KITH AND KIN
I don't think I troubled much about my father when I resolved to run
away from the _Lycee_ St. Andre. He had, as I thought, never troubled
much about me.
Afterwards I found that I had been mistaken, but perhaps not more than
most. For it is the rarest thing in the world to find a son entering
upon life, able to do justice to his father's ideas and motives.
Yet it was for my sake that he had given up the society of his fellow
savants and had exiled himself to Aramon le Vieux, with only his books
for company. At Nice, Mentone, or Cap Martin, the author of "The History
and Growth of Italian Art" could have lived a great part of the year
among kindred spirits, but because of me and St. Andre, he had shut
himself up with his books and collections in the Villa Gobelet on the
piney southern slopes of the long convent ridge, the summit of which was
crowned by the immense acreage of rambling white masonry which
constituted our _lycee_.
My father, Gordon Cawdor, mixed freely enough with the engineers in New
Aramon. But I knew very well that he endured rather than enjoyed their
society.
They talked of springs and hoppers, of pauls and recoil tampons, and my
father sat with his gentle wise head nodding as if taking in each point.
But he never spoke to them of his own work, and, excepting Deventer's
father, there was not one who knew more about Italian art than a dim
memory of a bad lithograph of Da Vinci's "Last Supper" could recall to
him.
Dennis Deventer, a tall dark grey man with the most mobile eyebrows I
ever saw in my life, lives much in my early memories of my father's
house. He seems now to have been always there, though of course he could
really have come but seldom--a massive, slow-moving, swiftly
scrutinising man, who bent shaggy eyebrows upon his son and myself, and
in whose presence it was not good to make the easily forged excuses
which served so well for my scholarly father.
Hugh said that it was because he listened all day to excuses and
explanations over at the Arms Factory, without believing any one of
them.
He had succeeded a manager who had been driven from Aramon because he
was afraid of his men. But now the men, though they hated him as the
representative of the Company, freely acknowledged his courage and
austere justice.
His house was the largest in New Aramon, and he had within it three
daughters all verging on, or just overlapping early womanhood, besides a
comfortable wife who purred her way contented and motherly through all
domestic storms. She alone could tame her husband's furies. They sank
before her eye, her husband changing obviously to all men's sight, his
factory oaths silenced, his bullying temper visibly crumbling, and the
man growing sweet and wholesome as newly ground meal.
These were the two houses best known to me as a boy, and indeed to the
edge of manhood. Judge ye which I liked the best?
My father was a beautifully profiled Scottish minister of the old
school, whom an unexpected fortune had enabled to follow his impulses in
the matter of work. He had long ago retired from his parish, indeed
before I could remember, and as I learned from his steadfast retainer,
old Saunders McKie, immediately after the death of my mother.
"Irongray Parish was no more for him, oh no," Saunders would say,
sententiously pausing in the polishing of my father's silver
shoe-buckles. "He laid down his wark as if he had been stricken. He
never preached again, and his pulpit was silent for three whole weeks
after her death. Assistants and siccan cattle werena sae common to come
at then as now--when ye send a telegram in the morning, and the laddie
is down on the six train wi' his baggie. So the elders juist read a
portion, and sent down to the Cameronian meeting-house for a man fit to
put up a prayer. We were Established, ye see, so the like was no to be
expected o' _us_!
"Eh, a broken man was your farther in thae days. He would wander from
room to room, tak' down a book here, look at it a while and then put it
up again with a muttered 'Tush' as if he could make nothing of it. I
doubt if he so much as saw the print line by line, but all
troubled-like, as one might through a green whorl of skylight glass.
Then he would dawner into the room where you were lying, or maybe being
fed, and at sight o' ye, the state that man would be in!
"He could not get out o' the nursery quick enough, yet for all that he
would be back within the hour."
Saunders was a great standby. His humour jumped with mine far more
nearly than my father's. This, too, in spite of the fact that I rarely
saw him without calling down the vials of his wrath. My father seldom
reproved me, never in anger, but Saunders, with the care of my young
soul heavy on his Calvinistic conscience, laboured faithfully with me in
season and out of season.
One good he did me. He kept me from forgetting my Scottish tongue, and
there was never a day that he did not supply me with some phrase sappy
with mother wit and drowned in Scotland.
"Aaengus," he would say, "I kenna wha it is ye favour--nane o' your
faither's folk at any rate--all chestnut-brown and quick as an eel. No
wonder ye can tie knots in yoursel' at the parallel bars that were
siccan a trouble to set up for ye to caper on, and your e'en like sloes
after the first frosts. It's a gipsy ye are and no real Cawdor of all.
Though they do say that the Cawdors have gipsy blood on the distaff
side. At ony rate ye will never be the 'sponsible sober man your faither
is."
In spite of all this I stood high in the good graces of Saunders, and he
would sometimes ask my father for the additional pocket-money which I
dared not hint at myself. Saunders often wandered back into reminiscence
of the time when he had been a jobbing stonemason on the Cromarty Firth,
a companion of Hugh Miller's, and "the very deevil for raking the
country."
He had tramped scores of miles with Hugh Miller only for the sake of
hearing him talk, yet I gathered that he had not believed a single word
he had been told about the great fishes and curious monsters that once
swam in the lakes of the Old Red Sandstone.
"But I never telled him sae," he would conclude; "oh, no, Saunders
kenned better. Hugh Miller was no doubt a wonderful genius, but at that
time he was a man easily angered, and when roused, violent of his
hands."
So now I have sketched the school, and the several domestic surroundings
which we proposed to leave behind us. I do not think that we thought
much about these. I know that I did not, and I don't believe that
Deventer did either--not, that is, till we saw the soldiers retreating
from the barracks and forts of Aramon, and that little oblong blot of
red in the sky which meant insurrection, and God only knew what of
terror and destruction, fluttering in the brisk mistral wind from the
tower on which we had so long seen the tricolour.
At that time we had only the vaguest idea of what the Commune was, and
none whatsoever of the new ideas of justice and equality which underlay
that cumbrously ill-managed business.