Nothing would have been farther
from the thoughts of those that knew them, than the supposition of any
correspondence or connection between them; yet this sympathy sprang in part from
a real similarity in their history and present condition.
All the facts that were known about Feel Jock's origin were these: that seventy
years ago, a man who had gone with his horse and cart some miles from the
village, to fetch home a load of peat from a desolate moss, had heard, while
toiling along as rough a road on as lonely a hillside as any in Scotland, the
cry of a child; and, searching about, had found the infant, hardly wrapt in
rags, and untended, as if the earth herself had just given birth-that desert
moor, wide and dismal, broken and watery, the only bosom for him to lie upon,
and the cold, clear night-heaven his only covering. The man had brought him
home, and the parish had taken parish-care of him. He had grown up, and proved
what he now was-almost an idiot. Many of the townspeople were kind to him, and
employed him in fetching water for them from the river or wells in the
neighbourhood, paying him for his trouble in victuals, or whisky, of which he
was very fond. He seldom spoke; and the sentences he could utter were few; yet
the tone, and even the words of his limited vocabulary, were sufficient to
express gratitude and some measure of love towards those who were kind to him,
and hatred of those who teased and insulted him. He lived a life without aim,
and apparently to no purpose; in this resembling most of his more gifted
fellow-men, who, with all the tools and materials necessary for building a noble
mansion, are yet content with a clay hut.
Elsie, on the contrary, had been born in a comfortable farmhouse, amidst
homeliness and abundance. But at a very early age she had lost both father and
mother; not so early, however, but that she had faint memories of warm soft
times on her mother's bosom, and of refuge in her mother's arms from the attacks
of geese, and the pursuit of pigs. Therefore, in after-times, when she looked
forward to heaven, it was as much a reverting to the old heavenly times of
childhood and mother's love, as an anticipation of something yet to be revealed.
Indeed, without some such memory, how should we ever picture to ourselves a
perfect rest? But sometimes it would seem as if the more a heart was made
capable of loving, the less it had to love; and poor Elsie, in passing from a
mother's to a brother's guardianship, felt a change of spiritual temperature too
keen. He was not a bad man, or incapable of benevolence when touched by the
sight of want in anything of which he would himself have felt the privation; but
he was so coarsely made that only the purest animal necessities affected him,
and a hard word, or unfeeling speech, could never have reached the quick of his
nature through the hide that enclosed it. Elsie, on the contrary, was
excessively and painfully sensitive, as if her nature constantly portended an
invisible multitude of half-spiritual, half-nervous antenna, which shrank and
trembled in every current of air at all below their own temperature. The effect
of this upon her behaviour was such that she was called odd; and the poor girl
felt she was not like other people, yet could not help it. Her brother, too,
laughed at her without the slightest idea of the pain he occasioned, or the