PHEMIE.
After many days Captain Stondon, with the fever which had prostrated him
subdued, awoke from a quiet sleep, and looked as well as extreme
weakness would permit about the room he occupied.
The apartment was small, clean, and scantily furnished. There were white
curtains to the bed, white curtains to the latticed windows.
Without moving his head, Captain Stondon could see, over the short
muslin blind, the valley of Tordale stretching away below; he beheld the
mountains bounding the view, and then, remembering what he had suffered
amongst those mountains, he closed his eyes again, and with a sensation
of luxurious weakness, fell asleep once more.
When next he woke it was getting late in the afternoon, and between him
and the window next the bed there sat a man, whose face he knew he had
seen before. This man was busily engaged in cleaning a gun, and with a
lazy interest Captain Stondon watched him removing the barrels, and
washing the stock, and going through the other ceremonies usually
performed on an occasion of the kind. As he rose to leave the room, in
which there was no fire, in order that he might finish the operation in
orthodox fashion over some live coals, the man glanced at the bed, and
noticing that his patients eyes were open, he laid down the gun, and,
stooping over the bed, inquired how the invalid felt.
“I am better, I suppose,” Captain Stondon answered, feebly. “How long?”
“A fortnight,” was the reply; and straight away went Mr. Aggland to his
wife.
“Beef tea, Priscilla,” he commanded, “beef tea of superlative strength
and in unlimited quantity. He is awake and sensible. Yes,” soliloquised
Mr. Aggland, “he has come back to that ‘stage where every man must play
a part.’ What have you there? Mutton broth! Let him have some of that. I
did not save him from ‘Such sheets of fire, such bursts of horrid
thunder, such groans of roaring wind and rain,’ to let him die of
starvation at last.”
“Lor’ a mercy, Daniel, how you do talk,” remarked his better half, as
she obeyed his commands. “Give you your own way, and I believe you would
stew down a bullock for him.”
“And why not, woman?” demanded her husband: “why not a bullock? What is
the life of a beast in comparison to the life of a man; not that I
myself——” At which point Mr. Aggland, growing argumentative, was
interrupted by a little scream from his wife.
“For any sake, Daniel, don’t turn its mouth next me! Put it down, or I
won’t take up the broth at all.”
“Mercy alive! it has not a barrel on it. There is not a thing about it
to go off. It is as harmless now as my walking-stick.”
“Well, harmless or not, I can’t a-bear it nigh me,” answered Mrs.
Aggland. “I had just as lief see a lion in the room as a gun. How does
the gentleman seem, Daniel? Has he spoken at all?”
“Yes, but I don’t want him to speak much till he has eaten. What says
Burns?—
‘Food keeps us livin’,
Tho’ life’s a gift no worth receivin’.’”
“Drat Burns!” interposed Mrs. Aggland. “Ay, and for that matter,” she
continued, “drat all them poets, say I. Here, take the broth, and I’ll
send one of the boys over to Grassenfel in the morning to see if we can
get any beef. Won’t I go up to him? Not I, indeed. Am I fit, Daniel, am
I fit—I put it to you—to be looked at by any gentleman? There’s
Phemie,—if you want anybody to go and see him, ask her. She’s always
dressed; she always seems just to have come out of a bandbox; she has
not to go mucking about like your wife; she is a lady, and can sit in
her parlour. Ask her.”
“I will, my dear, as you wish it,” replied Mr. Aggland, and he went
straight into the apartment his wife called the parlour, but which was
in reality the living room of the family, where sat the apple of discord
in the Aggland household, with a pile of needlework before her that it
would have appalled the most skilful seamstress to attack.
If that was being a lady, Daniel Aggland decided then, as he had decided
many a time before, the position was not one to be envied. Rather the
baking and brewing and cooking than that eternal stitch—stitch! And,
moreover, had not Phemie to do many a thing about the house besides
stitching? Whenever the bread was best and lightest, had not Phemie
kneaded it? When the butter was the colour of the daffodil, had not
Phemie’s soft, white hands, that no work made hard or coarse, taken it
off the churn? Who dressed the children, and sent them clean and tidy
off to school? Phemie, to be sure. Who helped them with their lessons,
and caused the three batches of children (the Agglands by the first
wife, the Agglands by the second wife, and the Kings, whose mother had
brought them with her to the Cumberland farm, as her contribution to the
general weal) to be far ahead of all competitors in their respective
classes? Who made and mended for them all? Phemie. Who sewed the buttons
on Mr. Aggland’s shirts, and kept his clothes in the order he loved?
Why, Phemie still, who now sat with her lovely hair reflecting back the
sunbeams, plying her needle busily.
She was not dressed in the finery to which Mr. Conbyr had taken
exception—finery that had descended to her from Mrs. Aggland; and there
was so great a contrast between her beauty and her attire, that Mr.
Aggland felt it strike him painfully.
He loved the girl, and would have clothed her in silks and satins if he
could. With the memory of all that was calmest, and best, and happiest
in his life, she was interwoven; and he would have liked to make her lot
different, if only for the affection he had borne to the dead woman who
was so fond of her.
Further, he admired beauty, and the beautiful, in his opinion, had no
business to be useful likewise; for both of which reasons Mr. Aggland,
with his wife’s complaints of Phemie’s “uppishness” still ringing in his
ears, could not help but pause and look at the girl who, if Mrs.
Aggland’s oft-repeated assertion might be believed, “was not worth her
salt.”
A really pretty woman always looks prettier without her bonnet, and
Phemie Keller proved no exception to this rule. The small well-shaped
head with its glory of luxuriant hair, the white graceful neck, the
shell-like ear!—the bonnet had concealed all these things from Captain
Stondon’s eyes,—and stripped of the old-fashioned clothes which were her
very best, and dressed in a faded and well-darned mousseline de laine of
the smallest pattern imaginable, which de laine had likewise descended
to her from remote centuries, with her soft round arms peeping from
below the open sleeves, with her snowy collar fastened by a bow of dark
brown ribbon, Phemie Keller sitting in the sunshine with the pile of
unfinished work before her, looked every inch what she was—a lady.
“Will you carry this up to our patient, Phemie?” said her uncle; and
there was a tone in his voice as he spoke which made the girl look at
him wonderingly. “He is awake now—awake and sensible; but we must keep
plenty of oil in the lamp, or it will go out after all our trouble.”
“It won’t go out, uncle, for want of oil while you are in the house,”
she answered, laying down her work and taking the tray from him. “Duncan
had better run down to the Rectory when he comes back from school, had
he not, and tell Mr. Conbyr the good news? Do you remember how, when he
was at the very worst, you used to say he would do us credit yet? Arn’t
you proud to have saved him? I am.”
That last speech, I am very sorry to say, had a spice of antagonism in
it. Mrs. Aggland had said, whenever she got tired of the extra fuss and
trouble, that as the man was sure to die any-way, he might better have
died on the hill-side than in the house of poor folks like themselves,
for which reason Phemie was triumphantly glad that Captain Stondon had
lived, “if only to spite the cross old thing,” the latter observation
being made in strict confidence to their only servant, Peggy M‘Nab.
But for Mr. Aggland and Phemie it is indeed more than likely that Mrs.
Aggland’s prophecies might have been fulfilled, and the pair had
certainly cause for gratulation at the progress made by their patient.
“It is positively refreshing to see you getting on so well,” remarked
Mr. Aggland, as he took his seat by the bedside again, and, the broth
having been swallowed, resumed his gun-cleaning performance; “but you
must not talk much—you must not talk at all. The less you exert
yourself, and the more you sleep, the sooner you will be able to go—
‘Chasing the wild deer and following the roe,’”
finished Mr. Aggland, who probably felt at a loss how to complete his
sentence otherwise.
In compliance with this advice, Captain Stondon refrained from speaking,
and did not exert himself at all, unless, indeed, looking with
half-closed eyes at his host could be called exertion.
To him Mr. Aggland was a never-ending, ever-beginning source of wonder:
dark, wild-looking hair, that looked as though it had met with some
terrible surprise, hung over a face as strange and weird as the face of
man need to be; hollow cheeks, thoughtful, greenish-grey eyes, a large
mouth, a nose that seemed all nostril, a ragged beard, a feeble attempt
at a moustache; lines where lines never appeared in other men’s faces; a
general effect of cleverness and eccentricity. It was this Captain
Stondon took in by degrees, as he lay between sleeping and waking,
listening to Mr. Aggland humming, in a low falsetto,
“The Lord my pa-hasture sha-hall prepare,
And feed me wihith ha she-heperd’s care.”
Many a day afterwards, when he saw Phemie’s gravity completely upset by
her uncle’s melody, he thought how weak he must have been that night
when he first heard his host speaking in what he called his “natural
language,” music.