Part 4

“Going to leave us and your home?” and Jack sat down on the kitchen table in stark amazement. “Where would you go to, Magsy? Why, you nursed me when I was a kid, and you knew the pater when he was a fellow at school. Why, you couldn't get on without us, and, look here, this circus can't be worked without you.

“If you don't feel fit for the cooking,--and it must be a beastly stew over the fire,--mother'ill get another hand, and you'll just order her round and have a good time.” But Margaret sat with sad, despairing eyes, looking straight before her, and making no sign.

“You couldn't do it, Magsibus,” and the lad came over and put his arm round her; “it would be too mean. Didn't you promise to wait and start house with me, the same as you did with father? and now you calmly announce that you are going to set up for yourself, and be a lady. Oh, you treacherous, wicked woman!”

“Master Jack, I have not a relative living, and I couldn't go to another place--I've been too long with one family--four-and-thirty years--and I don't know what I'll do without the sight of you, for my heart has no portion outside this house on earth; but I must go, I cannot do otherwise, I must go.

“You see, I'm getting old, dear, and I've been so long here that I forget it's not my own house--God knows that I would die for you all--and I have a temper, and I shall be... a trouble and not a help. Your mother has been a good mistress to me, and been kinder to me than I have been to her. I'll pray for you all as long as I live, and I would like to... see you sometimes; but I must go, Master Jack, I must go.”

III

“It seems to me, Flo,” and Leslie stretched out his legs in the warmth, “the chief good of easy circumstances is being able to afford a wood fire in one's bedroom,--that and books. Do you remember that evil-smelling oil-stove in our little house at Islington? By the way, did I tell you that I ran out one afternoon last week, when I had an hour to spare, and paid an outside visit to our first home. It looked rather forlorn, and so small and shabby.”

“It was the dearest little house when we lived in it, John,” and Mrs. Leslie saw wonderful things in the firelight; “and when you were at the office I used to go from room to room, arranging and dusting and admiring.”

“Yes, but you also had the most toothsome evening meals ready at eight p.m. for a struggling colonial broker, and used to dress perfectly, and did it all on next to nothing.”

“Two hundred and twenty-two pounds five shillings and threepence--that, sir, was the first year's income. Don't you remember making up the book, and finding we had thirty pounds over; but, then, Jack, we had... a perfect servant.”

“Poor Margaret! what an interest she took in our daring enterprise! By the way, your memory is better than mine, wife: didn't we tell her how the balance stood, and she was the best pleased of the three?”

“'Praise God!' she cried, 'I knew, Mr. John, you did right to trust and to marry, and some day I'll see you in a big house, if God will'; and then you told her to bring up her missionary box and you gave her a sovereign, and when she put it in, her hand was shaking for joy. Her temper has got masterful since she grew old, and she is aggravating; but I know she's a good woman.”

“Yes, Meg wouldn't have left us if we had been down on our luck: I believe she would have seen us through and gone without wages”; and Leslie spoke with the tone of one hazarding a wild speculation.

“You believe, John!” clever women are sometimes befooled. “Why, have you forgotten that winter when you lost so heavily, and it looked as if we would have to go into rooms, how Margaret wanted to go out cooking to help the family, and she would have done it had not things taken a turn? Whatever be her faults,--and she has been provoking,--she is a loyal soul.”

“Well, we only had one bad illness, Flo, and I'll never forget the mornings when I came from my lodgings and stood on the street, and you told me what kind of night Jack had had, and the days when I toiled at the office, and you fought scarlet fever at home. You were a brave woman--without a nurse, too.”

“Without what--for shame, John!--when Maggie sat up all night and worked all day, and was so clever that the doctor said she had saved Jack's life--well, perhaps be admitted that I helped, but she did more than I could--I would rather have let twenty housemaids go than see Maggie leave, John, if she had given me the chance.”

“Margaret always had a temper, Flo, even in the old days when I was a boy, and now she's fairly roused.”

“It isn't temper at all now, John, or I would not be so vexed: it's her goodness which will drive her out in the end, and she'll never know one day of happiness again. She told me to-night that she was sure that there would always be trouble between her and the other servants, and as she had tried to serve us well when she was younger she would not make our home unhappy in her old age. Jack pleaded with her, and I--I nearly cried; she was quite affected, too, but she is immovable.”

“Well, we can do no more, and you mustn't blame yourself, Flo: it has just been a smash; and if she does go, we must see that she be made comfortable in her last years. But I wish old Margaret were not leaving us on Christmas Eve. Jack is very sick about it, and I rather suspect that he was crying when I looked into his room just now; but he pretended to be asleep, and I couldn't insult a fellow in the fifth form with remarks.”

IV

When the Leslies set up house, eighteen years before, Margaret received them on their return from their ten days' wedding tour in the Lake District, and she was careful to ask in the evening whether Mr. John would like prayers before or after breakfast next morning. She also produced a book of family prayers, which she had purchased in anticipation of the sole difficulty which is understood to prevent the majority of male householders from having worship in their homes, and asked her young master and mistress to accept it from her. So it came to pass that owing to Margaret there were always morning prayers at the Leslies'; and in observance of a custom begun when there were just the three in the little house of Islington, fighting the battle of life together, the chapter was read round, each person taking one verse in turn. To-night Leslie divided his time between short snatches of sleep, when he dreamt of funerals in which Margaret departed sitting beside the driver of the hearse, while a mourning coach followed with her luggage on the roof, and long periods of wakefulness when he regarded next morning's prayers with dismay. Was there a special prayer for a servant leaving her household after eighteen--no, thirty-four years' faithful duty; and if there was not, could he weave in a couple of sentences among the petitions? At half-past six he was certain that he could not, and was ashamed at the thought that with that well worn prayer-book of Margaret's before him he would allow her to depart without a benediction, when he was visited quite suddenly, he declares, with the most brilliant inspiration of his life. He leaped from bed and lit the gas in hot haste, as poets are said to do when the missing word to rhyme with Timbuctoo flashes upon the mind.

“Florence, please tell me something”; and Mrs. Leslie saw her husband standing by her bed in poorly concealed excitement. “Where are those words that were sung at the sacred concert: 'Intreat me not to leave thee'? I want to know at once; never mind why. Ruth? Thanks so much,” and the noise he made in his bath was audible through the wall, and was that of a man in hot haste.

When Mrs. Leslie came down, her husband had a marker in the Bible projecting six inches, and was checking certain calculations on a sheet of paper with much care.

“Morning, Jack--slept well--not very? That's right, I mean I'm very sorry, must have been the pudding. Not there, for any sake; sit here, and, let me see--Florence, where are you wandering to? Take this chair. Six, seven, eight... seventeen, yes, that's Margaret. Now ring the bell.” And Mrs. Leslie could only look at Leslie in silence, while Jack felt that the firmament was being shaken that day, and one catastrophe more did not matter.

“We shall read,” said the head of the household in a shaky voice, “from--eh--the--eh--Book of Ruth, the first chapter and the sixth verse”; and as soon as his wife saw the passage she understood, and so did Margaret.

Round the circle went the verses--Leslie very nervous lest he should have miscalculated--till Jack read:

“'And Ruth said, Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.'”

Then it came to Margaret, and she began bravely, but soon weakened: “Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried... the Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death... part...”

“Let us pray,” said Leslie; and it is his fixed belief that, having lost the place, he read the prayer for the close of the year and making an attempt to right himself landed in a thanksgiving for the gift of a new-born child; but nobody is certain and nobody cared.

“I ought to go,” said Margaret, standing very white by the sideboard after the other servants had left the room, “and it would be better for you all, whom I love, that I should go; but... I cannot, I can...”

“Dear old Magsibus,” and Jack had her round the waist before she could say “not” again, or even explain, as she did afterwards, how good a woman the housemaid was, and how much she would miss her; and as Mrs. Leslie thought of the days they had been together, the saving the lad from death and many another deed of loyal, ungrudging service, she did that which was contrary to every rule of household discipline. But Leslie could not have seen his wife kiss Margaret, for his back was turned, and he was studying the snow-covered garden with rapt attention.

VII.--A RACONTEUR

“You must excuse me the gaucherie of a compliment,” I said to Bevan in the smoking-room, after a very pleasant dinner, “but you have never been more brilliant. Five stories, and each a success, is surely a record even in your experience.”

“It is very good of you to appreciate my poor efforts so highly. I felt it a distinct risk to attempt five in one evening--six is the farthest limit sanctioned by any raconteur of standing. You can always distinguish an artist from a mere amateur by his severe reserve. He knows that an anecdote is a liqueur, and he offers it seldom; but the other pours out his stuff like vin ordinaire, which it is, as a rule, the mere dregs of the vine. Did you ever notice how a man will come back from Scotland in autumn, and bore companies of unoffending people with a flood of what he considers humorous Scottish stories? It is one of the brutalities of conversation. What irritates me is not that the material is Scottish, for there are many northern stories with a fine flavour; it is the fellow's utter ignorance of the two great principles of our art.”

“Which are?”

“Selection and preparation,” said Bevan, with decision. “One must first get good stuff, and then work it into shape. It is amazing how much is offered and how little is of any use. People are constantly bringing me situations that they think excellent, and are quite disappointed when I tell them they are impossible for the purposes of art. Nothing can be done with them, although of course another artist in a different line might use them. Now I have passed several 'bits' on to Brown-Johnes, who delivers popular lectures. The platform story is scene-painting, the after-dinner miniature.”

“May I ask whether you are ever taken in, as it were, with your material, and find it 'give' after it has been manufactured, like rotten yarn or unseasoned wood?”

“Rarely; one's eye gets to be trained so that you know a promising subject at sight, but then comes the labour. I've heard a man bore a dinner-table to the yawning point with a story that had some excellent points in it, but he had taken no trouble, perhaps had no insight.”

“And you succeeded with it...?”

“It is, in my humble judgment, as good a story of its kind now as you would wish to hear, and it bears improvement, which is a good sign. A really high-class story will take years to perfect, just as I am told by clergymen that a sermon only begins to go after it has been preached twenty times.”

“You have been working on that Shakespeare bit, by the way; I noticed at least one new touch this evening which was excellent.”

“Now that is very gratifying,” and Bevan was evidently pleased; “it is a great satisfaction to have one's work appreciated in an intelligent manner; perhaps you are the only one present who saw any difference.

“What I think I like best”--and he tapped his snuff-box in a meditative way--“is to get an old, decayed, hopeless story, and restore it. Breaking out a window here, adding a porch there, opening up a room, and touching up the walls--it is marvellous what can be done. Besides new drains,” he added, with significance, “the sanitary state of some of those old stories is awful. You feel the atmosphere at the door--quite intolerable, and indeed dangerous.”

“Then you do not think that indecency...?”

“No, nor profanity. Both are bad art; they are cheap expedients, like strong sauces to cover bad cooking. It sounds like boasting, but I have redeemed one or two very unpleasant tales, which otherwise had been uninhabitable, if I may trifle again with my little figure, and now are charming.”

“You rather lean, one would gather, to old tales, while some of the younger men are terrified of telling a 'chestnut,' always prefacing, 'This must be well known, but it is new to me; say at once if you have heard it.'”

“Most humiliating, and quite unworthy of an artist. Heard it before!” and the old gentleman was full of scorn. “Imagine a painter apologizing for having taken a bend of the Thames or a Highland glen some man had used before. Of course, if one makes a copy of a picture and exhibits it as his own, that is fraud, and the work is certain to be poor. One must respect another artist's labour, which is the ground of his copyright. But if one makes a 'bit' of life as old as Aristophanes or Horace his own, by passing it through his own fancy and turning it out in his own style, then it is ever new. Then there is the telling! There are musicians who can compose, but who cannot play, and _vice versâ_. So with our art, there are story-tellers and story-makers. The former can suffer no wrong, for they are self-protected, but the latter have never been protected as they deserve in the fruit of their brains. You will see at once that, if I am right, the ownership of an anecdote is quite beyond dispute. The original material is really for the most part common property, and usually very poor property--prairie land, in fact. Personal rights come in when one has put capital into the land, has cleared and ploughed and sown it; then it's his own, and he is entitled to fence it, and he cannot be dispossessed except on fair terms.”

“Which would be?”

“Well, that depends. He might sell to an editor, or he might give the use of it to a friend. Personally, as an artist of now thirty years' standing, I do not part with my work; it may be an old-fashioned prejudice, but I don't like to let it go to the public.”

“But to a friend?”

“Of course that is different; still, how few can be trusted. Now I once gave Higginbotham a very nice little thing of French extraction, but not too subtle, with just enough body to suit our palate. He beard me tell it three times in exactly the same form, and I pledged him to make no changes, for his hand is heavy. Would you believe me?”--and my friend sat up in his indignation--“he gave it in my presence--but that did not matter--and left out the best point, which I now think he had never seen. Life has various trials in store for us as times go on,” and Bevan leant back again. “Some are greater, some are less, but among our minor vexations I know none like sitting at one end of a table and making talk with your partner, while a rank amateur at the other end mangles one of your pet anecdotes.”

“Torture, I should think; but isn't it rather trying when people miss the point altogether or ask stupid questions?”

“Artists must take their chance of that, and one is careful; besides, I've distinctly enjoyed such remarks,” and he looked quite genial. “It's like a painter hearing the people criticize the pictures on a free day. Once or twice I've got a very happy addition to a story in that way. After all, the main end of a raconteur must be to give pleasure. Yes”--and he began to glow--“no art is wholesome which lives for itself or for a professional class. Art must be a criticism of life and an aid to better living. No one can tell how much story-telling has contributed to the brightness and elevation of life. How? By correcting foibles, by explaining human nature, by destroying cant, by infusing good humour, by diminishing scandal, by--but I remind myself that a raconteur ought never to be excited or eloquent. He may, however, be a philanthropist, as it would appear. Do you know,” with a tone of great delight, “that I was once asked by a physician to call upon one of his patients, a mutual friend, and spend an hour with him, as a... tonic, in fact. It was after influenza, and the convalescent began by asking me whether I would distribute a sum of money among the poor. 'I'm not sure what I'm dying of; either peritonitis or pneumonia, but I'm glad to see you, Bevan, and you will do this little kindness for me'--those were his affecting words. 'Certainly,' I said, and that led me to give him a trifle from Devonshire--excellent place for stories--which seemed to interest him. I only told four stories--for he was rather weak, having had a slight touch of bronchitis--and he is pleased still to thank me,” and Bevan nodded with much satisfaction.

As I looked at him, so filled with the pride of his art, the time seemed to have come for a question that had long been in my mind. But it was necessary to be careful.

“What, may I ask, Mr. Bevan, do you feel about the matter of... well, you won't misunderstand me... of accuracy?”

“You mean whether is there any difference between giving evidence in a witness-box and relating an anecdote. Everything. The one is a land surveyor's plan, and must be correct to an inch. The other is a picture, and must interpret nature. The one is a matter of fact, the other a work of art. Imagine the folly”--and the good man rose to his feet--“if one should demand to know whether the figures in a historical painting stood exactly so and were dressed in those particular colours; we should think the man mad. A story is a miniature novel, shot through with humour, a morsel of the irony of things, a tiny comedy, and for it there is but one rule of judgment--does it represent the spirit of life?”

“What then do you think of one who should certify an anecdote as a fact?”

“That he did not know his craft, for if the tale has no merit, then it is little compensation to tell us it happened; if it has merit, we are sure it ought to have happened.”

“And if one should interrupt a raconteur as he approached his point, and should inquire whether the thing be true?”

“I am a merciful man,” said the venerable artist, “but my conviction is that he ought to be shot.”

VIII.--WITH UNLEAVENED BREAD

RABBI SAUNDERSON, minister of Kilbogie, had been the preacher on the fast day before Carmichaele's first sacrament in the Glen, and, under the full conviction that he had only been searching out his own sins, the old man had gone through the hearts of the congregation as with the candle of the Lord, till Donald Menzies, who had all along suspected that he was little better than a hypocrite, was now fully persuaded that for him to take the sacrament would be to eat and drink condemnation to himself, and Lauchlan Campbell was amazed to discover that a mere Lowland Scot like the rabbi was as mighty a preacher of the law as the chief of the Highland host. The rabbi had been very tender withal, so that the people were not only humbled, but also moved with the honest desire after better things.

Although it was a bitter day, and the snow was deep upon the ground, the rabbi would not remain over-night with Carmichael. Down in Kilbogie an old man near fourscore years of age was dying, and was not assured of the way everlasting, and the rabbi must needs go back through the snow that he might sit by his bedside and guide his feet into the paths of peace. All that night the rabbi wrestled with God that it might be His good pleasure to save this man even at the eleventh hour; and it was one of the few joys that visited the rabbi in his anxious ministry, that, before the grey light of a winter morning came into that lowly room, this aged sinner of Kilbogie had placed himself within the covenant of grace.

While he was ministering the promises in that cottage, and fighting a strong battle for an immortal soul, Carmichael had sent away his dogs, and was sitting alone in the low-roofed study of the Free Kirk manse, with the curtains drawn and the wood fire lighting up the room--for he had put out the lamp--but leaving shadows in the corners where there were no books, and where occasionally the red paper loomed forth like blood.

As the rabbi preached that day, the buoyancy and self-confidence of youth had been severely chastened, and sitting in the manse pew, curtained off from the congregation, the conscience of the young minister had grown tender. It was a fearful charge to lay on any man, and he only four-and-twenty years of age, the care of human souls; and what manner of man must he be who should minister unto them after a spiritual sort the body and blood of Jesus Christ? How true must be his soul, and how clean his hands! For surely, if any man would be damned in this world, and in that which is to come, it would be the man who dispensed the sacrament unworthily.

As he sat in the firelight the room seemed to turn into a place of judgment. Round the walls were the saints of the Church Catholic, and St. Augustine questioned him closely regarding the evil imagination of youthful days, and Thomas à Kempis reproached him because he had so often flinched in the way of the holy cross. Scottish worthies whose lives he had often read, and whose sayings had been often quoted from the pulpit, sat in judgment upon him as to his own personal faith and to his own ends in the ministry. Samuel Rutherford, with his passionate letters, reproached him for his coldness towards Christ; and MacCheyne's life, closed in early manhood, and filled with an unceasing hunger for the salvation of human souls, condemned him for his easy walk and conversation; and Leighton, the gentlest of all the Scotch saints, made him ashamed of bitter words and resentful feelings. And from the walls the face of his mother's minister regarded him with wistful regret, and seemed to plead with him to return to his first love and the simplicity of his mother's faith.