As she pa.s.sed various cottage doors my grandmother had several bouts with joiners who blocked the road with unfinished carts and diffusive pots of red paint, with small wayside cowherds in charge of animals which considered the hedge-rows as their appointed pasturage, with boys going fishing who had learned at school that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, and who practised their Euclid to the detriment of their neighbours" fences.
But nothing of great moment occurred till, on the same knoll from which he had summoned us to view the smoke of the ghost"s afternoon fire at Marnhoul, we encountered Boyd Connoway. He was stretched at length, as usual, one leg crossed negligently over the other. He had pivoted his head against a log for the purpose of seeing in three directions about him--towards the Great House, and both up and down the main road. A straw, believed to be always the same, was in his mouth.
A red rag to a bull, a match to tinder, are weak metaphors--quite incapable of expressing a tenth of what my grandmother felt at the sight of the pet idler of Eden Valley.
She rushed instantly to the a.s.sault, much as she would have led a forlorn hope. The dragoons who plunged their swords into great mows of straw in Covenanting barns, the unfortunates who pursued a needle through a load of hay, were employed in hopeful work when compared with Mistress Mary Lyon, searching with her tongue in this ma.s.s of self-sufficiency for any trace of Boyd Connoway"s long-lost conscience.
"Why are you not at home?" she cried; "I heard Bridget complaining as I came by, that she could not feed the pig because she had n.o.body to bring her wood for her boiler fire--and she in the middle of her blanket washing!"
The husband whom fate and her own youthful folly had given to Bridget Connoway, took off his battered and weather-beaten hat with the native politeness of a born Irishman. He did not rise. That would have been too much to expect of him. But he uncrossed his legs and recrossed them the other way about.
"Mistress Lyon," he said indolently, but with the soft, well-anointed utterance of the blarneying islander, which does not die away till the third generation of the poorest exile from Erin, "now, misthress dear, consider!"
"I have considered you for seven years, and seven to the back of that, Boyd Connoway, and you are a lazy lout! Every year you get worse!"
My grandmother counted nothing so stimulating as truth spoken to the face. She acted, with all save her male grandchildren, on the ancient principle that "Praise to the face is an open disgrace!" And Boyd, in his time, had been singularly exempt from this kind of disgrace, so far as my grandmother was concerned.
"But consider, Mrs. Lyon," he went on tranquilly, while my relative stood in the road and eyed him with bitter scorn, "there"s my wife, now she"s up early and late. She"s scrubbing and cleaning, and all for what?--just that yonder pack o" children o" hers should go out on the road and come trailing back in ten minutes dirtier than ever. She runs to Shepstone Oglethorpe"s to give his maid a help in the mornings, all for a miserable three shillings a week. She takes no rest to the sole of her foot, nor gives n.o.body any either! Poor Bridget--I am sorry for Bridget. "Take things easier, and you will feel better, Bridget," I say.
"Trust in Providence, Bridget!" "Think on what the Doctor said three Sundays but one ago from the very pulpit." And would ye believe me, Mistress Lyon, that poor woman, being left to herself, threw all the weights at me one after the other--aye, and would have thrown the scales too if I had not come away!"
Here Connoway sighed and stretched himself luxuriously, rubbing the stiff fell of his hair meditatively as he did so.
"Ah, poor Bridget," he continued, with pathos in his voice, "Bridget is so dreadfully unresigned, Mistress Lyon. Often have I said to her, "Be resigned, Bridget--trust in Providence, Bridget!" But as sure as I point out Bridget"s duty, there is something broken in our house!"
"Pity but it was your head, Boyd Connoway! Come away, child!" cried my grandmother, "quick--lest I do that man an injury. He puts me in such a state that I declare to goodness I am thankful I have not a poker in my hand! Now there"s your grandfather----"
But she went no further in the discussion of her own lesser household burden. For there right in front of us was the great gate, the battered notice to trespa.s.sers, the broken standard on which the padlock, now removed, had worn a rusty hollow, and in its place we read the little white notice concerning the hours at which the mistress of the mansion could receive visitors.
"Oh, the poor young things!" said my grandmother, her anger (as was its wont) instantly cooling, and even Boyd Connoway dropping back into his own place as perhaps a necessary factor in an ill-regulated but on the whole rather bearable world.
The gate creaked open slowly. My grandmother drew herself up. For did she not come of the best blood of the Westland Whigs, great-granddaughter of that Bell of Whiteside, kinsman of Kenmure"s, who was shot by Lag on the moor of Kirkconnel, near to the Lynn through which the Tarff foams white?
For me, I was chiefly conscious of the bushes and shrubs on either side the avenue, broken and trampled in the tumultuous rush of the populace on the day of the discovery. I felt guilty. By that way Gerty Greensleeves and I had pa.s.sed, Gerty very close to my elbow. And now, like the rolling away of a panorama picture in a show, Gerty Greensleeves, and all other maids save one, had pa.s.sed out of my life.
Or so, in my ignorance, I thought at the time.
For no woman ever pa.s.ses wholly out of any man"s life--that is, if he lives long enough. She steals back again with the coming of life"s gloaming, with the shadows of night creeping across the hills, or the morning mists swimming up out of the valley. Sometimes she is weeping, but more often smiling. For there is time enough, since the man last thought of her, for all tears to be wiped from her eyes. But come she will. Yet sometimes it is not so. She does not smile. She only stands on the threshold of a man"s soul with reproachful eyes, and lips drawn and mute. Then it is not good to be that man.
But in those days, being a boy, carried along in the waft of my grandmother"s skirt, I knew nothing about such things.
I watched my grandmother take the antique knocker between her fingers, noting with housewifely approval that it had recently been polished. I have seldom pa.s.sed a more uncomfortable time of waiting, than that between the resounding clatter of grandmother"s knocking reverberating through the empty house, and the patter of feet, the whispering, and at last the opening of the door.
Then I saw again the tall girl with the proudly angled chin, the crown of raven curls, and the pair of brave outlooking eyes that met all the world with something that was even a little bold.
I had been afraid that my grandmother, so indiscriminating in her admonitions, might open fire upon this forlorn couple, isolated in the great haunted house of Marnhoul. But I need not have troubled.
My grandmother had the instinct of caressing maternity for all the young, the forlorn, the helpless. So she only opened her arms and cried out, "Oh, you dears--you poor darlings!"
And the little boy, moved by the instinctive yearning of all that needed protection, of everything of tender years and little strength towards the breast that had suckled and the hands that had nursed, let go his sister"s hand and ran happily to my grandmother. She caught him in her arms and lifted him up with the easy habitual gesture of one long certified as a mother in Israel. He threw his little arms about my grandmother"s neck, nestling there just as the rest of us used to do when we were in any trouble.
"I like you! You are good!" he said.
Miss Irma and I were therefore left eye to eye while Louis Maitland, in spite of his t.i.tle, was so rapidly making friends with the actual head of our family.
Irma eyed me, and I did the like to Miss Irma--that is, to the best of my ability, which in this matter was nothing to hers. She seemed to look me through and through. At which I quailed, and then she appeared a little more content.
With the child still in her arms, and her voice, lately so harsh in rebuke, now tuned to the cooing of a nesting dove, my grandmother introduced herself.
"Child," she said to Miss Irma, "I am your nearest neighbour. Who should come to welcome you if not I? You will find me at the farm of Heathknowes. It is my goodman"s saw-mills that you hear clattering from where you stand, and I am come to see if there is anything I can do to help you."
"I thank you----" began the girl, and then hesitated. She had meant to declare that they wanted for nothing, perhaps to indicate that the wife of a tenant was hardly a fitting "first-foot" to venture over the threshold of a baronet of ancient name and of the sister who acted as his sponsor, tutor and governor.
But then Miss Irma did not know my grandmother as Eden Valley did, still less as we who were, as one might say, of Caesar"s household.
"Let me come in--I will soon see for myself!" quoth my grandmother, and marched straight into the front hall of the Maitlands, that immense dusky cavern I had only once looked into over the pikes and pitchforks.
She carried Sir Louis, tenth baronet of that name, on one arm. With her free right hand she went hither and thither, sweeping her hand along the ledges of great oak cabinets, blowing at the dust on the stone mantelpiece, and finally clearing the great curtained south-western window to let in the sun in flakes and patches of scarlet and gold.
Then she turned to Miss Irma and said in the tone of an expert who has inspected a grave piece of work and not found it wanting, "You have done very well, my dear!"
And at this Miss Irma changed the fashion of her countenance. Pleasure shone scarce concealed. It was certain that up to that moment she had regarded my grandmother somewhat in the light of an intruder, but she could not bear up against such an appeal from housewife to housewife.
"Will you come up-stairs?" she said, "I have hardly got begun here yet."
CHAPTER VI
THE APOTHEOSIS OF AGNES ANNE
No word or look included me in the invitation which Miss Irma tendered to my grandmother. Nevertheless I followed, not knowing what else to do.
I felt huge, awkward, clumsy of build and knotty of elbow and knee. I was conscious that my knuckles were red. I felt in the way and unhappy.
In short, I hulked. Indeed, but that I was able to watch two eyes of darkest grey beneath a wisp of untamed curls on a small and shapely head, and the look of the thing, I would far rather have stopped out on the doorstep with Crazy.
And perhaps that would have been the best place for me, all things considered.
After we had pa.s.sed two or three rooms in review, all of which were, as it appeared to me, garnished with the ordinary sheets and coverlets of a bedroom, my grandmother abruptly turned upon Miss Irma.
"Let me see your hands!" she said, in her ordinary brusque manner. I was in terror lest we should be shown to the door. But the freemasonry of work, the knowledge of things feminine, the fine little nod of appreciation at a detail which is perfectly lost on a man, the flush of answering approbation had done their perfect work between the old woman and the girl.
Such things were not within my ken, and my grandmother promptly banished me. She set down the little baronet at the same time with a "Run and play, my doo!" She issued directions for me to charge myself with the responsibility. I would much rather have stayed to hear what grandmother and Miss Irma had to say one to the other, because I was more interested in that. But the choice was not given to me. Go I must.
And with her first personal word of acknowledgment that I was a human being, Miss Irma, calling me by name, indicated the "drawing-room" as the place where we might await the end of this first congress of the Holy Alliance.
I was some little alarmed at the place, the name of which so far I had only seen in books, but little Sir Louis whispered in my ear as he took my hand, "We can play there. That"s only what sister Irma calls it!"
When my grandmother and Miss Irma appeared after an absence of half-an-hour they found the two of us deep in a game of bat-ball. I made an attempt to hide the ball, fearing lest Miss Irma might think I usually carried such things about with me (I had confiscated it in cla.s.s that day). But I need not have troubled, she paid no attention whatever to me, continuing to hold my grandmother"s hand and look into the wise, stormy, tender, emphatic, much-enduring old face. And I wondered at my relative, and saw in this marvel one more proof of her own infallibility.
"You must not stay any longer in this great house alone," she was saying, "I will send you--somebody."