Читать книгу The Complete Works - O. Douglas (Anna Buchan) - Страница 24

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"'O tell me what was on yer road, ye roarin' norland wind,

As ye cam' blowin' frae the land that's never frae my mind?

My feet they traivel England, but I'm deein' for the North—'

'My man, I heard the siller tides rin up the Firth o' Forth.'"

Songs of Angus.

Since the afternoon when Mr. Stewart Stevenson had called and talked ballads with Mr. Seton he had been a frequent visitor at the Setons' house. Something about it, an atmosphere homely and welcoming and pleasant, made it to him a very attractive place.

One afternoon (the Thursday of the week of Arthur Townshend's visit) he stood in a discouraged mood looking at his work. As a rule moods troubled Stewart Stevenson but little; he was an artist without the artistic temperament. He had his light to follow and he followed it, feeling no need for eccentricity in the way of hair or collars or conduct. He was as placid and regular as one of his father's "time-pieces" which ticked off the flying minutes in the decorous, well-dusted rooms of "Lochnagar." His mother summed him up very well when she confessed to strangers her son's profession. "Stewart's a Nartist," she would say half proud, half deprecating, "but you'd niver know it." Poor lady, she had a horror of artist-life as it was revealed to her in the pages of the Heart's Ease Library. Sometimes dreadful qualms would seize her in the night watches, and she would waken her husband to ask if he thought there was any fear of Stewart being Led Away, and was only partially reassured by his sleepy grunts in the negative. "What's Art?" she often asked herself, with a nightmare vision in her mind of ladies lightly clad capering with masked gentlemen at some studio orgy—"What's Art compared with Respectability?" though anyone more morbidly respectable and less likely to caper with females than her son Stewart could hardly be imagined, and her mind might have been in a state of perfect peace concerning him. He went to his studio as regularly as his father went to the Ham and Butter place, and both worked solidly through the hours.

But, as I have said, this particular afternoon found Stewart Stevenson out of conceit with himself and his work. It had been a day of small vexations, and the little work he had been able to do he knew to be bad. Finally, about four o'clock, he impatiently (but very neatly) put everything away and made up his mind to take Elizabeth Seton the book-plate he had designed for her. This decision made, he became very cheerful, and whistled as he brushed his hair and put his tie straight.

The thought of the Setons' drawing-room at tea-time was very alluring. He hoped there would be no other callers and that he would get the big chair, where he could best look at the picture of Elizabeth's mother above the fireplace. It was so wonderfully painted, and the eyes were the eyes of Elizabeth.

He was not quite sure that he approved of Elizabeth. His little mother, with her admiring "Ay, that's it, Pa," to all her husband's truisms, had given him an ideal of meek womanhood which Elizabeth was far from attaining to. She showed no deference to people, unless they were poor or very old. She laughed at most things, and he was afraid she was shallow. He distrusted, too, her power of charming. That she should be greatly interested in his work and ambitions was not surprising, but that her grey eyes should be just as shining and eager over the small success of a youth in the church was merely absurd. It was her way, he told himself, to make each person she spoke to feel he was the one person who mattered. It was her job to be charming. For himself, he preferred more sincerity, and yet—what a lass to go gipsying through the world with!

When he was shown into the drawing-room a cosy scene met his eyes. The fire was at its best, the tea-table drawn up before it; Mr. Seton was laughing and shaking his head over some remark made by Elizabeth, who was pouring out tea; his particular big chair stood as if waiting for him. Everything was just as he had wished it to be, except that, leaning against the mantelpiece, stood a tall man in a grey tweed suit, a man so obviously at home that Mr. Stevenson disliked him on the spot.

"Mr. Townshend," said Elizabeth, introducing him. "Sit here, Mr. Stevenson. This is very nice. You will help me to teach Mr. Townshend something of Scots manners and customs. His ignorance is intense."

"Is that so?" said Mr. Stevenson, accepting a cup of tea and eyeing the serpent in his Eden (he had not known it was his Eden until he realized the presence of the serpent) with disfavour.

The serpent's smile, however, as he handed him some scones was very disarming, and he seemed to see no reason why he should not be popular with the new-comer. "My great desire," he confided to him over the table, "is to know what a 'U.P.' is?"

"Dear sir," said Elizabeth, "'tis a foolish ambition. Unless you are born knowing what a U.P. is you can never hope to learn. Besides, there aren't any U.P.'s now."

"Extinct?" asked Arthur.

"Well—merged," said Elizabeth.

"It's very obscure," complained Arthur. "But it is absurd to pretend that I know nothing of Scotland. I once stayed nearly three weeks in Skye."

"And," put in Mr. Seton, "the man who knows his Scott knows much of Scotland. I only wish Elizabeth knew him as you do. I believe that girl has never read one novel of Sir Walter's to the end."

"Dear Father," said Elizabeth, "I adore Sir Walter, but he shouldn't have written in such small print. Besides, thanks to you, I know heaps of quotations, so I can always make quite a fair show of knowledge."

Mr. Seton groaned.

"You're a frivolous creature," he said, "and extraordinarily ignorant."

"Yes," said his daughter, "I'm just, as someone said, 'a little brightly-lit stall in Vanity Fair'—all my goods in the shop-window. I suppose," turning to Mr. Stevenson, "you have read all Scott?"

"Not quite all, perhaps, but a lot," said that gentleman.

"Yes, I had no real hope that you hadn't. But I maintain that the knowledge you gain about people from books is a very queer knowledge. In books and in plays about Scotland you get the idea that we 'pech' and we 'hoast,' and talk constantly about ministers, and hoard our pennies. Now we are not hard as a nation——"

"Pardon me," broke in Arthur, "the one Scots story known to all Englishmen seems to point to a certain carefulness——"

"You mean," cried Elizabeth, interrupting in her turn, "that stupid tale, 'Bang gaed sixpence'? But you know the end of the tale? I thought not. 'Bang gaed sixpence, maistly on wines and cigars.' The honest fellow was treating his friends."

Arthur shouted with laughter, but presently returned to the charge. "But you can't deny your fondness for ministers, or at least for theological discussion, Elizabeth?"

"Lizbeth!" said her father, "fond of ministers? This is surely a sign of grace."

"Father," said Elizabeth earnestly, "I'm not. You know I'm not. Ministers! I know all kinds of them, and I don't know which I like least. There are the smug complacent ones with sermons like prize essays, and the jovial, back-slapping ones who talk slang and hope thus to win the young men. Then there is a genteel kind with long, thin fingers and literary leanings who read the Revised Version and talk about 'a Larger Hope'; and the kind who have damp hands and theological doubts—the two always seem to go together, and——"

"That will do, Lizbeth," broke in Mr. Seton. "It's a deplorable thing to hear a person so far from perfect dealing out criticism so freely."

"Oh," said his daughter, "I am only talking about young ministers. Old, wise padres, full of sincerity and simplicity and all the crystal virtues, I adore."

"Have you any more tea?" asked Mr. Seton. "I don't think I've had more than three cups."

"Four, I'm afraid," said Elizabeth; "but there's lots here."

"These are very small cups," said Mr. Seton, as he handed his to be filled again. "You will have to add that to your list of the faults of the clergy—a feminine fondness for tea."

The conversation drifted back, led by Mr. Stevenson, to the great and radical differences between England and Scotland. To emphasize these differences seemed to give him much satisfaction. He reminded them that Robert Louis Stevenson had said that never had he felt himself so much in a foreign country as on his first visit to England.

"It's quite true," he added. "I know myself I'm far more at home in France. And I don't mind my French being laughed at, I know it's bad, but it's galling to be told that my English is full of Scotticisms. They laughed at me in London when I talked about 'snibbing' the windows."

"They would," said Elizabeth, and she laughed too. "They 'fasten' their windows, or do something feeble like that. We're being very rude, Arthur; stand up for your country."

"I only wish to remark that you Scots settle down very comfortably among us alien English. Perhaps getting all the best jobs consoles you for your absence from Scotland."

"Not a bit of it," Elizabeth assured him. "We're home-sick all the time: 'My feet they traivel England, but I'm deein' for the North.' But I'm afraid Mr. Stevenson will look on me coldly when I confess to a great affection for England. Leafy Warwick lanes, lush meadowlands, the lilied reaches of the Cherwell: I love the mellow beauty of it all. It's not my land, not my wet moorlands and wind-swept hills, but I'm bound to admit that it is a good land."

"Yes," said Mr. Stevenson, "England's a beautiful rich country, but——"

"But," Elizabeth finished for him, "it's just the 'wearifu' South' to you?"

"That's so."

"You see," said Elizabeth, nodding at Arthur Townshend; "we're hopeless."

"Do you know what you remind me of?" he asked.

"Something disgusting, I can guess by your face."

"You remind me of a St. Andrew's Day dinner somewhere in the Colonies.... By the way, where's Buff?"

"Having tea alone in the nursery, at his own request."

"Oh! the poor old chap," said Arthur. "May I go and talk to him?"

Buff, it must be explained, was in disgrace—he said unjustly. The fault was not his, he contended. It was first of all the fault of Elizabeth, who had once climbed the Matterhorn and who had fired him with a desire to be a mountaineer; and secondly, it was the fault of Aunt Alice, who had given him on his birthday a mountaineering outfit, complete with felt hat with feather, rücksack, ice-axe, and scarlet-threaded Alpine rope. Having climbed walls and trees and out-houses until they palled, he had looked about for something more difficult, and one frosty morning, when sitting on the Kirkes' ash-pit roof, Thomas drew his attention to the snowy glimmer of a conservatory three gardens away; it had a conical roof and had been freshly painted. Thomas suggested that it looked like a snow mountain. Buff, never having seen a snow mountain, agreed, adding that it was very much the shape of the Matterhorn. They decided to make the ascent that very day. Buff said that as it was the first ascent of the season the thing to do was to take a priest with them to bless it. He had seen a picture of a priest blessing the real Matterhorn. Billy, he said, had better be the priest.

Thomas objected, "I don't think Mamma would like Billy to be a priest and bless things;" but he gave in when Buff pointed out the nobility of the life.

They climbed three garden-walls, and wriggled Indian-fashion across three back-gardens; then, roping themselves securely together, they began the ascent. All went well. They reached the giddy summit, and, perilously poised, Buff was explaining to Billy his duties as a priest, when a shout came from below—an angry shout. Buff tried to look down, slipped, and clutched at the nearest support, which happened to be Billy, and the next instant, with an anguished yell, the priest fell through the mountain, dragging his companions with him.

By rights, to use the favourite phrase of Thomas, they should have been killed, but except for scrapes and bruises they were little the worse. Great, however, was the damage done to glass and plants, and loud and bitter were the complaints of the owner.

The three culprits were forbidden to visit each other for a week, their pocket-money was stopped, and various other privileges were curtailed.

Buff, seeing in the devastation wrought by his mountaineering ambitions no shadow of blame to himself, but only the mysterious working of Providence, was indignant, and had told his sister that he would prefer to take tea alone, indicating by his manner that the company of his elders in their present attitude of mind was far from congenial to him.

"May I go and talk to him?" Arthur Townshend asked, and was on his feet to go when the drawing-room door was kicked from outside, the handle turned noisily, and Buff entered.

In one day Buff played so many parts that it was difficult for his family to keep in touch with him. Sometimes he was grave and noble as befitted a knight of the Round Table, sometimes furtive and sly as a detective; again he was a highwayman, dauntless and debonair. To-night he was none of these things; to-night, in the rebound from a day's brooding on wrongs, he was frankly comic. He stood poised on one leg, in his mouth some sort of a whistle on which he performed piercingly until his father implored him to desist, when he removed the thing, and smiling widely on the company said, "But I must whistle. I'm 'the Wee Bird that cam'.'"

Elizabeth and her father laughed, and Arthur asked, "What does he say he is?"

"It's a Jacobite song," Mr. Seton explained,—"'A wee bird cam' tae oor ha' door.' He's an absurd child."

"Lessons done, Buff?" his sister asked him.

"Surely the fowls of the air are exempt from lessons," Arthur protested; but Buff, remembering that although he had allowed himself to unbend for the moment, his wrongs were still there, said in a dignified way that he had learned his lessons, and having abstracted a cheese-cake from the tea-table, he withdrew to a table in a corner with his paint-box. As he mixed colours boldly he listened, in an idle way, to the conversation that engaged his elders. It sounded to him dull, and he wondered, as he had wondered many times before, why people chose the subjects they did when there was a whole world of wonders to talk about and marvel at.

"Popularity!" Elizabeth was saying. "It's the easiest thing in the world to be popular. It only needs what Marget calls 'tack.' Appear always slightly more stupid than the person you are speaking to; always ask for information; never try to teach anybody anything; remember that when people ask for criticism they really only want praise. And of course you must never, never make personal remarks unless you have something pleasant to say. 'How tired you look!' simply means 'How plain you look!' It is so un-understanding of people to say things like that. If, instead of their silly, rude remarks, they would say, 'What a successful hat!' or 'That blue is delicious with your eyes!' and watch how even the most wilted people brighten and freshen, they wouldn't be such fools again. I don't want them to tell lies, but there is always something they can praise truthfully."

Her father nodded approval, and Arthur said, "Yes, but a popular man or woman needs more than tact. To be agreeable and to flatter is not enough—you must be tremendously worth while, so that people feel honoured by your interest. I think there is a great deal more in popularity than you allow. Watch a really popular woman in a roomful of people, and see how much of herself she gives to each one she talks to, and what generous manners she has. Counterfeit sympathy won't do, it is easily detected. It is all a question really of manners, but one must be born with good manners; they aren't acquired."

"Generous manners!" said Mr. Seton. "I like the phrase. There are people who give one the impression of having to be sparing of their affection and sympathy because their goods are all, so to speak, in the shop-window, and if they use them up there is nothing to fall back upon. Others can offer one a largesse because their life is very rich within. But, again, there are people who have the wealth within but lack the power of expression. It is the fortunate people who have been given the generous manners—Friday's bairns, born loving and giving—others have the warm instincts but they are 'unwinged from birth.'"

Stewart Stevenson nodded his head to show his approval of the sentiment, and said, "That is so."

Elizabeth laughed. "There was a great deal of feeling in the way you said that, Mr. Stevenson."

"Well," he said, with rather a rueful smile, "I've only just realized it—I'm one of the people with shabby manners."

"You have not got shabby manners," said Elizabeth indignantly. "Arthur, when I offer a few light reflections on life and manners there is no need to delve—you and Father—into the subject and make us uncomfortable imagining we haven't got things. Personally, I don't aspire to such heights, and I flatter myself I'm rather a popular person."

"An ideal minister's daughter, I'm told," said Arthur.

"Pouf! I'm certainly not that. I'm sizes too large for the part. I have positively to uncoil myself like a serpent when I sit at bedsides. I'm as long as a day without bread, as they say in Spain. But I do try very hard to be nice to the church folk. My face is positively stiff with grinning when I come home from socials and such like. An old woman said to me one day, 'A kirk is rale like a shop. In baith o' them ye've to humour yer customers!'"

"A very discerning old woman," said her father. "But you must admit, Elizabeth, that our 'customers' are worth the humouring."

"Oh! they are—except for one or two fellows of the baser sort—and I do think they appreciate our efforts."

This smug satisfaction on his sister's part was too much for Buff in his state of revolt against society. He finished laying a carmine cloud across a deeply azure sky, and said:

"It's a queer thing that all the Elizabeths in the world have been nasty—Queen Elizabeth and—and"—failing to find another historical instance, he concluded rather lamely, pointing with his paint-brush at his sister—"you!"

"This," Mr. Townshend remarked, "is a most unprovoked attack!"

"Little toad," said Elizabeth, looking kindly at her young brother. "Ah, well, Buff, when you are old and grey and full of years and meet with ingratitude——"

"When I'm old," said Buff callously, "you'll very likely be dead!"

She laughed. "I dare say. Anyway, I hope I don't live to be very old."

"Why?" Mr. Stevenson asked her. "Do you dread old age? I suppose all women do."

"Why women more than men?" Elizabeth's voice was pugnacious.

"Oh, well—youth's such an asset to a woman. It must be horrible for a beautiful woman to see her beauty go."

"'Beauty is but a flower

Which wrinkles will devour,'"

Arthur quoted, as he rose to look at Buff's drawing.

Elizabeth sat up very straight.

"Oh! If you look at life from that sort of 'from-hour-to-hour-we-ripe-and-ripe-and-then—from-hour-to-hour-we-rot-and-rot' attitude, it is a tragic thing to grow old. But surely life is more than just a blooming and a decay. Life seems to me like a Road—oh! I don't pretend to be original—a road that is always going round corners. And when we are quite young we expect to find something new and delightful round every turn. But the Road gets harder as we get farther along it, and there are often lions in the path, and unpleasant surprises meet us when we turn the corners; and it isn't always easy to be kind and honest and keep a cheerful face, and lines come, and wrinkles. But if the lines come from being sorry for others, and the wrinkles from laughing at ourselves, then they are kind lines and happy wrinkles, and there is no sense in trying to hide them with paint and powder."

"Dear me," Mr. Seton said, regarding his daughter with an amused smile. "You preach with vigour, Lizbeth. I am glad you value beauty so lightly."

"But I don't. I think beauty matters frightfully all through one's life, and even when one is dead. Think how you delight to remember beloved lovely people! The look in the eyes, the turn of the head, the way they moved and laughed—all the grace of them.... But I protest against the littleness of mourning for the passing of beauty. As my dentist says, truly if prosaically, we all come to a plate in the end; but I don't mean to be depressed about myself, no matter how hideous I get."

Mr. Townshend pointed out that the depression would be more likely to lie with the onlookers, and Buff, who always listened when his idol spoke, laughed loudly at the sally. "Haw," he said, "Elizabeth thinks she's beautiful!"

"No," his sister assured him, "I don't think I'm beautiful; but, as Marget—regrettably complacent—says of herself spiritually, 'Faigs! I'm no' bad!'"

They all laughed, then a silence fell on the room. Buff went on with his painting, and the others looked absently into the fire. Then Mr. Seton said, half to himself, "'An highway shall be there and a way ... it shall be called the way of holiness ... the wayfaring man though a fool shall not err therein.' Your Road, Lizbeth, and the Highway are one and the same. I think you will find that.... Well, well, I ought not to be sitting here. I have some visits to make before seven. Which way are you going, Mr. Stevenson? We might go together."

Stewart Stevenson murmured agreement and rose to go, very reluctantly. It had not been a satisfactory visit to him—he had never even had the heart to produce the book-plate that he had taken such pains with, and he greatly disliked leaving Elizabeth and this stranger to talk and laugh and quote poetry together while he went out into the night. This sensible and slightly stolid young man felt, somehow, hurt and aggrieved, like a child that is left out of a party.

He shivered as he stood on the doorstep, and remarked that the air felt cold after the warm room. "Miss Seton," he added, "makes people so comfortable."

"Yes," Mr. Seton agreed, "Elizabeth has the knack of making comfort. The house always seems warmer and lighter when she is in it. She is such a sunny soul."

"Your daughter is very charming," Stewart Stevenson said with conviction.

When one member of the Seton family was praised to the others they did not answer in the accepted way, "Oh! do you think so? How kind of you!" They agreed heartily. So now Mr. Seton said, "Isn't she?"

Then he smiled to himself, and quoted:

"'A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck,

And something of the Shorter Catechist.'"

Stewart Stevenson, walking home alone, admitted to himself the aptness of the quotation, and wondered what his mother would make of such a character. She would hardly value such traits in a daughter-in-law. Not, of course, that there was any question of such a thing. He knew he had not the remotest chance, and that certainty sent him in to the solid comfort of the Lochnagar dining-room feeling that the world was a singularly dull place, and nothing was left remarkable beneath the visiting moon.

* * * * *

"Are ye going out to-night, Stewart?" his mother asked him, as they were rising from the dinner-table. There was just a note of anxiety in her voice: the Heart's Ease Library and the capering ladies were always at the back of her mind.

"It's the Shakespeare Reading to-night, and I wasn't at the last. I think I'll look in for an hour. I see that it's at Mrs. Forsyth's to-night."

Mrs. Stevenson nodded, well satisfied. No harm could come to a young man who went to Shakespeare Readings. She had never been at one herself, and rather confused them in her mind with Freemasons, but she knew they were Respectable. She had met Mrs. Forsyth that very day, calling at another villa, and she had mentioned that it was her evening for Shakespeare.

Mrs. Forsyth was inclined to laugh about it.

"I don't go in all the evening," she told Mrs. Stevenson, "because you have to sit quiet and listen; but I whiles take my knitting and go in to see how they're getting on. There they all are, as solemn as ye like, with Romeo, Romeo here and somebody else there—folk that have been dead very near from the beginning of the world. I take a good laugh to myself when I come out. And it's hungry work too, mind you. They do justice to my sangwiches, I can tell you."

But though she laughed, Mrs. Forsyth had a great respect for Shakespeare. Her son Hugh thought well of him and that was enough for her.

Stewart Stevenson was a little late, and the parts had been given out and the Reading begun.

He stood at the door for a moment looking round the room. Miss Gertrude Simpson gave him a glance of recognition and moved ever so slightly, as if to show that there was room beside her on the sofa, but he saw Jessie Thomson over on the window-seat—it was at the Thomson's that he had met Elizabeth Seton; the Thomsons went to Mr. Seton's church; it was not the rose but it was someone who at times was near the rose—and he went and sat down beside Jessie.

That young woman got no more good of Shakespeare that evening. (She did not even see that it was funny that Falstaff should be impersonated by a most genteel spinster with a cold in her head, who got continual shocks at what she found herself reading, and murmured, "Oh! I beg your pardon," when she waded into depths and could not save herself in time.) The beauty and the wit of it passed her unnoticed. Stewart Stevenson was sitting beside her.

There was no chance of conversation while the reading lasted, but later on, over the "sangwiches" and the many other good things that hearty Mrs. Forsyth offered to her guests, they talked.

He recalled the party at the Thomsons' house and said how much he had enjoyed it; then she found herself talking about the Setons. She told him about Mrs. Seton, so absurdly pretty for a minister's wife, about the Seton children who had been so wild when they were little, and about Mr. Seton not being a bit strict with them.

"It's an awful unfashionable church," she finished, "but we're all fond of Mr. Seton and Elizabeth, and Father won't leave for anything."

"Your father is a wise man. I have a great admiration for Mr. Seton myself."

"Elizabeth's lovely, isn't she?" said Jessie. "So tall." Jessie herself was small and round.

"Too tall for a woman," said Mr. Stevenson.

"Oh! do you think so?" said Jessie, with a pleased thrill in her voice.

Before they parted Jessie had shyly told Mr. Stevenson that they were at home to their friends, "for a little music, you know," on the evenings of first and fourth Thursdays; and Mr. Stevenson, while he noted down the dates, asked himself why he had never noticed before what a sensible, nice girl Miss Thomson was.