When Mrs. Fielden came to stay at the Melfords we saw a good deal of
her. Their yacht used to steam up in the early morning, and they would
take us off for a day's cruise on the loch or for a trip round to Oban.
Mrs. Fielden used to sit on deck with a big red umbrella over her head
and a white yachting gown on, and seemed serenely unconscious that she
was looking very pretty and very smart. My sister tells me she never
feels badly dressed till she meets Mrs. Fielden.
The Melfords have very pleasant people stopping with them always, and
there are very jolly little parties on board their yacht. Mrs.
Fielden, however, is in her most provoking and wilful mood. Every day
it is the same thing--laughter and smiles for every one. But she has
absolutely no heart. All the beautiful, kindly things she does are
only the whim of the moment. They bespeak a generous nature, as easily
moved to tears as to laughter; but she loves every one a little, and
probably has no depth of affection or constancy in her. Lately, she
has added another provoking habit to the many she already possesses.
She exaggerates her pretence of having no memory, and indeed it may be
she has not any.
When I left home, rather a wreck as regards health, and drove to the
station in Mrs. Fielden's luxurious carriage, it was her hand that
piled the cushions, as no one else can, behind me. And the last thing
I saw was her smile as she waved her hand to me from my own door.
Last week, when we met again at the Melfords', she nodded to me in a
little indifferent sort of way. She sat under a big cedar-tree on one
of the lawns, and laughed, and talked a sort of brilliant nonsense the
whole afternoon.
By-and-by I said to her--probably clumsily, certainly at the wrong
time--"I never half thanked you for being so good to me when I was
ill;" for she had come in like some radiant vision, day after day, in
her beautiful summer gowns and rose-garlanded hats, and had sat by my
couch, reading to me sometimes, talking to me at others in a voice as
gentle as a dove's. Why will she not allow one to admire her? One
only wants to do so humbly and at a distance. It was so pleasant up
here in the Highlands, with the dear memory of those long days to look
back upon. But Mrs. Fielden ruthlessly robbed me and sent me away
empty the very first day of our meeting.
"Was I kind to you? I don't believe I was, really. If I was, I'm sure
I forget all about it. Let me see, how long were you ill? It can't
have been a bit amusing for you," and so on, laughing at my dull face
and serious ways.
And this has gone on for a whole week. At the Melfords' parties she
selects, quite indiscriminately, and in a royal way which she has, this
man or that to be her escort or her companion. Now it is a mere boy
whom she bewilders with a few of her radiant smiles, and now one of her
elderly colonels whom she reduces to a state of abject admiration in a
few hours. One man goes fishing with her, and another rows her on the
loch. A third, hearing that Mrs. Fielden's life will be a blank if she
does not possess a certain rare fern which may be found sometimes on
the hillsides of Scotland, spends a whole day scrambling about looking
for it, and returns triumphant in the evening. Mrs. Fielden has
forgotten that she ever wanted it. When we sulk she does not notice
it. When her colonels offer her their fatuous admiration she goes to
sleep, and then, waking up, is so very, very sorry. "But you can't
have amused me properly," she says, "or I should have stayed awake."
When any one tries by avoiding her to show displeasure, Mrs. Fielden is
oblivious of the fact. And when the penitence and boredom which
immediately ensue when one has deprived Mrs. Fielden of one's company
have led to ending the one-sided quarrel with an apology, it is only to
find that Mrs. Fielden has been blissfully unconscious of one's
absence. Summer and the air of the Highlands seem to be in her veins.
Her happiness, like the quality of mercy, is twice blessed, making her,
through her talent for enjoyment, diffuse something beautiful and gay
about her.
After all, why should she care? Life was evidently made to give her
pleasure. Why should a woman always be blamed for being loved? Mrs.
Fielden's charm is of the irresponsible sort. To live and to be lovely
are all one ought to demand of her, and at least she is without vanity.
She seems to be entirely unconscious of the admiration she receives, or
perhaps she is simply indifferent to it.
The Melfords adore her, and allow her to see it. They say no one knows
her as they do. Probably we all feel that. This is one of Mrs.
Fielden's most maddening charms. We have all found something in her
that seems to belong to ourselves alone.
Lately I have discovered that she loves to wander up the hillside by
herself, and listen to the plover's solitary cry, and sit in the
sunshine with no companion near her. And one wonders why so frivolous
a woman should care for this, and why when she comes back amongst us
again her eyes should wear the wistful look which covers them like a
veil sometimes.
When she left the Melfords' Palestrina asked her to come and stay with
us; and rather to my surprise, Mrs. Fielden came. It seems to me she
must find us a very dull lot after the Melfords' cheery house-parties.
She arrived late one afternoon in the yacht, and the whole party came
up to dine with us before returning to the castle. The little house
was taxed to its utmost capacity, even to provide teacups for our
guests. But the Melfords have a happy knack of seeming to find
pleasure in everything. Mrs. Fielden's gaiety was infectious, and her
lightheartedness knocked all one's serious world to pieces, while her
beauty seemed almost extravagant in the plain setting of the little
house.
She began to give us some of her experiences in Scotland. "Do you
know," she said, putting on a charming gravity and lifting her eyebrows
in a provoking, childish way, "that every single person in Scotland
gets up at five o'clock in the morning? and all the coaches and
excursions start at daybreak, and when you want to hit off what they
call a 'connection' anywhere, you have to get up in the middle of the
night?"
"I am afraid you had a horribly early start to join the yacht the other
day," said Lord Melford, "but it was the only way we could manage to
get to the Oban Gathering in time."
"I was there before you," said Mrs. Fielden; "and I had to rouse up the
people at the inn to take me in and give me breakfast. Even they were
not up at that hour! But after ringing twice, such a nice boots came
and opened the door to me, and brought me some breakfast."
"The gathering was very good this year," said Lord Melford. "Why
didn't some of you come? By-the-bye, your friend Mrs. Macdonald was
there. Indeed, it was she who insisted on taking Mrs. Fielden to the
Gaelic concert."
"Gaelic is rather an alarming language," said Mrs. Fielden. "I always
feel as if I were being sworn at when I hear it."
One of Mrs. Fielden's admirers who had reached the savage and sarcastic
stage here interposed, and said: "Poor Mrs. Fielden! I saw you at the
concert. How did you manage to sit throughout a whole evening between
Mrs. Macdonald and a wall?"
"Mrs. Macdonald is quite a dear!" said Mrs. Fielden. (Whom, in the
name of Fortune, would Mrs. Fielden not find charming?)
"I don't know what you and Mrs. Macdonald can have found to talk
about," said Palestrina, laughing.
"We discussed the training of servants most of the time," said Mrs.
Fielden simply.
Every one laughed; and my sister, with a recollection of our visit to
Mrs. Macdonald, said at once, "Did she give you any useful household
recipes?"
"It is very odd that you should have asked me that," said Mrs. Fielden.
"Do you know, that the whole of to-day I have been puzzling over a
letter which I received this morning? I did not know the handwriting,
and it was merely headed, 'Two recipes for boiling a ham, as
requested.' Now, I cannot really have asked Mrs. Macdonald for recipes
for boiling a ham, can I?"
We thought it highly probable that she had done so, and had done it,
too, with an air of profound interest; and I think we said this, which
Mrs. Fielden did not mind in the least.
"There is something rather horrible, don't you think so," she said, "in
knowing how a thing is cooked?"
The minister, who is assiduous in calling, walked up after tea with his
friend Evan Sinclair; and as we were already far too large a party for
dinner, we asked them to stay too.
Mr. Macorquodale has frequently described himself to us as a grand
preacher. He and Evan Sinclair live quite close to each other, and
they are friends whose affection is rooted and maintained in warfare.
For the minister and Sinclair to meet is one strenuous contest as to
who shall have the last word. Politeness is not a strong motive with
either of them--indeed, one would imagine that from the first it has
been ruled out of place. The friendship and the warfare began at the
Edinburgh High School years ago, and both the friendship and the
warfare have lasted without intermission ever since. They meet every
day, and often twice a day; they fish together, and in the winter they
spend every evening with each other. Scottish people seem to have a
sneaking liking for those who dislike them, and a certain pity mingled
with contempt for those who show them favour and affection. The
friendship of Evan and the minister is based upon feelings of the most
respectful admiration for their mutual antipathy.
To keep alive this laudable and self-respecting warfare is the highest
effort of genius of both Mr. Sinclair and the Reverend Alexander. To
foster it they apply themselves to what they call "plain speaking"
whenever they meet, and they conceal as much as possible from each
other every single good quality that they possess.
The minister, who is a big man, always talks of Evan as "Wee Sinkler,"
and sneers at "heritors;" and Evan invariably addresses Macorquodale as
"Taurbarrels," a name which he considers appropriate to the minister's
black clothes and portly figure.
"The minister," said Evan, when he had walked up the hill to see us,
"has been reading Josephus. We shall have some erudite learning from
the pulpit for the next Sunday or two."
The minister was announced a moment later, and, before taking the
trouble to shake hands with us, he looked Evan Sinclair over from top
to toe, and remarked, "Ye're very attentive in calling upon ladies."
"I was just talking about your fine preaching," said Evan.
"I admit my gift," said the minister; "but I fear that I very often
preach to a deaf adder which stops its ears." He nodded triumphantly
at us, and it then occurred to him to shake hands.
Evan said at once that he got a better sleep in kirk on Sundays than he
got during the whole of the week.
"Evan Sinclair," said the minister, "if I find you sleeping under me
I'll denounce you from my pulpit, as a minister has the right to do."
"And we'll settle it in the graveyard afterwards," said Evan dryly.
"And ye're not in very good training, my man."
Palestrina broke in gently to discuss a theological point which had
puzzled us for several Sundays. On each Lord's Day as it came round we
had prayed that we might become "a little beatle to the Lord."
Doubtless the simile is a beautiful one, but its immediate bearing upon
our needs was not too grossly evident. And it seemed almost dangerous
to those who believe in the efficacy of prayer to put up this petition
in its literal sense. We had decided for some time past that we should
ask Mr. Macorquodale what it was exactly for which we made petition,
when we prayed that we might become "a little beatle to the Lord."
"Similes," said Palestrina in her serious way, "are beautiful
sometimes, but we can't quite understand one of the references that you
make in your prayers on Sundays."
"We have prayed so fervently," said Mrs. Fielden, "without perhaps
entirely understanding the portent of the petition, that we might
become 'a little beatle to the Lord.'"
The thing was out now, and our curiosity, we hoped, would be gratified.
There was a pause which suggested that our hearers were puzzled, and
then Mr. Sinclair put a large pocket-handkerchief into his mouth and
roared with laughter, and Mr. Macorquodale turned to my sister, who was
trembling now, and remarked in an awful voice that he wondered that we
didn't understand plain English.
Of course she apologized, and an explanation came afterwards from Evan
Sinclair, who told us that the minister's prayer was that we--the
church--might become a little Bethel, and that Beethel was his Doric
pronunciation of the word.
It began to rain on Sunday, as it often does in Scotland--Nature itself
seems to put on a more serious expression on the Sabbath--and it
continued raining for four whole days. The rain came down steadily and
mercilessly, shutting out the view of the hills, and turning the whole
landscape into a big damp gray blanket. "I suppose," said Mrs.
Fielden, who is never affected by bad weather, "that we shall all get
very cross and quarrel with each other if the rain continues much
longer."
"I think I shall write a number of unnecessary letters to absent
friends," said Palestrina. "And Mr. Ellicomb and Sir Anthony Crawshay
will arrive to-morrow, and we must tell them to amuse us."
It was a disappointment to find that Mr. Ellicomb's nerves and temper
were seriously affected by the weather, and in moments of extreme
depression his low spirits vented themselves in a rabid abuse of the
Presbyterian Kirk. I cannot understand why Ellicomb should elect to
wear a brown velvet shooting-jacket, and a pale-green tie, and neat
boots laced half-way up his legs, in Scotland. He went to the village
church in the rain on Sunday, and he has not been the same man since.
"Don't call it a church!" he cried as we went homewards up the hill,
where the road was a watercourse and each tree poured down moisture.
He seemed to think that he had done his soul an irreparable injury by
entering a Presbyterian kirk.
Anthony said, "Oh! don't be an ass, Ellicomb." But even on Monday
morning poor Ellicomb was still suffering from the weather and the
effects of his churchgoing.
"Can he be in love?" said Palestrina; "and if so, as the Jamiesons
would say, which is it?"
Palestrina is prettier than ever since her marriage. She still says,
"Oh, that will be delightful!" to whatever Thomas and I suggest, and
she never seems to have any occupation except to be with us when we
want her, and to accede to everything we say, which of course, from a
man's point of view, is a very delightful trait in a woman.
"I rather wonder," said Palestrina, "that I have not heard from any of
the Jamiesons lately. They are usually such good writers."
"Depend upon it, there is a great bit of news coming," said Thomas.
"The Jamiesons always maintain a dramatic silence just before
announcing some tremendous piece of intelligence."
Thomas had hardly spoken the words before a telegram was handed to
Palestrina, containing the following enigmatical words:---
"Engaged Cuthbertson. Greatly surprised. Deeply thankful.--ELIZA."
This rather mysterious message was followed, later in the day, by a
letter four pages in length, and marked on the outside, for some reason
best known to Eliza, "Immediate." The letter explained more fully the
cause of Eliza's thankfulness, and who it was that was greatly
surprised.
"If you had told me," wrote Eliza, "six weeks ago that I should now be
engaged to Mr. Cuthbertson, I should hardly have believed it. I really
had not a notion that he cared for me until he actually said the words.
Is it not too strange to think that perhaps, after all, Maud may be one
of the last of us to get married?"
Here followed the usual descriptive catalogue, so characteristic of the
Jamiesons' letters. "Mr. Cuthbertson looks like a widower, though he
is not one." Strangely enough, I could never think of any other words,
when I came to know Mr. Cuthbertson, that described him so well as
these, and I can only account for it by saying that the man's deep
melancholy and the crape band that he habitually wore round his hat
must have given one the feeling that at some time Mr. Cuthbertson had
suffered a heavy bereavement. "I have only known him," Eliza's letter
went on, "for six weeks, but even that time has shown me his worth. He
has a very straight nose and a black beard, and his forehead is
distinctly intellectual. I met him first at Mrs. Darcey-Jacobs',
where, as you know, I had gone to stay to catalogue their library, and
to do a little typewriting for her. You know, of course, that she has
become a member of the S.R.S., and their library is a _mine of
information_.
"At first I was afraid to say, or even to allow myself to think, he
showed me any preference, but Maud thought from the first that he was
struck, and I asked her not to appear at all until everything was
settled, for you know how attractive she is. But I really don't think
that even then I thought that there was anything serious in it." (For
an intelligent woman Eliza's letter strikes one as being strangely
lacking in concentration.) "I have just been to the meeting of the
Browning Society--our first appearance in public together--and I read
my paper on "The Real Strafford," but I could hardly keep my voice
steady all the time. I wear his own signet-ring for the present, but
we are going up to London next week, when he will buy me a hoop of
pearls. I am sure that you will be glad to hear that he is comfortably
off. When the right man comes preconceived objections to matrimony
vanish, _but it must be the right man_."
Palestrina said that she was "thrilled" to hear of Eliza's engagement,
because an engagement was always thrilling, and she instantly went to
tell the news to Mr. Ellicomb. She told me afterwards that when she
had said that one of the Jamiesons was engaged Mr. Ellicomb became
suddenly very pale in his complexion, and exclaimed, in a most anxious
tone of voice, "Which?"
The cold weather has set in very suddenly, and already there is a
sprinkling of snow on some of the distant hills. The robins still sing
cheerily, but the gulls on the shore, flying over the yellow seaweed,
call to each other plaintively in the gray of the early twilight. The
heavy-winged herons stand in an attitude of serious thought for hours
on the cold rocks; then, as if suddenly making up their minds to
something, they stretch out their red legs behind them, and flop with
large wings over the waters of the loch. The red Virginian creeper has
begun to drop its leaves regretfully, after a night or two of white
frost, and the dahlias hang their heads, heavy with the moisture which
their cups contain. The sun wakes late in the mornings now, but shines
strong and warm when it does get up. Cottage lights and fires burn
cheerily o' nights, and within the cottages the old folks and the young
ones draw round the fires and speak eerily of wraiths and whaurlochs,
and some will tell of death-lights which they have seen on the lonely
shore road. The herring fishers who sail away in the early twilight
wear good stout jerseys now, and red woollen "crauvats" which the
"wumman at hame" has knitted. The _Lord_ has sailed away to Dunoon to
lay up for the winter, and the shepherds have gone away down South "to
winter the hogs." The shepherds' wives sit alone in the little
hillside cottages away up on the face of the brae, and "mak dae" with
their slender money till their men come home again.
The old women in the village have begun their winter spinning, and the
tap, tap, tap of the treadle on the floor gives a pleasant sound as one
passes outside on the dark road. Old men tell tales of snow in the
passes in winter-time, and of death on the bleak hillsides, and some
wife, shuddering, will say, "Ay, I mind I saw his corp-licht the very
evening he was lost." And then they tell tales of fantasy and signs
and premonitions of death.
The Finlaysons are going to wind up their very successful autumn in the
Highlands by giving what they insist upon calling a gillies' dance,
though probably the revels will mostly be indulged in by their large
retinue of English servants. Good-natured old Finlayson has more than
once said that he hopes we shall all come to the gillies' dance, and
that it will give ourselves and our guests a chance of seeing some
Highland customs. A good many of us come to Scotland most years, and
have seen gillies and pipers before, but our good-natured neighbours
certainly out-distance any one I know in their Highland sympathies.
They invited us to dine with them before the dance should begin, and
six of us went, feeling very like the Jamiesons, and resolved that when
we got home we should never put a limit to their numbers when we send
them an invitation again.
We talk of returning home at the end of next week, and Mrs. Fielden and
our other two guests are leaving on Monday, I believe.
Mrs. Fielden looks much prettier in the Highlands, I think, than
anywhere else. Young Finlayson is in love with her, and I believe has
offered her his heart and the ironmongery business with it; but I think
of all her lovers Anthony Crawshay is the one she likes best. He is
the only one for whom her moods never alter, and to whom she is always
gracious and charming and sweet. Perhaps it is in a quiet, less
radiant way than that in which she treats others, but it is with an
unvarying loving-kindness which I have not seen her bestow elsewhere.
And Anthony Crawshay is a good fellow--one of the best.
Old Mr. Finlayson actually donned a kilt for the gillies' dance; young
Finlayson also wore the national dress, and Thomas tells me that they
have sported the Macdonald tartan, and wants to know why. Old
Finlayson met us at the door of his baronial hall in a clannish, feudal
sort of way, and seizing his glengarry bonnet from his head he flung it
down upon the oak settle in the hall, and exclaimed in hearty accents,
"Welcome to the Glen." The Misses Finlayson wore sashes of royal
Stuart tartan put plaid-wise across their shoulders. Mrs. Finlayson
was dressed in a very regal manner which I cannot attempt to describe,
and her platform voice was in use throughout the entire evening.
Ellicomb said the dance was barbaric, but Thomas enjoyed the evening
immensely, and so did Crawshay, who said in his hearty way, "The
Finlaysons did us uncommonly well," and shouted out, "Not at all bad
people, not at all bad."
After dinner old Finlayson showed us all the pictures in the hall by
the light of a long wax taper which he held above his head, and he
pointed out the beauties of the house in a proprietary way, even to
Evan himself, to whom the place belongs. Evan Sinclair, in a shabby
green doublet, accepted all Mr. Finlayson's wildest statements about
his own house with a queer, humorous grin on his face, and submitted to
being patronized by the Miss Finlaysons, whose commercial instincts, no
doubt, caused them to despise a young man who was obliged to let his
place.
One of the Highland axioms which the Finlaysons have accepted is that
"a man's a man for a' that," and they shook hands with every one in an
effusive way, and condescended to a queer sort of familiarity with the
boatmen and keepers about the place. The daughters of the house, with
flying tartan ribbons, swung the young gillies about in the intricate
figures of the hoolichan, and talked to them with a heartiness which
one would hardly have thought possible of the Clarkham young ladies.
The Finlaysons had a large number of English guests staying in the
house for the dance. These all made the same joke when the pipes began
to play. "Is the pig being killed?" they asked, and looked very
pleased with their own ready wit.
Red-headed Evan Sinclair carried his old green doublet and battered
silver ornaments very well, and his neat dancing was in pleasant
contrast to the curious bounds and leaps of the Finlaysons. Old Mr.
Finlayson spent his evening strutting about in a kindly, important
fashion, and in making Athole Brose after a recipe supplied by Tyne
Drum, who superintended the brewing of it himself.
I hope I am not fanciful when I say that the pipes when I hear them
have to me something irresistibly sad about them, and that they conjure
up many fantasies in my head which I am half ashamed to put down on
paper. They seem to me to gather up in their bitter sobbings all the
sorrows of a people who have suffered much and have said very little
about it. There is the cry in them of children dying in the lonely
glens in winter-time, when the wind howls round the clachan and the
snow fills the passes. One almost sees the little procession of
black-coated men bearing away a tiny burden from the cottage door into
the whiteness beyond, with its one heaped-up patch of brown earth on
either side of the little grave. They wail, too, of the Killing Time,
when the Covenanters were crushed but never broken under persecution;
and one seems to see the defiant gray-haired old men, with their
splendid obstinacy, unmoved by threats--not defiant, but simply
unbreakable. Thinking of the Covenanters as they pass slowly before
one to the sighing of the pipes, one wonders if it is possible to
punish by death the man who is content to die.
The tuneful reeds sob out, too, the story of the Prince for whom so
many brave men bled, and they tell again of the days of song, and of
noble legends and deeds of daring when the nation spent its passionate
love on its King. "Come back! come back!" The desolate cry of the
times. Almost one hears it sounding across the hills, and it seems to
me that all that it is so hard to speak, so hard even to look, may
perhaps be told in music. And I think loyalty and love speak very
beautifully in the old Jacobite airs.
Again, as Evan's piper marches up and down in the moonlight playing a
lament, the romance of life seems lost in the hardness of it, its
stress and its loss. "Hame, hame, hame!" the pipes sob forth, crying
for the homes that are sold to strangers, and for the hills and the
glens which pass away from the old hands. It is "Good-bye, good-bye,"
an eternity of farewells. And still, wherever life is most difficult,
wherever comforts are fewest and work is most hard, in the distant
parts of the world are the Scottish exiles. But I know that all the
world over the sons of the heather and the mist, in however distant or
alien lands they may be, feel always, as they steer their way through
life, that there is a pole-star by which they set their compass; and
that some day, perhaps, they or their children may steer the boat to a
haven on some rocky shore, where the whaup calls shrilly on the moors
above the loch, and the heather grows strong and tough on the hillside,
and the peat reek rises almost like the incense of an evening prayer,
against a gray, soft sky in the land of the North.
I suppose that even in a diary I have no business to mix this up with
an account of the Finlaysons' dance.
Palestrina came up to me after conscientiously dancing reels with
Thomas, looking very pink and pretty, and thoughtful of me, as usual.
"Don't stay longer than you feel inclined," she said. "I told them to
come for you in the dog-cart, and to wait about for you between twelve
and one."
"I will take a turn down on the shore," I said, "and have a cigar, and
then I will come back and see how you are getting on."
Palestrina gave me my crutch, and I went down towards the loch, which
looked like a sheet of silver in the moonlight, and I found Anthony and
Mrs. Fielden sitting on a garden bench beneath some wind-torn beeches
by the shore. To-night there was not a breath of air stirring, and
Mrs. Fielden had only thrown a light wrap round her.
"Have you come to tell me that I am to go in and dance reels with old
Mr. Finlayson?" she said. "It is really so much pleasanter out here.
Do sit down and talk to Sir Anthony and me."
She would never have allowed one to know that one was in the way, even
if one had interrupted a proposal of marriage.
Anthony made room for me on the bench, and said heartily, "I am awfully
glad to see you able to sit up like this, Hugo. Why, man, you're
getting as strong as a horse!"
"Oh. I'm all right again," I said. "I'll begin to grow a new leg
soon. And the first thing I mean to do when that happens is to dance
reels like the Finlaysons."
"I believe I ought to be going in to supper now with Mr. Finlayson,"
said Mrs. Fielden. "Does any one know what time it is? He said he
would 'conduct me to the dining-hall' at twelve o'clock."
"It is a quarter past now," said Anthony, looking at his watch in the
moonlight. "Don't go in, Mrs. Fielden. Wait out here, and talk to
Hugo and me."
But old Finlayson in his kilt had tracked us to our seat underneath the
beech-trees, and he took instant possession of our fair neighbour, and
told us to follow presently. He thought all the supper-tables were
full just now.
"We shan't eat everything before you come," said hospitable old
Finlayson, walking away with his beautiful partner on his arm.
Mrs. Fielden was dressed in white satin, with some pretty soft stuff
about her, and she wore some white heather in her hair.
"What a good sort she is!" said Anthony in a loud voice, almost before
Mrs. Fielden was out of hearing.
It wasn't, perhaps, the most poetical way in which he could have put
it, but one didn't want or expect Anthony to express himself poetically.
"Utterly spoilt!" I replied, because at that moment I happened to be
feeling supremely miserable, and I did not want Anthony to know it.
"Not a bit," he replied; "and you know that as well as I do, old chap."
"Allow me, Anthony," I said, "to be as savage as I like; it is one of
the privileges of a cripple."
"Oh, blow cripples!" said Anthony. "You will be shooting next autumn,
man."
"And what will you be doing?" I said. After all, we have been pals all
our lives, and I think Anthony might tell me about it if there is
anything to tell.
"Oh, I'll be shooting too, I suppose," said Anthony.
We smoked for some time in silence.
And then Anthony began, and said that he had enjoyed himself amazingly
up here in the North, and he went on to say a good word for every one.
Old Finlayson had been a brick about his shooting and deer-stalking,
and it was beastly hard luck that I hadn't been able to come too. The
minister wasn't a bad fellow, even when he was jocose; and Evan
Sinclair was one of the best; and so on.
"What shall you be doing when you go back, Anthony?" I said, harking
back to my old question, and hoping for more information than I
actually asked for. "Are you going straight home?"
"I'll be at the first shoot at Stanby. Shall you be there?"
"I'm afraid not," I said. "I haven't learned to do cross-stitch yet,
and I'm sure all the women would think me a great bore, sitting about
in their morning-rooms all day. Except Mrs. Fielden, of course! Mrs.
Fielden would probably persuade me into thinking that the only thing
that made her house-party successful, or saved herself from boredom,
was the presence of a lame man in the house."
"I don't think you are quite just about Mrs. Fielden, Hugo," said
Anthony, moving rather resentfully on the garden bench.
"That doesn't matter much," I replied. "One voice will not be missed
from the general chorus of praise that follows Mrs. Fielden wherever
she goes."
"No; but still----" began Anthony; and then he stopped, and we smoked
on for some time without speaking. "You see," he began at last, "she
is the best friend I ever had." He did not lower his voice, because I
suppose Anthony finds it impossible to do so, but went on steadily:
"You see, I once cared for a little cousin of hers, and she died when
she was eighteen. I don't think anybody ever knew about it, except
Mrs. Fielden. But she knows how much cut up I was, and I suppose that
is why she is so nice to me always."
"I'm awfully sorry!" I said.
"I never meant to speak about it," said Anthony in a brisk, cheerful
voice. "Oh, don't you bother about it, Hugo! I mean I'm awfully keen
about hunting, and I have an excellent time, only I don't suppose I
shall ever care for any one else."
"Thanks for telling me, Tony."
"I wouldn't have said anything about it," said Anthony, "if it hadn't
been for what you said about Mrs. Fielden. Y'see, she has been so
awfully good to me, and I don't think you quite understand all she is
really."
"Why, man," I cried, "I love her with every bit of my heart! And I
worship her--how does one say one worships a woman?--as if she were the
sun!"
And I think that was the very first moment that I told myself that I
loved Mrs. Fielden.