CHAPTER XTHE SABBATHHe ordered a' things late and air';He ordered folk to stand at prayer(Although I cannae just mind whereHe gave the warnin').An' pit pomatum on their hairOn Sabbath mornin'.R.L.S.The Sabbath day at Burnhead was a long, long day. A day wholly given up to "the public and private exercises of God's worship."For Montagu, indeed, the shadow of the Sabbath began to steal over the horizon as early as Friday night: and it was only when he woke on Monday morning secure in the consciousness that the first day of the week was safely passed, that life assumed again its habitually cheerful aspect.Miss Esperance was a staunch Presbyterian, and belonged to the strictest sect of the so-called Free Kirk. Therefore did she consider it her duty to take Montagu twice to church in addition to superintending his instruction in Bible history and the shorter catechism.Montagu liked the scripture lessons well enough and found it no hardship to read the Bible aloud to his aunt for hours at a time; but nearly four hours' church with only the blessed interval of dinner in between was a heavy discipline for even a naturally quiet small boy, and sometimes Montagu was, inwardly, very rebellious.Mr. Wycherly begged him off the afternoon service as often as he could as a companion for Edmund, volunteering to look after both children so that Robina, as well as Elsa, could attend church. Mr. Wycherly was an Episcopalian, and as there was no "English" church within walking distance, he said he read the service to himself every Sunday morning.When Edmund was four years old, Miss Esperance decided that it was time he, too, should share the benefit of the Reverend Peter Gloag's ministrations. Edmund appeared pleased at the suggestion, for it was, like his knickerbockers, to a certain extent an acknowledgment that he had arrived at boy's estate. Montagu went to church, and why not he? It was evidently the correct thing to do, and although he could not remember to have seen his brother particularly uplifted by his privileges in that respect, nobody else seemed much exhilarated either. Hitherto, he had spent his Sunday mornings largely in the society of Mr. Wycherly, who, as all toys were locked up in a tall cupboard on Saturday night, connived at all sorts of queer games, invented on the spur of the moment by the ingenious Edmund."I'm goin' to kirk! I'm goin' to kirk!" Edmund chanted gaily on the appointed day.He wore a new white sailor suit with pockets, and in one pocket was a penny to "pirle" in the plate: in the other a wee packet of Wotherspoon's peppermints for refreshment during the sermon. His curly hair was brushed till it shone like the brass knocker on the front door when Elsa had newly cleaned it, and his round, rosy face was framed by a large new sailor hat that looked like a substantial sort of halo. White socks and neat black shoes with straps completed Edmund's toilet, and his aunt thought that never yet had the Bethune family possessed a worthier scion.Mr. Wycherly assisted to direct Edmund's fat, pink fingers into a tight, white cotton glove, and stood at the green gate watching the departure of Miss Esperance and her great-nephews, till the small black figure, with a little white sailor on either side, had vanished from his view.He marvelled greatly at the temerity of Miss Esperance in taking Edmund to church at this tender age, though it was not the age that mattered so much as Edmund. What Miss Esperance called the "Bethune temperament" was very marked in that sunny-haired small boy, and it was apt to manifest itself unexpectedly, wholly regardless of time or place.The house seemed queerly quiet and deserted as Mr. Wycherly returned to his room. Mause followed him and thrust a cold, wet nose into his hand, looking up at him from under her tangled hair with puzzled, pleading eyes."Poor old lady," said Mr. Wycherly, "you are lonely, too, are you? We'll go for a little walk when the bell stops."The church was a bare, white-washed, barn-like edifice, where none of the windows were ever opened, and the unchanged air was always redolent of hair-oil and strong peppermint.Edmund smiled and nodded at his friends as he pattered up the aisle to his aunt's pew, and when Andrew Mowat, the precentor, looking unwontedly stern and unapproachable, took his seat under the pulpit, the little boy wondered what could have annoyed him that he looked so cross. On week-days Andrew, who kept the little grocer's shop in the village, was the most sociable and friendly of creatures, and always bestowed "a twa-three acid-drops" on the little boys when they went with Robina to his shop.But to-day Andrew was far removed from worldly cares or enjoyments, and Edmund listened to him in awed astonishment as he wailed out the tune of the first psalm, "My heart not haughty is, O Lord," to be gradually taken up more or less tunefully by the whole congregation.For the first half-hour of service Edmund behaved beautifully. He held a large Bible open upside down, with white cotton fingers spread well out over the back. He hummed the tune diligently and not too loud during the first psalm, and stood quite moderately still during the first long prayers.It was not until the minister said: "Let us read in God's word from the fifteenth chapter of the Book of Kings, beginning at the fifth verse," that the troubles of Miss Esperance really began.At the announcement of the chapter to be read, there was an instantaneous fluttering and turning over of leaves among the congregation to find their places, and Edmund, zealous to be no whit behind the rest in this pious exercise, fluttered the leaves of his Bible violently to and fro for some time after every one else had settled into seemly silence to follow the reading. Such a noisy rustling did he make that several of the congregation raised their heads and glanced disapprovingly in the direction of Miss Bethune's pew. That gentle lady laid a detaining hand over Edmund's Bible to close it, but he pulled it violently away from her with both hands, opened it again, and held it ostentatiously against his nose, leaning forward to look over the top at Montagu, who sat on the other side of his aunt.Then to the horror of Miss Esperance, he began to imitate the minister; joining in the reading wherever the oft-repeated "And the rest of the acts of," whoever it happened to be, "are they not written," etc., in low but perfectly audible tones. Edmund evidently looked upon the phrase as a sort of chorus, waited for it, seized upon it, and joined in it gleefully, holding his Bible at arm's length as though he were singing at a concert.Poor Miss Esperance turned crimson and bent over the little boy, whispering, "You must beperfectlyquiet, my dear, you must not say a single word."Edmund, still holding his Bible stiffly out in front of him, looked reproachfully at his aunt and was quiet for a few minutes. Then came "and the rest of the acts of Pekah and all that he did," which was too many for him. The name was attractive: "Pekah! Pekah! Pekah!" he whispered, then faster: "Pekah, Pekah, Pekah, Pekah, Pekah, Pekah," exactly as he was wont to repeat "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers," which the minister's wife herself had taught him.His aunt laid a firm hand over his mouth and looked at him with all the severity her sweet old face could achieve. He realised that she was not to be trifled with, and set down his Bible on the book-board in front of him with an angry thump, at the same time leaning forward to frown reprovingly at Montagu."When will he stop?" he whispered to his aunt, pointing a scornful finger at the minister, "he's making far more noise nor me.""Hush," murmured Miss Esperance again. For three minutes he was comparatively quiet, then it occurred to him to take off his gloves. This he achieved by holding the end of each cotton finger in his teeth and pulling violently. Then he blew into each one, as he had seen his aunt do with hers, finally squeezing them into a tight ball and cramming them into the tiny pocket of his blouse."Pocket" instantly suggested the pockets of his trousers. His penny had been disposed of on entrance, 'twas but a fleeting joy. But the packet of Wotherspoon's sweeties remained. The minister had now engaged in prayer, the congregation was standing up; Edmund's doings were comparatively inconspicuous, and Miss Esperance permitted her thoughts to soar heavenward once more. Edmund arranged the contents of his packet in a neat square on the top of his Bible on the book-board in front of him, and proceeded to taste several of the little white comfits, putting each one back in its place wet and sticky, when he had savoured its sweetness for a minute or two. By accident he knocked one of the unsucked sweeties off the Bible, and it rolled away gaily under the seat. In a moment Edmund had dived after it. He squeezed behind his aunt and could not resist giving one of Montagu's legs a sharp pinch as he beheld those members and nothing more from his somewhat lowly and darksome position. Montagu leapt into the air with a scarcely suppressed yelp, that startled more than Miss Esperance, who, at the same moment, felt an unwonted something shoving against her legs. She feared that some dog had got into the pew, and opened her eyes only to find that one great-nephew had disappeared from her side and was squirming under the seat. She also beheld the neatly arranged rows of sweeties on the top of the Bible.It took but a moment to sweep these into the satin bag she always carried, but it took considerably longer to restore Edmund to an upright position, and when this was done, his face was streaked with dust and his small, hot hands were black.Edmund lolled; Edmund fidgeted; Edmund even infected Montagu so that he fidgeted too. Every five minutes or so Edmund whispered, "Can we go home now?" till at last peace descended upon poor Miss Esperance, for in the middle of the sermon Edmund fell fast asleep with his head against her shoulder.Miss Esperance looked quite pale and exhausted as she took her place at early dinner that day, but Edmund was rosy and cheerful, and greeted Mr. Wycherly as "Dearie" with rapturous affection when that gentleman took his place at the bottom of the table. He always had dinner with the children on Sundays.At first the small boys were so hungry that very little was said, but presently when pudding came Mr. Wycherly asked: "Well, Edmund, how did you get on at church?"Edmund laid down his spoon: "I'm never going back," he said decidedly, "it is a 'bomnable place.""Edmund!" exclaimed Miss Esperance, "how can you say such a thing. You, unfortunately, did not behave particularly well, though I forgive that, as it was the first time—but, remember, you will go to the church every Sunday, and you will learn to be a good boy when you're there.""It is," Edmund repeated, unconvinced, "a 'bomnable place, a 'bomnation of desolation place."The phrase had occurred several times in the earlier part of the minister's sermon before Edmund fell asleep, and commended itself to his youthful imagination as being singularly forceful and expressive.Miss Esperance sighed. She really felt incapable of further wrestling with Edmund just then, and looked appealingly at Mr. Wycherly. But he dropped his eyes and refused to meet her gaze."He," Edmund suddenly resumed, pointing with his spoon at Mr. Wycherly, "never goes there.He"—with even more emphasis and the greatest deliberation—"is a—very—wise—man."Here the naughty boy wagged his curly head and spoke with such barefaced and perfect mimicry of his aunt, that again catching Mr. Wycherly's eye, she burst into laughter, in which that gentleman was thankful to join her."More puddin', please!" Edmund exclaimed, seizing the propitious moment to hand up his plate.That afternoon neither of the little boys accompanied Miss Esperance to church.CHAPTER XILOAVES AND FISHESI am no quaker at my food. I confess I am not indifferent to the kinds of it.—CHARLES LAMB.On the following Sabbath day Edmund was a-missing directly it was time to get ready for church. He was to be found neither in house nor garden, and Miss Esperance came to the sorrowful conclusion that the Bethune temperament had again asserted itself, and that Edmund had, of deliberate purpose, effaced himself so that he should not be made to go to church. She was not on this occasion in the least perturbed by the fact that the small boy was lost. She had no fears as to his safety, but she was most grievously upset by this deliberate flying in the face of authority, and set off for church, looking very grave and almost stern, with only Montagu in attendance.Mr. Wycherly had shut himself in his room during the hunt for Edmund. He had a nervous dread of scenes of any kind, and when either of the little boys was punished he suffered horribly. He fully recognised the necessity for occasional correction, especially in the case of a small boy so chock-full of original sin as Edmund. But none the less did he undergo much mental anguish on the occasions when such punishment took place. He could not altogether approve of certain of the methods of Miss Esperance, although he reverenced her far too much to indulge in any conscious criticism.Remote had always been marked out from other houses by the immense tranquillity of its chief inmates, to whom fret and fuss were unknown. People were never scolded at Remote, unless by Elsa, when she was quite sure Miss Esperance was out of hearing.When Montagu and Edmund were naughty they were punished by Miss Esperance, who always, and manifestly, suffered much more than the delinquents.A favourite mode of correction in days when Miss Esperance was young was the substitution of bread and water for whatever meal happened to come nearest the time of the offence: and for the little boys poignancy was added to this dismal diet by the knowledge that their aunt tasted nothing else at her own meal during such times of abstinence for them. From such punishment, all suspicion of revenge—which, in the chastened one, so often nullifies the desired result—was entirely eliminated; and the children quite understood that they were being corrected for the good of their souls, and not because their aunt required a vent for her annoyance at their misdeeds.Sunday dinner, however—the day on which by his own request Mr. Wycherly took his mid-day meal with Miss Esperance and the children—had hitherto been exempt from any such punitive mortification of the carnal appetites. Indeed, Mr. Wycherly had imbued it with a certain Elizabethan flavour of festivity and cheerfulness, and here, greatly to his surprise, he was warmly seconded by Elsa, who grudged no extra cooking to make the Sabbath-day dinner particularly appetising. From the time that Mr. Wycherly had asserted his right to throw his all into the common lot, things had been easier at Remote, and old Elsa did not forget his enthusiastic eagerness to further her endeavours that her mistress should have a peaceful and proper breakfast.Therefore when it became the established custom for Mr. Wycherly to carve the joint on Sundays, she was ever ready to fall in with any small plans he might make for the benefit of the little boys.And now Edmund had been naughty on the Sabbath, and Mr. Wycherly knew what to expect.Bread, watered by his tears, for Edmund. Bread, seasoned only by sorrowful reflection, for Miss Esperance.Banishment for hungry Edmund if he cried aloud, and there were ducks for dinner, large fat ducks sent by Lady Alicia. Mr. Wycherly could smell the stuffing even now. Who would believe that the smell of sage and onions could bear so mournful a message?The Greek characters of the Philebus he held in his hand danced before his eyes. He could not give his mind to the philosophy of beauty or the theory of pleasure. The doctrine of æsthetical, moral, and intellectual harmonies, pleasing as it was to him on ordinary occasions, failed to hold him just then, when all his mental vision was concentrated on a chubby, tearful figure whose misdeeds would debar him from duck for dinner.Mr. Wycherly laid down his "Plato" and began to pace the room restlessly, finally taking up his stand at the window looking out on the garden. Where was that boy? Where had the monkey hidden himself? He was not with Mause, for Mr. Wycherly could see the old dog lying in a patch of sunshine on the little plot of grass.He went back to his bookshelf for comfort: he wanted something human, something warm and faulty and sympathetic, and his eye lighted on "Tristram Shandy." "Tristram Shandy" was tight in the shelf—squeezed in between the "Phædo" and Hooker's "Ecclesiastical Polity"—Mr. Wycherly was nervous and agitated, and he must have pulled it out clumsily, for it fell to the ground with a thump.As he stooped to recover it he caught sight of a plump brown leg protruding from beneath his sofa. He went down on his knees to look more closely, and there, cuddled up under the sofa, his curly head pillowed on his arm, lay Edmund, fast asleep. Edmund possessed a Wellingtonian capacity for falling asleep whenever he kept still. He had hidden under the sofa in Mr. Wycherly's room just before that gentleman took refuge there from the grieved annoyance of Miss Esperance at her grand-nephew's defection. Mr. Wycherly had shut his door, and no one dreamt of disturbing him to look there for the missing one.Here was a pretty kettle of fish!Although Mr. Wycherly knew that Miss Esperance would exonerate him from any actual participation in Edmund's truancy, he was assuredly accessory after the fact, and what was to be done?"I hope he won't hit his head when he wakes up," Mr. Wycherly thought concernedly. "What a beautiful child he is!" and he knelt on where he was gazing admiringly at the slumbering cupid.Stronger and stronger grew the savour of sage and onions throughout the little house. It penetrated even to Mause in the garden, and she arose from her patch of sunshine and sniffed inquisitively.Mr. Wycherly grew stiff with kneeling, and rose to his feet. At the 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 XIITHE VILLAGE'Tis with our judgments as our watches, noneGo 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 ourclientèlewas 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. "Ishould 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 X
THE SABBATH
He ordered a' things late and air';He ordered folk to stand at prayer(Although I cannae just mind whereHe gave the warnin').An' pit pomatum on their hairOn Sabbath mornin'.R.L.S.
He ordered a' things late and air';He ordered folk to stand at prayer(Although I cannae just mind whereHe gave the warnin').An' pit pomatum on their hairOn Sabbath mornin'.R.L.S.
He ordered a' things late and air';
He ordered folk to stand at prayer
He ordered folk to stand at prayer
(Although I cannae just mind where
He gave the warnin').
He gave the warnin').
An' pit pomatum on their hair
On Sabbath mornin'.R.L.S.
On Sabbath mornin'.
R.L.S.
R.L.S.
The Sabbath day at Burnhead was a long, long day. A day wholly given up to "the public and private exercises of God's worship."
For Montagu, indeed, the shadow of the Sabbath began to steal over the horizon as early as Friday night: and it was only when he woke on Monday morning secure in the consciousness that the first day of the week was safely passed, that life assumed again its habitually cheerful aspect.
Miss Esperance was a staunch Presbyterian, and belonged to the strictest sect of the so-called Free Kirk. Therefore did she consider it her duty to take Montagu twice to church in addition to superintending his instruction in Bible history and the shorter catechism.
Montagu liked the scripture lessons well enough and found it no hardship to read the Bible aloud to his aunt for hours at a time; but nearly four hours' church with only the blessed interval of dinner in between was a heavy discipline for even a naturally quiet small boy, and sometimes Montagu was, inwardly, very rebellious.
Mr. Wycherly begged him off the afternoon service as often as he could as a companion for Edmund, volunteering to look after both children so that Robina, as well as Elsa, could attend church. Mr. Wycherly was an Episcopalian, and as there was no "English" church within walking distance, he said he read the service to himself every Sunday morning.
When Edmund was four years old, Miss Esperance decided that it was time he, too, should share the benefit of the Reverend Peter Gloag's ministrations. Edmund appeared pleased at the suggestion, for it was, like his knickerbockers, to a certain extent an acknowledgment that he had arrived at boy's estate. Montagu went to church, and why not he? It was evidently the correct thing to do, and although he could not remember to have seen his brother particularly uplifted by his privileges in that respect, nobody else seemed much exhilarated either. Hitherto, he had spent his Sunday mornings largely in the society of Mr. Wycherly, who, as all toys were locked up in a tall cupboard on Saturday night, connived at all sorts of queer games, invented on the spur of the moment by the ingenious Edmund.
"I'm goin' to kirk! I'm goin' to kirk!" Edmund chanted gaily on the appointed day.
He wore a new white sailor suit with pockets, and in one pocket was a penny to "pirle" in the plate: in the other a wee packet of Wotherspoon's peppermints for refreshment during the sermon. His curly hair was brushed till it shone like the brass knocker on the front door when Elsa had newly cleaned it, and his round, rosy face was framed by a large new sailor hat that looked like a substantial sort of halo. White socks and neat black shoes with straps completed Edmund's toilet, and his aunt thought that never yet had the Bethune family possessed a worthier scion.
Mr. Wycherly assisted to direct Edmund's fat, pink fingers into a tight, white cotton glove, and stood at the green gate watching the departure of Miss Esperance and her great-nephews, till the small black figure, with a little white sailor on either side, had vanished from his view.
He marvelled greatly at the temerity of Miss Esperance in taking Edmund to church at this tender age, though it was not the age that mattered so much as Edmund. What Miss Esperance called the "Bethune temperament" was very marked in that sunny-haired small boy, and it was apt to manifest itself unexpectedly, wholly regardless of time or place.
The house seemed queerly quiet and deserted as Mr. Wycherly returned to his room. Mause followed him and thrust a cold, wet nose into his hand, looking up at him from under her tangled hair with puzzled, pleading eyes.
"Poor old lady," said Mr. Wycherly, "you are lonely, too, are you? We'll go for a little walk when the bell stops."
The church was a bare, white-washed, barn-like edifice, where none of the windows were ever opened, and the unchanged air was always redolent of hair-oil and strong peppermint.
Edmund smiled and nodded at his friends as he pattered up the aisle to his aunt's pew, and when Andrew Mowat, the precentor, looking unwontedly stern and unapproachable, took his seat under the pulpit, the little boy wondered what could have annoyed him that he looked so cross. On week-days Andrew, who kept the little grocer's shop in the village, was the most sociable and friendly of creatures, and always bestowed "a twa-three acid-drops" on the little boys when they went with Robina to his shop.
But to-day Andrew was far removed from worldly cares or enjoyments, and Edmund listened to him in awed astonishment as he wailed out the tune of the first psalm, "My heart not haughty is, O Lord," to be gradually taken up more or less tunefully by the whole congregation.
For the first half-hour of service Edmund behaved beautifully. He held a large Bible open upside down, with white cotton fingers spread well out over the back. He hummed the tune diligently and not too loud during the first psalm, and stood quite moderately still during the first long prayers.
It was not until the minister said: "Let us read in God's word from the fifteenth chapter of the Book of Kings, beginning at the fifth verse," that the troubles of Miss Esperance really began.
At the announcement of the chapter to be read, there was an instantaneous fluttering and turning over of leaves among the congregation to find their places, and Edmund, zealous to be no whit behind the rest in this pious exercise, fluttered the leaves of his Bible violently to and fro for some time after every one else had settled into seemly silence to follow the reading. Such a noisy rustling did he make that several of the congregation raised their heads and glanced disapprovingly in the direction of Miss Bethune's pew. That gentle lady laid a detaining hand over Edmund's Bible to close it, but he pulled it violently away from her with both hands, opened it again, and held it ostentatiously against his nose, leaning forward to look over the top at Montagu, who sat on the other side of his aunt.
Then to the horror of Miss Esperance, he began to imitate the minister; joining in the reading wherever the oft-repeated "And the rest of the acts of," whoever it happened to be, "are they not written," etc., in low but perfectly audible tones. Edmund evidently looked upon the phrase as a sort of chorus, waited for it, seized upon it, and joined in it gleefully, holding his Bible at arm's length as though he were singing at a concert.
Poor Miss Esperance turned crimson and bent over the little boy, whispering, "You must beperfectlyquiet, my dear, you must not say a single word."
Edmund, still holding his Bible stiffly out in front of him, looked reproachfully at his aunt and was quiet for a few minutes. Then came "and the rest of the acts of Pekah and all that he did," which was too many for him. The name was attractive: "Pekah! Pekah! Pekah!" he whispered, then faster: "Pekah, Pekah, Pekah, Pekah, Pekah, Pekah," exactly as he was wont to repeat "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers," which the minister's wife herself had taught him.
His aunt laid a firm hand over his mouth and looked at him with all the severity her sweet old face could achieve. He realised that she was not to be trifled with, and set down his Bible on the book-board in front of him with an angry thump, at the same time leaning forward to frown reprovingly at Montagu.
"When will he stop?" he whispered to his aunt, pointing a scornful finger at the minister, "he's making far more noise nor me."
"Hush," murmured Miss Esperance again. For three minutes he was comparatively quiet, then it occurred to him to take off his gloves. This he achieved by holding the end of each cotton finger in his teeth and pulling violently. Then he blew into each one, as he had seen his aunt do with hers, finally squeezing them into a tight ball and cramming them into the tiny pocket of his blouse.
"Pocket" instantly suggested the pockets of his trousers. His penny had been disposed of on entrance, 'twas but a fleeting joy. But the packet of Wotherspoon's sweeties remained. The minister had now engaged in prayer, the congregation was standing up; Edmund's doings were comparatively inconspicuous, and Miss Esperance permitted her thoughts to soar heavenward once more. Edmund arranged the contents of his packet in a neat square on the top of his Bible on the book-board in front of him, and proceeded to taste several of the little white comfits, putting each one back in its place wet and sticky, when he had savoured its sweetness for a minute or two. By accident he knocked one of the unsucked sweeties off the Bible, and it rolled away gaily under the seat. In a moment Edmund had dived after it. He squeezed behind his aunt and could not resist giving one of Montagu's legs a sharp pinch as he beheld those members and nothing more from his somewhat lowly and darksome position. Montagu leapt into the air with a scarcely suppressed yelp, that startled more than Miss Esperance, who, at the same moment, felt an unwonted something shoving against her legs. She feared that some dog had got into the pew, and opened her eyes only to find that one great-nephew had disappeared from her side and was squirming under the seat. She also beheld the neatly arranged rows of sweeties on the top of the Bible.
It took but a moment to sweep these into the satin bag she always carried, but it took considerably longer to restore Edmund to an upright position, and when this was done, his face was streaked with dust and his small, hot hands were black.
Edmund lolled; Edmund fidgeted; Edmund even infected Montagu so that he fidgeted too. Every five minutes or so Edmund whispered, "Can we go home now?" till at last peace descended upon poor Miss Esperance, for in the middle of the sermon Edmund fell fast asleep with his head against her shoulder.
Miss Esperance looked quite pale and exhausted as she took her place at early dinner that day, but Edmund was rosy and cheerful, and greeted Mr. Wycherly as "Dearie" with rapturous affection when that gentleman took his place at the bottom of the table. He always had dinner with the children on Sundays.
At first the small boys were so hungry that very little was said, but presently when pudding came Mr. Wycherly asked: "Well, Edmund, how did you get on at church?"
Edmund laid down his spoon: "I'm never going back," he said decidedly, "it is a 'bomnable place."
"Edmund!" exclaimed Miss Esperance, "how can you say such a thing. You, unfortunately, did not behave particularly well, though I forgive that, as it was the first time—but, remember, you will go to the church every Sunday, and you will learn to be a good boy when you're there."
"It is," Edmund repeated, unconvinced, "a 'bomnable place, a 'bomnation of desolation place."
The phrase had occurred several times in the earlier part of the minister's sermon before Edmund fell asleep, and commended itself to his youthful imagination as being singularly forceful and expressive.
Miss Esperance sighed. She really felt incapable of further wrestling with Edmund just then, and looked appealingly at Mr. Wycherly. But he dropped his eyes and refused to meet her gaze.
"He," Edmund suddenly resumed, pointing with his spoon at Mr. Wycherly, "never goes there.He"—with even more emphasis and the greatest deliberation—"is a—very—wise—man."
Here the naughty boy wagged his curly head and spoke with such barefaced and perfect mimicry of his aunt, that again catching Mr. Wycherly's eye, she burst into laughter, in which that gentleman was thankful to join her.
"More puddin', please!" Edmund exclaimed, seizing the propitious moment to hand up his plate.
That afternoon neither of the little boys accompanied Miss Esperance to church.
CHAPTER XI
LOAVES AND FISHES
I am no quaker at my food. I confess I am not indifferent to the kinds of it.—CHARLES LAMB.
On the following Sabbath day Edmund was a-missing directly it was time to get ready for church. He was to be found neither in house nor garden, and Miss Esperance came to the sorrowful conclusion that the Bethune temperament had again asserted itself, and that Edmund had, of deliberate purpose, effaced himself so that he should not be made to go to church. She was not on this occasion in the least perturbed by the fact that the small boy was lost. She had no fears as to his safety, but she was most grievously upset by this deliberate flying in the face of authority, and set off for church, looking very grave and almost stern, with only Montagu in attendance.
Mr. Wycherly had shut himself in his room during the hunt for Edmund. He had a nervous dread of scenes of any kind, and when either of the little boys was punished he suffered horribly. He fully recognised the necessity for occasional correction, especially in the case of a small boy so chock-full of original sin as Edmund. But none the less did he undergo much mental anguish on the occasions when such punishment took place. He could not altogether approve of certain of the methods of Miss Esperance, although he reverenced her far too much to indulge in any conscious criticism.
Remote had always been marked out from other houses by the immense tranquillity of its chief inmates, to whom fret and fuss were unknown. People were never scolded at Remote, unless by Elsa, when she was quite sure Miss Esperance was out of hearing.
When Montagu and Edmund were naughty they were punished by Miss Esperance, who always, and manifestly, suffered much more than the delinquents.
A favourite mode of correction in days when Miss Esperance was young was the substitution of bread and water for whatever meal happened to come nearest the time of the offence: and for the little boys poignancy was added to this dismal diet by the knowledge that their aunt tasted nothing else at her own meal during such times of abstinence for them. From such punishment, all suspicion of revenge—which, in the chastened one, so often nullifies the desired result—was entirely eliminated; and the children quite understood that they were being corrected for the good of their souls, and not because their aunt required a vent for her annoyance at their misdeeds.
Sunday dinner, however—the day on which by his own request Mr. Wycherly took his mid-day meal with Miss Esperance and the children—had hitherto been exempt from any such punitive mortification of the carnal appetites. Indeed, Mr. Wycherly had imbued it with a certain Elizabethan flavour of festivity and cheerfulness, and here, greatly to his surprise, he was warmly seconded by Elsa, who grudged no extra cooking to make the Sabbath-day dinner particularly appetising. From the time that Mr. Wycherly had asserted his right to throw his all into the common lot, things had been easier at Remote, and old Elsa did not forget his enthusiastic eagerness to further her endeavours that her mistress should have a peaceful and proper breakfast.
Therefore when it became the established custom for Mr. Wycherly to carve the joint on Sundays, she was ever ready to fall in with any small plans he might make for the benefit of the little boys.
And now Edmund had been naughty on the Sabbath, and Mr. Wycherly knew what to expect.
Bread, watered by his tears, for Edmund. Bread, seasoned only by sorrowful reflection, for Miss Esperance.
Banishment for hungry Edmund if he cried aloud, and there were ducks for dinner, large fat ducks sent by Lady Alicia. Mr. Wycherly could smell the stuffing even now. Who would believe that the smell of sage and onions could bear so mournful a message?
The Greek characters of the Philebus he held in his hand danced before his eyes. He could not give his mind to the philosophy of beauty or the theory of pleasure. The doctrine of æsthetical, moral, and intellectual harmonies, pleasing as it was to him on ordinary occasions, failed to hold him just then, when all his mental vision was concentrated on a chubby, tearful figure whose misdeeds would debar him from duck for dinner.
Mr. Wycherly laid down his "Plato" and began to pace the room restlessly, finally taking up his stand at the window looking out on the garden. Where was that boy? Where had the monkey hidden himself? He was not with Mause, for Mr. Wycherly could see the old dog lying in a patch of sunshine on the little plot of grass.
He went back to his bookshelf for comfort: he wanted something human, something warm and faulty and sympathetic, and his eye lighted on "Tristram Shandy." "Tristram Shandy" was tight in the shelf—squeezed in between the "Phædo" and Hooker's "Ecclesiastical Polity"—Mr. Wycherly was nervous and agitated, and he must have pulled it out clumsily, for it fell to the ground with a thump.
As he stooped to recover it he caught sight of a plump brown leg protruding from beneath his sofa. He went down on his knees to look more closely, and there, cuddled up under the sofa, his curly head pillowed on his arm, lay Edmund, fast asleep. Edmund possessed a Wellingtonian capacity for falling asleep whenever he kept still. He had hidden under the sofa in Mr. Wycherly's room just before that gentleman took refuge there from the grieved annoyance of Miss Esperance at her grand-nephew's defection. Mr. Wycherly had shut his door, and no one dreamt of disturbing him to look there for the missing one.
Here was a pretty kettle of fish!
Although Mr. Wycherly knew that Miss Esperance would exonerate him from any actual participation in Edmund's truancy, he was assuredly accessory after the fact, and what was to be done?
"I hope he won't hit his head when he wakes up," Mr. Wycherly thought concernedly. "What a beautiful child he is!" and he knelt on where he was gazing admiringly at the slumbering cupid.
Stronger and stronger grew the savour of sage and onions throughout the little house. It penetrated even to Mause in the garden, and she arose from her patch of sunshine and sniffed inquisitively.
Mr. Wycherly grew stiff with kneeling, and rose to his feet. At the 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, noneGo just alike, yet each believes his own.POPE.
'Tis with our judgments as our watches, noneGo just alike, yet each believes his own.POPE.
'Tis with our judgments as our watches, none
Go just alike, yet each believes his own.
POPE.
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 ourclientèlewas 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. "Ishould 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."