Part 13

"We'll wait a wee while," Edmund whispered. And wait they did in breathless silence, shoulder pressed to shoulder, the only sound the quick beating of their hearts.

Their patience was rewarded. The hesitating steps came slowly round to the front of the house and paused under their very window. Then somebody gave a low whistle.

Montagu dragged Edmund back from the window. "That's to summon his confederates. What'll we do? If there's more than one, they're sure to wake Aunt Esperance and frighten her dreadfully. We must do something--quick!"

"Will I fling out the poker on the chance of hitting him?" inquired Edmund, who had already provided himself with that weapon.

"No, that won't do, for if you don't hit him, it would warn him we'd seen him----"

"Perhaps it would make him run away."

"Not it. I've got it! Let's empty the ewer of water over him first. I think he's just under the window, and that's sure to startle him, and he'll jump out. Then you must say in an awful voice, 'Throw up your hands without a sound (you mustn't say it loud, mind) or you're a dead man.' And you'll light the candle and show me holding one of the big pistols hanging at the stair-head. I brought one in with me."

"I don't think he'd better see you," Edmund objected; "he mightn't be a bit terrified."

"Perhaps we'd better keep the room dark, then, and mebbe he'll think it's Guardie."

"Guardie's voice isn't a bit awful. I'll be a lot more frightening than him, I can tell you. Have you got that jug? Steady, now; mind you don't let the ewer go, too, else we'd catch it from Robina. Listen a minute!"

Again the low whistle immediately under their window.

Very carefully they balanced the heavy bedroom jug on the window-sill. "It must go all at once in one big splash!" Montagu whispered, "_Now!_"

A very big splash undoubtedly followed.

A series of gasps, and the sound of a voice raised in lamentation exclaiming: "Lord hae mercy! What like a way's that to greet a body? An' it that dark I couldna' find the back door. Hoo was I tae ken ye'd a' be gane tae yer beds at nine o'clock? Ye didna' use to be sae awfu' airly. But I'll just tell you this, Robina lass, it's the last time you'll catch me trailin' awa' over here to speer after ye--to get sic a like cauld welcome, as though it wasna' wet eneugh onny wye. I'm din, I can tell ye."

Montagu clutched Edmund by the arm, exclaiming in horrified tones, "I do believe it's Sandie Croall." Then leaning as far out of the window as he could, "Is it you, Sandie? Because, if so, we're most awfully sorry; only please don't speak so loud, for Aunt Esperance is asleep, and she's been so ill. We thought you must be somebody trying to break in. What made you come in the middle of the night?"

"It's no' the middle o' the night," Sandie grunted indignantly, "the church clock has only just chappit nine. It happened I could get over, an' I thocht I'd just look in an' see Robiny--little thinkin' I'd get sic a like reception. I'm jest drooket through an' through. What for did ye no' speer wha it was, young gentleman, and no' go droonin' honest folk?"

"Would you like to come in and get dry?" Edmund suggested hospitably; "there's sure to be some fire in the kitchen."

"No, thank ye," Sandie replied, still somewhat huffy, "I'll get awa' hame to my mither, an' she'll dry my claes to me whiles I'm in my bed."

"Shall I tell Robina you called?" Montagu asked politely.

Sandie paused. "I'm thinkin', young gentleman," he remarked severely, "that the less you say about to-night's wark the better it will be for you. If I am content to pass the matter over with obleevion, it's the least you can dae to dae the same."

"We're most awfully sorry," the boys said once more in subdued chorus.

"Just gang awa' back tae yer beds," said Sandie, and with these parting words he felt his way out to the green gate, and they heard his footsteps going plop-plop on the wet road till they died away in the distance.

Edmund sighed. "It was a pity we couldn't bash his head or anything," he murmured regretfully. "I hope a real one'll come some day when Aunt Esperance is well, and we don't need to be so hushified. Then we could have a jolly good mill."

Rather dispirited and extremely cold they crept back to bed.

"I wonder," Montagu murmured thoughtfully, "why he didn't want Robina to know he'd been here."

Edmund gave a smothered laugh. "My word, but he did catch his breath when we douched him, an' wasn't he cross when he thought it was Robina? I wonder if she's ever done it before?"

*CHAPTER XX*

*A QUESTION OF THEOLOGY*

Nae shauchlin' testimony here-- We were a' damned, an' that was clear, I owned, wi' gratitude an' wonder, He was a pleisure to sit under. R.L.S.

The while that Mr. Wycherly looked after Montagu's secular education, Miss Esperance undertook the religious, and long, weary Sunday evenings did he spend in wrestling with the polemics of the "Shorter Catechism."

"Why shorter?" he would ask bitterly. "It's as long as ever it can be."

"There's a longer one than that, my dear son," Miss Esperance would answer cheerfully; "but you won't need to learn it unless you become a minister."

"I shall never be a minister," said Montagu firmly, one day when he had made four mistakes in the answer which defines "Effectual Calling"--an answer, by the way, which he could have learned in two minutes had he been in the slightest degree interested. "I shall never be a minister. I shall be an Epicurean when I'm grown up. Mr. Wycherly was telling me about them yesterday, and I liked them."

Miss Esperance gave a positive gasp of dismayed astonishment. "Oh, my dear!" she exclaimed. "I hope that you will always be too sincere a Christian ever to dream of being anything else. I must indeed have taught you badly that any such idea should be possible."

"Oh, no, dear aunt," said Montagu reassuringly, rubbing his head against her shoulder. "It's not that at all; but people do sometimes change their religion, you know, when they're grown up--like Calvin and Luther you told me about--and you know I really think I like the old gods best; they were very pleasant on the whole."

"Montagu, Montagu, you don't know what you are saying! Those heathen gods that you speak of never existed. There were no such beings."

"Are you sure, auntie?" Montagu asked earnestly. "They sound very real, quite as real, and much cheerfuller than--the Shorter Catechism," he concluded lamely, checked by the unfeigned horror he saw in his aunt's face.

Miss Esperance took off her spectacles and wiped them, then she put them on again and laid her frail old hand over the square, brown little hand lying on her knee, saying gently: "Montagu, dear, you are talking of what you do not understand. It will in no wise be counted against you _because_ you do not understand, but you must not say such things; really, my dear boy, you _must_ not, and it grieves me the more in that I somehow must be in fault. My teaching has in no way been blest if you are so filled with doubts already."

Poor Miss Esperance looked terribly distressed, and the little boy at her knee, who, child as he was, had realised her sweetness and her truth every day of the years he had been with her, wondered, with a sorrowful vagueness, what he could have said to vex her so. And inasmuch as he could find no words to express the thoughts that were in him he flung his arms round his aunt's neck, exclaiming: "I love you so, I won't be an Epicurean if you don't want me to; but you know, dear Auntie, it must have been so happy in those days--there were never any Sabbaths."

Miss Esperance held him close and prayed silently; she even forbore to dilate upon the blessed privileges of that Sabbath which, as she had just been instructing Montagu, "is to be sanctified by a holy resting all that day, even from such worldly employments and recreations as are lawful on other days; and spending the whole time in the public and private exercises of God's worship, except so much as is to be taken up in the works of necessity and mercy."

"Is dinner a necessity or a mercy?" Montagu had asked one day, he himself being distinctly inclined to look upon it as a mercy, for it followed morning church, and after the children came, in deference to a suggestion of Mr. Wycherly's, founded upon certain youthful reminiscences of his own, there was always dessert on Sundays.

Now it happened that on the Sunday previous to Montagu's announcement of his approaching conversion to Epicureanism, the Reverend Peter Gloag had given a lengthy and vigorous discourse on Eternal Punishment. He was a true disciple of Calvin in that he believed that the majority of mankind needed herding into the right path by the sheep-dog of sheer terror as to what would most certainly befall them should they stray from it; and he succeeded in striking dire dismay to the very soul of one small member of his congregation. The minister had also touched upon predestination and election, and Montagu, who was tender-hearted and imaginative, was suddenly panic-stricken by the idea that perhaps he and Edmund, and even Mr. Wycherly, who never came to church, might be already numbered among those whom the Reverend Peter Gloag had denounced as being "rejected, left to sin, to unbelief, and to perdition."

Long after he was put to bed in the big four-post bed, while Edmund slept peacefully in the little bed beside him, did Montagu lie awake wondering whether he would die that night. The very prayer that he said every evening at his aunt's knee took on a new and terrible significance:

If I should die before I wake, I pray thee, Lord, my soul to take.

Montagu repeated it over and over again with dry lips, while he turned from side to side in a vain endeavour to get away from the constant beating as of a hammer upon an anvil that sounded ceaselessly in his ears.

"If I should die"--the child whispered to himself, then gradually he fell once more into thinking of his beloved Greeks; they, too, if they did not actually fear death, met it sorrowfully, for it meant leaving the bright light of the sun, and presently the reiterated "If I should die" changed to the cry of Alcestis, "Lay me down, I have no strength in my feet. Hades is nigh at hand, and dark night steals over mine eyes." Then more familiar and less terrible came the thought of that "old man, the guide of the dead, who sitteth at the oar and the helm"--who in Montagu's mind was inextricably mixed up with a saturnine old boatman he knew at Leith, till at last he drifted into the blessed haven of sleep.

Next day in the Horace lesson Mr. Wycherly happened to mention that in religion he was an Epicurean, whereupon Montagu, as was his wont, asked innumerable questions, which his tutor set himself to answer as fully as possible; dilating, in his pleasantly detached and impersonal fashion, on the fact that Epicureanism pure and undefiled did away with the fear of death among its professors; and quoted the philosopher himself to the effect that "When we are, death is not; and when death is, we are not." How that in his time the great incubus of human happiness was fear--fear of the gods and fear of death--and that pleasure pursued with prudence and tempered by justice and self-control was the true end and aim of all wise men.

That what he said could by any remote possibility have any personal application to Montagu never occurred to him for a moment. He described the doctrines of Epicurus with as little expectation of their affecting the boy's attitude toward life as that the use of the prolative infinitive in his Latin prose should cause him any searchings of the heart. But he had reckoned without the minister, for Montagu, fresh from the terrors of the previous night, suddenly determined to adopt as his own a religion which seemed so singularly free from any disquieting tenets.

Edmund's curly head was never perplexed or troubled with vain imaginings or hankerings after the old gods; but equally little did he aspire to any considerable knowledge of the Shorter Catechism. Lessons of any kind he frankly detested, and as he learned by heart with difficulty, he "went through," in two senses, an inordinate number of "Shorter Catechisms" in the cinnamon paper bindings, such as Miss Esperance was wont to provide for the instruction of her grand-nephews. Hardly ever did Edmund get any answer absolutely without mistake, except the one which replies to the question, "What is the misery of that estate whereinto man fell?" When he would respond in a dismal sort of chant, "All mankind by their fall lost communion with God, are under His wrath and curse, and so made liable to all miseries in this life, to death itself, and to the pains of Hell for ever." This Edmund would repeat with positive relish till sensitive Montagu shook in his shoes, and wished harder than ever that he had been born in an age when there seemed fewer possibilities of wrong-doing, followed by such appalling punishment; and youths and maidens, light-footed, crowned with garlands, trooped gaily to propitiate their easy-going gods by means of gifts.

* * * * *

On the evening of the day on which Montagu had announced his preference for the doctrines of Epicurus Miss Esperance knocked at the door of Mr. Wycherly's study about nine o'clock. This was a most unusual proceeding on her part, for they rarely met after supper, as Miss Esperance usually went to bed about a quarter to nine.

When Mr. Wycherly saw her standing on the threshold he rose hastily and led her in and set her in his special chair by the fire, taking up his own position on the hearth-rug. The reading lamp shone full on Miss Esperance, but his face was in shadow.

"Mr. Wycherly, I am anxious about Montagu," Miss Esperance began somewhat tremulously.

"Is he ill?" that gentleman interpolated hastily. "He seemed quite well at dinner-time."

"Oh, he's well enough in health, I think, I am thankful to think--but--" here Miss Esperance paused as if she found it somewhat difficult to broach the subject, "I am not equally confident as to his spiritual condition."

"His spiritual condition!" Mr. Wycherly repeated vaguely. "Montagu's! He is surely a very young boy to have attained to a--spiritual condition?"

"That's just it," said Miss Esperance, despair in her voice, and grave disquietude writ large upon her face. "That's just it. Would you not say that he was far too young to be assailed by doubts? Would you not expect so young a child to accept the teaching of our religion without question or rebellion? And yet Montagu--" Here poor Miss Esperance again faltered, then by a mighty effort forcing herself to voice the dreadful thing--"told me to-day, when I was hearing him the Shorter Catechism, that he intended to become an Epicurean when he was grown up! What are we to do with him?"

It was well for Mr. Wycherly that his face was in shadow, for although his mouth remained quite grave, there were little puckers round the corners of his eyes, not wholly to be accounted for by the lines that time had drawn there. He coughed slightly, and cleared his throat. "Am I, dear Miss Esperance, to gather that you think I am in some degree to blame for Montagu's unregenerate frame of mind?" he asked gently.

"Not to blame!" she hastily ejaculated. "Not to blame! But perhaps he is learning rather too much about those old days, those unenlightened heathen times, and evidently you render it all so entertaining that he gets rather carried away, and is unable to distinguish between what is mere fable and what is historical, vital truth. He is very little," she continued pleadingly. "Do you think it is quite wholesome for him to learn so much mythology? Don't you think it is apt to unsettle him?"

Mr. Wycherly was silent for a minute. "Do you know," he asked suddenly, "that with the exception of the little 'gilt-books' you had as a child, we haven't a single child's book in the house? Perhaps I was wrong to discuss any school of philosophy with him--but as regards mythology, I have only told Montagu such stories as are in reality the foundation of most of the child-stories that have ever been written. I don't think they have really hurt him, and such knowledge will be of use to him by and by."

"But why should he seem positively to dislike proper religious instruction?" persisted Miss Esperance. "I am sure that when I was a child it never occurred to me to do other than learn what was set me with the greatest reverence. Montagu's critical and rebellious attitude was undreamt of in my young days."

"Montagu has a curiously analytic mind," said Mr. Wycherly slowly, "and a passionate longing for pleasantness and gaiety. It is probably inherited. You remember dear Archie loved cheerfulness, and perhaps that poor young mother--a Cornish girl, if I remember rightly--perhaps she, too, had the Southern love of colour and brightness in life. We are old people to have to do with children, Miss Esperance, and I--perhaps my aim has been too exclusively to teach Montagu to love study by making the approach to it as pleasant as possible. It is a great temptation, for I find him so docile, so receptive, so eager to please. But perhaps I have been wrong--though Socrates would bear me out. It is pleasant to wander in the Elysian fields with a young boy--but if you think--" Mr. Wycherly's voice had dropped almost to a whisper, and here he paused altogether. He seemed to have been talking to himself rather than to Miss Esperance, and to be looking past her into that pleasaunce of memory which is the priceless heritage of the old. Miss Esperance did not interrupt him, and presently he went on again. "Perhaps the recollection of my own mother that is clearest to me is that of seeing her come dancing down a garden path toward me. To me now she seems so inexpressibly young, and gay, and gracious; and I have remembered her more distinctly lately, because the other day when I was reading with Montagu that portion of the Odyssey which describes Nausicaa at play among her maidens, he interrupted me to exclaim: '_My_ mother was like that, so beautiful!' Now he has never spoken to me of his mother before. I did not even know that he remembered her, and it has made me think of how distinctly I remember my own. She was not five and twenty when she died."

Miss Esperance sat upright in Mr. Wycherly's chair, the lamplight falling full on her troubled face. In spite of her ready sympathy, a sympathy so spontaneous that it seemed to give itself at all times independently of her volition, she felt that her dear old friend was wandering from the real question at issue. It was all very well to point out that Montagu loved beauty. She was perfectly aware of it herself, and it was not without an agreeable thrill that she recalled a little scene enacted that very evening. Montagu, according to custom, had been reading aloud to her from one of the very "Gilt-Books" Mr. Wycherly had mentioned, when the child came upon the somewhat gratuitous and ungrammatical assertion with regard to the fleeting character of personal beauty: "People's faces soon alter; when they grow old, nobody looks handsome."

Then Montagu brought his fist down on the page with a thump, declaring indignantly: "That's nonsense! You and Mr. Wycherly are both old--and you are quite beautiful. There's a beautiful oldness as well, don't you think so, Aunt Esperance?"

The delicate colour that came and went so easily flushed her face as Miss Esperance met the child's eager, admiring eyes. "For none more than children are concerned for beauty, and, above all, for beauty in the old." She not only thought so, but knew so; but it was not the custom for women of her stamp to acknowledge that they took any sort of interest in their personal appearance, and although she was distinctly gratified, she merely shook her head, saying gravely: "What the writer would point out, Montagu, is this--that without beauty of character mere personal beauty is of but small account."

Montagu, unlike Miss Esperance, who never allowed her back to "come in contact with her chair," lolled comfortably in his, disposed to argue the question. "I think it matters very much how people look," he said decidedly. "I hope I shall grow up to look like Achilles in the book Mr. Wycherly gave me."

Miss Esperance looked down at the thin, little, brown boy beside her, remarking dryly: "Well, at present, Montagu, I see small likelihood of any such transformation," and returned to the perusal of "The History of More Children than One."

But Montagu had not yet "threshed the subject out." In spite of his aunt's forefinger laid entreatingly at the line where he had left off, he continued in the tone of one who grants something to a vanquished foe. "Of course, young people look nicer in Greek clothes--I don't think, f'r instance (Montagu was very fond of "for instance," a favourite phrase of Mr. Wycherly's), that Mr. Gloag would look nice with only a wee towel."

Miss Esperance chuckled, and was fain to close the "History of More Children than One" for that day.

All this time those two dear old people waited in silence--Miss Esperance fondly remembering Montagu's unconscious compliment of the morning; Mr. Wycherly absorbed in his vision of the girl who, clad in a high-waisted, skimpy, muslin frock, with sandalled, twinkling feet, came dancing down the broad central path of a Shropshire garden nearly sixty years ago.

The sunlight was on the grass, the air charged heavily with the scent of the tall lilies on either hand, and she held out her arms toward him, singing as she came.

Miss Esperance gave a faint little cough, and Mr. Wycherly came back to the present with a start, saying: "Doubtless I have been wrong in the way I have taught Montagu. For the future we must have more grammar and less romance. I am sorry you should have been worried. It is my fault."

"No, no!" cried Miss Esperance. "I am sure that all you have done, all you are doing, is right and wise, but I--what am I to do? How can I make him see the beauty and priceless value of that knowledge without which all other knowledge is as dust and ashes?"

Mr. Wycherly turned to look at Miss Esperance, and fresh as he was from his vision of a woman in all the radiance of her first youth and beauty, he agreed with Montagu that there is a very beautiful oldness, and that such beauty is to the understanding heart perhaps most fair of all.

She held out her hands in her eagerness, and leant forward, straining her eyes to read his face in the shadow.

"You are far more fit to deal with such subjects than I," he said hesitatingly, "but since you have done me the honour to consult me--if I might venture, I would suggest that for a boy of Montagu's temperament much dogmatic teaching is a mistake. In childhood we can only realise the Infinite through the finite. Some of us in that respect never get beyond childhood; I, myself, somewhat resemble Montagu, and therefore I think it might be better to defer the--er--Shorter Catechism until he is older and more able to grapple with--" Mr. Wycherly seemed to swallow something in his throat, and the lines round his eyes deepened "its--er--theology."

"No," said Miss Esperance firmly, "he must learn his catechism whether he understands it or not."

"Well, don't be disappointed if he doesn't understand it, dear Miss Esperance. I don't, but then I never read it until the other day."