The Setons Part 31

"Why women more than men?" Elizabeth's voice was pugnacious.

"Oh, well--youth's such an a.s.set to a woman. It must be horrible for a beautiful woman to see her beauty go."

"'Beauty is but a flower Which wrinkles will devour,'"

Arthur quoted, as he rose to look at Buff's drawing.

Elizabeth sat up very straight.

"Oh! If you look at life from that sort of 'from-hour-to-hour-we-ripe-and-ripe-and-then--from-hour-to-hour-we-rot-and-rot'

att.i.tude, it is a tragic thing to grow old. But surely life is more than just a blooming and a decay. Life seems to me like a Road--oh! I don't pretend to be original--a road that is always going round corners. And when we are quite young we expect to find something new and delightful round every turn. But the Road gets harder as we get farther along it, and there are often lions in the path, and unpleasant surprises meet us when we turn the corners; and it isn't always easy to be kind and honest and keep a cheerful face, and lines come, and wrinkles. But if the lines come from being sorry for others, and the wrinkles from laughing at ourselves, then they are kind lines and happy wrinkles, and there is no sense in trying to hide them with paint and powder."

"Dear me," Mr. Seton said, regarding his daughter with an amused smile.

"You preach with vigour, Lizbeth. I am glad you value beauty so lightly."

"But I don't. I think beauty matters frightfully all through one's life, and even when one is dead. Think how you delight to remember beloved lovely people! The look in the eyes, the turn of the head, the way they moved and laughed--all the grace of them.... But I protest against the littleness of mourning for the pa.s.sing of beauty. As my dentist says, truly if prosaically, we all come to a plate in the end; but I don't mean to be depressed about myself, no matter how hideous I get."

Mr. Townshend pointed out that the depression would be more likely to lie with the onlookers, and Buff, who always listened when his idol spoke, laughed loudly at the sally. "Haw," he said, "Elizabeth thinks she's beautiful!"

"No," his sister a.s.sured him, "I don't think I'm beautiful; but, as Marget--regrettably complacent--says of herself spiritually, 'Faigs!

I'm no' bad!'"

They all laughed, then a silence fell on the room. Buff went on with his painting, and the others looked absently into the fire. Then Mr.

Seton said, half to himself, "'An highway shall be there and a way ...

it shall be called the way of holiness ... the wayfaring man though a fool shall not err therein.' Your Road, Lizbeth, and the Highway are one and the same. I think you will find that.... Well, well, I ought not to be sitting here. I have some visits to make before seven. Which way are you going, Mr. Stevenson? We might go together."

Stewart Stevenson murmured agreement and rose to go, very reluctantly.

It had not been a satisfactory visit to him--he had never even had the heart to produce the book-plate that he had taken such pains with, and he greatly disliked leaving Elizabeth and this stranger to talk and laugh and quote poetry together while he went out into the night. This sensible and slightly stolid young man felt, somehow, hurt and aggrieved, like a child that is left out of a party.

He shivered as he stood on the doorstep, and remarked that the air felt cold after the warm room. "Miss Seton," he added, "makes people so comfortable."

"Yes," Mr. Seton agreed, "Elizabeth has the knack of making comfort.

The house always seems warmer and lighter when she is in it. She is such a sunny soul."

"Your daughter is very charming," Stewart Stevenson said with conviction.

When one member of the Seton family was praised to the others they did not answer in the accepted way, "Oh! do you think so? How kind of you!"

They agreed heartily. So now Mr. Seton said, "_Isn't_ she?"

Then he smiled to himself, and quoted:

"'A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck, And something of the Shorter Catechist.'"

Stewart Stevenson, walking home alone, admitted to himself the aptness of the quotation, and wondered what his mother would make of such a character. She would hardly value such traits in a daughter-in-law.

Not, of course, that there was any question of such a thing. He knew he had not the remotest chance, and that certainty sent him in to the solid comfort of the Lochnagar dining-room feeling that the world was a singularly dull place, and nothing was left remarkable beneath the visiting moon.

"Are ye going out to-night, Stewart?" his mother asked him, as they were rising from the dinner-table. There was just a note of anxiety in her voice: the Heart's Ease Library and the capering ladies were always at the back of her mind.

"It's the Shakespeare Reading to-night, and I wasn't at the last. I think I'll look in for an hour. I see that it's at Mrs. Forsyth's to-night."

Mrs. Stevenson nodded, well satisfied. No harm could come to a young man who went to Shakespeare Readings. She had never been at one herself, and rather confused them in her mind with Freemasons, but she knew they were Respectable. She had met Mrs. Forsyth that very day, calling at another villa, and she had mentioned that it was her evening for Shakespeare.

Mrs. Forsyth was inclined to laugh about it.

"I don't go in all the evening," she told Mrs. Stevenson, "because you have to sit quiet and listen; but I whiles take my knitting and go in to see how they're getting on. There they all are, as solemn as ye like, with Romeo, Romeo here and somebody else there--folk that have been dead very near from the beginning of the world. I take a good laugh to myself when I come out. And it's hungry work too, mind you.

They do justice to my sangwiches, I can tell you."

But though she laughed, Mrs. Forsyth had a great respect for Shakespeare. Her son Hugh thought well of him and that was enough for her.

Stewart Stevenson was a little late, and the parts had been given out and the Reading begun.

He stood at the door for a moment looking round the room. Miss Gertrude Simpson gave him a glance of recognition and moved ever so slightly, as if to show that there was room beside her on the sofa, but he saw Jessie Thomson over on the window-seat--it was at the Thomson's that he had met Elizabeth Seton; the Thomsons went to Mr. Seton's church; it was not the rose but it was someone who at times was near the rose--and he went and sat down beside Jessie.

That young woman got no more good of Shakespeare that evening. (She did not even see that it was funny that Falstaff should be impersonated by a most genteel spinster with a cold in her head, who got continual shocks at what she found herself reading, and murmured, "Oh! I beg your pardon," when she waded into depths and could not save herself in time.) The beauty and the wit of it pa.s.sed her unnoticed. Stewart Stevenson was sitting beside her.

There was no chance of conversation while the reading lasted, but later on, over the "sangwiches" and the many other good things that hearty Mrs. Forsyth offered to her guests, they talked.

He recalled the party at the Thomsons' house and said how much he had enjoyed it; then she found herself talking about the Setons. She told him about Mrs. Seton, so absurdly pretty for a minister's wife, about the Seton children who had been so wild when they were little, and about Mr. Seton not being a bit strict with them.

"It's an awful unfashionable church," she finished, "but we're all fond of Mr. Seton and Elizabeth, and Father won't leave for anything."

"Your father is a wise man. I have a great admiration for Mr. Seton myself."

"Elizabeth's lovely, isn't she?" said Jessie. "So tall." Jessie herself was small and round.

"Too tall for a woman," said Mr. Stevenson.

"Oh! do you think so?" said Jessie, with a pleased thrill in her voice.

Before they parted Jessie had shyly told Mr. Stevenson that they were at home to their friends, "for a little music, you know," on the evenings of first and fourth Thursdays; and Mr. Stevenson, while he noted down the dates, asked himself why he had never noticed before what a sensible, nice girl Miss Thomson was.

_CHAPTER XIV_

"_Sir, the merriment of parsons is very offensive._"

Dr. Johnson.

When Mr. Seton had gone, and taken Stewart Stevenson with him, Elizabeth and Arthur sat on by the fire lazily talking. Arthur asked some question about the departed visitor.

"He is an artist," Elizabeth told him. "Some day soon, I hope, we shall allude to him as Mr. Stewart Stevenson _the_ artist. He is really frightfully good at his job, and he never makes a song about himself.

Perhaps he will go to London soon and set the Thames on fire, and become a fashionable artist with a Botticelli wife."