saying politely:
“Can you, please, tell me whose garden this is?”
Now it is an easy thing to take off a tam-o’-shanter, but when you try
to put it on again it has a shabby way of curling up and sitting on
the top of your head so insecurely that it topples off again directly.
Pussy generally put Bunchy’s on again for him, and as she wasn’t there
he left the matter alone and held it in his hand. The man started a
little as Bunchy spoke, then he said slowly:
“I think it is God’s garden.”
Bunchy was not surprised. He felt that he knew God very well indeed.
When you say prayers morning and evening, and know that there is a
benevolent Somebody somewhere, who gives you your home, and your
parents, and your little white bed, who likes you to be truthful and
courteous, and to have clean hands at meals, it is quite natural to
hear that this benevolent Person has a garden. All nice people ought to
have gardens, so Bunchy said:
“Why does God have so many little rockeries in His garden? Why are
there all these stones, and figures, and little mounds?”
“When people die they are buried in this garden, and their friends put
up the crosses and stones----”
“And angels?” interrupted Bunchy admiringly; and as he looked up in the
man’s face he noticed that his eyes were very kind, but that there were
big black shadows round them, and their lids looked red and heavy.
“They put up the crosses, and stones, and angels to show where their
friends are sleeping,” continued the tall man.
“Then it’s a funeral,” said Bunchy solemnly, and there was silence.
The man looked sorrier than ever, and Bunchy felt that now was the time
to talk of something else, so he said:
“Can you tell me the nearest way to Yorkshire?”
The man seemed to give himself a shake, as though he were trying to
wake up. He held out his hand to Bunchy, who placed his own in it
confidingly; then he drew the child toward him and set him on his knee,
asking:
“Why do you want to go to Yorkshire, old chap?”
“Because Pussy is there and I am so lonely,” Bunchy’s voice broke.
“I went into her room, and I saw her shoes--the ones with the curly
heels--and they made me want her so bad. They’re such tall heels.”
“She had such little feet,” murmured the man.
And Bunchy saw that he had gone to sleep again, so he sat very still
for a minute or two, then he said mournfully:
“I’m so lonely!”
“So am I,” said the man. “My Pussy has gone to sleep. She is not coming
back any more. She is sleeping under the heather here.”
Bunchy felt the man’s shoulder heave as he leant against him, but he
said nothing. He felt that this was not a time to talk of something
else; this sorryness was something beyond him; so he stroked the man’s
face with a soft, sticky little hand, and the corners of his mouth
drooped, but he did not feel quite so lonely.
The man seemed to like the feel of the little hand, for he bent his
head, and, laying his cheek against Bunchy’s, said in a queer broken
voice:
“How is it that you understand, you quaint little boy?”
“Sorry people always understand, and I feel to love you! Will you come
to Yorkshire too? We should be such nice company.”
The man seemed to consider; then he said:
“It’s a long way. I’m afraid we shouldn’t get there by candle-light.
You’d be very tired, and your shoes would be quite worn out.”
“Couldn’t you carry me a bit sometimes? Daddy does when I’m very tired.”
“Well, I might do that; but even then we shouldn’t get there to-day.
How is it you are here all alone?”
The man seemed waking up, and waited quite anxiously for Bunchy’s
answer.
“Well, you see, Nana was busy sewing, and I was lonely wivout Pussy, so
I thought I’d walk to Yorkshire just to see her.”
“Suppose you come to lunch with me instead. It’s not so far as
Yorkshire; still, it’s a good way, and we’ll go and tell Nana you’re
coming, then she won’t be anxious. I don’t think Pussy would like you
to walk all that way to-day. She’ll come back as soon as she can, you
may be quite sure. Will you come? We’d be nice company, as you say.”
Bunchy looked up into the man’s eyes; then he slid off his knee, saying:
“I’ll come, thank you.”
The man got up off the big flat stone and held out his hand to Bunchy;
but the little boy had knelt down by the mound all covered with
heather. He stooped his curly head and kissed the flowers, saying in
his sweet child’s voice:
“Good-bye, man’s Pussy! I hope you are happy in God’s garden.”
Then he took the man’s hand and they walked away together.
But the man had gone to sleep again, for he said:
“Nay! And though all men, seeing, had pity on me, she would not see.”
LITTLE SHOES
The Vicarage stands at the bottom of the market place, inside high
walls and entered by wooden gates which generally stand open. Thus the
passer-by can, for a moment, feast his eyes upon the perfect garden
within.
The Vicaress was dead-heading her roses. She does this carefully every
summer afternoon just after lunch. She had reached the bush of cabbage
roses close to the gate, and her long lath basket lay on the drive
beside her.
The market place was empty and still; nobody was shopping, for all the
world rested preparatory to attending the Earl’s garden-party later
on. Road and houses alike glared white in the hot June sunshine, while
in contrast the Vicarage garden seemed doubly cool and shady. The yew
hedge just inside the gates threw long green shadows on drive and lawn.
Such a lawn it was! Plantains or dandelions were a thing unknown. Other
lawns might get brown or worn in a drought, but the Vicarage lawn was
watered every night by a specially constructed hose, that the beauty
of its velvet turf might never vary. The Vicar was wont to excuse his
exceeding pride in his lawn by quoting: “The green hath two pleasures:
the one, because nothing is more pleasant to the eye than green grass
finely shorn; the other, because it will give you a fair alley in the
midst.” It was a sunken lawn surrounded by smoothly shaven banks and
reached by broad stone steps.
The Vicar and like-minded clerics occasionally played bowls upon it;
but to think of lawn tennis or croquet in connection with such grass
were little short of sacrilege.
Presently the Vicaress became aware that a woman stood in the doorway,
a woman carrying a baby, while a little girl of some three years clung
to her skirts.
They stood gazing wistfully into the garden. As both mother and child
wore red kerchiefs instead of hats, the Vicaress looked for the
inevitable organ, but could not see it.
As she strongly disapproved of indiscriminate charity she shook her
head at them, saying: “We never give at the door!”
Wearily shifting the baby to her other arm, the woman answered, with a
touch of gentle dignity: “I have not ask the senora for money, but if
she permit that we rest on the seat in the shade; we do no harm.”
Her voice was soft, and her English refined by its foreign accent. The
Vicaress pointed to a rustic seat under the yews, saying: “You may
certainly come in and rest.” Then she continued to deadhead the cabbage
rose--it was an untidy bush that cabbage rose.
As the child toddled past her to climb into the seat the Vicaress
noticed that the little feet made red marks on the gravel. The woman
pointed to them with an apologetic shrug: “The little Zita she wear out
her shoes, her feet bleed. The senora has a pair of old shoes of her
children? Yes?”
The Vicaress shook her head, and a spasm of pain crossed her face.
There were no children at the Vicarage now. But shoes? Yes! there were
shoes. She bent down to look at the ragged little feet, and very gently
took off Zita’s shoes. “Her feet must be washed,” she announced. “Will
she come with me?”
Zita shook her curls out of her eyes, but on further inspection of the
senora declined to budge. “Then I must bring the water here,” said the
Vicaress, marching away to fetch it.
She was a tall, thin woman, with keen grey eyes and a lined, hard face,
framed in hair that Nature had intended to break into fluffy rings of
sunlight round her brow. But the Vicaress coerced her hair with some
abomination that kept it flat and close to her head. It was only when a
shaft of sunlight struck the tight braid at the back that one realized
it was of the true Titian color. She went up the wide oak staircase
into her cool, sweet-scented bedroom, where the _Gloire de Dijon_
roses nodded into the windows. Stopping in front of a big Chippendale
wardrobe, she pulled out one of the deep drawers.
“I can’t bear to do it!” she murmured, “but I never give money, and her
little feet were cut and bleeding.”
In that drawer lay many pairs of half-worn little shoes--shoes that had
pattered gaily down the Vicarage stairs and danced across the sacred
lawn. Her eyes were very soft as she chose out a pair of little strap
shoes and some woollen socks. Had the Murillo cherub, chattering in
her sweet jargon of Pyrenean Spanish under the shade of the yew trees,
seen the face of the Vicaress just then, she would not have refused
to go with her. But the Vicaress kept what Mr. Barrie tenderly calls
her “soft face” for solitary places. The best that people could say
of her was, that if her manner was hard her deeds were often kindly.
She filled a basin with warm water and went through the silent house
into the garden again. Zita laughed and showed her white teeth as
she dabbled her feet in the water, becoming quite friendly; then the
Vicaress dried her brown legs and arrayed her in the new shoes and
socks. On the party being regaled with Vicarage cake and milk, the
mother informed her hostess that they purposed to go on to Gloucester
that day--a fifteen-mile walk.
“Have you no money to go by train?” asked the Vicaress.
“Oh, no, senora! My ’usban’ sell ze ice cream there, he cannot send me
large money.”
“But you can’t get there to-night; where will you sleep?”
The woman shrugged her shoulders, turning her unoccupied hand outward
with an expressive gesture. “In the hedge, senora, it is cool and dry.”
“But the children?”
“Oh, zay sleep--and Zita, she walk well till her foots come to ze
ground.” Then turning to the child she said something rapidly in
Spanish, adding: “She sing for you, senora, you so kind for her.”
“_A la puerta del cielos, venden zapatos_,” crooned Zita in her funny
little nasal chant, and sang the lullaby right through.
“What is it all about?” demanded her hostess with a queer little catch
in her voice.
“Senora! it is that zay sell shoes at ze doorway of heaven, to ze
ragged little angels who have none!”
The woman rose, and shouldering the brown baby, prepared to depart. But
the baby, who approved of Vicarage cake, choked alarmingly, and delayed
matters for a while.
The baby’s equanimity restored, they bade their hostess farewell. They
had not gone very far, however, when hearing hasty footsteps behind
them, they turned. It was the Vicaress. She thrust something into
little Zita’s hand, exclaiming breathlessly: “I wish you to go by
train; it is not safe for such babies to be out all night!” Then she
turned and fairly ran home.
An hour later, as she stood in front of her looking-glass, smoothing
her hair till it looked like a yellow skull-cap, she said to herself:
“To pay for a person’s railway journey is not indiscriminate charity!”
and her eyes grew tender as she thought of the little shoes.
“PASSING THE LOVE OF WOMEN”
“You sent for me, mother?”
“Yes, child; I sent for you to say good-bye. I am going away for some
time.” The woman spoke deliberately in the monotonous voice of one
giving a piece of information tedious to give.
Angus did not express any surprise, or regret. The nine years he had
spent with his mother had not helped him to know her. Without in the
least understanding wherein lay her strange aloofness, he was conscious
that he was supremely uninteresting to her. He wondered why it should
be so, and his honest boyish soul was sometimes troubled. But children
submit readily to the inevitable, and Angus had his compensations.
Vera Warden looked at her son with more interest than was usual with
her. He was certainly a handsome lad, tall and well built, with blue
eyes that were both kind and honest. She had been long in making her
decision. Now that it was made she did not regret: she only wondered
if, somehow, she had missed something that more commonplace women find
easily.
“Angus, dear, you must take care of father. You and your father are so
much alike--understand each other so well--that it will be easy for
you. You must be especially good to him, now.”
There was a curious little catch in Vera’s voice as she said the “now.”
“Why are you going, mother?” questioned Angus, feeling that here was
something even more puzzling than usual in his mother’s manner. “When
are you coming back? Father will miss you.”
“Will he?” asked Vera wistfully. “And you, Angus, will you miss me at
all?”
Angus was profoundly astonished. He would like to have kissed his
mother just as he kissed dad, but he did not dare. He only grew red,
and fidgeted awkwardly, as he answered: “Of course I shall miss you,
mother--at meals.”
It was not greed that prompted the child’s definition, but the fact
that he seldom saw his mother, except at breakfast and lunch.
Vera Warden did not care for children, and said so--frequently.
The carriage came to the door, good-bye being said without much emotion
on either side. As she was driven out of the big stone gates, Vera gave
herself a little shake, saying: “And now for life!”
* * * * *
An hour later Thomas Warden returned from a fishing expedition on the
other side of the Dale. The oak trees in the avenue had burst into
gold-green leaf. The big chestnut on the lawn--the only chestnut on the
estate--was covered with cones of pinky blossom. The May sunset touched
the grim grey house with rosy light, and Thomas Warden felt a welcome
in it all.
Laying down his rods and fishing-baskets in the hall, he went straight
to his study. There on his blotting-book lay the letter he had both
dreaded and expected.
His sunburnt face looked grey as he took it up. He sat down heavily;
then, with shaking hands, opened the letter and read:
“I have burnt my boats; there is no going back. I warned you that
it would come to this: that I would bear the monotony no longer. I
have given you ten years of my life--the ten best years. Now I owe it
to myself to live--it may be ten years more--but anyway, to _live_.
Marriage and maternity have, for me, proved uninteresting; but I have
endured them for your sake, and for the sake of the boy--while he was
quite young. Had he been in any way an unusual boy I might have found
life more tolerable. To develop his mind would have been an interest
for me; he might have shared, in some degree, my aspirations after
a fuller intellectual life. But he is a healthy, handsome, quite
commonplace boy, who will grow into what you would call ‘an honest,
God-fearing man’ without my help. He has an excellent governess, and
your good mother will doubtless come frequently to worship you both.
I wish I could free you of me altogether, and that you could marry
again and be happy. But you are not the sort of man to bear with
equanimity any sort of scandal or publicity, and you have my promise
that the life I lead shall be such as can give you no cause for
offence other than the fact that I lead it away from you. For your
never-failing courtesy and kindness I thank you. Believe me, I shall
always have the sincerest affection and respect for you. The fact
remains, however, that I cannot lead your life, and you can lead no
other. Let us then separate, and go our different ways in peace.
“In every conventional and actual sense, I am and will be your
faithful wife,
“VERA WARDEN.”
There was nothing in the letter that she had not said to him, many
times, during the last six months.
Now, she had actually carried out her so often announced intention, and
was gone; and the realization stunned him. He felt cold and numbed. The
roar of the beck, in which he had stood all morning, was in his ears,
and he gazed out into the gathering twilight, seeing nothing--only
conscious that it was dark and chill everywhere.
There was a knock at the door, and a servant came in, saying: “Please,
sir, Master Angus is ready, and would like you to come to him, if you
are not too tired.”
Dragging himself out of his chair, he passed his hand across his
dazed, strained eyes. Then he went out of the room and up the wide old
staircase to his dressing-room, where Angus slept.
“I’ve got a new nightsuit, dad, just like yours. Look--pocket and
trowsies, and all!” exclaimed the child, displaying the latter garments
with great pride. “Miss Taylor had them made for me in York. Aren’t
they nice?”
“Yes, my boy, yes--very!” but the voice was absent, and Angus felt that
there was a something lacking, something that he generally found there.
The child felt frightened. Was dad, too, going to hold himself “aloof”?
Would he, too, take to looking over people’s heads, and answering in a
far-away voice? The thought was one full of omen.
Angus gazed into his father’s face, as he sat wearily on the edge of
the little bed. The child, if commonplace, was quick to understand
those who loved him. In a moment he acquitted his father, and came and
knelt beside him, rubbing his curly head against his knees. He said his
prayer with devoutly folded hands, as Grannie had taught him. Then,
climbing into Warden’s arms, put his own round his neck.
“Shall I sing my psalm, dad? Or are you too tired?”
His father held him very close. “Sing it, laddie. Sing Grannie’s psalm.”
Grannie was Scotch. When she came she taught Angus the psalms in metre.
She taught him other things that he learned more easily than the
psalms; chief among them a great love and trust in her, and through
her, for everything Scotch.
Shortbread was Scotch, and it was good. Scones were Scotch, and they
were good, especially with currants. Edinburgh rock was excellent;
therefore the psalms, too, were probably superior in the Scotch
version. Angus learned all Grannie’s favorites, the first of which was
the twenty-third:
My table thou hast furnished,
In presence of my foes.
The child always pictured a long table, covered with a fair white
cloth, and plentifully plenished with plates piled high with scones and
shortbread. He wondered what “foes” were, for he hadn’t any; he thought
they must be the servants who handed round the plates.
“Goodness and mercy all my life shall surely follow me.” The sad,
patient tune Grannie had taught him sounded almost triumphant, as the
child’s strong treble voice rang out. When he had finished, his father
leant his head against the little rounded shoulder, and there was
silence save for the man’s quick breathing.
“Good-night, dad!” said Angus at last, turning himself to see his
father’s face.
Thomas Warden rose hastily; he laid the boy in his little white bed,
kissed him, and blessed him, and went down and sat in the study again.
But a man cannot dine in his fishing boots; so he went upstairs, had a
bath, and while he dressed, Angus discoursed cheerfully to him through
the half-open door.
* * * * *
The silence was unbearable; it was so lonely. Thomas Warden could not
sleep. He got up and walked about his room. Only one o’clock! The night
had hardly begun.
The moon shone brilliantly, but the wind blew shrewdly through the open
casement. May nights are cold in the North country.
He went into the dressing-room and looked at Angus. “If she had only
loved the boy--if she had only loved the boy.” He could have forgiven
her all the rest. A just and tolerant man, he knew his own limitations.
He granted to the full his wife’s intellectual superiority; but she
might have loved the boy.
“Goodness and mercy all my life shall surely follow me.” Why did those
lines ring in his head? and then, there always followed the sentence in
his wife’s letter: “I cannot live your life, and you can live no other.”
It was true: _he_ could live no other. But the boy--why did she not
love the boy?
He drew up the blind, and the mellow moonlight fell on the sleeping
child. Surely he was a goodly child, so comely, and kindly, and honest.
As he looked at the boy his heart went out to him. He did not stoop and
kiss him as a woman would have done; he reverenced too much this fair
sleep which wrapped him round. He went back to his own room and got a
pillow. Then, laying his long length on the floor beside the little
bed, and with the child’s psalm still sounding in his ears, he too
slept.
The room was flooded with moonlight when Angus awoke. There was a sound
of regular and heavy breathing. Angus felt puzzled; puzzled, but not in
the least afraid. Such breathing must come from a man, or a dog; from
men and dogs the child had experienced nothing but kindness.
He sat up, and listening, looked about to see where the sound came
from. He shook his hair back from his forehead, and rubbed his eyes.
Yes! he was not mistaken, it _was_ his father who lay there on the
floor beside his bed.
Angus rose softly, and touched his father’s bare feet; they were very
cold. “Poor dad,” he said to himself--“and him so tired!”
Then suddenly he remembered his mother’s words: “You must take care of
father.” It was bad to sleep without a covering, Grannie had told him
that. He pulled his little quilt off his bed, and laid it lightly on
his father. To his delight the sleeping figure never stirred, but the
quilt was short, and Thomas Warden was long--by no amount of stretching
would it cover both his shoulders and his feet--poor cold feet! Then
Angus was seized by an inspiration, which even his mother could not
have called quite commonplace. He lay down at his father’s feet, and
unbuttoning the jacket of the new sleeping suit, he cuddled up so that
the cold feet rested on his own warm breast. Then he, too, fell asleep.
The kindly moon shone in upon them, and it was very still.
When Thomas Warden awoke the moonlight had changed to pearly dawn. He
was no longer cold, and when he realized why, he was no longer lonely.
A THROW BACK
Nana had at last gone out and left the coast clear. Kit seized her
little brother’s hand, and they sped down the long passage to the red
baize door which swung heavily but did not latch, shutting off the
nursery quarters from the house.
Kit was a person of dramatic instincts, and as they ran down the
passage she quoted in a deep and awful voice, “The tiger is a fearful
beast, He comes when you expect him least.” Addison gazed fearfully
over his shoulder, and ran at the top of his speed.
At last by a mighty effort they pushed open the heavy red door, and
the staircase and the house lay before them for exploration. It was a
very wide staircase, black and shiny and slippery, and as they went
down their little feet made a pattering noise which seemed to echo
and multiply in the silent house. Kit turned and said, “Hush!” in a
reproving voice to Addison, who was, like Agag, walking delicately, on
the banister side. “I can’t hush any more than I’m doing!” he replied
in an injured tone. “I must put my feet down firm or I’d skate!”
“Come on!” said Kit. “Let’s go and see if Jakes is in the dining-room,
and he’ll tell us what’s for lunch.”
They crossed the stone-flagged hall, and Kit opened the dining-room
door and marched boldly in. There was no one there; the big room was
wrapped in silence, and Addison felt very small and timid as he stood
on the threshold. Not so Kit; she walked boldly up to the table, which
was laid. There was a great deal of old silver on the table, and many
flowers; but its appearance was evidently most displeasing to Kit, for
she exclaimed angrily:
“Look here, Addison, just look here! Jakes has only laid lunch for
_one_!”
Even the mild and gentle Addison was roused to something like
indignation at this tremendous intelligence. To have breakfast and tea
in the nursery is an understood thing; but lunch--whoever heard of a
well-conducted child having lunch anywhere but in the dining-room, once
he or she could hold a spoon and fork? It was abominable; it had to be
seen into at once.
Kit gave an indignant sniff, saying: “I know it isn’t Jakes; it’s Nana.
She’d go and say we could have lunch with her till Miss Mercer came;
but I’ll go and speak to grandpapa at once; it’s a shame; I won’t stand
it. Come on!”
The obedient Addison trotted after Kit across the hall with some
alacrity. He hadn’t seen much of grandpapa; but what he had seen he
liked. How still the old house was, no sound to be heard but the drip,
drip of the rain on the ivy outside the windows and the sizzle and fiz
of the big logs in the great stone fireplace.
The children looked upon “Nanas” and their like as necessary evils.
They divided mankind into two classes, which they called respectively
“the dears” and “the deafs.” To the “dears” belonged father and mother,
all father’s friends and most of mother’s; Gaffer and all Gaffer’s
servants; orderlies--particularly orderlies--and grooms. To the “deafs”
belonged nurses, governesses, cross gardeners, and a great many young
ladies who wore smart frocks and were affectionate in public. These
latter were called “deafs” not because of any defect in their aural
arrangements, but simply because the children considered them incapable
of discussing anything interesting. “Stupid people!” Kit was wont to
observe, “who ask you how old you are, and who fetch stale cake out of
tin boxes, and one’s got to eat it for politeness’ sake. Oh, I hate
deafs!”
When Kit reached the study door she knocked, but there was no answer.
“Mother says he never hears if he’s writing,” she whispered. “Let’s
go in--come on!” So she turned the handle of the door and went in.
Grandfather was writing. His great knee-hole table was piled with open
books, and he had on his gold-rimmed spectacles. He never looked up as
Kit shut the door softly behind her. For one thing, doors never creaked
in grandfather’s house.
The children stood inside the door and waited, but he never looked
up. “Come on,” said Kit, as, holding Addison by the hand, they walked
leisurely across the room, till she stood close by their grandfather;
then she said in a loud and cheerful voice:
“Good-morning, Gaffer; we’ve come to see you!”
“We’ve come to see you!” echoed the ever-obedient Addison. Grandfather
was fond of old-fashioned things, and the name “Gaffer” was so
delightfully inappropriate that he encouraged the children to use it
when they spoke to him.
“Oh, you’ve come, have you?” he said, taking off his spectacles and
turning himself in his heavy revolving chair toward the children. “And
how are you, my dears? Did you sleep well after your long journey?”
It did not take long to install a child on each knee. Addison gazed
at him in adoring silence, but Kit hastened to unbosom herself of her
wrongs. “I’ve come to complain!” she began with dignity. “They’ve
only laid lunch for you in the dining-room. Now I know you’d like our
company. Mother said we were to keep you company--will you give orders
about it?”
Gaffer seemed duly impressed, as he said: “I will give orders at once.
Of course you are to have lunch with me while you are here. It’s a pity
it’s so wet for your first day, but it’s nice to think that those dear
people are going further and further away from the fogs and damp. It
will do mother so much good to be in a warm climate, and you must try
not to feel dull without them.”
“I wish they’d taken me!” said Kit. “I love hotels!” Gaffer looked at
her and laughed: “What a traveled little person you are! I never slept
in a hotel till I was seventeen.”
“Ah, but that’s long ago. People go about more now, and, you see, we
have to go with the regiment.”
“To go with the regiment,” echoed Addison.
Kit conversed affably with her grandfather for some time; she told him
who were her favorite officers, and which her favorite puddings. She
carefully explained that, as she was four years older than Addison, she
went to bed an hour later, and that she intended to spend that hour in
her grandfather’s society. She expressed her approval of the study as
a room, but thought it was a pity that, owing to the large number of
books, there was no space for any pictures on the walls. Addison stared
about him in solemn silence, till at last Gaffer suggested that, as he
had got to write to mother, they had better go back to the nursery till
lunchtime. Then they trotted across the room together, but when they
reached the door and Kit had gone out, Addison raced back and stood
by his grandfather’s chair, whispering breathlessly: “Will you let me
see some of the books some day--wivout Kit?” There was a passionate
eagerness in the question which startled Gaffer. He looked down at the
imploring, upturned face.
And then “a strange thing happened.” It was no longer Addison, his
namesake, that he saw; it was himself. Himself of sixty years ago.
There he stood, the quaint, serious-eyed boy, whose portrait hung in
his dead wife’s dressing-room. The boy who longed for books, and who
had asked the same question of a scholar in an Oxford library, on a
long-forgotten morning all those years ago. With a sudden rush of
gratitude he remembered how the question had been answered, and though
his smile was very pleasant, his voice was a trifle husky as he said:
“Assuredly!”
“Wivout Kit?” persistently questioned the little boy.
“Without Kit, I promise,” repeated Gaffer. Then he and Addison shook
hands, and Addison followed Kit.
She was waiting in the hall. “What did you say to Gaffer?” she asked
inquisitively, but Addison shook his head. He could keep his own
counsel even when coerced by pinches.
At lunch Gaffer inquired: “Addison, can you read?”
“Not well!” answered Kit. “He can’t read well; he’s only doing
‘sequel,’ and he’s six. He’s very backward!”
“I asked Addison, my dear,” said Gaffer, in gently reproving tones.
Addison blushed and held down his head; then he said: “I don’t like
what I read; it’s so uninteresting. They ask such silly questions, over
and over again.”
“He knows heaps of poetry!” said Kit magnanimously. “He can learn
anything when he’s heard it once, and he knows pages of verses, and
psalms, and that, but he’s no good on horseback. He’s got no nerve. Dad
says he’ll never be any good across country! And he’s afraid of the
dark!”
“Are you not nervous?” asked Gaffer.
“Me nervous!” said Kit with great scorn. “I can ride dad’s chargers!”
“Ah, you’re like your mother,” said Gaffer, smiling at her. “Now I, I
was never any good across country; but yet I haven’t found that it has
alienated my friends, or done me any great damage in life. Has Addison
begun Latin?”
“Oh, no; Miss Mercer doesn’t teach Latin, and he’s far too backward in
other things to begin.”
“I began Greek when I was his age,” said Gaffer dreamily; “but there’s
no reason why Addison should not begin Latin. He shall begin it with
me.”
Addison flushed up to the roots of his hair; then he scrambled off his
seat--a most unheard-of proceeding in the middle of lunch--and ran
round to his grandfather. He threw himself upon him, exclaiming: “I
love you; oh, how I love you!”
Kit regarded him with astonished eyes. That Addison, who never kissed
anybody but mother, who was so undemonstrative, so slow to show
feeling, should behave in this extraordinary manner, because he was
told he might have Latin lessons, was to her incomprehensible; and
Gaffer seemed to approve, for he lifted Addison on to his knee, and
said in such a queer voice: “I think we’re rather of a kidney, you and
I; we’re going to understand each other uncommonly well,” and Addison
sat enthroned on Gaffer’s knee all the rest of lunch, and shared his
cheese. Kit felt injured.
When Gaffer went back to his study he sat down before the fire, and he
pondered for a long time over his queer little grandson. Then he gave
his shoulders a shake and sighed: “I was a disappointment to my father,
and he’ll be a disappointment--he is a disappointment--poor little
chap, to his. He is unaccountably like me.”
A lonely child was Addison. The fact that he was always called Addison
from the time he ceased to be baby was proof enough. A child who is
understood gets a nickname. Kit had fifty. Addison was always called
by his baptismal name. It was Gaffer’s name, and Gaffer’s grandfather
had been called after a gentleman who wrote poetry and things. Little
Addison knew that much, and he wondered if the writings of that
far-away Mr. Addison were more interesting than “Step by Step.” Addison
was called an “old-fashioned child”; he was not very sure precisely
what that was, but that it was something a child ought not to be, he
was convinced. Kit was pretty, very pretty; so the officers said, not
infrequently to Kit herself. Kit was never afraid of anything by day
or by night. Kit always spoke the truth; Addison had been known to
prevaricate when he was frightened, and he was often frightened--at
nothing at all, Kit said.
But the worst and most unforgivable thing about Addison was this: he
had no wish to be a soldier--and said so. The sound of a pop-gun caused
his heart to thump against his breast in an unpleasantly violent
manner, and a review was to him a prolonged agony that made him ill for
days.
His mother--whom he worshipped--and who loved him tenderly, was quite
unconscious of his many sufferings. She was absolutely devoid of nerves
herself, and thought that Addison would grow out of his “delicacy,”
as she called it. She was proud of his remarkable resemblance to
her father, whom she admired above all mortal men--but she was
disappointed; and poor Addison, with the quick intuition of childhood,
was perfectly aware of it--at his being what her husband called “such a
Molly.”
So it came about that Kit was always brought forward, and Addison kept
in the background--to his own satisfaction certainly, but very much to
the detriment of Kit.
Edinburgh, where the regiment was stationed, was too cold for mother,
and dad obtained leave to take her to the Riviera for the worst months;
so Kit and Addison were sent to Gaffer, and for Addison it was the
turning-point of his life.
To most people, their initiation into the accidence of the Latin
language is not a very happy recollection. To Addison it is a
recollection little short of rapturous.
To him the first pages of a Latin grammar call up the picture of a
large, old-fashioned room, flooded with a mellow light like that of
the sun through a veil of yellowing beeches. There is a goodly smell
in the room, the smell of dressed and well-kept leather. The walls are
lined with books, books bound in calf and russet-colored Russia, and
in the middle of the room stands a knee-hole table both deep and wide.
It, too, is covered with books; but here they lie open, one upon the
other, a crowd of witnesses to the tastes of the owner of the room.
That gracious owner! Addison’s eyes grow dim as he thinks of the spare
upright figure seated in the revolving chair; the keen scholarly face
and noble white head. He hears again the kind, cultivated voice ever
ready to answer questions, to answer them so fully and so beautifully,
with such a tender sympathy for the eager childish questioner. And then
Addison goes down on his mental knees and thanks his God that as yet he
had brought no look of sorrow into those kind eyes, but many a look of
pride and joy.
Is there not one shelf in that library devoted to Addison’s prizes?
And the row is lengthening by leaps and bounds. Yet they wonder at
Winchester why he should be so fond of classics.
THE INTERVENTION OF THE DUKE
I
ENTER WIGGINS
The Reverend Andrew Methven stood at his study window gazing out to
sea. The sea was very blue, the sands yellow and smooth, but it was not
the sea that the Reverend Andrew saw.
Elgo, on the Fife coast, is growing fashionable. In summer every house
is let, and there are sometimes as many as fifty bathers at once in
the bay. At Elgo the bathers usually wear blue serge, adorned it may
be by red or white braid. Pale blue silk with white facings and short
sleeves is not the usual uniform. It impressed the Reverend Andrew,
and consequently he stood and stared. Moreover, the wearer of this
wonderful creation--he felt it was a “creation,” though he had never
heard the word so used--came out of the house next door to the Manse,
the house being that of his most worthy parishioner, Mrs. Urquhart,
Baker and Confectioner, who let her rooms during the summer months.
Elgo streets are somewhat one-sided, the town being built upon the
cliff with a railing near the outer edge for the protection of the
unwary.
The vision in pale blue silk tripped down the steep steps cut in the
rocks, and ran across the sands. She was followed by a small thin boy,
whose freckled face was broad and good-natured. On the sands they took
hands and danced into the water together.
The vision was tall and slim, with wonderful arms that flashed white
in the June sunshine, and the minister remarked that she could swim
magnificently. The little naked boy splashed after her, looking like a
terrier as he shook the water from his crop of curly hair.
The minister’s window was open, and across the sunlit sands came the
sound of a woman’s voice, crying: “Come on, Wiggins, get on my back,
and I’ll swim with you to the Cock’s-tail Rocks!”
The Reverend Andrew swung his telescope into position; he had the grace
to blush as he did so, but none the less did he eagerly follow that
swimmer by its aid. She did it, there and back; then she and the small
boy ran dripping over the sands and vanished through Mrs. Urquhart’s
side door.
An hour later the minister (he was the Free Kirk minister really; there
is an Established Church in Elgo, but as its pews are empty and its
incumbent of small account, he was “the minister” to Elgo) strolled
into Mrs. Urquhart’s shop to buy cookies. Mrs. Urquhart herself bustled
forward to serve him.
“You’ve let your rooms, I see, Mrs. Urquhart! And early in the season,
too!”
“Yes, sir! I’ve let my rooms, and to my own young lady that I was
nurse to; you’ll mind my telling you of Sir John Penberthy and his
bonny family. Well, Mrs. Burton is just my Miss Mary, married and
widowed too, poor lamb, and she and Master Wiggins have come all the
way from London to be with me, and it’s proud I am to have them!” Mrs.
Urquhart paused breathless.
The minister murmured something sympathetic, and taking up his bag of
cookies strode back to the Manse. “Mary, mother of names,” he thought,
as he turned over the information he had received. “Widowed! She
doesn’t wear much mourning anyway!” as he thought of the blue silk
bathing-dress. Then he said with a sigh, “She is very beautiful!” and
sat him down to write his Sunday sermon.
In the afternoon he met Wiggins on the beach: that gentleman was
digging while a French _bonne_ kept guard in the rear.
“Do you like Elgo?” asked the minister. He had a kindly way with
children; he was rather childlike himself, and they knew it.
“Awfully,” answered Wiggins, patting his castle walls, and barely
looking up.
“Have you ever been to the sea before?”
“Oh, dear, yes; haven’t you?”
“I live here,” said the minister, rather discomposed by this
exceedingly cool child.
“I wish I did!” sighed Wiggins. “I hate Kensington.”
“Ah, that’s London! I’ve never been there,” said the minister simply.
“I wish I had.”
“It’s not a very nice place. There’s gardens and busses, and sometimes
we ride in a hansom, and you always have to wear your shoes and
generally gloves, it’s beastly.” Wiggins spoke bitterly, as one who had
tasted the hollow shams of Kensington.
The minister sat down on the sand.
“Isn’t there a museum there, and an Art Gallery?” he asked.
“Oh, yes, but you mayn’t touch anything, and you have to wear your hat!”
“You seem to object to clothing,” remarked the minister.
“Don’t you?” responded this discomposing child.
“Well, no, I can’t say I do. It’s warm, and----”
“Oh, it’s warm enough in Kensington, if that’s what you want!” and
Wiggins turned to dig a fresh channel from his castle to the sea.
“M’sieu Wiggins, il faut aller à la maison pour le thé. Faites vos
adieux à M’sieu le Curé!” and Madeleine, the pretty French _bonne_,
folded up her crochet, and rose.
But Wiggins was smitten with deafness, and waded deeper into the water,
with a seraphically unconscious look.
Madeleine went down to the water’s edge, where she discoursed volubly
for about five minutes. The minister sat watching; he wondered why
French people speak so fast, and whether Wiggins understood. He
evidently did, for he answered derisively, and sat down suddenly in
the water. Then he came out, and grinning at the minister, remarked
gleefully as he took his dripping way homeward:
“That’s the third pair to-day, soon shan’t have any left to wear. What
a rux!”
“So that’s a London child!” mused the minister. “He’s a fine frank lad;
I must call upon his mother.”
II
A NEW ATMOSPHERE
But the days went on, and the minister did not call. He was a sociable
fellow, much beloved by his fisher folk, and by such summer visitors
as knew him. Elgo was his first “charge.” Had he been small, instead
of six-foot-three, he would doubtless long ago have been dubbed “The
Little Minister,” after Mr. Barrie’s immortal hero, for he was young as
a minister can be.
He did not call on Mrs. Burton because he had conceived for her an
extravagant admiration, or rather adoration. He met her constantly on
the beach and in the village street, and on these occasions gravely
lifted his hat. Had he followed his impulse, he would have gone down
on his knees and begged leave to kiss her feet. We do not follow our
impulses in these matters nowadays, and Mary Burton never wondered why
he did not call, for she thought about him not at all.
She did not go to church that first Sunday, but played with Wiggins on
the beach all the morning. Mrs. Urquhart was scandalized and suggested
the Episcopalian church at Pittenweem; but Mary only put her arms round
her old nurse and laughingly promised to come and sit in her pew next
Sunday.
The minister progressed in his friendship with Wiggins; while Mary was
scouring the country on her bicycle, Wiggins and his new friend played
on the beach or fished for poddlies from the rocks.
Madeleine with the inevitable crochet sat on the beach and beamed at
them.
“You’re a Presbyterian, aren’t you?” asked Wiggins abruptly of the
minister one afternoon.
“Yes, I’m a member of the Free Kirk.”
“Oh, you’re Free Kirk, and Madeleine’s a Roman Catholic, and mother and
me is Pagans!”
“Pagans?” echoed the minister in astonished tones.
“Well, mother says so. It means that you love the sun, and the sea, and
bare feet and meringues and music-halls and things!”
“Pagans, music-halls!” The minister gazed in horror at the unconscious
but breathless Wiggins. “Do you mean to say,” he asked solemnly, “that
you do not know anything about our Saviour who died for us?”
Wiggins turned and looked at him with something of reproachful scorn on
his broad freckled face; then he said slowly: “Of course, I know, but
we never talk about _that_ to strangers, mother and me. It is bad form,
like the people who give you tracts in busses.”
“I beg your pardon, I misunderstood,” said the minister.
They were silent for a few minutes, during which the minister digested
this, to him, new view of confessing your faith before men.
Although he himself never gave tracts either in busses or anywhere
else, he had certainly in a sort of hazy fashion considered that to do
so was praiseworthy, if mistaken.
“There’s mother!” announced Wiggins suddenly. “Let’s come and talk to
her.”
The minister scrambled to his feet, and in another moment he had shaken
hands with Mrs. Burton, and they all sat down on the beach together.
Wiggins did most of the talking, and then it began to rain.
“Will you come in and have a cup of tea with Wiggins and me?” asked
Mrs. Burton.
The minister felt that no words at all expressed the rapture with which
this proposal filled him.
Mrs. Urquhart’s parlor looked so different that afternoon. Many
photographs stood on the mantelpiece, books other than albums or Family
Bibles were scattered on the table, papers and magazines strewed the
horsehair sofa, while on the mantelpiece among the photographs and
the little vases full of roses were the ends of many half-smoked
cigarettes. Another shock was in store for the minister.
They had tea; he drank three cups and ate endless scones in order to
prolong the meal. To sit opposite to Mary and watch her white, heavily
ringed hands flit in and out among the cups as she made tea was a
wonderful thing. To listen to her as she praised Elgo, and Scotland
generally, in her soft Southern voice was wonderful; but most wonderful
of all was to gaze at her unrebuked, to drink in the beauty of her
face, to note the gracious line of cheek and chin as she turned her
head, and lose himself in the depths of her eyes, brown as the trout
stream beyond Glen Dynoch. When at last some small consciousness of
material things awoke in him and he rose to go, Mary reached to the
chimneypiece for a slim tin box.
“Will you have a cigarette?” she asked. “Dear Mrs. Urquhart forgives my
evil habits, and pretends she thinks that I smoke for asthma. I don’t
look asthmatical, do I?”
“Thank you,” faltered the minister. “I do not smoke now--I gave it
up after my student days, just as I gave up drinking anything, for
the sake of my people. I daresay it was useless, but I thought it was
right--then.”
He spoke diffidently, humbly, half expecting a flash of amused scorn in
her, such as he not infrequently encountered in Wiggins. But Mary held
out her hand, saying softly:
“I am sure it was right then, and is now; but don’t judge me hardly,
for I have no flock to influence. My boys will smoke, anyhow, when they
are big.”
“It is kind of you not to laugh at me,” he said, and with that took his
leave.
Mary lit her cigarette and smoked thoughtfully for some time. Wiggins
was once more searching for treasure on his beloved beach. She sat at
the open window and watched the boats come in. Presently she rang the
bell for Mrs. Urquhart. When that good lady appeared, breathless from
her ascent of the steep little stairs, Mary pushed her into an armchair
and sat down at her feet, with her head against the old woman’s knees.
“Amuse me, nursey; tell me about your minister. Where does he come
from? How is it that, without having been anywhere or seen anything,
he is such a perfect gentleman, and why--oh, why is he a Free Church
minister?”
“And what for no, my dearie? He’s an excellent, well-doing young man.
You should hear him preach; it’s just wonderfu’. His father’s a doctor
near Aberdeen; bein’ douce people they are--a large young family, and
all doing well. He was at the college in Edinburgh, and passed very
high. But it’s no his learning that we care about, it’s his kind,
friendly ways. He’d take his turn nursing a body that’s sick just like
one of the family; and he’s just a wonderful way with young men. To
be sure, he’s young himself--only just twenty-six--but he’s not a bit
bumptious or puffed up, like many young men. He’s greatly set up with
Master Wiggins; they’re grand friends.”
“He has been very kind to Wiggins. I’ll ask him to dinner. Will you
cook me a very nice dinner, nursey dear, on Thursday evening?”
“He’ll no come then, my dearie, for it’s prayer-meeting night. I just
wish you’d go yourself.”
“I’ve never been to a prayer-meeting. What’s it like? What happens?”
“It’s just beautiful, my dearie; and the gentry go too. Mrs. Braid, of
Elgo House, she always goes.”
Mary made a little face. “She called upon me yesterday. I didn’t find
her very exciting. I’ve got to dine there to-night, so I suppose I must
dress. You might send Madeleine to do my hair. Dear nursey, I’d far
rather stay with you than go to Elgo House.”
III
“ALL SECRET SHADOWS AND MYSTIC SIGHTS”
Dinner parties at Elgo House were not, as a rule, exciting. The
conversation generally vibrated between the harvest prospects and the
game prospects, with somewhat numerous flashes of silence, during which
each guest madly racked his brain for a fresh topic of conversation,
only to fall back finally upon the weather.
Andrew Methven did not expect to enjoy himself much on that particular
evening. His presence at Elgo House was something of an anomaly, for
the family were “established” by conviction, yet Mrs. Braid attended
the Free Kirk because she liked Andrew’s sermons.
He felt rather as though he were poaching on his neighbor’s preserves
when he went there. He liked his brother cleric (as he liked most
people), who, if old and somewhat dull, was kindly and human. So long
as his evening pipe and toddy were forthcoming with regularity the
“established” minister recked little if he preached to empty benches.
Andrew Methven felt the blood rush to his face as on entering the
Braids’ drawing-room he heard that voice which had been ringing in his
ears ever since his parting with Mary that afternoon.
Daylight lasts long in the North Country, and there were no candles
needed at Elgo House for dinner. Mary sat opposite the minister, and
had he been given to cursing he would have cursed the tall epergne of
fruit that hid her from his sight, especially as the majority of her
remarks were addressed to him.
The only other guests were an elderly colonel and his wife, who were
staying at the hotel. The colonel, whenever he looked at or spoke
to Mary, seemed by his very atmosphere to ejaculate “Monstrous fine
woman,” and Andrew felt an insane desire to choke him there and then in
his own high white collar.
Dinner over, they all strolled into the garden, and then that happened
which made an epoch in Andrew Methven’s life.
When they had all duly admired the roses and the goodly promise of
peaches on the south wall, someone brought a guitar out of the house
and Mary sat down to sing.
Her dress, some soft transparent blackness over white, faded into the
shadows among which she sat. Somehow it reminded Andrew of the silver
birch trees in the copse beyond. She bent her head as she tuned the
guitar, and the throb of the strings seemed an appropriate background
to the sweetness of her profile. Vision and sound became indissolubly
mixed. Andrew could never afterward separate Mary’s face from her
voice, and both were irresistibly a part of the beech copse seen dimly
in the evening light. The whole making a picture, subtle, detached,
vivid; an experience in which all the senses bore an equal part and
were indistinguishable.
Mary’s voice was a big, soft contralto, as unlike the usual
“drawing-room voice” as it is possible to be, and she sang seriously.
She gave her message to the four winds to be carried where they listed.
She sang to the scented night, to the distant sea, to the flowers and
the moonlight: not to the little handful of human beings, whose chairs
creaked as they sat, and who, saving one, only realized that she was a
beautiful woman who had a fine voice.
They thanked her when she had finished, all but Andrew, who,
white-faced and dumb, gazed into the deepening shadows as he stood by
Mary’s chair.
“It’s really most extraordinary to be able to sit out at night in
June in Scotland, is it not?” said the colonel’s wife in his ear. He
started, looking at her stupidly. “A very absent young man!” she said
to herself.
Truly he was absent, for he had been in heaven.
Mary, too, was silent, softly beating out a faint melody on her guitar
as it lay across her knees.
Suddenly she looked up at Andrew, saying under her breath: “The rest
may reason and welcome, ’tis we musicians know!”
“The rest” did not hear, or hearing did not understand; but Andrew
said: “Thank God!”
The colonel’s voice was heard declaring that it was “deucedly chilly,”
and everybody made a move to go indoors, except Andrew, who, pleading
work, fled down the drive, only to walk for miles aimlessly in a
direction leading further and further from the Manse.
Had he but known it, that walk was symbolical of the rest of his life.
When he did get home his rather ancient “evening shoes” were quit worn
out.
IV
THE EDUCATION OF THE MINISTER
“The Duke is coming at the end of the month,” announced Wiggins to the
minister, as they anchored and fished for poddlies in the bay.
“What Duke?”
“My brother; he’s at school at Leamington; he’s going to Eton in three
years. He’s ten, four years older nor me.” Wiggins was a model of
conciseness in the way he imparted information.
“Why do you call him the Duke?” asked the minister in rather an
abstracted voice; he was watching a tall lady on the distant links.
“’Cause he is one; his name’s Marmaduke, and he is a tremenjous Duke;
they all say so.”
“Who are _they_?”
“Oh, mother, and uncles, and boys, and people.”
“Is he like you?”
“Not a bit; he’s handsome; he’s exactly like mother.”
The minister smiled. Was Mary handsome? he wondered. For many days now
he had forgotten to take her beauty into account. He never compared her
with other women. She was not to him more beautiful, not more clever,
not more kind than other women; she was simply what that Frenchman said
of his lady--she was _mieux femme_. There was no one else.
“Are you very fond of your brother?” asked the minister, forcing
himself to attend to Wiggins.
“I’m glad he goes to school,” replied that gentleman guardedly. “He
rather bangs me about.”
“Is Wiggins a family name?” abruptly demanded the minister.
“You _are_ a jokey man,” said Wiggins admiringly. “Why, it’s because of
my hair they call me that; my name’s Tregenna--‘Tre, Pol, and Pen,’ you
know. Mother’s Cornish.”
At this moment Wiggins had a bite, therefore excitement reigned for the
next five minutes, and even the advent of the Duke was forgotten.
* * * * *
Did Mary Burton know what she was doing when she admitted this obscure
Free Kirk minister to friendship and intimacy? Did she realize how
contact with her kindness, her simplicity, her gentlehood, was making
him every day more hopelessly her slave? In after years, when he walked
in darkness, with a hunger that nothing appeased, Andrew would ask
himself this question, and whichever way he answered it he blessed
her. He no more thought of blaming her than the sailor thinks of
tracing the storm to the evening star.
“She shall have worship of me,” he said in those early days of wonder
and happiness. “She still has worship of me,” he said after years of
unsatisfied longing and ceaseless pain.
There was a song that Mary used to sing, a song he loved, written by a
man for whom and for whose writings in those youthful opinionated days
Andrew felt a hatred that was almost fear. Yet the song dominated him,
and in after years he would repeat it to himself with a curious fierce
sense of possession.
O brother, the Gods were good to you.
Sleep, and be glad while the world endures.
Be well content as the years wear through;
Give thanks for life, and the loves and lures;
Give thanks for life, O brother, and death,
For the sweet last sound of her feet, her breath,
For gifts she gave you, gracious and few,
Tears and kisses, that lady of yours.
Again across the silence he would hear Mary’s voice; again would he see
against the evening sky her delicate pale profile and the little head
weighted with its coils of shadowy hair; accompanying it all, the soft
plash of the waves as they rolled over the sands beneath her window and
the sharp salt wind which sighed foreboding things.
* * * * *
“No! I won’t sing any more to-night; let us talk,” said Mary.
The weather had turned unkindly, a bright fire flickered on the
hearth, while the rain outside drove and pattered against the rattling
windows. The minister had come in “for some music” as had become his
habit during the last weeks, but, Mary was in no mood to sing, so she
laid the guitar aside.
“You told me that you intended to criticize my sermon of yesterday,”
said Andrew deferentially. “I gather that you altogether disagree with
me.”
Mary lit a cigarette and smiled at him, her own indulgent smile, which
always softened the severity of her remarks. “Yes, I think your view is
narrow, and in some respects unjust. Of course, I know it is the kind
of sermon that is popular; and it is certainly kind to the novelists
to abuse them from the pulpit--it increases the sale of their books so
enormously. But that was hardly your object, was it?”
“I do not know what was my object, unless it were to deliver a message
that I felt had been entrusted to me. I do feel strongly on this
question. It seems to me so pitiful that people should waste their time
in reading injurious trash, when all the time there waits in silent
patience the great company of the Immortals.”
“I like Schumann’s view best. He says, ‘Reverence what is old, but
have a warm heart also for what is new.’ Much that is new is true, and
beautiful, and helpful.”
Mary leant forward, looking eagerly through a little cloud of smoke at
the minister.
He shook his head. “A great deal is hopelessly false, and ugly and
lowering.”
“I think you overrate the influence of bad books,” said Mary. “It is
only the great books that live; a meretricious book may have a few
months’ popularity, and then no one reads it any more, it is forgotten
as absolutely as we forget the smell of decaying cabbage when we have
passed the rubbish heaps.”
“But surely you will allow that there is a great badness as well as a
great goodness. Look at those Frenchmen; you cannot say their work is
good, but it certainly will live, because it is great.”
The minister spoke earnestly. He hated that she should think him
narrow; but he had the courage of his opinions.
Mary was silent for a minute, then she looked at him and smiled, saying
frankly:
“That is true; but I believe that in all genius there must be something
of goodness. We are all going to heaven, and De Maupassant is going
too.”
“I would like to think they are all going, but it seems to me some of
them have much to answer for. Influence is an awful responsibility.
I believe it is the one thing for which we shall have to give the
strictest account.”
Mary looked grave. “Do you think that people always realize when they
have influence?”
“No, not always; they do not certainly realize the extent of their
influence. You, for instance, were you less noble-minded, might do
incalculable harm, for you never think about the effect you produce at
all.”
“Oh, please don’t be so seriously complimentary,” she exclaimed. “To
pose as ‘a good influence’ would be too dreadful! I should feel like
seven curates rolled into one. Confess now, though, that you always
thought a liking for cigarettes was the sign in a woman of moral
obliquity, now, didn’t you?”
Andrew blushed. “I have seen very little, and known few interesting
people,” he said modestly; “none from your world.”
“How far we are getting from your sermon on modern literature; that is
what we were going to talk about.”
“I spoke as I felt; I daresay I am wrong, but I can’t feel wrong yet.
It may be that I overestimate the influence of books; but you see, in
my case, books have been the only great influences I have known--until
lately,” he added softly.
Mary looked into the fire in silence for a few minutes, then she said:
“Never judge a man by one book any more than you would judge him by one
single act, but be grateful when you come across any piece of work that
you like. It always seems to me that we render so little gratitude to
the people who give us so much pleasure, and it must be sad for them.”
She threw the end of her cigarette into the fire, and stood up, holding
out her hand.
“I must send you away, for it’s half-past ten, and we are early folk
here.”
Andrew bowed over the fair kind hand, and went back to his study at the
Manse. Here there was no fire, no genial smell of smoke, everything was
orderly, cold, and dull. Andrew sat down by his writing-table, and laid
his head down on his arms. Truly the thoughts of youth are long, long
thoughts.
A sleepless night is interminable at six-and-twenty. At forty, one
takes it as something that has to be got through, probably with the aid
of chloral.
V
MARY
There are people who can stir up the worst that is in us; that strange,
inherent moral obliquity, which few are so happy as to be without, but
which most of us bury under our strivings after things lovely and of
good report. When success crowns the efforts of these moral dredgers,
and they are generally as successful as they are persevering, they
stand aside, apparently aghast, and proceed to cry “shame” noisily upon
our depravity. These are they who “compound for sins they are inclined
to” by damning, not “those they have no mind to,” but such sins as at
the time they happen to be tired of.
There are others, thank God for it, with whom intercourse is a sort
of festival, not merely because their own outlook is so generous and
kindly, but because they rouse what is best in one’s self. One leaves
such friends--they are friends if you have met them once--strong and
gay and full of belief in the infinite possibilities of life.
Mary Burton was of this latter class. She made no great sacrifices, she
enjoyed her life thoroughly, taking eagerly all pleasure that came in
her way; but her temper was generous, her mind broad, and because she
herself could not understand meanness, she never suspected others. She
was seldom disappointed. It is the narrow little soul who so constantly
encounters other narrow souls. The simple, kindly people meet with
simplicity and kindness.
Perhaps the fact that their outlook was so similar proved the great
bond between Mary and the minister of Elgo. Their upbringing and
environment were so absolutely dissimilar, their views of life so
unlike, yet beyond it all and through it all sounded the same note,
dominating the discords and making harmony.
“He’s such a lovable good fellow,” Mary would say to herself. “One
forgives him for always using shall and will in the wrong places,
and for denying himself everything that some people think makes life
endurable.”
“She is so kind and gracious, so dignified without being haughty, so
absolute an aristocrat in all her beautiful ways; she is a princess.
What does it matter if she does smoke and read French novels? If she
does it, it must be right for her.” So argued the minister, though he
kept his own sturdy Scottish opinion with regard to the unwholesomeness
for ordinary digestions of some of the literature which Mary affected.
So the days went on and these two lovable good people saw more and more
of one another, worshipper and worshipped, and although the parties
mainly concerned preserved the ostrich-like blindness of people in
their condition, the “summer visitors” of Elgo and the parish itself
took a lively interest in their doings and waited with a somewhat
impatient expectation of the climax.
One thing struck Andrew Methven as curious: in all their many
conversations Mary had never mentioned her husband. She talked frankly
of her father and her brothers, of the people she had met in India, and
of those she was in the habit of meeting in London, but of her husband,
never. Andrew found himself wondering what manner of man Captain Burton
had been; but it never occurred to him to try to find out anything
about Mary or her surroundings. He never spoke of her to anyone, and
winced if anyone spoke of her to him. About his own family and his own
“past,” if so uneventful life can be said to have a past, he was most
frank.
“My people are what you would call ‘nice middle-class’ people, perhaps
a little fonder of books than their sort are in England, but you have
never met anybody of that kind except me, and you would not find them
congenial.”
Mary made a little face. “I’m sure I never spoke of anybody as a ‘nice
middle-class person,’ I shouldn’t be such a snob, and I have met all
sorts of people--people you would think Bohemian and terrible!”
“I should like to meet literary people,” said Andrew wistfully, “but I
suppose I never shall.”
“Oh, yes, you will, and you won’t find them any more interesting than
your Fifeshire fisher folk. Epigrams pall upon you when they form the
staple commodity of conversation. The somewhat dingy journalist, who
has a trick of smart talking and who poses to himself as everything
he is not, is just as great a bore as the respectable city clerk who
lives at Hornsey and expatiates upon its advantages. You must not
mistake cleverness for genius. The one is often merely the result of
environment and atmosphere. The other nearly always appears in unlikely
and seemingly impossible places. You know what Swinburne says: ‘There
is only one thing we may reverence, and that is genius. There is only
one thing we may worship, and that is goodness.’”
“It seems to me,” said Andrew thoughtfully, “that you reverse it. You
reverence goodness and worship genius!”
“Perhaps I do, certainly and perhaps fortunately, the one is much rarer
than the other. The best things in life are the commonest. There are
flowers, and children, and love, and friendship for everybody, if they
will have them.”
“And death and disillusion.”
“You, turning pessimist, _Padre mio_! This will never do. You are
too serious--far too serious. I prescribe a course of Anthony Hope
immediately. I have the ‘Dolly Dialogues’ with me, and you must force
yourself to appreciate them. It’s plain you have met with little real
tragedy in your life, or you would be more cheerful.”
“Have you a tragic past, that you are always gay?”
Mary shivered, but she did not answer. She called to Wiggins to come
out of the water, for it was growing cold.
The minister scourged himself for four hours afterward, for he noticed
that she was pale, and that there were shadows under her brown eyes.
What had he said?
VI
MARY’S HUSBAND
Mary had gone to play golf at St. Andrews. The minister called on Mrs.
Urquhart anent some parish matters and she detained him, rather against
his will, to talk of Mary and her perfections. She never spoke of her
except as “My Miss Mary,” and it was apt to bewilder the uninitiated.
Suddenly she asked the minister:
“Does she ever talk to you of the wee girlie who was killed?”
“What wee girlie? Never!”
“Eh, it was just an awful thing. Sit down, Mr. Methven, and I’ll tell
you.”
“But, Mrs. Urquhart, do you think if it is so sad, and if she--Mrs.
Burton never told me herself--that she would like----”
“Tuts, sir! It’s nothing disgraceful; it’s just fearfully sad. Ye can
only admire her the more for her courage. Well, as I was saying, she
had a wee girlie just three years old when they all came home from
India on long leave. Master Wiggins was the baby, and Miss Molly was
the bonniest creature you ever saw. The Captain--a fine, free-handed
gentleman he was, if a wee thing wild--was just wrapped up in her,
the boys were nowhere; and he would aye go and fetch her out o’ her
cot every evening after dinner and play, and nothing Miss Mary could
say would stop him. Well, that August they had taken a house down in
Cornwall to be near Miss Mary’s father. And one evening Miss Mary had
gone to dine with an old aunt some miles off, and the Captain and a
gentleman staying dined alone. It is thought that the Captain may have
taken rather much champagne--he did whiles--but anyway he went and got
Miss Molly out of bed and wrapped her in a blanket and carried her
out-of-doors. It was no use for the nurse to say anything--he was a
masterful gentleman, and brooked no interference. The other gentleman
had gone to write letters in the study. Well, Miss Mary came home about
ten, and of course went straight up to the night nursery. The little
boys were both in bed asleep, but Miss Molly’s cot was empty, and the
nurse told her the Captain had not brought her up to bed yet. Miss Mary
was rather indignant, for she thought it so bad for the child, and
went down to fetch her. But the Captain was not in the study, and the
other gentleman had not seen him since dinner. He seemed rather alarmed
when he heard that Miss Molly was missing, and everybody went out to
search the garden, for they were nowhere in the house. They sought and
sought, and nothing could they find. Then Miss Mary sent the grooms out
with lanterns, and she and the gentleman took the carriage lamps and
went down to the foot of the garden where the cliff went sharp down to
the sea. There was a steep path cut in the cliff, and down this they
went. At the bottom, lying on the hard rock, they found the Captain,
with Miss Molly in his arms quite dead, and his back was broken. He
lived for three days, and he died with his hand in my dear lady’s.
She never spoke one word of reproach; but he didn’t need it, poor
man; his grief was terrible to see, they say. He must have stumbled
and fallen sheer over. It’s six years ago now; my young lady was only
three-and-twenty. Eh, it was a heavy sorrow for a young thing like
that!”
Mrs. Urquhart’s voice broke, and she stopped. The minister was very
white, he held out his hand to her, but did not speak. The Scotch
understand each other. They have realized this great truth--that some
things are unsayable. The minister held good Mrs. Urquhart’s hand in
both his for two silent minutes, then he took his hat and went his way.
“He’s a grand young man yon!” said Mrs. Urquhart to herself, “he’ll
make it up till her.”
But the young man in question felt that he was further off than
ever from his divinity. The wall of unshared experience is high and
impassable; we may break it down in places, but it stretches its gaunt
length along life’s highway and we each of us must keep to our own
side.
VII
“BESIDE THE IDLE SUMMER SEA”
“I rather like that minister person,” said the Duke to Wiggins in his
most patronizing voice, “he seems a decent chap.”
“He is,” ejaculated Wiggins with immense conviction; “he’s a splendid
chap--a bit Scotchy, you know, but he’s awfully kind.”
“The mater likes him too, doesn’t she?”
“Oh, yes. He’s always with us, you see, living next door and that. He
knows all the best places to fish, and he can build the most splendid
castles with moats and secret passages and no end!”
The Duke turned his handsome head and smiled indulgently at Wiggins. “I
bet he can’t shoot or play cricket much, or ride anything but a bike.
You can’t remember father, Wiggins; he was a soldier, you know, and he
used to say: ‘Ride straight, shoot straight, and speak the truth, and
you’ll be a gentleman, sonny.’ An officer and a gentleman. I remember
though it’s so long ago.”
The Duke’s eyes grew soft. He had loved that big handsome father of his
with the uncomprehending, admiring love of a little-noticed child. The
little daughter had been everything to Captain Burton, yet the Duke
cherished his memory and rendered him a devotion greater than that he
gave to the mother who understood him; a devotion which Mary took care
should never be disturbed by any word of hers.
As Captain Burton lay dying he had lifted his weak arms and dragged her
head down close to his face.
“Don’t tell the boys,” he whispered. “Let them think the best of me.
Duke is a fine chap; he’ll make it up to you. I’ve been a beast and a
fool, but I always loved you, Mary. Promise you won’t tell the boys.”
And Mary promised.
The Duke was a singularly handsome boy, with grave, beautiful manners.
He never looked untidy or slovenly. Like his mother, he wore his
clothes in such a way that he always seemed better and more suitably
dressed than other people. He was rather a silent person, but gave
one the impression that he was silent from choice, not because he had
nothing to say.
He was very unmistakably a member of the “classes,” and though
exceedingly urbane and gracious to what he was pleased to call mentally
his “inferiors,” he was so because it would be ungentlemanly to be
otherwise.
He would gravely assist a fishwife to raise her heavy creel to her
shoulders, and lift his cap to her with a Hyde Park flourish when
she started on her way. But he did so because he considered it the
duty of a gentleman to assist women--not as Wiggins would have done,
from a friendly interest in that particular fishwife. Slim, tall, and
aristocratic, with oval face, straight nose, and big brown eyes, the
Duke was a noticeable boy anywhere, and Mary was immensely proud of him.
He was good at most games, and quick to learn. He ferreted out a pony
in the next village and rode about the country, to the admiration of
the natives. He golfed on the gentlemen’s links and played a very good
game for his age. He went fishing with the minister and Wiggins, and he
bicycled with his mother.
Since the advent of her eldest boy, it seemed to the minister that
there was a certain remoteness about Mary. Certainly her time was very
much taken up. The Duke required other amusements than those afforded
by the beach, a bucket, and a wooden spade. He expected and received
the constant companionship of his mother. On several occasions the
minister was allowed to join their bicycling expeditions. To watch
Mary bicycle was a never-ending wonder to him. She never seemed to go
fast; it was only when you rode after her that you found she was hard
to catch. The minister always wondered why her skirts never seemed to
bunch and blow as did those of other women. He knew nothing of tailors
as a great artistic power, but he was keenly alive to the result of
their labors in the grace and symmetry of her appearance.
The Duke also was a constant surprise, but for him the minister’s frank
admiration was tempered by a subtle but searching discomfort in his
society.
“Do you know,” he said ruefully one day to Mary, “that the Duke makes
me conscious of my boots, and the lack of trees to keep them on? I
never thought of it before, but I am sure now that it has been a
serious omission.”
“The Duke is the descendant of generations of dandies, and has all
the faults and the good qualities that belong to the class. In many
respects the dandy is a limited person both for good and evil; certain
social solecisms are, of course, impossible to him, but he generally
is lacking in imagination. The Duke, for instance, is less sympathetic
than Wiggins, but he is harder on himself also.”
“Can a woman be a dandy?” inquired the minister in a tone of grave
interest.
Mary laughed. “Every woman of the world is more or less a dandy, but
she takes the position less seriously than does a man. If in some
directions our sense of proportion is undeveloped, it has arrived at
perfection in matters of clothes.”
“I’m glad I can only wear one sort of clothes; it saves so much
trouble, and I should be certain to get the wrong ones.”
“I think you would. Be thankful for your uniform; it is becoming!”
“It’s very hot and uncomfortable in summer. I almost feel I could echo
Wiggins in his abuse of clothing.”
“Why don’t you wear flannels?”
“I do for tennis, but one can’t call on one’s parishioners in flannels;
they’d think it casual and disrespectful.”
“So they would. Well, you must dree your weird!” Mary spoke lightly,
but for the minister her last words had an ominous sound.
Presently they all halted “to give the bicycles a feed” as the Duke put
it--the fact being that they had arrived at the foot of what was for
Fife a very steep hill. The day was hot, and they had six more miles
to do before they reached the East Neuk, whither they were escorting
the Duke. Grass and the shade of trees looked inviting. Mary and
the minister decided to rest, but the energetic Duke went off on an
exploring expedition in an adjacent wood.
The minister and Mary sat quite silent for some minutes; then Mary said
slowly:
“Mrs. Urquhart told you of my great trouble six years ago. I am glad. I
wanted you to know, and I wanted you to know that I am glad.” Her voice
was very soft, her eyes were bent on the grass.
Andrew Methven looked at her but he did not speak.
She looked up a little surprised, and saw his face working strangely.
She understood.
“Don’t try to say anything,” she said, laying her hand on his arm. “You
are sorry. You are a good friend of mine.”
Somehow the touch of the little gloved hand on his arm made the
minister lose his head. He did not attempt to hold it in his own--his
reverence for her was too great for that--but he told her simply
and forcibly what he felt for her. She did not try to stop him. The
sunshine and the summer had got into her blood, and this worship that
was offered to her was sweet and precious. There was nothing ridiculous
in it, nothing impossible. He did not ask her to be his wife; in his
wildest dreams of happiness he had never reckoned on the possibility
of that. He did not ask to be anything to her; all he told her was what
she was to him.
And in the very middle of it all the Duke came back, saying:
“If we are to get to the East Neuk by teatime, we’d better be off; it’s
four already.”
So they rode off, and very silent companions the Duke found them.
* * * * *
Seven years before in Simla, Mary had had a great success. She had been
made much of, and had enjoyed it. Many men had made love to her, and
she had enjoyed it. A beautiful, healthy girl accepts admiration as her
natural right.
But the men who made love to her did not enjoy it, for many of them had
the misfortune to be serious, and although Mary accepted their flowers
and their compliments and their devotion in her own gay, gracious
fashion, she gave nothing in return but that gay graciousness and the
privilege of her society.
“If she were in love with that card-playing, drinking fool, her
husband, I could understand it,” said Major Molyneux of the 42nd;
“but she isn’t in love with him, not a bit; and yet she’s an icicle
to every other chap. It’s not as if she were one of those cold,
saint-in-a-shrine sort of women; she’s as human as she can be. She’s no
fool, either. What, in heaven’s name, made her marry her husband?”
“Calm yourself, my dear Molly! Calm yourself,” answered the elderly
civilian to whom he was unburdening himself. “You have yet to learn
that the selective faculty is latest of development in women. Most
women, especially if they are pretty, marry before it has developed
at all. If they are good as well as pretty, they take care it shan’t
develop afterwards.”
“Burton hasn’t even the grace to be jealous; he lets her do just what
she pleases. He’s so mighty conceited that he never seems to think she
may come across a man capable of understanding her.”
The commissioner smiled. “I don’t think much of Burton’s intellectual
capacity, but I do give him credit for this--he understands his wife,
and because he understands her, he trusts her absolutely. It’s no use,
my dear boy, Simla will never have the pleasure of discussing Mrs.
Burton in connection with any sort of scandal; she’s not that kind!”
The commissioner was right. Her husband never had reason to find fault
with Mary, and since his death she had devoted herself to her boys and
to the cultivation of her mind. She took it as a matter of course that
men should fall in love with her; they always did. But her experience
did not make her eager to investigate further the realms of marriage.
Men made love to her because they wanted to possess her. She was so
tired of hearing, “Don’t you understand? I want you for myself, for my
very own.”
Mary understood, but as yet she had felt no desire to belong to anybody
in that exclusive fashion.
Andrew Methven touched her. Here at last was the Princely Giver she
had dreamed of, as women will dream, the man ready to give everything,
asking only for leave to lay his homage at her feet, nothing more.
When she had first met him, she set him down as one of those who are
destined “to do something.” It was not his fate to remain an obscure
Free Kirk minister, of that she was sure. The more she saw of him the
more she felt the reality of the strange power that lay behind his
apparently commonplace views of men and things. “It is there,” she said
to herself exultingly, and now that he had made love to her in this
strange, unusual way, she was seized with a passionate desire to take
this man into her life, and help him to give form and substance to that
latent force of his.
So Mary dreamed dreams while she listened to the minister as he
discoursed upon the historical interests of the East Neuk; as they rode
home swiftly and for the most part silently; as, the Duke having gone
to bed, she sat at the open window and watched the moonlight on the sea.
Then she went and looked at the boys in their two little straight beds
side by side. As she bent over the Duke he smiled, and threw his arm
round her neck, murmuring sleepily, “Dear mater.”
Shading the candle with her hand, she looked long and greedily at the
sleeping children, and, like all women at such moments, the triumphant
sense of possession swamped every other feeling.
As she reached her own room and stood before her glass, she looked into
the reflected eyes, saying: “Take ship, for happiness is somewhere to
be had!”
VIII
THE COLONEL INTERFERES
“There’s little Burton. I’ll ask him if it’s true,” ejaculated Colonel
Colquhoun, as he noticed three or four small red-coated figures coming
down the long slope at the far end of the gentlemen’s links.
“No, not the child; I would not ask the child if I were you,
Colquhoun.” Mr. Braid spoke earnestly, laying his hand on the colonel’s
arm to detain him. “He may know nothing about it, you know, there may
be nothing to know. In any case I wouldn’t ask the boy.”
But Colonel Colquhoun had just made an inferior drive, he was in a
bad temper as are many people during the royal and ancient game,
so he bustled off, ignoring his friend’s remonstrance, toward the
putting-green where the Duke was triumphantly holing in after a
specially brilliant placing of his ball.
The caddie shouldered the colonel’s clubs, and Mr. Braid followed more
slowly. He felt a curious disinclination to join the little group on
the putting-green. His own lad--just home from Fettes--was one of the
players; he had said kind things of the pluck and perseverance of
little Burton. Mr. Braid’s heart was tender, and he himself had not
forgotten the moment when he first heard of a possible stepfather. He
walked more and more slowly.
The hole that the Duke and his friends were playing was the last on
the links; the boyish figures were outlined sharply against the sky.
Mr. Braid saw the Duke lift his cap as the colonel came up. He could
not hear what passed, but he saw the four boys turn, and one after
another tee their balls and drive. The colonel was left alone on the
putting-green, where his ball was not. The caddie stood grinning, and
the colonel cuffed his ears, declaring that the young ruffian had
stolen his ball.
Mr. Braid waited in patience till the ball was discovered in some
distant bents, but the colonel did not again mention little Burton or
his mother.
The Duke was playing abominably. Halfway home he said: “Braid, would
you think me an awful cad if I break up the foursome? I can’t play a
hang.” The child’s lips were quivering, and his sunburnt cheeks looked
white under the tan.
Braid put his arm round his shoulders affectionately. “You go home,
old chap. You’re hipped, but never mind that old beast Colquhoun, he’s
always making mischief. Don’t you notice him.”
“I didn’t--much, did I?” the Duke asked anxiously. “I hope I
didn’t--show.”
“Not you--not a bit. Here, scoot! I’ll bring your clubs.”
The Duke broke into a run, and regardless of the enraged “fores” which
sounded on every side, made straight across the links to the rocky
shore. There he would be alone--alone with this terrible possibility
that flashed its lurid light across his path.
Once behind the rocks he sat down and sobbed, even as he did so
wondering when he had cried before. The Duke did not “blub”--never--he
considered tears unworthy of a man, “of an officer and a gentleman,”
had not the father whose memory he adored once said to him: “Curse if
you like, old man, but never cry.” So the Duke never cried, though his
language on occasions would have surprised his mother by its forcible
variety. Before ladies, though, “gentlemen do not swear,” so Mary
remained in blissful ignorance of her son’s proficiency in certain
forms of objurgation.
Now, however, the Duke sobbed, great tearing, dreadful sobs that racked
his slender body with a pain that was almost physical.
The colonel had done his work. As he walked across the green to
enlighten Duke, he had said to himself: “I’ll make it hot for Mrs.
Burton, haughty minx; the boy’s a tartar.”
Mary had found it necessary to snub the colonel on more than one
occasion; so he no longer called her “a monstrous fine woman.” A
fancied slight rankles in the mean and narrow soul; revenge is doubly
sweet if one near and dear to the offender can be made the instrument
of punishment.
The Duke sat behind the rocks and sobbed until he felt sick and stupid.
Had he not heard of that horrible institution called a stepfather? Had
he not read only last holidays a book called “David Copperfield,”
wherein the iniquities of such an one were set forth with terrible
distinctness.
He was not a religious child. Mary was not dogmatic in her teaching,
she influenced more by her example and her mental attitude than by
conscious effort. Yet here and now the boy felt that circumstances were
too strong for him, and he prayed in a hopeless, muddled fashion that
if his mother did this thing, God would take him to join the father she
seemed to have forgotten.
It is a mistake to think that children never come face to face with
despair. They do, more often than the superior, omniscient grown-ups
themselves. There is a finality about every sorrow for children, they
cannot realize that such pain as they feel _can_ pass; they do not
believe it. That saddest of all poets must have thought of sorrowing
children when he wrote:
We are most hopeless, who had once most hope,
And most beliefless, who had most believed.
What matter if the grief be short, its poignancy while it lasts is none
the less acute.
The Duke stopped crying, and looked at the bare wall of rock before
him with hopeless, unseeing eyes. Then as he prayed, a great wave of
tenderness, of longing for his mother, broke over his child soul, and
he got up. Scrambling over the great boulder he had hidden behind, he
set off to run home. If this amazing, this shameful news were true, he
would set a seal on his misery, and uncertainty would be at an end. If
it were false, the Duke set his teeth as he thought of the colonel,
then he squared his shoulders and dropped into the swinging run which
made him such an admirable hare at “hare and hounds.”
He ran by the beach, a good three miles, and burst into their little
sitting-room, tear-stained and breathless, just as Mary had arranged
her writing-board on her knee.
She looked up in astonishment at his somewhat noisy entrance. He still
wore his cap in the room, before her, and his face was dirty. Who had
seen the Duke with a dirty face since he arrived at years of discretion?
“My darling boy, what has happened? Is it Wiggins? Is he hurt?” Mary
stood up in her excitement, and the paper and envelopes were scattered
about the floor.
The Duke only looked at her, his lips trembling.
“Speak, Duke, what is it? Don’t keep me in suspense.”
“No one is hurt, mother, except me, and I’m only hurt in my heart.” The
tears ran down his cheeks as he spoke. “Mother, is it true--are you
going to marry Mr. Methven? Oh, say it isn’t true. It’s so dreadful!”
Mary drew the boy to her, and sitting down she took him on her knee. He
buried his dirty face in her neck and sobbed.
“My dearest, who has said that I am going to marry Mr. Methven? Surely
you do not suspect me of telling people--other people--before I would
tell you such a thing as that! Oh, Duke, I thought you trusted me.”
“But, mother, you might not have _told_ them, they might have guessed,
and it’s not the not knowing that I mind, it’s--it’s--Mr. Methven!”
“Dear Duke, did it never strike you as possible that I might marry
again?”
“Never! Never! You belong to Wiggins and me--and father. Have you
forgotten father?”
“No, sonny, no. I have not forgotten.”
“Oh, mother, say it isn’t true, say it isn’t true, or I shall die!”
Mary folded the boy closer in her arms. “It is not true, dear. Mr.
Methven has not even asked me to marry him.”
As she spoke she remembered her own words as she looked into the glass
the night before. Her face grew very sad.
“But if he did ask you, mother, you would say no? You would say no?”
The Duke’s voice, husky with long crying, was very pathetic.
Mary leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. She held her boy
very close, and her breath came quickly.
“I don’t think he will ask me, dear, but if he does, I must say no, for
his sake!”
The Duke sat up and gazed at his mother in absolute amazement.
“For his sake,” he repeated in a hushed, almost frightened voice. “Do
you want to marry him, mother?”
“It does not matter much what I want to do, my little son; it’s what I
must _not_ do that we have to do with. I shall not marry Mr. Methven.
Some day when you are a man you will realize what I have given up for
you--and for him!” And Mary fell a-weeping with her boy clasped in her
arms.
The Duke felt her hot tears on his short-cropped hair, and he trembled;
then, releasing himself from his mother’s arms, got off her knee and
stood beside her, very pale and grave.
“Dear!” he said solemnly, “if you want to marry this--gentleman--if it
will make you happier, you shall. Do you hear, darling? You shall.”
And throwing himself into his mother’s arms, they cried together. When
it came to the point, he found that he loved his mother better--than
himself.
Presently Mary began to laugh. “Oh, Duke, Duke, how funny you are! You
talk as if I were a little girl, as if--but it doesn’t matter--some day
you will understand.... It’s not going to happen, Duke dear. It’s been
a storm in a teacup. You must never listen to what ignorant people say.”
“May I contradict them, politely?” asked the Duke eagerly, with an
immense relief shining in his eyes.
“Certainly, if anyone has the impertinence to speak of such a thing
again. It is an insult to Mr. Methven and to me. Oh, Duke, there’s
somebody coming upstairs. Quick, go and say I’ve got a headache and
can’t see people.”
It flashed across the boy’s mind that he was not very presentable
either. However, the staircase was dark, and he shut the sitting-room
door behind him. A tall, black-coated figure was ascending the stairs.
“Mother can’t see anyone to-day, Mr. Methven; she’s got a headache.”
But even as he spoke the door at the top of the stairs opened, and Mary
said:
“I’ll see Mr. Methven, sonny, but ask Mrs. Urquhart to say I am engaged
if anyone else calls.”
The sitting-room door closed behind the minister and Mary. The Duke
went to his own room to wash his face, and to ponder over his mother’s
words.
IX
VALE
Somebody has said that women have no sense of humor. It is one of those
knock-me-down assertions that provoke argument. The sense of humor is
so blessed a gift, it were unjust indeed to deny its benefits to the
larger half of humanity. The gods had bestowed it with no niggardly
hand upon Mary. It had stood her in good stead during many a crisis;
its divine attribute did not desert her now.
There was a poetic justice in the appearance of Andrew Methven at that
particular moment that appealed to her sense of artistic inevitability;
and as Andrew shut the door behind him, though the tears shone wet upon
her cheeks, she laughed.
“I am sorry you have a headache,” began Andrew lamely. “Shall I go
away?”
“No, sit down; I want to talk to you. I’ve just been through a somewhat
trying scene with the Duke, and I long that somebody should horsewhip
Colonel Colquhoun.”
“I don’t possess a horsewhip, but I have a good stout stick.” The
minister’s manner was most unclerical as his grasp tightened on the
weapon in question.
“You do not even ask what he has done.”
“He has annoyed you--that is quite enough; but I wish he was a younger
man.”
“He is not young enough to thrash, and he is not quite old enough to
ignore; all the same, we shall have to ignore him. But, you Quixotic
person, would you really thrash a man because I asked you to?”
“If you asked me to thrash a man, I should know he well deserved
thrashing, and I--should enjoy it.”
“You’re more man than minister, after all,” said Mary, more to herself
than to him.
“Better man, better minister. Do you think I could have had any sort of
influence over my colliers at Cowdenbeath if I couldn’t fight? I can’t
fence, but I can box. I’ll teach the Duke, if you like.”
“Why don’t you ask me what Colonel Colquhoun has done?”
“Because if you want to tell me, you will tell me; and if it is
unpleasant to you to tell me, why should you?”
“It’s as unpleasant as it is necessary I should tell you, because we
must both publicly contradict a foolish report that has got spread
abroad in Elgo to the effect that we are to be married.”
Mary did not blush as she spoke, but the minister crimsoned to the
roots of his hair. “I am too sorry you should have been subjected to
this annoyance. You know what my feeling for you is; you also know that
I have not the right to ask a fisher lass to marry me. I am nothing,
and have nothing; but you have let me lay my great love at your feet.”
Mary made a little sound, half sob, half laugh, and held out her hands
to him in a helpless, unseeing way that went to his heart. He caught
them in his own, and looking into the dear face with purple shadows
painted by tears under the eyes, he knew that she, too, cared.
What does it avail to tell in words how these two plighted their troth,
that was to be ever unfulfilled? The tenderest and truest of lovers
have generally small literary value.
For half an hour they went to heaven together.
Then they faced realities, and Andrew asked: “Will you write to me?”
Mary shook her head. “No; if we write we shall simply waste our lives
in everlasting watching for the postman. We are very human, you and I,
and how can we hope to be better and wiser than other people?”
“You are hard,” murmured Andrew. “I can find no comfort in virtuous
soliloquy. A letter would be something tangible.”
“No, I am not hard; but I am old who once was young, and I know. As it
is we shall have a perfect and unspoiled memory, full of tenderness
and grace and poetry; but if we write we shall be miserable, ever
unsatisfied, hanging, like Mahomet’s coffin, between heaven and earth.
No; let us keep this sweet experience untarnished by impotent tears and
regrets.”
* * * * *
Three days after, Mary and her boys had joined some of the numerous
uncles at a shooting-box near Kingussie. The Duke was very happy; but
Wiggins missed his beloved sea. “I think my minister must miss me,” he
said. “I miss him so very much; he’s such a kind man.”