CHAPTER XVIII.—“AULD LANG SYNE.”
Two women, one well past middle age and the other just turned seventeen, walked along Princes Street in Edinburgh one morning, taking in deep breaths of the warm heather-scented breeze from the inland hills.
Perhaps they were exiles, restored to their native land after long wanderings in distant countries. Who could tell? At least a passer-by might have thought as much from the expressions of intense pleasure that animated their two faces. And, as if it were not enough to be treading the soil trod by one’s ancestors, there came to them the sound of a bagpipe (bagpipes are not so plentiful in Edinburgh as of yore), actually playing their own stirring ancestral chant:
“The Campbells are coming,
Oh, ho! Oh, ho!”
“Well of all the strange coincidences, my dear Wilhelmina,” exclaimed the elder of the two women, none other than Miss Helen Eustace Campbell.
“Isn’t it, cousin?” cried Billie, her soul fired with the martial strains of her ancestors.
But stranger than the coincidence of the bagpipe was the condition of the weather. It was a bright and beautiful day!
“When I was here more than thirty years ago it rained perpetually,” remarked Miss Campbell. “As much as I loved Edinburgh and valued its associations with former generations of my family, I will admit to you privately, my dear, that I was glad to leave.”
There was a subdued excitement in Miss Campbell’s voice, but Billie did not notice it. She smiled dreamily.
“I think I could love it even in rainy weather,” she said. “It is the most picturesque and beautiful city I was ever in.”
She raised her eyes with worshipful reverence to Edinburgh Castle, old and gray, perched on the summit of a bold rock in the distance, like an ancient sentinel always on duty.
The two wanderers, who had by some accident of fate been born in a foreign land when they might just as well have been born in Scotland where they really belonged, walked on the air of expectancy.
Behind them followed those three alien persons of Irish and English descent who regarded the sights like any common tourists and experienced only tourists’ palpitations.
Miss Campbell pulled out her watch nervously.
“Did our Cousin Annie say that half past one was the lunch hour?” she asked.
“Yes,” answered Billie. “The note said, ‘It would felicitate me if you, my dear Cousin Helen, and my younger cousin, Wilhelmina, and your three American friends, will lunch with me this afternoon at half past one.’”
“A very unusual woman, my dear,” said Miss Campbell. “Thirty years ago she was the very pink of propriety——”
“Meaning as stiff as a ramrod?” asked Billie.
“Well, yes, a little stiff, to the free and easy American type. We must mind our manners this afternoon and be very careful what we do and say.”
“In the meantime, we’ll enjoy life,” cried Billie. “We’ll look at the Old Town and the Castle and when the time comes for lunch, we’ll bottle up our spirits and pretend we are just Scotch spinsters and members of the Presbyterian Church. And, by the way, Cousin Helen, are you going to mention that in the last hundred years we’ve turned Episcopal?”
“We sha’n’t thrust it on her, child,” replied the little lady. “If she brings up the subject, of course we will have to tell her the truth.”
“We might say,” went on Billie, “that the only Presbyterian preacher in West Haven is, to speak plainly, fairly dull.”
“Oh, my dear child, never confess a thing like that to your Cousin Annie Campbell. It is just possible she might consider it wicked to be anything else but dull.”
“Are we going to the Castle now?” demanded Mary Price, running up breathlessly.
“We are so,” answered Billie. “We are on the way and Cousin Helen’s going to walk because she loves every inch of Edinburgh soil.”
And walk they did up the steep hill, and Miss Helen never once made her usual complaint:
“My dears, I’m afraid I’m getting to be an old woman.”
At the top they paused to look at the view,—and there is hardly a more beautiful one in all the world: first the irregular roofs of the Old Town, once the center of fashion in Edinburgh; then a sheer drop into the New Town, gay and airy and highly picturesque, diversified with its terraced gardens, its spires and steeples; and farther on still, the sea, shimmering blue and dotted with white sails.
Then they crossed the drawbridge over the ancient moat and passed under a portcullis. Here Mary paused and burst out with:
“‘What, warder, ho! Let the portcullis fall!
The steed along the drawbridge flies
Just as it trembles on the rise;
Not lighter does a swallow skim
Along the smooth lake’s level brim.’”
The girls giggled freely over this exhibition of Mary’s enthusiasm and an old gentleman who happened to be entering the castle at the same time smiled with great amusement, and, lifting his hat, said to Miss Campbell:
“It warms an old heart to hear young lips recite the good old rhymes.”
But, after all, the exterior of the grand old building and the view interested the girls more than the Crown Room inside or even the museum, and it was not long before they were on their way to the Old Town whose tortuous narrow streets and toppling houses, some of them ten stories high and more, were the most picturesque tenements the Motor Maids had ever seen. Through the crooked alleys they wandered, peeping under dark arches and up long flights of steps. Occasionally at the end of a tunnel-like street, narrow enough to touch the walls on either side, they caught a glimpse of a white sail on a deep blue strip of water.
At last, entirely unconscious that they were footsore and weary to the point of shedding tears, they descended by one of the quaint streets to Holyrood Palace, gray and silent, where the rooms of the ill-fated Mary Queen of Scots are still preserved.
How many murders were done behind those old walls! What a nest of intrigue and plots it had once been! Suddenly, Miss Helen Campbell began to feel her nerves. Hunger and fatigue had done their work.
“Billie,” she exclaimed in a weak voice, “I am sure Holyrood Palace feels no older than I do this minute. I am ready to crumble into a handful of dust. If it’s not lunch time, we must go back to the hotel and rest a bit.”
Billie looked at her watch.
“Heavens!” she ejaculated. “We haven’t but two minutes to reach Cousin Annie’s. Oh, dear! And we did want to be on time.”
They tried to find two cabs, but the Palace is in a mean quarter of the city and there was no cab in sight. They tried to hasten the lagging footsteps of the little lady, but for some inexplicable reason she lagged the more.
“I will not be rushed along,” she cried. “Annie Campbell can wait. She’s been waiting for sixty years. It won’t hurt her to wait a little longer.”
“Waiting for what, Cousin Helen,—a husband?” asked Billie, who also was weary and hungry to the point of extreme exasperation.
But Miss Campbell did not reply.
By dint of inquiring at every street corner and much impatient studying of maps, they finally found the house wherein lived this spinster relic of the Campbell family. Nearly twenty minutes late for lunch, they sounded the knocker with the desperate determination to see the thing through if death or imprisonment resulted.
If you have ever been a tourist in Europe, you will recall having felt the same way when you have been seeing sights all day and forgotten the lunch hour.
The house had the aspect of a prison indeed from outside, with its thick gray walls, iron gratings on the windows of the lower story, and massive front doors. And the old woman who admitted them might have been a matron of the prison, so stern and uncompromising was her expression.
She ushered them silently through a broad, dark hall with stiff, high-backed chairs ranged against the wall, to the drawing-room.
Now, Miss Campbell had an angelic disposition, but even angels, when put to the test by fatigue and hunger and also a strange and unacknowledged flutter in the region of the heart, may be a trifle irritable. If Annie Campbell was going to be as stiff as a starched shirt and formal and all that, she was just going to be a little stiffer. There was a blister on her heel that minute that was agonizing to a degree, and if Annie Campbell had been any other person but a prim, Scotch spinster, she would have asked for the loan of a pair of slippers.
All these aggressive and agitated thoughts were flying through the little lady’s head like small, angry clouds before the coming storm, as she led the way into one of the most charming parlors ever seen. A splendidly handsome old lady in black silk came forward with both hands outstretched. Her tall erect figure was well filled out; her features regular; her hair still showed signs of having once been red, and her brown eyes were wells of intelligent humor.
“My dear cousin,” she exclaimed. “It will have been many years since we met in this room.”
Billie was surprised. She had assuredly been prepared for something quite different, and she wondered why Miss Helen Campbell had spoken of her cousin with so much irritation. Miss Annie Campbell was certainly the very opposite of her Cousin Helen in looks and figure, but, it must be confessed, equally as handsome. What beautiful young girls they must have been forty years ago!
“My dear Annie, don’t speak of the years,” exclaimed Miss Helen with much agitation. “Age is the only thing that has come to us. We are still spinsters.”
Annie’s beautiful brown eyes and Helen’s heavenly blue ones exchanged a long, meaningful glance.
“Ah, well, Helen,” said Annie, “you will be remembering the old song:
“‘We twa ha’ rin aboot the braes,
And pu’d the gowans fine;
But we’ve wandered monie a weary fit
Sin’ auld lang syne.’”
“We’ve wandered monie a weary foot to-day, my dear,” answered Miss Helen, a trifle flippantly.
“I never heard so much ‘my dearing,’” thought Billie. “Will Cousin Helen never introduce us?”
“And which will be my other American cousin?” asked Miss Annie, with the evident intention of putting bygones out of her mind and being entirely polite and charming. “But I can guess without being told,” she added, embracing Billie. “You’re the image of your father, child. You have the same gray eyes; the same glint of gold color in the hair. You’re a Campbell, indeed, and glad I am to welcome you to Edinburgh.”
Miss Annie spoke with a beautiful English accent and only occasionally lapsed into Scotch dialect. There was a decided b-r-r-r to her r’s at all times, however, especially when she was telling an anecdote, and she told numbers of them during that memorable visit.
While Billie introduced her friends and greetings were being exchanged, Miss Helen turned her somewhat agitated gaze about the fine old room. The polished surfaces of the floor and mahogany tables and cabinets reflected the glow of the wood fire and the shining brass of the fender. On a corner of the mantel was a Canton jar filled with peacock feathers, which, with the red damask curtains at the windows and the old faded Turkey rug, gave a certain richness to the room,—the luster of time and careful usage.
“Not a thing changed, I see,” observed Miss Helen, “not even the peacocks’ feathers in the Canton vase.”
There was an accusing note in her voice when Miss Annie replied:
“We Campbells do not change, do we, Helen? Neither ourselves nor our homes,” and Billie felt more and more convinced that some girlhood difference had separated the two cousins years before.
But the Scotch Miss Campbell was very hospitable and friendly, nevertheless. She led them upstairs, and in one of the vast bedrooms they washed the grime of Edinburgh smoke from their faces, and smoothed their front hair.
“Why don’t you ask her for a pair of slippers to ease your feet, Cousin Helen?” Billie suggested.
“I’d rather die,” replied that lady decisively.
At last, at an inexcusably late hour, they went down to luncheon and were served by the same uncompromising female who had opened the door.
Hot tea and certain rather queer, unaccustomed kinds of food warmed and cheered the five weary tourists, and presently they were all talking amiably together. It was evident that Miss Annie Campbell enjoyed the conversation of her young visitors. She asked them a hundred questions about America, and she amused them by relating some of the ghostly old legends that are clustered about Edinburgh as thickly as barnacles on the hull of a ship.
It was Mary Price, however, who, by some unconscious suggestion that she could not explain, presently told a story that she had read that morning in an old book, which came near to bringing the strained situation to a climax.
“Did you ever hear the tale of the two sisters who lived in the old town?” she began. “They quarreled when they were young and never spoke again. They lived for forty years in the same room up in one of those topply houses. A chalk line was drawn across the middle of the floor and there they slept and cooked and lived, each on her own side and never a word was spoken in all that time.”
“And didn’t they ever make up?” demanded Nancy.
“No, they died unreconciled, the book said.”
“What a dreadful story,” exclaimed Elinor.
“The Scotch are very unforgiving people,” put in Miss Annie.
“I’m thinking their own sins are just as great as the unforgiven sins of others,” finished Miss Helen.
The two spinsters glared at each other. The four young girls were quite frightened. Nancy stifled a little tremulous giggle and Billie was about to cast herself into the breach by a perfectly irrelevant remark, when the Scotch woman servant appeared at the door and announced:
“Meester David Ramsay is in the drawing-room.”
Miss Helen Campbell dropped her hands at her sides helplessly.
“Annie,” she said, “why didn’t you tell me?”
“I wasn’t sure you’d come if I had, Helen. But you will have forgiven him after all these years. He’s an old man now,” she continued in a pleading tone.
“Has—has he ever married?” asked Miss Helen tremulously.
“No, no, that he hasn’t,” answered the other spinster smiling.
A look of intense relief radiated Miss Helen’s face.
“Cousin Annie,” she said, “shall we rub out the chalk line and forget the past?”
“I’m muckle glad to do it, Cousin Helen,” said the other.
Whereupon the two ladies kissed and with arms interlocked marched into the drawing-room.
The four girls lingered behind in the dining-room. That there had been some romance in Miss Helen’s past they all well knew, and now it did look as if they had stumbled against it.
They gathered in a whispering group near the window looking into a trim, pretty garden.
“Billie, do you know the story?” demanded Nancy with uncontrollable curiosity.
“No,” answered Billie, “I wish I did. And the worst of it is, we can never, never ask, because she might not like it and I wouldn’t want to take any risk. Even Papa doesn’t know it. She has never mentioned it to a soul.”
“It must have been a love affair,” put in Mary.
“Of course,” added Elinor.
“Oh, Billie, couldn’t you ask? I can’t stand not knowing,” exclaimed Nancy.
The old serving woman who was passing quietly through the room at this juncture came over to them.
“I ha’ been livin’ in the family this monie and monie a year,” she said, “an’ I know the tale well, Miss. It’s the auld, auld story of the twa bonnie lassies and a braw laddie who could not decide which he liked best, blue eyes or brown. It was back and forth he was from one to other, ‘til they was all three half distracted like, and there was a grand quarrel amongst ’em. Then one went awa’ to the wars, and one went to her hame across the seas and one stayed in her ain countree. An’ that’s the sum and gist of it. And if the three hearts bracht, it was even so God’s will and the decree of Providence.”
“It doesn’t sound like three brachet hearts,” remarked Billie, as the noise of talk and laughter floated down the hall.
Presently they were summoned back to the drawing-room where they were duly presented to Mr. David Ramsay. And a superb-looking old gentleman he was, indeed, as handsome as a picture. Not one of the Motor Maids but felt a special thrill, when he smiled and pressed her hand.
They talked until late in the afternoon and the party did not break up until Elinor had been prevailed upon to sit down at the tinkling little old piano, and, accompanying herself, sing:
“‘Should auld acquaintance be forgot
And never brought to min’?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
And days of auld lang syne?
”‘We twa ha’ rin aboot the braes
An’ pu’d the gowans fine,
But we’ve wandered monie a weary fit
Sin’ auld lang syne.’”