The Setons Part 38

Buff, with the air of having rather a good excuse for refusing a dull invitation, said, 'I can't go _some day_; that's the day I'm going to Etterick.'"

But Elizabeth did not go to London in April.

One Sabbath in March, James Seton came in after his day's work admitting himself strangely tired.

"My work has been a burden to me to-day, Lizbeth," he said; "I'm getting to be an old done man."

Elizabeth scoffed at the idea, protesting that most men were mere youths at sixty. "Just think of Gladstone," she cried. (That eminent statesman was a favourite weapon to use against her father when he talked of his age, though, truth to tell, his longevity was the one thing about him that she found admirable). "Father, I should be ashamed to say that I was done at sixty."

Albeit she was sadly anxious, and got up several times in the night to listen at her father's door.

He came down to breakfast next morning looking much as usual, but when he rose from the table he complained of faintness, and the pinched blue look on his face made Elizabeth's heart beat fast with terror as she flew to telephone for the doctor. A nurse was got, and for a week James Seton was too ill to worry about anything; but the moment he felt better he wanted to get up and begin work again.

"It's utter nonsense," he protested, "that I should lie here when I'm perfectly well. Ask the doctor, when he comes to-day, if I may get up to-morrow. If he consents, well and good; but if he doesn't, I'll get up just the same. Dear me, girl," as Elizabeth tried to make him see reason, "my work will be terribly in arrears as it is."

Elizabeth and Buff were in the drawing-room when the doctor came that evening. It was a clear, cold March night, and a bright fire burned on the white hearth; pots of spring flowers stood about the room, scenting the air pleasantly.

Buff had finished learning his lessons and was now practising standing on his head in the window, his heels perilously near the plate gla.s.s.

Both he and Elizabeth were in great spirits, the cloud of their father's illness having lifted. Elizabeth had been anxious, how anxious no one knew, but to-night she welcomed the doctor without a qualm.

"Come to the fire, Dr. Nelson," she said; "these March evenings are cold. Well, and did you find Father very stiff-necked and rebellious?

He is going to defy you and get up to-morrow, so he tells me. His work is calling him--but I don't suppose we ought to allow him to work for a time?"

Then the doctor told her that her father's work was finished.

With great care he might live for years, but there was serious heart trouble, and there must be no excitement, no exertion that could be avoided: he must never preach again.

A week later Elizabeth wrote to Arthur Townshend:

"Thank you for your letters and your kind thoughts of us. Aunt Alice wasn't hurt, was she? that we didn't let her come. There are times when even the dearest people are a burden.

"Father is wonderfully well now; in fact, except for occasional breathless turns, he seems much as usual. You mustn't make me sorry for myself. I am not to be pitied. The doctor says 'many years'; it is so much better than I dared to hope. I wonder if I could make you understand my feeling? If you don't mind a leaf from a family journal, I should like to try.

"'Tell me about when you were young,' Buff sometimes says, and it does seem a long time ago since the world began.... When I remember my childhood I think the fairy pipes in Hans Andersen's tale that blew everyone into their right place must have given us our Mother. She was the proper-est Mother that ever children had.

"'_Is Mother in?_' was always our first question when we came in from our walks, and if Mother was in all was right with the world. She had a notion--a blissful notion as you may suppose for us--that children ought to have the very best time possible. And we had it. Funny little happy people we were, not penned up in nurseries with starched nurses, but allowed to be a great deal with our parents, and encouraged each to follow our own bent.

"Our old nurse, Leezie, had been Father's nurse, and to her he was still 'Maister Jimmie.' You said when you were here that you liked the nursery with its funny old prints and chintzes, but you should have seen it with Leezie in it. She kept it a picture of comfort, and was herself the most comfortable thing in it, with her large clean rosy face and white hair, her cap with bright ribbons, and her most capacious lap. Many a time have I tumbled into that lap crying from some childish ache--a tooth, a cut finger, perhaps hurt feelings, to be comforted and told in her favourite formula 'It'll be better gin morning.' She had no modern notions about bringing up children, but in spite of that (or because of that?) we very rarely ailed anything.

Once, when Alan's nose bled violently without provocation, Mother, after wrestling with a medical book, said it might be connected with the kidneys. 'Na, na,' said Leezie, and gave her 'exquisite reason' for disbelief, 'his nose is a lang gait frae his kidneys.' In the evenings she always sat, mending, on a low chair beside a table which held the mending basket and a mahogany workbox, a gift to her from our grandmother. As a great treat we were sometimes allowed to lift all the little lids of the fittings, and look at our faces in the mirror, and try to find the opening of the carved ivory needlecase which had come from India all the way. Our noise never disturbed Leezie. 'Be wise, noo, like guid bairns,' she would say when we got beyond reason; and if we quarrelled violently, she would shake her head and tell herself, 'Puir things! They'll a' gree when they meet at frem't kirk doors'--a dark saying which seldom failed to quell even the most turbulent.

"On Sabbath evenings, when the mending basket and the workbox were shut away in the cupboard, the little table was piled with vivid religious weeklies, such as _The Christian Herald_, and Leezie pored over them, absorbed, for hours. Then she would remove her gla.s.ses, give a long satisfied sigh, and say, 'Weel, I hev read mony a stert-ling thing this day.'

"Above the mantelshelf hung Leezie's greatest treasure--a text, _Thou G.o.d seest me_, worked in wool, and above the words, also in wool, a large staring eye. The eye was, so to speak, a cloud on my young life.

I knew--Mother had taken it down and I had examined it--that it was only canvas and wool, but if I happened to be left alone in the room it seemed to come alive and stare at me with a terrible questioning look, until I was reduced to wrapping myself up in the window curtains, 'trembling to think, poor child of sin,' that it was really the eye of G.o.d, which seems to prove that, even at a very tender age, I had by no means a conscience 'void of offence.'

"We were brought up st.u.r.dily on porridge (I can hear Leezie's voice now--'Bairns, come to yer porridges') and cold baths, on the Shorter Catechism, the Psalms of David, and--to use your own inelegant phrase--great chunks of the Bible. When I read in books, where people talk of young men and women driven from home and from the paths of virtue by the strictness of their Calvinistic parents and the narrowness and unloveliness of their faith, I think of our childhood and of our father, and I 'lawff,' like Fish. Calvinism is a strong creed, too apt, as someone says, to dwarf to harsh formality, but those of us who have been brought up under its shadow know that it can be in very truth a tree of life, with leaves for the healing of the nations.

"Why do some families care so much more for each other than others? Has it anything to do with the upbringing? Is it the kind of mother one has? I don't know, but I know we grew up adoring each other in the frankest and most absurd way. Not that we showed it by caresses or by endearing names. The nearest we came to an expression of affection was at night, when the clamour of the day was stilled and bedtime had come.

In that evening hour Sandy, who fought 'bitter and reg'lar' all day but who took the Scriptures very literally, would say to Walter and Alan, 'Have I hit you to-day? Well, I'm sorry.' If a handsome expression of forgiveness was not at once forthcoming, 'Say you forgive me,' he warned them, 'or I'll hit you again.'

"When we were safely tucked away in bed, my door being left open that I might shout through to the boys, Sandy would say, 'Good-night, Lizbeth,' and then '_Wee_ Lizbeth' and I would reply, 'Good-night, Sandy. _Wee_ Sandy.' The same ceremony was gone through with Walter and Alan, and then but not till then, we could fall asleep, at peace with all men.

"We were none of us mild or docile children, but Sandy was much the wickedest--and infinitely the most lovable. Walter and Alan and I were his devoted slaves. He led us into the most involved sc.r.a.pes, for no one could devise mischief as he could, and was so penitent when we had to suffer the consequences with him. He was always fighting boys much bigger than himself, but he was all tenderness to anything weak or ugly or ill-used. At school he was first in both lessons and games, and as he grew up everything seemed to come easy to him, from boxing to sonnet writing.

"It isn't always easy to like beautiful, all-conquering sort of people, but I never heard of anyone not liking Sandy. He had such a disarming smile and such kind, honest eyes.

"He was easily the most brilliant man of his year at Oxford; great things were predicted for him; he seemed to walk among us 'both hands full of gifts, carrying with nonchalance the seeds of a most influential life.' And he died--he died at Oxford in his last summer-term, of a chill got on the river. Even now, after five years, I can't write about it; my eyes dazzle.... Three months later my mother died.

"We hardly realized that she was ill, for she kept her happy face and was brave and gay and lovely to the end. Mother and Sandy were so like each other that so long as we kept Mother we hadn't entirely lost Sandy, but now our house was left unto us desolate.

"Of course we grew happy again. We found, almost reluctantly, that we could remember sad things yet be gay! The world could not go on if the first edge of grief remained undulled--but the sword had pierced the heart and the wound remains. On that June night when the nightingale sang, and the grey shadow crept over Sandy's face, I realized that nothing was too terrible to happen. Before that night the earth had seemed a beautifully solid place. I had pranced on it and sung the 'loud mad song' of youth without the slightest misgiving, but after that I knew what Thomas Nash meant when he wrote:

'Brightness falls from the air; Queens have died young and fair; Dust hath closed Helen's eyes,'

and I said, 'I will walk softly all my days.'

"Only Father remained to us. I clung to him as the one prop that held up my world. Since then I have gone in bondage to the fear that he might be s.n.a.t.c.hed from me as Mother and Sandy were. When otherwise inoffensive people hinted to me that my father looked tired or ill, I hated them for the sick feeling their words gave me. So, you see, when the doctor said that with care he might live many years, I was so relieved for myself that I could not be properly sorry for Father. It is hard for him. I used to dream dreams about what we would do when he retired, but I always knew at the bottom of my heart that he would never leave his work as long as he had strength to go on. If he had been given the choice, I am sure he would have wanted to die in harness. Not that we have ever discussed the question. When I went up to his room after the doctor had told me (I knew he had also told Father), he merely looked up from the paper he was reading and said, 'There is an ignorant fellow writing here who says Scott is little read nowadays,' and so great was his wrath at the 'ignorant fellow' that such small things as the state of his own health pa.s.sed unremarked on.

"There is no point in remaining in Glasgow: we shall go to Etterick.

"You say you can't imagine what Father will do, forbidden to preach (he who loved preaching); forbidden to walk except on level places (he who wore seven-league boots); forbidden to exert himself (he who was so untiring in his efforts to help others). I know. It will be a life of limitations. But I promise you he won't grumble, and he won't look submissive or resigned. He will look as if he were having a perfectly radiant time--and what is more, he will feel it. How triumphantly true it is that the meek inherit the earth! Flowers are left to him, flowers and the air and the sky and the sun; spring mornings, winter nights by the fire, and books--and I may just mention in pa.s.sing those two unconsidered trifles Buff and me! As I write, I have a picture in my mind of Father in retirement. He will be interested in everything, and always apt at the smallest provocation to be pa.s.sionately angry at Radicals. (They have the same effect on him as Puritans had on gentle Sir Andrew Aguecheek--you remember?) I can see him wandering in the garden, touching a flower here and there in the queer tender way he has with flowers, listening to the birds, enjoying their meals, reading every adventure book he can lay his hands on (with his Baxter's _Saints' Rest_ in his pocket for quiet moments), visiting the cottage folk, deeply interested in all that interests them, and never leaving without reminding them that there is 'something ayont.' In the words of the old Covenanter, 'He will walk by the waters of Eulai, plucking an apple here and there'--and we who live with him will seem to hear the sound of his Master's feet."

Later she wrote:

"I don't suppose you ever 'flitted,' did you? That is our Scots expression for removing ourselves and our belongings to another house--a misleading bird-like and airy expression for such a ponderous proceeding.

"Just at present all our household G.o.ds, and more especially the heavy wardrobes, seem to be lying on my chest. The worry is, we have far too much furniture, for Etterick is already furnished with old good things that it would be a shame to touch, so we can only take the things from here that are too full of a.s.sociations to leave. We would hate to sell anything, but I wish we could hear of a nice young couple setting up house without much money to do it with, and we would beg of them to take our furniture.

"You would be surprised how difficult it is to leave Glasgow and the church people. I never knew how much I liked the friendly old place until the time came for leaving it; it is like digging oneself up by the roots.

"And the church people are so pathetic. It never seems to have occurred to them that Father might leave them, and they are so surprised and grieved, and so quite certain that if he only goes away for a rest he will soon be fit again and able for his work.

"But I am not really sorry for them. I know quite well that in a few months' time, flushed with tea and in most jocund mood, they will be sitting at an Induction Soiree drinking in praise of their new minister--and thank goodness I shan't be there to hear the speeches! Of course there are some to whom Father simply made life worth living--it hurts me to think of them.

"Life is a queer, confusing thing! There are one or two people in the church who have enjoyed making things difficult (even in the most lamb-like and pleasant congregations such are to be found), and I have always promised myself that some day, in a few well-chosen words, I should tell them what I thought of them. Well, here is my opportunity, and I find I don't want to use it! After all, they are not so complacent, so cra.s.sly stupid, so dead to all fine feeling as I thought they were. They are really quite decent folk. The one I disliked most--the sort of man who says a minister is well paid with 'three pounds a week and a free house'--a Socialist, a leveller, this man came to see Father the other night after he had 'cleaned hissel' after the day's work. There were actually tears in his suspicious small eyes when he saw Father so frail-looking, and he talked in what was for him quite a hushed small voice on uncontroversial subjects. As he was going out of the room he stopped and blurted out, 'I niver believed a Tory could be a Christian till I kent you." ... I am glad I won't have to say good-bye to Peggy. I saw her yesterday afternoon, and she didn't seem any worse, and we were happy together. This morning they sent up to tell me she had died suddenly in the night. She went away 'very peaceably,' her father said. It wasn't the word he meant, but he spoke more truly than he knew. She went 'peaceably' because there was no resentment or fear in her child's heart. To souls like Peggy's, innocent and quiet, G.o.d gives the knowledge that Death is but His angel, a messenger of light in whom is no darkness at all....

"I have opened this to tell you a piece of news that has pleased me very much. Do you remember my friend Kirsty Christie and her fiance Mr.

Hamilton? Perhaps you have forgotten them, though I expect the evening you spent at the Christies' house is seared on your memory, and I a.s.sure you your 'c.o.c.kney accent' has quite spoiled Mrs. Christie for the plain Glasgow of her family circle; well, anyway, Kirsty can't marry Mr. Hamilton until he has got a church, and it so happened that the minister at Langhope, the nearest village to Etterick, was finding his work too much and felt he must resign. Here was my chance! (Oh for the old bad days of patronage!) I don't say I didn't pull strings. I did. I pulled about fifty, and tangled most of them; but the upshot is that they have elected Mr. Hamilton to be minister of Langhope. They are a wise and fortunate people, for he is one of the best; and just think of the fun for me having Kirsty settled near us!

"It is the nicest thing that has happened for a long time. I have just thought of another thing--it is a solution of the superfluous furniture problem.

"Langhope Manse is large and the stipend small, and I don't think Kirsty would mind taking our furniture. I shall ask her delicately, using 'tack.'"