THE INTERVENTION OF THE DUKE
I
ENTER WIGGINS
The Reverend Andrew Methven stood at his study window gazing out to sea. The sea was very blue, the sands yellow and smooth, but it was not the sea that the Reverend Andrew saw.
Elgo, on the Fife coast, is growing fashionable. In summer every house is let, and there are sometimes as many as fifty bathers at once in the bay. At Elgo the bathers usually wear blue serge, adorned it may be by red or white braid. Pale blue silk with white facings and short sleeves is not the usual uniform. It impressed the Reverend Andrew, and consequently he stood and stared. Moreover, the wearer of this wonderful creation—he felt it was a “creation,” though he had never heard the word so used—came out of the house next door to the Manse, the house being that of his most worthy parishioner, Mrs. Urquhart, Baker and Confectioner, who let her rooms during the summer months.
Elgo streets are somewhat one-sided, the town being built upon the cliff with a railing near the outer edge for the protection of the unwary.
The vision in pale blue silk tripped down the steep steps cut in the rocks, and ran across the sands. She was followed by a small thin boy, whose freckled face was broad and good-natured. On the sands they took hands and danced into the water together.
The vision was tall and slim, with wonderful arms that flashed white in the June sunshine, and the minister remarked that she could swim magnificently. The little naked boy splashed after her, looking like a terrier as he shook the water from his crop of curly hair.
The minister’s window was open, and across the sunlit sands came the sound of a woman’s voice, crying: “Come on, Wiggins, get on my back, and I’ll swim with you to the Cock’s-tail Rocks!”
The Reverend Andrew swung his telescope into position; he had the grace to blush as he did so, but none the less did he eagerly follow that swimmer by its aid. She did it, there and back; then she and the small boy ran dripping over the sands and vanished through Mrs. Urquhart’s side door.
An hour later the minister (he was the Free Kirk minister really; there is an Established Church in Elgo, but as its pews are empty and its incumbent of small account, he was “the minister” to Elgo) strolled into Mrs. Urquhart’s shop to buy cookies. Mrs. Urquhart herself bustled forward to serve him.
“You’ve let your rooms, I see, Mrs. Urquhart! And early in the season, too!”
“Yes, sir! I’ve let my rooms, and to my own young lady that I was nurse to; you’ll mind my telling you of Sir John Penberthy and his bonny family. Well, Mrs. Burton is just my Miss Mary, married and widowed too, poor lamb, and she and Master Wiggins have come all the way from London to be with me, and it’s proud I am to have them!” Mrs. Urquhart paused breathless.
The minister murmured something sympathetic, and taking up his bag of cookies strode back to the Manse. “Mary, mother of names,” he thought, as he turned over the information he had received. “Widowed! She doesn’t wear much mourning anyway!” as he thought of the blue silk bathing-dress. Then he said with a sigh, “She is very beautiful!” and sat him down to write his Sunday sermon.
In the afternoon he met Wiggins on the beach: that gentleman was digging while a French bonne kept guard in the rear.
“Do you like Elgo?” asked the minister. He had a kindly way with children; he was rather childlike himself, and they knew it.
“Awfully,” answered Wiggins, patting his castle walls, and barely looking up.
“Have you ever been to the sea before?”
“Oh, dear, yes; haven’t you?”
“I live here,” said the minister, rather discomposed by this exceedingly cool child.
“I wish I did!” sighed Wiggins. “I hate Kensington.”
“Ah, that’s London! I’ve never been there,” said the minister simply. “I wish I had.”
“It’s not a very nice place. There’s gardens and busses, and sometimes we ride in a hansom, and you always have to wear your shoes and generally gloves, it’s beastly.” Wiggins spoke bitterly, as one who had tasted the hollow shams of Kensington.
The minister sat down on the sand.
“Isn’t there a museum there, and an Art Gallery?” he asked.
“Oh, yes, but you mayn’t touch anything, and you have to wear your hat!”
“You seem to object to clothing,” remarked the minister.
“Don’t you?” responded this discomposing child.
“Well, no, I can’t say I do. It’s warm, and——”
“Oh, it’s warm enough in Kensington, if that’s what you want!” and Wiggins turned to dig a fresh channel from his castle to the sea.
“M’sieu Wiggins, il faut aller à la maison pour le thé. Faites vos adieux à M’sieu le Curé!” and Madeleine, the pretty French bonne, folded up her crochet, and rose.
But Wiggins was smitten with deafness, and waded deeper into the water, with a seraphically unconscious look.
Madeleine went down to the water’s edge, where she discoursed volubly for about five minutes. The minister sat watching; he wondered why French people speak so fast, and whether Wiggins understood. He evidently did, for he answered derisively, and sat down suddenly in the water. Then he came out, and grinning at the minister, remarked gleefully as he took his dripping way homeward:
“That’s the third pair to-day, soon shan’t have any left to wear. What a rux!”
“So that’s a London child!” mused the minister. “He’s a fine frank lad; I must call upon his mother.”
II
A NEW ATMOSPHERE
But the days went on, and the minister did not call. He was a sociable fellow, much beloved by his fisher folk, and by such summer visitors as knew him. Elgo was his first “charge.” Had he been small, instead of six-foot-three, he would doubtless long ago have been dubbed “The Little Minister,” after Mr. Barrie’s immortal hero, for he was young as a minister can be.
He did not call on Mrs. Burton because he had conceived for her an extravagant admiration, or rather adoration. He met her constantly on the beach and in the village street, and on these occasions gravely lifted his hat. Had he followed his impulse, he would have gone down on his knees and begged leave to kiss her feet. We do not follow our impulses in these matters nowadays, and Mary Burton never wondered why he did not call, for she thought about him not at all.
She did not go to church that first Sunday, but played with Wiggins on the beach all the morning. Mrs. Urquhart was scandalized and suggested the Episcopalian church at Pittenweem; but Mary only put her arms round her old nurse and laughingly promised to come and sit in her pew next Sunday.
The minister progressed in his friendship with Wiggins; while Mary was scouring the country on her bicycle, Wiggins and his new friend played on the beach or fished for poddlies from the rocks.
Madeleine with the inevitable crochet sat on the beach and beamed at them.
“You’re a Presbyterian, aren’t you?” asked Wiggins abruptly of the minister one afternoon.
“Yes, I’m a member of the Free Kirk.”
“Oh, you’re Free Kirk, and Madeleine’s a Roman Catholic, and mother and me is Pagans!”
“Pagans?” echoed the minister in astonished tones.
“Well, mother says so. It means that you love the sun, and the sea, and bare feet and meringues and music-halls and things!”
“Pagans, music-halls!” The minister gazed in horror at the unconscious but breathless Wiggins. “Do you mean to say,” he asked solemnly, “that you do not know anything about our Saviour who died for us?”
Wiggins turned and looked at him with something of reproachful scorn on his broad freckled face; then he said slowly: “Of course, I know, but we never talk about that to strangers, mother and me. It is bad form, like the people who give you tracts in busses.”
“I beg your pardon, I misunderstood,” said the minister.
They were silent for a few minutes, during which the minister digested this, to him, new view of confessing your faith before men.
Although he himself never gave tracts either in busses or anywhere else, he had certainly in a sort of hazy fashion considered that to do so was praiseworthy, if mistaken.
“There’s mother!” announced Wiggins suddenly. “Let’s come and talk to her.”
The minister scrambled to his feet, and in another moment he had shaken hands with Mrs. Burton, and they all sat down on the beach together.
Wiggins did most of the talking, and then it began to rain.
“Will you come in and have a cup of tea with Wiggins and me?” asked Mrs. Burton.
The minister felt that no words at all expressed the rapture with which this proposal filled him.
Mrs. Urquhart’s parlor looked so different that afternoon. Many photographs stood on the mantelpiece, books other than albums or Family Bibles were scattered on the table, papers and magazines strewed the horsehair sofa, while on the mantelpiece among the photographs and the little vases full of roses were the ends of many half-smoked cigarettes. Another shock was in store for the minister.
They had tea; he drank three cups and ate endless scones in order to prolong the meal. To sit opposite to Mary and watch her white, heavily ringed hands flit in and out among the cups as she made tea was a wonderful thing. To listen to her as she praised Elgo, and Scotland generally, in her soft Southern voice was wonderful; but most wonderful of all was to gaze at her unrebuked, to drink in the beauty of her face, to note the gracious line of cheek and chin as she turned her head, and lose himself in the depths of her eyes, brown as the trout stream beyond Glen Dynoch. When at last some small consciousness of material things awoke in him and he rose to go, Mary reached to the chimneypiece for a slim tin box.
“Will you have a cigarette?” she asked. “Dear Mrs. Urquhart forgives my evil habits, and pretends she thinks that I smoke for asthma. I don’t look asthmatical, do I?”
“Thank you,” faltered the minister. “I do not smoke now—I gave it up after my student days, just as I gave up drinking anything, for the sake of my people. I daresay it was useless, but I thought it was right—then.”
He spoke diffidently, humbly, half expecting a flash of amused scorn in her, such as he not infrequently encountered in Wiggins. But Mary held out her hand, saying softly:
“I am sure it was right then, and is now; but don’t judge me hardly, for I have no flock to influence. My boys will smoke, anyhow, when they are big.”
“It is kind of you not to laugh at me,” he said, and with that took his leave.
Mary lit her cigarette and smoked thoughtfully for some time. Wiggins was once more searching for treasure on his beloved beach. She sat at the open window and watched the boats come in. Presently she rang the bell for Mrs. Urquhart. When that good lady appeared, breathless from her ascent of the steep little stairs, Mary pushed her into an armchair and sat down at her feet, with her head against the old woman’s knees.
“Amuse me, nursey; tell me about your minister. Where does he come from? How is it that, without having been anywhere or seen anything, he is such a perfect gentleman, and why—oh, why is he a Free Church minister?”
“And what for no, my dearie? He’s an excellent, well-doing young man. You should hear him preach; it’s just wonderfu’. His father’s a doctor near Aberdeen; bein’ douce people they are—a large young family, and all doing well. He was at the college in Edinburgh, and passed very high. But it’s no his learning that we care about, it’s his kind, friendly ways. He’d take his turn nursing a body that’s sick just like one of the family; and he’s just a wonderful way with young men. To be sure, he’s young himself—only just twenty-six—but he’s not a bit bumptious or puffed up, like many young men. He’s greatly set up with Master Wiggins; they’re grand friends.”
“He has been very kind to Wiggins. I’ll ask him to dinner. Will you cook me a very nice dinner, nursey dear, on Thursday evening?”
“He’ll no come then, my dearie, for it’s prayer-meeting night. I just wish you’d go yourself.”
“I’ve never been to a prayer-meeting. What’s it like? What happens?”
“It’s just beautiful, my dearie; and the gentry go too. Mrs. Braid, of Elgo House, she always goes.”
Mary made a little face. “She called upon me yesterday. I didn’t find her very exciting. I’ve got to dine there to-night, so I suppose I must dress. You might send Madeleine to do my hair. Dear nursey, I’d far rather stay with you than go to Elgo House.”
III
“ALL SECRET SHADOWS AND MYSTIC SIGHTS”
Dinner parties at Elgo House were not, as a rule, exciting. The conversation generally vibrated between the harvest prospects and the game prospects, with somewhat numerous flashes of silence, during which each guest madly racked his brain for a fresh topic of conversation, only to fall back finally upon the weather.
Andrew Methven did not expect to enjoy himself much on that particular evening. His presence at Elgo House was something of an anomaly, for the family were “established” by conviction, yet Mrs. Braid attended the Free Kirk because she liked Andrew’s sermons.
He felt rather as though he were poaching on his neighbor’s preserves when he went there. He liked his brother cleric (as he liked most people), who, if old and somewhat dull, was kindly and human. So long as his evening pipe and toddy were forthcoming with regularity the “established” minister recked little if he preached to empty benches. Andrew Methven felt the blood rush to his face as on entering the Braids’ drawing-room he heard that voice which had been ringing in his ears ever since his parting with Mary that afternoon.
Daylight lasts long in the North Country, and there were no candles needed at Elgo House for dinner. Mary sat opposite the minister, and had he been given to cursing he would have cursed the tall epergne of fruit that hid her from his sight, especially as the majority of her remarks were addressed to him.
The only other guests were an elderly colonel and his wife, who were staying at the hotel. The colonel, whenever he looked at or spoke to Mary, seemed by his very atmosphere to ejaculate “Monstrous fine woman,” and Andrew felt an insane desire to choke him there and then in his own high white collar.
Dinner over, they all strolled into the garden, and then that happened which made an epoch in Andrew Methven’s life.
When they had all duly admired the roses and the goodly promise of peaches on the south wall, someone brought a guitar out of the house and Mary sat down to sing.
Her dress, some soft transparent blackness over white, faded into the shadows among which she sat. Somehow it reminded Andrew of the silver birch trees in the copse beyond. She bent her head as she tuned the guitar, and the throb of the strings seemed an appropriate background to the sweetness of her profile. Vision and sound became indissolubly mixed. Andrew could never afterward separate Mary’s face from her voice, and both were irresistibly a part of the beech copse seen dimly in the evening light. The whole making a picture, subtle, detached, vivid; an experience in which all the senses bore an equal part and were indistinguishable.
Mary’s voice was a big, soft contralto, as unlike the usual “drawing-room voice” as it is possible to be, and she sang seriously. She gave her message to the four winds to be carried where they listed. She sang to the scented night, to the distant sea, to the flowers and the moonlight: not to the little handful of human beings, whose chairs creaked as they sat, and who, saving one, only realized that she was a beautiful woman who had a fine voice.
They thanked her when she had finished, all but Andrew, who, white-faced and dumb, gazed into the deepening shadows as he stood by Mary’s chair.
“It’s really most extraordinary to be able to sit out at night in June in Scotland, is it not?” said the colonel’s wife in his ear. He started, looking at her stupidly. “A very absent young man!” she said to herself.
Truly he was absent, for he had been in heaven.
Mary, too, was silent, softly beating out a faint melody on her guitar as it lay across her knees.
Suddenly she looked up at Andrew, saying under her breath: “The rest may reason and welcome, ’tis we musicians know!”
“The rest” did not hear, or hearing did not understand; but Andrew said: “Thank God!”
The colonel’s voice was heard declaring that it was “deucedly chilly,” and everybody made a move to go indoors, except Andrew, who, pleading work, fled down the drive, only to walk for miles aimlessly in a direction leading further and further from the Manse.
Had he but known it, that walk was symbolical of the rest of his life. When he did get home his rather ancient “evening shoes” were quit worn out.
IV
THE EDUCATION OF THE MINISTER
“The Duke is coming at the end of the month,” announced Wiggins to the minister, as they anchored and fished for poddlies in the bay.
“What Duke?”
“My brother; he’s at school at Leamington; he’s going to Eton in three years. He’s ten, four years older nor me.” Wiggins was a model of conciseness in the way he imparted information.
“Why do you call him the Duke?” asked the minister in rather an abstracted voice; he was watching a tall lady on the distant links.
“’Cause he is one; his name’s Marmaduke, and he is a tremenjous Duke; they all say so.”
“Who are they?”
“Oh, mother, and uncles, and boys, and people.”
“Is he like you?”
“Not a bit; he’s handsome; he’s exactly like mother.”
The minister smiled. Was Mary handsome? he wondered. For many days now he had forgotten to take her beauty into account. He never compared her with other women. She was not to him more beautiful, not more clever, not more kind than other women; she was simply what that Frenchman said of his lady—she was mieux femme. There was no one else.
“Are you very fond of your brother?” asked the minister, forcing himself to attend to Wiggins.
“I’m glad he goes to school,” replied that gentleman guardedly. “He rather bangs me about.”
“Is Wiggins a family name?” abruptly demanded the minister.
“You are a jokey man,” said Wiggins admiringly. “Why, it’s because of my hair they call me that; my name’s Tregenna—‘Tre, Pol, and Pen,’ you know. Mother’s Cornish.”
At this moment Wiggins had a bite, therefore excitement reigned for the next five minutes, and even the advent of the Duke was forgotten.
Did Mary Burton know what she was doing when she admitted this obscure Free Kirk minister to friendship and intimacy? Did she realize how contact with her kindness, her simplicity, her gentlehood, was making him every day more hopelessly her slave? In after years, when he walked in darkness, with a hunger that nothing appeased, Andrew would ask himself this question, and whichever way he answered it he blessed her. He no more thought of blaming her than the sailor thinks of tracing the storm to the evening star.
“She shall have worship of me,” he said in those early days of wonder and happiness. “She still has worship of me,” he said after years of unsatisfied longing and ceaseless pain.
There was a song that Mary used to sing, a song he loved, written by a man for whom and for whose writings in those youthful opinionated days Andrew felt a hatred that was almost fear. Yet the song dominated him, and in after years he would repeat it to himself with a curious fierce sense of possession.
O brother, the Gods were good to you.
Sleep, and be glad while the world endures.
Be well content as the years wear through;
Give thanks for life, and the loves and lures;
Give thanks for life, O brother, and death,
For the sweet last sound of her feet, her breath,
For gifts she gave you, gracious and few,
Tears and kisses, that lady of yours.
Again across the silence he would hear Mary’s voice; again would he see against the evening sky her delicate pale profile and the little head weighted with its coils of shadowy hair; accompanying it all, the soft plash of the waves as they rolled over the sands beneath her window and the sharp salt wind which sighed foreboding things.
“No! I won’t sing any more to-night; let us talk,” said Mary.
The weather had turned unkindly, a bright fire flickered on the hearth, while the rain outside drove and pattered against the rattling windows. The minister had come in “for some music” as had become his habit during the last weeks, but, Mary was in no mood to sing, so she laid the guitar aside.
“You told me that you intended to criticize my sermon of yesterday,” said Andrew deferentially. “I gather that you altogether disagree with me.”
Mary lit a cigarette and smiled at him, her own indulgent smile, which always softened the severity of her remarks. “Yes, I think your view is narrow, and in some respects unjust. Of course, I know it is the kind of sermon that is popular; and it is certainly kind to the novelists to abuse them from the pulpit—it increases the sale of their books so enormously. But that was hardly your object, was it?”
“I do not know what was my object, unless it were to deliver a message that I felt had been entrusted to me. I do feel strongly on this question. It seems to me so pitiful that people should waste their time in reading injurious trash, when all the time there waits in silent patience the great company of the Immortals.”
“I like Schumann’s view best. He says, ‘Reverence what is old, but have a warm heart also for what is new.’ Much that is new is true, and beautiful, and helpful.”
Mary leant forward, looking eagerly through a little cloud of smoke at the minister.
He shook his head. “A great deal is hopelessly false, and ugly and lowering.”
“I think you overrate the influence of bad books,” said Mary. “It is only the great books that live; a meretricious book may have a few months’ popularity, and then no one reads it any more, it is forgotten as absolutely as we forget the smell of decaying cabbage when we have passed the rubbish heaps.”
“But surely you will allow that there is a great badness as well as a great goodness. Look at those Frenchmen; you cannot say their work is good, but it certainly will live, because it is great.”
The minister spoke earnestly. He hated that she should think him narrow; but he had the courage of his opinions.
Mary was silent for a minute, then she looked at him and smiled, saying frankly:
“That is true; but I believe that in all genius there must be something of goodness. We are all going to heaven, and De Maupassant is going too.”
“I would like to think they are all going, but it seems to me some of them have much to answer for. Influence is an awful responsibility. I believe it is the one thing for which we shall have to give the strictest account.”
Mary looked grave. “Do you think that people always realize when they have influence?”
“No, not always; they do not certainly realize the extent of their influence. You, for instance, were you less noble-minded, might do incalculable harm, for you never think about the effect you produce at all.”
“Oh, please don’t be so seriously complimentary,” she exclaimed. “To pose as ‘a good influence’ would be too dreadful! I should feel like seven curates rolled into one. Confess now, though, that you always thought a liking for cigarettes was the sign in a woman of moral obliquity, now, didn’t you?”
Andrew blushed. “I have seen very little, and known few interesting people,” he said modestly; “none from your world.”
“How far we are getting from your sermon on modern literature; that is what we were going to talk about.”
“I spoke as I felt; I daresay I am wrong, but I can’t feel wrong yet. It may be that I overestimate the influence of books; but you see, in my case, books have been the only great influences I have known—until lately,” he added softly.
Mary looked into the fire in silence for a few minutes, then she said: “Never judge a man by one book any more than you would judge him by one single act, but be grateful when you come across any piece of work that you like. It always seems to me that we render so little gratitude to the people who give us so much pleasure, and it must be sad for them.”
She threw the end of her cigarette into the fire, and stood up, holding out her hand.
“I must send you away, for it’s half-past ten, and we are early folk here.”
Andrew bowed over the fair kind hand, and went back to his study at the Manse. Here there was no fire, no genial smell of smoke, everything was orderly, cold, and dull. Andrew sat down by his writing-table, and laid his head down on his arms. Truly the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.
A sleepless night is interminable at six-and-twenty. At forty, one takes it as something that has to be got through, probably with the aid of chloral.
V
MARY
There are people who can stir up the worst that is in us; that strange, inherent moral obliquity, which few are so happy as to be without, but which most of us bury under our strivings after things lovely and of good report. When success crowns the efforts of these moral dredgers, and they are generally as successful as they are persevering, they stand aside, apparently aghast, and proceed to cry “shame” noisily upon our depravity. These are they who “compound for sins they are inclined to” by damning, not “those they have no mind to,” but such sins as at the time they happen to be tired of.
There are others, thank God for it, with whom intercourse is a sort of festival, not merely because their own outlook is so generous and kindly, but because they rouse what is best in one’s self. One leaves such friends—they are friends if you have met them once—strong and gay and full of belief in the infinite possibilities of life.
Mary Burton was of this latter class. She made no great sacrifices, she enjoyed her life thoroughly, taking eagerly all pleasure that came in her way; but her temper was generous, her mind broad, and because she herself could not understand meanness, she never suspected others. She was seldom disappointed. It is the narrow little soul who so constantly encounters other narrow souls. The simple, kindly people meet with simplicity and kindness.
Perhaps the fact that their outlook was so similar proved the great bond between Mary and the minister of Elgo. Their upbringing and environment were so absolutely dissimilar, their views of life so unlike, yet beyond it all and through it all sounded the same note, dominating the discords and making harmony.
“He’s such a lovable good fellow,” Mary would say to herself. “One forgives him for always using shall and will in the wrong places, and for denying himself everything that some people think makes life endurable.”
“She is so kind and gracious, so dignified without being haughty, so absolute an aristocrat in all her beautiful ways; she is a princess. What does it matter if she does smoke and read French novels? If she does it, it must be right for her.” So argued the minister, though he kept his own sturdy Scottish opinion with regard to the unwholesomeness for ordinary digestions of some of the literature which Mary affected.
So the days went on and these two lovable good people saw more and more of one another, worshipper and worshipped, and although the parties mainly concerned preserved the ostrich-like blindness of people in their condition, the “summer visitors” of Elgo and the parish itself took a lively interest in their doings and waited with a somewhat impatient expectation of the climax.
One thing struck Andrew Methven as curious: in all their many conversations Mary had never mentioned her husband. She talked frankly of her father and her brothers, of the people she had met in India, and of those she was in the habit of meeting in London, but of her husband, never. Andrew found himself wondering what manner of man Captain Burton had been; but it never occurred to him to try to find out anything about Mary or her surroundings. He never spoke of her to anyone, and winced if anyone spoke of her to him. About his own family and his own “past,” if so uneventful life can be said to have a past, he was most frank.
“My people are what you would call ‘nice middle-class’ people, perhaps a little fonder of books than their sort are in England, but you have never met anybody of that kind except me, and you would not find them congenial.”
Mary made a little face. “I’m sure I never spoke of anybody as a ‘nice middle-class person,’ I shouldn’t be such a snob, and I have met all sorts of people—people you would think Bohemian and terrible!”
“I should like to meet literary people,” said Andrew wistfully, “but I suppose I never shall.”
“Oh, yes, you will, and you won’t find them any more interesting than your Fifeshire fisher folk. Epigrams pall upon you when they form the staple commodity of conversation. The somewhat dingy journalist, who has a trick of smart talking and who poses to himself as everything he is not, is just as great a bore as the respectable city clerk who lives at Hornsey and expatiates upon its advantages. You must not mistake cleverness for genius. The one is often merely the result of environment and atmosphere. The other nearly always appears in unlikely and seemingly impossible places. You know what Swinburne says: ‘There is only one thing we may reverence, and that is genius. There is only one thing we may worship, and that is goodness.’”
“It seems to me,” said Andrew thoughtfully, “that you reverse it. You reverence goodness and worship genius!”
“Perhaps I do, certainly and perhaps fortunately, the one is much rarer than the other. The best things in life are the commonest. There are flowers, and children, and love, and friendship for everybody, if they will have them.”
“And death and disillusion.”
“You, turning pessimist, Padre mio! This will never do. You are too serious—far too serious. I prescribe a course of Anthony Hope immediately. I have the ‘Dolly Dialogues’ with me, and you must force yourself to appreciate them. It’s plain you have met with little real tragedy in your life, or you would be more cheerful.”
“Have you a tragic past, that you are always gay?”
Mary shivered, but she did not answer. She called to Wiggins to come out of the water, for it was growing cold.
The minister scourged himself for four hours afterward, for he noticed that she was pale, and that there were shadows under her brown eyes. What had he said?
VI
MARY’S HUSBAND
Mary had gone to play golf at St. Andrews. The minister called on Mrs. Urquhart anent some parish matters and she detained him, rather against his will, to talk of Mary and her perfections. She never spoke of her except as “My Miss Mary,” and it was apt to bewilder the uninitiated. Suddenly she asked the minister:
“Does she ever talk to you of the wee girlie who was killed?”
“What wee girlie? Never!”
“Eh, it was just an awful thing. Sit down, Mr. Methven, and I’ll tell you.”
“But, Mrs. Urquhart, do you think if it is so sad, and if she—Mrs. Burton never told me herself—that she would like——”
“Tuts, sir! It’s nothing disgraceful; it’s just fearfully sad. Ye can only admire her the more for her courage. Well, as I was saying, she had a wee girlie just three years old when they all came home from India on long leave. Master Wiggins was the baby, and Miss Molly was the bonniest creature you ever saw. The Captain—a fine, free-handed gentleman he was, if a wee thing wild—was just wrapped up in her, the boys were nowhere; and he would aye go and fetch her out o’ her cot every evening after dinner and play, and nothing Miss Mary could say would stop him. Well, that August they had taken a house down in Cornwall to be near Miss Mary’s father. And one evening Miss Mary had gone to dine with an old aunt some miles off, and the Captain and a gentleman staying dined alone. It is thought that the Captain may have taken rather much champagne—he did whiles—but anyway he went and got Miss Molly out of bed and wrapped her in a blanket and carried her out-of-doors. It was no use for the nurse to say anything—he was a masterful gentleman, and brooked no interference. The other gentleman had gone to write letters in the study. Well, Miss Mary came home about ten, and of course went straight up to the night nursery. The little boys were both in bed asleep, but Miss Molly’s cot was empty, and the nurse told her the Captain had not brought her up to bed yet. Miss Mary was rather indignant, for she thought it so bad for the child, and went down to fetch her. But the Captain was not in the study, and the other gentleman had not seen him since dinner. He seemed rather alarmed when he heard that Miss Molly was missing, and everybody went out to search the garden, for they were nowhere in the house. They sought and sought, and nothing could they find. Then Miss Mary sent the grooms out with lanterns, and she and the gentleman took the carriage lamps and went down to the foot of the garden where the cliff went sharp down to the sea. There was a steep path cut in the cliff, and down this they went. At the bottom, lying on the hard rock, they found the Captain, with Miss Molly in his arms quite dead, and his back was broken. He lived for three days, and he died with his hand in my dear lady’s. She never spoke one word of reproach; but he didn’t need it, poor man; his grief was terrible to see, they say. He must have stumbled and fallen sheer over. It’s six years ago now; my young lady was only three-and-twenty. Eh, it was a heavy sorrow for a young thing like that!”
Mrs. Urquhart’s voice broke, and she stopped. The minister was very white, he held out his hand to her, but did not speak. The Scotch understand each other. They have realized this great truth—that some things are unsayable. The minister held good Mrs. Urquhart’s hand in both his for two silent minutes, then he took his hat and went his way.
“He’s a grand young man yon!” said Mrs. Urquhart to herself, “he’ll make it up till her.”
But the young man in question felt that he was further off than ever from his divinity. The wall of unshared experience is high and impassable; we may break it down in places, but it stretches its gaunt length along life’s highway and we each of us must keep to our own side.
VII
“BESIDE THE IDLE SUMMER SEA”
“I rather like that minister person,” said the Duke to Wiggins in his most patronizing voice, “he seems a decent chap.”
“He is,” ejaculated Wiggins with immense conviction; “he’s a splendid chap—a bit Scotchy, you know, but he’s awfully kind.”
“The mater likes him too, doesn’t she?”
“Oh, yes. He’s always with us, you see, living next door and that. He knows all the best places to fish, and he can build the most splendid castles with moats and secret passages and no end!”
The Duke turned his handsome head and smiled indulgently at Wiggins. “I bet he can’t shoot or play cricket much, or ride anything but a bike. You can’t remember father, Wiggins; he was a soldier, you know, and he used to say: ‘Ride straight, shoot straight, and speak the truth, and you’ll be a gentleman, sonny.’ An officer and a gentleman. I remember though it’s so long ago.”
The Duke’s eyes grew soft. He had loved that big handsome father of his with the uncomprehending, admiring love of a little-noticed child. The little daughter had been everything to Captain Burton, yet the Duke cherished his memory and rendered him a devotion greater than that he gave to the mother who understood him; a devotion which Mary took care should never be disturbed by any word of hers.
As Captain Burton lay dying he had lifted his weak arms and dragged her head down close to his face.
“Don’t tell the boys,” he whispered. “Let them think the best of me. Duke is a fine chap; he’ll make it up to you. I’ve been a beast and a fool, but I always loved you, Mary. Promise you won’t tell the boys.”
And Mary promised.
The Duke was a singularly handsome boy, with grave, beautiful manners. He never looked untidy or slovenly. Like his mother, he wore his clothes in such a way that he always seemed better and more suitably dressed than other people. He was rather a silent person, but gave one the impression that he was silent from choice, not because he had nothing to say.
He was very unmistakably a member of the “classes,” and though exceedingly urbane and gracious to what he was pleased to call mentally his “inferiors,” he was so because it would be ungentlemanly to be otherwise.
He would gravely assist a fishwife to raise her heavy creel to her shoulders, and lift his cap to her with a Hyde Park flourish when she started on her way. But he did so because he considered it the duty of a gentleman to assist women—not as Wiggins would have done, from a friendly interest in that particular fishwife. Slim, tall, and aristocratic, with oval face, straight nose, and big brown eyes, the Duke was a noticeable boy anywhere, and Mary was immensely proud of him.
He was good at most games, and quick to learn. He ferreted out a pony in the next village and rode about the country, to the admiration of the natives. He golfed on the gentlemen’s links and played a very good game for his age. He went fishing with the minister and Wiggins, and he bicycled with his mother.
Since the advent of her eldest boy, it seemed to the minister that there was a certain remoteness about Mary. Certainly her time was very much taken up. The Duke required other amusements than those afforded by the beach, a bucket, and a wooden spade. He expected and received the constant companionship of his mother. On several occasions the minister was allowed to join their bicycling expeditions. To watch Mary bicycle was a never-ending wonder to him. She never seemed to go fast; it was only when you rode after her that you found she was hard to catch. The minister always wondered why her skirts never seemed to bunch and blow as did those of other women. He knew nothing of tailors as a great artistic power, but he was keenly alive to the result of their labors in the grace and symmetry of her appearance.
The Duke also was a constant surprise, but for him the minister’s frank admiration was tempered by a subtle but searching discomfort in his society.
“Do you know,” he said ruefully one day to Mary, “that the Duke makes me conscious of my boots, and the lack of trees to keep them on? I never thought of it before, but I am sure now that it has been a serious omission.”
“The Duke is the descendant of generations of dandies, and has all the faults and the good qualities that belong to the class. In many respects the dandy is a limited person both for good and evil; certain social solecisms are, of course, impossible to him, but he generally is lacking in imagination. The Duke, for instance, is less sympathetic than Wiggins, but he is harder on himself also.”
“Can a woman be a dandy?” inquired the minister in a tone of grave interest.
Mary laughed. “Every woman of the world is more or less a dandy, but she takes the position less seriously than does a man. If in some directions our sense of proportion is undeveloped, it has arrived at perfection in matters of clothes.”
“I’m glad I can only wear one sort of clothes; it saves so much trouble, and I should be certain to get the wrong ones.”
“I think you would. Be thankful for your uniform; it is becoming!”
“It’s very hot and uncomfortable in summer. I almost feel I could echo Wiggins in his abuse of clothing.”
“Why don’t you wear flannels?”
“I do for tennis, but one can’t call on one’s parishioners in flannels; they’d think it casual and disrespectful.”
“So they would. Well, you must dree your weird!” Mary spoke lightly, but for the minister her last words had an ominous sound.
Presently they all halted “to give the bicycles a feed” as the Duke put it—the fact being that they had arrived at the foot of what was for Fife a very steep hill. The day was hot, and they had six more miles to do before they reached the East Neuk, whither they were escorting the Duke. Grass and the shade of trees looked inviting. Mary and the minister decided to rest, but the energetic Duke went off on an exploring expedition in an adjacent wood.
The minister and Mary sat quite silent for some minutes; then Mary said slowly:
“Mrs. Urquhart told you of my great trouble six years ago. I am glad. I wanted you to know, and I wanted you to know that I am glad.” Her voice was very soft, her eyes were bent on the grass.
Andrew Methven looked at her but he did not speak.
She looked up a little surprised, and saw his face working strangely. She understood.
“Don’t try to say anything,” she said, laying her hand on his arm. “You are sorry. You are a good friend of mine.”
Somehow the touch of the little gloved hand on his arm made the minister lose his head. He did not attempt to hold it in his own—his reverence for her was too great for that—but he told her simply and forcibly what he felt for her. She did not try to stop him. The sunshine and the summer had got into her blood, and this worship that was offered to her was sweet and precious. There was nothing ridiculous in it, nothing impossible. He did not ask her to be his wife; in his wildest dreams of happiness he had never reckoned on the possibility of that. He did not ask to be anything to her; all he told her was what she was to him.
And in the very middle of it all the Duke came back, saying:
“If we are to get to the East Neuk by teatime, we’d better be off; it’s four already.”
So they rode off, and very silent companions the Duke found them.
Seven years before in Simla, Mary had had a great success. She had been made much of, and had enjoyed it. Many men had made love to her, and she had enjoyed it. A beautiful, healthy girl accepts admiration as her natural right.
But the men who made love to her did not enjoy it, for many of them had the misfortune to be serious, and although Mary accepted their flowers and their compliments and their devotion in her own gay, gracious fashion, she gave nothing in return but that gay graciousness and the privilege of her society.
“If she were in love with that card-playing, drinking fool, her husband, I could understand it,” said Major Molyneux of the 42nd; “but she isn’t in love with him, not a bit; and yet she’s an icicle to every other chap. It’s not as if she were one of those cold, saint-in-a-shrine sort of women; she’s as human as she can be. She’s no fool, either. What, in heaven’s name, made her marry her husband?”
“Calm yourself, my dear Molly! Calm yourself,” answered the elderly civilian to whom he was unburdening himself. “You have yet to learn that the selective faculty is latest of development in women. Most women, especially if they are pretty, marry before it has developed at all. If they are good as well as pretty, they take care it shan’t develop afterwards.”
“Burton hasn’t even the grace to be jealous; he lets her do just what she pleases. He’s so mighty conceited that he never seems to think she may come across a man capable of understanding her.”
The commissioner smiled. “I don’t think much of Burton’s intellectual capacity, but I do give him credit for this—he understands his wife, and because he understands her, he trusts her absolutely. It’s no use, my dear boy, Simla will never have the pleasure of discussing Mrs. Burton in connection with any sort of scandal; she’s not that kind!”
The commissioner was right. Her husband never had reason to find fault with Mary, and since his death she had devoted herself to her boys and to the cultivation of her mind. She took it as a matter of course that men should fall in love with her; they always did. But her experience did not make her eager to investigate further the realms of marriage.
Men made love to her because they wanted to possess her. She was so tired of hearing, “Don’t you understand? I want you for myself, for my very own.”
Mary understood, but as yet she had felt no desire to belong to anybody in that exclusive fashion.
Andrew Methven touched her. Here at last was the Princely Giver she had dreamed of, as women will dream, the man ready to give everything, asking only for leave to lay his homage at her feet, nothing more.
When she had first met him, she set him down as one of those who are destined “to do something.” It was not his fate to remain an obscure Free Kirk minister, of that she was sure. The more she saw of him the more she felt the reality of the strange power that lay behind his apparently commonplace views of men and things. “It is there,” she said to herself exultingly, and now that he had made love to her in this strange, unusual way, she was seized with a passionate desire to take this man into her life, and help him to give form and substance to that latent force of his.
So Mary dreamed dreams while she listened to the minister as he discoursed upon the historical interests of the East Neuk; as they rode home swiftly and for the most part silently; as, the Duke having gone to bed, she sat at the open window and watched the moonlight on the sea.
Then she went and looked at the boys in their two little straight beds side by side. As she bent over the Duke he smiled, and threw his arm round her neck, murmuring sleepily, “Dear mater.”
Shading the candle with her hand, she looked long and greedily at the sleeping children, and, like all women at such moments, the triumphant sense of possession swamped every other feeling.
As she reached her own room and stood before her glass, she looked into the reflected eyes, saying: “Take ship, for happiness is somewhere to be had!”
VIII
THE COLONEL INTERFERES
“There’s little Burton. I’ll ask him if it’s true,” ejaculated Colonel Colquhoun, as he noticed three or four small red-coated figures coming down the long slope at the far end of the gentlemen’s links.
“No, not the child; I would not ask the child if I were you, Colquhoun.” Mr. Braid spoke earnestly, laying his hand on the colonel’s arm to detain him. “He may know nothing about it, you know, there may be nothing to know. In any case I wouldn’t ask the boy.”
But Colonel Colquhoun had just made an inferior drive, he was in a bad temper as are many people during the royal and ancient game, so he bustled off, ignoring his friend’s remonstrance, toward the putting-green where the Duke was triumphantly holing in after a specially brilliant placing of his ball.
The caddie shouldered the colonel’s clubs, and Mr. Braid followed more slowly. He felt a curious disinclination to join the little group on the putting-green. His own lad—just home from Fettes—was one of the players; he had said kind things of the pluck and perseverance of little Burton. Mr. Braid’s heart was tender, and he himself had not forgotten the moment when he first heard of a possible stepfather. He walked more and more slowly.
The hole that the Duke and his friends were playing was the last on the links; the boyish figures were outlined sharply against the sky. Mr. Braid saw the Duke lift his cap as the colonel came up. He could not hear what passed, but he saw the four boys turn, and one after another tee their balls and drive. The colonel was left alone on the putting-green, where his ball was not. The caddie stood grinning, and the colonel cuffed his ears, declaring that the young ruffian had stolen his ball.
Mr. Braid waited in patience till the ball was discovered in some distant bents, but the colonel did not again mention little Burton or his mother.
The Duke was playing abominably. Halfway home he said: “Braid, would you think me an awful cad if I break up the foursome? I can’t play a hang.” The child’s lips were quivering, and his sunburnt cheeks looked white under the tan.
Braid put his arm round his shoulders affectionately. “You go home, old chap. You’re hipped, but never mind that old beast Colquhoun, he’s always making mischief. Don’t you notice him.”
“I didn’t—much, did I?” the Duke asked anxiously. “I hope I didn’t—show.”
“Not you—not a bit. Here, scoot! I’ll bring your clubs.”
The Duke broke into a run, and regardless of the enraged “fores” which sounded on every side, made straight across the links to the rocky shore. There he would be alone—alone with this terrible possibility that flashed its lurid light across his path.
Once behind the rocks he sat down and sobbed, even as he did so wondering when he had cried before. The Duke did not “blub”—never—he considered tears unworthy of a man, “of an officer and a gentleman,” had not the father whose memory he adored once said to him: “Curse if you like, old man, but never cry.” So the Duke never cried, though his language on occasions would have surprised his mother by its forcible variety. Before ladies, though, “gentlemen do not swear,” so Mary remained in blissful ignorance of her son’s proficiency in certain forms of objurgation.
Now, however, the Duke sobbed, great tearing, dreadful sobs that racked his slender body with a pain that was almost physical.
The colonel had done his work. As he walked across the green to enlighten Duke, he had said to himself: “I’ll make it hot for Mrs. Burton, haughty minx; the boy’s a tartar.”
Mary had found it necessary to snub the colonel on more than one occasion; so he no longer called her “a monstrous fine woman.” A fancied slight rankles in the mean and narrow soul; revenge is doubly sweet if one near and dear to the offender can be made the instrument of punishment.
The Duke sat behind the rocks and sobbed until he felt sick and stupid. Had he not heard of that horrible institution called a stepfather? Had he not read only last holidays a book called “David Copperfield,” wherein the iniquities of such an one were set forth with terrible distinctness.
He was not a religious child. Mary was not dogmatic in her teaching, she influenced more by her example and her mental attitude than by conscious effort. Yet here and now the boy felt that circumstances were too strong for him, and he prayed in a hopeless, muddled fashion that if his mother did this thing, God would take him to join the father she seemed to have forgotten.
It is a mistake to think that children never come face to face with despair. They do, more often than the superior, omniscient grown-ups themselves. There is a finality about every sorrow for children, they cannot realize that such pain as they feel can pass; they do not believe it. That saddest of all poets must have thought of sorrowing children when he wrote:
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 have told them, 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 must not do that we have to do with. I shall not marry Mr. Methven. Some day 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 door behind 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.
IX
VALE
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.”