way," he said, between cups. "It was in London, on the Duke of York's
wedding-day. I'm rather a tall chap, you see, and in the crowd
somebody touched me on the shoulder and a plaintive voice behind me
said, 'You're such a big man, and I am so little, will you please
help me to save my life? My mother was separated from me in the crowd
somewhere as we were trying to reach the Berkeley, and I don't know
what to do.' I was a trifle nonplused, but I did the best I could. She
was a tiny thing, in a marvelous frock and a flowery hat and a silver
girdle and chatelaine. In another minute she spied a second man, an
officer, a full head taller than I am, broad shoulders, splendidly put
up altogether. Bless me! if she didn't turn to him and say, 'Oh,
you're so nice and big, you're even bigger than this other gentleman,
and I need you both in this dreadful crush. If you'll be good enough
to stand on either side of me, I shall be awfully obliged.' We
exchanged amused glances of embarrassment over her blonde head, but
there was no resisting the irresistible. She was a small person, but
she had the soul of a general, and we obeyed orders. We stood guard
over her little ladyship for nearly an hour, and I must say she
entertained us thoroughly, for she was as clever as she was pretty.
Then I got her a seat in one of the windows of my club, while the
other man, armed with a full description, went out to hunt up the
mother; and by Jove! he found her, too. She would have her mother, and
her mother she had. They were awfully jolly people; they came to
luncheon in my chambers at the Albany afterwards, and we grew to be
great friends."
"I dare say she was an English girl masquerading," I remarked
facetiously. "What made you think her an American?"
"Oh, her general appearance and accent, I suppose."
"Probably she didn't say Barkley," observed Francesca cuttingly; "she
would have been sure to commit that sort of solecism."
"Why, don't you say Barkley in the States?"
"Certainly not; we never call them the States, and with us c-l-e-r-k
spells clerk, and B-e-r-k Berk."
"How very odd!" remarked Mr. Anstruther.
"No odder than your saying Bark, and not half as odd as your calling
it Albany," I interpolated, to help Francesca.
"Quite so," said Mr. Anstruther; "but how do you say Albany in
America?"
"Penelope and I allways call it Allbany," responded Francesca
nonsensically, "but Salemina, who has been much in England, always
calls it Albany."
This anecdote was the signal for Miss Ardmore to remark (apropos of
her own discrimination and the American accent) that hearing a lady
ask for a certain med'cine in a chemist's shop, she noted the
intonation, and inquired of the chemist, when the fair stranger had
retired, if she were not an American. "And she was!" exclaimed the
Honorable Elizabeth triumphantly. "And what makes it the more curious,
she had been over here twenty years, and of course spoke English quite
properly."
In avenging fancied insults, it is certainly more just to heap
punishment on the head of the real offender than upon his neighbor,
and it is a trifle difficult to decide why Francesca should chastise
Mr. Macdonald for the good-humored sins of Mr. Anstruther and Miss
Ardmore; yet she does so, nevertheless.
The history of these chastisements she recounts in the nightly
half-hour which she spends with me when I am endeavoring to compose
myself for sleep. Francesca is fluent at all times, but once seated on
the foot of my bed she becomes eloquent!
"It all began with his saying"--
This is her perennial introduction, and I respond as invariably, "What
began?"
"Oh, to-day's argument with Mr. Macdonald. It was a literary quarrel
this afternoon."
"'Fools rush in'"--I quoted.
"There is a good deal of nonsense in that old saw," she interrupted;
"at all events, the most foolish fools I have ever known stayed still
and didn't do anything. Rushing shows a certain movement of the mind,
even if it is in the wrong direction. However, Mr. Macdonald is both
opinionated and dogmatic, but his worst enemy could never call him a
fool."
"I didn't allude to Mr. Macdonald."
"Don't you suppose I know to whom you alluded, dear? Is not your style
so simple, frank, and direct that a wayfaring girl can read it and not
err therein? No, I am not sitting on your feet, and it is not time to
go to sleep; I wonder you do not tire of making these futile protests.
As a matter of fact, we began this literary discussion yesterday
morning, but were interrupted; and knowing that it was sure to come up
again, I prepared for it with Salemina. She furnished the ammunition,
so to speak, and I fired the guns."
"You always make so much noise with blank cartridges I wonder you ever
bother about real shot," I remarked.
"Penelope, how can you abuse me when I am in trouble? Well, Mr.
Macdonald was prating, as usual, about the antiquity of Scotland and
its aeons of stirring history. I am so weary of the venerableness of
this country. How old will it have to be, I wonder, before it gets
used to it? If it's the province of art to conceal art, it ought to be
the province of age to conceal age, and it generally is. 'Everything
doesn't improve with years,' I observed sententiously.
"'For instance?' he inquired.
"Of course you know how that question affected me! How I do dislike an
appetite for specific details! It is simply paralyzing to a good
conversation. Do you remember that silly game in which some one points
a stick at you and says,' Beast, bird, or fish,--_beast_!' and you
have to name one while he counts ten? If a beast has been requested,
you can think of one fish and two birds, but no beasts. If he says
'_Fish_,' all the beasts in the universe stalk through your memory,
but not one finny, scaly, swimming thing! Well, that is the effect of
'For instance?' on my faculties. So I stumbled a bit, and succeeded in
recalling, as objects which do not improve with age, mushrooms, women,
and chickens, and he was obliged to agree with me, which nearly killed
him. Then I said that although America is so fresh and blooming that
people persist in calling it young, it is much older than it appears
to the superficial eye. There is no real propriety in dating us as a
nation from the Declaration of Independence in 1776, I said, nor even
from the landing of the Pilgrims in 1620; nor, for that matter, from
Columbus's discovery in 1492. It's my opinion, I asserted, that some
of us had been there thousands of years before, but nobody had had the
sense to discover us. We couldn't discover ourselves,--though if we
could have foreseen how the sere and yellow nations of the earth would
taunt us with youth and inexperience, we should have had to do
something desperate!"
"That theory must have been very convincing to the philosophic Scots
mind," I interjected.
"It was; even Mr. Macdonald thought it ingenious. 'And so,' I went on,
'we were alive and awake and beginning to make history when you Scots
were only barelegged savages roaming over the hills and stealing
cattle. It was a very bad habit of yours, that cattle-stealing, and
one which you kept up too long.'
"'No worse a sin than your stealing land from the Indians,' he said.
"'Oh yes,' I answered, 'because it was a smaller one! Yours was a
vice, and ours a sin; or I mean it would have been a sin had we done
it; but in reality we didn't steal land; we just _took_ it, reserving
plenty for the Indians to play about on; and for every hunting-ground
we took away we gave them in exchange a serviceable plough, or a
school, or a nice Indian agent, or something. That was land-grabbing,
if you like, but it is a habit you Britishers have still, while we
gave it up when we reached years of discretion.'"
"This is very illuminating," I interrupted, now thoroughly wide awake,
"but it isn't my idea of a literary discussion."
"I am coming to that," she responded. "It was just at this point that,
goaded into secret fury by my innocent speech about cattle-stealing,
he began to belittle American literature, the poetry especially. Of
course he waxed eloquent about the royal line of poet-kings that had
made his country famous, and said the people who could claim
Shakespeare had reason to be the proudest nation on earth.
'Doubtless,' I said. 'But do you mean to say that Scotland has any
nearer claim upon Shakespeare than we have? I do not now allude to the
fact that in the large sense he is the common property of the
English-speaking world' (Salemina told me to say that), 'but
Shakespeare died in 1616, and the union of Scotland with England
didn't come about till 1707, nearly a century afterwards. You really
haven't anything to do with him! But as for us, we didn't leave
England until 1620, when Shakespeare had been perfectly dead four
years. We took very good care not to come away too soon. Chaucer and
Spenser were dead, too, and we had nothing to stay for!'"
I was obliged to relax here and give vent to a burst of merriment at
Francesca's absurdities.
"I could see that he had never regarded the matter in that light
before," she went on gayly, encouraged by my laughter, "but he braced
himself for the conflict, and said, 'I wonder that you didn't stay a
little longer while you were about it. Milton and Ben Jonson were
still alive; Bacon's Novum Organum was just coming out; and in thirty
or forty years you could have had L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, and
Paradise Lost; Newton's Principia, too, in 1687. Perhaps these were
all too serious and heavy for your national taste; still, one
sometimes likes to claim things one cannot fully appreciate. And then,
too, if you had once begun to stay, waiting for the great things to
happen and the great books to be written, you would never have gone,
for there would still have been Browning, Tennyson, and Swinburne to
delay you.'
"'If we couldn't stay to see out your great bards, we certainly
couldn't afford to remain and welcome your minor ones,' I answered
frigidly; 'but we wanted to be well out of the way before England
united with Scotland, knowing that if we were uncomfortable as things
were, it would be a good deal worse after the Union; and we had to
come home, anyway, and start our own poets. Emerson, Whittier,
Longfellow, Holmes, and Lowell had to be born.'
"'I suppose they had to be if you had set your mind on it,' he said,
'though personally I could have spared one or two on that roll of
honor.'
"'Very probably,' I remarked, as thoroughly angry now as he intended I
should be. 'We cannot expect you to appreciate all the American poets;
indeed, you cannot appreciate all of your own, for the same nation
doesn't always furnish the writers and the readers. Take your precious
Browning, for example! There are hundreds of Browning Clubs in
America, and I never heard of a single one in Scotland.'
"'No,' he retorted, 'I dare say; but there is a good deal in belonging
to a people who can understand him without clubs!'"
"Oh, Francesca!" I exclaimed, sitting bolt upright among my pillows.
"How _could_ you give him that chance! How could you! What did you
say?"
"I said nothing," she replied mysteriously. "I did something much more
to the point,--I cried!"
"_Cried?_"
"Yes, cried; not rivers and freshets of woe, but small brooks and
streamlets of helpless mortification."
"What did he do then?"
"Why do you say 'do'?"
"Oh, I mean 'say,' of course. Don't trifle; go on. What did he say
then?"
"There are some things too dreadful to describe," she answered, and
wrapping her Italian blanket majestically about her she retired to her
own apartment, shooting one enigmatical glance at me as she closed the
door.
That glance puzzled me for some time after she left the room. It was
as expressive and interesting a beam as ever darted from a woman's
eye. The combination of elements involved in it, if an abstract thing
may be conceived as existing in component parts, was something like
this:--
One half, mystery.
One eighth, triumph.
One eighth, amusement.
One sixteenth, pride.
One sixteenth, shame.
One sixteenth, desire to confess.
One sixteenth, determination to conceal.
And all these delicate, complex emotions played together in a circle
of arching eyebrow, curving lip, and tremulous chin,--played together,
mingling and melting into one another like fire and snow; bewildering,
mystifying, enchanting the beholder!
If Ronald Macdonald did--I am a woman, but, for one, I can hardly
blame him!
XXII
"'O has he chosen a bonny bride,
An' has he clean forgotten me?'
An' sighing said that gay ladye,
'I would I were in my ain countrie!'"
_Lord Beichan_.
It rained in torrents; Salemina was darning stockings in the inglenook
at Bide-a-Wee Cottage, and I was reading her a Scotch letter which
Francesca and I had concocted the evening before. I proposed sending
the document to certain chosen spirits in our own country, who were
pleased to be facetious concerning our devotion to Scotland. It
contained, in sooth, little that was new, and still less that was
true, for we were confined to a very small vocabulary which we were
obliged to supplement now and then by a dip into Burns and Allan
Ramsay.
Here is the letter:--
BIDE-A-WEE COTTAGE,
PETTYBAW.
_East Neuk o' Fife_.
TO MY TRUSTY FIERES,--Mony's the time I hae ettled to send ye a
screed, but there was aye something that cam' i' the gait. It wisna
that I couldna be fashed, for aften hae I thocht o' ye and my hairt
has been wi' ye mony's the day. There's no muckle fowk frae Ameriky
hereawa; they're a' jist Fife bodies, and a lass canna get her tongue
roun' their thrapple-taxin' words ava, so it's like I may een drap a'
the sweetness o' my good mither-tongue.
'Tis a dulefu' nicht, and an awful blash is ragin' wi'oot. Fanny's
awa' at the gowff rinnin' aboot wi' a bag o' sticks after a wee bit
ba', and Sally and I are hame by oor lane. Laith will the lassie be to
weet her bonny shoon, but lang ere the play'll be o'er, she'll wat her
hat aboon. A gust o' win' is skirlin' the noo, and as we luik ower the
faem, the haar is risin', weetin' the green swaird wi' misty shoo'rs.
Yestreen was a calm simmer gloamin', sae sweet an' bonnie that while
the sun was sinkin' doon ower Pettybaw Sands, we daundered ower the
muir. As we cam' through the scented birks, we saw a trottin' burnie
wimplin' 'neath the white-blossomed slaes and hirplin' doon the
hillside; an' while a herd-laddie lilted ower the fernie brae, a
cushat crooed leesomely doon i' the dale. We pit aff oor shoon, sae
blithe were we, kilted oor coats a little aboon the knee and paidilt
i' the burn, gettin' gey an' weet the while. Then Sally pu'd the
gowans wat wi' dew an' twined her bree wi' tasseled broom, while I had
a wee crackie wi' Tibby Buchan, the flesher's dochter frae Auld
Reekie. Tibby's nae giglet gawky like the lave, ye ken,--she's a
sonsie maid, as sweet as ony hinny pear, wi' her twa pawky een an' her
cockernony snooded up fu' sleek.
We were unco gleg to win hame when a' this was dune, an' after
steekin' the door, to sit an' taist oor taes at the bit blaze. Mickle
thocht we o' the gentles ayont the sea an' sair grat we for a' frien's
we knew lang syne in oor ain countree.
Late at nicht, Fanny, the bonny gypsy, cam' ben the hoose an' tirled
at the pin of oor bigly bower door, speirin' for baps and bannocks.
"Hoots, lassie!" cried oot Sally, "th' auld carline i' the kitchen is
i' her box-bed an' weel aneuch ye ken is lang syne cuddled doon."
"Oo, ay!" said Fanny, straikin' her curly pow, "then fetch me parritch
an' dinna be lang wi' 'em, for I've lickit a Pettybaw lass at the
gowff, an' I could eat twa guid jints o' beef gin I had 'em!"
"Losh, girl," said I, "gie ower makin' sic a mickle din. Ye ken verra
weel ye'll get nae parritch the nicht. I'll rin an' fetch ye a 'piece'
to stap awee the soun'."
"Blathers an' havers!" cried Fanny, but she blinkit bonnily the while,
an' when the tea was weel maskit, she smoored her wrath an' stappit
her mooth wi' a bit o' oaten cake. We aye keep that i' the hoose, for
th' auld servant-body is gey an' bad at the cookin' an' she's sae dour
an' dowie that to speak but till her we daur hardly mint.
In sic divairsions pass the lang simmer days in braid Scotland, but I
canna write mair the nicht, for 'tis the wee sma' hours ayont the
twal'.
Like th' auld wife's parrot, "we dinna speak muckle, but we're deevils
to think," an' we're aye thinkin' aboot ye. An' noo I maun leave ye to
mak' what ye can oot o' this, for I jalouse it'll pass ye to untaukle
the whole hypothec.
Fair fa' ye a'! Lang may yer lum reek, an' may prosperity attend oor
clan!
Aye your gude frien',
PENELOPE HAMILTON.
"It may be very fine," remarked Salemina judicially, "though I cannot
understand more than half of it."
"That would also be true of Browning," I replied. "Don't you love to
see great ideas loom through a mist of words?"
"The words are misty enough in this case," she said, "and I do wish
you would not tell the world that I paddle in the burn, or 'twine my
bree wi' tasseled broom.' I'm too old to be made ridiculous."
"Nobody will believe it," said Francesca appearing in the doorway.
"They will know it is only Penelope's havering," and with this
undeserved scoff, she took her mashie and went golfing; not on the
links, on this occasion, but in our microscopic sitting-room. It is
twelve feet square, and holds a tiny piano, desk, centre-table, sofa,
and chairs, but the spot between the fireplace and the table is
Francesca's favorite "putting green." She wishes to become more deadly
in the matter of approaches, and thinks her tee shots weak; so these
two deficiencies she is trying to make good by home practice in
inclement weather. She turns a tumbler on its side on the floor, and
"puts" the ball into it, or at it, as the case may be, from the
opposite side of the room. It is excellent discipline, and as the
tumblers are inexpensive the breakage really does not matter. Whenever
Miss Grieve hears the shivering of glass, she murmurs, not without
reason, "It is not for the knowing what they will be doing next."
"Penelope, has it ever occurred to you that Elizabeth Ardmore is
seriously interested in Mr. Macdonald?"
Salemina propounded this question to me with the same innocence that a
babe would display in placing a match beside a dynamite bomb.
Francesca naturally heard the remark,--although it was addressed to
me,--pricked up her ears, and missed the tumbler by several feet.
It was a simple inquiry, but as I look back upon it from the safe
ground of subsequent knowledge I perceive that it had a certain amount
of influence upon Francesca's history. The suggestion would have
carried no weight with me for two reasons. In the first place,
Salemina is far-sighted. If objects are located at some distance from
her, she sees them clearly; but if they are under her very nose she
overlooks them altogether, unless they are sufficiently fragrant or
audible to address other senses. This physical peculiarity she carries
over into her mental processes. Her impression of the Disruption
movement, for example, would be lively and distinct, but her
perception of a contemporary lovers' quarrel (particularly if it were
fought at her own apron-strings) would be singularly vague. If she
suggested, therefore, that Elizabeth Ardmore was interested in Mr.
Beresford, who is the rightful captive of my bow and spear, I should
be perfectly calm.
My second reason for comfortable indifference is that, frequently in
novels, and always in plays, the heroine is instigated to violent
jealousy by insinuations of this sort, usually conveyed by the villain
of the piece, male or female. I have seen this happen so often in the
modern drama that it has long since ceased to be convincing; but
though Francesca has witnessed scores of plays and read hundreds of
novels, it did not apparently strike her as a theatrical or literary
suggestion that Lady Ardmore's daughter should be in love with Mr.
Macdonald. The effect of the new point of view was most salutary, on
the whole. She had come to think herself the only prominent figure in
the Reverend Ronald's landscape, and anything more impertinent than
her tone with him (unless it is his with her) I certainly never heard.
This criticism, however, relates only to their public performances,
and I have long suspected that their private conversations are of a
kindlier character. When it occurred to her that he might simply be
sharpening his mental sword on her steel, but that his heart had at
last wandered into a more genial climate than she had ever provided
for it, she softened unconsciously; the Scotsman and the American
receded into a truer perspective, and the man and the woman approached
each other with dangerous nearness.
"What shall we do if Francesca and Mr. Macdonald really fall in love
with each other?" asked Salemina, when Francesca had gone into the
hall to try long drives. (There is a good deal of excitement in this,
as Miss Grieve has to cross the passage on her way from the kitchen to
the china-closet, and thus often serves as a reluctant "hazard" or
"bunker.")
"Do you mean what should we have done?" I queried.
"Nonsense, don't be captious! It can't be too late yet. They have
known each other only a little over two months; when would you have
had me interfere, pray?"
"It depends upon what you expect to accomplish. If you wish to stop
the marriage, interfere in a fortnight or so; if you wish to prevent
an engagement, speak--well, say to-morrow; if, however, you didn't
wish them to fall in love with each other, you should have kept one of
them away from Lady Baird's dinner."
"I could have waited a trifle longer than that," argued Salemina, "for
you remember how badly they got on at first."
"I remember you thought so," I responded dryly; "but I believe Mr.
Macdonald has been interested in Francesca from the outset, partly
because her beauty and vivacity attracted him, partly because he could
keep her in order only by putting his whole mind upon her. On his
side, he has succeeded in piquing her into thinking of him
continually, though solely, as she fancies, for the purpose of
crossing swords with him. If they ever drop their weapons for an
instant, and allow the din of warfare to subside so that they can
listen to their own heart-beats, they will discover that they love
each other to distraction."
"Ye ken mair than's in the catecheesm," remarked Salemina, yawning a
little as she put away her darning-ball. "It is pathetic to see you
waste your time painting mediocre pictures, when as a lecturer upon
love you could instruct your thousands."
"The thousands would never satisfy me," I retorted, "so long as you
remained uninstructed, for in your single person you would so swell
the sum of human ignorance on that subject that my teaching would be
forever vain."
"Very clever indeed! Well, what will Mr. Monroe say to me when I land
in New York without his daughter, or with his son-in-law?"
"He has never denied Francesca anything in her life; why should he
draw the line at a Scotsman? I am much more concerned about Mr.
Macdonald's congregation."
"I am not anxious about that," said Salemina loyally. "Francesca would
be the life of an Inchcaldy parish."
"I dare say," I observed, "but she might be the death of the pastor."
"I am ashamed of you, Penelope; or I should be if you meant what you
say. She can make the people love her if she tries; when did she ever
fail at that? But with Mr. Macdonald's talent, to say nothing of his
family connections, he is sure to get a church in Edinburgh in a few
years, if he wishes. Undoubtedly, it would not be a great match in a
money sense. I suppose he has a manse and three or four hundred pounds
a year."
"That sum would do nicely for cabs."
"Penelope, you are flippant!"
"I don't mean it, dear; it's only for fun; and it would be so absurd
if we should leave Francesca over here as the presiding genius of an
Inchcaldy parsonage,--I mean a manse!"
"It isn't as if she were penniless," continued Salemina; "she has
fortune enough to assure her own independence, and not enough to
threaten his,--the ideal amount. I hardly think the good Lord's first
intention was to make her a minister's wife, but he knows very well
that Love is a master architect. Francesca is full of beautiful
possibilities if Mr. Macdonald is the man to bring them out, and I am
inclined to think he is."
"He has brought out impishness so far," I objected.
"The impishness is transitory," she returned, "and I am speaking of
permanent qualities. His is the stronger and more serious nature,
Francesca's the sweeter and more flexible. He will be the oak-tree,
and she will be the sunshine playing in the branches."
"Salemina, dear," I said penitently, kissing her gray hair, "I
apologize: you are not absolutely ignorant about Love, after all, when
you call him the master architect; and that is very lovely and very
true about the oak-tree and the sunshine."
XXIII
"'Love, I maun gang to Edinbrugh,
Love, I maun gang an' leave thee!'
She sighed right sair, an' said nae mair
But 'O gin I were wi' ye!'"
_Andrew Lammie_.