"You that are old," Falstaff reminds the Chief Justice, "consider
not the capacities of us that are young."
One afternoon Jean called for Pamela to take her to see Mrs. Hope.
It was a clear, blue-and-white day, with clouds scudding across the sky,
and a cold, whistling wind that blew the fallen leaves along the dry
roads--a day that made people walk smartly and gave the children
apple-red cheeks and tangled curls.
Mhor and Peter were seated on The Rigs garden wall as Pamela and Jean
came out of Hillview gate. Peter wagged his tail in recognition, but
Mhor made no sign of having seen his sister and her friend.
"Aren't you cold up there?" Pamela asked him.
"Very cold," said Mhor, "but we can't come down. We're on sentry duty on
the city wall till sundown," and he shaded his eyes with his hand and
pretended to peer into space for lurking foes.
Peter looked wistfully up at him and hunched himself against the
scratched bare knees now blue with cold.
"When the sun touches the top of West Law," said Jean, pointing to a
distant blue peak, "it has set. See--there.... Now run in, sonny, and
tell Mrs. M'Cosh to let you have some currant-loaf for tea. Pamela and I
are going to tea at Hopetoun."
"Aw," said Mhor, "I hate when you go out to tea. So does Jock. So does
Peter. Look out! I'm going to jump."
He jumped and fell prostrate, barking his chin, but no howl came from
him, and he picked himself up with dignity, merely asking for the loan
of a handkerchief, his own "useful little hanky," as he explained,
having been used to mop up a spilt ink-bottle.
Fortunately Jean had a spare handkerchief, and Pamela promised that on
her return he should have a reel of sticking-plaster for his own use,
so, battered but content, he returned to the house, Peter remaining
behind to investigate a mole-heap.
"What a cheery day for November," Pamela remarked as they took the road
by Tweedside. "Look at that beech tree against the blue sky, every black
twig silhouetted. Trees are wonderful in winter."
"Trees are wonderful always," said Jean. "'Solomon spake of trees'--I do
wonder what he said. I suppose it would be the cedars of Lebanon he
'spake' of, and the hyssop that grows in the walls, and sycamores, but
he would have been worth hearing on a rowan tree flaming red against a
blue September sky. Look at that newly ploughed field so softly brown,
and the faded gold of the beech hedge. November _is_ a cheery time. The
only depressing time of the year to me is when the swallows go away. I
can't bear to see them wheeling round and preparing to depart. I want so
badly to go with them. It always brings back to me the feeling I had as
a child when people read Hans Andersen to me--the storks in _The Marsh
King's Daughter_, talking about the mud in Egypt. Imagine Priorsford
swallows in Egypt!... As the song says:
"'It's dowie at the hint o' hair'st
At the way-gaun o' the swallow.'"
"What a lovely sound Lowland Scots has," said Pamela. "I like to hear
you speak it. Tell me about Mrs. Hope, Jean. I do hope we shall see her
alone. I don't like Priorsford tea-parties; they are rather like a
foretaste of eternal punishment. With no choice you are dumped down
beside the most irrelevant sort of person, and there you remain. I went
to return Mrs. Duff-Whalley's call the other day, and fell into one.
Before I could retreat I was wedged into a chair beside a woman whom I
hope I shall never see again. She was one of those bleak people who make
the thought of getting up in the morning and dressing quite
insupportable. I don't think there was a detail in her domestic life
that she didn't touch on. She told me all her husband could eat and
couldn't eat; she called her children 'little tots,' and said she
couldn't get so much as a 'serviette' washed in the house. I thought
nobody talked of serviettes outside Wells and Arnold Bennett. Mrs.
Duff-Whalley rescued me in the nick of time before I could do anything
desperate, and then _she_ cross-examined me as to my reasons for coming
to Priorsford."
Jean laughed. "What a cheery afternoon! But it will be all right to-day.
Mrs. Hope never sees more than one or two people at a time. She is
pretty old, you see, and frail, though she has such an extraordinary
gift of being young. I do hope you will like each other. She has an edge
to her tongue, but she is an incomparable friend. The poor people go to
her in flocks, and she scolds them roundly, but always knows how to help
them in the only wise way. Her people have been in Priorsford for ages;
she knows every soul in the place, and is vastly amused at all the
little snobberies that abound in a small town. But she laughs kindly.
Pretentious people are afraid of her; simple people love her."
"Am I simple, Jean?"
Jean laughed and refused to give an opinion on the subject, beyond
quoting the words of Autolycus--"How blessed are we that are not simple
men."
They were in the Hopetoun Woods now, and at the end of the avenue could
see the house standing on a knoll by the river, whitewashed, dignified,
home-like.
"Talk to Mrs. Hope about the view," Jean advised "She is as proud of the
Hopetoun Woods as if she had made them. Isn't it a nice place? Old and
proud and honourable--like Mrs. Hope herself."
"Are there sons to inherit?"
Jean shook her head. "There were three sons. Mrs. Hope hardly ever
talks about them, but I've seen their photographs, and of course I have
often been told about them--by Great-aunt Alison, and others--and heard
how they died. They were very clever and good-looking and
well-liked--the kind of sons mothers are very proud of, and they all
died imperially, if that is an expression to use. Two died in India,
one--a soldier--in one of the Frontier skirmishes: the other--an I.C.S.
man--from over-working in a famine-stricken district. The youngest fell
in the Boer War ... so you see Mrs. Hope has the right to be proud. Aunt
Alison used to tell me that she made no moan over her wonderful sons.
She shut herself up for a short time, and then faced the world again,
her kindly, sharp-tongued self. She is one of those splendid people who
take the slings and arrows thrown at them by outrageous fortune and bury
them deep in their hearts and go on, still able to laugh, still able to
take an interest. Only, you mustn't speak to her of what she has lost.
That would be too much."
"Yes," said Pamela. "I can understand that."
She stopped for a minute and stood looking at the river full of "wan
water from the Border hills," at the stretches of lawn ornamented here
and there by stone figures, at the trees _thrawn_ with winter and rough
weather, and she thought of the three boys who had played here, who had
lived in the whitewashed house (she could see the barred nursery
windows), bathed and fished in the Tweed, thrown stones at the grey
stone figures on the lawn, climbed the trees in the Hopetoun Woods, and
who had gone out with their happy young lives to lay them down in a far
country.
Mrs. Hope was sitting by the fire in the drawing-room, a room full of
flowers and books, and lit by four long windows. Two of the windows
looked on to the lawns, and the stone figures chipped by generations of
catapult-owning boys; the other two looked across the river into the
Hopetoun Woods. The curtains were not drawn though the lamps were lit,
for Mrs. Hope liked to keep the river and the woods with her as long as
light lasted, so the warm bright room looked warmer and brighter in
contrast with the cold, ruffled water and the wind-shaken trees outside.
Mrs. Hope had been a beautiful woman in her day, and was still an
attractive figure, her white hair dressed high and crowned with a square
of lace tied in quaint fashion under her chin. Her black dress was soft
and becoming to her spare figure. There was nothing unsightly about her
years; she made age seem a lovely, desirable thing. Not that her years
were so very many, but she had lived every minute of them; also she had
given lavishly and unsparingly of her store of sympathy and energy to
others: and she had suffered grievously.
She kissed Jean affectionately, upbraiding her for being long in coming,
and turned eagerly to Pamela. New people still interested her vividly.
Here was a newcomer who promised well.
"Ah, my dear," she said in greeting, "I have wanted to know you. I'm
told you are the most interesting person who ever came to this little
town."
Pamela laughed. "There I am sure you have been misled. Priorsford is
full of exciting people. I expected to be dull, and I have rarely been
so well amused."
Mrs. Hope studied the charming face bent to her own. Her blue eyes were
shrewd, and though she stood so near the end of the way she had lost
none of her interest in the comings and goings of Vanity Fair.
"Is Priorsford amusing?" she said. "Well" (complacently), "we have our
points. As Jane Austen wrote of the Misses Bingley, 'Our powers of
conversation are considerable--we can describe an entertainment with
accuracy, relate an anecdote with humour, and laugh at our acquaintances
with spirit.'"
"Laugh!" Jean groaned. "Pamela, I must warn you that Mrs. Hope's
laughter scares Priorsford to death. We speak her fair in order that she
won't give us away to our neighbours, but we have no real hope that she
doesn't see through us. Have we, Miss Augusta?" addressing the daughter
of the house, who had just come into the room.
"Ah," said Mrs. Hope, "if everyone was as transparent as you, Jean."
"Oh, don't," Jean pleaded. "You remind me that I am quite uninteresting
when I am trying to make believe that I am subtle, or 'subtile,' as the
Psalmist says of the fowler's snare."
"Absurd child! Augusta, my dear, this is Miss Reston."
Miss Hope shook hands in her gentle, shy way, and busied herself putting
small tables beside her mother and the two guests as the servant brought
in tea. Her life was spent in doing small services.
Once, when Augusta was a child, someone asked her what she would like to
be, and she had replied, "A lady like mamma." She had never lost the
ambition, though very soon she had known that it could not be realised.
It was difficult to believe that she was Mrs. Hope's daughter, for she
had no trace of the beauty and sparkle with which her mother had been
endowed. Augusta had a long, kind, patient face--a drab-coloured
face--but her voice was beautiful. She had never been young; she was
born an anxious pilgrim, and now, at fifty, she seemed infinitely older
than her ageless mother.
Pamela, watching her as she made the tea, saw all Augusta's heart in her
eyes as she looked at her mother, and saw, too, the dread that lay in
them--the dread of the days that she must live after the light had gone
out for her.
During tea Mrs. Hope had many questions to ask about David at Oxford,
and Jean was only too delighted to tell every single detail.
"And how is my dear Jock? He is my favourite."
"Not the Mhor?" asked Pamela.
"No. Mhor is 'a'body's body.' He will never lack for admirers. But Jock
is my own boy. We've been friends since he came home from India, a
white-headed baby with the same surprised blue eyes that he has now. He
was never out of scrapes at home, but he was always good with me. I
suppose I was flattered by that."
"Jock," said Jean, "is very nearly the nicest thing in the world, and
the funniest. This morning Mrs. M'Cosh caught a mouse alive in a trap,
and Jock, while dressing, heard her say she would drown it. Down he
went, like an avalanche in pyjamas, drove Mrs. M'Cosh into the scullery,
and let the mouse away in the garden. He would fight any number of boys
of any size for an ill-treated animal. In fact, all his tenderness is
given to dumb animals. He has no real liking for mortals. They affront
him with their love-making and their marriages. He has to leave the room
when anything bordering on sentiment is read aloud. 'Tripe,' he calls it
in his low way. _Do_ you remember his scorn of knight-errants who
rescued distressed damsels? They seemed to him so little worth
rescuing."
"I never cared much for sentiment myself," said Mrs. Hope. "I wouldn't
give a good adventure yarn for all the love-stories ever written."
"Mother remains very boyish," said Augusta. "She likes something vivid
in the way of crime."
"And now," said her mother, "you are laughing at an old done woman,
which is very unseemly. Come and sit beside me, Miss Reston, and tell me
what you think of Priorsford."
"Oh," said Pamela, drawing a low chair to the side of her hostess,
"it's not for me to talk about Priorsford. They tell me you know more
about it than anyone."
"Do I? Well, perhaps; anyway, I love it more than most. I've lived here
practically all my life, and my forbears have been in the countryside
for generations, and that all counts. Priorsford ... I sometimes stand
on the bridge and look and look, and tell myself that I feel like a
mother to it."
"I know," said Pamela. "There is something very appealing about a little
town: I never lived in one before."
"But," said Mrs. Hope, jealous as a mother for her own, "I think there
is something very special about Priorsford. There are few towns as
beautiful. The way the hills cradle it, and Peel Tower stands guard over
it, and the links of Tweed water it, and even the streets aren't
ordinary, they have such lovely glimpses. From the East Gate you look up
to the East Law, pine trees, grey walls, green terraces; in the Highgate
you don't go many yards without coming to a _pend_ with a view of blue
distances that takes your breath, just as in Edinburgh when you look
down an alley and see ships tacking for the Baltic.... But I wish I had
known Priorsford as it was in my mother's young days, when the French
prisoners were here. The genteel supper-parties and assemblies must have
been vastly entertaining. It has changed even in my day. I don't want to
repeat the old folks' litany, 'No times like the old times,' but it does
seem to me--or is it only distance lending enchantment?--that the
people I used to know were more human, more interesting; there was less
worship of money, less running after the great ones of the earth,
certainly less vulgarity. We were content with less, and happier."
"But, Mrs. Hope," said Pamela, laying down her cup, "this is most
depressing hearing. I came here to find simplicity."
"You needn't expect to find it in Priorsford. We aren't so provincial as
all that. I just wish Mrs. Duff-Whalley could hear you. Simplicity
indeed! I'm not able to go out much now, but I sit here and watch
people, and I am astonished at the number of restless eyes. So many
people spend their lives striving to keep in the swim. They are
miserable in case anyone gets before them, in case a neighbour's car is
a better make, in case a neighbour's entertainments are more
elaborate.... Two girls came to see me this morning, nice girls, pretty
girls, but even my old eyes could see the powder on their faces and
their touched-up eyes. And their whole talk was of daft-like dances, and
bridge, and absurdities. If they had been my daughters I would have
whipped them for their affected manners. And when I think of their
grandmother! A decent woman was Mirren Somerville. She lived with her
father in that ivy-covered cottage at our gates, and she did sewing for
me before she married Banks. She wasn't young when she married. I
remember she came to ask my advice. 'D'you care for him, Mirren?' I
asked. 'Well, mem, it's no' as if I were a young lassie. I'm forty, and
near bye caring. But he's a dacent man, and it's lonely now ma faither's
awa, an' I'm a guid cook, an' he would aye come in to a clean fireside.'
So she married him and made a good wife to him, and they had one son.
And Mirren's son is now Sir John Banks, a baronet and an M.P. Tuts, the
thing's ridiculous.... Not that there's anything wrong with the man.
He's a soft-tongued, stuffed-looking butler-like creature, with a lot of
that low cunning that is known as business instinct, but he was good to
his mother. He didn't marry till she died, and she kept house for him in
his grand new house--the dear soul with her caps and her broad
south-country accent. She managed wonderfully, for she had great natural
dignity, and aped nothing. It was the butler killed her. She could cope
with the women servants, but when Sir John felt that his dignity
required a butler she gave it up. I dare say she was glad enough to
go.... 'Eh, mem, I am effrontit,' she used to say to me if I went in and
found her spotless kitchen disarranged, and I thought of her to-day when
I saw those silly little painted faces, and was glad she had been spared
the sight of her descendants.... But what am I raging about? What does
it matter to me, when all's said? Let the lassies dress up as long as
they have the heart; they'll have long years to learn sense if they're
spared.... Miss Reston, did you ever see anything bonnier than Tweed and
Hopetoun Woods? Jean, my dear, Lewis Elliot brought me a book last night
which really delighted me. Poems by Violet Jacob. If anyone could do for
Tweeddale what she has done for Angus I would be glad...."
"You care for poetry, Miss Reston? In Priorsford it's considered rather
a slur on your character to care for poetry. Novels we may discuss,
sensible people read novels, even now and again essays or biography, but
poetry--there we have to dissemble. We pretend, don't we, Jean?--that
poetry is nothing to us. Never a quotation or an allusion escapes us. We
listen to tales of servants' misdeeds, we talk of clothes and the
ongoings of our neighbours, and we never let on that we would rather
talk of poetry. No. No. A daft-like thing for either an old woman or a
young one to speak of. Only when we are alone--Jean and Augusta and
Lewis Elliot and I--we 'tire the sun with talking and send it down the
sky.' ... Miss Reston, Lewis Elliot tells me he knew you very well at
one time."
"Yes, away at the beginning of things. I adored him when I was fifteen
and he was twenty. He was wonderfully good to me and Biddy--my brother.
It is delightful to find an old friend in a new place."
"I'm very fond of Lewis," said Mrs. Hope, "but I wish to goodness he had
never inherited Laverlaw. He might have done a lot in the world with his
brain and his heart and his courage, but there he is contentedly settled
in that green glen of his, and greatly absorbed in sheep. Sheep! The
country is run by the Sir John Bankses, and the Lewis Elliots think
about sheep. It's all wrong. It's all wrong. The War wakened him up,
and he was in the thick of it both in the East and in France, but never
in the limelight, you understand, just doggedly doing his best in the
background. If he would marry a sensible wife with some ambition, but
he's about as much sentiment in him as Jock. It would take an earthquake
to shake him into matrimony."
"Perhaps," said Pamela, "he is like your friend Mirren--'bye caring.'"
"Nonsense," said Mrs. Hope briskly. "He's 'bye' the fervent stage, if he
ever was a prisoner in that cage of rushes, which I doubt, but there are
long years before him, I hope, and if there isn't a fire of affection on
the hearth, and someone always about to listen and understand, it's a
dowie business when the days draw in and the nights get longer and
colder, and the light departs."
"But if it's dreary for a man," said Pamela, "what of us? What of the
'left ladies,' as I heard a child describe spinsters?"
Mrs. Hope's blue eyes, callously calm, surveyed the three spinsters
before her.
"You will get no pity from me," she said. "It's practically always the
woman's own fault if she remains unmarried. Besides, a woman can do fine
without a man. A woman has so much within herself she is a constant
entertainment to herself. But men are helpless souls. Some of them are
born bachelors and they do very well, but the majority are lost without
a woman. And angry they would be to hear me say it!... Are you going,
Jean?"
"Mhor's lessons," said Jean. "I'm frightfully sorry to take Pamela
away."
"May I come again?" Pamela asked.
"Surely. Augusta and I will look forward to your next visit. Don't tire
of Priorsford yet awhile. Stay among us and learn to love the place."
Mrs. Hope smiled very kindly at her guest, and Pamela, stooping down,
kissed the hand that held her own.