White Fire Part 2

He looked at the delicate provision, and said stoutly--

"No, thank you. I like this best."

And, as the little lady possessed the dainty but vigorous appet.i.te of the fully-restored-to-health-and-got-to-make-up-for-lost-time, and as she was only thirteen, she was not rude enough to press him unduly.

"Now tell me the names of all those hills and lochs," she said, and he proceeded to tell her all she wanted to know.

"Yon's Dumbarton,"--between bites; "you can see Glasgow some days," and she regarded him doubtfully.

"And yon's the Gare Loch. That big fellow with the shoulders is Ben Lomond. The one humped up like this is The Cobbler. That other big one is Ben Ihme. That's Loch Long and a bit of Loch Goil, and yon's Holy Loch and Ben More."

When she had eaten her tiny sandwiches, and her two small cookies with jam inside, and her two biscuits, and had learned the names and personal peculiarities of all the hills and lochs, and he had finished the last crumbs of his oatcake and cheese, he convoyed her past the black menace down below, as far as the next stone d.y.k.e, and told her how she could shorten her journey by cutting across some fields, and so get down to the Inverkip road, and eventually to Ashton and the "caurs."

He watched the sprightly little figure, with the gleaming mane of hair and swinging skirts and twinkling brown shoes, till she reached the next distant corner, waved his hand to her, received an answering wave from her, and turned back to his life--his unruly beasts, his treasured Euclid and Latin grammar, his dreams, his hopes, and ever so much more than he knew.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Waved his hand to her, and received an answering wave.]

But Prop. 47 was not amenable that afternoon. He smiled at thought of the windmill, and looked up to see her standing before him with her sweet childish face and questioning eyes. He thought much of the winsome little lady, both then and for a long time afterwards. He scanned the winding path by the Cut each day in hopes that she might come again. But she was away home to London, and at last only a memory of her remained, and that growing dimmer and dimmer till it was little more than a sentiment--simply the warm glow of a pleasant impression.

And she? Ah, she wrought better than she knew that day.

For when she got home from her great adventure, and had been duly scolded by her aunts for undertaking so much, when they had only expected her to go up to the Cut and down again in a couple of hours or so--when she reached home, old Mr. MacTavish, the minister, was there, and he rejoiced in her prattling tongue, and delighted in drawing her out.

She enlarged upon the very uncommon herd-laddie she had met up on the Cut,--on his satisfactory looks, his unique cleanliness, his fearlessness in the matter of wild beasts, his understanding, and his aims in life. Her thoughts were full of him, and when Miss Jean Arnot had something on her mind her little world was by way of hearing of it.

Old Mr. MacTavish had been a herd-laddie himself in his time.

_Suffecit!_

CHAPTER II

THE MAN

Ten years later Miss Jean Arnot was visiting her aunts in Greenock again. Not but what she had been there many times in between, but this is the only occasion of which we need take note.

There had been many changes in these ten years.

For one thing, Jean's father was dead, and she was a very wealthy young woman. In many respects she was still very like the little Jean of earlier times. Her face was still the sweet, long oval of her childhood, though the features were more p.r.o.nounced and matured. But the chief impression it left upon you was still that of eager questioning, a great longing to know, tempered somewhat by years and freedom from all material care. "Want-to-know" was getting on in years--twenty-three, a great age--but there were still mysteries of life which she had not solved, wherein she found matter for surprise at times.

But life ran very smoothly and pleasantly with her. She went out a little, and entertained a little in return, travelled much, and was not wanting in good deeds and charity. Her income was about ten times as large as was really good for her, and if she gave munificently she never missed what she gave, so that the recipients were the sole beneficiaries of her giving.

She had hosts of friends, phalanxes of admirers; could have had hosts of aspirants to a still closer relationship, but so far would have none of them. She was enjoying herself exceedingly, and fulfilling in their entirety the aspirations of her childhood. She was a lady, she was rich, and she was doing as she liked--and she had not touched a needle since she came into her kingdom.

That was the natural rebound, for Aunt Jannet Harvey, a famous needlewoman and housewife herself, had rigorously insisted--so long as she was in power--on her niece learning the minor as well as the major accomplishments of a gentlewoman, such as had obtained during her own long apprenticeship to that high estate. And that is how it came to pa.s.s that Miss Jean Arnot, wealthy heiress and society lady, really knew a very great deal more about some things than you would have imagined from the casual sight of her at dance or opera.

The moment she was free, and a woman of herself, she relegated the "hijjus" things to what she considered their proper place in the economy of her life, and, later, dug them up out of their dusty corners gratefully, and Aunt Jannet was justified.

Aunt Harvey--Aunt Jannet Harvey, to distinguish her from Aunt Lisbeth Harvey--had lived with them and mothered her since her own mother died, when she was a very small child indeed. Aunt Jannet was really her mother's aunt, early widowed and childless, a wise and placid old lady--old, that is, in the eyes of effervescent three-and-twenty--with somewhat rigid ideas of right and wrong, toning slowly, by course of time and easy circ.u.mstance, into a tolerant acceptance of things as they came. Her husband had been a professor in Edinburgh, and the society he and she had enjoyed in the modern Athens, thirty years before, was her standard of what society ought to be. She was, however, each year becoming more reconciled to the disparities of the lighter age with which John Arnot's great success in life had forced her into contact. And Jean had been to her as her own daughter would have been, if she had had one, since the day she first took charge of her and began to endeavour to answer some of her questions, and quietly to shelve others for more suitable occasion of discussion. For little Jean Want-to-know had a most active brain and an insatiable curiosity, and never hesitated to ask for fullest details of anything she did not understand; and the wonderings and questionings of such a child have no bounds at times, and are almost impossible of control, either from the inside or the outside.

Jean made a point of spending a part of each year in Scotland, wherever else she and Aunt Jannet might wander at other times. On such occasions Aunt Jannet went to Edinburgh and lived again in the past, but in a yearly narrowing circle, so far as the personal element was concerned, and Jean went to Greenock and queened it over her aunts there.

She was a great enjoyment, a continuous ripple of excitement, to their ordered household; and since they no longer sat upon her and answered her erstwhile inconvenient questions by gentle snubs and nicknames, the times she spent with them were times of great enjoyment to her also.

She rather patronised them, of course, which was perhaps inevitable; for she lived twenty to their one, and, moreover, possessed the means to do it and a will that carried all before it.

She insisted, for instance, on paying for her board and lodging, and on a tariff of her own fixing, whenever she came to stay with them, and flatly declined to come on any other condition. They were independent-minded, and declined to be dictated to in such a matter by a small thing whom they had known in frocks with skirts only thirteen inches long. She promptly scandalised them by going to the Tontine and putting up there. Then they gave way, and she had them. After that she was capable of anything, and they submitted to all her whims, which were always pretty and thoughtful ones, and--she a.s.sured them, just as they had been wont to a.s.sure her in the days of the thirteen-inch frocks--entirely for their own good and happiness. She salved the cicatrice of the Tontine wound by carrying them all off _en ma.s.se_ to the Riviera for a month; and Aunt Jean, after whom she was named, gravely suggested the advisability of frequently opposing her ideas, since the outcome was so eminently agreeable.

Then she was always making them presents, at which their independency kicked, but in which, nevertheless, they could not but own to enjoyment.

But the girl was right, after all. She had much too much, and they had only enough, and that only with clever handling; and they would no more have accepted bald gifts of money than they would have burned down their house and claimed double the value of the furniture.

Jean and her visits, and their visits to her, and with her to hitherto unattainable places, were the high lights of their lives. They loved her dearly, rejoiced in her greatly, were proud of her, and wondered much when it would all come to an end in the centering of her thoughts and affections on one sole and--they fervently hoped, but were not without misgivings, because of her wealth and her impulsiveness--worthy man.

They made ingenuous little attempts at sounding her on that subject, but she was much too clever for them, and skilfully eluded all approaches which might tend, even remotely, to any self-revelations.

That there were no revelations to make only added piquancy to the game, from her point of view, since it kept the aunts in a state of perpetual mystification, and held no pitfalls.

Among many other changes she had seen in the last ten years, old Mr.

MacTavish had retired long ago, and a younger man occupied his pulpit, and, strange to say, gave satisfaction in it.

The Rev. Archibald Fastnet was so exactly the opposite of his predecessor that it might have seemed impossible that where the one had pleased the other should do so. Mr. Fastnet was young, and he believed in--as he put it--making things jump. And he made both things and people jump at times. He was full of enthusiasms which were generally at white heat and--which is more unusual--remained so. The older generation said he kept them on the perpetual "kee-vee" to see what he would do next; the younger people enjoyed him and the service he exacted from them. And on Sundays they all, old and young, always turned out both morning and evening, since it invariably came to pa.s.s that, if they missed a service, something happened which made them feel out of the running for the whole of the following week. When Jean Arnot was at Greenock she did as good Greenockians do, and went to church twice every Sunday and one evening in the week as well.

The Rev. Archibald never failed to furnish her with a certain amount of quiet amus.e.m.e.nt, and, apart from other feelings, she always went in expectation and was rarely disappointed.

On this particular Sunday morning Mr. Fastnet had prepared a little surprise for his people, which turned out, as his arrangements generally did, a perfect success. It also afforded Jean Arnot the surprise of her life, and she never forgot it.

You can forget many things in ten full years. If, for instance, you yourself had met a person informally ten years ago, and spent half an hour with him, just incidentally hearing his name, it is doubtful if you would recall him very distinctly if he presented himself suddenly before you after the ten years had pa.s.sed.

Jean felt a rustle of surprise among her aunts in the pew, and she saw that two men pa.s.sed up into the pulpit where the Rev. Archibald lorded it alone as a rule. The voluntary ceased, and he stood up, beaming all over, as usual when he had something unusually delectable up his sleeve for them.

"Instead of speaking to you myself this morning," he said, "I have asked our friend Mr. Blair to say a few words to us. We all take a fatherly and motherly, and I may say a sisterly and brotherly, interest in Mr. Blair. Perhaps some of us regret that none of us has taken a still nearer and dearer-than-all-otherly interest in him"--at which Fastneticism a smile rippled round. "Our young friend leaves this week to begin his work in the South Seas, where, as you know, he is about to join that valiant bearer of light into outer darkness, John Gerson, in his n.o.ble work. You will, I know, appreciate with me this chance--it may be the last chance--of hearing our young standard-bearer's voice before he pa.s.ses beyond the fringes of the night."

Then he came down, and took his seat in a front pew and enjoyed a preacher's holiday.

And, after a pause, and very quietly, young Blair rose in the pulpit and gave out the hymn.

So far Jean Arnot had been only interested and amused. But the sound of his voice, clear and round and full as an organ tone, made her jump with surprise. He had spoken quite naturally, but there was a ring in it that told of immense possibilities behind, and there was something in it that plucked at some hidden chord of Jean's memory and set it humming as a harp-string responds to a bugle note.

She stared at him eagerly. Had she ever by any possibility met him before? She could hardly have forgotten it if she had, she thought.

For he was a young man of most striking appearance. Tall, square-shouldered and broad-chested--a commanding figure in truth. It occurred to others besides Jean that if the natives needed more forcible arguments than words for their conversion, here was a likely man for the work. Light-haired and clean-shaven, his face seemed to glow with an inner radiance--a masterful face, and grave. His eyes were wonderfully magnetic; fearless and steadfast, they made you jump as their glance crossed your own. Jean had just jumped, so she knew.

Now who was this? Surely she had met him before somewhere.

Remember it was ten years since she had seen him, and then only for half an hour, and under very different conditions, and she had never heard his name since.

She ordered her brain, or her heart, or whichever of her inner servants it was that held the key, to go find it, and sat gazing at him to give them such light as that might afford. But the clue evaded her till he was near the end of his quiet, forceful talk.