Chapter Twelve.
The Steward on his Rounds.
The return of Macdonald’s boat was a great event; and especially to the inhabitants of the hill-side cottages. Macdonald was accompanied by Sir Alexander’s steward, who brought some furniture and finishings for the chapel and the minister’s dwelling, and, for the first time, a parcel for Lady Carse.
When the package was brought up from the shore, Lady Carse rushed in to tell Annie the news, and to bid her come and see the unpacking.
The poor lady was sure that by means of Mr Johny, or through some other channel, tidings of her existence and banishment had reached her friends at Edinburgh, and that this parcel contained some warrant of release. With raised colour and sparkling eyes, she talked of her departure the next morning; of how it would be best to travel, when she once set foot on the main; of how soon she could reach Edinburgh, and whether it would not be better to go first to London, to lay her own case and the treason of her enemies before the Prime Minister. Mrs Ruthven agreed to all she said. Mr Ruthven walked to and fro before the door, stopping at every turn to offer his congratulations. Annie looked anxious and eager.
When the package was deposited before the door, and the glee of the party was at the highest, the children capered and shouted. Annie quietly checked this, and kept them by her side; whereupon Lady Carse smiled at Mrs Ruthven, and said she pitied people who were grave when good fortune befell their friends, and who could not bear even to let children sympathise in it.
“You mistake me, madam,” said Annie. “If this package was from Edinburgh, I should feel more like dancing myself than stopping the children’s dancing; but I sadly fear this comes from no further off than Skye. I know the Skye packages.”
“Nonsense!” cried Lady Carse. “I know nobody in Skye. I hate croakers. Some people take a pleasure in spoiling other people’s pleasure.”
“That is a temper that I do not approve of,” observed Mr Ruthven. “This life is to some such a vale of tears that I think it is ungrateful not to pluck the few flowers of innocent pleasure which grow by the wayside. I should think that a Christian temper would be ready to assist the enjoyment. Here, my good men—”
“What stupid fellows those men are!” cried Lady Carse. “They are actually going away without helping us to uncord the package.”
She called after them; but in answer to her scolding, the men only stared; which made Lady Carse tell them they were idiots. A word or two from Annie in Gaelic brought them back directly, and obtained from them what aid was needed.
“Shall I enquire, madam,” asked Annie, “anything that you may wish to know?”
“No,” replied Lady Carse, sharply. “You speak Gaelic, I think,” she said to Mr Ruthven. “Will you learn from the men all you can about this package, and tell me every word they say?”
Mr Ruthven bowed, cleared his throat, and began to examine the men. Lady Carse meantime said to Mrs Ruthven, in Annie’s hearing, that she must wait, and restrain her patience a little while. There was no saying what might be in the package, and they must be by themselves when they opened it.
Mrs Ruthven said she would send the children away; and Annie offered to take them home with her.
“The children!” exclaimed Lady Carse. “Oh, bless them! what harm can they do? Let them stay by all means. I hope there will be nobody to spoil their pleasure.”
Annie curtseyed, and withdrew to her own house. As she shut the door and sank into a chair, she thought how bad her rheumatic pains were. Her heart was swelling a little too; but it soon subsided as she said to herself, “A vale of tears, indeed, is this life; or rather a waste and howling wilderness, to that poor lady with her restless mind. God knows I would not reckon hardly with her, or anyone so far from peace of mind. Nor can I wonder, when I pity her so much, that others should also, and forget other things when she is before their eyes. I did think, when I heard the minister was coming— But I had no right to expect anything beyond the blessing of the sabbath, and of burial, and the ordinances. And oh, there is the comfort of the sabbath! The Word is preached, and there is prayer and praise now on sabbath-days for a year to come; or, perhaps, as many years as I shall live. If this was a place for peace of mind before, what can trouble us now?” The closing psalm of last sabbath had never been out of her ears and her heart since. She now began to sing it, softly at first, but louder as her soul warmed to it. She was soon stopped by a louder sound; a shrill cry from the next house, and presently Mrs Ruthven rushed in to know what she was to do. Lady Carse was hysterical. The package had contained no news from her friends, but had brought cruel disappointment. It contained some clothing, a stone of sugar, a pound of tea, six pecks of wheat, and an anker of spirits; and there was a slip of paper to say that the same quantity of these stores would be brought yearly by the steward when he came to collect the heather rent. At this sentence of an abode of years in this place, Lady Carse had given way to despair; had vowed she would choke the steward in his sacks of feathers, that she might be tried for murder on the main; and then she had attempted to scatter the wheat, and to empty out the spirits, but that Mr Ruthven had held her hand, and told her that the anker of spirits was, in fact, her purse—her means of purchasing from Macdonald and others her daily meat and such service as she needed. But now she was in hysterics, and they did not know what to do next. Would Mrs Fleming come?
Annie thought the lady would rather not see her; told Mrs Ruthven how to treat the patient, and begged that the children might be sent to her, if they were in the way.
The children were with Annie all the rest of the day; for their father and mother were exceedingly busy writing letters, to go by the steward.
In the evening the steward paid them a visit, in his round back to the boat. He was very civil, brought with him a girl, the handiest and comeliest he said, that he could engage among Macdonald’s people, to wait upon Lady Carse; gave order for the immediate erection of a sort of outhouse for her stores, and desired her to say if there was anything else she was pressingly in want of. She would not say a word to him of one kind or another, but turned him over to the minister. But the minister could not carry his own points. He could not induce the steward to convey a single letter of the several written that day. The steward was sorry: had hoped it was understood that no letter was to leave the island,—no written paper of any kind,—while Lady Carse resided there. He would not take these to Sir Alexander: he would not ask him to yield this point even to the minister. Sir Alexander’s orders were positive; and it was clear that in these parts that settled the question.
While the argument was going on, Lady Carse rose from her seat, and passed behind the steward, to leave the room. She caught up the letters unperceived, and unperceived slipped them into the steward’s pocket: so that while he bowed himself out, declining to touch the letters, he was actually carrying them with him.
Helsa, Lady Carse’s new maid, witnessed this prank; and, not daring to laugh at the moment, made up for this by telling the story to her acquaintance, the widow, when sent for the children at night.
“That will never do,” Annie declared. “Harm may come of it, but no good.”
And this set her thinking.
The consequence of her meditation was that she roused the family from their beds when even Lady Carse had been an hour asleep. When Mr Ruthven found that there was neither fire nor illness in the case, he declared to Annie his disapprobation of untimely hours; and said that if those who had a lamp to keep burning became in time forgetful of the difference between night and day, they should remember that it was not so with others; and that the afflicted especially, who had griefs and agitations during the day, should be permitted to enjoy undisturbed such rest as might be mercifully sent them.
Annie listened respectfully to all this, and acknowledged the truth of it. It was, however, a hope that Lady Carse might possibly sleep hereafter under the same roof with her children, if this night were not lost, which made her take the liberty of rousing the minister at such an hour.
She was confident that the steward would either bring back the letters, as soon as he put his hand upon them, or destroy them; for such a thing was never heard of as an order of Sir Alexander’s being disobeyed. She had thought of a way of sending a note, if the minister could write on a small piece of paper what would alarm the lady’s friends. She had now and then, at long intervals, a supply from a relation from Dumfries, of a particular kind of thread which she used to knit into little socks and mittens for sale. This knitting was now too fine for her eyes: but the steward did not know this; and he would no doubt take her order, as he had done before. She believed he would come up to return the letters quite early in the morning. If she had a ball of thread ready, he would take it as a pattern: and this ball might contain a little note;—a very small one indeed, if the minister would write it.
“How would the receiver know there was a note?” asked Mr Ruthven.
“It might be years before the ball was used up,” Mrs Ruthven observed: “or it might come back as it went.”
“I thought,” said Annie, “that I would give the order in this way. I would say that I want four pieces of the thread, all exactly the same length as the one that goes. The steward will set that down in his book; and he always does what we ask him very carefully. Then my relation will unwind the ball to see what the length is, and come upon the note; and then—”
“I see. I see it all,” declared Mr Ruthven. “Do not you, my dear?”
“Oh yes; I see. It will be delightful, will it not, Lady Carse?”
“That is as it may be,” said Lady Carse. “It is a plan which may work two ways.”
“I do not see how it can work to any mischief,” Annie quietly declared. “I will leave you to consider it. If you think well of the plan, I shall be found ready with my thread. If the steward returns, it will be very early, that he may not lose the tide.”
As might be expected, Annie’s offer was accepted; for even Lady Carse’s prejudiced mind could point out no risk, while the success might be everything. There was something that touched her feelings in the patient care with which the widow sat, in the lamplight, winding the thread over and over the small slip of paper, so as to leave no speck visible, and to make a tight and secure ball.
The slip of paper contained a request that the reader would let Mr Hope, advocate, Edinburgh, know that Lady Carse was not dead, though pretended to be buried, but stolen away from Edinburgh, and now confined to the after-mentioned island of the Hebrides. Then followed Lady Carse’s signature and that of the minister, with the date.
“It will do! It will do!” exclaimed Mrs Ruthven. “My dear, dear Lady Carse—”
But Lady Carse turned away, and paced the room, “I don’t wonder, I am sure,” declared Mrs Ruthven, “I don’t wonder that you walk up and down. To think what may hang on this night— Now, take my arm,—let me support you.”
And she put her arm around the waist of her dear friend. But Lady Carse shook her off, turned weeping to Annie, and sobbed out, “If you save me— If this is all sincere in you, and—”
“Sincere!” exclaimed Annie, in such surprise that she almost dropped the ball.
“O yes, yes; it is all right, and you are an angel to me. I—”
“What an amiable creature she is!” said Mrs Ruthven to her husband, gazing on Lady Carse. “What noble impulses she has!”
“Very fine impulses,” declared the minister. “It is very affecting. I find myself much moved.” And he began pacing up and down.
“Sincere!” Annie repeated to herself in the same surprise.
“Oh, dear!” observed Mrs Ruthven, in a whisper, which, however, the widow heard: “how long it takes for some people to know some other people. There is Mrs Fleming, now, all perplexed about the dear creature. Why, she knew her; I mean, she had her with her before we ever saw her, and now we know her— Oh! how well, how thoroughly we know her—we know her to the bottom of her heart.”
“A most transparent being, indeed!” declared Mr Ruthven. “As guileless as a child.”
“Call me a child; you may,” sobbed Lady Carse. “None but children and such as I quarrel with their best friends. She has been to me—”
“You reproach yourself too severely, my dear lady,” declared the minister. “There are seasons of inequality in us all; not that I intend to justify—”
His wife did not wait for the end, but said, “Quarrel, my dear soul? Quarrel with your best friends? You do such a thing! Let us see whether you ever quarrel with us; and we are friends, are we not; you and we? Let us see whether you ever quarrel with us! Ah!”
Annie had finished her work; and she was gone before the long kiss of the new friends was over.
“It is only two days more to the sabbath,” thought she. Then she smiled, and said, “Anyone might call me a child, counting the days as if I could not wait for my treat. But, really, I did not know what the comfort of the sabbath would be. The chapel is all weather-tight now; and thank God for sending us a minister!”
As all expected, up came the steward; very early and very angry. Nobody from the minister’s house cared to
encounter him. He threw the letters down upon the threshold of the door, and shouted out that his bringing them back was more than the writer deserved. If he had read them, and made mischief of their contents, nobody could, under the circumstances, have blamed him. Here they were, however, as a lesson to the family not to lose their time, and waste their precious ink and paper in writing letters that would never leave the island.
As he was turning to go away, the widow opened her door, and asked if he would excuse her for troubling him with one little commission which she had not thought of the day before, and she produced the ball of thread.
Lady Carse was watching through a chink in a shutter. She saw the steward’s countenance relax, and heard his voice soften as he spoke to the widow. She perceived that Annie had influence with him, if she would use it faithfully and zealously. Next she observed the care with which he wrote in his note book Annie’s directions about her commission, and how he deposited the precious ball in his securest pocket. She felt that this chance of escape, though somewhat precarious, was the best that had yet occurred.
Before the steward was out of sight she opened the shutter, though it creaked perilously, and kissed her hand to the surprised Annie, who was watching her agent down the hill. Annie smiled, but secured caution by immediately going in.