CHAPTER IX.RETROSPECTIVE.
During the greater part of the next day, Phemie mended stockings as if her life depended on the rapidity with which she worked. She would not eat—she would not talk—she would not play with the children—but she would stitch on hour after hour, never lifting her eyes except to look out at the rain, which was pelting down in torrents.
Every one in the house knew as a matter of course that Phemie was making her choice; even the youngest child contemplated her with a vague kind of wonder, dimly conscious that Phemie was thinking of something in which it could have no part or lot—something which separated her from the remainder of the household for the time being, which rendered it necessary for all conversation held in her presence to be unnatural and constrained,and which forced Daniel Aggland, junior—the baby above mentioned—to sit down on the carpet and stare at Phemie for a full half-hour without winking.
There it sat, holding its shoeless foot with its right hand, while sucking the thumb of its left—there it sat, the child looking at the girl to whom the woman’s question, marriage, had come to be solved so soon, until, having exhausted its wonderment, it began to take offence at Phemie’s unusual silence and at last burst out into a paroxysm of indignant screams.
Then Phemie laid aside her work and comforted it. She had grown so accustomed to nursing that, young though she was, she could hush and quiet a child’s distress as cleverly as any matron in the county. She had such a sweet voice, that instinctively the baby ceased crying to listen to its tones. She had such a beautiful face, that the little hands unclenched naturally in order to stroke it. She had such divine hair, that infant eyes instinctively opened wide to watch the light flickering and rippling over the braids.
She had such a way of gathering a child to her, that the tiny creature could not choose but lie still, nestling close to her heart. Dear Phemie Keller! pretty, vain, gay, fanciful, dreamy Phemie—thinking of you as you walked up and down that little sitting-room, hushing the child into quietness, it seems to me that Captain Stondon might well be excused for forgetting his own age and your youth, and remembering only the beauty which he saw, and the true, faithful nature that he had penetration enough to know you possessed.
“Poor baby Danny,” muttered Mrs. Agglandsotto voce, as she watched the girl soothing the child’s distress; “you won’t have her long to coo over you and humour you at every turn; you’ll be a poor forsaken baby soon, for mother won’t have time to be waiting upon you as Phemie has done.”
All of which Phemie heard, as Mrs. Aggland intended she should; truth being that Mrs. Aggland had a burning desire to know for certain what she was thinking about.
“It is the most unnatural thing I ever heardof,” said the mistress of the Hill Farm to Peggy M‘Nab. “Instead of taking counsel with one and another, and being uplifted at the notion of being made a grand lady of for life, she sits like a statue mending them old stockings, not opening her lips to a soul, not even talking about her wedding clothes. Anybody might think it was sentence of death that had come instead of an offer of marriage.”
“Marriage is an unco’ serious thing,” answered Peggy M‘Nab.
“You may say that, Peggy,” replied Mrs. Aggland; “not that you can know much about the matter from your own experience; but still it is not so serious a thing as a funeral; and Phemie sits there with as solemn a face as if she was at a burying, sighing every now and then as though her heart was like to burst.”
“Maybe she’s no on for taking him,” suggested Peggy; “though he’s weel enough, weel favoured and kindly spoken, he’s no young, mistress. He’s nearer a match for you or me, nor for such a bairn as Phemie.”
“As for that, Peggy M‘Nab,” said Mrs. Aggland, “I will thank you to keep your distance, and not talk of your age and mine in the same sentence, when anybody with half an eye can see you might be my mother twice over.”
“I would have had to begin young, then,” remarked Peggy, parenthetically.
“And with regard to Captain Stondon,” went on Mrs. Aggland, unheeding the interruption, “what does the few years’ difference between him and Phemie signify? Won’t she have everything she wants? Won’t she have money, and leisure, and dress, and servants, and carriages and horses, and goodness only can tell what besides? And don’t you know those are just the things Phemie has been hankering after all her life? Is she not the making of a fine lady?”
“She is bonny enough for one, at ony rate,” put in Peggy.
“Some may think her so. I know I think her conceity enough for anything; and if she wants all this—if she wishes to be made a princess just at once, why need she look so miserable nowit is all put in her way—by the act of Providence, as one may say? Does she think she will ever get such a chance again? Does she think it snows, and hails, and rains husbands on the hills? Does she think a poor country girl can pick and choose like some great heiress? Does she imagine all the lords and dukes in the country are coming down to Cumberland to make her a peeress out of hand? If she thinks that, Peggy M‘Nab, she is mistaken, and so I tell you.”
Nobody knew better than Peggy that Phemie was mistaken. Nobody knew better than the old Scotch woman that there is a deal of difference between a fairy tale and everyday life; between the lover of a winter evening’s story and the suitor who, in the broad daylight, comes in his proper flesh and blood to ask for the fair maiden’s hand. Since the suitor had come across the hills—since such astonishing good fortune had fallen to Phemie’s lot as to secure a real live gentleman for her lover—Peggy M‘Nab had seen light. It was very well to keep back the farmers’ sons, and the young tradesmen who sometimes came from theneighbouring towns to see their parents at Tordale; but to reject Captain Stondon—to repulse this middle-aged Robin Gray, when there was not a Jamie at all in the question, Peggy saw would be midsummer madness. Was not he, as she often said, a “braw man,” tall and erect, and gentleman-looking, and of gentle bluid into the bargain? Had not he given her, Peggy, as much money in one handful as she earned for wages in the course of a year? Was not he quiet spoken? not a ranting, shouting devil like the young surgeon from Grassenfel, who alternately cursed Peggy for a fool, and slapped her on the back, saying she was a great old girl for all that. He did not drink spirits raw, like Mr. Fagg. He did not come into the house like a company of dragoons. You never heard him say a wry word about his food; whatever was set before him he eat, let it be loaf-bread or oatmeal, haggis or a joint. Was it not better to be an old man’s darling than a young man’s slave? Spite of the fairy tales, and the lord’s son, and the carriage and four, was not Captain Stondon’s offer better than any reality Peggy had ever thoughtlikely to come in her nurseling’s way? Vague visions are one thing—tangible success is another; and there is no use in denying that the tangible success which had come to Phemie Keller astonished every person who knew that young lady, except, indeed, the young lady herself, who, having pacified the child at last, laid it down in its mother’s lap, and then gathering up her work, went off to her own room, where, having locked her door, she drew a chair up to the window, and sat down to look out upon the valley of Tordale, whilst she thought of her own present—of her own future.
She was but a young thing after all, dear reader, to be thinking about the whole of her life to come—but a young, ignorant girl, to be brought in a moment face to face, with that which was to determine the weal or the woe of every future hour; and as she gazed down the valley her tears fell faster than the driving rain, and she leaned her head against the window-frame and cried as though her heart were breaking, at the choice she was called upon to make so suddenly.
It is not much to read about this man’s mistake, about that woman’s error; the book is closed, the tale forgotten, and the reader goes on his own path contentedly. Even when soul talking to soul some one tells his neighbour where and how he lost himself—how he went wrong—where he dug deep graves—where he laid down his heart in the coffin beside some frail human body, the listener, sympathizing though he may be, is apt to overlook what loss all this wrong and suffering involved.
Do you know when he has finished what it all meant? As he turns away, do you understand what he has been talking about? It was his life, man; and he had but one. But one, good God! and that is what none of these happy, prosperous people can be made to comprehend. He has spoiled his horn; he has not made his spoon. Other people have lives to live out and make the most of, but he has marred his: it may not signify much to you, my friend, but it signifies everything to him, because he cannot go back and beginde novo; it has been all loss, and in this world theremay never come a profit to compensate for that which he has left behind.
Some idea of this kind, very vague and very shadowy, passed through Phemie’s mind as she sat at the window looking through blinding tears at the familiar landscape, at the mountains that had been her friends for years. It might not be very much she was considering; but it was her all, nevertheless. Her little investment in the world’s great lottery might be a mere bagatelle; but it was the whole of her capital, notwithstanding.
It was her life; it was what I have been trying to talk about; it was everything she possessed of value on earth, that she sat thinking of as the evening darkness gathered down upon Tordale church; upon the wet graves where the dead, who had lived out their lives before she was born, were sleeping quietly; upon the waterfall; upon the trees; upon the distant valley; upon the parsonage house, in the dining-room whereof Captain Stondon was standing at that very moment, thinking, in the flickering firelight, of her.
As the seed-time is to the harvest; as the acornis to the oak; as the blossom is to the fruit, so was this vague thought to Phemie Keller, in comparison to what the same thought grew to, clear and tangible, in the after years, which were then all before her. It was instinct; it was an uncertain glimmering of an eternal truth. With the same shadowy indistinctness—with the same unreasoning terror as that of a child coming in contact for the first time with death—did Phemie Keller look out for the first time from her little bed-chamber on life.
Hitherto, though I have spoken of the promise of her beauty, I have said little of herself, and less of the kind of existence hers had been from childhood, until Captain Stondon met her in Tordale church. She is thinking of her past as she sits in the gathering darkness; thinking as she leans her head against the window-frame, and listens to the wind howling among the mountains, and the rain beating over the beautiful valley below—at one and the same moment of when she will be a woman, and of when she was a child. She is wondering, if she leaves Tordale,with what eyes she will look upon it again; what she will have to pass through, ere, in years to come, she returns to look upon it once more; and as she wonders, her memory casts back to the days that are gone, and she is a child in the old manse by the sea-shore, listening to the roar of the ever-restless ocean, lying in her bed with the waves singing her lullaby, wandering on the beach and building up palaces on the sand—palaces ornamented with shells, and set out with sea-weed that the next flood-tide destroyed!
What more did she see? what more did memory give back to her, as the waves cast up drift on the shore? Out of the past there came again to her the self she had been, the child she could never be more.
A child with a clear white skin, through which the veins appeared blue and distinct—a delicate child with a faint colour in her cheeks, with golden hair, who was mostly dressed in white, who had dainty muslin frocks, who had soft lace, edging her short sleeves, who was her grandfather’s pet, who was the life and soul of themanse; with her old-fashioned talk; with her loving, clinging, twining, cheery, tender ways. A child who, being always with grown-up people, learned to think long before her proper time—a child who had never lain down to sleep when a storm was raging without praying God to bring those who were on sea, safe to land—a young thing who had seen women wringing their hands and mourning for the dead—who having lost both father and mother herself could understand the meaning of the word orphan, and cry with the fatherless children as they talked about the parents who might never again come home.
Right and wrong! She had learnt what both words signified in early days in that old manse by the sea-shore. From the time she could toddle, she had been wont to shake her head gravely at temptation, and to draw back her fingers from desired objects, lisping to herself, “Musn’t; granpa’s father in heaven wouldn’t be pleased,” and then she would mount on a chair, and, sitting cross-legged upon it, argue out the rest of the question to her own satisfaction.
There never was a better child than Phemie! Save for the way she cried when the wind was high, and the sea rough; save for the trick she had of stripping herself half naked in order to clothe any beggar brat who might happen to be complaining of the cold; save for huffy fits she took when her grandfather was too busy to notice her; save for the unaccountable and unanswerable questions she was in the habit of propounding suddenly—Phemie—little Phemie, I mean, had not a fault.
The most terrible battle she and the household at the manse ever fought was over the body of a dead kitten, which she kept from decent burial for a whole day, and which was at length taken from her arms only when she had cried herself to sleep over the loss of her pet. To grandfather and servants, to the fishermen and their wives, to the shepherds on the moors, to the children by the roadside, Phemie Keller—little soft-hearted Phemie—was an object of the tenderest interest and affection.
The courtship of her father and mother wastalked of by the side of many a winter fire. The young things—boy and girl—who had fallen in love at first sight, who had met secretly by the sea-shore, who had been seen by the shepherds walking hand in hand together among the heather, who had wanted the old minister to marry them, and who had bound themselves together as man and wife before a couple of witnesses when he refused to let them wed unless the consent of the lover’s family were first obtained, who had gone away out into the world together—all the story was repeated over and over whenever Phemie’s name was mentioned in the lonely cottages scattered here and there through the thinly-peopled district.
The love-story with its sorrowful end; the love-story, finis to which was written on a moss-covered headstone in the quiet kirkyard close by! They had known her a girl, and she came back to them a widow—came back, “wi’ her wee bit bairn, Phemie, to dee.”
Was it not natural that a certain romance should be associated with Phemie in the mindsof those who could remember her parents so well? Was it to be wondered at, if they made, perhaps, too much of the child; if they speculated as to her future lot, foolishly?
Anyhow, Phemie was loved, and petted; and never a princess ruled more absolutely over her subjects, than did the young child rule over the household at the manse. It was always who could please Phemie most, who could make her look prettiest, who could get sitting by her till she went to sleep, who could make time to take the child on her lap, and tell her the stories she liked best to hear.
All the old tales of fairies and brownies, of second sight, of witches and warlocks, were familiar to Phemie as her A B C. Old ballads were recited to her; old songs were sung to her, till her head was as full of romantic narrative as it could hold.
There was not a blast that blew over the hills but touched an answering note in the child’s heart. The poetry lying there always uttered some responsive tone in answer to the elements—sunshineand shower, storm and calm, the wind whistling across the moors or sobbing through the fir-trees, the snow covering the earth, or the spring flowers decking the fields—all these things had a double meaning for Phemie; like a face reflected from glass to glass, every object in nature was projected into the child’s heart from the heart of some one else who had basked in the summer glory, and braved the winter tempest before she was thought of.
Then came Death to the manse once more; and this time he took the old minister from among his people to the kirkyard, within sound of the mourning and murmuring sea. Thoughtful hearts tried to keep Phemie from seeing him in his coffin, but Phemie’s thoughtfulness exceeded theirs.
Her love made her cunning; and then the episode of the kitten was repeated with the grief intensified, with the despair more terrible.
She was taken away to a friend’s house, and kept there till the funeral was over. All the day they watched her; but at night, in the dead ofthe winter time, she seized her opportunity and tracked her way across the moors to the manse, sobbing through the darkness as she toiled along.
At the manse they watched her again, and again she eluded their vigilance, and stole out to the lonely kirkyard, where she was found tearing up the wet mould with her little hands; scratching at the newly-made grave like a dog.
After that, grievous sickness—sickness almost unto death, and then removal by slow stages to the house of the only living relative willing to receive her—Mrs. Aggland, her mother’s sister. The Agglands had children of their own; but yet at the Hill Farm it was the old story enacted once again by fresh performers. Her aunt could not be too kind to her. Mr. Aggland might punish his own daughter, but he never dreamt of saying a cross word to Phemie Keller. She was privileged: by reason of her desolateness, by reason of her story, by reason of her sensitive heart, that reproof and harshness would havebroken, Phemie hadcarte blancheto do as she liked, and if she did not grow up indolent and selfish, it was simply because there are some natures that cannot be made indolent or selfish by kindness and indulgence.
And yet it may fairly be questioned whether Phemie would ever have developed into a useful character, but for the death of her aunt. Whilst Mrs. Aggland lived the girl had always some one to think for her; see to her; love her. When once her aunt died, out of very gratitude, for very pity, Phemie was forced to think for others; see to others; and give love, and care, and affection, back.
“It was sic a sair sicht to see the puir maister frettin’ after his wife,” as Peggy M‘Nab asserted, that by common consent Peggy M‘Nab and Phemie Keller joined together to make him feel his loss in the trifles of everyday life as little as might be. Phemie was still a child, a mere child, but yet she could do something for the widower; she could nurse the baby and keep its cries from troubling its father; she could help Peggy in athousand little ways; she could amuse the little ones by repeating to them the stories she had heard told in broad Scotch, where the Scottish moors stretched away lone and desolate towards the north; she could read to him; she could work for him; she could stand at the door looking for his return; she could talk to him in the twilight; and she could make the sight of her bright pretty face as welcome to the solitary man as the flowers in May.
After his second marriage, Phemie proved more useful still. As she grew older, she grew not merely cleverer, but wiser—wise to hold her tongue, wise to keep unpleasantness in the background, wise to do the work she had to do with a cheerful countenance and a brave heart, wise towards everybody but herself, for she dreamed dreams and built castles all the day long.
Aided and abetted therein by Peggy M‘Nab, who was never weary of telling Phemie about her father, about the great family he belonged to, about the grand folks, somewhere or other, with whom Phemie could claim kith and kin.
If Mrs. Aggland were cross, if Phemie wearied over her making and mending, if the girl ever took to fretting about the days departed, straight away Peggy told her nursling “to whisht.”
“Canna ye quet yer greetin’—canna ye tak patience for a bit? Dinna ye ken that if ye wunna thraw that bonnie face o’ yours, some braw laird will come ben when ye hae leest thocht o’ him, and mak ye a gentle for life? He’ll come in the gloamin’ over the hills speerin’ for ane Phemie Keller, and he’ll tak ye awa’, my bairn—he’ll tak ye frae thrawn words and cross looks, and frae yer auld daft nurse wha canna bear to see ye forfoughten.”
And then Phemie would declare she was not fretting, and that no laird, not even the Duke of Argyll himself, should take her from Peggy M‘Nab.
“Wherever I go, ye shall go,” Phemie was wont to declare; “and I’d like to take Duncan, and Helen, and the rest of uncle’s children, and we could leave Mrs. Aggland her children, and make him come with us. Where should we go,Peggy, and how should we go? Tell me all about it.”
Thus exhorted, Peggy would conjure up quite a royal procession for Phemie’s edification.
With her darling’s lovely head resting in her lap, with the girl’s soft white fingers stroking her hard brown hands, Peggy was wont to talk of a hero so handsome and good and clever as to border on the impossible; of estates and houses that might have made an auctioneer’s fortune; of furniture that sounded like an inventory taken of the domestic goods and chattels of some establishment in fairyland; of horses that could never have been foaled on earth, so great was their speed, so extraordinary their beauty; the crowning gem of the whole programme being the carriage, which, I am afraid, Peggy would have described as precisely similar to the state chariot of the Lord Mayor of London, had she ever been so blest as to behold that functionary’s progress on the 9th of November through the City streets.
It was for long a vexed question betweenPhemie and her nurse, whether the Kellers, or a distracted lover were to come for her.
Peggy held to the Kellers, but Phemie preferred the lover, who was to right her wrongs, to take her from the cinders, and dance with her at the ball, and get her the property of her ancestors, and live happily with her for ever after. She did not want to owe anything to her father’s family. She preferred the idea of some dark-haired, dark-eyed nobleman coming to the Hill Farm like a flash of lightning, and rescuing her from stocking-mending and cast-off clothes, after the fashion of a hero of romance.
Sometimes in her fancy she would be proud and distant, sometimes indifferent, sometimes cruel and unkind; but however she began the story, it had never but one end, and that end was not suicide and distraction, but a grand wedding, and joy, and confidence, and love all the days of their lives.
They would build a castle on the site of the Hill Farmhouse, and come and spend some portion of every summer at Tordale. Mr. Conbyrshould have his organ, and she would bestow such magnificent presents on the wives of the farmers she had known! She would even give Mrs. Aggland a satin dress, and a brooch, and a bonnet, and everybody should be happy, and all should go joyous as a marriage bell.
As for the nobleman, he was to be something between Fergus M‘Ivor, the lover of the poor Bride of Lammermoor, and Percy, as described in Otterbourne. Whichever of these desirable models he most resembled, there was yet one thing in which he never varied—his devoted affection for herself. Phemie experienced no pangs of jealousy: she had no mental misgivings about a previous attachment, about any former lady love. It was to be first love with him as well as with her; it was to be first love and last love with both. Heaven help her! though these dreams may sound worldly and calculating, they were nevertheless pure and innocent, and it was the shock of coming down from the contemplation of such a lover and such a fortune, to the flat level of accepting or rejecting a middle-aged and unromanticsuitor that proved too much for Phemie’s equanimity, and made her—sitting by the window looking down over Tordale valley—so sad and thoughtful.
For the touch of reality had done two things: it had wakened her at once from a land of pleasant visions, to the certainties of existence; it showed her she had been asleep and dreaming; it proved to her she must wake and bestir herself.
She could not go on after this, picturing to herself the advent of an ideal lover. Like one arising from a long sweet slumber, she looked out over the plains of life, and saw her actual position for the first time.
She was born—not to be run after like a damsel of romance, but to darn stockings, and to be considered an amazingly fortunate girl if a rich prosaic man fell in love with and married her. She had overrated her goods; she had been like a man with a clever invention, who never thinks of making hundreds out of it, but always millions, until some one offers him, say a thousand pounds,with which all his friends consider he ought to believe himself overpaid.
So long as her little possessions were kept out of the market she placed a price on them far and away above their actual value; but now, when she saw the precise sum at which she was rated by other people, her spirits sank to zero.
If it were so wonderful a thing for this common-place stranger to ask her to marry him, what chance was there of the lord coming across the hills to woo? Was it likely she should ever meet Lord Ronald Clanronald by Strammer Tarn? And if she did meet him, was it at all probable he would take her back with him to his home? Lizzie Lindsay had skirts of green satin, but Phemie Keller had only three dresses in the world, and none of them much to boast of!
Further, it was evident her uncle had laid her out to marry Duncan. He had mentioned it, and she had told him that might never be. Having told him so, what was she to do—stay on mending old clothes and dreaming her dreams—dreams that might never seem realities again—or goaway and become a lady, as every one told her she might by speaking only one word?
Suppose, after all this to-do, after all this respect, after all this disturbance, she subsided again into the Phemie of six months previously, should she be able to lead the old life again patiently? Could she endure Mrs. Aggland’s scolding, and the incessant work, work, slave, slave, drive, drive, after this chance of freedom? Suppose poverty came again: she had seen bad seasons at the Hill Farm, and felt the nipping of scarcity like the rest, and these bad seasons might return, and then, instead of being able to help, she would only prove an incumbrance.
If she accepted Captain Stondon, her hero would have to be turned with his face to the wall; but if she did not accept him, why, then, still the hero might never come, after all.
What should she do? “Oh, what shall I do?” sobbed Phemie, by way of a climax to her reverie; and, as if in answer to her question, Helen tapped at her cousin’s door, and said:
“Captain Stondon is in the parlour, Phemie,and father says, will you come down and see him?”
“An’ I hev brought ye up a candle, my bairn,” added Peggy M‘Nab; “redd up yer hair, and wash the tears aff yer face, for he’ll no be pleased to see ye looking like a ghaist.”