Part 8

On the following Sabbath day Edmund was a-missing directly it was time to get ready for church. He was to be found neither in house nor garden, and Miss Esperance came to the sorrowful conclusion that the Bethune temperament had again asserted itself, and that Edmund had, of deliberate purpose, effaced himself so that he should not be made to go to church. She was not on this occasion in the least perturbed by the fact that the small boy was lost. She had no fears as to his safety, but she was most grievously upset by this deliberate flying in the face of authority, and set off for church, looking very grave and almost stern, with only Montagu in attendance.

Mr. Wycherly had shut himself in his room during the hunt for Edmund. He had a nervous dread of scenes of any kind, and when either of the little boys was punished he suffered horribly. He fully recognised the necessity for occasional correction, especially in the case of a small boy so chock-full of original sin as Edmund. But none the less did he undergo much mental anguish on the occasions when such punishment took place. He could not altogether approve of certain of the methods of Miss Esperance, although he reverenced her far too much to indulge in any conscious criticism.

Remote had always been marked out from other houses by the immense tranquillity of its chief inmates, to whom fret and fuss were unknown. People were never scolded at Remote, unless by Elsa, when she was quite sure Miss Esperance was out of hearing.

When Montagu and Edmund were naughty they were punished by Miss Esperance, who always, and manifestly, suffered much more than the delinquents.

A favourite mode of correction in days when Miss Esperance was young was the substitution of bread and water for whatever meal happened to come nearest the time of the offence: and for the little boys poignancy was added to this dismal diet by the knowledge that their aunt tasted nothing else at her own meal during such times of abstinence for them. From such punishment, all suspicion of revenge--which, in the chastened one, so often nullifies the desired result--was entirely eliminated; and the children quite understood that they were being corrected for the good of their souls, and not because their aunt required a vent for her annoyance at their misdeeds.

Sunday dinner, however--the day on which by his own request Mr. Wycherly took his mid-day meal with Miss Esperance and the children--had hitherto been exempt from any such punitive mortification of the carnal appetites. Indeed, Mr. Wycherly had imbued it with a certain Elizabethan flavour of festivity and cheerfulness, and here, greatly to his surprise, he was warmly seconded by Elsa, who grudged no extra cooking to make the Sabbath-day dinner particularly appetising. From the time that Mr. Wycherly had asserted his right to throw his all into the common lot, things had been easier at Remote, and old Elsa did not forget his enthusiastic eagerness to further her endeavours that her mistress should have a peaceful and proper breakfast.

Therefore when it became the established custom for Mr. Wycherly to carve the joint on Sundays, she was ever ready to fall in with any small plans he might make for the benefit of the little boys.

And now Edmund had been naughty on the Sabbath, and Mr. Wycherly knew what to expect.

Bread, watered by his tears, for Edmund. Bread, seasoned only by sorrowful reflection, for Miss Esperance.

Banishment for hungry Edmund if he cried aloud, and there were ducks for dinner, large fat ducks sent by Lady Alicia. Mr. Wycherly could smell the stuffing even now. Who would believe that the smell of sage and onions could bear so mournful a message?

The Greek characters of the Philebus he held in his hand danced before his eyes. He could not give his mind to the philosophy of beauty or the theory of pleasure. The doctrine of aesthetical, moral, and intellectual harmonies, pleasing as it was to him on ordinary occasions, failed to hold him just then, when all his mental vision was concentrated on a chubby, tearful figure whose misdeeds would debar him from duck for dinner.

Mr. Wycherly laid down his "Plato" and began to pace the room restlessly, finally taking up his stand at the window looking out on the garden. Where was that boy? Where had the monkey hidden himself? He was not with Mause, for Mr. Wycherly could see the old dog lying in a patch of sunshine on the little plot of grass.

He went back to his bookshelf for comfort: he wanted something human, something warm and faulty and sympathetic, and his eye lighted on "Tristram Shandy." "Tristram Shandy" was tight in the shelf--squeezed in between the "Phaedo" and Hooker's "Ecclesiastical Polity"--Mr. Wycherly was nervous and agitated, and he must have pulled it out clumsily, for it fell to the ground with a thump.

As he stooped to recover it he caught sight of a plump brown leg protruding from beneath his sofa. He went down on his knees to look more closely, and there, cuddled up under the sofa, his curly head pillowed on his arm, lay Edmund, fast asleep. Edmund possessed a Wellingtonian capacity for falling asleep whenever he kept still. He had hidden under the sofa in Mr. Wycherly's room just before that gentleman took refuge there from the grieved annoyance of Miss Esperance at her grand-nephew's defection. Mr. Wycherly had shut his door, and no one dreamt of disturbing him to look there for the missing one.

Here was a pretty kettle of fish!

Although Mr. Wycherly knew that Miss Esperance would exonerate him from any actual participation in Edmund's truancy, he was assuredly accessory after the fact, and what was to be done?

"I hope he won't hit his head when he wakes up," Mr. Wycherly thought concernedly. "What a beautiful child he is!" and he knelt on where he was gazing admiringly at the slumbering cupid.

Stronger and stronger grew the savour of sage and onions throughout the little house. It penetrated even to Mause in the garden, and she arose from her patch of sunshine and sniffed inquisitively.

Mr. Wycherly grew stiff with kneeling, and rose to his feet. At the same moment Edmund rolled over and hit his leg against the edge of the sofa. It woke him, and the instant Edmund awoke he was wide awake. "Dearie, are you zere?" he demanded. He could see Mr. Wycherly's legs, and no more, from where he was lying. In another minute he was sitting on Mr. Wycherly's knee while that elderly scholar cudgelled his brains for some form of remonstrance which would bring home to this very youthful delinquent the impropriety of his conduct.

"Dearie," Edmund exclaimed with disarming sweetness, "aren't you glad I'm here wiv you?" Here he rubbed his soft face against Mr. Wycherly's. "What a good smell! isn't it? I'm so hungry: is there a bikkit about?"

Mr. Wycherly steeled his heart: "You know, sonnie," he said very gravely, "that you ought not to be here at all; you ought to be with your dear aunt in church."

Edmund looked at Mr. Wycherly in reproachful surprise. "In church?" he echoed, as though such a possibility had occurred to him for the first time that morning.

"In church," Mr. Wycherly repeated. "Your dear aunt expected you to go there with her and with Montagu, and she was very sad that she had to go without you. It was not right of you to hide, sonnie. It was neither kind nor polite nor straightforward."

"You doesn't go," Edmund argued, staring gloomily at Mr. Wycherly. "Why mus' I?"

"You must go because your dear aunt wishes it," Mr. Wycherly replied, ignoring the first part of Edmund's remark.

"Would you go if see wissed it?"

"I would. But you see, for me it is different. I was brought up in a different kind of church, and I am no longer a little boy. Miss Esperance has never asked me to go to church with her."

"Why hasn't see ast you?"

"Because, as I tell you, I was brought up in a different church."

"Why can't I be brought up in your church? Then we needn't neither of us never go," Edmund suggested, smiling radiantly, as though he had solved the difficulty.

Mr. Wycherly sighed deeply. "But I did go," he exclaimed. "I always went when I was a little boy, every Sunday, and afterward at Oxford I went nearly every day as well."

Edmund's face fell. He desired to belong to no church that required daily attendance. Mr. Wycherly's looks were so serious that the little boy began to be anxious.

"What will Aunt Esp'ance do, do you sink?"

"I fear she will feel compelled to punish you."

"Bed?" Edmund inquired uneasily.

"No, I fear, I very greatly fear it will be dinner----"

Mr. Wycherly felt the little figure stiffen in his arms, as without a word Edmund laid his head down on his old friend's shoulder. The child lay quite still, and glancing down at him Mr. Wycherly saw how the red mouth drooped at the corners, and the blue eyes were screwed up tight to keep back the tears. No such dread contingency had crossed Edmund's mind till this moment, and it swept over him with devastating force. Not to share in the Sunday dinner, that cheerful meal, when Mr. Wycherly made jokes and Aunt Esperance sat beaming in her Sunday silks; when hungry little boys were never refused two, even three, helpings of everything. It was a dreadful dispensation.

Edmund gave a short, smothered sob and buried his face in Mr. Wycherly's neck.

"Perhaps," the grave voice went on, and Edmund opened one tearful eye, as though the gloom of his outlook were pierced by some ray of hope, "perhaps if you went to your aunt and told her how sorry you are, and that you promise on your honour as a gentleman you will never try to get out of going to church again--perhaps she might forgive you this once. If you can tell her this and mean it, my son, every word, I think that she may be induced to forgive you--just this once."

The green gate creaked, there was a rush of feet on the staircase as Montagu made straight for Mr. Wycherly's room.

"Here you are," he exclaimed. "I thought you'd be here somehow--what's the matter?"

Mr. Wycherly put Edmund gently from off his knee, and rose from his chair.

"Wait here with Montagu, sonnie," he said. "I will see Miss Esperance first," and he left the room, carefully shutting the door behind him.

"Is Aunt Esp'ance very sorry?" Edmund asked anxiously. He did not ask if she were angry, for that she had never been with him.

"I don't think she's as sorry as she was at first," Montagu said consolingly. "We met Mrs. Gloag as we were coming out and Aunt Esperance told how you'd hidden, and Mrs. Gloag laughed, and after that I don't think she was so sorry."

The door was opened and Mr. Wycherly came back. "Go to your aunt in her room, Edmund," he said, "and remember what I told you."

Edmund trotted off obediently.

A few minutes later Robina rang the dinner bell. Edmund and his aunt descended the curly staircase together, hand in hand.

"I told her I was sorry," he announced to Mr. Wycherly, who was waiting at the dining-room door that Miss Esperance might pass in first. "I'm going to church zis afternoon. I'm going," he added gleefully, "becos' zere's ducks for dinner."

*CHAPTER XII*

*THE VILLAGE*

'Tis with our judgments as our watches, none Go just alike, yet each believes his own. POPE.

"Our society may be small but it is extremely select," Miss Maggie Moffat used to say on such occasions as friends from the South-side of Edinburgh used to visit her.

"It is what we have always sought after," Miss Jeanie, her sister, would chime in. "Quality not quantity, and nowhere could we have found superior quality if we had gone over the whole of the British Isles to look for it."

None of the earlier inhabitants of Burnhead ever quite fathomed how or why the Misses Moffat had come to live there. The fact remained, however, that one term day they had taken a small house in the middle of the village street: a house that had been empty for many years. Its original name was "Rowan Cottage," because there was a rowan tree in the back garden, but when the Misses Moffat took it they persuaded the landlord to change the name to "Rowan Lodge," the only lodge in the neighbourhood save that which guarded the entrance at Lady Alicia's drive gate. The name was painted on the front of the house in large, clear characters, and it looked, the Misses Moffat thought, extremely well on the pink note-paper with scalloped edges which they affected in their correspondence.

They were ladies of uncertain age; that is to say, of the kind of age to which direct reference is never made.

They were not serenely and beautifully old like Miss Esperance, nor sturdily and frankly middle-aged like Lady Alicia, and by no stretch of imagination could they be considered young like Bonnie Margaret. They were, as they themselves would have put it, "of a quite suitable age for matrimony, not giddy girls, you understand, but nice, sensible, douce young women."

Miss Jeanie was probably not more than forty-five, and Miss Maggie some six years older. They were both moderately tall, moderately stout, and of a healthy, homely aspect which did not challenge observation. Miss Jeanie, indeed, wore a curly fringe, and on muddy days a serge golf-skirt that barely reached her substantial ankles, but Miss Maggie's mouse-coloured hair was brushed back over a cushion and displayed every inch of her intellectual forehead. Miss Maggie took in "Wise Words," and had literary leanings toward everything of an improving character.

At one time they had kept a "fancy-work emporium" on the South-side, but they had not been dependent upon their sales of Berlin wool or crochet cotton, and as the emporium was by no means thronged with customers it had seemed good to them to retire from business and seek in the country that seclusion and select society which their genteel souls hungered after.

They were sincerely convinced that the emporium of the past could not in any way preclude their reception into such society.

"It could not exactly be called trade, me dear," Miss Maggie argued, "for you see our _clientele_ was so exceedingly select. We were never called upon to serve a man in all the years----"

"Not so very many years, Maggie," Miss Jeanie would interrupt.

"During the time our residence was above the emporium," Miss Maggie continued calmly. "That makes a very great difference. Anybody can come into an ordinary shop. A stationer's now--a man might burst into a stationer's at any minute to buy envelopes or elastic bands, or a bit rubber: but no man would dream of entering a--place where Berlin wools and fingering and sewing silks are to be had. And you know, me dear, it always seems to me that so long as no strange man has had the opportunity to accost one, one's delicacy cannot be said to have suffered in any way."

"I've heard," said Miss Jeanie, with a little sigh, "that in London one may be accosted on the public street. It must be terrible to be accosted by a strange man. I think I should faint away at his feet from sheer terror."

"Indeed," replied Miss Maggie, bridling. "_I_ should do no such thing. I would freeze him with a glance."

So far, however, neither of these ladies had been called upon either to faint or to freeze. Mankind had passed them by in decorous silence. Neither of them had ever been accosted by anyone more alarming than a village urchin, and their delicacy and their gentility remained unimpaired. For truly they were vastly genteel.

The real and chief attractions of Burnhead had been that the rent of their modest residence was very small, that the "big house" was occupied by "a lady of title," and that there were only two other houses in the village having any claim to be the abodes of gentility, namely, the Manse and Remote.

"Surely," argued the Misses Moffat, "in such a small place the gentry will be friendly."

And so indeed it proved, for if the Misses Moffat were genteel they were also the kindest and most amiable of women, and had they but known it, they might have searched Scotland before they found a neighbourhood where such qualities would have met with so swift a recognition from the three chief ladies in the place.

There were many who pitied the minister because his wife was so delicate. There were others, mostly outsiders, who pitied Mrs. Gloag because her husband was so stern. And because, although she had done her best to take root and bring forth the fruits of the spirit in the humble vineyard where her husband worked, there was always something alien about her which most of that small community mistrusted.

For Mrs. Gloag was English.

It was even whispered that she was the daughter of an Episcopalian clergyman.

She was slender and pretty and very frail in health: and twenty-seven years of Burnhead had not yet cured her of a tendency to laugh when things amused her. And things amused Mrs. Gloag which ought to have shocked a right-minded minister's wife.

In early days her chief offence had been that she looked younger than any minister's wife ought to have looked, that she played with her little boys as though she were a child herself; and that she had been known to yawn openly and apparently unashamed during the minister's sermons.

Now that her pretty, wavy hair was grey and her health so bad that she seldom came to church more than once on a Sabbath, sometimes not at all for weeks together, folks felt that this, and what happened to their third boy, was a judgment on the minister for having married a person so Englishey and irresponsible as Mrs. Gloag.

There was no question whatever that the minister adored his wife. Whenever his eyes rested upon her, his whole face changed and softened, and it was felt to be almost indecent that a minister should openly manifest any affection whatsoever.

Three tall sons had the minister. Two of them well-doing young men, who passed examinations and won bursaries, and were as economical, hard-working and clear-headed young Scotsmen as even a minister could wish to see. A little harsh, perhaps, and dictatorial, and argumentative; a little fond of airing their opinions unasked, a little apt to judge character wholly by failure or success in practical things; a little lacking in deference to older people. Still they were fine, capable, upstanding young men of the "get up and git" order which is so admirable; and while Mr. Wycherly would go miles out of his way to avoid either of them, he was the very first to acknowledge their many excellent qualities.

But Curly, the youngest, was different. He was even more brilliant intellectually than his brothers; he was better looking, and he had much of his mother's charm. When he was eighteen he won a scholarship at Balliol, a regular blue-ribbon among scholarships, and the minister was a proud man.

Curly did well at Oxford, he lived sparely, and took tutorships in the vacations, and when he came home the Manse was a merry place. Mr. Wycherly was very fond of Curly, for he came and talked about Oxford, and he would ask the older scholar's opinion about many things, and seemed to think it quite worth having. Now his brothers considered Mr. Wycherly a failure, effete, played out, _vieux-jeu_, and Mr. Wycherly knew it.

Curly took a good degree, and then the blow fell. He became an actor and "went on the stage."

Had he turned forger or robbed a church the minister could hardly have been more upset. Mr. Gloag hated the theatre and everything connected with it. He honestly believed it to be morally degrading and soul-soiling to enter the doors of any such place of amusement. That there could ever, under any circumstances, be found any common ground or bond of union, or even mutual toleration, between the followers of this degraded and degrading calling and professing Christians, he could not conceive. The minister had no belief in toleration. He was fond of saying, "Those that are not for us are against us"; and that "us" might by any possibility include persons he designated as "mountebanks" never for one moment entered his head.

He forbade the mention of Curly's name, declaring that now he had only two sons. Curly's brothers said very little. They thought Curly a fool, but, after all, he knew his own business best.

Mrs. Gloag said nothing at all. She grew frailer and frailer, and her pretty eyes wore always a strained expression as though they were tired with watching for one who never came.

She did not attempt to soften the minister. He was always gentle to her, but she knew him too well not to discern when argument and supplication were alike useless. She laughed less often now, and when no one was watching her gentle face was very sad.

If anything, however, this sore trouble made her kinder and more sympathetic than before, so that when the Misses Moffat took sittings in the church and she, in her capacity of minister's wife, went to see them, she realised at once how anxious and timid and kind and harmless they were; and most of all how they hungered to be admitted to the inner circle of the "select."

She asked Miss Esperance to go and see them, and Miss Esperance went; and she asked Lady Alicia to go and see them, and Lady Alicia went.

That was a great, a never-to-be-forgotten day for the Misses Moffat when Lady Alicia walked over from the "big house" to call. They could have wished she had come in the carriage; it would have looked so fine in the street for all the world to see. But Lady Alicia was energetic and inclined to grow stout, and she liked to walk when she could. There she sat in the Misses Moffat's best room, talking affably in her big voice. Everything about Lady Alicia was big and decided, and every simplest remark she made was treasured by the Misses Moffat as the sayings of a sibyl. She didn't stay long, but she praised the arrangements of Rowan Lodge, from the window curtains to the chocolate-coloured railings in front of the windows.

When she got up to go they watched her anxiously. She had her silver card-case in her hand. Would she leave a card or not?

Alas! in their eagerness to be polite they both accompanied her into the narrow passage and thence into the street. And Lady Alicia, being rather crowded, did not see the Benares bowl on the little table in the lobby, wherein reposed the visiting cards of Miss Esperance and Mrs. Gloag, and completely forgot to leave a similar memento of her visit.

This was a great blow to the Misses Moffat. Without the outward and visible sign of a visiting card was it a proper call or not?

Might they return it? Or was it only an act of condescension on Lady Alicia's part and not an act of friendship?

Miss Jeanie sought vainly in the pages of a bound volume of the "Lady's Home Companion" for guidance on this intricate point of etiquette. But although there was a whole long article on "calls" in that useful work, with minute directions as to the most desirable deportment at afternoon tea, there was no guidance as to what course should be taken by two genteel unmarried females when visited by an earl's daughter, who called at three in the afternoon and omitted to leave a card at all.

"It's most annoying!" Miss Jeanie exclaimed, tapping the "Lady's Home Companion" with her finger. "There's any amount about leaving cards, but not one word about when they're not left. Listen to this: 'Should there be only a lady, you would merely leave one of your husband's.' Perhaps Lady Alicia Carruthers just didn't leave one of his because he's dead, poor man. Then further on it says: 'When calling on a stranger on any business matter, your card should be sent in by the servant, who will ascertain if it is convenient for her mistress to see you.' Now she most certainly did not call on business. What are we to think, Maggie?"