Читать книгу The Primrose Path: A Chapter in the Annals of the Kingdom of Fife - Mrs. Oliphant - Страница 6

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Margaret searched a whole half-hour for her thimble, which was found at the end of that time in the pocket of a dress which she had not worn for a week; but when she had found it, she no longer thought of Lady Jean’s work. That purpose had faded altogether from her mind. She forgot even what she wanted the thimble for, and being seized with a sudden fancy for remedying the disorder of her drawers, immediately set to work to do so, with a zeal more fervent than discreet; for as soon as she had turned the top drawer out, scattering all her light possessions, her collars and ribbons and bits of lace, out upon her bed, she was summoned by the bell for dinner, and thought of them no more. Margaret hastily arranged her hair, put on a bit of fresh ribbon, and rushed down-stairs; for to keep Sir Ludovic waiting was a sin beyond excuse. On the other side of the great japanned screen which divided the room into two, stood the table, laid with scrupulous care, and served by John in his rusty but trim and sober “blacks,” with a gravity that would not have misbecome an archbishop. Sir Ludovic had put down his book, he had washed his hands, and he was ready. He stood dignified and serious, almost as serious as John himself in the centre of the room, by the edge of the screen. J’ai failli attendre might be read in the curve above his eyebrows; and yet he received his erring child with perfect temper, which was more than could be said for John, who gloomed at her from under his heavy eyebrows.

“Oh, papa, I am sorry,” Margaret began. “I was busy—”

“If you were busy, that is no reason for being sorry; but you should not forget hours—they are our best guide in life,” said her father. But he was not angry; he took her by the hand and led her in, handing her to her seat with stately ceremony. This daily ceremonial, which Margaret hated, and would have done anything to avoid, was the means by which Sir Ludovic every day made his claim of high-breeding and unforgotten courtliness of demeanor, in presence of men and angels. Whosoever might think he had forgotten what was due to his daughter as a young lady and a Leslie, and what was due to himself as a gentleman of the old school, not a modern man of no manners, here was his answer. John looked on at this solemnity with gloomy interest; but Margaret hated it. She reddened all over her youthful countenance, brow and throat. Between the two old men she moved, passive but resentful, to her seat, and slid into it the moment her father released her, with ungrateful haste to get done with the disagreeable ceremony. They were “making a fool of her,” Margaret thought. Though it occurred every evening, she never got less impatient of this formula. Then Sir Ludovic took his own place. He was not tall, but of an imposing appearance, now that he was fully visible. In the other half of the room, where all his work was done, he sat invariably with his back to the light. But here he was fully revealed. His white locks surrounded a fine and remarkable face, in which every line seemed drawn on ivory. He had no color save in his lips, and the wonderful undimmed dark eyes, darkly lashed and eyebrowed, which shone in all the lustre of youth. With those eyes Sir Ludovic could do anything—“wile a bird from the tree,” old Bell said; and, indeed, it was his eyes which had beguiled Margaret’s mother, and brought her to this old-world place. But Margaret was used to them; perhaps she had not that adoring love for her father which many girls have; and especially at dinner, after the little ceremony we have recorded, she was more than indifferent to, she was resentful of his attractions. At that age he might have known better than “to make a fool,” before John, day after day, of his little girl.

This day, however, the dinner went on harmoniously enough; for Margaret never ventured to show her resentment, except by the sudden angry flush, which her father took for sensitiveness and quickly moved feeling. He talked to her a little with kind condescension, as to a child.

“You were busy, you said; let us hear, my little Peggy, what the busy-ness was.”

“I was doing—a great many things, papa.”

“Ah! people who do a great many things all at once are apt to get into confusion. I would do one thing, just one thing at a time, my Peggy, if I were a little girl.”

“Papa!” said Margaret, with another wave of color passing over her, “indeed, if you would look at me, you would see that I am not a little girl.”

“Yes, you have grown a great deal lately, my dear. I beg your pardon. It is hard to teach an old person like myself where babyhood ends. You see, I like to think that you are a little girl. Eh, John? we like something young in the house; the younger the better—”

“No me, Sir Ludovic,” said John.

He was very laconic, wasting no words; and Margaret felt that he disapproved of her youth altogether. But this restored her to herself, and she laughed. For John, though morose in outward aspect, was, as she very well knew, her slave actually. This made her laugh, and the two old men liked the laugh. It brought a corresponding light into Sir Ludovic’s fine eyes, and it melted a little the morose muscles about John’s closely shut mouth.

“But I am not so very young,” she said. “Jeanie’s sister, who is just my age, has been in a place for a long time; and most people are considered grown-up at my age. You ought not to make a fool of me.”

“My little Peggy,” said Sir Ludovic, “that is an incorrect expression. Nobody could make a fool of you except yourself. It is Scotch, my dear, very Scotch, which is a thing your sisters Jean and Grace have already often warned me against. You are very Scotch, they tell me.”

“Set them up!” ejaculated old John, under his breath.

Margaret reddened with ready wrath.

“And I am Scotch,” she said. “How could I speak otherwise? They were always going on about something. Either it was my shoulders, or it was my hair, or it was my tongue—”

“Your tongue! My Peggy, your idioms are strange, it must be allowed; but never mind. What had they to say against your hair? It is very pretty hair. I don’t see any ground to find fault there.”

“Oh, it was not in the fashion,” said Margaret. “You know, papa, you like it smooth, and that is not the fashion now; it ought to be all towzy, like my little dog, and hanging in my eyes.”

“The Lord preserve us!” said old John. He was in the habit of giving utterance to his sentiments as constrained by some internal movement plus fort que lui; and no one ever interfered with this habit of his. “What next?” said the old man, with a shrug of his shoulders behind his master’s chair.

“Then you must continue to be old-fashioned so long as I live,” said Sir Ludovic. “Your sisters are very well-meaning women, my Peggy; but even when you are as clever as Mrs. Bellingham and as wise as Miss Leslie, you will not have fathomed everything. We’ll leave the philosophy to them, my little woman, and you and I will manage the hair-dressing. That is evidently the point in which our genius lies.”

Margaret looked up, somewhat jealously, to see whether she was again being made “a fool of;” but as no such intention appeared in her father’s face, she returned to the consideration of her dinner. It was not a heavy meal. A little fish—“haddies,” such as were never found but in the Firth, little milk-white flounders, the very favorites of the sea, or the homely herring, commonest, cheapest, and best of fish. But then, perhaps, they require to be cooked as Bell knew how to cook them. No expensive exotic salmon, turbot, or other aristocrat of the waters ever came to Sir Ludovic’s table. Let them be for the vulgar rich, who knew no better. The native product of his own coasts was good enough, he would say, in mock humility, for him. And then came one savory dish of the old Scotch cuisine now falling out of knowledge; no vulgar dainty of the haggis kind, but stews and ragoûts which the best of chefs would not disdain. This was all; the plat doux has never been a regular concomitant of a Scotch dinner; and Sir Ludovic was a small eater, and had his digestion to consider. It was not, therefore, a very lengthened meal; and as six o’clock was the dinner-hour at Earl’s-hall, there were still several long hours of sunshine to be got through before night came.

Now was the time when Margaret felt what it was to be alone. The long summer evening, loveliest, most wistful, and lingering hour of all the day, when something in the heart demands happiness, demands that which is unattainable one way or another—is it possible to be young, to be void of care, to possess all the elements of happiness, without wishing for something more, a visionary climax, another sweetness in those soft, lingering, visionary hours? Margaret did not know what she wanted, but she wanted something. She could not rest contented as her father did, to sit over a book and see through the west window (when he chanced to look up) the flush of the sunset glories. To feel that all this was going on in the sky, and nothing going on within, nor anything that concerned herself in earth and heaven, was not to be borne.

The little withdrawing-room—the East Chamber, as it was called, though its window faced to the south—was already all dim, deserted by the sunshine. Lady Jean’s work lay on the table, where Margaret had thrown it in the afternoon, but nothing living, nothing that could return glance for glance and word for word. It was but seven o’clock, and it would be ten o’clock, ten at the earliest, before night began to fall. Margaret got her hat and ran down-stairs. She did not know what she should do, but something she must do. The little court was by this time quite abandoned by the sunshine, the body of the house lying between it and the west; but all the sky overhead was warm with pink and purple, and Bell was seated outside, with her knitting dropped upon her lap. Jeanie had gone out to milk the cow; and even old John had strolled forth with his hands behind him, to see, he said, how the “pitawties” were getting on. The “pitawties” would have got on just as well without his supervision, but who could resist the loveliness of the evening light?

“Our John he’s awa’, like Isaac, to meditate among the fields at even-tide,” Bell said. “Eh, but it’s an auld custom that! and nae doubt auld Sawra, the auld mither, would sit out at the ha’ door, and ponder in her mind just like me.”

“But John is not your son, Bell,” said Margaret, with the literal understanding of youth.

“Na, I never had a son, Miss Margret, naething but wan daughter, and she’s been married and gone from me this twenty years. Eh, my dear, we think muckle of our bairns, but they think little and little enough of us. I might as well have had nane at all but for the thought.”

To this Margaret made no reply, her mind not taking in the maternal relation. She stood musing, with her eyes afar, while Bell went on:

“They say a woman has no after-pain when her first bairn’s born, because of the Virgin Mary, that had but wan. But ay me, I’ve had mony an after-pain, and her too, poor woman, though no the same kind. I think of her mony a day, Miss Margret, how she would sit and ponder things in her heart. Eh, they would be so ill to understand—till the time came.”

Still Margaret said nothing. The old woman pondered the past, but the girl’s brain was all throbbing and thrilling with the future. The sound of something coming was in her ears, a ringing, a singing, a general movement and flutter of she knew not what. To Bell the quiet was everything; to Margaret, she herself was the universe, and all the horizon was not too big to hold the rustling pinions and approaching foot-balls of the life to come.

“I think I will take a walk down the road,” she said, suddenly, over Bell’s head.

“Take a hap with you, in case it should get cauld. Sometimes there’s a wind gets up when the sun goes down. And you’ll no bide too long, Miss Margret,” Bell called after her as she ran lightly away.

Margaret did not care for the wind getting up, nor foresee the possibility of the evening chillness after the warmth of the day. It was always chilly at night so near the sea; but seventeen years’ experience to the contrary had not dispelled Margaret’s conviction that as the weather was at one bright moment, so would it always be.

The road down which Margaret went was not very attractive as a road. The hedges were low and the country bare. It is true that even the rigor of Fife farming had not cut down the wild roses, which made two broken lines of exquisite bloom on either side of the way. Long branches all bloomed to the very tips waved about in the soft air, and concealed the fact that the landscape on either side was limited to a potato-field on the right and a turnip-field on the left. But the wild roses were enough for Margaret. Were they not repeated all over the skies in those puffs of snowy vapor tinted to the same rose hue, and in the girl’s cheeks, which bloomed as softly, when the exercise, and the flowering of the flowers, and the reflection of the sunset reflections had got into her young veins? The color and sweetness rapt her for a moment in an ecstasy, mere beauty satisfying her as it does a child. But human nature, even in a child, soon wants something more, and in Margaret the demand came very quickly. She forgot the loveliness all at once, and remembered the something that was wanted, the blank that required filling up. She turned aside into a by-way, along the edge of a cornfield, with a sigh. The corn was not high, as it was but June, and when she turned her face away from the sunset, the world paled all at once all around her.

Margaret went on more slowly, unconscious why. She went on hanging her young head till she came to a brook at the end of the field, over which there was but a plank for a bridge. The brook (she called it a burn) ran between two fields, and on one side of it grew an old ash-tree, its trunk lost among the bushes of the hedge. Here a post, which had been driven into the ground to support the homely bridge, made a kind of seat upon which the wayfarer might pause and look at the homely yet pretty Kirkton, with its old church on the brae. Margaret herself had intended to rest upon this seat. But when she was half-way across the plank, a sudden sound so startled her that she lost her footing; and though she saved herself from plunging into the burn altogether by a despairing grasp at the bushes, yet she got her foot fast imbedded in the damp bank, and there stuck, to her infinite embarrassment and disgust. Some one started from the seat at the sound of the suppressed cry she gave, and rushed to the rescue. It was, need it be said, a young man? yet not exactly of heroic guise.

Margaret, crimson to the hair, and feeling herself the most gawky, the most awkward, the most foolish of distressed damsels, her ungloved hand all torn and pricked with the thorns of the branch which she had caught at, her foot held fast in the tenacious clay, did not know what kind of hoyden, what rude village girl, red and blowzy, she must have looked to the stranger. She looked a nymph out of the poetic woods, a creature out of the poets, a celestial vision to him. He sprang forward, his heart beating, to offer his hand and his assistance. Was it his fault? He feared it was his fault; he had startled her, moving just when she was in the act of crossing the plank. He made her a thousand apologies. It was all his doing; he hoped she would forgive him. He expended himself so in apologies that Margaret felt it necessary to apologize too.

“It was me that was silly,” she said. “Generally, I never mind a sudden sound. What should it matter? Nobody would do me harm, and there’s no wild beasts, that I should be so silly. Oh, it’s nothing; and it was all my fault.”

“You are the queen in your own country. There should be nothing in your path to startle you.”

“Oh no, I’m not the queen,” said Margaret, laughing. “I have to take my chance like other folk. You are a stranger here,” she said, with friendly innocence. The fact that she was, if not the queen, as she said, yet at least a princess, the first young lady hereabouts, and known to everybody as such, made her friendly and made her bold. Supremacy has many agreeable accessories. The young man, who had taken off his hat and held it in his hand, half in respect, half in awkwardness, here blushed more deeply than she had done when she saw him first.

“I am not a stranger, Miss Margaret. I am Robert Glen, whom you used to play with when you were a little girl; but I cannot expect you to remember me, for I have been long away.”

“Oh, Rob!” she cried. Margaret was delighted. The vivid color came flushing back to her cheeks out of pure pleasure. She held out her hand to him. He had not been so respectful when they had parted, which was ten years ago. “Indeed, I mind you quite well, though I should not have known you after all this long time; but how did you know me?”

“The first moment I saw you,” he said, “and there is nothing wonderful in that. There are many like me, but only one Miss Margaret, here or anywhere else.”

The last words he murmured in an undertone, but Margaret made them out. She laughed, not in ridicule, but in pleasure, just touched with amusement. How funny to see him again, and that he should know her; and still more funny, though not disagreeable, that he should speak to her so.

“I was vexed,” she said, “very vexed that a stranger should see me so, my shoe all dirty and my hand all torn—it looked so strange; but I am not vexed now, since it is only you, and not a stranger. Just look at me—such a figure! and what will Bell say?”

“You have still Bell?”

“Still Bell! who should we have but Bell?” cried Margaret, the idea of such a domestic change as the displacement of Bell never having so much as crossed her fancy. Then she added, quickly, “But tell me, for I have not heard of you for such a long, long time. You went to the college, Rob?”

She said his name unadvisedly in the first impulse; but looking up at him, and seeing him look at her in a way she was unused to, Margaret’s countenance flamed once more with a momentary blush. She shrank a little. She said to herself that he was not a little boy now as he used to be, and that she would never call him Rob again.

“Yes, Miss Margaret, I went to the college. I went through all the curriculum, and took my degree sometime ago.”

“Then are you a minister now?”

Margaret spoke with a little chill in her tone. She thought that to be a minister implied a withdrawal from life of a very melancholy and serious description, and that she might not be able to keep up easy relations with poor Rob if he had passed that Rubicon. She looked at him earnestly, with a great deal of gravity in her face. Margaret had not known many ministers close at hand, and never any so nearly on a level with her own youthful unimportance as Rob Glen.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “No. My poor mother! I will never give her the pleasure I ought. I am not a minister, and never will be. I say it with sorrow and shame.”

“Oh!” cried Margaret, growing so much interested that her breast heaved and her breath came quick. “Oh! and what was that for, Mr.—Rob? You have not done anything wrong?”

“No,” he said, with a smile; “nothing wicked, and yet perhaps you will think it wicked. I cannot believe just what everybody else believes. There are papers and things to sign, doctrines—”

Margaret put her hands together timidly and looked into his face.

“You are not an infidel?” she said, with a look of awe and pain.

“No; I am— I don’t quite know what. I don’t examine too closely, Miss Margaret. I believe as much as I can, and I don’t think anybody does more; but I can’t sign papers, can I, when I do not know whether they are true or not? I cannot do it. I may be wrong, but I cannot say I believe what I don’t believe.”

“No,” said Margaret, doubtfully. This was something entirely out of her way, and she did not know how to treat it. She made a hurried sweep over her own experiences. “I always think it is because I don’t understand,” she said; and then, after another pause, “When papa says things I don’t understand, I just hold my tongue.”

“But I am obliged to say yes or no, and I can’t say yes. I hope you will not blame me, Miss Margaret; that would make me very unhappy. I have often thought you were one that would be sure to understand what my position was.”

Margaret did not ask herself why it was that she was expected to understand; but she was vaguely flattered that he should think her approbation so important.

“Me! what do I know?” she said. “I have not been at the college, like you. I have never learned anything;” and, for almost the first time, it occurred to Margaret that there might be some reason in the animadversions and lamentations over her ignorance, of her sisters Grace and Jean.

“You know things without learning.”

“Oh!—but you are making a fool of me, like papa,” cried Margaret. “And what are you doing now, if you are not a minister? You have never been back again till now at the Farm?”

“I am doing just nothing, that is the worst of it. I cannot dig, and to beg I am ashamed.”

“Beg!” She looked at him with a merry laugh. He was what Bell would have called “very well put on.” Margaret saw, by instinct, though she was without any experience, that Rob Glen could not have been a gentleman; but yet he was well dressed, and very superior to everybody else about the Kirkton. “I suppose you have come home on a visit, and to rest.”

“Yes; but, Miss Margaret, all this time your foot is wet and your hand is scratched. Will you come to the house? Shall I go and get you dry shoes from Bell? What can I do?”

“Oh, nothing,” said Margaret; “do you think I never got my feet wet before? I will change them when I get in. But I think I will go home now. What have you been doing? Oh, drawing!” she exclaimed, with a cry of delight. She seized the book which he half showed, half withdrew. “Oh, I should like to see it—it is the Kirkton! Oh, I would like to draw like that! Oh,” cried Margaret, with a deep-drawn breath, and all her heart in it, “what I would give!” and then she remembered that she had nothing to give, and stopped short, her lips half open, her eyes aflame.

“Will you let me show you how to do it? It would make me so happy. It is as easy as possible. You have only to try.”

Margaret did not make any reply in her eagerness. She turned over the book with delight. The sketches were not badly done. There was the Kirkton, breezy and sunny, with its cold tones of blue; there were all the glimpses of Earl’s-hall that could be had at a distance; there was the estuary and the sand-banks, and the old pale city on the headland. But Margaret had never come across anything in the shape of an artist before, and this new capability burst upon her as something more enviable, more delightful than any occupation she had as yet ever known.