PART II CHILDREN OF LAST CENTURY (continued 3)

Andrew Methven looked at her but he did not speak.

She looked up a little surprised, and saw his face working strangely. She understood.

“Don’t try to say anything,” she said, laying her hand on his arm. “You are sorry. You are a good friend of mine.”

Somehow the touch of the little gloved hand on his arm made the minister lose his head. He did not attempt to hold it in his own—his reverence for her was too great for that—but he told her simply and forcibly what he felt for her. She did not try to stop him. The sunshine and the summer had got into her blood, and this worship that was offered to her was sweet and precious. There was nothing ridiculous in it, nothing impossible. He did not ask her to be his wife; in his wildest dreams of happiness he had never reckoned on the possibility of that. He did not ask to be anything to her; all he told her was what she was to him.

And in the very middle of it all the Duke came back, saying:

“If we are to get to the East Neuk by teatime, we’d better be off; it’s four already.”

So they rode off, and very silent companions the Duke found them.

Seven years before in Simla, Mary had had a great success. She had been made much of, and had enjoyed it. Many men had made love to her, and she had enjoyed it. A beautiful, healthy girl accepts admiration as her natural right.

But the men who made love to her did not enjoy it, for many of them had the misfortune to be serious, and although Mary accepted their flowers and their compliments and their devotion in her own gay, gracious fashion, she gave nothing in return but that gay graciousness and the privilege of her society.

“If she were in love with that card-playing, drinking fool, her husband, I could understand it,” said Major Molyneux of the 42nd; “but she isn’t in love with him, not a bit; and yet she’s an icicle to every other chap. It’s not as if she were one of those cold, saint-in-a-shrine sort of women; she’s as human as she can be. She’s no fool, either. What, in heaven’s name, made her marry her husband?”

“Calm yourself, my dear Molly! Calm yourself,” answered the elderly civilian to whom he was unburdening himself. “You have yet to learn that the selective faculty is latest of development in women. Most women, especially if they are pretty, marry before it has developed at all. If they are good as well as pretty, they take care it shan’t develop afterwards.”

“Burton hasn’t even the grace to be jealous; he lets her do just what she pleases. He’s so mighty conceited that he never seems to think she may come across a man capable of understanding her.”

The commissioner smiled. “I don’t think much of Burton’s intellectual capacity, but I do give him credit for this—he understands his wife, and because he understands her, he trusts her absolutely. It’s no use, my dear boy, Simla will never have the pleasure of discussing Mrs. Burton in connection with any sort of scandal; she’s not that kind!”

The commissioner was right. Her husband never had reason to find fault with Mary, and since his death she had devoted herself to her boys and to the cultivation of her mind. She took it as a matter of course that men should fall in love with her; they always did. But her experience did not make her eager to investigate further the realms of marriage.

Men made love to her because they wanted to possess her. She was so tired of hearing, “Don’t you understand? I want you for myself, for my very own.”

Mary understood, but as yet she had felt no desire to belong to anybody in that exclusive fashion.

Andrew Methven touched her. Here at last was the Princely Giver she had dreamed of, as women will dream, the man ready to give everything, asking only for leave to lay his homage at her feet, nothing more.

When she had first met him, she set him down as one of those who are destined “to do something.” It was not his fate to remain an obscure Free Kirk minister, of that she was sure. The more she saw of him the more she felt the reality of the strange power that lay behind his apparently commonplace views of men and things. “It is there,” she said to herself exultingly, and now that he had made love to her in this strange, unusual way, she was seized with a passionate desire to take this man into her life, and help him to give form and substance to that latent force of his.

So Mary dreamed dreams while she listened to the minister as he discoursed upon the historical interests of the East Neuk; as they rode home swiftly and for the most part silently; as, the Duke having gone to bed, she sat at the open window and watched the moonlight on the sea.

Then she went and looked at the boys in their two little straight beds side by side. As she bent over the Duke he smiled, and threw his arm round her neck, murmuring sleepily, “Dear mater.”

Shading the candle with her hand, she looked long and greedily at the sleeping children, and, like all women at such moments, the triumphant sense of possession swamped every other feeling.

As she reached her own room and stood before her glass, she looked into the reflected eyes, saying: “Take ship, for happiness is somewhere to be had!”

VIII THE COLONEL INTERFERES

“There’s little Burton. I’ll ask him if it’s true,” ejaculated Colonel Colquhoun, as he noticed three or four small red-coated figures coming down the long slope at the far end of the gentlemen’s links.

“No, not the child; I would not ask the child if I were you, Colquhoun.” Mr. Braid spoke earnestly, laying his hand on the colonel’s arm to detain him. “He may know nothing about it, you know, there may be nothing to know. In any case I wouldn’t ask the boy.”

But Colonel Colquhoun had just made an inferior drive, he was in a bad temper as are many people during the royal and ancient game, so he bustled off, ignoring his friend’s remonstrance, toward the putting-green where the Duke was triumphantly holing in after a specially brilliant placing of his ball.

The caddie shouldered the colonel’s clubs, and Mr. Braid followed more slowly. He felt a curious disinclination to join the little group on the putting-green. His own lad—just home from Fettes—was one of the players; he had said kind things of the pluck and perseverance of little Burton. Mr. Braid’s heart was tender, and he himself had not forgotten the moment when he first heard of a possible stepfather. He walked more and more slowly.

The hole that the Duke and his friends were playing was the last on the links; the boyish figures were outlined sharply against the sky. Mr. Braid saw the Duke lift his cap as the colonel came up. He could not hear what passed, but he saw the four boys turn, and one after another tee their balls and drive. The colonel was left alone on the putting-green, where his ball was not. The caddie stood grinning, and the colonel cuffed his ears, declaring that the young ruffian had stolen his ball.

Mr. Braid waited in patience till the ball was discovered in some distant bents, but the colonel did not again mention little Burton or his mother.

The Duke was playing abominably. Halfway home he said: “Braid, would you think me an awful cad if I break up the foursome? I can’t play a hang.” The child’s lips were quivering, and his sunburnt cheeks looked white under the tan.

Braid put his arm round his shoulders affectionately. “You go home, old chap. You’re hipped, but never mind that old beast Colquhoun, he’s always making mischief. Don’t you notice him.”

“I didn’t—much, did I?” the Duke asked anxiously. “I hope I didn’t—show.”

“Not you—not a bit. Here, scoot! I’ll bring your clubs.”

The Duke broke into a run, and regardless of the enraged “fores” which sounded on every side, made straight across the links to the rocky shore. There he would be alone—alone with this terrible possibility that flashed its lurid light across his path.

Once behind the rocks he sat down and sobbed, even as he did so wondering when he had cried before. The Duke did not “blub”—never—he considered tears unworthy of a man, “of an officer and a gentleman,” had not the father whose memory he adored once said to him: “Curse if you like, old man, but never cry.” So the Duke never cried, though his language on occasions would have surprised his mother by its forcible variety. Before ladies, though, “gentlemen do not swear,” so Mary remained in blissful ignorance of her son’s proficiency in certain forms of objurgation.

Now, however, the Duke sobbed, great tearing, dreadful sobs that racked his slender body with a pain that was almost physical.

The colonel had done his work. As he walked across the green to enlighten Duke, he had said to himself: “I’ll make it hot for Mrs. Burton, haughty minx; the boy’s a tartar.”

Mary had found it necessary to snub the colonel on more than one occasion; so he no longer called her “a monstrous fine woman.” A fancied slight rankles in the mean and narrow soul; revenge is doubly sweet if one near and dear to the offender can be made the instrument of punishment.

The Duke sat behind the rocks and sobbed until he felt sick and stupid. Had he not heard of that horrible institution called a stepfather? Had he not read only last holidays a book called “David Copperfield,” wherein the iniquities of such an one were set forth with terrible distinctness.

He was not a religious child. Mary was not dogmatic in her teaching, she influenced more by her example and her mental attitude than by conscious effort. Yet here and now the boy felt that circumstances were too strong for him, and he prayed in a hopeless, muddled fashion that if his mother did this thing, God would take him to join the father she seemed to have forgotten.

It is a mistake to think that children never come face to face with despair. They do, more often than the superior, omniscient grown-ups themselves. There is a finality about every sorrow for children, they cannot realize that such pain as they feel can pass; they do not believe it. That saddest of all poets must have thought of sorrowing children when he wrote:

What matter if the grief be short, its poignancy while it lasts is none the less acute.

The Duke stopped crying, and looked at the bare wall of rock before him with hopeless, unseeing eyes. Then as he prayed, a great wave of tenderness, of longing for his mother, broke over his child soul, and he got up. Scrambling over the great boulder he had hidden behind, he set off to run home. If this amazing, this shameful news were true, he would set a seal on his misery, and uncertainty would be at an end. If it were false, the Duke set his teeth as he thought of the colonel, then he squared his shoulders and dropped into the swinging run which made him such an admirable hare at “hare and hounds.”

He ran by the beach, a good three miles, and burst into their little sitting-room, tear-stained and breathless, just as Mary had arranged her writing-board on her knee.

She looked up in astonishment at his somewhat noisy entrance. He still wore his cap in the room, before her, and his face was dirty. Who had seen the Duke with a dirty face since he arrived at years of discretion?

“My darling boy, what has happened? Is it Wiggins? Is he hurt?” Mary stood up in her excitement, and the paper and envelopes were scattered about the floor.

The Duke only looked at her, his lips trembling.

“Speak, Duke, what is it? Don’t keep me in suspense.”

“No one is hurt, mother, except me, and I’m only hurt in my heart.” The tears ran down his cheeks as he spoke. “Mother, is it true—are you going to marry Mr. Methven? Oh, say it isn’t true. It’s so dreadful!”

Mary drew the boy to her, and sitting down she took him on her knee. He buried his dirty face in her neck and sobbed.

“My dearest, who has said that I am going to marry Mr. Methven? Surely you do not suspect me of telling people—other people—before I would tell you such a thing as that! Oh, Duke, I thought you trusted me.”

“But, mother, you might not have told them, they might have guessed, and it’s not the not knowing that I mind, it’s—it’s—Mr. Methven!”

“Dear Duke, did it never strike you as possible that I might marry again?”

“Never! Never! You belong to Wiggins and me—and father. Have you forgotten father?”

“No, sonny, no. I have not forgotten.”

“Oh, mother, say it isn’t true, say it isn’t true, or I shall die!”

Mary folded the boy closer in her arms. “It is not true, dear. Mr. Methven has not even asked me to marry him.”

As she spoke she remembered her own words as she looked into the glass the night before. Her face grew very sad.

“But if he did ask you, mother, you would say no? You would say no?”

The Duke’s voice, husky with long crying, was very pathetic.

Mary leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. She held her boy very close, and her breath came quickly.

“I don’t think he will ask me, dear, but if he does, I must say no, for his sake!”

The Duke sat up and gazed at his mother in absolute amazement.

“For his sake,” he repeated in a hushed, almost frightened voice. “Do you want to marry him, mother?”

“It does not matter much what I want to do, my little son; it’s what I must not do that we have to do with. I shall not marry Mr. Methven. Some day when you are a man you will realize what I have given up for you—and for him!” And Mary fell a-weeping with her boy clasped in her arms.

The Duke felt her hot tears on his short-cropped hair, and he trembled; then, releasing himself from his mother’s arms, got off her knee and stood beside her, very pale and grave.

“Dear!” he said solemnly, “if you want to marry this—gentleman—if it will make you happier, you shall. Do you hear, darling? You shall.” And throwing himself into his mother’s arms, they cried together. When it came to the point, he found that he loved his mother better—than himself.

Presently Mary began to laugh. “Oh, Duke, Duke, how funny you are! You talk as if I were a little girl, as if—but it doesn’t matter—some day you will understand.... It’s not going to happen, Duke dear. It’s been a storm in a teacup. You must never listen to what ignorant people say.”

“May I contradict them, politely?” asked the Duke eagerly, with an immense relief shining in his eyes.

“Certainly, if anyone has the impertinence to speak of such a thing again. It is an insult to Mr. Methven and to me. Oh, Duke, there’s somebody coming upstairs. Quick, go and say I’ve got a headache and can’t see people.”

It flashed across the boy’s mind that he was not very presentable either. However, the staircase was dark, and he shut the sitting-room door behind him. A tall, black-coated figure was ascending the stairs.

“Mother can’t see anyone to-day, Mr. Methven; she’s got a headache.”

But even as he spoke the door at the top of the stairs opened, and Mary said:

“I’ll see Mr. Methven, sonny, but ask Mrs. Urquhart to say I am engaged if anyone else calls.”

The sitting-room door closed behind the minister and Mary. The Duke went to his own room to wash his face, and to ponder over his mother’s words.

IX VALE

Somebody has said that women have no sense of humor. It is one of those knock-me-down assertions that provoke argument. The sense of humor is so blessed a gift, it were unjust indeed to deny its benefits to the larger half of humanity. The gods had bestowed it with no niggardly hand upon Mary. It had stood her in good stead during many a crisis; its divine attribute did not desert her now.

There was a poetic justice in the appearance of Andrew Methven at that particular moment that appealed to her sense of artistic inevitability; and as Andrew shut the door behind him, though the tears shone wet upon her cheeks, she laughed.

“I am sorry you have a headache,” began Andrew lamely. “Shall I go away?”

“No, sit down; I want to talk to you. I’ve just been through a somewhat trying scene with the Duke, and I long that somebody should horsewhip Colonel Colquhoun.”

“I don’t possess a horsewhip, but I have a good stout stick.” The minister’s manner was most unclerical as his grasp tightened on the weapon in question.

“You do not even ask what he has done.”

“He has annoyed you—that is quite enough; but I wish he was a younger man.”

“He is not young enough to thrash, and he is not quite old enough to ignore; all the same, we shall have to ignore him. But, you Quixotic person, would you really thrash a man because I asked you to?”

“If you asked me to thrash a man, I should know he well deserved thrashing, and I—should enjoy it.”

“You’re more man than minister, after all,” said Mary, more to herself than to him.

“Better man, better minister. Do you think I could have had any sort of influence over my colliers at Cowdenbeath if I couldn’t fight? I can’t fence, but I can box. I’ll teach the Duke, if you like.”

“Why don’t you ask me what Colonel Colquhoun has done?”

“Because if you want to tell me, you will tell me; and if it is unpleasant to you to tell me, why should you?”

“It’s as unpleasant as it is necessary I should tell you, because we must both publicly contradict a foolish report that has got spread abroad in Elgo to the effect that we are to be married.”

Mary did not blush as she spoke, but the minister crimsoned to the roots of his hair. “I am too sorry you should have been subjected to this annoyance. You know what my feeling for you is; you also know that I have not the right to ask a fisher lass to marry me. I am nothing, and have nothing; but you have let me lay my great love at your feet.”

Mary made a little sound, half sob, half laugh, and held out her hands to him in a helpless, unseeing way that went to his heart. He caught them in his own, and looking into the dear face with purple shadows painted by tears under the eyes, he knew that she, too, cared.

What does it avail to tell in words how these two plighted their troth, that was to be ever unfulfilled? The tenderest and truest of lovers have generally small literary value.

For half an hour they went to heaven together.

Then they faced realities, and Andrew asked: “Will you write to me?”

Mary shook her head. “No; if we write we shall simply waste our lives in everlasting watching for the postman. We are very human, you and I, and how can we hope to be better and wiser than other people?”

“You are hard,” murmured Andrew. “I can find no comfort in virtuous soliloquy. A letter would be something tangible.”

“No, I am not hard; but I am old who once was young, and I know. As it is we shall have a perfect and unspoiled memory, full of tenderness and grace and poetry; but if we write we shall be miserable, ever unsatisfied, hanging, like Mahomet’s coffin, between heaven and earth. No; let us keep this sweet experience untarnished by impotent tears and regrets.”

Three days after, Mary and her boys had joined some of the numerous uncles at a shooting-box near Kingussie. The Duke was very happy; but Wiggins missed his beloved sea. “I think my minister must miss me,” he said. “I miss him so very much; he’s such a kind man.”