same moment Edmund rolled over and hit his leg against the edge of the
sofa. It woke him, and the instant Edmund awoke he was wide awake.
"Dearie, are you zere?" he demanded. He could see Mr. Wycherly's legs,
and no more, from where he was lying. In another minute he was sitting
on Mr. Wycherly's knee while that elderly scholar cudgelled his brains
for some form of remonstrance which would bring home to this very
youthful delinquent the impropriety of his conduct.
"Dearie," Edmund exclaimed with disarming sweetness, "aren't you glad
I'm here wiv you?" Here he rubbed his soft face against Mr. Wycherly's.
"What a good smell! isn't it? I'm so hungry: is there a bikkit about?"
Mr. Wycherly steeled his heart: "You know, sonnie," he said very
gravely, "that you ought not to be here at all; you ought to be with
your dear aunt in church."
Edmund looked at Mr. Wycherly in reproachful surprise. "In church?" he
echoed, as though such a possibility had occurred to him for the first
time that morning.
"In church," Mr. Wycherly repeated. "Your dear aunt expected you to go
there with her and with Montagu, and she was very sad that she had to go
without you. It was not right of you to hide, sonnie. It was neither
kind nor polite nor straightforward."
"You doesn't go," Edmund argued, staring gloomily at Mr. Wycherly. "Why
mus' I?"
"You must go because your dear aunt wishes it," Mr. Wycherly replied,
ignoring the first part of Edmund's remark.
"Would you go if see wissed it?"
"I would. But you see, for me it is different. I was brought up in a
different kind of church, and I am no longer a little boy. Miss
Esperance has never asked me to go to church with her."
"Why hasn't see ast you?"
"Because, as I tell you, I was brought up in a different church."
"Why can't I be brought up in your church? Then we needn't neither of us
never go," Edmund suggested, smiling radiantly, as though he had solved
the difficulty.
Mr. Wycherly sighed deeply. "But I did go," he exclaimed. "I always
went when I was a little boy, every Sunday, and afterward at Oxford I
went nearly every day as well."
Edmund's face fell. He desired to belong to no church that required
daily attendance. Mr. Wycherly's looks were so serious that the little
boy began to be anxious.
"What will Aunt Esp'ance do, do you sink?"
"I fear she will feel compelled to punish you."
"Bed?" Edmund inquired uneasily.
"No, I fear, I very greatly fear it will be dinner----"
Mr. Wycherly felt the little figure stiffen in his arms, as without a
word Edmund laid his head down on his old friend's shoulder. The child
lay quite still, and glancing down at him Mr. Wycherly saw how the red
mouth drooped at the corners, and the blue eyes were screwed up tight to
keep back the tears. No such dread contingency had crossed Edmund's
mind till this moment, and it swept over him with devastating force.
Not to share in the Sunday dinner, that cheerful meal, when Mr. Wycherly
made jokes and Aunt Esperance sat beaming in her Sunday silks; when
hungry little boys were never refused two, even three, helpings of
everything. It was a dreadful dispensation.
Edmund gave a short, smothered sob and buried his face in Mr. Wycherly's
neck.
"Perhaps," the grave voice went on, and Edmund opened one tearful eye,
as though the gloom of his outlook were pierced by some ray of hope,
"perhaps if you went to your aunt and told her how sorry you are, and
that you promise on your honour as a gentleman you will never try to get
out of going to church again--perhaps she might forgive you this once.
If you can tell her this and mean it, my son, every word, I think that
she may be induced to forgive you--just this once."
The green gate creaked, there was a rush of feet on the staircase as
Montagu made straight for Mr. Wycherly's room.
"Here you are," he exclaimed. "I thought you'd be here somehow--what's
the matter?"
Mr. Wycherly put Edmund gently from off his knee, and rose from his
chair.
"Wait here with Montagu, sonnie," he said. "I will see Miss Esperance
first," and he left the room, carefully shutting the door behind him.
"Is Aunt Esp'ance very sorry?" Edmund asked anxiously. He did not ask
if she were angry, for that she had never been with him.
"I don't think she's as sorry as she was at first," Montagu said
consolingly. "We met Mrs. Gloag as we were coming out and Aunt
Esperance told how you'd hidden, and Mrs. Gloag laughed, and after that
I don't think she was so sorry."
The door was opened and Mr. Wycherly came back. "Go to your aunt in her
room, Edmund," he said, "and remember what I told you."
Edmund trotted off obediently.
A few minutes later Robina rang the dinner bell. Edmund and his aunt
descended the curly staircase together, hand in hand.
"I told her I was sorry," he announced to Mr. Wycherly, who was waiting
at the dining-room door that Miss Esperance might pass in first. "I'm
going to church zis afternoon. I'm going," he added gleefully, "becos'
zere's ducks for dinner."
*CHAPTER XII*
*THE VILLAGE*
'Tis with our judgments as our watches, none
Go just alike, yet each believes his own.
POPE.
"Our society may be small but it is extremely select," Miss Maggie
Moffat used to say on such occasions as friends from the South-side of
Edinburgh used to visit her.
"It is what we have always sought after," Miss Jeanie, her sister, would
chime in. "Quality not quantity, and nowhere could we have found
superior quality if we had gone over the whole of the British Isles to
look for it."
None of the earlier inhabitants of Burnhead ever quite fathomed how or
why the Misses Moffat had come to live there. The fact remained,
however, that one term day they had taken a small house in the middle of
the village street: a house that had been empty for many years. Its
original name was "Rowan Cottage," because there was a rowan tree in the
back garden, but when the Misses Moffat took it they persuaded the
landlord to change the name to "Rowan Lodge," the only lodge in the
neighbourhood save that which guarded the entrance at Lady Alicia's
drive gate. The name was painted on the front of the house in large,
clear characters, and it looked, the Misses Moffat thought, extremely
well on the pink note-paper with scalloped edges which they affected in
their correspondence.
They were ladies of uncertain age; that is to say, of the kind of age to
which direct reference is never made.
They were not serenely and beautifully old like Miss Esperance, nor
sturdily and frankly middle-aged like Lady Alicia, and by no stretch of
imagination could they be considered young like Bonnie Margaret. They
were, as they themselves would have put it, "of a quite suitable age for
matrimony, not giddy girls, you understand, but nice, sensible, douce
young women."
Miss Jeanie was probably not more than forty-five, and Miss Maggie some
six years older. They were both moderately tall, moderately stout, and
of a healthy, homely aspect which did not challenge observation. Miss
Jeanie, indeed, wore a curly fringe, and on muddy days a serge
golf-skirt that barely reached her substantial ankles, but Miss Maggie's
mouse-coloured hair was brushed back over a cushion and displayed every
inch of her intellectual forehead. Miss Maggie took in "Wise Words,"
and had literary leanings toward everything of an improving character.
At one time they had kept a "fancy-work emporium" on the South-side, but
they had not been dependent upon their sales of Berlin wool or crochet
cotton, and as the emporium was by no means thronged with customers it
had seemed good to them to retire from business and seek in the country
that seclusion and select society which their genteel souls hungered
after.
They were sincerely convinced that the emporium of the past could not in
any way preclude their reception into such society.
"It could not exactly be called trade, me dear," Miss Maggie argued,
"for you see our _clientele_ was so exceedingly select. We were never
called upon to serve a man in all the years----"
"Not so very many years, Maggie," Miss Jeanie would interrupt.
"During the time our residence was above the emporium," Miss Maggie
continued calmly. "That makes a very great difference. Anybody can come
into an ordinary shop. A stationer's now--a man might burst into a
stationer's at any minute to buy envelopes or elastic bands, or a bit
rubber: but no man would dream of entering a--place where Berlin wools
and fingering and sewing silks are to be had. And you know, me dear, it
always seems to me that so long as no strange man has had the
opportunity to accost one, one's delicacy cannot be said to have
suffered in any way."
"I've heard," said Miss Jeanie, with a little sigh, "that in London one
may be accosted on the public street. It must be terrible to be
accosted by a strange man. I think I should faint away at his feet from
sheer terror."
"Indeed," replied Miss Maggie, bridling. "_I_ should do no such thing.
I would freeze him with a glance."
So far, however, neither of these ladies had been called upon either to
faint or to freeze. Mankind had passed them by in decorous silence.
Neither of them had ever been accosted by anyone more alarming than a
village urchin, and their delicacy and their gentility remained
unimpaired. For truly they were vastly genteel.
The real and chief attractions of Burnhead had been that the rent of
their modest residence was very small, that the "big house" was occupied
by "a lady of title," and that there were only two other houses in the
village having any claim to be the abodes of gentility, namely, the
Manse and Remote.
"Surely," argued the Misses Moffat, "in such a small place the gentry
will be friendly."
And so indeed it proved, for if the Misses Moffat were genteel they were
also the kindest and most amiable of women, and had they but known it,
they might have searched Scotland before they found a neighbourhood
where such qualities would have met with so swift a recognition from the
three chief ladies in the place.
There were many who pitied the minister because his wife was so
delicate. There were others, mostly outsiders, who pitied Mrs. Gloag
because her husband was so stern. And because, although she had done
her best to take root and bring forth the fruits of the spirit in the
humble vineyard where her husband worked, there was always something
alien about her which most of that small community mistrusted.
For Mrs. Gloag was English.
It was even whispered that she was the daughter of an Episcopalian
clergyman.
She was slender and pretty and very frail in health: and twenty-seven
years of Burnhead had not yet cured her of a tendency to laugh when
things amused her. And things amused Mrs. Gloag which ought to have
shocked a right-minded minister's wife.
In early days her chief offence had been that she looked younger than
any minister's wife ought to have looked, that she played with her
little boys as though she were a child herself; and that she had been
known to yawn openly and apparently unashamed during the minister's
sermons.
Now that her pretty, wavy hair was grey and her health so bad that she
seldom came to church more than once on a Sabbath, sometimes not at all
for weeks together, folks felt that this, and what happened to their
third boy, was a judgment on the minister for having married a person so
Englishey and irresponsible as Mrs. Gloag.
There was no question whatever that the minister adored his wife.
Whenever his eyes rested upon her, his whole face changed and softened,
and it was felt to be almost indecent that a minister should openly
manifest any affection whatsoever.
Three tall sons had the minister. Two of them well-doing young men, who
passed examinations and won bursaries, and were as economical,
hard-working and clear-headed young Scotsmen as even a minister could
wish to see. A little harsh, perhaps, and dictatorial, and
argumentative; a little fond of airing their opinions unasked, a little
apt to judge character wholly by failure or success in practical things;
a little lacking in deference to older people. Still they were fine,
capable, upstanding young men of the "get up and git" order which is so
admirable; and while Mr. Wycherly would go miles out of his way to avoid
either of them, he was the very first to acknowledge their many
excellent qualities.
But Curly, the youngest, was different. He was even more brilliant
intellectually than his brothers; he was better looking, and he had much
of his mother's charm. When he was eighteen he won a scholarship at
Balliol, a regular blue-ribbon among scholarships, and the minister was
a proud man.
Curly did well at Oxford, he lived sparely, and took tutorships in the
vacations, and when he came home the Manse was a merry place. Mr.
Wycherly was very fond of Curly, for he came and talked about Oxford,
and he would ask the older scholar's opinion about many things, and
seemed to think it quite worth having. Now his brothers considered Mr.
Wycherly a failure, effete, played out, _vieux-jeu_, and Mr. Wycherly
knew it.
Curly took a good degree, and then the blow fell. He became an actor
and "went on the stage."
Had he turned forger or robbed a church the minister could hardly have
been more upset. Mr. Gloag hated the theatre and everything connected
with it. He honestly believed it to be morally degrading and
soul-soiling to enter the doors of any such place of amusement. That
there could ever, under any circumstances, be found any common ground or
bond of union, or even mutual toleration, between the followers of this
degraded and degrading calling and professing Christians, he could not
conceive. The minister had no belief in toleration. He was fond of
saying, "Those that are not for us are against us"; and that "us" might
by any possibility include persons he designated as "mountebanks" never
for one moment entered his head.
He forbade the mention of Curly's name, declaring that now he had only
two sons. Curly's brothers said very little. They thought Curly a
fool, but, after all, he knew his own business best.
Mrs. Gloag said nothing at all. She grew frailer and frailer, and her
pretty eyes wore always a strained expression as though they were tired
with watching for one who never came.
She did not attempt to soften the minister. He was always gentle to her,
but she knew him too well not to discern when argument and supplication
were alike useless. She laughed less often now, and when no one was
watching her gentle face was very sad.
If anything, however, this sore trouble made her kinder and more
sympathetic than before, so that when the Misses Moffat took sittings in
the church and she, in her capacity of minister's wife, went to see
them, she realised at once how anxious and timid and kind and harmless
they were; and most of all how they hungered to be admitted to the inner
circle of the "select."
She asked Miss Esperance to go and see them, and Miss Esperance went;
and she asked Lady Alicia to go and see them, and Lady Alicia went.
That was a great, a never-to-be-forgotten day for the Misses Moffat when
Lady Alicia walked over from the "big house" to call. They could have
wished she had come in the carriage; it would have looked so fine in the
street for all the world to see. But Lady Alicia was energetic and
inclined to grow stout, and she liked to walk when she could. There she
sat in the Misses Moffat's best room, talking affably in her big voice.
Everything about Lady Alicia was big and decided, and every simplest
remark she made was treasured by the Misses Moffat as the sayings of a
sibyl. She didn't stay long, but she praised the arrangements of Rowan
Lodge, from the window curtains to the chocolate-coloured railings in
front of the windows.
When she got up to go they watched her anxiously. She had her silver
card-case in her hand. Would she leave a card or not?
Alas! in their eagerness to be polite they both accompanied her into the
narrow passage and thence into the street. And Lady Alicia, being
rather crowded, did not see the Benares bowl on the little table in the
lobby, wherein reposed the visiting cards of Miss Esperance and Mrs.
Gloag, and completely forgot to leave a similar memento of her visit.
This was a great blow to the Misses Moffat. Without the outward and
visible sign of a visiting card was it a proper call or not?
Might they return it? Or was it only an act of condescension on Lady
Alicia's part and not an act of friendship?
Miss Jeanie sought vainly in the pages of a bound volume of the "Lady's
Home Companion" for guidance on this intricate point of etiquette. But
although there was a whole long article on "calls" in that useful work,
with minute directions as to the most desirable deportment at afternoon
tea, there was no guidance as to what course should be taken by two
genteel unmarried females when visited by an earl's daughter, who called
at three in the afternoon and omitted to leave a card at all.
"It's most annoying!" Miss Jeanie exclaimed, tapping the "Lady's Home
Companion" with her finger. "There's any amount about leaving cards,
but not one word about when they're not left. Listen to this: 'Should
there be only a lady, you would merely leave one of your husband's.'
Perhaps Lady Alicia Carruthers just didn't leave one of his because he's
dead, poor man. Then further on it says: 'When calling on a stranger on
any business matter, your card should be sent in by the servant, who
will ascertain if it is convenient for her mistress to see you.' Now
she most certainly did not call on business. What are we to think,
Maggie?"
Miss Maggie puckered her intellectual forehead in deep consideration of
the weighty matter. Apparently she reached no conclusion, for after a
minute she said: "I'm thinking, Jeanie, that our best course would be to
ask Miss Esperance Bethune. She seems very intimate with Lady Alicia
Carruthers, and may know her ways, and I'm quite sure she'll think none
the worse of us for asking. She left a card, if you remember."
"You might just put on your bonnet and go now, Maggie. It would set our
minds at rest. I wish she had left a card, though; it would have looked
fine on the table in the lobby, and you mind the Macdougals are coming
out to their tea on Saturday."
Miss Moffat sought Miss Esperance then and there, and that gentle little
lady gave it as her opinion that the omission of the card was mere
forgetfulness on Lady Alicia's part and by no means intentional.
Whereupon Miss Maggie departed much comforted.
Miss Esperance happened to be dining with Lady Alicia that very evening
and told her how much soul-searching her visit had occasioned the Misses
Moffat.
"Bless me!" good-natured Lady Alicia exclaimed. "The poor bodies! I'd
have left a whole card-case of cards if I'd remembered. But they
fluttered round me so as I was leaving, and were so civil and obliging
and desperately fussy, that I got myself out as quickly as ever I
could."
"You'd make them very happy if you'd leave a card even yet, any time you
are passing," Miss Esperance suggested. "They are such good, meek
creatures."
So it came to pass that next day, when Lady Alicia went out to drive,
the carriage stopped at Rowan Lodge, and she, in a voice that could be
heard all down the street, instructed her footman to leave cards,
explaining that she had forgotten to leave them the day before.
The front door of Rowan Lodge was separated from the footpath by about
three feet of gravel, and the Misses Moffat, seated behind the curtains
that Lady Alicia had admired, heard her every word.
"One for each of us!" exclaimed Miss Jeanie rapturously, gloating over
the little white cards, for them so packed with meaning. "I hope it's
not wicked, but I can't help feeling rather glad poor Mr. Carruthers is
no more--though it would have been pleasant enough to have him calling,
too--for then, if that book is right, we should only have had his card,
and he hadn't a title or anything."
"He was an advocate, I'm told," Miss Maggie said solemnly, "but whether
they put that on cards I'm not very sure, never having been called upon
by anyone connected with the legal profession except yon wee auctioneer,
who came about the fittings at the South-side, and I very much doubt if
he had a card at all."
"The Macdougals 'll rather open their eyes when they see these," Miss
Jeanie chuckled. "I'll put one on each side the Benares bowl in the
lobby, lest they shouldn't look inside. I hope it'll be a nice bright
day, for it's a wee thing dark there when the door's shut, and if it's
left open there's a terrible draught, and they might blow away."
"If it's a mirk day," Miss Maggie said firmly, "I'll stand them up
against the parlour clock, just careless-like. You may depend the
Macdougal's will spy them out."
*CHAPTER XIII*
*A MEETING*
We two will stand beside that shrine,
Occult, withheld, untrod,
Whose lamps are stirred continually
With prayer sent up to God;
And see our old prayers, granted, melt
Each like a little cloud.
D. G. ROSSETTI.
When Edmund was five years old Mr. Wycherly expressed his readiness to
teach him all he was teaching Montagu. He took infinite pains to do so,
but Edmund's presence was found to be so provocative of dispeace in the
quiet study upstairs, and so effectually hindered his brother's
progress, while his own was of the slowest, that Miss Esperance took the
matter into her own hands and sent her younger nephew to be instructed
by the Reverend Peter Gloag, who seasoned his instruction with the
tawse, and was altogether more fitted to cope with the average boy's
vagaries than the gentle, dreamy Mr. Wycherly. Edmund was rather afraid
of the minister. His hand was heavy, and he was singularly awake to the
devices by means of which small boys seek to evade their scholastic
duties. Nevertheless, the child liked him, for he could unbend on
occasion and was an excellent hand at marbles. Moreover, he had a sense
of humour, and like so many of the Scottish Calvinists of that time,
managed to keep his denunciations of abstract sins quite separate from
his judgment of the sinner. In the pulpit he was a terror to
evil-doers. When tackled upon questions of doctrine, he laid down the
law with a vigour and determination that left his opponent with the
impression that never was there such a hard and inflexible man: but when
it came to deeds, when it was a question of giving another chance to a
ne'er-do-weel, or the punishment to be meted out to some young
ragamuffin caught stealing apples or breaking windows, the sinner had
far rather fall into the hands of the minister than those of many a
gentler spoken man.
In spite of the minister's endeavours, however, Edmund was still
laboriously writing sentences to the effect that "'Tis education forms
the mind" at an age when Montagu had begun to write Latin verses and to
read Xenophon.
"I hate sitting on a chair and hearing things," Edmund would say. "I
want to be doing them. I want more room than there is in Auntie's house,
or the Manse. I _hate_ things over my head 'cept the sky."
One day Miss Esperance drove both boys to Leith, and left them to play
on the beach while she went to see an old friend. In a minute Edmund
had off his shoes and socks, and in spite of the jagged pebbles, that
hurt his unaccustomed feet so cruelly, went down to the water's edge and
in up to his knees, then turning to the more timid Montagu, who still
stood dubiously upon the brink, cried joyously, "_This_ is what I've
always been wanting: there's _plenty_ of room out there."
The same evening he climbed on to Mr. Wycherly's knee demanding, "How
can I get to be a sailor like my daddie was?"
"You go into the Navy."
"How do I go? What way? Where's the Navy? Is it a town?"
No, it's an institution, a service----"
"Like the poorhouse?" Edmund interrupted, in less enthusiastic tones.
"Oh, dear, no."
"Tell me all about it," the little boy commanded, whereupon Mr. Wycherly
obediently and at considerable length explained the constitution of His
Majesty's Navy, and Edmund never once interrupted.
When Mr. Wycherly had finished, the little boy was silent for a minute,
then asked earnestly, "How soon can I go?"
"Let me see, you're nearly eight now; it might be managed in about three
years. You will need to read well, and write well, and be able to do
many kinds of sums, and be very obedient."