Miss Ailie stood quite still now, a stiff, thick figure, with a soft, plain face and nervous hands. "Before you speak," she said, nervously, "I have something to tell you that--perhaps then you will not say it.
"I have always led you to believe," she began, trembling, "that I am forty-nine. I am fifty-one."
He would have spoken, but the look of appeal came back to her face, asking him to make it easier for her by saying nothing. She took a pair of spectacles from her pocket, and he divined what this meant before she spoke. "I have avoided letting you see that I need them," she said.
"You--men don"t like--" She tried to say it all in a rush, but the words would not come.
"I am beginning to be a little deaf," she went on. "To deceive you about that, I have sometimes answered you without really knowing what you said."
"Anything more, Ailie?"
"My accomplishments--they were never great, but Kitty and I thought my playing of cla.s.sical pieces--my fingers are not sufficiently pliable now. And I--I forget so many things."
"But, Ailie--"
"Please let me tell you. I was reading a book, a story, last winter, and one of the characters, an old maid, was held up to ridicule in it for many little peculiarities that--that I recognized as my own. They had grown upon me without my knowing that they made me ridiculous, and now I--I have tried, but I cannot alter them."
"Is that all, Ailie?"
"No."
The last seemed to be the hardest to say. Dusk had come on, and they could not see each other well. She asked him to light the lamp, and his back was toward her while he did it, wondering a little at her request.
When he turned, her hands rose like cowards to hide her head, but she pulled them down. "Do you not see?" she said.
"I see that you have done something to your hair," he answered, "I liked it best the other way."
Most people would have liked it best the other way. There was still a good deal of it, but the "bun" in which it ended had gone strangely small. "The rest was false," said Miss Ailie, with a painful effort; "at least, it is my own, but it came out when--when Kitty died."
She stopped, but he was silent. "That is all now," she said, softly; and she waited for him to speak if he chose. He turned his head away sharply, and Miss Ailie mistook his meaning. If she gave one little sob--Well, it was but one, and then all the glory of womanhood came rushing to her aid, and it unfurled its flag over her, whispering, "Now, sweet daughter, now, strike for me," and she raised her head gallantly, and for a moment in her life the old school-mistress was a queen. "I shall ring for tea," she said, quietly and without a tremor; "do you think there is anything so refreshing after a walk as a dish of tea?"
She rang the bell, but its tinkle only made Gavinia secede farther into the cellar, and that summons has not been answered to this day, and no one seems to care, for while the wires were still vibrating Mr. McLean had asked Miss Ailie to forgive him and marry him.
Miss Ailie said she would, but, "Oh," she cried, "ten years ago it might have been my Kitty. I would that it had been Kitty!"
Miss Ailie was dear to him now, and ten years is a long time, and men are vain. Mr. McLean replied, quite honestly, "I am not sure that I did not always like you best," but that hurt her, and he had to unsay the words.
"I was a thoughtless fool ten years ago," he said, bitterly, and Miss Ailie"s answer came strangely from such timid lips. "Yes, you were!" she exclaimed, pa.s.sionately, and all the wrath, long pent up, with very different feelings, in her gentle bosom, against the man who should have adored her Kitty, leapt at that reproachful cry to her mouth and eyes, and so pa.s.sed out of her forever.
CHAPTER XXIX
TOMMY THE SCHOLAR
So Miss Ailie could be brave, but what a poltroon she was also! Three calls did she make on dear friends, ostensibly to ask how a cold was or to instruct them in a new device in Shetland wool, but really to announce that she did not propose keeping school after the end of the term--because--in short, Mr. Ivie McLean and she--that is he--and so on.
But though she had planned it all out so carefully, with at least three capital ways of leading up to it, and knew precisely what they would say, and pined to hear them say it, on each occasion shyness conquered and she came away with the words unspoken. How she despised herself, and how Mr. McLean laughed! He wanted to take the job off her hands by telling the news to Dr. McQueen, who could be depended on to spread it through the town, and Miss Ailie discovered with horror that his simple plan was to say, "How are you, doctor? I just looked in to tell you that Miss Ailie and I are to be married. Good afternoon." The audacity of this captivated Miss Ailie even while it outraged her sense of decency.
To Redlintie went Mr. McLean, and returning next day drew from his pocket something which he put on Miss Ailie"s finger, and then she had the idea of taking off her left glove in church, which would have announced her engagement as loudly as though Mr. Dishart had included it in his pulpit intimations. Religion, however, stopped her when she had got the little finger out, and the Misses Finlayson, who sat behind and knew she had an itchy something inside her glove, concluded that it was her threepenny for the plate. As for Gavinia, like others of her cla.s.s in those days, she had never heard of engagement rings, and so it really seemed as if Mr. McLean must call on the doctor after all. But "No,"
said he, "I hit upon a better notion to-day in the Den," and to explain this notion he produced from his pocket a large, vulgar bottle, which shocked Miss Ailie, and indeed that bottle had not pa.s.sed through the streets uncommented on.
Mr. McLean having observed this bottle afloat on the Silent Pool, had fished it out with his stick, and its contents set him chuckling. They consisted of a sheet of paper which stated that the bottle was being flung into the sea in lat. 20, long. 40, by T. Sandys, Commander of the Ailie, then among the breakers. Sandys had little hope of weathering the gale, but he was indifferent to his own fate so long as his enemy did not escape, and he called upon whatsoever loyal subjects of the Queen should find this doc.u.ment to sail at once to lat. 20, long. 40, and there cruise till they had captured the Pretender, _alias_ Stroke, and destroyed his Lair. A somewhat unfavorable personal description of Stroke was appended, with a map of the coast, and a stern warning to all loyal subjects not to delay as one Ailie was in the villain"s hands and he might kill her any day. Victoria Regina would give five hundred pounds for his head. The letter ended in manly style with the writer"s sending an affecting farewell message to his wife and little children.
"And so while we are playing ourselves," said Mr. McLean to Miss Ailie, "your favorite is seeking my blood."
"Our favorite," interposed the school-mistress, and he accepted the correction, for neither of them could forget that their present relations might have been very different had it not been for Tommy"s faith in the pa.s.s-book. The boy had shown a knowledge of the human heart, in Miss Ailie"s opinion, that was simply wonderful; inspiration she called it, and though Ivie thought it a happy accident, he did not call it so to her. Tommy"s father had been the instrument in bringing these two together originally, and now Tommy had brought them together again; there was fate in it, and if the boy was of the right stuff McLean meant to reward him.
"I see now," he said to Miss Ailie, "a way of getting rid of our fearsome secret and making my peace with Sandys at one fell blow." He declined to tell her more, but presently he sought Gavinia, who dreaded him nowadays because of his disconcerting way of looking at her inquiringly and saying "I do!"
"You don"t happen to know, Gavinia," he asked, "whether the good ship Ailie weathered the gale of the 15th instant? If it did," he went on, "Commander Sandys will learn something to his advantage from a bottle that is to be cast into the ocean this evening."
Gavinia thought she heard the c.h.i.n.k of another five shillings, and her mouth opened so wide that a chaffinch could have built therein. "Is he to look for a bottle in the pond?" she asked, eagerly.
"I do," replied McLean with such solemnity that she again retired to the coal-cellar.
That evening Mr. McLean cast a bottle into the Silent Pool, and subsequently called on Mr. Cathro, to whom he introduced himself as one interested in Master Thomas Sandys. He was heartily received, but at the name of Tommy, Cathro heaved a sigh that could not pa.s.s unnoticed. "I see you don"t find him an angel," said Mr. McLean, politely.
""Deed, sir, there are times when I wish he was an angel," the dominie replied so viciously that McLean laughed. "And I grudge you that laugh,"
continued Cathro, "for your Tommy Sandys has taken from me the most precious possession a teacher can have--my sense of humor."
"He strikes me as having a considerable sense of humor himself."
"Well he may, Mr. McLean, for he has gone off with all mine. But bide a wee till I get in the tumblers, and. I"ll tell you the latest about him--if what you want to hear is just the plain exasperating truth.
"His humor that you spoke of," resumed the school-master presently, addressing his words to the visitor, and his mind to a toddy ladle of horn, "is ill to endure in a school where the understanding is that the dominie makes all the jokes (except on examination-day, when the ministers get their yearly fling), but I think I like your young friend worst when he is deadly serious. He is constantly playing some new part--playing is hardly the word though, for into each part he puts an earnestness that cheats even himself, until he takes to another. I suppose you want me to give you some idea of his character, and I could tell you what it is at any particular moment; but it changes, sir, I do a.s.sure you, almost as quickly as the circus-rider flings off his layers of waistcoats. A single puff of wind blows him from one character to another, and he may be n.o.ble and vicious, and a tyrant and a slave, and hard as granite and melting as b.u.t.ter in the sun, all in one forenoon.
All you can be sure of is that whatever he is he will be it in excess."
"But I understood," said McLean, "that at present he is solely engaged on a war of extermination in the Den."
"Ah, those exploits, I fancy, are confined to Sat.u.r.day nights, and unfortunately his Sat.u.r.day debauch does not keep him sober for the rest of the week, which we demand of respectable characters in these parts.
For the last day or two, for instance, he has been in mourning."
"I had not heard of that."
"No, I daresay not, and I"ll give you the facts, if you"ll fill your gla.s.s first. But perhaps--" here the dominie"s eyes twinkled as if a gleam of humor had been left him after all--"perhaps you have been more used of late to ginger wine?"
The visitor received the shock impa.s.sively as if he did not know he had been hit, and Cathro proceeded with his narrative. "Well, for a day or two Tommy Sandys has been coming to the school in a black jacket with c.r.a.pe on the cuffs, and not only so, he has sat quiet and forlorn-like at his desk as if he had lost some near and dear relative. Now I knew that he had not, for his only relative is a sister whom you may have seen at the Hanky School, and both she and Aaron Latta are hearty. Yet, sir (and this shows the effect he has on me), though I was puzzled and curious I dared not ask for an explanation."
"But why not?" was the visitor"s natural question.
"Because, sir, he is such a mysterious little sacket," replied Cathro, testily, "and so clever at leading you into a hole, that it"s not chancey to meddle with him, and I could see through the corner of my eye that, for all this woeful face, he was proud of it, and hoped I was taking note. For though sometimes his emotion masters him completely, at other times he can step aside as it were, and take an approving look at it. That is a characteristic of him, and not the least maddening one."
"But you solved the mystery somehow, I suppose?"
"I got at the truth to-day by an accident, or rather my wife discovered it for me. She happened to call in at the school on a domestic matter I need not trouble you with (sal, she needna have troubled me with it either!), and on her way up the yard she noticed a laddie called Lewis Doig playing with other unG.o.dly youths at the game of kickbonnety.
Lewis"s father, a gentleman farmer, was buried jimply a fortnight since, and such want of respect for his memory made my wife give the loon a dunt on the head with a pound of sugar, which she had just bought at the "Sosh. He turned on her, ready to scart or spit or run, as seemed wisest, and in a klink her woman"s eye saw what mine had overlooked, that he was not even wearing a black jacket. Well, she told him what the slap was for, and his little countenance cleared at once. "Oh" says he, "that"s all right, Tommy and me has arranged it," and he pointed blithely to a corner of the yard where Tommy was hunkering by himself in Lewis"s jacket, and wiping his mournful eyes with Lewis"s hanky. I daresay you can jalouse the rest, but I kept Lewis behind after the school skailed, and got a full confession out of him. He had tried hard, he gave me to understand, to mourn fittingly for his father, but the kickbonnety season being on, it was up-hill work, and he was relieved when Tommy volunteered to take it off his hands. Tommy"s offer was to swop jackets every morning for a week or two, and thus properly attired to do the mourning for him."
The dominie paused, and regarded his guest quizzically. "Sir," he said at length, "laddies are a queer growth; I a.s.sure you there was no persuading Lewis that it was not a right and honorable compact."
"And what payment," asked McLean, laughing, "did Tommy demand from Lewis for this service?"