CHAPTER XVI.
After the operation on my leg, I was laid up for a long time, and when I got about again, Palestrina and Thomas were married. Thomas has lately come into his kingdom in the shape of a lordly castle in Scotland, and for the life of me I can't say whether or not Palestrina hastened her wedding because the doctor ordered me to the North. If it was so, my sister's plans were frustrated by the fact that Thomas's ancient Scottish seat was pronounced uninhabitable by a sanitary surveyor, just as we proposed entering it under garlanded archways and mottoes on red cotton. Our old friend Mrs. Macdonald, hearing of our dilemma, very kindly invited us to stay with her while Palestrina and Thomas looked about for some little house that would take us in till their own place should be ready. The finding of the little house occupied some days, owing to the powers of imagination displayed by people when describing their property. One lady, to whom Palestrina wrote to ask if her house were to be let, replied, "Yes, madam; this dear, delightful, pretty house is to let;" and she pointed out in a letter, some four pages long, all the advantages that would accrue to us if we took it, ending up with the suggestion, subtly conveyed, that by taking the house we should be turning her into the street, but that she would bear this indignity in consideration of receiving ten guineas a week.
Palestrina went to see it, and returned in the evening, almost in tears, to say that the house was a semi-detached villa, and that she had found the week's washing spread out on the front lawn.
Thomas said that the railway companies ought to pay a percentage on all misleading advertisements which induce people to make these useless journeys.
The following day they returned from another fruitless expedition, having been to see a very small house owned by the widow of a sea-captain, with a strong Scottish accent. I have often noticed that the seafaring man's one idea of well-invested capital is house property—perhaps he alone knows how precarious is the life of the sea. And I shall like to meet the sailor who has invested his money in a shipping concern. The widow's house was so very small that it was almost impossible to believe that it contained the ten bedrooms as advertised in my sister's well-worn house-list. So small indeed were the rooms, that Palestrina said she felt sure that they must have been originally intended for cupboards. Nevertheless, the rent of the house was very high, and my sister ventured gently to hint this to the lady of the house—the sea-captain's widow with the strong Scottish accent.
"Of course, it is a very nice house," she said politely; "but the rent is a little more than we thought of paying for a house of this size."
"I ken it's mair than the hoose is worth," said the old dame; "but, ye see, I'm that fond o' money—aye, I'm fearfu' fond o' money."
Palestrina and Thomas spent most of their days in their search for a suitable house, and Mrs. Macdonald spends the greater part of her life house-keeping, so I was rather bored. What it actually is that occupies my hostess during the hours she spends in the back regions of her house I have never been able to discover. But the fact remains that we have to get up unusually early in the morning to allow time for Mrs. Macdonald's absorbing occupation. An old-fashioned Scotswoman of my acquaintance used to refuse all invitations to leave the house on Thursdays, because, as she explained, "I keep Thursdays for my creestal and my napery." The rest of her week, however, was comparatively free. At Mrs. Macdonald's, housekeeping is never over. And so systematic are the rules and regulations of the house, so many and so various are the lady's keys, that one finds one's self wondering if the rules of a prison or a workhouse can be more strict. The Times newspaper arrives every evening after dinner; by lunch-time next day it is locked away in a cabinet, so that if one has not read the news by two o'clock, one must ask Mrs. Macdonald for the keys; this she does quite good-naturedly, but I have never discovered why old newspapers should be kept with so much care. On Saturdays an old man from the village comes in to do a little extra tidying-up in the garden. At nine o'clock precisely, Mrs. Macdonald is on the doorstep of her house, with a cup of tea in her hand, and a brisk, kindly greeting for John, and she stands over the old man while he drinks his tea, and then returns with the empty cup to the house.
Tuesday is the day on which her drawing-room is cleaned. At half-past nine precisely on Monday evenings Mrs. Macdonald says, "Monday, you know, is our early-closing night;" and she fetches you a candle and dispatches you to bed. Mrs. Macdonald and her housemaid—there seem to be plenty of servants to do the work of the house—walk the whole of the drawing-room furniture into the hall, Mrs. Macdonald loops up the curtains herself, and covers some appalling pictures and the mantelpiece ornaments with dust-sheets. At ten o'clock she removes a pair of housemaid's gloves, and an apron which she has donned for the occasion, and says, "There! that's all ready for Tuesday's cleaning;" and she briskly bids her housemaid good-night.
On Tuesdays we are not allowed to enter the drawing-room all day, and on Wednesdays the same restrictions are placed upon the dining-room. Indeed, on no day in the week is the whole of the house available, and upon no morning of the week has Mrs. Macdonald a spare moment to herself. After breakfast, when Palestrina and Thomas have gone, she conducts me to the morning-room, and placing the Scotsman (the Scotsman is used for lighting the fires, and is formally handed to the housemaid at six o'clock in the evening) by my chair, she says, "I hope you will be all right," and shuts the door upon me. During the morning she pops her head in from time to time, like an attentive guard who has been told to look after a lady on a journey, and nodding briskly from the door, she asks, "Are you all right? Sure you would not like milk or anything?" and then disappears again. With a little stretch of imagination one can almost believe that the green flag has been raised to the engine-driver, and that the train is moving off. At lunch-time she is so busy giving directions to her servants that she hardly ever hears what one says, and the most interesting piece of news is met with the somewhat irrelevant reply, "The bread-sauce, please, Jane, and then the cauliflower." Turning to one, she explains, "I always train my servants myself.... What were you saying just now?"
"I saw in the newspaper this morning," I repeat, "that H.M.S. —— has foundered with all hands."
"In the middle of the table, if you please," says Mrs. Macdonald; "and then the coffee with the crystallized sugar—not the brown—and open the drawing-room windows when you have finished tidying there.... What were you saying? How sad these things are!"
The house is charmingly situated, with a most beautiful view over river and hills; but I really think my preoccupied friend hardly ever has time to look out of the window, and that to her the interior of a store-cupboard with neatly-filled shelves is more beautiful than anything which the realms of Nature can offer.
When Palestrina is present Mrs. Macdonald gives her recipes for making puddings and for taking stains out of carpets, and she advises her about spring-cleanings and the proper sifting of ashes at the back door. Mrs. Macdonald was brought up in the old days, when a young lady's training and education were frankly admitted to be a training for her as a wife. She belonged to the period when a girl with a taste for music was encouraged to practise "so that some day you may be able to play to your husband in the evenings, my dear," and was advised to be an early riser so that the house might be comfortable and in order when her husband should descend to breakfast. And now that that husband, having been duly administered to, is dead, Mrs. Macdonald's homely talents, once the means to an end, have resolved themselves into an end, a finality of effort. Mrs. Macdonald was brought up to be a housekeeper, and she remains a housekeeper, and jam-pots and preserving-pans form the boundary line of her life and the limit of her horizon.
Eliza Jamieson would probably tell us that even though Mrs. Macdonald's soups and preserves are excellent, these culinary efforts should not be the highest things required of a wife by her husband, and that therefore they are not a wife's highest duty, even during the time that her husband remains with her. And she would probably point out that servants and weekly bills, and an endeavour to render this creature complacent, have ruined many a woman's life. And I laugh as I think of Palestrina's rejoinder, "But then it is so much pleasanter when they are complacent."
One certainly imagined that the late Mr. Macdonald must have been well looked after during his life, and it was something of a shock to me to hear the account of his death, from the lodgekeeper's wife, one afternoon when she had come in to help with the cleaning, and was arranging my dressing-table for me. The rest of my bedroom furniture was then standing in the passage, and I had found my cap in one of the spare bedrooms, and all the boots of the house in the hall.
"He was a rale decent gentleman," said Mrs. Gemmil, "and awfy patient with the cleaning. But I am sure whiles I was sorry for him. He was shuftit and shuftit, and never knew in the morn whichna bed in the hoose he would be sleeping in at nicht. And we a' ken that it was the spring-cleaning, when he was pit to sleep ower the stables, that was, under Providence, the death o' him. He had aye to cross ower in the wat at nicht-time, and he juist took a pair o' cauld feet, and they settled on his lungs."
The day following my chat with Mrs. Gemmil was the day Palestrina found a house such as she had been looking for all along. The day was Saturday. Overnight she had announced her intention of being away all day, and Mrs. Macdonald had said delightedly that that would suit her admirably. "I do like the servants to have the entire day for the passages on Saturday," she remarked.
Even when the day dawned wet and cloudy, Palestrina had not the courage to suggest that she should stay at home, and thereby interfere with the cleaning of the passages.
The house she had found seemed to be everything that was desirable, and Palestrina returned in an elated frame of mind. "It is far away from everything," she said, "except the village people and the minister, and the 'big hoose,' as they call it, which some English bodies have rented for the autumn."
"It can't be far from the Melfords," said Thomas, pulling out a map. "Yes, I thought so; they are just the other side of the loch."
"We 'mussed the connaketion' on our way back," said Palestrina; "and I do believe there's nothing a Scottish porter enjoys telling one so much as this."
"I hope I am not unduly disparaging the railway system of my native land," said Thomas, "when I say that if you go by steamer and by train it is the remark that usually greets one, and it is always made in a tone of humorous satisfaction." And Thomas, with an exaggerated Scottish accent, which he does uncommonly well, began to tell me of their adventures. "We had a rush for the train," he said, "and I told an elderly Scot, who couldn't have hurried if he had had a mad bull behind him, to run and get us two first-class tickets. He walked slowly down the platform, muttering, 'Furrst, furrst,' and then he opened the door of a third-class carriage and shoved us in, saying, 'Ye've no occasion to travel furrst when there's plenty of room in the thurrds.'"