RETROSPECTIVE.
During the greater part of the next day, Phemie mended stockings as if
her life depended on the rapidity with which she worked. She would not
eat—she would not talk—she would not play with the children—but she
would stitch on hour after hour, never lifting her eyes except to look
out at the rain, which was pelting down in torrents.
Every one in the house knew as a matter of course that Phemie was making
her choice; even the youngest child contemplated her with a vague kind
of wonder, dimly conscious that Phemie was thinking of something in
which it could have no part or lot—something which separated her from
the remainder of the household for the time being, which rendered it
necessary for all conversation held in her presence to be unnatural and
constrained, and which forced Daniel Aggland, junior—the baby above
mentioned—to sit down on the carpet and stare at Phemie for a full
half-hour without winking.
There it sat, holding its shoeless foot with its right hand, while
sucking the thumb of its left—there it sat, the child looking at the
girl to whom the woman’s question, marriage, had come to be solved so
soon, until, having exhausted its wonderment, it began to take offence
at Phemie’s unusual silence and at last burst out into a paroxysm of
indignant screams.
Then Phemie laid aside her work and comforted it. She had grown so
accustomed to nursing that, young though she was, she could hush and
quiet a child’s distress as cleverly as any matron in the county. She
had such a sweet voice, that instinctively the baby ceased crying to
listen to its tones. She had such a beautiful face, that the little
hands unclenched naturally in order to stroke it. She had such divine
hair, that infant eyes instinctively opened wide to watch the light
flickering and rippling over the braids.
She had such a way of gathering a child to her, that the tiny creature
could not choose but lie still, nestling close to her heart. Dear Phemie
Keller! pretty, vain, gay, fanciful, dreamy Phemie—thinking of you as
you walked up and down that little sitting-room, hushing the child into
quietness, it seems to me that Captain Stondon might well be excused for
forgetting his own age and your youth, and remembering only the beauty
which he saw, and the true, faithful nature that he had penetration
enough to know you possessed.
“Poor baby Danny,” muttered Mrs. Aggland _sotto voce_, as she watched
the girl soothing the child’s distress; “you won’t have her long to coo
over you and humour you at every turn; you’ll be a poor forsaken baby
soon, for mother won’t have time to be waiting upon you as Phemie has
done.”
All of which Phemie heard, as Mrs. Aggland intended she should; truth
being that Mrs. Aggland had a burning desire to know for certain what
she was thinking about.
“It is the most unnatural thing I ever heard of,” said the mistress of
the Hill Farm to Peggy M‘Nab. “Instead of taking counsel with one and
another, and being uplifted at the notion of being made a grand lady of
for life, she sits like a statue mending them old stockings, not opening
her lips to a soul, not even talking about her wedding clothes. Anybody
might think it was sentence of death that had come instead of an offer
of marriage.”
“Marriage is an unco’ serious thing,” answered Peggy M‘Nab.
“You may say that, Peggy,” replied Mrs. Aggland; “not that you can know
much about the matter from your own experience; but still it is not so
serious a thing as a funeral; and Phemie sits there with as solemn a
face as if she was at a burying, sighing every now and then as though
her heart was like to burst.”
“Maybe she’s no on for taking him,” suggested Peggy; “though he’s weel
enough, weel favoured and kindly spoken, he’s no young, mistress. He’s
nearer a match for you or me, nor for such a bairn as Phemie.”
“As for that, Peggy M‘Nab,” said Mrs. Aggland, “I will thank you to keep
your distance, and not talk of your age and mine in the same sentence,
when anybody with half an eye can see you might be my mother twice
over.”
“I would have had to begin young, then,” remarked Peggy,
parenthetically.
“And with regard to Captain Stondon,” went on Mrs. Aggland, unheeding
the interruption, “what does the few years’ difference between him and
Phemie signify? Won’t she have everything she wants? Won’t she have
money, and leisure, and dress, and servants, and carriages and horses,
and goodness only can tell what besides? And don’t you know those are
just the things Phemie has been hankering after all her life? Is she not
the making of a fine lady?”
“She is bonny enough for one, at ony rate,” put in Peggy.
“Some may think her so. I know I think her conceity enough for anything;
and if she wants all this—if she wishes to be made a princess just at
once, why need she look so miserable now it is all put in her way—by the
act of Providence, as one may say? Does she think she will ever get such
a chance again? Does she think it snows, and hails, and rains husbands
on the hills? Does she think a poor country girl can pick and choose
like some great heiress? Does she imagine all the lords and dukes in the
country are coming down to Cumberland to make her a peeress out of hand?
If she thinks that, Peggy M‘Nab, she is mistaken, and so I tell you.”
Nobody knew better than Peggy that Phemie was mistaken. Nobody knew
better than the old Scotch woman that there is a deal of difference
between a fairy tale and everyday life; between the lover of a winter
evening’s story and the suitor who, in the broad daylight, comes in his
proper flesh and blood to ask for the fair maiden’s hand. Since the
suitor had come across the hills—since such astonishing good fortune had
fallen to Phemie’s lot as to secure a real live gentleman for her
lover—Peggy M‘Nab had seen light. It was very well to keep back the
farmers’ sons, and the young tradesmen who sometimes came from the
neighbouring towns to see their parents at Tordale; but to reject
Captain Stondon—to repulse this middle-aged Robin Gray, when there was
not a Jamie at all in the question, Peggy saw would be midsummer
madness. Was not he, as she often said, a “braw man,” tall and erect,
and gentleman-looking, and of gentle bluid into the bargain? Had not he
given her, Peggy, as much money in one handful as she earned for wages
in the course of a year? Was not he quiet spoken? not a ranting,
shouting devil like the young surgeon from Grassenfel, who alternately
cursed Peggy for a fool, and slapped her on the back, saying she was a
great old girl for all that. He did not drink spirits raw, like Mr.
Fagg. He did not come into the house like a company of dragoons. You
never heard him say a wry word about his food; whatever was set before
him he eat, let it be loaf-bread or oatmeal, haggis or a joint. Was it
not better to be an old man’s darling than a young man’s slave? Spite of
the fairy tales, and the lord’s son, and the carriage and four, was not
Captain Stondon’s offer better than any reality Peggy had ever thought
likely to come in her nurseling’s way? Vague visions are one
thing—tangible success is another; and there is no use in denying that
the tangible success which had come to Phemie Keller astonished every
person who knew that young lady, except, indeed, the young lady herself,
who, having pacified the child at last, laid it down in its mother’s
lap, and then gathering up her work, went off to her own room, where,
having locked her door, she drew a chair up to the window, and sat down
to look out upon the valley of Tordale, whilst she thought of her own
present—of her own future.
She was but a young thing after all, dear reader, to be thinking about
the whole of her life to come—but a young, ignorant girl, to be brought
in a moment face to face, with that which was to determine the weal or
the woe of every future hour; and as she gazed down the valley her tears
fell faster than the driving rain, and she leaned her head against the
window-frame and cried as though her heart were breaking, at the choice
she was called upon to make so suddenly.
It is not much to read about this man’s mistake, about that woman’s
error; the book is closed, the tale forgotten, and the reader goes on
his own path contentedly. Even when soul talking to soul some one tells
his neighbour where and how he lost himself—how he went wrong—where he
dug deep graves—where he laid down his heart in the coffin beside some
frail human body, the listener, sympathizing though he may be, is apt to
overlook what loss all this wrong and suffering involved.
Do you know when he has finished what it all meant? As he turns away, do
you understand what he has been talking about? It was his life, man; and
he had but one. But one, good God! and that is what none of these happy,
prosperous people can be made to comprehend. He has spoiled his horn; he
has not made his spoon. Other people have lives to live out and make the
most of, but he has marred his: it may not signify much to you, my
friend, but it signifies everything to him, because he cannot go back
and begin _de novo_; it has been all loss, and in this world there may
never come a profit to compensate for that which he has left behind.
Some idea of this kind, very vague and very shadowy, passed through
Phemie’s mind as she sat at the window looking through blinding tears at
the familiar landscape, at the mountains that had been her friends for
years. It might not be very much she was considering; but it was her
all, nevertheless. Her little investment in the world’s great lottery
might be a mere bagatelle; but it was the whole of her capital,
notwithstanding.
It was her life; it was what I have been trying to talk about; it was
everything she possessed of value on earth, that she sat thinking of as
the evening darkness gathered down upon Tordale church; upon the wet
graves where the dead, who had lived out their lives before she was
born, were sleeping quietly; upon the waterfall; upon the trees; upon
the distant valley; upon the parsonage house, in the dining-room whereof
Captain Stondon was standing at that very moment, thinking, in the
flickering firelight, of her.
As the seed-time is to the harvest; as the acorn is to the oak; as the
blossom is to the fruit, so was this vague thought to Phemie Keller, in
comparison to what the same thought grew to, clear and tangible, in the
after years, which were then all before her. It was instinct; it was an
uncertain glimmering of an eternal truth. With the same shadowy
indistinctness—with the same unreasoning terror as that of a child
coming in contact for the first time with death—did Phemie Keller look
out for the first time from her little bed-chamber on life.
Hitherto, though I have spoken of the promise of her beauty, I have said
little of herself, and less of the kind of existence hers had been from
childhood, until Captain Stondon met her in Tordale church. She is
thinking of her past as she sits in the gathering darkness; thinking as
she leans her head against the window-frame, and listens to the wind
howling among the mountains, and the rain beating over the beautiful
valley below—at one and the same moment of when she will be a woman, and
of when she was a child. She is wondering, if she leaves Tordale, with
what eyes she will look upon it again; what she will have to pass
through, ere, in years to come, she returns to look upon it once more;
and as she wonders, her memory casts back to the days that are gone, and
she is a child in the old manse by the sea-shore, listening to the roar
of the ever-restless ocean, lying in her bed with the waves singing her
lullaby, wandering on the beach and building up palaces on the
sand—palaces ornamented with shells, and set out with sea-weed that the
next flood-tide destroyed!
What more did she see? what more did memory give back to her, as the
waves cast up drift on the shore? Out of the past there came again to
her the self she had been, the child she could never be more.
A child with a clear white skin, through which the veins appeared blue
and distinct—a delicate child with a faint colour in her cheeks, with
golden hair, who was mostly dressed in white, who had dainty muslin
frocks, who had soft lace, edging her short sleeves, who was her
grandfather’s pet, who was the life and soul of the manse; with her
old-fashioned talk; with her loving, clinging, twining, cheery, tender
ways. A child who, being always with grown-up people, learned to think
long before her proper time—a child who had never lain down to sleep
when a storm was raging without praying God to bring those who were on
sea, safe to land—a young thing who had seen women wringing their hands
and mourning for the dead—who having lost both father and mother herself
could understand the meaning of the word orphan, and cry with the
fatherless children as they talked about the parents who might never
again come home.
Right and wrong! She had learnt what both words signified in early days
in that old manse by the sea-shore. From the time she could toddle, she
had been wont to shake her head gravely at temptation, and to draw back
her fingers from desired objects, lisping to herself, “Musn’t; granpa’s
father in heaven wouldn’t be pleased,” and then she would mount on a
chair, and, sitting cross-legged upon it, argue out the rest of the
question to her own satisfaction.
There never was a better child than Phemie! Save for the way she cried
when the wind was high, and the sea rough; save for the trick she had of
stripping herself half naked in order to clothe any beggar brat who
might happen to be complaining of the cold; save for huffy fits she took
when her grandfather was too busy to notice her; save for the
unaccountable and unanswerable questions she was in the habit of
propounding suddenly—Phemie—little Phemie, I mean, had not a fault.
The most terrible battle she and the household at the manse ever fought
was over the body of a dead kitten, which she kept from decent burial
for a whole day, and which was at length taken from her arms only when
she had cried herself to sleep over the loss of her pet. To grandfather
and servants, to the fishermen and their wives, to the shepherds on the
moors, to the children by the roadside, Phemie Keller—little
soft-hearted Phemie—was an object of the tenderest interest and
affection.
The courtship of her father and mother was talked of by the side of many
a winter fire. The young things—boy and girl—who had fallen in love at
first sight, who had met secretly by the sea-shore, who had been seen by
the shepherds walking hand in hand together among the heather, who had
wanted the old minister to marry them, and who had bound themselves
together as man and wife before a couple of witnesses when he refused to
let them wed unless the consent of the lover’s family were first
obtained, who had gone away out into the world together—all the story
was repeated over and over whenever Phemie’s name was mentioned in the
lonely cottages scattered here and there through the thinly-peopled
district.
The love-story with its sorrowful end; the love-story, finis to which
was written on a moss-covered headstone in the quiet kirkyard close by!
They had known her a girl, and she came back to them a widow—came back,
“wi’ her wee bit bairn, Phemie, to dee.”
Was it not natural that a certain romance should be associated with
Phemie in the minds of those who could remember her parents so well? Was
it to be wondered at, if they made, perhaps, too much of the child; if
they speculated as to her future lot, foolishly?
Anyhow, Phemie was loved, and petted; and never a princess ruled more
absolutely over her subjects, than did the young child rule over the
household at the manse. It was always who could please Phemie most, who
could make her look prettiest, who could get sitting by her till she
went to sleep, who could make time to take the child on her lap, and
tell her the stories she liked best to hear.
All the old tales of fairies and brownies, of second sight, of witches
and warlocks, were familiar to Phemie as her A B C. Old ballads were
recited to her; old songs were sung to her, till her head was as full of
romantic narrative as it could hold.
There was not a blast that blew over the hills but touched an answering
note in the child’s heart. The poetry lying there always uttered some
responsive tone in answer to the elements—sunshine and shower, storm and
calm, the wind whistling across the moors or sobbing through the
fir-trees, the snow covering the earth, or the spring flowers decking
the fields—all these things had a double meaning for Phemie; like a face
reflected from glass to glass, every object in nature was projected into
the child’s heart from the heart of some one else who had basked in the
summer glory, and braved the winter tempest before she was thought of.
Then came Death to the manse once more; and this time he took the old
minister from among his people to the kirkyard, within sound of the
mourning and murmuring sea. Thoughtful hearts tried to keep Phemie from
seeing him in his coffin, but Phemie’s thoughtfulness exceeded theirs.
Her love made her cunning; and then the episode of the kitten was
repeated with the grief intensified, with the despair more terrible.
She was taken away to a friend’s house, and kept there till the funeral
was over. All the day they watched her; but at night, in the dead of the
winter time, she seized her opportunity and tracked her way across the
moors to the manse, sobbing through the darkness as she toiled along.
At the manse they watched her again, and again she eluded their
vigilance, and stole out to the lonely kirkyard, where she was found
tearing up the wet mould with her little hands; scratching at the
newly-made grave like a dog.
After that, grievous sickness—sickness almost unto death, and then
removal by slow stages to the house of the only living relative willing
to receive her—Mrs. Aggland, her mother’s sister. The Agglands had
children of their own; but yet at the Hill Farm it was the old story
enacted once again by fresh performers. Her aunt could not be too kind
to her. Mr. Aggland might punish his own daughter, but he never dreamt
of saying a cross word to Phemie Keller. She was privileged: by reason
of her desolateness, by reason of her story, by reason of her sensitive
heart, that reproof and harshness would have broken, Phemie had _carte
blanche_ to do as she liked, and if she did not grow up indolent and
selfish, it was simply because there are some natures that cannot be
made indolent or selfish by kindness and indulgence.
And yet it may fairly be questioned whether Phemie would ever have
developed into a useful character, but for the death of her aunt. Whilst
Mrs. Aggland lived the girl had always some one to think for her; see to
her; love her. When once her aunt died, out of very gratitude, for very
pity, Phemie was forced to think for others; see to others; and give
love, and care, and affection, back.
“It was sic a sair sicht to see the puir maister frettin’ after his
wife,” as Peggy M‘Nab asserted, that by common consent Peggy M‘Nab and
Phemie Keller joined together to make him feel his loss in the trifles
of everyday life as little as might be. Phemie was still a child, a mere
child, but yet she could do something for the widower; she could nurse
the baby and keep its cries from troubling its father; she could help
Peggy in a thousand little ways; she could amuse the little ones by
repeating to them the stories she had heard told in broad Scotch, where
the Scottish moors stretched away lone and desolate towards the north;
she could read to him; she could work for him; she could stand at the
door looking for his return; she could talk to him in the twilight; and
she could make the sight of her bright pretty face as welcome to the
solitary man as the flowers in May.
After his second marriage, Phemie proved more useful still. As she grew
older, she grew not merely cleverer, but wiser—wise to hold her tongue,
wise to keep unpleasantness in the background, wise to do the work she
had to do with a cheerful countenance and a brave heart, wise towards
everybody but herself, for she dreamed dreams and built castles all the
day long.
Aided and abetted therein by Peggy M‘Nab, who was never weary of telling
Phemie about her father, about the great family he belonged to, about
the grand folks, somewhere or other, with whom Phemie could claim kith
and kin.
If Mrs. Aggland were cross, if Phemie wearied over her making and
mending, if the girl ever took to fretting about the days departed,
straight away Peggy told her nursling “to whisht.”
“Canna ye quet yer greetin’—canna ye tak patience for a bit? Dinna ye
ken that if ye wunna thraw that bonnie face o’ yours, some braw laird
will come ben when ye hae leest thocht o’ him, and mak ye a gentle for
life? He’ll come in the gloamin’ over the hills speerin’ for ane Phemie
Keller, and he’ll tak ye awa’, my bairn—he’ll tak ye frae thrawn words
and cross looks, and frae yer auld daft nurse wha canna bear to see ye
forfoughten.”
And then Phemie would declare she was not fretting, and that no laird,
not even the Duke of Argyll himself, should take her from Peggy M‘Nab.
“Wherever I go, ye shall go,” Phemie was wont to declare; “and I’d like
to take Duncan, and Helen, and the rest of uncle’s children, and we
could leave Mrs. Aggland her children, and make him come with us. Where
should we go, Peggy, and how should we go? Tell me all about it.”
Thus exhorted, Peggy would conjure up quite a royal procession for
Phemie’s edification.
With her darling’s lovely head resting in her lap, with the girl’s soft
white fingers stroking her hard brown hands, Peggy was wont to talk of a
hero so handsome and good and clever as to border on the impossible; of
estates and houses that might have made an auctioneer’s fortune; of
furniture that sounded like an inventory taken of the domestic goods and
chattels of some establishment in fairyland; of horses that could never
have been foaled on earth, so great was their speed, so extraordinary
their beauty; the crowning gem of the whole programme being the
carriage, which, I am afraid, Peggy would have described as precisely
similar to the state chariot of the Lord Mayor of London, had she ever
been so blest as to behold that functionary’s progress on the 9th of
November through the City streets.
It was for long a vexed question between Phemie and her nurse, whether
the Kellers, or a distracted lover were to come for her.
Peggy held to the Kellers, but Phemie preferred the lover, who was to
right her wrongs, to take her from the cinders, and dance with her at
the ball, and get her the property of her ancestors, and live happily
with her for ever after. She did not want to owe anything to her
father’s family. She preferred the idea of some dark-haired, dark-eyed
nobleman coming to the Hill Farm like a flash of lightning, and rescuing
her from stocking-mending and cast-off clothes, after the fashion of a
hero of romance.
Sometimes in her fancy she would be proud and distant, sometimes
indifferent, sometimes cruel and unkind; but however she began the
story, it had never but one end, and that end was not suicide and
distraction, but a grand wedding, and joy, and confidence, and love all
the days of their lives.
They would build a castle on the site of the Hill Farmhouse, and come
and spend some portion of every summer at Tordale. Mr. Conbyr should
have his organ, and she would bestow such magnificent presents on the
wives of the farmers she had known! She would even give Mrs. Aggland a
satin dress, and a brooch, and a bonnet, and everybody should be happy,
and all should go joyous as a marriage bell.
As for the nobleman, he was to be something between Fergus M‘Ivor, the
lover of the poor Bride of Lammermoor, and Percy, as described in
Otterbourne. Whichever of these desirable models he most resembled,
there was yet one thing in which he never varied—his devoted affection
for herself. Phemie experienced no pangs of jealousy: she had no mental
misgivings about a previous attachment, about any former lady love. It
was to be first love with him as well as with her; it was to be first
love and last love with both. Heaven help her! though these dreams may
sound worldly and calculating, they were nevertheless pure and innocent,
and it was the shock of coming down from the contemplation of such a
lover and such a fortune, to the flat level of accepting or rejecting a
middle-aged and unromantic suitor that proved too much for Phemie’s
equanimity, and made her—sitting by the window looking down over Tordale
valley—so sad and thoughtful.
For the touch of reality had done two things: it had wakened her at once
from a land of pleasant visions, to the certainties of existence; it
showed her she had been asleep and dreaming; it proved to her she must
wake and bestir herself.
She could not go on after this, picturing to herself the advent of an
ideal lover. Like one arising from a long sweet slumber, she looked out
over the plains of life, and saw her actual position for the first time.
She was born—not to be run after like a damsel of romance, but to darn
stockings, and to be considered an amazingly fortunate girl if a rich
prosaic man fell in love with and married her. She had overrated her
goods; she had been like a man with a clever invention, who never thinks
of making hundreds out of it, but always millions, until some one offers
him, say a thousand pounds, with which all his friends consider he ought
to believe himself overpaid.
So long as her little possessions were kept out of the market she placed
a price on them far and away above their actual value; but now, when she
saw the precise sum at which she was rated by other people, her spirits
sank to zero.
If it were so wonderful a thing for this common-place stranger to ask
her to marry him, what chance was there of the lord coming across the
hills to woo? Was it likely she should ever meet Lord Ronald Clanronald
by Strammer Tarn? And if she did meet him, was it at all probable he
would take her back with him to his home? Lizzie Lindsay had skirts of
green satin, but Phemie Keller had only three dresses in the world, and
none of them much to boast of!
Further, it was evident her uncle had laid her out to marry Duncan. He
had mentioned it, and she had told him that might never be. Having told
him so, what was she to do—stay on mending old clothes and dreaming her
dreams—dreams that might never seem realities again—or go away and
become a lady, as every one told her she might by speaking only one
word?
Suppose, after all this to-do, after all this respect, after all this
disturbance, she subsided again into the Phemie of six months
previously, should she be able to lead the old life again patiently?
Could she endure Mrs. Aggland’s scolding, and the incessant work, work,
slave, slave, drive, drive, after this chance of freedom? Suppose
poverty came again: she had seen bad seasons at the Hill Farm, and felt
the nipping of scarcity like the rest, and these bad seasons might
return, and then, instead of being able to help, she would only prove an
incumbrance.
If she accepted Captain Stondon, her hero would have to be turned with
his face to the wall; but if she did not accept him, why, then, still
the hero might never come, after all.
What should she do? “Oh, what shall I do?” sobbed Phemie, by way of a
climax to her reverie; and, as if in answer to her question, Helen
tapped at her cousin’s door, and said:
“Captain Stondon is in the parlour, Phemie, and father says, will you
come down and see him?”
“An’ I hev brought ye up a candle, my bairn,” added Peggy M‘Nab; “redd
up yer hair, and wash the tears aff yer face, for he’ll no be pleased to
see ye looking like a ghaist.”