We are most hopeless, who had once most hope,And most beliefless, who had most believed.
We are most hopeless, who had once most hope,And most beliefless, who had most believed.
We are most hopeless, who had once most hope,
And most beliefless, who had most believed.
What matter if the grief be short, its poignancy while it lasts is none the less acute.
The Duke stopped crying, and looked at the bare wall of rock before him with hopeless, unseeing eyes. Then as he prayed, a great wave of tenderness, of longing for his mother, broke over his child soul, and he got up. Scrambling over the great boulder he had hidden behind, he set off to run home. If this amazing, this shameful news were true, he would set a seal on his misery, and uncertainty would be at an end. If it were false,the Duke set his teeth as he thought of the colonel, then he squared his shoulders and dropped into the swinging run which made him such an admirable hare at “hare and hounds.”
He ran by the beach, a good three miles, and burst into their little sitting-room, tear-stained and breathless, just as Mary had arranged her writing-board on her knee.
She looked up in astonishment at his somewhat noisy entrance. He still wore his cap in the room, before her, and his face was dirty. Who had seen the Duke with a dirty face since he arrived at years of discretion?
“My darling boy, what has happened? Is it Wiggins? Is he hurt?” Mary stood up in her excitement, and the paper and envelopes were scattered about the floor.
The Duke only looked at her, his lips trembling.
“Speak, Duke, what is it? Don’t keep me in suspense.”
“No one is hurt, mother, except me, and I’m only hurt in my heart.” The tears ran down his cheeks as he spoke. “Mother, is it true—are you going to marry Mr. Methven? Oh, say it isn’t true. It’s so dreadful!”
Mary drew the boy to her, and sitting down she took him on her knee. He buried his dirty face in her neck and sobbed.
“My dearest, who has said that I am going to marry Mr. Methven? Surely you do not suspect me of telling people—other people—before I would tell you such a thing as that! Oh, Duke, I thought you trusted me.”
“But, mother, you might not havetoldthem, they might have guessed, and it’s not the not knowing that I mind, it’s—it’s—Mr. Methven!”
“Dear Duke, did it never strike you as possible that I might marry again?”
“Never! Never! You belong to Wiggins and me—and father. Have you forgotten father?”
“No, sonny, no. I have not forgotten.”
“Oh, mother, say it isn’t true, say it isn’t true, or I shall die!”
Mary folded the boy closer in her arms. “It is not true, dear. Mr. Methven has not even asked me to marry him.”
As she spoke she remembered her own words as she looked into the glass the night before. Her face grew very sad.
“But if he did ask you, mother, you would say no? You would say no?”
The Duke’s voice, husky with long crying, was very pathetic.
Mary leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. She held her boy very close, and her breath came quickly.
“I don’t think he will ask me, dear, but if he does, I must say no, for his sake!”
The Duke sat up and gazed at his mother in absolute amazement.
“For his sake,” he repeated in a hushed, almost frightened voice. “Do you want to marry him, mother?”
“It does not matter much what I want to do, my little son; it’s what I mustnotdo that we have to do with. I shall not marry Mr. Methven. Someday when you are a man you will realize what I have given up for you—and for him!” And Mary fell a-weeping with her boy clasped in her arms.
The Duke felt her hot tears on his short-cropped hair, and he trembled; then, releasing himself from his mother’s arms, got off her knee and stood beside her, very pale and grave.
“Dear!” he said solemnly, “if you want to marry this—gentleman—if it will make you happier, you shall. Do you hear, darling? You shall.” And throwing himself into his mother’s arms, they cried together. When it came to the point, he found that he loved his mother better—than himself.
Presently Mary began to laugh. “Oh, Duke, Duke, how funny you are! You talk as if I were a little girl, as if—but it doesn’t matter—some day you will understand.... It’s not going to happen, Duke dear. It’s been a storm in a teacup. You must never listen to what ignorant people say.”
“May I contradict them, politely?” asked the Duke eagerly, with an immense relief shining in his eyes.
“Certainly, if anyone has the impertinence to speak of such a thing again. It is an insult to Mr. Methven and to me. Oh, Duke, there’s somebody coming upstairs. Quick, go and say I’ve got a headache and can’t see people.”
It flashed across the boy’s mind that he was not very presentable either. However, the staircase was dark, and he shut the sitting-room doorbehind him. A tall, black-coated figure was ascending the stairs.
“Mother can’t see anyone to-day, Mr. Methven; she’s got a headache.”
But even as he spoke the door at the top of the stairs opened, and Mary said:
“I’ll see Mr. Methven, sonny, but ask Mrs. Urquhart to say I am engaged if anyone else calls.”
The sitting-room door closed behind the minister and Mary. The Duke went to his own room to wash his face, and to ponder over his mother’s words.
Somebody has said that women have no sense of humor. It is one of those knock-me-down assertions that provoke argument. The sense of humor is so blessed a gift, it were unjust indeed to deny its benefits to the larger half of humanity. The gods had bestowed it with no niggardly hand upon Mary. It had stood her in good stead during many a crisis; its divine attribute did not desert her now.
There was a poetic justice in the appearance of Andrew Methven at that particular moment that appealed to her sense of artistic inevitability; and as Andrew shut the door behind him, though the tears shone wet upon her cheeks, she laughed.
“I am sorry you have a headache,” began Andrew lamely. “Shall I go away?”
“No, sit down; I want to talk to you. I’ve just been through a somewhat trying scene with the Duke, and I long that somebody should horsewhip Colonel Colquhoun.”
“I don’t possess a horsewhip, but I have a good stout stick.” The minister’s manner was most unclerical as his grasp tightened on the weapon in question.
“You do not even ask what he has done.”
“He has annoyed you—that is quite enough; but I wish he was a younger man.”
“He is not young enough to thrash, and he is not quite old enough to ignore; all the same, we shall have to ignore him. But, you Quixotic person, would you really thrash a man because I asked you to?”
“If you asked me to thrash a man, I should know he well deserved thrashing, and I—should enjoy it.”
“You’re more man than minister, after all,” said Mary, more to herself than to him.
“Better man, better minister. Do you think I could have had any sort of influence over my colliers at Cowdenbeath if I couldn’t fight? I can’t fence, but I can box. I’ll teach the Duke, if you like.”
“Why don’t you ask me what Colonel Colquhoun has done?”
“Because if you want to tell me, you will tell me; and if it is unpleasant to you to tell me, why should you?”
“It’s as unpleasant as it is necessary I should tell you, because we must both publicly contradict a foolish report that has got spread abroad in Elgo to the effect that we are to be married.”
Mary did not blush as she spoke, but the minister crimsoned to the roots of his hair. “I am too sorry you should have been subjected to this annoyance. You know what my feeling for you is; you also know that I have not the right to ask a fisher lass to marry me. I am nothing, and have nothing; but you have let me lay my great love at your feet.”
Mary made a little sound, half sob, half laugh, and held out her hands to him in a helpless, unseeing way that went to his heart. He caught them in his own, and looking into the dear face with purple shadows painted by tears under the eyes, he knew that she, too, cared.
What does it avail to tell in words how these two plighted their troth, that was to be ever unfulfilled? The tenderest and truest of lovers have generally small literary value.
For half an hour they went to heaven together.
Then they faced realities, and Andrew asked: “Will you write to me?”
Mary shook her head. “No; if we write we shall simply waste our lives in everlasting watching for the postman. We are very human, you and I, and how can we hope to be better and wiser than other people?”
“You are hard,” murmured Andrew. “I can find no comfort in virtuous soliloquy. A letter would be something tangible.”
“No, I am not hard; but I am old who once was young, and I know. As it is we shall have a perfect and unspoiled memory, full of tenderness and grace and poetry; but if we write we shall be miserable, ever unsatisfied, hanging, like Mahomet’s coffin, between heaven and earth. No; let us keep this sweet experience untarnished by impotent tears and regrets.”
Three days after, Mary and her boys had joined some of the numerous uncles at a shooting-box near Kingussie. The Duke was very happy; but Wiggins missed his beloved sea. “I think my minister must miss me,” he said. “I miss him so very much; he’s such a kind man.”