“Perennial! Wretch! If there is anything I am sensitive about, really sensitive about, it is my age! Mr. Dunn, I beseech you, save me from further insult! Dear 'Lily,' run away now. You are much too tired to dance, and besides there is Mrs. Craig-Urquhart waiting to talk your beloved Wagner-Tennyson theory; or what is the exact combination? Mendelssohn-Browning, is it?”
“Oh, Miss Bessie!” cried “Lily” in a shocked voice, “how can you? Mendelssohn-Browning! How awful! Do have some regard for the affinities.”
“Mr. Dunn, I implore you, save me! I can bear no more. There! A merciful providence has accomplished my deliverance. They are going. Good-night, 'Lily.' Run away now. I want a word with Mr. Dunn.”
“Oh, heartless cruelty!” exclaimed “Lily,” in an agonised voice. “But what can you expect from such associations?” And he hastened away to have a last word with Mrs. Craig-Urquhart, who was swimming languidly by.
Miss Brodie turned eagerly to Dunn. “I'd like to help you awfully,” she said; “indeed I must try. I have very little hope. My uncle is so strong when he is once set, and he is so funny about that Bank. But a boy is worth more than a Bank, if he IS a fool; besides, there is his sister. Good-night. Thanks for letting me help. I have little hope, but to-morrow I shall see Sir Archibald, and—and his pigs.”
It was still in the early forenoon of the following day when Miss Brodie greeted her uncle as he was about to start upon his round of the pastures and pens where the Wiltshires of various ages and sizes and sexes were kept. With the utmost enthusiasm Miss Brodie entered into his admiration of them all, from the lordly prize tusker to the great mother lying broadside on in grunting and supreme content, every grunt eloquent of happiness and maternal love and pride, to allow her week-old brood to prod and punch her luxuriant dugs for their breakfast.
By the time they had made their rounds Sir Archibald had arrived at his most comfortable and complacent mood. He loved his niece. He loved her for the sake of his dead brother, and as she grew in years, he came to love her for herself. Her sturdy independent fearlessness, her sound sense, her honest heart, and chiefly, if it must be told, her whole-souled devotion to himself, made for her a great space in his heart. And besides all this, they were both interested to the point of devotion in pigs. As he watched his niece handling the little sucklings with tender care, and listened to her appraising their varying merits with a discriminating judgment, his heart filled up with pride in her many accomplishments and capabilities.
“Isn't she happy, Uncle?” she exclaimed, lifting her brown, sunny face to him.
“Ay, lassie,” replied Sir Archibald, lapsing into the kindly “braid Scots,” “I ken fine how she feels.”
“She's just perfectly happy,” said his niece, “and awfully useful and good. She is just like you, Uncle.”
“What? Oh, thank you, I'm extremely flattered, I assure you.”
“Uncle, you know what I mean! Useful and good. Here you are in this lovely home—how lovely it is on a warm, shiny day like this!—safe from cares and worries, where people can't get at you, and making—”
“Ah, I don't know about that,” replied her uncle, shaking his head with a frown. “Some people have neither sense nor manners. Only yesterday I was pestered by a fellow who annoyed me, seriously annoyed me, interfering in affairs which he knew nothing of—actually the affairs of the Bank!—prating about his family name, and all the rest of it. Family name!” Here, it must be confessed, Sir Archibald distinctly snorted, quite in a manner calculated to excite the envy of any of his Wiltshires.
“I know, Uncle. He is a fool, a conceited fool, and a selfish fool.”
“You know him?” inquired her uncle in a tone of surprise.
“No, I have no personal acquaintance with him, I'm glad to say, but I know about him, and I know that he came with Mr. Rae, the Writer.”
“Ah, yes! Thoroughly respectable man, Mr. Rae.”
“Yes, Mr. Rae is all right; but Captain Cameron—oh, I can't bear him! He came to talk to you about his son, and I venture to say he took most of the time in talking about himself.”
“Exactly so! But how—?”
“And, Uncle, I want to talk to you about that matter, about young Cameron.” For just a moment Miss Brodie's courage faltered as she observed her uncle's figure stiffen. “I want you to know the rights of the case.”
“Now, now, my dear, don't you go—ah—”
“I know, Uncle, you were going to say 'interfering,' only you remember in time that your niece never interferes. Isn't that true, Sir?”
“Yes, yes! I suppose so; that is, certainly.”
“Now I am interested in this young Cameron, and I want you to get the right view of his case, which neither your lawyer nor your manager nor that fool father of his can give you. I know that if you see this case as I see it you will do—ah—exactly what is right; you always do.”
Miss Brodie's voice had assumed its most reasonable and business-like tone. Sir Archibald was impressed, and annoyed because he was impressed.
“Look here, Bessie,” he said, in as impatient a tone as he ever adopted with his niece, “you know how I hate being pestered with business affairs out here.”
“I know quite well, Uncle, and I regret it awfully, but I know, too, that you are a man of honour, and that you stand for fair play. But that young man is to be arrested to-day, and you know what that will mean for a young fellow with his way to make.”
Her appeal was not without its effect. Sir Archibald set himself to give her serious attention. “Let us have it, then,” he said briefly. “What do you know of the young man?”
“This first of all: that he has a selfish, conceited prig for a father.”
With which beginning Sir Archibald most heartily agreed. “But how do you know?”
“Now, let me tell you about him.” And Miss Brodie proceeded to describe the scene between father and son in Mr. Rae's office, with vigorous and illuminating comments. “And just think, the man in the company who was first to condemn the young chap was his own father. Would you do that? You'd stand for him against the whole world, even if he were wrong.”
“Steady, steady, lass!”
“You would,” repeated Miss Bessie, with indignant emphasis. “Would you chuck me over if I were disgraced and all the world hounding me? Would you?”
“No, by God!” said Sir Archibald in a sudden tempest of emotion, and Miss Bessie smiled lovingly upon him.
“Well, that's the kind of a father he has. Now about the young fellow himself: He's just a first-class fool, like most young fellows. You know how they are, Uncle.”
Sir Archibald held up his hand. “Don't make any such assumptions.”
“Oh, I know you, and when you were a boy you were just as gay and foolish as the rest of them.”
Her arch, accusing smile suddenly cast a rich glow of warm colour over the long, grey road of Sir Archibald's youth of self-denial and struggle. The mild indulgences of his early years, under the transforming influence of that same arch and accusing smile, took on for Sir Archibald such an aspect of wild and hilarious gaiety as to impart a tone of hesitation to his voice while he deprecated his niece's charge.
“What, I? Nonsense! What do you know about it? Well, well, we have all had our day, I suppose!”
“Aha! I know you, and I should love to have known you when you were young Cameron's age. Though I'm quite sure you were never such a fool as he. You always knew how to take care of yourself.”
Her uncle shook