Penny Plain Part 6

"She told me all about it as simply as a child. Didn't seem to find it in the least odd to confide in a stranger, didn't seem at all impressed by the sudden appearance of my fashionably dressed self!

"People, I am often told, find themselves rather in awe of me. I know that they would rather have me for a friend than an enemy. You see, I can think of such extraordinarily nasty things to say about people I don't like. But this little girl treated me as if I had been an older sister or a kind big brother, and--well, I found it rather touching.

"Jean Jardine is her funny little name. She looks a mere child, but she tells me she is twenty-three and she has been head of the house since she was nineteen.

"It is really the strangest story. The father, one Francis Jardine, was in the Indian Civil Service--pretty good at his job, I gather--and these three children, Jean and her two brothers, David and Jock, were brought up in this cottage--The Rigs it is called--by an old aunt of the father's, Great-aunt Alison. The mother died when Jock was a baby, and after some years the father married again, suddenly and unpremeditatedly, a beautiful and almost friendless girl whom he met in London when home on leave. Jean offered no comment on the wisdom or the unwisdom of the match, but she told me the young Mrs. Jardine had sent for her (Jean was then a schoolgirl of fourteen) and had given her a good time in London before she sailed with her husband for India. Rather unusual when you come to think of it! It isn't every young wife who has thought on the honeymoon for schoolgirl stepdaughters, and Jean had seen that it was kind and unselfish, and was grateful. The Jardines sailed for India, and were hardly landed when Mr. Jardine died of cholera. The young widow stayed on--I suppose she liked the life and had little to bring her back to England--and when the first year of her widowhood was over she married a young soldier, Gervase Taunton. I'm almost sure I remember meeting him about--good-looking, perfect dancer, crack polo player. They seem, in spite of lack of money, to have been supremely happy for about three years, when young Taunton was killed playing polo.

The poor girl broke her heart and slipped out of life, leaving behind one little boy. She had no relations, and Captain Taunton had no one very near, and when she was dying she had left instructions. 'Send my boy to Scotland. Ask Jean to bring him up. She will understand.' I suppose she had detected even in the schoolgirl of fourteen Jean's most outstanding quality, steadfastness, and entrusted the child to her without a qualm.

"So the baby of two was sent to the child of eighteen, and Jean glows with grat.i.tude and tells you how good it was of her at-one-time stepmother to think of her! That is how she seems to take life: no suspecting of motives: looking for, therefore perhaps finding, kindness on every side. It is rather absurd in this wicked world, but I shouldn't wonder if it made for happiness.

"The Taunton child has, of course, no shadow of claim on the Jardines, but he is to them a most treasured little brother. 'The Mhor,' as they call him, is their great amus.e.m.e.nt and delight. He is quite absurdly good-looking, with great grave green eyes and a head most wonderfully set on his shoulders. He has a small income of his own, which Jean keeps religiously apart so that he may be able to go to a good school when he is old enough.

"The great-aunt who brought up the Jardines must have been an uncommon old woman. She died (perhaps luckily) just as the young Gervase Taunton came on the scene.

"It seems she always dressed in rustling black silk, sat bolt upright on the edge of chairs for the sake of her figure, took the greatest care of her hands and complexion, and was a great age. She had, Jean said, 'come out at the Disruption.' Jean was so impressive over it that I didn't like to ask what it meant. Do you suppose she made her debut then?

"Perhaps 'the Disruption' is a sort of religious _tamasha_. Anyway, she was frightfully religious--a strict Calvinist--and taught Jean to regard everything from the point of view of her own death-bed. I mean to say, the child had to ask herself, 'How will this action look when I am on my death-bed?' Every cross word, every small disobedience, she was told, would be a 'thorn in her dying pillow.' I said, perhaps rather rudely, that Great-aunt Alison must have been a horrible old ghoul, but Jean defended her hotly. She seems to have had a great admiration for her aged relative, though she owned that her death was something of a relief. Unfortunately most of her income died with her.

"I think perhaps it was largely this training that has given Jean her particular flavour. She is the most happy change from the ordinary modern girl. Her manners are delightful--not noisy, but frank and gay like a nice boy's. She neither falls into the Scylla of affectation nor the Charybdis of off-handness. She has been nowhere and seen very little; books are her world, and she talks of book-people as if they were everyday acquaintances. She adores Dr. Johnson and quotes him continually.

"She has no slightest trace of accent, but she has that lilt in her voice--I have noticed it once or twice before in Scots people--that makes one think of winds over heathery moorlands, and running water. In appearance she is like a wood elf, rather small and brown, very light and graceful. She is so beautifully made that there is great satisfaction in looking at her. (If she had all the virtues in the world I could never take any interest in a girl who had a large head, or short legs, or thick ankles!) She knows how to dress, too. The little brown frock was just right, and the ribbon that was tied round her hair. I'll tell you what she reminded me of a good deal--Romney's 'Parson's Daughter.'

"What a find for my first day at Priorsford!

"I went to tea with the Jardines and I never was at a nicer tea-party.

We said poems to each other most of the time. Mhor's rendering of Chesterton's 'The Pleasant Town of Roundabout' was very fine, but Jock loves best 'Don John of Austria.' You would like Jock. He has a very gruff voice and such surprised blue eyes, and is fond of weird interjections like 'Gosh, Maggie!' and 'Earls in the streets of Cork!'

He is a determined foe to sentiment. He won't read a book that contains love-making or death-beds. 'Does anybody marry?' 'Does anybody die?' are his first questions about a book, so naturally his reading is much restricted.

"The Jardines have the lovable habit of becoming suddenly overpowered with laughter, crumpled up, and helpless. You have it, too; I have it; all really nice people have it. I have been refreshing myself with _Irish Memories_ since dinner. Do you remember what is said of Martin Ross? 'The large conventional jest had but small power over her; it was the trivial absurdity, the inversion of the expected the sublimity getting a little above itself and failing to realise that it had taken that fatal step over the border--those were the things that felled her, and laid her, wherever she might be, in ruins....'

"Bella Bathgate, I must tell you, remains unthawed. She hinted to me to-night that she thought the Hydropathic was the place for me--surely the unkindest cut of all. People dress for dinner every night there, she tells me, and most of them are English, and a band plays. Evidently she thinks I would be at home in such company.

"Some day I think you must visit Priorsford and get to know Miss Bathgate.--Yours,

"PAM.

"I forgot to tell you that for some dark reason the Jardines call their cat Sir J.M. Barrie.

"I asked why, but got no satisfaction.

"'Well, you see, there's Peter,' Mhor said vaguely.

"Jock looked at the cat and observed obscurely, 'It's not a sentimental beast either'--while Jean asked if I would have preferred it called Sir Rabindranath Tagore!"

CHAPTER V

"O, the land is fine, fine, I could buy it a' for mine, For ma gowd's as the stooks in Strathairlie."

_Scots Song._

When Peter Reid arrived at Priorsford Station from London he stood for a few minutes looking about him in a lost way, almost as if after thirty years he expected to see a "kent face" coming to meet him. He had no -notion where to go; he had not written for rooms; he had simply obeyed the impulse that sent him--the impulse that sends a hurt child to its mother. It is said that an old horse near to death turns towards the pastures where he was foaled. It is true of human beings. "Man wanders back to the fields which bred him."

After a talk with a helpful porter he found rooms in a temperance hotel in the Highgate--a comfortable quiet place.

The next day he was too tired to rise, and spent rather a dreary day in his rooms with the _Scotsman_ for sole companion.

The landlord, a cheery little man, found time once or twice to talk for a few minutes, but he had only been ten years in Priorsford and could tell his guest nothing of the people he had once known.

"D'you know a house called The Rigs?" he asked him.

The landlord knew it well--a quaint cottage with a pretty garden. Old Miss Alison Jardine was living in it when he came first to Priorsford; dead now, but the young folk were still in it.

"Young folk?" said Peter Reid.

"Yes," said the landlord, "Miss Jean Jardine and her brothers. Orphans, I'm told. Father an Anglo-Indian. Nice people? Oh, very. Quiet and inoffensive. They don't own the house, though. I hear the landlord is a very wealthy man in London. By the way, same name as yourself, sir."

"Do I look like a millionaire?" asked Peter Reid, and the landlord laughed pleasantly and non-committally.

The next day was sunny and Peter Reid went out for a walk. It was a different Priorsford that he had come back to. A large draper's shop with plate-gla.s.s windows occupied the corner where Jenny Baxter had rolled her toffee-b.a.l.l.s and twisted her "gundy," and where old Davy Linton had cut joints and weighed out mince-collops accompanied by wise weather prophecies, a smart fruiterer's shop now stood furnished with a wealth of fruit and vegetables unimagined in his young days. There were many handsome shops, the streets were wider and better kept, unsightly houses had been demolished; it was a clean, prosperous-looking town, but it was different.

Peter Reid (of London) would have been the first to carp at the tumbledown irregular old houses, with their three steps up and three steps down, remaining, but Peter Reid (of Priorsford) missed them. He resented the new shops, the handsome villas, the many motors, all the evidences of prosperity.

And why had Cuddy Brig been altered?

It had been far liker the thing, he thought--the old hump-backed bridge with the gra.s.s and ferns growing in the crannies. He had waded in Cuddy when he was a boy, picking his way among the broken dishes and the tin cans, and finding wonderful adventures in the dark of the bridge; he had bathed in it as it wound, clear and shining, among the green meadows outside the town, and run "skirl-naked" to dry himself, in full sight of scandalised pa.s.sengers in the Edinburgh train; he had slid on it in winter. The memory of the little stream had always lain in the back of his mind as something precious--and now to find it spanned by a staring new stone bridge. Those Town Councils with their improvements!

Even Tweed Bridge had not been left alone. It had been widened, as an inscription in the middle told the world at large. He leant on it and looked up the river. Peel Tower was the same, anyway. No one had dared to add one cubit to its grey stature. It was a satisfaction to look at something so unchanging.

The sun had still something of its summer heat, and it was pleasant to stand there and listen to the sound of the river over the pebbles and see the flaming trees reflected in the blue water all the way up Tweedside till the river took a wide curve before the green slope on which the castle stood. A wonderfully pretty place, Priorsford, he told himself: a home-like place--if one had anyone to come home to.

He turned slowly away. He would go and look at The Rigs. His mother had come to it as a bride. He had been born there. Though occupied by strangers, it was the nearest he had to a home. The house in Prince's Gate was well furnished, comfortable, smoothly run by efficient servants, but only a house when all was said. He felt he would like to creep into The Rigs, into the sitting-room where his mother had always sat (the other larger rooms, the "good room" as it was called, was kept for visitors and high days), and lay his tired body on the horsehair arm-chair by the fireside. He could rest there, he thought. It was impossible, of course. There would be no horsehair arm-chair, for everything had been sold--and there was no mother.

But, anyway, he would go and look at it. There used to be primroses--but this was autumn. Primroses come in the spring.

Thirty years--but The Rigs was not changed, at least not outwardly. Old Mrs. Reid had loved the garden, and Great-aunt Alison, and Jean after her, had carried on her work.

The little house looked just as Peter Reid remembered it.

He would go in and ask to see it, he told himself.

He would tell these Jardines that the house was his and he meant to live in it himself. They wouldn't like it, but he couldn't help that.

Perhaps he would be able to persuade them to go almost at once. He would make it worth their while.

He was just going to lift the latch of the gate when the front door opened and shut, and Jean Jardine came down the flagged path. She stopped at the gate and looked at Peter Reid.