CHAPTER XI.SATISFIED.
Having won Phemie Keller, the next thing Captain Stondon desired was to wed her. It might have made the heart of many a matchmaking mother ache with envy to hear how the man hammered on at that one string.
It was the refrain of every sentence. Mr. Aggland and he never separated without the subject being mooted by this fortunate lover. Vainly did the farmer assert that the girl was too young, that there was time enough, that nobody was going to run away with her. Captain Stondon would listen to no objections. Christmas was coming on, and he must get back to Norfolk immediately, and he wanted to have something definite decided on before he went away.
To all of which Mr. Aggland listened gravely ere he replied—
“Then I tell you what, Captain Stondon: let me go to Norfolk with you, and there we will talk about the future. You must not think,” proceeded Mr. Aggland, hastily, “that because I say this I am ‘a kind of burr—I shall stick.’ I do not mean to intrude. I have no intention of forcing myself upon you. Once let me see the place where Phemie is going to, the home in which she is to live, and you need never fear sign or token of me again.”
“But I hope and trust that I shall,” answered Captain Stondon: “I do not want to separate Phemie from her friends. I have no wish to do anything of the kind. You surely have not thought me so forgetful—so ungrateful as all that comes to?” cried the officer, growing quite vehement over the matter.
But Mr. Aggland shook his head and answered, “I do not think you either ungrateful or forgetful, only I know that, when once you and Phemie are married, the less she and you are troubledwith any of us the better it will be for her. It is never a pleasant thing for a woman to be constantly reminded whence she has been transplanted, and Phemie is young enough to take kindly to a new soil and root herself firmly in it. Further, sir; though I was once humble companion to a gentleman’s son, I hope I never wore
‘The rags of any great man’s looks, nor fedUpon their after meals.’
‘The rags of any great man’s looks, nor fedUpon their after meals.’
‘The rags of any great man’s looks, nor fedUpon their after meals.’
‘The rags of any great man’s looks, nor fed
Upon their after meals.’
And because I am so sure of my own mind in this matter—so positive that I do not want Phemie to feel anyone belonging to her a burden, I have no scruple in asking you to let me go to Norfolk. I shall be able to give her away with a lighter heart when I have once looked on the house that is to be her home.”
Doubtless Mr. Aggland was right; but Captain Stondon, with his heart full of generous projects, with a vivid memory of all he owed to the farmer’s care and kindness, felt that this constant assertion of independence—this everlasting refusal to come up and stand on the same level with himself—was irritating in the extreme.
It is so hard to have one’s best intention doubted—to see people thinking they are wiser and better than everybody else on earth—to have good gifts tossed back in one’s face, that Captain Stondon often felt inclined to tell Mr. Aggland that independence may be carried far too far; that there is an extreme point at which every virtue touches a vice; and that the most dangerous pride is, after all, the pride that “apes humility.”
But as often as he felt inclined he refrained. He remembered that, to a man like Mr. Aggland, poverty was the most severe trial to which his character could have been subjected; and he recollected likewise that, if an ungenial climate had made the fruit of his life somewhat bitter, it had not rendered it unwholesome.
Besides, he, Captain Stondon, was so happy that he could afford to be tolerant of the short-comings of others; and accordingly he answered, good-humouredly—
“You will know me better some day, Aggland. Meantime, come to Norfolk, and we can arrangeabout settlements and other matters when once we get there.”
“One thing more,” said Mr. Aggland. “I pay my own expenses.”
“Agreed,” replied Captain Stondon, laughing; “so long as you do not ask me to send you in a bill for board and lodging at Marshlands, you can pay what you like.”
And so the matter was settled; and for letting Mr. Aggland have his own way the officer received his reward.
Never had the Hill Farm been made pleasanter to him than it was during the week which intervened between the time the journey was proposed and the hour they started.
Everyone seemed now to feel that matters were finally settled, and that there was, therefore, nothing more to be done except to put on holiday faces, and make matters agreeable for Phemie and Captain Stondon.
What if the boys did tease their cousin? It only made a little more life about the Farm. What if Johnny King had the audacity to answerCaptain Stondon’s question as to whether Mr. Aggland was at home with a wink and a shrug, and a hand pointed over his shoulder, and “No, he is not; but Phemie is in there; and father says she is all you want at the Hill Farm!” The officer only boxed the young monkey’s ears, and went on his way with a light step, whilst Phemie’s whole time was taken up in expostulating and remonstrating.
“Uncle, are they to torment me? Uncle, is Duncan to say the things he does? Is he to go about the house singing, ‘Woo’d, and married, and a’?’—more particularly when Captain Stondon is here. It is enough to put a person from being married at all.”
“The lassie is glaikit wi’ pride,” remarked Duncan, from a safe distance.
“The Lord has been very good to her to put such a chance in her way,” added Mrs. Aggland, sanctimoniously.
“Blest if I don’t think Phemie is right, and that it is enough to prevent her marrying at all,hearing so much about it,” said Mr. Aggland; but for all that the boys would teaze, and Mrs. Aggland would talk concerning the wedding clothes, and Peggy M‘Nab would spend hours tracing out a brilliant future for her darling. On the whole, that future was by no means one to be scoffed at by a country girl whose entire fortune was under a couple of hundred pounds, and whose well-born relations refused to recognise her. It was very pleasant to become in a moment a person of importance—very charming to be the sun round which the whole household revolved—very delightful to have Mrs. Aggland alternately fawning upon her and making envious speeches.
Already Phemie was beginning to feel the beneficial change in her position, and from the height she had attained she was able clearly to see the inferiority of the station from which Captain Stondon had raised her. Distant, and more distant still, grew the heroes of her romantic visions. They were real men to her no more; and she could even smile to herself as she repeated a verse of Carrick’s “Rose of the Canongate,”a song she had learned in the old manse by the sea-shore:—
“She dream’d of lords, of knights, of squires,And men of high degree;But lords were scarce and knights were shy,So ne’er a joe had she.”
“She dream’d of lords, of knights, of squires,And men of high degree;But lords were scarce and knights were shy,So ne’er a joe had she.”
“She dream’d of lords, of knights, of squires,And men of high degree;But lords were scarce and knights were shy,So ne’er a joe had she.”
“She dream’d of lords, of knights, of squires,
And men of high degree;
But lords were scarce and knights were shy,
So ne’er a joe had she.”
Perhaps a letter Mr. Aggland received from her aunt, Miss Keller, in answer to one he wrote informing the Keller family of Captain Stondon’s proposals, and Phemie’s acceptance of them, had a little to do with this desirable change in her sentiments. “Miss Keller presented her compliments to Mr. Aggland, and on behalf of herself and her brother, General Keller, begged to inform Mr. A. that they were happy to hear the young person referred to in his letter was likely to be comfortably provided for. At the same time, as Lieutenant Keller’s unhappy marriage had severed all ties of relationship between them, General and Miss Keller trusted that Mr. Aggland would not think it necessary to enter into any further correspondence, as it was impossible for either General or Miss Keller to recognise in any way the child of such a degrading and ill-assorted union.”
“Never mind, my darling,” said Captain Stondon, when Phemie showed him this gracious epistle. “You can do without them, I hope;” and the girl was grateful for the tone in which the words were spoken, and thought more and more that things were not so bad as they seemed at first, and that she had great cause for thankfulness.
She had to keep a guard on her lips and refrain from wishing for anything, for so surely as she said she would fancy this, or something else, so surely it was purchased for her. If she had expressed a desire for the moon, Captain Stondon would straightway have set to work thinking how he might best procure it; and Phemie could often have bitten a piece off her tongue after she had exclaimed—
“I should like this. I wish I had that.”
“It seems as if I were always taking—taking, and I cannot bear it,” she said once, piteously; and Mr. Aggland coming to the rescue, said he could not bear it either.
“The girl will forget how to say any other wordthan ‘thank you’” he added; “you are making a perfect parrot of her. Give her what you like when once she is your wife, but hold your hand now;” and Captain Stondon agreed to do what they asked him on condition that the Norfolk journey was undertaken without delay.
“When once she is my wife she shall not need to wish,” he said; from which speech it will be seen that Phemie’s future husband had laid himself out to spoil her completely, if he could; and meantime he made so much of her—was so patient, so good, and kind, that Phemie, poor child, cried when he went away, and caused the man to fall more rapturously in love with her than ever.
If the weather had been better, the journey to London could have left nothing to be desired; but as it was, with the snow on the ground, Captain Stondon acknowledged to himself that, but for Mr. Aggland, he should have found the way between Carlisle and Euston Square of the longest.
Having Mr. Aggland, the time passed rapidly enough. They talked a good deal, they slept a good deal; and by-and-by, when they both awokeabout Stafford, Mr. Aggland roused himself thoroughly, and began to show his companion what really was in him.
He told tales of his own long ago: his boyhood’s scrapes, his manhood’s chances, the various adventures he had met with in the course of an irregular rambling life. The excitement of travelling, the sight of so many strange faces, the change and variety of going back after years to London, seemed to make a different creature of the individual who had always hitherto seemed to Captain Stondon a clever, eccentric “wild man of the hills.”
“If he would but shave himself and get his hair cut, and buy a respectable suit of clothes, he might pass anywhere,” thought the officer; but he would as soon have dreamed of suggesting any alteration in his attire to the Commander-in-Chief as to Mr. Aggland, for which reason, though every one they met, stared at the man as they might at a maniac, Captain Stondon appeared perfectly unconscious of the fact; and for any remark he made, Phemie’s uncle might have been “got up”like the greatest dandy that ever walked down Bond Street.
Only—he told the cabman to drive to an hotel in the City instead of to the “Burlington,” where he usually stopped, alleging as his reason that he wanted to be near the Shoreditch Station, so as to get on to Norfolk betimes the next morning.
When the next morning came, however, Mr. Aggland asked whether his companion would object to putting off their journey for a few hours.
“I see,” he said, “there is an afternoon train which arrives at Disley about nine o’clock in the evening. If that would suit you equally well, I should prefer it.”
“I have no objection,” answered Captain Stondon. “I must telegraph down, though, for them to meet us at the nine train, for otherwise I do not see exactly how we should ever get over from Disley to Marshlands.”
“Thank you,” said Mr. Aggland; “and would you—would you—mind my leaving you alone for a short time?”
The man actually coloured as he asked thisand after he had departed, Captain Stondon fell to wondering where his companion could be gone—on what secret mission he could have departed by himself.
“He surely has not seen some pretty woman and fallen in love with her,” soliloquised the officer; and then his thoughts went back to the pretty girl he had fallen in love with in Cumberland, and whom he hoped to have all to himself when next he passed through London.
How little he expected, when he was in town before, ever to marry—ever to see anybody again for whom he could care in the least; and now he was lying on a sofa in one of the sitting-rooms in the Castle and Falcon, building all kinds of beautiful edifices, while the City traffic thundered along Aldersgate Street, till finally, with its very monotony, it lulled him to sleep.
How long he slept he did not know, but at last he awoke with a start, and found a stranger sitting opposite to the sofa he occupied—a stranger, yet not a stranger—a person who was unknown to him, and yet whose face seemed familiar. CaptainStondon raised himself on his elbow to inquire who his visitor might be, but in the same moment recognised him, and exclaimed—
“Good heavens, Aggland! what have you been doing to yourself? I could not, for the life of me, think who you were.”
And indeed it was no marvel that Captain Stondon had been mystified; for Mr. Aggland who entered the Castle and Falcon at one o’clock was certainly remarkably unlike the Mr. Aggland who walked out of it at eleven. He had gone to a hair-dresser’s, he had gone to a tailor, and the consequence was that he came back another person. Hitherto his head had looked like the wings of an old raven that is moulting; now dexterous hands had brushed and smoothed his hair till it seemed really to be human hair, and not the mane of a wild colt. His moustache had been as the bristles of a well-worn hearth-broom; and heaven only knows through what torments of fixatrice he had passed in order to get it into decent trim. His whiskers had resembled nothing so much as long, bare, straggling branches of the hop plant; butthe barber’s skill having pruned away all the impoverishing suckers, the original hair on his cheeks remained trim and neat as could have been desired.
At his clothes Captain Stondon stared in amazement. About the legs and shoulders, about his feet and arms, Mr. Aggland was now as other men.
Excepting that he still wore his shirt-collar turned down—a fashion which in those days was not in vogue—the farmer looked quite like ordinary mortals. He had compassed that metamorphosis which Captain Stondon so earnestly desired to see; and having compassed this end, it is only fair to add that Mr. Aggland looked desperately ashamed of himself.
But he had thought it right to give heed to such vanities for Phemie’s sake; and a sense of duty consequently supported him through his trial.
“I did not care to go to your place looking an old guy,” he explained, awkwardly enough; “and as I should have had, sooner or later, to buy afew things for the wedding, I have bought them sooner instead of later—that is all.”
“You do my place too much honour,” answered Captain Stondon; but he wished, even as he said it, that he could be quite sure Mr. Aggland had not guessed what was passing through his mind as they journeyed southward together.
He had forgotten what keen vision living among the hills insures; he had not thought of the quick sensitiveness which catches at an idea from a look, a movement, a chance glance.
However, Mr. Aggland was all the more presentable for the change in his attire, and as he proceeded to say, how he had thought the day might come when somebody in Norfolk would know he was Phemie’s uncle, and that therefore—and to do such credit as he could to Captain Stondon—he wanted to make the best of himself, the officer was quite touched by the man’s unselfish thoughtfulness, by the love and affection which had compelled him to make an exertion that a weaker nature would have been ashamed to confess.
Everything he saw about the farmer made him regret more and more that his life had proved so hard an one for himself, so profitless an one for others; and this feeling made him treat his new friend in a manner which induced Mr. Aggland afterwards to declare to Phemie—
“If I had been a king, child, he could not have made more of me.”
Nor was Mr. Aggland, who had seen some fine estates in his lifetime, less impressed with the stateliness of Marshlands than with the courtesy of its owner.
The house was “far and away grander than Worton Court,” he told his niece, and if Mr. Aggland had entertained any doubts on the subject of Captain Stondon’ s social standing, his visit to Marshlands completely undeceived him.
He passed a week there—a whole week, though he had declared he “couldna, shouldna, daurna stay for more than a couple of days;” and many a long talk had he and Captain Stondon, sitting over the library fire, whilst dessert remained untouched beside them, and each forgot to passthe decanter which contained some of that “inimitable ’24 port.”
It was great promotion for Phemie. The longer Mr. Aggland stayed at Marshlands, and the more he saw of the master of Marshlands, the more unreal the whole affair seemed; and he went meekly back to Cumberland, feeling that neither he nor his could ever have made the girl half so happy as it was in both the power and the will of this rich gentleman to do.
The marriage was to take place in the spring, and Captain Stondon wanted to provide Phemie’s trousseau; but on this point Mr. Aggland was firm.
“There is no use in the child bringing her two or three halfpence in her hand to you,” he said, not without a certain sadness; “and so we may just as well spend her little fortune on the only thing she is ever likely to have to provide for herself. She shall not disgrace any of us, I promise you that; and till she is your wife, I would rather she was not indebted to you for anything.”
As usual, there was so much sense in what Mr. Aggland said, that Captain Stondon had to yield the point; and the consequence was that the farmer returned from London with such a quantity of luggage as caused his wife to stand aghast.
“Oh! Peggy; oh! Peggy,” cried Phemie Keller. “Those boxes are like something out of fairyland: there are silks and laces, and muslins and ribbons, and the most enchanting kid shoes, and kid gloves, Peggy—French gloves, like Lady Wauthrope’s. And whatever more I want, uncle says is to be ordered from Liverpool; but I shall never wear all those things out. I could not do it if I were to live for a thousand years. Come and look at them, and then tell me if you believe I am Phemie Keller. It is something like what we used to talk about, Peggy. Do you remember how we used to talk?”
“Ay, bairn, I mind it weel.” The time Miss Phemie dreamed her dreams was not so very far remote but that any one could recollect it. “And it seems to me, when I’m thinking ower it a’, thatthe Yerl has come across the hills to tak’ my darling frae me.”
“But you shall come too. I asked him about it, and he said, ‘Yes, of course;’ so you must get a trousseau, Peggy, and travel with us wherever we go.”
“Ye dinna want an auld fule like me to wait on ye,” answered Peggy; “an if ye did, I’d rather stay i’ the house I ken sae weel, wi’ the maister who has been aye sae gude to me, than gang roamin’ about the warld. But when ye are a great lady, mind I always said this would come to pass; for if he is not an yerl, he is as rich as one, I’ll be bound.”
“And I am sure he is kinder to me than any duke in the land could be,” agreed Phemie; but Phemie sighed for all that—a deep sigh—for the vanished hopes, for the dream hero that could return to her no more!