Part 8

“Yes, if you like to call it that—I suppose a man may call a woman’s faithfulness by any name he likes.”

“Did you find the mark?” asked Marcus meekly; he was always cowed by feminine firmness.

Elsie looked at him, and a doubt entered his mind. He asked if he might look at the vase—hold it in his hand?

She handed it to him. He looked at it, then at her. “You were to buy it, if there was a scratch upon it?”

Elsie nodded. He handed her back the vase.

“But—she—died happy,” Elsie said, perhaps pleading extenuating circumstances.

There was a silence while she replaced the vase on the bracket.

“You gave too much for it,” said Marcus, refusing to be beaten, or to be made to say wrong was right—or to be touched by the thought of the foolish old lady who had been taken in—so kindly.

“How do you know?” asked Elsie. “What, after all, was too much to pay for a thing she wanted, that would make her happy? She could afford to pay. Anyhow, she left the vase to me and I put it there.” She nodded to the bracket on the wall.

“A very bad place for it.”

“I like it there,” said Elsie, and Marcus knew he had been right; pig-headed and obstinate was Diana’s aunt.

“Where is Diana?” he asked.

“She’s reading aloud Mr. Watkins’s poems.”

“To whom?”

“To Mr. Watkins—she says he reads them in a family-prayer sort of a voice that lends them a fictitious value. She wants him to hear what they sound like read by an ordinary person.”

Of course, Marcus at once said Diana was not an ordinary person, and Elsie could only answer that she read poetry like a very ordinary person.

“This man is in love with her, I suppose?” asked Marcus gloomily.

“If she has read him his ‘Ode to Japonica,’ I should say not.”

“He was in love with her, then?” persisted the enquiring uncle.

“Of course.”

“Why of course?”

“Isn’t every man in love with her?”

“And she—is she in love with any man?”

“Ah, that is the question,” said Elsie. The relations between them, which had become surprisingly easier, were again strained. She was the aunt on the one side—he the uncle on the other. Rebecca announced luncheon.

“I suppose we must eat,” said Marcus.

Elsie didn’t suppose anything about it; as a matter of fact there was no necessity, but she led the way to the dining-room, and there at the table sat Diana.

“Dears!” she exclaimed, when she saw her uncle and aunt; “getting so heated talking about me—how do you like each other now you meet? Have I exaggerated the charm of either of you? You both think so? Well, darlings, sit down. No, Elsie, you must do the honours and I’ll do the laughing and the crying, if you like—but there must be no more fighting. Look at your faces.” And she handed to each one a spoon. Elsie passed hers on to Marcus. He laid them both down beside his plate.

“Is my face red too?” he asked, turning to Diana.

“Is that quite how you meant to put it?” she asked; and he was obliged to answer, “Not quite.”

Shan’t was out; she had gone to spend the day with some children in the neighbourhood and she wouldn’t be back till after tea. After tea seemed a long way off to Marcus. Could he make Aunt Elsie and her garden and her ridiculous farm last till then? Diana was too distressed; she was engaged to play golf with Mr. Pease.

“Don’t bother about me,” said Marcus stiffly.

Diana had no intention of bothering about him. He had come to see Elsie, not her. It was so important they should make friends. If she stayed with them, they would both try, each one, to talk to her more than the other.

“And when are you coming back to me, Diana?” asked Marcus.

Diana looked from Marcus to Elsie and from Elsie to Marcus.

“You are such unselfish darlings, both of you,” she answered. “You must decide between you.”

Here was Elsie’s opportunity. “I think, perhaps, Diana,” she said, “you ought to go to your uncle—your mother left you with him.” And Elsie knew that, in the eyes of Diana, she must stand on the heights above Marcus—that Marcus must look up to her.

But Marcus despised her. He knew she had done it to impress Diana, and didn’t mean it.

“I wouldn’t ask you to come back to London at this time of year,” he said gently.

“You are both darlings,” said Diana, and she went and left them.

And Elsie talked calmly of the joys of the country—mentioning incidentally the heat of London pavements, and Marcus said nothing, but he thought the more. Elsie now looked quite cool: her complexion was fair, and that, in conjunction with her grey eyes, made her look younger than she ought to have looked, or than he had expected her to look.

He spun out his visit till tea-time, and after tea Elsie volunteered to walk to the station with him. “We may meet Shan’t,” she said.

They walked and they met Shan’t. She was being escorted home by a family of boys and girls, and was among those who filled a pony-cart to overflowing. She was rioting; no other word described the joy that possessed her. She was playing mad bulls with a boy a little smaller than herself. Elsie called her to stop: besought her to speak to her Uncle Marcus—but she couldn’t listen—she was laughing—how she laughed! Marcus had a train to catch—and the pony-cart passed on, Shan’t still fighting the small boy—and laughing—so happy and Uncle Marcus was so neglected.

“She didn’t realize it was you,” said Aunt Elsie. “Children so soon forget.”

She might have spared him that thrust which he had not the strength to parry. She might have known that no child who is playing mad bulls with a little boy, sufficiently mad, will stop to look at an elderly uncle—or to listen to an—_elderly_ aunt.

In the train Marcus comforted himself by picturing a scene in which he and Shan’t made it up. He said, “Why didn’t you stop and speak to your Uncle Marcus?”

And Shan’t said, “Well, you see, darlin’,”—her fingers popped in and out of the button-holes of his coat,—“I was so busy—I really didn’t—quite properly see it was you.”

“But you were glad to see me—what you did see of me?”

“Of course—I was—didn’t you _think_ I was?”

Uncle Marcus hadn’t been sure.

“Let’s play at somethin’,” suggested Shan’t.

He felt comforted—a little. Two arms were round his neck, and he felt as nearly comforted as it is possible to feel when the comforting arms are not real arms and the child is not a real child, and nothing is real but the hurt the _real_ child inflicted.

XII

_An old man cried, “Umbrella to sell.” It had no handle. He met an old woman who cried she had an umbrella to sell, but only the handle. Each called what they had an umbrella, but only the man’s could keep off the rain._

There is a small book, written by one of the greatest masters of fiction. No romance stirs the blood, excites the imagination of weary men, as this book does. Lever, Dumas, Hugo are pigmies compared to this giant among story-tellers.

It is a small book—no matter its colour—its pages number some hundreds, and they can be read, re-read, and read yet again. On every page is the same story differently, and delightfully told. It never palls. A wise woman is she who, seeing her husband tired and perhaps bored, slips into his hands this volume of immortal prose. If he be a sportsman, his chair comfortable, and the fire brightly burning, all his worries will vanish like “smoke” on the hillside, and for the space of some hours he will be at peace, tramping once again the moors, fishing the rivers, the lochs, and climbing the hills he loves. Marcus, lonely and deserted, opened the book and read:

£600: Exceptionally good shooting. Average bag 245 brace grouse. Lodge contains dining-room, drawing-room, ten bedrooms, bathroom, and complete offices. Hotel, post, telegraph, quite close. Nearest station twenty-five miles. Very bracing climate and lovely scenery. Proprietor pays—etc.

£500: Beautiful lodge, four and a half miles from station. Contains 4 public rooms, 6 bedrooms, bathroom, and ample servants’ accommodation. Stabling, coach house. Kennels, gardens, 5000 acres, shooting yielding 80 brace grouse, 3000 rabbits, 100 hares, 200 brace partridges, 100 snipe, 200 pheasants, 20 duck, roe deer and plover, woodcock. Good trout fishing in lochs and burns. Salmon fishing can be had.

£450: 10,000 acres, mostly moorland, yielding about 250 brace grouse (limit), four stags, besides other game. Good woodcock and snipe and wild fowl shooting, in winter. Exclusive right to the fishing in whole of river, six miles, both banks. And in one of the finest lochs in Scotland, which holds sea trout and occasionally a salmon. Lodge situated in the midst of magnificent scenery—

Marcus leant forward and re-filled his pipe—the shadow of a great peace in his eyes—a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. He had no wish to be disturbed—let Shan’t stay with her aunt, and Diana, too, if she wanted to—it was like the old game of Oranges and Lemons. They could choose; he was Oranges—

Last season’s bag—6 stags, 200 brace grouse, 20 wild fowl, 111 hares, and 90 sea trout—

He sighed and turned the pages.

£2000: Splendid sporting domain, yielding 80 or 84 stags, 500 brace grouse and there are also roe deer, hares, wild fowl, salmon and sea trout. Fishing in river from both banks, also trout fishing in well-known loch and excellent trout fishing in many hill lochs—good sea fishing [this for Pillar]. Very comfortable lodge situated at the head of one of the finest lochs in Scotland, amidst magnificent scenery—20 miles from station. Post and telegraph close by. Lodge contains—hall, drawing-room, dining-room, smoking-room, gun room, ample bedroom accommodation, two bathrooms, complete offices. Proprietor pays—

“Not much,” murmured Marcus.

£250.

£200.

£270.

£300:—each in its small way buying for August and September perfect happiness, and Marcus knew what that perfect happiness might be. Agents say much, sometimes more than they need, but do they ever say anything of six o’clock in the morning, on the moor, when the spiders’ webs, set with diamonds, are slung from one tuft of heather to another, making a wealth of jewels of untold value? Do they ever describe the joy of walking home knee-deep in scented purple heather right into the setting sun, after a day on the hill? Do they ever describe a fine day on the West Coast, as the West Coast alone knows it? A fine day in Skye? No day, for pure glory of fineness, can compare with it. (And it might always be fine in Skye if people really believed in fairies.) Skye paints her foreground as no other foreground is painted, so rich in colour, so deep—so varied. No skies can vie with hers in blueness, when they are blue. No distance is so enchanting in its softness. No breeze so caressing in its gentleness. No hills can compare with the Cuchullins in their splendid ruggedness, and the sun never sets in Scotland, leaving behind him more glorious promises of his coming again than he does in Skye. Do agents count these things? They must—and that is why—if the grouse fail, the deer fade away, and the fish sulk—the man who truly loves his Scotland will always pay his rent without murmuring, for those glorious two months: and the day he gets back to London, if he be a proper man, he will sit himself down in his chair, his hand will reach out to the table at his elbow, and he will take from the table a book that his wife, if she be a wise wife, has placed there, and he will open it at any page and read—

£500—beau-ti-ful lodge, 40 miles from station—Contains—etc.—bag should include—250 brace grouse, good woodcock and snipe—wild fowl—in the winter—Exclusive right—

This is the book Marcus read on his return to London after sending Shan’t back to the aunt of his detestation. It is a work of fiction that should be in all circulating libraries, yet it is in none. During the reading it came upon him—the inspiration—to offer as a counter-attraction to Bestways—Scotland!

Could Diana resist a moor in Scotland? To shoot over which she might ask any one she liked. What would Aunt Elsie do against a force so overwhelming as this? It was late in the season to get a place, but sometimes late in the day even a good place is to be had. Sometimes the best places might be picked up at the last moment.

The next day Marcus lunched at his club, having interviewed agents both hopeful and depressing. At the club he met a friend plunged in the depths of melancholy. So deeply immersed was he that Marcus rose buoyant on the crest of a wave of exultation. The friend’s wife was ill. Marcus, sobered, expressed sympathy: the man, to a certain extent, had brought it on himself by having a wife, but still Marcus was sorry she was ill. Added to that the man had taken a place in Scotland to which he could not go in consequence of his wife’s illness and the agents said it was too late to sub-let it. Here Marcus was really sympathetic. What sort of a place was it?—and out it all came—the same grand old story. The blood that had run through the veins of Marcus now coursed and by the end of luncheon the moor was practically his—he had walked it. Its geographical position was scored on the tablecloth: its marches defined by spoons and forks. So much was the place his that he felt justified in telegraphing to Diana—“Got place Scotland, will you come?” What about the hill now upon which Elsie had imagined herself standing looking down upon poor Marcus?

When Diana got the telegram she read it aloud, and Elsie began feebly about a picnic—and more picnics—and a possible dance—and more dances, but Diana’s heart was already in the Highlands. “Darling Uncle Man!” she cried. “Delicious old Marky Man!” And Marcus put his head under her hand and swallowed with gratitude. “Not you, you darling, blessed black angel,” she said.

“Bribery and corruption,” said Aunt Elsie, as she pulled furiously at the weeds in the garden; “pure bribery—it isn’t that the child cares for him—she only goes—because she wants to go to Scotland. I shall at least have Dick. He would never desert me.” And to make sure of that she went in and wrote to Dick—wrote of cricket matches—wrote in glowing terms, showing an amazing knowledge of the game, which she felt was bound to impress a small nephew. To which letter Dick wrote back:

DEAR AUNT ELSIE,—It’s jolly decent of you, but I’m a bit fed up with cricket, and what’s more I might get stale if I played too much, and what’s still more to the purpose is that Taboret Major has asked me to go to Scotland. His people have taken a sort of castle there—what d’you say to that? Don’t say no and break the heart of your anxious nephew. Taboret Major says it’s a rippin’ place and there’s lots of shooting and fishing. Old Wane says it’s a chance that shouldn’t be missed—so I say.

Your loving and hopeful DICK

P.S. What about my being confirmed next term? Do you think I need? I don’t feel much like it at present and Taboret Major isn’t going to be because he’s going to join the Scotch religion. I expect I shall be converted when I’m in Scotland, so had I better wait to see? But then I ought to say that Taboret Major is going to wear a kilt. I expect this makes a difference. What do you think?

So even Dick was denied her, and Elsie went out into her garden where the borders were full of blossoms which Diana loved, and into the kitchen garden where grew vegetable marrows, things which Dick had sworn he loved, and the aunt felt she had laboured in vain. She had sown and Uncle Marcus would reap.

XIII

_God made the Highlander—then rested. His finest work was never bested._

Is there any waking up in this world to be compared with the waking up in Scotland after a night spent in the train?

Is there any air so thin and clear as the air one breathes on stepping out to the station platform? Would a man be anywhere else on God’s earth? No, not if he be a sportsman and something of a Scotsman. It is not necessary to be more than that to make one eager to claim kinship with every one as one stands for the first time after many months on Scottish ground. Marcus bethought himself of the portrait of an ancestress of his wearing a tartan sash and blessed her for having worn it and for having passed on to him something of her love for the Highlands that had lain in her heart beneath the tartan band.

As Marcus stood on the platform he pointed out to Diana its many beauties. God had willed that there should be no mist that morning—and no veil hung between them and the moor—purpling with promise of deeper things to come. Diana said that, and Marcus enthused in his turn over the convolvulus that scrambled over the white wooden paling as it scrambles nowhere else: nowhere else, perhaps, is it so worth while scrambling to get over the paling.

“It’s good to be alive!” he exclaimed.

“Delicious!” said Diana, sniffing; “isn’t it good? How much longer shall we be before we get there?”

Marcus said some hours, but Diana didn’t mind how many. The people at the stations interested her; the barefooted, sandy-haired, freckled boys, the barefooted, shy, proud little girls; fisherwomen, old and young, pretty and pretty once upon a time—long ago. She loved the shivering pointers and setters—shivering with excitement only—she knew that—waiting while their masters and men disinterred deeply buried luggage. Stalwart keepers meeting parties interested her and she knew she witnessed the meeting of old friends. She loved the keepers and wondered if Marcus and she would have a nice one of their own? What a thing it is to own for even two months a Scotch keeper! Marcus assured her all keepers in Scotland were nice. They were a race apart—a race of fine gentlemen.

“Darlings,” said Diana; “it’s a heavenly place.” Then she wondered what Glenbossie would be like? And Marcus knew exactly. It would be a smallish house—stucco, whitewashed; it might have a tropæolum growing over the porch. The woodwork of the house would be painted a clarety brown; there might be strings of convolvulus up the walls, and there would be pegs on which to lay the fishing-rods under the sloping roof.

“It will be a lodge,” said Diana with some anxiety; “not a proper house?”

“A lodge, of course; certainly not a proper house.”

“It would be horrible if it were a proper house.”

“Uncanny, positively,” agreed Marcus.

“You will love being uncomfortable, won’t you?” asked Diana.

Marcus looked anxious, but smiled as he said, “Yes, of course”; for he knew his Oven and his Pillar.

Pillar came along the train at most stations to tell Mr. Maitland it looked like fine weather and that the luggage was in at the front.

Mrs. Oven never moved. Her heart was sick for her London kitchen and all it contained—its electrical contrivances. She didn’t look forward except with dismay to a lodge that was not a proper house. But going to Scotland was an act of madness committed by the best families and it was very expensive. She knew, of course, that people who live in Scotland, whose homes are there, live in the greatest comfort, that the best cooks come from Scotland; it is only of those people who go from England for two months and live in places they would never think of living in in England, and paying enormous sums to do so, she was thinking.

The scullery-maid refused to look out of the window. She preferred to read. She knew what the country looked like. She had been to Epping Forest twice. Books for her, please! The kitchen-maid was from Skye. She hung out of the window drinking it all in. The housemaid tried to sleep. She was a bad traveller. She had nothing to say against Skye, but as they weren’t going there there was no need to think about it. It was beds she was thinking of. The mattresses wouldn’t be “box,” she was despondingly certain of that. “Not even spring, I should say,” Mrs. Oven said. At one of the stations—a small private station—the train stopped to take up a party of fishermen—a man, a girl, and a boy. The gillies got into the next compartment with the rods and landing-nets. Marcus glanced quickly at Diana. She looked perfectly fresh, tidy, and delightful. Her eyes sparkled. She was hoping Uncle Marcus would speak. She remembered a horrible story he was wont to tell of two men who had lived for twenty years in the same house in Jermyn Street, who had never spoken to each other, although they met constantly on the stairs. He had seemed proud of the story as illustrating something rather fine in the English character, but now, throwing all Jermyn Street restraint to the winds, he spoke. He asked them what luck they had had. The boy started off to tell him. He took ten minutes to tell how he had lost a fish. The girl, in one, told how she had seen one. The man had got two. Moreover, he prophesied that by tea-time Diana would have got one—if not more—to her own rod. “You are for Glenbossie?” he said to Marcus. And Marcus said he was and that Diana was his niece.

“Nice people,” said Diana when they had gone, and Marcus beamed. Where was Aunt Elsie now? Scotland was the place to bring a girl to, of course. What was the good of picnics and dances? English picnics! English dances!

At last they arrived at the station that for two months was to be their own. Marcus had never seemed to care for a station before—had never before patted one on the back, as it were. Diana was amused to see him greet the station-master as his best friend in the world. He looked as though he were longing to tell him how glad he was he had elected to be a station-master. It was delightful to Diana. She had never seen Marcus purring to this extent. She had known him very polite, but this was something far pleasanter, and much funnier. The station-master was his long-lost brother, that was all. So was the keeper: Macpherson by name: and more of a brother than any—an elder brother—was John. John with a wrinkled face and a twinkle in his eyes. Nature is a wonderful needle-woman when she takes the time and trouble to “gather” an old face. She had made thousands of “gathers” on John’s face without in any way spoiling the material, and Diana loved every wrinkle. Most of them stood for smiles and many of them for sunshine. “I shall love John,” she confided to Marcus.