THE DRAWING-ROOM.
As soon as they were out of the kitchen-door, the boy pushed his hand
into his father’s; the father grasped it, and without a word spoken,
they walked on together. They would often be half a day together
without a word passing between them. To be near, each to the other,
seemed enough for each.
Cosmo had thought his father was going somewhere about the farm, to see
how things were getting on; but, instead of crossing to the other side
of the court, where lay the sheds and stables, etc., or leaving it by
the gate, the laird turned to the left, and led the way to the next
block of building, where he stopped at a door at the farther end of the
front of it. It was a heavy oak door, studded with great broad iron
knobs, arranged in angular patterns. It was set deep in the thick wall,
but there were signs of there having been a second, doubtless still
stronger, flush with the external surface, for the great hooks of the
hinges remained, with the deep hole in the stone on the opposite side
for the bolt. The key was in the lock, for, except to open the windows,
and do other necessary pieces of occasional tendance, it was seldom
anybody entered the place, and Grizzie generally turned the key, and
left it in the lock. She would have been indignant at the assertion,
but I am positive it was not _always_ taken out at night. In this part
of the castle were the dining and drawing rooms, and immediately over
the latter, a state bedroom in which nobody had slept for many years.
It was into a narrow passage, no wider than itself, the door led.
From this passage a good-sized hall opened to the left--very barely
furnished, but with a huge fireplace, and a great old table, that
often had feasted jubilant companies. The walls were only plastered,
and were stained with damp. Against them were fixed a few mouldering
heads of wild animals--the stag and the fox and the otter--one ancient
wolf’s-head also, wherever that had been killed. But it was not into
this room the laird led his son. The passage ended in a stone stair
that went up between containing walls. It was much worn, and had so
little head-room that the laird could not ascend without stooping.
Cosmo was short enough as yet to go erect, but it gave him always a
feeling of imprisonment and choking, a brief agony of the imagination,
to pass through the narrow curve, though he did so at least twice every
day. It was the oldest-looking thing about the place--that staircase.
At the top of it, the laird turned to the right, and lifted the
latch--all the doors were latched--of a dark-looking door. It screaked
dismally as it opened. He entered and undid a shutter, letting an
abiding flash of the ever young light of the summer day into the
ancient room. It was long since Cosmo had been in it before. The aspect
of it affected him like a withered wall-flower.
It was a well-furnished room. A lady with taste must at one time
at least have presided in it--but then withering does so much for
beauty--and that not of stuffs and _things_ only! The furniture of
it was very modern compared with the house, but not much of it was
younger than the last James, or Queen Anne, and it had all a stately
old-maidish look. Such venerable rooms have been described, and
painted, and put on the stage, and dreamed about, tens of thousands
of times, yet they always draw me afresh as if they were as young as
the new children who keep the world from growing old. They haunt me,
and if I miss them in heaven, I shall have one given me. On the floor
was an old, old carpet, wondrously darned and skilfully patched, with
all its colours faded into a sweet faint ghost-like harmony. Several
spider-legged, inlaid tables stood about the room, but most of the
chairs were of a sturdier make, one or two of rich carved work of
India, no doubt a great rarity when first brought to Glenwarlock. The
walls had once had colour, but it was so retiring and indistinct in
the little light that came through the one small deep-set window whose
shutter had been opened, that you could not have said what it was.
There were three or four cabinets--one of them old Japanese; and on a
table a case of gorgeous humming birds. The scarlet cloth that covered
the table was faded to a dirty orange, but the birds were almost as
bright as when they darted like live jewels through the tropical
sunlight. Exquisite as they were however, they had not for the boy half
the interest of a faded old fire-screen, lovelily worked in silks, by
hands to him unknown, long ago returned to the earth of which they were
fashioned. A variety of nick-nacks and ornaments, not a few of which
would have been of value in the eyes of a connoisseur, crowded the
chimney-piece--which stood over an iron grate with bulging bars, and a
tall brass fender. How still and solemn-quiet it all was in the middle
of the great triumphant sunny day--like some far-down hollow in a rock,
the matrix of a gem! It looked as if it had done with life--as much
done with life as if it were a room in Egyptian rock, yet was it full
of the memories of keenest life, and Cosmo knew there was treasure upon
treasure of wonder and curiosity hid in those cabinets, some of which
he had seen, and more he would like to see. But it was not to show him
any of these that his father had now brought him to the room.
Not once yielding the right hand of the boy which was clasped to and
in his own, the laird closed the door of the room, and advancing the
whole length of it, stopped at a sofa covered with a rich brocade, and
seating himself thereon, slowly, and with a kind of care, drew him
between his thin knees, and began to talk to him. Now there was this
difference between the relation of these two and that of most fathers
and sons, that, thus taken into solemn solitude by his old father,
the boy felt no dismay, no sense of fault to be found, no troubled
expectation of admonition. Reverence and love held about equal sway in
his feeling towards his father. And while the grandmother looked down
on Cosmo as the son of his mother, for that very reason his father in a
strange lovely way reverenced his boy: the reaction was utter devotion.
Cosmo stood and looked in his father’s eyes--their eyes were of the
same colour--that bright sweet soft Norwegian blue--his right hand
still clasped in his father’s left, and his left hand leaning gently
on his father’s knee. Then, as I say, the old man began to talk to the
young one. A silent man ordinarily, it was from no lack of the power of
speech, for he had a Celtic gift of simple eloquence.
“This is your birthday, my son.”
“Yes, papa.”
“You are now fourteen.”
“Yes, papa.”
“You are growing quite a man.”
“I don’t know, papa.”
“So much of a man, at least, my Cosmo, that I am going to treat you
like a man this day, and tell you some things that I have never talked
about to any one since your mother’s death.--You remember your mother,
Cosmo?”
This question he was scarcely ever alone with the boy without
asking--not from forgetfulness, but from the desire to keep the boy’s
remembrance of her fresh, and for the pure pleasure of talking of
her to the only one with whom it did not seem profane to converse
concerning his worshipped wife.
“Yes, papa, I do.”
The laird always spoke Scotch to his mother, and to Grizzie also,
who would have thought him seriously offended had he addressed her
in book-English; but to his Marion’s son he always spoke in the best
English he had, and Cosmo did his best in the same way in return.
“Tell me what you remember about her,” said the old man.
He had heard the same thing again and again from the boy, yet every
time it was as if he hoped and watched for some fresh revelation
from the lips of the lad--as if, truth being one, memory might go on
recalling, as imagination goes on foreseeing.
“I remember,” said the boy, “a tall beautiful woman, with long hair,
which she brushed before a big, big looking-glass.”
The love of the son, kept alive by the love of the husband, glorifying
through the mists of his memory the earthly appearance of the mother,
gave to her the form in which he would see her again, rather than that
in which he had actually beheld her. And indeed the father saw her
after the same fashion in the memory of his love. Tall to the boy of
five, she was little above the middle height, yet the husband saw her
stately in his dreams; there was nothing remarkable in her face except
the expression, which after her marriage had continually gathered
tenderness and grace, but the husband as well as the child called her
absolutely beautiful.
“What colour were her eyes, Cosmo?”
“I don’t know; I never saw the colour of them; but I remember they
looked at me as if I should run into them.”
“She would have died for you, my boy. We must be very good that we may
see her again some day.”
“I will try. I do try, papa.”
“You see, Cosmo, when a woman like that condescends to be wife to one
of us and mother to the other, the least we can do, when she is taken
from us, is to give her the same love and the same obedience after
she is gone as when she was with us. She is with her own kind up in
heaven now, but she may be looking down and watching us. It may be God
lets her do that, that she may see of the travail of her soul and be
satisfied--who can tell? She can’t be very anxious about me now, for I
am getting old, and my warfare is nearly over; but she may be getting
things ready to rest me a bit. She knows I have for a long time now
been trying to keep the straight path, as far as I could see it, though
sometimes the grass and heather has got the better of it, so that it
was hard to find. But _you_ must remember, Cosmo, that it is not enough
to be a good boy, as I shall tell her you have always been: you’ve got
to be a good man, and that is a rather different and sometimes a harder
thing. For, as soon as a man has to do with other men, he finds they
expect him to do things they ought to be ashamed of doing themselves;
and then he has got to stand on his own honest legs, and not move an
inch for all their pushing and pulling; and especially where a man
loves his fellow man and likes to be on good terms with him, that is
not easy. The thing is just this, Cosmo--when you are a full-grown
man, you must be a good boy still--that’s the difficulty. For a man
to be a boy, and a good boy still, he must be a thorough man. The man
that’s not manly can never be a good boy to his mother. And you can’t
keep true to your mother, except you remember Him who is father and
mother both to all of us. I wish my Marion were here to teach you as
she taught me. She taught me to pray, Cosmo, as I have tried to teach
you--when I was in any trouble, just to go into my closet, and shut
to the door, and pray to my Father who is in secret--the same Father
who loved you so much as to give you my Marion for a mother. But I am
getting old and tired, and shall soon go where I hope to learn faster.
Oh, my boy! hear your father who loves you, and never do the thing
you would be ashamed for your mother or me to know. Remember, nothing
drops out; everything hid shall be revealed. But of all things, if ever
you should fail or fall, don’t lie still because you are down: get up
again--for God’s sake, for your mother’s sake, for my sake--get up and
try again.
“And now it is time you should know a little about the family of which
you come. I don’t doubt there have been some in it who would count me a
foolish man for bringing you up as I have done, but those of them who
are up there don’t. They see that the business of life is not to get
as much as you can, but to do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly
with your God--with your mother’s God, my son. They may say I have made
a poor thing of it, but I shall not hang my head before the public of
that country, because I’ve let the land slip from me that I couldn’t
keep any more than this weary old carcase that’s now crumbling away
from about me. Some would tell me I ought to shudder at the thought
of leaving you to such poverty, but I am too anxious about yourself,
my boy, to think much about the hardships that may be waiting you.
I should be far more afraid about you if I were leaving you rich. I
have seen rich people do things I never knew a poor gentleman do. I
don’t mean to say anything against the rich--there’s good and bad of
all sorts; but I just can’t be so very sorry that I am leaving you to
poverty, though, if I might have had my way, it wouldn’t have been so
bad. But he knows best who loves best. I have struggled hard to keep
the old place for you; but there’s hardly an acre outside the garden
and close but was mortgaged before I came into the property. I’ve been
all my life trying to pay off, but have made little progress. The house
is free, however, and the garden; and don’t you part with the old
place, my boy, except you see you _ought_. But rather than anything not
out and out honest, anything the least doubtful, sell every stone. Let
all go, if you should have to beg your way home to us. Come clean, my
son, as my Marion bore you.”
Here Cosmo interrupted his father to ask what _mortgaged_ meant. This
led to an attempt on the part of the laird to instruct him in the
whole state of the affairs of the property. He showed him where all
the papers were kept, and directed him to whom to go for any requisite
legal advise. Weary then of business, of which he had all his life had
more than enough, he turned to pleasanter matters, and began to tell
him anecdotes of the family.
“What in mercy can hae come o’ the laird, think ye, my leddy?” said
Grizzie to her mistress. “It’s the yoong laird’s birthday, ye see, an’
they aye haud a colloguin’ thegither upo’ that same, an’ I kenna whaur
to gang to cry them till their denner.”
“Run an’ ring the great bell,” said the grandmother, mindful of old
glories.
“’Deed, I s’ du naething o’ the kin’,” said Grizzie to herself; “it’s
eneuch to raise a regiment--gien it camna doon upo’ my heid.”
But she had her suspicion, and finding the great door open, ascended
the stair.
The two were sitting at a table, with the genealogical tree of the
family spread out before them, the father telling tale after tale, the
son listening in delight. I must confess, however--let it tell against
the laird’s honesty as it may--that, his design being neither to
glorify his family, nor to teach records, but to impress all he could
find of ancestral nobility upon his boy, he made a choice, and both
communicated and withheld. So absorbed were they, that Grizzie’s knock
startled them both a good deal.
“Yer denners is ready, laird,” she said, standing erect in the doorway.
“Verra weel, Grizzie, I thank ye,” returned the laird.--“Cosmo, we’ll
take a walk together this evening, and then I’ll tell you more about
that brother of my grandfather’s. Come along to dinner now.--I houp
ye hae something in honour o’ the occasion, Grizzie,” he added in a
whisper when he reached the door, where the old woman waited to follow
them.
“I teuk it upo’ me, laird,” answered Grizzie in the same tone, while
Cosmo was going down the stair, “to put a cock an’ a leek thegither,
an’ they’ll be nane the waur that ye hae keepit them i’ the pot a
whilie langer.--Cosmo,” she went on when they had descended, and
overtaken the boy, who was waiting for them at the foot, “the Lord
bless ye upo’ this bonnie day! An’ may ye be aye a comfort to them ’at
awes ye, as ye hae been up to this present.”
“I houp sae, Grizzie,” responded Cosmo humbly; and all went together to
the kitchen.
There the table was covered with a clean cloth of the finest of
homespun, and everything set out with the same nicety as if the meal
had been spread in the dining-room. The old lady, who had sought to
please her son by putting on her best cap for the occasion, but who
had in truth forgot what day it was until reminded by Grizzie, sat
already at the head of the table, waiting their arrival. She made a
kind speech to the boy, hoping he would be master of the place for many
years after his father and she had left him. Then the meal commenced.
It did not last long. They had the soup first, and then the fowl that
had been boiled in it, with a small second dish of potatoes--the year’s
baby Kidneys, besides those Grizzie had pared. Delicate pancakes
followed--and dinner was over--except for the laird, who had a little
toddy after. But as yet Cosmo had never even tasted strong drink--and
of course he never desired it. Leaving the table, he wandered out,
pondering some of the things his father had been telling him.