The Attic Guest: A Novel

by Robert E. Knowles

IX
LOVE'S TUTORSHIP

But those were happy days, as I have said already. Neither of us knew, I fancy, whence came the silent music that was slowly gathering in our hearts. But it was there, even though it came in secret strains, neither recognizing, neither declaring. Of course, I was an engaged girl—and I was trying to live up to it. I flaunted Charlie's ring, sometimes; and I often wrote to him, sitting in the very same room with Mr. Laird the while, at my own little desk in the corner. This itself had been one of Charlie's Christmas presents. And I kept Charlie's letters in the tiny drawer in the top, but I had so often been careless about it that mother saw to it herself that it was kept securely locked; I knew where the key was secreted—on the ledge above the library door. Mother said I really ought to carry it on a little gold chain around my neck; but I had no chain—and I never could bear to have things concealed about my person. Mother never glanced at his letters, of course—but I sometimes used to show her bits of mine after I had written them, and mother would suggest a word here and there, a little tenderer than the original, and I would stick them in like plums in a pudding. Indeed—I may as well tell it—mother rewrote a part of the one in which I kind of finally renounced any immediate prospect of Europe and the yacht. She said no member of our family had ever been so gifted with the pen as I—but that I was a little astray on the facts. So she fixed my letter in a way to prevent it being very final—for she said if it was ordained that I should go even yet, it would be wrong to make it impossible. I fancied at the time that this was a little like lending omnipotence a hand—but mother was an old-time Calvinist, especially on the subject of me and Charlie, so I presumed it must be all right to have it as she said.

I don't think any of them, and mother least of all, ever fancied that Mr. Laird had the remotest connection with my engagement to Charlie. For he was a minister—and that itself would be supposed to settle it as far as I was concerned. Besides, he was a minister without a church, a kind of free lance on a holiday. Then, too, we knew he was poor; he never said so, but there are always certain signs; and he took great care of his clothes, and seemed very cautious about money, except when he came across some one who was very poor. And I'm sure we all remembered, though we almost never spoke of it, that he had been a shepherd, and that his father was still keeping sheep on the hills of Scotland—it never seemed to embarrass him a bit to refer to this, which we all thought very strange.

Then, on the other hand, we hadn't the slightest reason—for a long time at least—to think he cared a single thing for me. Indeed, I was just a little piqued about this; one evening I took some fresh flowers to his room in the attic, and his diary was lying open on the table. I don't know why—I have no excuses to make at all—but my eye fell on the entry for the first day or two he had been with us. I only glanced at it—any girl would, I think—to see what he said about us. And I found references to uncle, and my mother, and Aunt Agnes—even to Lyn and Moses more than once—but not a single word about me. I didn't care a straw—only I had a good mind to take the violets down-stairs with me again. But I didn't.

I have always fancied I would have been a good deal more interested if I had thought he was engaged. But I soon made up my mind he wasn't, although I had declared so stoutly to the contrary. For he never seemed to want to be alone, especially in the twilight—and that's a sure sign; and he left all his letters lying around after he had written them; and when he sang, which he did very nicely, he preferred "Scots Wha' Ha'e" to "Annie Laurie"; and he was never melancholy, and never sighed—and he never asked the price of things you need for house-keeping. So all these signs convinced me thoroughly.

I have already said he didn't seem to care a thing for me. And yet—and yet! For one thing, he loved to hear me sing—and he taught me two or three of the old psalms that were in a leather-bound book he brought down-stairs one day. Then he seemed so happy when I said I thought them beautiful. And he talked with me so gently and reasonably about the darkey question that I finally came to admit he did right in preaching in that coloured church. And I wondered why he cared for what I thought at all. Besides all this, he tried to get my promise that I would take a class in the Sunday-school after he was gone—and I remember the gray kind of feeling I had inside of me when he spoke of going away. I wouldn't promise, for I was about as fit to teach a class as I was to be President of the United States—but I promised to help in the library.

By and by, though I can't tell how, we even came to speaking about Charlie. And he praised him, said he was such a clever business man, and handsome. I didn't think much of that; but one evening, when we were sitting on the shore all alone, he said he thought an engagement was such a sacred thing—and he urged me, in a veiled kind of way, always to be true to Charlie. And it was then I began to know—any true girl would know there was something, when he talked like that.

And it was through that—that kind of conversation, I mean—that it all came about. Because, by and by, I actually told him all about my misgivings and my fears. Of course I did it all loyally enough—I always praised Charlie, and always said I knew we'd likely be so happy because he was, already—and I would try to be. And I told him one day how Charlie was still urging me to consent that it should be soon, right away soon—and any one would have thought, if they watched his expression, that he was very concerned for Charlie's interests. For a strange paleness came upon his face when he broke a silence that seemed rather long, I fancy, to both of us.

"I think you should," he said, but his voice was so strange that I wondered where all his strength had gone to.