Robert Gray

“ Meantime Gray had promised Bothwell to secure for him the king's favour on condition that Bothwell supported his accusation against Bruce, but Bothwell, fearing treachery, failed to appear at the court. Gray, having therefore no evidence, ‘left the court for shame,’ and afterwards ‘denied all accusation of Mr. Robert Bruce, and offered to fight his honest quarrel in that behalf with any man’ (ib.) After James ascended the English throne Gray acted frequently in a lawless manner, and more than once was summoned to answer for his conduct before the council or the estates. ”

“ The war is not ours, but God’s!’
Robert’s eyes had kindled. He was about to indulge himself in such a quick passage of arms as all such natures as his delight in, when his look travelled past the gaunt figure of the Ritualist vicar to his wife. A sudden pang smote, silenced him. She was sitting with her face raised to Newcome; and her beautiful gray eyes were full of a secret passion of sympathy. It was like the sudden re-emergence of something repressed, the satisfaction of something hungry. Robert moved closer to her, and the color rushed over all his young boyish face. ”

“ Robert found that the afternoon boat for Muskegon left at half past three, so there was still time left in which to get back to Mrs. Gibbs' house for a late dinner.
At the boarding house he found a short note from Livingston Palmer.
"Mr. Gray is going to go into business again," it read; "with one office here and another in New York. He is going to take me back and he says you can return too, if you desire."
"That's nice," thought Robert. "But I'll have to see Dick Marden before I decide upon what's best to do next." ”

“ Pouring sand between her fingers, she said:
"I remember very well how he mentioned us. He said that he had never seen either one of us, and was glad of it. He said that as I was an orphan with no money, and that as you were similarly situated, and that as neither you nor I had brains enough to ever make any, he would leave his coquina quarry to that one of us who had brains enough to get here first and stake the claim. Do you call that an agreeable manner of making a bequest?"
Gray laughed easily: "I don't care what he thought about my intellectual capacity." ”

“ Gary got Gray by the elbow: "Reggie, it's this way. We flip up for cuckoo. Whoever gets stuck takes a shot apiece from our automatics in the legs—eh, what?"
"It's perfectly agreeable to me," assented Gray, in the mincing, elaborate voice characteristic of him when drunk.
Flint wagged his head. "It's a sportin' game. I'm in," he said.
Gary looked at Carfax. "A shot in the dark at a man's legs. And if he gets his—it will be Blighty in exchange for hell." ”

“ Soon Little Son was as gentle as Lady Gray. Sometimes he would let them put their hands on his soft fur.
One day Robert was out walking with his father. They saw a hole in an old tree.
Robert’s father held him up so that he could put his hand in the hole. The squirrel’s nest was almost full of nuts.
All summer Robert had good times, playing with Lady Gray and Little Son.
[29]
THE ELVES AND THE SHOEMAKER.
There was once a kind old shoemaker who was very poor. He had leather to make only one pair of shoes. ”

“ Alicia, not haughty but silent, sat in the shadow dressed in an exquisite pale-gray tea gown. Robert’s mother discoursed to her happily concerning marmalade and lumbago. Tom sat on the top step; Sisters Millie and Pam on the lowest step to catch the lightning bugs. Mother had the willow rocker. Father sat in the big armchair with one of its arms gone. Buff sprawled in the middle of the porch in everybody’s way. The twilight pixies and pucks stole forth unseen and plunged other poignant shafts of memory into the heart of Robert. A rural madness entered his soul. The city was far away. ”

“ Gray into a worse hole than ever," he ventured.
"Oh, I guess not. He will have you to fall back on. I doubt if he will be able to resume business immediately."
Livingston Palmer was right in the latter surmise. The next day Robert found his employer in an office on the opposite side of the street.
"I am all upset, Frost," said Mr. Gray. "The [Pg 130] safe has dropped to the bottom of the ruins and it will be a week or two before they can dig it out." ”

“ Even if that new clerk does suit there may be another opening before long—although I would not advise you to lay back and depend upon it."
"I couldn't afford to lay back, sir."
"You have to support yourself?"
"I do."
"Then I trust you get an opening soon—if I cannot use you," concluded Mr. Ruggles.
Robert wrote out his name in his best style, and added the address of his boarding house. The handwriting pleased the map-publisher, but he put it on file without comment. Then the boy bowed himself out.
[Pg 139]
"What a nice man," he thought. "I like him even better than I do Mr. Gray." ”

“ From the one he produced an aluminum pannikin; from the other he filled it with water. The puppy drank it all while Gray and the brown-eyed girl looked on intently.
Then Gray produced some beef sandwiches, and the famished little creature leaped and whirled and danced as Gray fed him cautiously, bit by bit.
"Do you think that is perfectly fair?" asked the girl gravely.
"Fair?" repeated Gray guiltily.
"Yes. Who first feeds a strange dog is recognised as the reigning authority." ”

“ Mason whom Gray described, a little before this offer, as repining at his four and twenty weeks residence at York, and longing for the flesh-pots and coffee-houses of Cambridge, was notwithstanding in his friend and fellow-poet's phrase, a long while mariturient, “and praying to heaven to give him a good and gentle governess.” “No man,” says Gray, “wants such a thing more in all senses; but his greatest wants do not make him move a foot faster, nor has he, properly speaking, any thing one can call a passion about him, except a little malice and revenge.” ”

“ Elsewhere he speaks of Mason's “insatiable repining mouth.” Yet there was no malice in these expressions. Gray loved him, taking him for all in all, and to have been the friend of Gray will always be considered as evidence of no ordinary worth; for it is not on intellect alone that the friendship of so good and wise a man as Gray could be founded. ”

“ And if you throw three balls apiece and nobody hits me, then you each pay ten shillings to me and I'm cuckoo for another round."
"We aim at random?" inquired Gray, mildly interested.
"Certainly. It must be played in pitch darkness. When I call out cuckoo, you take a shot at where you think I am. If you all miss, you all pay. If I'm hit, I pay."
Gary chose three tennis balls and retired to a corner of the room; Gray and Flint, urged into action, took three each, unwillingly.
"Blow out the candle," said Carfax, who had walked into the middle of the room. ”

“ Gray went for a spin in his motor. Cecile, mischievously persuaded that Hamil desired to have Shiela to himself for half an hour, stifled her yawns and bedward inclinations and remained primly near them until Gray returned.
Then the four played innocuous Bridge whist until Cecile's yawns could no longer be disguised; and finally Gray rose in disgust when she ignored the heart-convention and led him an unlovely spade.
"How many kinds of a chump can you be in one day?" asked her wrathful brother.
"Pons longa, vita brevis," observed Hamil, intensely amused. "Don't sit on her, Gray." ”

“ Taylor steadily favoured a conciliatory attitude towards those who were opposed to the union, and with Robert Rainy [q. v. Suppl. II] he shared the burden of the work connected with the crisis of 1904, when a judgment of the House of Lords handed over the whole property of the undivided Free Church to a small minority who resisted the union. ”

“ GIBB, ROBERT (d. 1837) , landscape-painter, a native of Dundee, was an associate of the Royal Institution, Edinburgh, and contributed to the exhibitions of that body from 1822 to 1830. He was an original associate of the Scottish Academy, became a full member in July 1829, and contributed to its exhibitions from 1830 to 1834. His works, which are chiefly landscapes, though he occasionally produced figure-pictures, are carefully handled and show considerable feeling for nature. ”

“ The house, which fronts us as we approach the termination of the drive, is a modern edifice, built by Sir James, the third Baronet, in 1761, after he had returned from a residence in Italy, saturated with classical ideas. It was erected entirely from the Baronet’s own designs; but, doubtless, these were produced under the influence of Robert Adam, the celebrated architect, whose sister had been married in 1753 to John Clerk, author of the “Naval Tactics,” Sir James’s younger brother. ”

“ In 1891 he received the honorary degree of D.D. from Edinburgh University, and in 1901 he declined nomination for the moderatorship of the general assembly of the United Free church of Scotland (formed in the previous year by the union of the Free and United Presbyterian churches) . Appointed in May 1907, on the death of Dr. Robert Rainy [q. v. Suppl. II] , principal of New College, Edinburgh, he was prevented by ill-health from entering on the duties of the office. He died at Edinburgh on 26 April 1909, and was buried in the Dean cemetery there. ”

“ Near the portrait of his son is a half-length by Aikman, rather hard in execution, showing a gentleman, with face turned to the left, in a purple-grey coat, the end of his white cravat being thrust through one of its button-holes. This is Dr. John Clerk, grandson of the first Baronet of Penicuik, whose father, Robert Clerk, was a physician in Edinburgh, and a close friend of Dr. Pitcairn. The son, born 1689, died 1757, was a personage of greater mark. For above thirty years he was the most eminent physician in Scotland ”

“ Alimony does not arise from any business transaction, but from the relation of marriage. It is not founded on contract, express or implied, but on the natural and legal duty of the husband to support the wife. The general obligation to support is made specific by the decree of the court of appropriate jurisdiction. Generally speaking, alimony may be altered by that court at any time, as the circumstances of the parties may require. ”

“ Gray was born in London; his father possessed property, but was indolent and selfish; his mother was a successful woman of business, and supported her son in college from her own earnings. The poet was educated at Eton and Cambridge; at the latter place, he resided for several years after his return from a continental tour, begun in 1739. He was small and delicate in person, refined and precise in dress and manners, and shy and retiring in disposition. He was an accomplished scholar in many fields of learning, but left comparatively little finished work in any department. ”

“ Gray was an author of great pretensions, but of great merit. He has an air of sublimity, if not the reality. He aims at the highest things; and if he fails, it is only by a hair’s-breadth. His pathos is injured, like his sublimity, by too great an ambition after the ornaments and machinery of poetry. His craving after foreign help perhaps shows the want of the internal impulse. His Elegy in a Country Churchyard, which is the most simple, is the best of his productions. ”

“ Grey, an eager politician, would throw back his head, and talk with more sparkle and rapidity, flashing occasionally into grim humour which seemed to throw light on the innate strength and pugnacity of the peasant and Puritan breed from which he sprang. Nothing could be more unlike the inspired philosopher, the mystic surrounded by an adoring school, whom Robert had been picturing to himself in his walk up to the house, through the soft May twilight. ”

“ Gray was thirty-eight, and tall and slender and handsome, a little bald in front, alert, quick in his movements, businesslike, prompt, decided, unsentimental, and with that kind of trim-chiselled face that just seems to glint and sparkle with frosty intellectuality! He was a renowned scientist. I do not know what the word means, but my mother would know how to use it and get effects. She would know how to depress a rat-terrier with it and make a lap-dog look sorry he came. But that is not the best one; the best one was Laboratory. ”

“ Accept my good wishes and thanks beside for the service you have done me in taming a perverse brute, and when you are again in this vicinity be sure to call on your friend,
"Louisa Stafford."
235
"The old lady's a trump!" exclaimed Robert warmly. "There isn't one in a thousand that would be so generous. This is a regular windfall to me as I am situated now. Now I shan't be obliged to send to Dr. Grey for part of my savings."
Robert continued on his way with a light heart, for it is wonderfully cheering to think that one has money enough to pay for rest and food at the close of the day. ”

“ In this manner he would go on until he had found her, or those who had taken her. There was no alternative. Mirai Khan would have said that Gray was a fatalist, but Mirai Khan did not know the soul of a white man.
"If only I am not too late," he thought. "I must not be too late. That could not happen."
Gray had no words to frame a prayer. But, lacking words, he nevertheless prayed silently as he walked.
The stars faded. The moon had disappeared over the plain in front of the American. The dunes turned from black to gray and to brown, as the sunrise climbed behind him. ”