CHAPTER XVIII.
CLEMENTINA GILLESPIE.
ucy could not honestly say to Miss Latimer that she had enjoyed herself at the Brands’ dinner, but she could frankly say that Miss Latimer had been right, and that her visit had “done her good.” For though she had not returned refreshed and re-invigorated, yet she felt a wonderful thankfulness to be once more enfolded in her own home-life. Somehow, too, she could see her own trials in a truer and brighter light. She herself might indeed be worn and nervous, but there was good reason, and a grand purpose to be fulfilled by the labours and endurance which made her so. Florence seemed not less worn and nervous, and why? For no end but vanity and irritating emulation. There floated through Lucy’s mind some lines she had learned in childhood:—
“Idler, why lie down to die?
Better rub than rust!”
But was rubbing really better than rusting, if it were but a voluntary and needless friction? Lucy realised now that the deeper agonies and anxieties and the more strenuous efforts of the past few months had given her new standpoints, and had separated her from much which she would once have tolerated without question. She remembered having read the utterance of a certain writer, somewhat to this effect—“I have been through the furnace, and I have passed out too scorched to mingle freely with those who are not even singed.” Lucy could not quite see the matter in that aspect. Rather she would have expressed herself—“I have been out on God’s wolds, under His open sky with its storms and its starlight, and I cannot again relish close, artificially-lit rooms, sickly with manufactured perfumes.” Oh, when once Charlie was at home again, how much they would have to be thankful for, in their life grown at once wider and deeper! What a new meaning was given to the old words, “The Lord drew me out of many waters.... He brought me forth also into a large place.”
So Lucy’s long holiday from her classes at the Institute proved both restful and delightful. Nor were they barren of practical results. She found many picturesque “bits” to sketch near London. Work of this kind was such pure joy to Lucy that she was apt to forget that nevertheless it remained a strain upon the nerves. She might have been wiser, ay, and thriftier too, had she indulged herself in a little sheer idleness, in lying among the clover making daisy chains or cowslip balls for Hugh. As it was, when he grew tired of playing alone, he would nestle down beside mamma, watching her busy fingers and begging for “a story,” for which he never begged in vain.
Oh, those were happy days, peaceful in their present calm, radiant with big hopes dawning! Then the evening coming-home was always cheery, with Miss Latimer hovering over the teacups, Tom’s merry welcome, and the sighing Clementina’s conscientious preparations for their creature-comforts. If Lucy’s ceaseless industry did not permit her to gather up all the physical benefit she might have got, at least her nightly rest grew sweet and calm, and the troubled haunting visions vanished.
She herself found much satisfaction in regaining her healthy moral poise. It did not fret her now when Jane Smith openly gibed at her in the street. It did not worry her when Jessie Morison’s mysterious female ally was seen passing the house, and lingering in front of the gate, as if half inclined to call. Nay, she bore herself with courage and resolution when the policeman rang the bell in the middle of the night, and roused all the household to hear that a man was lying in the area, having evidently climbed over the locked gate and descended the stairs.
She and Miss Latimer and Tom went downstairs together, Tom being an incalculable blessing in such circumstances. The invader was intoxicated, not hurt, as Lucy at first suggested, to the policeman’s great amusement.
“He’s not been so bad when he was so spry getting over; he thought he’d got a nice corner to sleep himself square in,” said that functionary, as, with Tom’s disgusted assistance, he pulled the man nearer the wall and tried to make him “sit up.” Horrors! Where did Lucy know the smooth white face and red head thus revealed to view? Why, this was no other than the carpenter whom she had accredited as Jane Smith’s lawful “young man.”
“You come out of this, my man,” said the policeman. “You’re where you’ve no call to be. And if you don’t stir your stumps pretty quick, it’ll be the worse for you.”
The man had nearly “slept himself square.” He stared wildly around, and muttered something about “coming to visit one as had called herself a friend”—“a-wanting to give her a bit of his mind.”
“Take him away and let him go,” Lucy pleaded with the policeman. “I know who he is—he’s been employed at Shand’s works—he used to visit a servant of mine who is not with me now. I don’t think she behaved very well to him.”
The policeman looked up knowingly. “Is it that there woman that lives——” he paused, with a significant glance towards the closed windows of the Marvels’ house. “A bad lot she is. She behaves best to any fellow she treats badly. Come, come, young man, as the lady speaks for you, I’ll let you go this time. Your young ’ooman ain’t here now, d’ye understand? And if you take my advice, you’ll give her a wide berth, wherever she may be.”
The wretched youth rose, picking up his cap, and dashing it against the iron balustrade to beat off the dust.
“Thank you kindly, mum,” he mumbled thickly. “I begs your pardon. I did not know she’d left here. I on’y knew she gave me the go-by directly my back was turned, a-earnin’ money to make a home for her.”
“Well, well,” rejoined the policeman, pushing the shambling figure before him. “You be thankful she did give you the go-by, though you don’t deserve a better woman, if you ain’t more of a man than to let the likes of her get you into the mess you’re in to-night—or this morning, rather,” he added, looking up at the whitening sky. “Good day, mum, I’m sorry I had to disturb you.”
On their way back to their rooms, they met Clementina, who had been aroused by the movements within the house. Clementina, as she herself expressed it, “was trembling so that one could knock her down with a feather.” She had not descended below the first floor. Her breathless question was—
“Is he dead? Has it been a murder?”
She seemed so alarmed and agitated that Lucy, reminded that any such night disturbance, if occurring on Clementina’s Highland hills, would have meant something of tragic importance, proposed that they should all adjourn to the kitchen together and fortify themselves with cups of coffee. Dawn was already so bright that gas was a ghastly superfluity. Clementina, usually almost obsequious in her methods of attendance, was so shaken that she sat down and allowed the two ladies to make all the little preparations. Yet she suddenly became more communicative than she had ever been before, and also wonderfully interesting. She told of other night alarms of her life—of a wild shriek that went sounding over the moor in one black midnight hour, and was never explained till months afterwards, when a few whitened bones and wasted rags had been found among the heather. She whispered of the heavy knock which fell on her father’s cottage door one bright moonlit evening, though no step was heard on the footpath, and nobody was in sight when they looked forth. “But on the afternoon of that day my brother Niel was killed in India,” she went on in her monotonous mysterious voice, “and when we heard that, we knew what the knock had been. That’s Niel’s memorial,” she added, pointing to the melancholy little framed card. “It tells the date—June 25—and the moon was at the full. It was Rachel’s sweetheart who wrote and told us all about it,” she went on. “It was the year after Rachel had been up seeing her sweetheart’s mother and visiting us. And I mind, wicked sinner as I was, that I grudged that our lad should be taken and hers left. But after all, she was never to see hers again, for as long after as he lived. Eh, but life is short for any of us, whatever!”
“Was your house quite lonely?” Tom asked in an awed whisper.
“Yes,” she said, “that house was. When my father first went there, there was only a one-roomed place, and he had to pick up the stones off the fields before he could plant. He said my mother put her life into that bit of land. That was why she died so young. I’ve heard him say he could never see a hayrick or a sheaf of ours without thinking her very heart was inside it. In time he built two rooms more, putting stone upon stone himself, and Niel helping him. And when, the summer after Niel was dead, the factor’s letter came, saying the rent was to be raised, I thought my father was struck for a dead man. I mind I lay waking through the night. I slept in the old part of the house that had been there from the beginning, and just when the light was peeping in, I heard a strange sound, like a spade howking in hard earth. I lay and listened, and I thought it was like the digging of a grave, and that it was a sign sent that my father’s time had come. I kept still, for it’s ill to pry where a sign is set. Then I heard something like a very heavy sigh and a cough. I thought ‘that’s human,’ and I ventured to peep. There was my old father himself, howking down the stones that he’d built up, one by one! And all that day he did it, and by nightfall no human creature could find a place there to lay its head. And it was the room where my mother had died, and where Niel had sat in the chimney corner. My father never said one word,” she concluded, “but I knew what was in his heart. And next day he took the rubble, and threw it over the fields. ‘And now,’ said he, ‘let the laird come and take his own again.’”
A fierce vindictive exultation thrilled through her wailing Celtic voice.
“But he that quarrels with the gentry is a miserable man,” she went on. “Trouble came of it. The ford is as deep as the pool. Yet we got another cot and croft close by, on another laird’s land. It was but a one-roomed place with a stony field. But my father did nothing to it this time. Weak is the grasp of the downcast! He was an old man, and I think he left the soul of his soul in the other place where his children had been born and his wife had died. My father never spoke out about the hardship he’d had, but he went about, muttering, and though he had been a godly man, it was the sound o’ curses that I heard. One was, ‘May he die in the poors’ house.’ I knew he meant the laird. And just one week after father himself was taken away, his prayer came true,” she added in a strange, hissing tone, which sent a shiver over her listeners.
They all bent forward, eagerly attentive. A strange light in her eyes seemed to draw their souls towards hers.
“It came true!” she said. “The laird was visiting the poors’ house; they say he had just been calling something—I think it was a cup of tea—an ‘unnecessary luxury,’ when he was struck down in a fit, and there, on a pauper bed, he died quickly, and never saw face of his own folk again. All the strath was talking of it. But father did not live to see it,” she went on, “so it did him no good. And naught but false hearts and evil tongues had been with us in that last place, and I couldn’t bide there.”
She added that with strong excitement. Lucy remembered Mrs. Bray’s hint about the unhappy love affair and the hated sister-in-law.
“You must find it a great change from the heather hills to muddy London streets,” said Mrs. Challoner, hoping to divert Clementina’s moody mind into gentler channels.
“You can’t give luck to a luckless man,” she answered rather enigmatically. Just then, the white dawn brightened into a sunbeam, and the little group arose, feeling that though still early, it was time they should separate and begin the tasks of the ordinary day.
“She’s an uncanny creature, that,” whispered Tom to Lucy, as they left the kitchen. “Sometimes, while she was talking, I could not believe it was our Clementina. It was like another person taking possession of her.”
“I noticed that, too,” was Lucy’s whispered reply. “And her story about the curse was awful!”
“You don’t believe it was the curse which did the thing, do you?” asked Tom.
Lucy hesitated. “No,” she answered, “not as the curse. But without that curse and the general impression that it was deserved, nobody would have seen any significance in the laird’s dying where he did. Had he been a kindly, good man, it would have been felt that his Master took him to Himself while he was doing his Master’s business among the poor. We must not forget that some terrible curses stand recorded in the Bible, possibly to let the evil and unjust see the feelings which they stir, and the fate they are making for themselves, and how it will be interpreted.”
Clementina really seemed so much more communicative and even cheerful after those untimely confidences that Lucy, fearing that she had not been considerate enough to a lonely and possibly land-sick woman, tried more persistently than ever to draw her into some conversation. But Lucy was careful that the name of Charlie—Clementina’s unknown master—should never get into the talk. She dreaded associating it with Clementina’s sighs and shakings of the head. She had a nervous horror lest Clementina should make it a point about which visions and dreams and omens should crystallise. If this should happen, Lucy felt that she herself was not now strong enough to shake off the gloomy impressions.
Tom, too, was evidently struck by the general bent of Clementina’s remarks, generally made when she was setting out the supper-table or removing it. He used to ask her why “second sight” could not foresee marriages as well as deaths, comings home as well as goings away, future occasions for joy as clearly as future woes?
Lucy was rather afraid Clementina might be hurt by Tom’s questions, but though she sighed and shook her head over his words, she smiled indulgently on the speaker.
Clementina seemed so unwilling to go out to take exercise in the open air that Lucy determined to suspend her usual orders to her tradespeople, and to send her servant out to shop in the evening, when she herself could keep guard at home.
She told Clementina why she made this new arrangement, remarking that she could not understand how one who had lived all her life in pure bracing mountain air could persist in being so much confined in a London kitchen. Clementina answered, shrewdly enough,
“There’s little bracing air to be had here, ma’am, however much one may go out for it, and on our hills we didn’t need to go out for the air, it came to us at our doors. That is why our people can live in such low, dismal houses. They have but to go to the threshold, and God Almighty’s glory meets them spread over earth and sky.”
Since Clementina had been with Mrs. Challoner she had not seen much of Rachel. For Mr. Bray was seriously ill, and he and his wife and their faithful attendant had gone to Bath, and communication between the two women was limited to one or two brief notes. Clementina showed Rachel’s notes to Mrs. Challoner, because they had tidings of the mistress’s friends. Clementina once opened one of her prim little screeds to add a message from Lucy in the postscript. Clementina was very lugubrious over her old acquaintance’s master. Perhaps it was this which first warned Lucy to give her no encouragement to weave fateful spells round the absent Charlie. That “the master” would be at home about Christmas time was all Clementina knew from Lucy herself. Of course Rachel might have made confidences, but the Highland woman was too well-bred either to trade on these or to ask any questions. Probably she but thought the more. Lucy posted her own letters, but Clementina saw her writing them, saw them lying addressed on the hall-table, waiting for Lucy’s out-going. And as Clementina took in all the letters, she must have known that no trans-Atlantic letters came. Undoubtedly she puzzled herself over this mystery, for once she ventured to say to Lucy—
“It’s sore, ma’am, to see you writing so much and so often. Sending letters across the world seems so like writing to the dead.”
“Oh, no, Clementina,” Lucy answered, “for we get answers.” And Clementina smiled an inscrutable smile.
“You don’t believe we get answers from the dead, ma’am?” she asked.
“No,” said Lucy, “certainly not! Not in that way. The dead have cast off their bodies, and if they do hold any communication with us, it must be as if we too were out of the flesh.”
“My father always said we had no call to have any dealings with the blessed dead,” remarked Clementina. “We never had any portrait of Niel. But after he was killed, Rachel’s sweetheart sent us home a little one in a case. It had been taken after Niel was in India. But when my father saw what it was, he wouldn’t take a second look. After the neighbours had been told about the death, my father never named Niel again. He never spoke of our mother.” And Clementina sighed and went about her business.
Lucy drew a long breath. The mere thought of such suppressed existence seemed to choke her. There may be danger of righteous indignation or strong emotion merely frittering itself away in the “soft luxurious flow” of too copious expression. A deep thinker has cautioned us.
“Prune thou thy words, the thoughts control
That o’er thee swell and throng:
They will condense within thy soul
And change to purpose strong.”
But merely to smother and bury is not to control and direct. It is rather to deprive healthful force of its lawful function, and to screen fevered force from wholesome cure. Surely speech is to the mind as an opened window is to a chamber. If the chamber be fresh already, then its freshness but meets newer freshness. If it be filled with noxious vapours, they escape and fresh air enters.
It struck Lucy, too, as singular how this Highland father and daughter, unlike the Brands in every other respect, yet resembled them in one particular.
These Gillespies had clearly been gloomy people, narrow of creed, strict in life, staunch alike in love and in hatred. The Brands were frivolous, practically creedless, moving at the breath of every social wind, their emotions floating like bubbles on the surface.
Yet both the Brands and the Gillespies kept silence over “the dead.” They shut up their names and their memories in the tomb. It had often pained Lucy to realise that in her sister’s silence her own recollections of her early home were fading. When we so inevitably soon pass out of hearing of those who have shared a common past, Lucy felt much should be made of that treasury, while two remain to turn it over. Apart from the attractions of Mrs. Bray’s quaintness and elfishness, the old lady had for Lucy the supreme attraction that she remembered Lucy’s parents, and seldom saw her without making bright reference to some saying or doing of “your father” or “your mother.” But when Florence was forced to mention these parents, it was always in a whisper—such as Lucy would have used in naming a painful subject. And she invariably said “poor papa,” “poor mamma,” as if Death—as universal as birth—can, in itself, be a misfortune.
Winter was drawing on, as Clementina poetically expressed it, “fast as a stone rolls down the hillside.” No Pacific Island letter had ever come from Mr. Challoner, but Lucy said to herself that possibly his American letter would but come the sooner. Every morning she woke with the thought “Charlie’s letter may come to-day!” She knew the hope was still premature. So when she did not find Charlie’s letter, she always opened her other letters cheerily and read aloud any items of news which she thought might amuse the little breakfast party, Hugh generally having an interest in most of his mother’s friends, since those who cared for her did not forget to send a message to him, and one or two even added a bit of paper “all for himself,” covered with “O’s” for kisses.
One morning towards the end of November three letters lay by Lucy’s breakfast plate. The top one was a note from the picture dealer, the under one was but a type-written circular. But Lucy paused over the centre missive.
“Here is a funny-looking epistle,” she said, holding it up. The envelope was thin and poor and dirty, and the writing seemed to have been done by a pin-like pen wielded by a very heavy hand, which must have wrought sore damage on its instrument before it laid it down.
“I know what that is,” said Tom confidently; “it’s the bricklayer’s bill.” A few days earlier a bricklayer had been employed to relay a stone in the scullery floor, and Tom and Hugh had superintended the performance with great delight.
“Well, I don’t think he makes out many bills,” remarked Lucy, rather daintily tearing open the filthy wrapper and unfolding its contents.
As she did so, her contented smile changed to a look of bewilderment.
(To be continued.)