"'By Heaven!' said Bertram, 'it is the very ballad.'"
Mr. Seton closed the book with a sigh of pleasure, and asked them where they had been.
Elizabeth told him, and "Oh, yes, I remember now," he said. "Well, I hope you had a pleasant evening?"
"I think Mr. Christie had, anyway. That man's life is one long soiree-speech. And I wouldn't mind if he were really gay and jolly and carefree; but I know that at heart he is shrewd and calculating and un-simple as he can be. But, Father, the nicest thing has happened. Kirsty has got engaged to a man called Andrew Hamilton, a minister, a real jewel. You would like him, I know. But he hasn't got a church yet, although he is worth a dozen of the people who do get churches, and I was wondering what about Langhope? It's the nearest village to Etterick," she explained to Arthur. "It's high time Mr. Smillie retired. He is quite old, and he has money of his own, and could go and live in Edinburgh and attend all the Committees. It is such a good manse, and I can see Kirsty keeping it so spotless, and Mr. Hamilton working in the garden—and hens, perhaps—and everything so cosy. There's a specially good storeroom, too. I know, because we used to steal raisins and things out of it when we visited Mr. Smillie."
Mr. Seton laughed and called her an absurd creature, and Arthur asked if a good store-room was necessary to married happiness; but she heeded them not.
"You know, Father, it would be doing Langhope a really good turn to recommend Mr. Hamilton as their minister. How do I know, Arthur? I just know. His father was a Free Kirk minister, so he has been well brought up, and I know exactly the kind of sermons he will preach—solid well-reasoned discourses, with now and again an anecdote about the 'great Dr. Chalmers,' and with here and there a reference to 'the sainted Dr. Andrew Bonar' or 'Dr. Wilson of the Barclay.' Fine Free Kirk discourses. Such as you and I love, Father."
Her father shook his head at her; and Arthur, as he lit a cigarette, remarked that it was all Chinese to him. Elizabeth sat down on the arm of her father's chair.
"You had quite a success to-night, Arthur," she said kindly. "Mr. Christie called you a 'gentlemanly fellow,' and Mrs. Christie said, speaking for herself, she had no objection to the Cockney accent, she rather liked it! And oh! Father, your friend Mr. M'Cann was there. You know who I mean? He talked to me quite a lot. He has been politic-ing down in Ayrshire, and he told me that he rather reminds himself of the Covenanters at their best—Alexander Peden I think was the one he named."
Mr. Seton was carrying Guy Mannering to its place, but he stopped and said, "The wretched fellow!"
The utter wrath and disgust in his tone made his listeners shout with laughter, and Elizabeth said:
"Father, I love you. 'Cos why?"
Mr. Seton, still sore at this defiling of his idols, only grunted in reply.
"Because you are not too much of a saint after all. Oh!don't turn out the lights!"
"There was a lady once, 'tis an old story,That would not be a queen, that would she notFor all the mud in Egypt."Henry VIII.
"It is funny to think," Elizabeth said, "that last Friday I was looking forward to your visit with horror."
"Hospitable creature!" Arthur replied.
"And now," she continued, "I can't remember what it was like not to know you."
They were sitting in the drawing-room after dinner. Mr. Seton had gone out, and Buff was asleep after such an hour of crowded life as seldom fell to his lot. He had been very down at the thought of losing his friend, and had looked so small and forlorn when he said his reluctant good-night, that Arthur, to lighten his gloom, asked him if he had ever taken part in a sea-fight, and being answered in the negative, had carried him upstairs shoulder-high. Then issued from the bathroom such a splashing of water, such gurgles of laughter and yells of triumph as Buff, a submarine, dashed from end to end of the large bath, torpedoing warships under Arthur's directions, that Elizabeth, Marget, and Ellen all rushed upstairs to say that if the performance did not stop at once the house would certainly be flooded.
As it was, fresh pyjamas had to be fetched, the pair laid out being put out of action by the wash of the waves. Then Arthur carried Buff to his room and threw him head-over-heels into bed, sitting by his side for quite half an hour and relating the most thrilling tales of pirates; finally presenting him with two fat half-crowns, and promising that he, Buff, should go up in an aeroplane at the earliest opportunity.
Buff, as he lay pillowed on that promise, his two half-crowns laid on a chair beside him along with one or two other grubby treasures, and his heart warm with gratitude, wondered and wondered what he could do in return—and still wondering fell asleep.
Elizabeth was knitting a stocking for her young brother, and counted audibly at intervals; Arthur lay in a large arm-chair and looked into the fire.
"Buff is frightfully sorry to lose you.One two—one two.This is a beautiful 'top,' don't you think? Rather like a Persian tile."
"Yes," said Arthur rather absently.
There was silence for a few minutes; then Elizabeth said, "There is something very depressing about last nights—we would really have been much better at the Band of Hope, and I would have been doing my duty, and thus have acquired merit. I hate people going away. When nice people come to a house they should just stay on and on, after the fashion of princes in fairy-tale stories seeking their fortunes. They stayed about twenty years before it seemed to strike them that their people might be getting anxious."
"For myself," said Arthur, "I ask nothing better. You know that, don't you?"
"One two—one two," Elizabeth counted. She looked up from her knitting with twinkling eyes. "Did you hate very much coming? or were you passive in the managing hands of Aunt Alice?"
He looked at her impish face blandly, then took out his cigarette case, chose a cigarette carefully, lit it, and smoked with placid enjoyment.
"Cross?" she asked, in a few minutes.
"Not in the least. Merely wondering if I might tell you the truth."
"I wouldn't," said Elizabeth. "Fiction is always stranger and more interesting. By the way, are you to be permanently at the Foreign Office now?"
"I haven't the least notion, but I shall be there for the next few months. When do you go to London?"
In the spring, she told him, probably in April, and added that her Aunt Alice had been a real fairy godmother to her.
"Very few ministers' daughters have had my chances of seeing men and cities. And some day, some day when Buff has gone to school and Father has retired and has time to look about him, we are going to India to see the boys."
"You have a very good time in London, I expect," Arthur said. "I can imagine that Aunt Alice makes a most tactful chaperon, and I hear you are very popular."
"'Here's fame!'" quoted Elizabeth flippantly. "What else did Aunt Alice tell you about me?"
Arthur Townshend put the end of his cigarette carefully into the ash-tray and leant forward.
"You really want to know—then here goes. She told me you were tall—like a king's own daughter; that your hair was as golden as a fairy tale, and your eyes as grey as glass. She told me of suitors waiting on your favours——"
Elizabeth dropped her knitting with a gasp.
"If Aunt Alice told you all that—well, I've no right to say a word, for she did it to glorify me, and perhaps her kind eyes and heart made her think it true; but surely you don't think I am such a conceited donkey as to believe it."
"But isn't it true?—about the suitors, I mean?"
"Suitors! How very plural you are!"
"But I would rather keep them in the plural," he pleaded; "they are more harmless that way. But Aunt Alice did talk about some particular fellow—I think Gordon was his wretched name."
"Bother!" said Elizabeth. "I've dropped a stitch." She bent industriously over her knitting.
"I'm waiting, Elizabeth."
"What for?"
"To hear about Mr. Gordon."
"Oh! you must ask Aunt Alice," Elizabeth said demurely. "She is your fount of information." Then she threw down her knitting. "Arthur, don't let's talk any more about such silly subjects. They don't interest me in the least."
"Is Mr. Gordon a silly subject?"
"The silliest ever. No—of course he isn't. Why do you make me say nasty things? He is only silly to me because I am an ungrateful creature. I don't expect I shall ever marry. You see, I would never be a grateful wife, and it seems a pity to use up a man, so to speak, when there are so few men and so many women who would be grateful wives and may have to go without. I think I am a born spinster, and as long as I have got Father and Buff and the boys in India I shall be more than content."
"Buff must go to school soon," he warned her. "Your brothers may marry; your father can't be with you always."
"Oh, don't try to discourage me in my spinster path. You are as bad as Aunt Alice. She thinks of me as living a sort of submerged existence here in Glasgow, and only coming to the surface to breathe when I go to London or travel with her. But I'm not in the least stifled with my life. I wouldn't change with anybody; and as for getting married and going off with trunks of horrid new unfamiliar clothes, and a horrid new unfamiliar husband, I wouldn't do it. I haven't much ambition; I don't ask for adventures; though I look so large and bold, I have but a peeping and a timorous soul."
She smiled across at Arthur, as if inviting him to share her point of view; but he looked into the fire and did not meet her glance.
"Then you think," he said, "that you will be happy all your life—alone?"
"Was it Sydney Smith who gave his friends forty recipes for happiness? I remember three of them," she counted on her fingers, "a bright fire, a kettle singing on the hob, a bag of lollipops on the mantelshelf—all easy to come at. I can't believe that I shall be left entirely alone—I should be so scared o' nights. Surely someone will like me well enough to live with me—perhaps Buff, if he continues to have the contempt for females that he now has; but anyway I shall hold on to the bright fire and the singing kettle and the bag of lollipops."
She sat for a moment, absent-eyed, as if she were looking down the years; then she laughed.
"But I shall be a frightfully long gaunt spinster," she said.
Arthur laughed with her, and said:
"Elizabeth, you aren't really a grown-up woman at all. You're a schoolboy."
"I like that 'grown-up,'" she laughed; "it sounds so much less mature than the reality. I'm twenty-eight, did you know? Already airting towards spinsterhood."
Arthur shook his head at her.
"In your father's words, you are an absurd creature. Sing to me, won't you? seeing it's my last night."
"Yes." She went to the piano. "What shall I sing? 'A love-song or a song of good life'?"
"A love-song," said Arthur, and finished the quotation. "'I care not for good life.'"
Elizabeth giggled.
"Our language is incorrigibly noble. You know how it is when you go to the Shakespeare Festival at Stratford? I come away so filled with majestic words that I can hardly resist greeting our homely chemist with 'Ho! apothecary!' But I'm not going to sing of love. 'I'm no' heedin' for't,' as Marget says.... This is a little song out of a fairy tale—a sort of good-bye song:
'If fairy songs and fairy goldWere tunes to sell and gold to spend,Then, hearts so gay and hearts so bold,We'd find the joy that has no end.But fairy songs and fairy goldAre but red leaves in Autumn's play.The pipes are dumb, the tale is told,Go back to realms of working day.
The working day is dark and long,And very full of dismal things;It has no tunes like fairy song,No hearts so brave as fairy kings.Its princes are the dull and old,Its birds are mute, its skies are grey;And quicker far than fairy goldIts dreary treasures fleet away.
But all the gallant, kind and trueMay haply hear the fairy drum,Which still must beat the wide world through,Till Arthur wake and Charlie come.And those who hear and know the callWill take the road with staff in hand,And after many a fight and fall,Come home at last to fairy-land.'"
*****
They were half-way through breakfast next morning before Buff appeared. He stood at the door with a sheet of paper in his hand, looking rather distraught. His hair had certainly not been brushed, and a smear of paint disfigured one side of his face. He was not, as Mr. Taylor would have put it, looking his "brightest and bonniest."
"I've been in Father's study," he said in answer to his sister's question, and handed Arthur Townshend the paper he carried.
"It's for you," he said, "a sea-fight. It's the best I can do. I've used up nearly all the paints in my box."
He had certainly been lavish with his colours, and the result was amazing in the extreme.
Mr. Townshend expressed himself delighted, and discussed the points of the picture with much insight.
"We shall miss you," Mr. Seton said, looking very kindly at him. "It has been almost like having one of our own boys back. You must come again, and to Etterick next time."
"Aw yes," cried Buff, "come to Etterick and see my jackdaw with the wooden leg." He had drawn his chair so close to Arthur's that to both of them the business of eating was gravely impeded.
"Come for the shooting," said Mr. Seton.
"Yes," said Elizabeth, as she filled out a third cup of tea for her father, "and the fourth footman will bring out your lunch while the fifth footman is putting on his livery. Don't be so buck-ish, Mr. Father. Our shooting, Arthur, consists of a heathery hillside inhabited by many rabbits, a few grouse—very wild, and an ancient blackcock called Algernon. No one can shoot Algernon; indeed, he is such an old family friend that it would be very ill manners to try. When he dies a natural death we mean to stuff him."
"But may I really come? Is this apukkainvitation?"
"It is," Elizabeth assured him. "As the Glasgow girl said to the Edinburgh girl, 'What's a slice of ham and egg in a house like ours?' We shall all be frightfully glad to see you, except perhaps old Watty Laidlaw—I told you about him? He is very anxious when we have guests, he is so afraid we are living beyond our means. One day last summer I had some children from the village to tea, and he stood on the hillside and watched them cross the moor, then went in to Marget and said in despairing accents, 'Pit oot eighty mair cups. They're comin' ower the muir like a locust drift.' The description of the half-dozen poor little stragglers as a 'locust drift' was almost what Robert Browning calls 'too wildly dear.'"
"This egg's bad," Buff suddenly announced.
"Is it, Arthur?" Elizabeth asked.
Mr. Townshend regarded the egg through his monocle.
"It looks all right," he said; "but Buff evidently requires his eggs to be like Cæsar's wife."
"Don't waste good food, boy," his father told him. "There is nothing wrong with the egg."
"It's been a nest-egg," said Buff in a final manner, and began to write in a small book.
Elizabeth remarked that Buff was a tiresome little boy about his food, and that there might come a time when he would think regretfully of the good food he had wasted. "And what are you writing?" she finished.
"It's my diary," said Buff, putting it behind his back. "Father gave it me. No, you can't read it, but Arthur can if he likes, 'cos he's going away"; and he poked the little book into his friend's hand.
Arthur thanked him gravely, and turned to the first entry:
New Year's Day.
Good Rissolution. Not to be crool to gerls.
The other entries were not up to the high level of the first, but were chiefly the rough jottings of nefarious plans which, one could gather, generally seemed to miscarry. On 12th August was printed and emphatically underlined the announcement that on that date Arthur Townshend would arrive at Etterick.
That the diary was for 1911 and that this was the year of grace 1913 troubled Buff not at all: years made little difference to him.
Arthur pointed this out as he handed back the book, and rubbing Buff's mouse-coloured hair affectionately, quoted:
"Poor Jim Jay got stuck fast in yesterday."
"But I haven't," Buff protested; "I'll know it's 1914 though it says 1911."
He put his diary into his safest pocket and asked if he might go to the station.
"Oh, I think not," his father said. "Why go into town this foggy morning?"
"He wants the 'hurl,'" said Elizabeth. "Arthur that's a new word for you. Father, we should make Arthur pass an examination and see what knowledge he has gathered. Let's draw up a paper:
I. What is—(a) A Wee Free?(b) A U.P.?II. Show in what way the Kelvinside accentdiffers from that of Pollokshields.III. What is a 'hurl'?
I can't think of anything else. Anyway, I don't believe you could answer one of my questions, and I am only talking for talking's sake, because we are all so sad. By the way, when you say Good-bye to Marget and Ellen shake hands, will you? They expect it."
"Of course," said Arthur.
The servants came in for prayers.
Mr. Seton prayed for "travelling mercies" for the friend who was about to leave them to return to the great city.
"Here's the cab!" cried Buff, and rushed for his coat. His father followed him, and Arthur turned to Elizabeth.
"Will you write to me sometimes?"
Elizabeth stooped to pick up Launcelot, the cat.
"Yes," she said, "if you don't mindprattle. I so rarely have any thoughts."
He assured her that he would be grateful for anything she cared to send him.
"Tell me what you are doing; about the church people you visit, if the Peggy-child gets better, if Mr. Taylor makes a joke, and of course about your father and Buff. Everything you say or do interests me. You know that, don't you—Lizbeth?"
But Elizabeth kept her eyes on the purring cat, and—"Isn't he a polite young man, puss-cat?" was all she said.
Buff's voice was raised in warning from the hall.
"Coming," cried Arthur; but he still tarried.
Elizabeth put the cat on her shoulder and led the way.
"Launcelot and I shall see you off from the doorstep. You mustn't miss your train. As Marget says, 'Haste ye back.'"
"You've promised to write.... There's loads of time, Buff." He was on the lowest step now. "Till April—you are sure to come in April?"
"Reasonably sure, but it's an uncertain world.... My love to Aunt Alice."
"Then said he, I wish you a fair day when you set out for Mount Zion, and shall be glad to see that you go over the river dry-shod. But she answered, Come wet, come dry, I long to be gone; for however the weather is on my journey, I shall have time to sit down and rest me and dry me."The Pilgrim's Progress.
"Pure religion and undefiled," we are told, "before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction and keep ourselves unspotted from the world." If this be a working definition of Christianity, then James Seton translated its letter as but few men do, into a spirit and life of continuous and practical obedience. No weary, sick, or grieved creature had to wait for his minister's coming. The congregation was widely scattered, but from Dennistoun to Pollokshields, from Govanhill to Govan, in all weathers he trudged—cars were a weariness to him, walking a pleasure—carrying with him comfort to the comfortless, courage to the faint-hearted, and a strong hope to the dying.
On the day that Arthur Townshend left them he said to his daughter:
"I wonder, Elizabeth, if you would go and see Mrs. Veitch this afternoon? She is very ill, and I have a meeting that will keep me till about seven o'clock. If you bring a good report I shan't go to see her till to-morrow."
"Mrs. Veitch who makes the treacle-scones? I am sorry. Of course I shall go to see her. I wonder what I could take her? She will hate to be ill, indomitable old body that she is! Are you going, Father? I shall do your bidding, but I'm afraid Mrs. Veitch will think me a poor substitute. Anyway, I'm glad it isn't Mrs. Paterson you want me to visit. I so dislike the smug, resigned way she answers when I ask her how she is: 'Juist hingin' by a tack.' I expect that 'tack' will last her a good many years yet. Buff, what are you going to do this afternoon?"
"Nothing," said Buff. He sat gloomily on a chair, with his hands in his pockets. "I'm as dull as a bull," he added.
His sister did not ask the cause of his depression. She sat down on a low chair and drew him on to her lap, and cuddled him up and stroked his hair, and Buff, who as a rule sternly repulsed all caresses, laid his head on her shoulder and, sniffing dolefully, murmured that he couldn't bear to have Arthur go away, and that he had nothing to look forward to except Christmas and that was only one day.
"Nothing to look forward to! Oh, Buff! Think of spring coming and the daffodils. And Etterick, and the puppies you haven't seen yet. And I'll tell you what. When Arthur comes, I shouldn't wonder if we had a sea-fight on the mill-pond—on rafts, you know."
Buff sat up, his grubby little handkerchief still clutched in his hand, tears on his lashes but in his eyes a light of hope.
"Rafts!" he said. He slid to the floor. "Rafts!" he repeated. There was dizzy magic in the word. Already, in thought, he was lashing spars of wood together.
Five minutes later Elizabeth, carrying a basket filled with fresh eggs, grapes, and sponge-cakes, was on her way to call on Mrs. Veitch, while at home Marget stood gazing, speechless with wrath, at the wreck Buff had made of her tidy stick-house.
When Elizabeth reached her destination and knocked, the door was opened by Mrs. Veitch's daughter Kate, who took her into the room and asked her to take a seat for a minute and she would come. Left alone, Elizabeth looked round the cherished room and noticed that dust lay thick on the sideboard that Mrs. Veitch had dusted so frequently and so proudly, and that the crochet antimacassars on the sofa hung all awry.
She put them tidy, pulled the tablecover even, straightened a picture and was wondering if she might dust the sideboard with a spare handkerchief she had in her coat (somehow it hurt her to see the dust) when her attention was caught by a photograph that hung on the wall—a family group of two girls and two boys.
She went forward to study it. That funny little girl with the pulled-back hair must be Kate she decided. She had not changed much, it was the same good, mild face. The other girl must be the married daughter in America. But it was the boys she was interested in. She had heard her father talk of Mrs. Veitch's sons, John and Hugh. John had been his mother's stand-by, a rock for her to lean on; and Hugh had been to them both a joy and pride.
Elizabeth, looking at the eager, clever face in the faded old picture, understood why, even after twenty years, her father still talked sometimes of Hugh Veitch, and always with that quick involuntary sigh that we give to the memory of those ardent souls so well equipped for the fight but for whom the drums ceased to beat before the battle had well begun.
John and his mother had pinched themselves to send Hugh to college, where he was doing brilliantly well, when he was seized with diphtheria and died. In a week his brother followed him, and for twenty years Mrs. Veitch and Kate had toiled on alone.
Elizabeth turned with a start as Kate came into the room. She looked round drearily. "This room hasna got a dust for days. I'm not a manager like ma mother. I can sew well enough, but I get fair baffled in the house when there's everything to do."
"Poor Kate! Tell me, how is your mother?"
"No' well at all. The doctor was in this morning, and he's coming up again later, but he says there is nothing he can do. She's just worn out, and can you wonder? Many a time I've been fair vexed to see her toilin' with lodgers; but you see we had just ma pay, and a woman's pay is no' much to keep a house on, and she wanted to make a few shillings extra. And, Miss Seton, d'ye know what she's been doing a' these years? Scraping and hoarding every penny she could, and laying it away, to pay ma passage to America. Ma sister Maggie's there, ye know, and when she's gone she says I'm to go to Maggie. A' these years she's toiled with this before her. She had such a spirit, she would never give in." Kate wiped her eyes with her apron. "Come in and see ma mother."
"Oh, I don't think so. She oughtn't to see anyone when she is so ill."
"The doctor says it makes no difference, and she'll be vexed no' to see you. I told her you were in. She had aye a notion of you."
"If you think I won't do her harm, I should love to see her," said Elizabeth, getting up; and Kate led the way to the kitchen. The fog had thickened, and the windows in the little eyrie of a kitchen glimmered coldly opaque. From far beneath came the sounds of the railway.
Mrs. Veitch lay high on her pillows, her busy hands folded. She had given in at last.
Elizabeth thought she was sleeping, but she opened her eyes, and, seeing her visitor, smiled slightly.
"Are ye collectin' the day?" she asked.
"No," Elizabeth said, leaning forward and speaking very gently. "I don't want any money to-day. I came to ask for you. I am so sorry you are ill."
Mrs. Veitch looked at her with that curious appraising look that very sick people sometimes give one.
"Ay. I'm aboot by wi' it noo, and I em no' vexed. I'm terrible wearied."
"You are very wearied now," Elizabeth said, stroking the work-roughened hands that lay so calmly on the counterpane—all her life Mrs. Veitch had been a woman of much self-control, and in illness the habit did not desert her—"you are very wearied now, but you will get a good rest and soon be your busy self again."
"Na, I've been wearied for years.... Ma man died forty years syne, an' I've had ma face agin the wind ever since. That last nicht he lookit at the fower bairns—wee Hugh was a baby in ma airms—and he says,'Ye've aye been fell, Tibbie. Be fell noo.'Lyin' here, I'm wonderin' what ma life's been—juist a fecht to get the denner ready, and a fecht to get the tea ready, an' a terrible trauchle on the washin'-days. It vexes me to think I've done so little to help ither folk. I never had the time."
"Ah! but you're forgetting," said Elizabeth. "The people you helped remember. I have heard—oh! often—from one and another how you did a sick neighbour's washing, and gave a hot meal to children whose mothers had to work out, and carried comfort to people in want. Every step your tired feet took on those errands is known to God."
The sick woman hardly seemed to hear. Her eyes had closed again, and she had fallen into the fitful sleep of weakness.
Elizabeth sat and looked at the old face, with its stern, worn lines. Here was a woman who had lived her hard, upright life, with no soft sayings and couthy ways, and she was dying as she had lived, "uncheered and undepressed" by the world's thoughts of her.
The fog crept close to the window.
Kate put the dishes she had washed into the press. The London express rushed past on its daily journey. The familiar sound struck on the dim ear, and Mrs. Veitch asked, "Is that ma denner awa' by?"
Kate wiped her eyes. The time-honoured jest hurt her to-day.
"Poor mother!" she said. "She's aye that comical."
"When I was a lassie," said Mrs. Veitch, "there was twae things I had a terrible notion of—a gig, an' a gairden wi' berries. Ma mither said, 'Bode for a silk goon and ye'll get a sleeve o't,' and Alec said, 'Bide a wee, lassie, an I'll get ye them baith.' Ay, but, Alec ma man, ye've been in yer grave this forty year, an' I've been faur frae gairdens."
The tired mind was wandering back to the beginning of things. She plucked at the trimming on the sleeve of her night-dress.
"I made this goon when I was a lassie for ma marriage. They ca'ed this 'flowering.' I mind fine sittin' sewin' it on simmer efternunes, wi' my mither makin' the tea. Scones an' new-kirned butter an' skim-milk cheese.I can taste that tea.Naebody could mak' tea like ma mither. I wish I had a drink o' it the noo, for I'm terrible dry. There was a burn ran by oor door an' twae muckle stanes by the side o' it, and Alec and me used to sit there and crack—and crack."
Her voice trailed off, and Elizabeth looked anxiously at Kate so see if so much talking was not bad for her mother; but Kate said she thought it pleased her to talk. It was getting dark and the kitchen was lit only by the sparkle of the fire.
"I'd better light the gas," Kate said, reaching for the matches. "The doctor'll be in soon."
Elizabeth watched her put a light to the incandescent burner, and when she turned again to the bed she found the sick woman's eyes fixed on her face.
"You're like your faither, lassie," said the weak voice. "It's one-and-twenty years sin' I fell acquaint wi' him. I had flitted to this hoose, and on the Sabbath Day I gaed into the nearest kirk to see what kinna minister they hed. I've niver stayed awa' willingly a Sabbath sin' syne.... The first time he visited me kent by ma tongue that I was frae Tweedside."
"'Div 'ee ken Kilbucho?' I speired at him.
"'Fine,' he says.
"'Div 'ee ken Newby and the gamekeeper's hoose by the burn?"
"'I guddled in that burn when I was a boy,' he says; and I cud ha' grat. It was like a drink o' cauld water.... I aye likit rinnin' water. Mony a time I've sat by that window on a simmer's nicht and made masel' believe that I could hear Tweed. It ran in ma ears for thirty years, an' a body disna forget. There's a bit in the Bible about a river ... read it."
Elizabeth lifted the Bible and looked at it rather hopelessly.
"I'm afraid I don't know where to find it," she confessed.
"Tuts, lassie, yer faither would ha' kent," said Mrs. Veitch.
"There is a river," Elizabeth quoted from memory,—"there is a river the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God."
"Ay! that's it." She lay quiet, as if satisfied.
"Mother," said Kate. "Oh! Mother!"
The sick woman turned to her daughter.
"Ay, Kate. Ye've been a guid lassie to me, and noo ye'll gang to Maggie in Ameriky. The money is there, an' I can gang content. Ye wudna keep me Kate, when I've waited so lang? I'll gang as blythe doon to the River o' Death as I gaed fifty years syne to ma trystin', and Alec will meet me at the ither side as he met me then ... and John, ma kind son, will be waitin' for me, an' ma wee Hughie——"
"And your Saviour, Mother," Kate reminded her anxiously.
Mrs. Veitch turned on her pillow like a tired child.
"I'll need a lang, lang rest, an' a lang drink o' the Water of Life."
"Oh! Mother!" said Kate. "You're no' going to leave me."
Elizabeth laid her hand on her arm. "Don't vex her, Kate. She's nearly through with this tough world."
The doctor was heard at the door.
"I'll go now, and Father will come down this evening. Oh! poor Kate, don't cry. It is so well with her."
That night, between the hours of twelve and one, at the turning of the tide, the undaunted soul of the old country-woman forded the River, and who shall say that the trumpets did not sound for her on the other side!
"He was the Interpreter to untrustful soulsThe weary feet he led into the coolSoft plains called Ease; he gave the faint to drink:Dull hearts he brought to the House Beautiful.The timorous knew his heartening on the brinkWhere the dark River rolls.He drew men from the town of Vanity,Past Demas' mine and Castle Doubting's towers,To the green hills where the wise shepherds be,And Zion's songs are crooned among the flowers."J.B.
The winter days slipped past. Christmas came, bringing with it to Buff the usual frantic anticipations, and consequent flatness when it was borne in on him that he had not done so well in the way of presents and treats as he felt he deserved.
It was a hard winter, and there was more than the usual hardships among the very poor. James Seton, toiling up and down the long stairs of the Gorbals every day of the week and preaching three times on the Sabbath, was sometimes very weary.
Elizabeth, too, worked hard and laughed much, as was her way.
It took very little to make her laugh, as she told Arthur Townshend.
"This has been a nasty day," she wrote. "The rain has never ceased—drippingyellowrain. (By the way, did you ever read in Andrew Lang'sMy Own Fairy Bookabout the Yellow Dwarf who bled yellow blood? Isn't it a nice horrible idea?)
"At breakfast it struck me that Father looked frail, and Buff sneezed twice, and I made up my mind he was going to take influenza or measles, probably both, so I didn't feel in any spirits to face the elements when I waded out to do my shopping. But when I went into the fruit shop and asked if the pears were good and got the reply 'I'm afraid we've nothing startling in the pear line to-day,' I felt a good deal cheered. Later, walking in Sauchiehall Street, I met Mrs. Taylor in her 'prayer-meeting bonnet,' her skirt well kilted, goloshes on her feet, and her circular waterproof draping her spare figure. After I had assuaged her fears about my own health and Father's and Buff's I complimented her on her courage in being out on such a day.
"'I hed to come,' she assured me earnestly; 'I'm on ma way to the Religious Tract Society to get somecards for mourners.'
"The depressing figure she made, her errand, and the day she had chosen for it, sent me home grinning broadly. Do you know that in spite of ill weather, it is spring? There are three daffodils poking up their heads in the garden, and I have got a new hat to go to London with some day in April. What day, you ask, is some day? I don't know yet. When Buff was a very little boy, a missionary staying in the house said to him, 'And some day you too will go to heaven and sing among the angels.' Buff, with the air of having rather a good excuse for refusing a dull invitation, said, 'I can't gosome day; that's the day I'm going to Etterick.'"
But Elizabeth did not go to London in April.
One Sabbath in March, James Seton came in after his day's work admitting himself strangely tired.
"My work has been a burden to me to-day, Lizbeth," he said; "I'm getting to be an old done man."
Elizabeth scoffed at the idea, protesting that most men were mere youths at sixty. "Just think of Gladstone," she cried. (That eminent statesman was a favourite weapon to use against her father when he talked of his age, though, truth to tell, his longevity was the one thing about him that she found admirable). "Father, I should be ashamed to say that I was done at sixty."
Albeit she was sadly anxious, and got up several times in the night to listen at her father's door.
He came down to breakfast next morning looking much as usual, but when he rose from the table he complained of faintness, and the pinched blue look on his face made Elizabeth's heart beat fast with terror as she flew to telephone for the doctor. A nurse was got, and for a week James Seton was too ill to worry about anything; but the moment he felt better he wanted to get up and begin work again.
"It's utter nonsense," he protested, "that I should lie here when I'm perfectly well. Ask the doctor, when he comes to-day, if I may get up to-morrow. If he consents, well and good; but if he doesn't, I'll get up just the same. Dear me, girl," as Elizabeth tried to make him see reason, "my work will be terribly in arrears as it is."
Elizabeth and Buff were in the drawing-room when the doctor came that evening. It was a clear, cold March night, and a bright fire burned on the white hearth; pots of spring flowers stood about the room, scenting the air pleasantly.
Buff had finished learning his lessons and was now practising standing on his head in the window, his heels perilously near the plate glass. Both he and Elizabeth were in great spirits, the cloud of their father's illness having lifted. Elizabeth had been anxious, how anxious no one knew, but to-night she welcomed the doctor without a qualm.
"Come to the fire, Dr. Nelson," she said; "these March evenings are cold. Well, and did you find Father very stiff-necked and rebellious? He is going to defy you and get up to-morrow, so he tells me. His work is calling him—but I don't suppose we ought to allow him to work for a time?"
Then the doctor told her that her father's work was finished.
With great care he might live for years, but there was serious heart trouble, and there must be no excitement, no exertion that could be avoided: he must never preach again.
*****
A week later Elizabeth wrote to Arthur Townshend:
"Thank you for your letters and your kind thoughts of us. Aunt Alice wasn't hurt, was she? that we didn't let her come. There are times when even the dearest people are a burden.
"Father is wonderfully well now; in fact, except for occasional breathless turns, he seems much as usual. You mustn't make me sorry for myself. I am not to be pitied. The doctor says 'many years'; it is so much better than I dared to hope. I wonder if I could make you understand my feeling? If you don't mind a leaf from a family journal, I should like to try.
"'Tell me about when you were young,' Buff sometimes says, and it does seem a long time ago since the world began.... When I remember my childhood I think the fairy pipes in Hans Andersen's tale that blew everyone into their right place must have given us our Mother. She was the proper-est Mother that ever children had.
"'Is Mother in?' was always our first question when we came in from our walks, and if Mother was in all was right with the world. She had a notion—a blissful notion as you may suppose for us—that children ought to have the very best time possible. And we had it. Funny little happy people we were, not penned up in nurseries with starched nurses, but allowed to be a great deal with our parents, and encouraged each to follow our own bent.
"Our old nurse, Leezie, had been Father's nurse, and to her he was still 'Maister Jimmie.' You said when you were here that you liked the nursery with its funny old prints and chintzes, but you should have seen it with Leezie in it. She kept it a picture of comfort, and was herself the most comfortable thing in it, with her large clean rosy face and white hair, her cap with bright ribbons, and her most capacious lap. Many a time have I tumbled into that lap crying from some childish ache—a tooth, a cut finger, perhaps hurt feelings, to be comforted and told in her favourite formula 'It'll be better gin morning.' She had no modern notions about bringing up children, but in spite of that (or because of that?) we very rarely ailed anything. Once, when Alan's nose bled violently without provocation, Mother, after wrestling with a medical book, said it might be connected with the kidneys. 'Na, na,' said Leezie, and gave her 'exquisite reason' for disbelief, 'his nose is a lang gait frae his kidneys.' In the evenings she always sat, mending, on a low chair beside a table which held the mending basket and a mahogany workbox, a gift to her from our grandmother. As a great treat we were sometimes allowed to lift all the little lids of the fittings, and look at our faces in the mirror, and try to find the opening of the carved ivory needlecase which had come from India all the way. Our noise never disturbed Leezie. 'Be wise, noo, like guid bairns,' she would say when we got beyond reason; and if we quarrelled violently, she would shake her head and tell herself, 'Puir things! They'll a' gree when they meet at frem't kirk doors'—a dark saying which seldom failed to quell even the most turbulent.
"On Sabbath evenings, when the mending basket and the workbox were shut away in the cupboard, the little table was piled with vivid religious weeklies, such asThe Christian Herald, and Leezie pored over them, absorbed, for hours. Then she would remove her glasses, give a long satisfied sigh, and say, 'Weel, I hev read mony a stert-ling thing this day.'
"Above the mantelshelf hung Leezie's greatest treasure—a text,Thou God seest me, worked in wool, and above the words, also in wool, a large staring eye. The eye was, so to speak, a cloud on my young life. I knew—Mother had taken it down and I had examined it—that it was only canvas and wool, but if I happened to be left alone in the room it seemed to come alive and stare at me with a terrible questioning look, until I was reduced to wrapping myself up in the window curtains, 'trembling to think, poor child of sin,' that it was really the eye of God, which seems to prove that, even at a very tender age, I had by no means a conscience 'void of offence.'
"We were brought up sturdily on porridge (I can hear Leezie's voice now—'Bairns, come to yer porridges') and cold baths, on the Shorter Catechism, the Psalms of David, and—to use your own inelegant phrase—great chunks of the Bible. When I read in books, where people talk of young men and women driven from home and from the paths of virtue by the strictness of their Calvinistic parents and the narrowness and unloveliness of their faith, I think of our childhood and of our father, and I 'lawff,' like Fish. Calvinism is a strong creed, too apt, as someone says, to dwarf to harsh formality, but those of us who have been brought up under its shadow know that it can be in very truth a tree of life, with leaves for the healing of the nations.
"Why do some families care so much more for each other than others? Has it anything to do with the upbringing? Is it the kind of mother one has? I don't know, but I know we grew up adoring each other in the frankest and most absurd way. Not that we showed it by caresses or by endearing names. The nearest we came to an expression of affection was at night, when the clamour of the day was stilled and bedtime had come. In that evening hour Sandy, who fought 'bitter and reg'lar' all day but who took the Scriptures very literally, would say to Walter and Alan, 'Have I hit you to-day? Well, I'm sorry.' If a handsome expression of forgiveness was not at once forthcoming, 'Say you forgive me,' he warned them, 'or I'll hit you again.'
"When we were safely tucked away in bed, my door being left open that I might shout through to the boys, Sandy would say, 'Good-night, Lizbeth,' and then 'WeeLizbeth' and I would reply, 'Good-night, Sandy.WeeSandy.' The same ceremony was gone through with Walter and Alan, and then but not till then, we could fall asleep, at peace with all men.
"We were none of us mild or docile children, but Sandy was much the wickedest—and infinitely the most lovable. Walter and Alan and I were his devoted slaves. He led us into the most involved scrapes, for no one could devise mischief as he could, and was so penitent when we had to suffer the consequences with him. He was always fighting boys much bigger than himself, but he was all tenderness to anything weak or ugly or ill-used. At school he was first in both lessons and games, and as he grew up everything seemed to come easy to him, from boxing to sonnet writing.
"It isn't always easy to like beautiful, all-conquering sort of people, but I never heard of anyone not liking Sandy. He had such a disarming smile and such kind, honest eyes.
"He was easily the most brilliant man of his year at Oxford; great things were predicted for him; he seemed to walk among us 'both hands full of gifts, carrying with nonchalance the seeds of a most influential life.' And he died—he died at Oxford in his last summer-term, of a chill got on the river. Even now, after five years, I can't write about it; my eyes dazzle.... Three months later my mother died.
"We hardly realized that she was ill, for she kept her happy face and was brave and gay and lovely to the end. Mother and Sandy were so like each other that so long as we kept Mother we hadn't entirely lost Sandy, but now our house was left unto us desolate.
"Of course we grew happy again. We found, almost reluctantly, that we could remember sad things yet be gay! The world could not go on if the first edge of grief remained undulled—but the sword had pierced the heart and the wound remains. On that June night when the nightingale sang, and the grey shadow crept over Sandy's face, I realized that nothing was too terrible to happen. Before that night the earth had seemed a beautifully solid place. I had pranced on it and sung the 'loud mad song' of youth without the slightest misgiving, but after that I knew what Thomas Nash meant when he wrote:
'Brightness falls from the air;Queens have died young and fair;Dust hath closed Helen's eyes,'
and I said, 'I will walk softly all my days.'
"Only Father remained to us. I clung to him as the one prop that held up my world. Since then I have gone in bondage to the fear that he might be snatched from me as Mother and Sandy were. When otherwise inoffensive people hinted to me that my father looked tired or ill, I hated them for the sick feeling their words gave me. So, you see, when the doctor said that with care he might live many years, I was so relieved for myself that I could not be properly sorry for Father. It is hard for him. I used to dream dreams about what we would do when he retired, but I always knew at the bottom of my heart that he would never leave his work as long as he had strength to go on. If he had been given the choice, I am sure he would have wanted to die in harness. Not that we have ever discussed the question. When I went up to his room after the doctor had told me (I knew he had also told Father), he merely looked up from the paper he was reading and said, 'There is an ignorant fellow writing here who says Scott is little read nowadays,' and so great was his wrath at the 'ignorant fellow' that such small things as the state of his own health passed unremarked on.
"There is no point in remaining in Glasgow: we shall go to Etterick.
"You say you can't imagine what Father will do, forbidden to preach (he who loved preaching); forbidden to walk except on level places (he who wore seven-league boots); forbidden to exert himself (he who was so untiring in his efforts to help others). I know. It will be a life of limitations. But I promise you he won't grumble, and he won't look submissive or resigned. He will look as if he were having a perfectly radiant time—and what is more, he will feel it. How triumphantly true it is that the meek inherit the earth! Flowers are left to him, flowers and the air and the sky and the sun; spring mornings, winter nights by the fire, and books—and I may just mention in passing those two unconsidered trifles Buff and me! As I write, I have a picture in my mind of Father in retirement. He will be interested in everything, and always apt at the smallest provocation to be passionately angry at Radicals. (They have the same effect on him as Puritans had on gentle Sir Andrew Aguecheek—you remember?) I can see him wandering in the garden, touching a flower here and there in the queer tender way he has with flowers, listening to the birds, enjoying their meals, reading every adventure book he can lay his hands on (with his Baxter'sSaints' Restin his pocket for quiet moments), visiting the cottage folk, deeply interested in all that interests them, and never leaving without reminding them that there is 'something ayont.' In the words of the old Covenanter, 'He will walk by the waters of Eulai, plucking an apple here and there'—and we who live with him will seem to hear the sound of his Master's feet."