Complete Works. Anna Buchan. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Anna Buchan
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like, because it's frightful cheek on my part.... Do you really believe all that?"

      "All what?"

      "Well, about the next world. Are you as sure as you seem to be?"

      Elizabeth did not speak for a moment, then she nodded her head gravely.

      "Yes," she said, "I'm sure. You can't live with Father and not be sure."

      "It seems to me so extraordinary. I mean to say, I never heard people talk about such things before. And you all know such chunks of the Bible—even Buff. Why do you laugh?"

      "At your exasperated tone! You seem to find our knowledge of the Bible almost indecent. Remember, please, that you have never lived before in Scots clerical circles, and that ministers' children are funny people. We are brought up on the Bible and the Shorter Catechism—at least the old-fashioned kind are. In our case, the diet was varied by an abundance of poetry and fairy tales, which have given us our peculiar daftness. But don't you take any interest in the next world?"

      Arthur Townshend screwed his short-sighted eyes in a puzzled way, as he said:

      "I don't know anything about it."

      "As much as anybody else, I daresay," said Elizabeth. "Don't you like that old song I sang to Peggy?—

      'Thy gardens and thy gallant walks Continually are green....'

      One has a vision of smooth green turf, and ladies 'with lace about their delicate hands' walking serenely; and gentlemen ruffling it with curled wigs and carnation silk stockings. Such a deliciously modish Heaven! Ah well! Heaven will be what we love most on earth. At Etterick——"

      "Tell me about Etterick," begged Arthur. "It's a place I want very much to see. Aunt Alice adores it."

      "Who wouldn't! It's only a farmhouse with a bit built on, and a few acres of ground round it but there is a walled garden where old flowers grow carelessly, and the heather comes down almost to the door. And there is a burn—what you would call a stream—that slips all clear and shining from one brown pool to another; and the nearest neighbours are three good miles away, and the peeweets cry, and the bees hum among the wild thyme. You can imagine what it means to go there from a Glasgow suburb. The day we arrive, Father swallows his tea and goes out to the garden, snuffing the wind, and murmuring like Master Shallow, 'Marry, good air.' Then off he goes across the moor, and we are pretty sure that the psalm we sing at prayers that night will be 'I to the hills will lift mine eyes.'"

      "Etterick belongs to your father?"

      "Yes, it is our small inheritance. Father's people have had it for a long time. We can only be there for about two months in the summer, but we often send our run-down or getting-better people for a week or two. The air is wonderful, but it is dull for them, lacking the attractions of Millport or Rothesay—the contempt of your town-bred for the country-dwellers is intense, and laughable. I was going to tell you about the old man who along with his wife keeps it for us. He has the softest, most delicious Border voice, and he remarked to me once, 'A' I ask in the way o' Heaven is juist Etterick—at a raisonable rent.' I thought the 'raisonable rent' rather nice. Nothing wanted for nothing, even in the Better Country."

      Arthur laughed, and said the idea carried too far might turn Heaven into a collection of Small Holdings.

      "But tell me one thing more. What do you do it for? I mean visiting the sick, teaching Sunday schools, handing people tracts. Is it because you think it is your duty as a parson's daughter?"

      Elizabeth turned to look at her companion's face to see if he were laughing; but he was looking quite serious, and anxious for an answer.

      "Do you know," she asked him, "what the Scots girl said to the Cockney tourist when he asked her if all Scots girls went barefoot? No? Then I'll tell you. She said, 'Pairtly, and pairtly they mind their ain business.'"

      "I deserve it," said Arthur. "I brought it on myself."

      "I'm not proud, like the barefoot girl," said Elizabeth. "I'll answer your questions as well as I can. I think I do it 'pairtly' from duty and 'pairtly' from love of it. But oh! isn't it best to leave motives alone? When I go to see Peggy it is a pure labour of love, but when I go to see fretful people who whine and don't wash I am very self-conscious about myself. I mean to say, I can't help saying to myself, 'How nice of you, my dear, to come into this stuffy room and spend your money on fresh eggs and calf's-foot jelly for this unpleasant old thing.' Then I walk home on my heels. You've read Valerie Upton? Do you remember the loathly Imogen and her 'radiant goodness,' and how she stood 'forth in the light'? I sometimes have a horrid thought that I am rather like that."

      "Oh no," said Arthur consolingly. "You will never become a prig. If your own sense of humour didn't save you I know what would—the knowledge that Fish would lawff."

      Their walk was nearly over: they had come to the end of the road where the Setons' house stood.

      "It is nice," said Elizabeth, with a happy sigh, "to think that we are going in to Father and Buff and tea. Have you got the paint-box all right? Let me be there when you give it to him."

      They walked along in contented silence, until Elizabeth suddenly laughed, and explained that she had remembered a dream Buff once had about Heaven.

      "He was sleeping in a little bed in my room, and he suddenly sprang up and said, 'It's a good thing that's not true, anyway.' I asked what was the matter, and he told me. He was, it seems, in a beautiful golden ship with silver sails, sailing away to Heaven, when suddenly he met another ship—a black, wicked-looking ship—bound for what Marget calls 'the Ill Place,' and to his horror he recognized all his family on board. 'What did you do, Buff?' I asked, and poor old Buff gave a great gulp and said, 'I came on beside you.'"

      "Sound fellow!" said Arthur.

      CHAPTER XIII

       Table of Contents

      "'O tell me what was on yer road, ye roarin' norland wind,

       As ye cam' blowin' frae the land that's never frae my mind?

       My feet they traivel England, but I'm deein' for the North—'

       'My man, I heard the siller tides rin up the Firth o' Forth.'"

       Songs of Angus.

      Since the afternoon when Mr. Stewart Stevenson had called and talked ballads with Mr. Seton he had been a frequent visitor at the Setons' house. Something about it, an atmosphere homely and welcoming and pleasant, made it to him a very attractive place.

      One afternoon (the Thursday of the week of Arthur Townshend's visit) he stood in a discouraged mood looking at his work. As a rule moods troubled Stewart Stevenson but little; he was an artist without the artistic temperament. He had his light to follow and he followed it, feeling no need for eccentricity in the way of hair or collars or conduct. He was as placid and regular as one of his father's "time-pieces" which ticked off the flying minutes in the decorous, well-dusted rooms of "Lochnagar." His mother summed him up very well when she confessed to strangers her son's profession. "Stewart's a Nartist," she would say half proud, half deprecating, "but you'd niver know it." Poor lady, she had a horror of artist-life as it was revealed to her in the pages of the Heart's Ease Library. Sometimes dreadful qualms would seize her in the night watches, and she would waken her husband to ask if he thought there was any fear of Stewart being Led Away, and was only partially reassured by his sleepy grunts in the negative. "What's Art?" she often asked herself, with a nightmare vision in her mind of ladies lightly clad capering with masked gentlemen at some studio orgy—"What's Art compared with Respectability?" though anyone more morbidly respectable and less likely to caper with females than her son Stewart could hardly be imagined, and her mind might have been in a state of perfect peace concerning him. He went to his studio as regularly as his father went to the Ham and Butter place, and both worked solidly through the hours.

      But, as I have said, this particular afternoon found Stewart Stevenson out