CHAPTER XVI.
A GLINT OF SUNSHINE.
r. Black,” said Lucy, speaking rather suddenly after her pause, “Miss Latimer and I are keeping house together just now, and we are hopeful of securing the services of a highly respectable elderly woman, who will keep things neat and punctual. Would you care to come and live here for the present, paying me precisely what you have paid Mrs. Mott?”
“Oh, Mrs. Challoner,” cried the lad, “how can you propose such a delightful thing! It is far too good to be true! To come to a house like this, so near the office too, and your home! It would be a real kindness in you to do such a thing: but it would not be fair—you oughtn’t to think of it!”
“Mr. Black,” said Lucy, “I think it may suit you very well indeed; but the kindness and the service will not be all on my side. In the event of all manner of evil chances—burglaries or chimney fires, for instance,” she interpolated with a smile, “we shall have a reliable and friendly house-mate. See how useful you were to me, and how you kept up our spirits on that terrible Christmas Day! But most especially, Mr. Black, there will be somebody else besides me for Hughie to talk to, and perhaps play with sometimes.” Her lip trembled as she spoke. It was hard to think she herself could not suffice for her own child. But she was too true a mother to limit her little boy’s enjoyments to her own failing powers, no longer equal to provide them.
“I come home so tired sometimes,” she said, “that I fear I may put a damper on Hugh’s prattle, or fail him in his romps. Miss Latimer, too, is very tired, and she is growing old. It would be such a comfort to feel I had a young friend’s help to fall back upon at a pinch. It might not happen often. It may not happen at all, because it will be such a restful relief to know there is somebody to fall back on. I shall take no mean advantage of your presence in this matter,” she added, with an April smile. “I think you may trust me for that!”
“Oh, Mrs. Challoner,” said Tom, “that’s just what a fellow misses when he isn’t at home; there’s nobody expects anything from him, and he gets like a working and feeding and eating machine. I’m sure I’ll be only too delighted to be of any use I can. As for playing with Hugh, we’ll have drill and all sorts of larks. And he can go for a run with me in the evenings, whenever you don’t want to walk! To think of getting into a home such as this! How thankful mother will be! She’s beginning to worry about the matter, for though I’ve made light of it to her, she seemed to guess how it would be.”
So it was settled. Then Clementina Gillespie duly kept the appointment Mrs. Challoner made with her. Her appearance well supported her introduction by Mrs. Bray’s faithful Rachel. Certainly she had not the sonsie charm of the delusive Mrs. Morison. Quite the reverse. Clementina’s face had no resemblance to a winter apple lying in the frost. She was pale and thin, almost cadaverous-looking, with a well-marked aquiline nose and a long jaw. In place of Mrs. Morison’s white frills and cosy wraps, she was clad in what she called her “mournings,” without a dash of white about her. Lucy at once noticed the soft Highland voice, with its strange Celtic wailing. But Clementina Gillespie’s manner and appearance were alike “superior.” Indeed, there was a kind of severe, decayed high-breeding and elegance about her.
“Four people instead of three, ma’am,” she said, when Lucy told her that her household was to be joined by a youth of seventeen. “It will make no differ to me, whatever. I shall have nothing to do but to try to do my best for you all. And, indeed, the young gentleman will be a blessing and a safeguard in the house, for I do think this Babylon has terrible risks for a household of lone women.”
“There is not so much danger as people from country places are apt to imagine,” Lucy hastened to reassure her, fearful lest terrors of “Babylon” should drive her back to her native fastnesses. “The young gentleman will sleep in the little room behind the dining-room, Miss Latimer, I and my little boy are on the first floor, and your bedroom is in the attic, so you see burglars will have to pass us all before they can get to you,” she added playfully.
Clementina Gillespie did not smile. “They might come in by the roof,” she said. “I hear they often do. What is fated will happen. But I am not afraid, whatever.”
“Of course not,” Lucy replied. “If you have lived in a lonely house on a hillside, you are sure to be a brave woman. It must be rather eerie in such places on wild, dark, winter nights.”
“The winds and the darkness are the servants of the Almighty,” returned the Highland woman. “But wherever there be peoples, there be bad peoples.”
“Ay, but good ones also,” said Lucy. “And all people are in God’s hand, as well as all forces of nature.”
Clementina Gillespie did not answer, and Lucy somehow felt that she did not quite agree. It struck her, however, that conversation having taken such a turn was a sufficient proof that this person was on a different intellectual level from all the other servants she had seen lately. It was equally clear that if Clementina were never to be more cheerful than she was at present, she might be a little depressing. Yet Lucy recollected that she had come from a father’s grave and a broken-up home, and was a stranger in surroundings utterly alien to her previous ways and thoughts. Besides there would be Tom to keep the house alive with mirth and laughter.
Lucy was not sorry to be able to ask Jane Smith whether it would put her to any inconvenience to leave before her “notice month” had expired, or whether she would like to do so. Of course, in either case she would get her wage the same, but badly as the girl had behaved, Lucy was reluctant to evict her if the home was of any importance to her.
“Oh, no, mum, I’ll go to-morrow if you like, mum,” was Jane’s answer. “I’ve got a place waiting for me the minute you can do without me. They’ll be glad to have me so soon.”
Lucy allowed herself to ask no question then. Nobody had inquired about Jane’s character. But if she had taken a place in the country it might be in her own village, and might have been secured by some other line of introduction. But when the day of departure came, Lucy felt it to be her duty as a mistress to know where the girl was going. So she inquired gently—
“Have you far to go, Jane?”
“No, mum,” was the curt answer, with no information vouchsafed.
“Shall you want a cab? Or are your boxes to be called for by the railway people?” Lucy persisted.
“I don’t want no cab, mum. A friend of mine’s coming to give me a hand. You needn’t trouble about me, mum.”
Lucy and Hugh were seated at their tea, when the black-bearded man came whistling up the street and descended the area steps. Jane was waiting for him. One or two loud laughs were heard, followed by bumping sounds. He had laden himself with Jane’s big trunk, and she followed with a tin box and a brown paper parcel. She had not relented, nor come to the parlour even for a civil “Good evening.” As she followed her trunk and its bearer, she turned and looked in at the dining-room window with a mocking smile.
The group crossed the street, but paused a few yards lower down. There was a house whose door was open, and there they went in. That was where Jane had found a place! That was the “country situation” in favour of which she had given her abrupt notice! It was Mrs. Challoner’s own neighbours who had received her servant without the slightest reference to her. Lucy felt stung. She knew nothing of these people, except that their name was Marvel, and that the family seemed to consist of father, mother, and two or three daughters. She had constantly seen them going out, in evening dress, in cabs. But how discourteous was their present action! If, as it seemed, they had made up their minds to take Jane under any circumstances, they might at least have made formal recognition of her last employer’s existence. The only inference Lucy could draw was that her late servant had managed to put her so thoroughly in the wrong that the Marvels believed hers to be no standard to which they need refer, and herself a person to whom no civility was due.
It vexed Lucy to find how this thought hurt her. She knew that, in ordinary parlance, she “ought to be above feeling such things.” Once upon a time she would have laughed at such a matter as affecting herself, though she might have recognised its significance socially. She could not understand her greater weakness now. She said to herself that often in her life she had found pleasure in setting herself harder tasks than any she was now accomplishing; for she had taken youth’s athletic joy in pedestrian feats and in working against time. She was still unable to realise that it is one thing to court fatigue and excitement with unimpaired vigour and high-strung nerves, and quite another matter to accept these when one is already worn out with anxieties and fears. Also that it is one thing to live even the most laborious days in at atmosphere of love and appreciation, and another to toil in so much risk of carping and misunderstanding that one is thankful if one can but escape notice altogether. There is repose and refreshment beforehand in the very consciousness that there exists somebody who will say presently, “You must rest; you must have a holiday;” and who possesses both the will and the power to enforce the words, just as we often feel so much assurance in an outstretched helping hand, that we can jump safely, without availing ourself of its help.
Fond mother Lucy could not be expected to understand that there had been a perpetual strain in having for so long had no household companionship but that of her little laddie. If it is tiring to stretch ever upwards to minds above our own, speaking of things we do not understand, and in a language we scarcely know, it is equally exhausting to the mind to be for ever stooping, and never able fully to express its deepest thoughts and feelings.
There was a strain, too, in Lucy’s terror lest Hugh should lack something in being thrown wholly upon her failing resources; she would not rest if she thought he wanted a game; she would not even relapse into brief silences such as she often craved. No, she had goaded herself on to chatter, and make fun, and tell stories!
Then there had been nobody to remember and provide the little dainties—the pleasant table-surprises which do so much to stimulate a failing appetite. Until Miss Latimer had come to stay, all that Lucy cared for was that Hugh should get his milk, and his puddings, and his fruit. And somehow she herself turned from all these. And there was nothing tempting in their stead.
Also Lucy had started on her new laborious, lonely life after the agony of Charlie’s illness and the supreme effort made for his departure. She had been at the very bottom of her physical powers and nervous energy. For six months she had been steadily giving out and taking nothing in; nothing but nameless little worries had filled in the interstices of work and anxiety.
Looking in her glass, she could see her face was thin and wan; she noticed one or two silver threads in her hair. Anybody else looking so, she would know to be ill, but she would not own any breakdown in herself. Ill! Was not her task already half accomplished, and had not Charlie’s journey prospered beyond their hopes?
If only she had been able to enjoy one week of the bracing breezes off Deal, and of the wholesome presence of Mrs. May! If only the Brands’ house had been one where she was sure to find hearty welcome, and where she could have spoken out all the imaginings and horrors that began to haunt her. But from nobody in the world was it more necessary to hide her trembling spirits and collapsing forces than from her sister Florence, who would have seen in them only an occasion for criticism and censure, and for counsels for whose carrying out she would offer no furtherance.
It was at this time that Lucy first had a dream—which she often had afterwards—and which, worse still, became a sort of waking vision, which would open before her if ever she dared to remain for one moment without active occupation for brain or hand.
In that sleeping dream, and in that waking “vision,” she saw herself walking on a dreary road, between a dead wall and an open wold. Night was falling fast; wind and rain were beating upon her; her limbs were failing, and still she struggled on, and as she went, she seemed to wail, “Alone! Alone! Alone!”
The dream always broke off there; the vision went no further. She never knew how it ended.
Two days after Jane Smith’s exit and Clementina’s in-coming, Tom Black arrived. Miss Latimer and Lucy welcomed his cheery presence. Clementina certainly seemed highly respectable, and set about her work as one who wished to do her duty conscientiously. But her very presence was depressing. Her necessary sentences always ended with a sigh, and the depth of her mourning-raiment was never alleviated while she went about her household tasks. Indeed, one could scarcely fancy her in a cheerful lilac print. Of course, she had not worn caps on her father’s croft, and Lucy did not dream of suggesting them to her, though she could not help feeling that it would have been a joyful relief to see a white lace butterfly crowning the smooth black hair which seemed as much in mourning as all the rest of Clementina.
The only little personalities which Clementina contributed to the kitchen furniture were three memorial cards: one yellow and almost undecipherable with age, the other in commemoration of the piper, Niel Gillespie, the friend of Rachel’s dead lover; the newest, a tribute to the recently deceased father; also she possessed a piece of quaint and heavy pottery, the figures of two children kneeling beside a grave under a weeping willow, and a dim old print, “The Death of Abel,” in a thick black frame.
Tom brought quite a different order of things into the house. The pictures he hung up in his bedroom were of Skye terriers hopelessly watching butterflies, kittens playing with a ball, a group of cricketers on the green of his native place. He had his mother’s portrait, too, set up in a dainty little frame, on which he had evidently lavished some pocket-money. He brought it into the dining-room to show Lucy, and Lucy, with one moment’s reflection, asked him whether he would not like to keep it there, where he would pass his waking hours. “Oh, yes, certainly, Tom would like it, only wouldn’t Mrs. Challoner feel——” but while he was yet speaking, Lucy had taken it from his hand, and had found room for it on the mantelshelf. Her own father’s portrait and Charlie’s were there already. There had been one of herself and little Hugh, but her husband had taken that away with him. Lucy slipped Mrs. Black’s picture into the empty place. Clementina crooned eerie Gaelic songs in the kitchen. Tom went about the house singing—
“For a-hunting we will go!”
It is, perhaps, needless to say in which song Hugh learned to join. Indeed, the oddest thing about Clementina was that Hugh did not seem to like her—no, not though she always sent up a special little pie-cake for him whenever there was a pie, and though if her face ever wore a smile, that smile was put on for him. Alas, little Hugh had been so fond of the ill-starred Jessie Morison! It seemed a pity that such proven moral instability should have charms which this manifold respectability had not!
Lucy had not seen or heard from the Brands for some time. Such silences were not unusual between the two households, unless something special was going forward. Lucy knew that her sister had been paying some country-house visits, and felt sure she should hear from her when she came home to make her preparations for the annual family migration to the seaside.
The summer holidays began at the Institute. Of course, it was impossible for Lucy or Miss Latimer to think of leaving home when they had just received a strange servant and a guest. Still, the holidays meant considerable relaxation. Hugh had his holidays, too, and he and his mother, and sometimes Miss Latimer, too, used to go off together to Hampstead or Highgate or Greenwich, where he could gather wild flowers and play about, while she found quaint or pretty “bits” for sketches. Then, when they came home, there was Tom with funny stories about people and events at the office, or the “latest news” of the evening. The domestic group, with their varied ages and developments, made, as it were, a pretty household chime—the child’s exuberant inconsequence melting into Tom’s boyish enthusiasms, and those rising towards Lucy’s serious ideals and soberer outlook on life, and Miss Latimer’s gentle pathos. Of course, to old household loves and loyalties bred from years of mutual experience, this was but as a sketch is to a masterpiece. But it was good so far as it went. And every masterpiece has been but a sketch once!
It was certainly a lovely gleam of peace and content, but Lucy knew that for her its brightness was derived from her consciousness that Charlie, in all the elation of renewed health, might now be considered fairly on his homeward way! His last letter, which had arrived three days after Tom Black’s in-coming, had come from Hong Kong, whither Captain Grant had unexpectedly steered his course, owing to the unforeseen demands of a promising branch of business. They would leave that port a day or two after the letter was posted, and might reasonably expect to arrive at Vancouver well within the year of Charlie’s proposed absence. But the Slains Castle herself, after despatching her business at the Canadian port, would have to return home all round by Cape Horn, thus not only unconscionably prolonging her voyage, but doing this through stormy seas at an inclement season. Captain Grant, however, had declared that he had never had such a fortunate voyage, that Charlie had been such a “luck” passenger, and that as circumstances had broken his own promise that his ship would not be away more than a year, so on his side he would release Charlie at Vancouver, rebating from the hundred guinea fee enough to pay for Charlie’s land journey by the Pacific Railway and the short Atlantic voyage by a liner from New York.
“I begin to feel that we may expect to keep our next Christmas together,” wrote Charlie, “and I dared hardly form that hope while my return within that time lay wholly with a sailing-vessel, on which I find two or three weeks ‘more or less’ are matters of no account whatever. Now, little woman, you and I must prepare for one more long silence. We may touch at some of the islands of the North Pacific, and then you shall get a missive; but again we may not, and then your next letter will hail from Vancouver, and I myself shall arrive on the back of it—like a postscript! I don’t need to ask you to let me have letters waiting at Vancouver. Write there regularly whenever you feel inclined to have a chat with your old man, and then, whether I arrive sooner or later, I shall have a nice sequence of sweet letters to keep me company on my lonely rush across North America and the Atlantic. Remember, my wifie, that before you receive this, the distance between us will be actually lessening day by day. Here’s to our happy meeting hour! And God bless my brave little wife!”
Of course Lucy’s heart rose high. The worst was now over, and in the glow of renewed joy she began to think it had not been so very bad. As by magic the weariness and weight dropped from her feet, her voice recovered its full, rich timbre, her eyes shone with fresh light. She said to herself that she had not been overworn or ill after all—“only anxious and depressed.” And now what she had to do was to banish the thin wanness of her face before Charlie came home. As for the silvery hairs—they must stay. But she said to herself that there is beauty in silvery hairs, and she was not at all sorry to stand proven as no longer girl or bride, but as woman and matron, with every right to think and to act for herself and for others.
She was still going cheerily in the light cast by Charlie’s letter, and though she had already eagerly written to Vancouver, she had not begun to feel the damping effect of the inevitable silence of the North Pacific, when an epistle came from Florence.
“Dearest Lu,—I am home from my visits, and am very busy packing us all off for Scarborough. Can’t get round to see you at any hours I am likely to find you in Pelham Street.” (She had quite forgotten the holidays!) “Won’t you come over to me here? Please, do! Come to-morrow, as early as you can in the afternoon, and stay to dinner and for the evening. Please wire reply. We expect only one or two friends. The change will do you good. I don’t invite Hugh too, because I want you to stay, and I know you wouldn’t keep him out in the night air. Surely you can leave him at home for once! And do remember I’m your only sister, and have got such a lot of things to show you. I’ve told Jem I’m writing to you; don’t let him say you pay no attention to my invitations! (He has said that—Jem can be nasty sometimes, though he’s always so polite to you!) Do come!
“From your loving sister,
“Flo Brand.
“P.S.—I suppose you are always getting the best of good news from the other side of the sea?”
That palpable “afterthought” nearly made Lucy flatly decline the appeal. Yet she hesitated. This was only “Florence’s way,” and she might have done just the same had the original motive of her letter been inquiry after her brother-in-law and not a mere invitation to her sister. Lucy wanted to cherish family affection, so far as it was possible; and then she could well believe that Jem “could be nasty.” Poor Flo!
So she got as far as to mention her invitation to her little household at tea-time.
“Of course you’ll go,” said Miss Latimer. “It will do you a world of good.”
“Hugh and I will get on grandly while you are away,” said Tom. “We’ve got a plan laid out already for some evening ‘when mamma is busy,’ but now it shall be when ‘mamma is gone to a party.’”
“I can’t go very early,” observed Lucy, hesitating, “for I sha’n’t leave home before you come from the office.”
“It’s a slack time, and I’ll get away sharp,” returned Tom, while Hugh’s face, which had clouded, cleared, and he danced to and fro between his mother and his friend.
So Lucy wrote to Florence, and told her she might expect to see her between five and six next evening.
(To be continued.)