A Witch of the Hills Volume I Part 6

'Ladies won't keep the dry rot out of a place, sir,' answered Ferguson, with dry contempt. 'However, you know best, sir, what kind of cattle you like to harbour in your own barns, and I daresay they'll be snug enough till the snow comes.'

This dark suggestion was but the echo to my own fears. I was so anxious to secure a co-operation in my plan, not merely perfunctory, but zealous, knowing well, as I did, the highly-sensitive mood in which the elder at least of my new tenants would arrive, that even after this scantily-gracious speech I humbled myself more than was meet.

'By the bye, Ferguson,' I began again after a short pause, during which he helped me on with my coat, 'I'm thinking of having the little north room upstairs fitted up for you, as a sort of--sort of housekeeper's room, butler's room, you know.' Mine was such a nondescript household that it was not easy to find a designation for any of the apartments, but I wished thus neatly to intimate that if my mayor of the palace had matrimonial intentions, his do-nothing king would not stand in his way. 'Now that my household is becoming larger, I daresay you would like to have some place where you and Tim and Mrs.--Miss--what did you say her name was? could sit in the evenings.'

'Neither Mrs. nor Miss anything did I say was her name,' answered Ferguson, with grave deliberation. 'Plain Janet, sir; she leaves t.i.tles to her betters. And the kitchen does very well for me, sir, and for Janet too if you care to engage her as housekeeper, after due trial of her capabilities.'

'Oh, if she satisfies you she will satisfy me.'

'None the less I should wish you to see her, that you may understand it was for your better service and not for my own pleasure that I introduced her here. I have no opinion of women, sir, until they are past the age for frivolity, and I'm not handsome enough to go courting myself.'

Whether this was a warning to me not to be beguiled into a fatal trust in the power of my own beauty, and an obscure hint that in his opinion I was in danger of making a fool of myself, Ferguson's face was too wooden to betray; but the manner in which he gave his services towards putting the cottage in order was unsatisfactory, not to say venomous.

He veiled his displeasure with my new freak under an officious zeal for the comfort of the coming tenants, which was much harder to deal with than stubborn unwillingness to work for them would have been. My a.s.surances that one was an invalid and the other a child only supplied him with fresh forms of indirect attack. He was surprised that I did not have one of the two rooms on the ground-floor fitted up as a bedroom, as invalids cannot walk up and down stairs; he was kind enough to place in one of the upper rooms, which he persisted in calling 'the nursery,' a small wooden horse of the primitive straight-legged kind, a penny rattle, and a soft fluffy parrot; and when I impatiently pitched the things out at the door he seemed dismayed, and said 'he had thought they would please the wee bairn.'

That old beast took all the pleasure out of the little excitement of furnis.h.i.+ng. On the morning after my return, he took care to present to me the respectable Janet; he had, indeed, not overrated her magnificent lack of meretricious charms; for in the wooden face and hard blue eyes I recognised at once the features of my faithful attendant, additional wrinkles taking the place of the sabre-cut. She was his mother. As, however, neither made any reference to this fact, I treated it as a family secret and made no indiscreet inquiries.

The eventful Friday came. I was in the cottage as soon as it was light, making for the last time the tour of the two bedrooms, kitchen, and sitting-room, trying all the windows to see that they were draught-tight, pa.s.sing my hands along the walls in a futile attempt to find out if they were damp. In the sitting-room I stayed a long time, moving about the furniture, a second-hand suite, covered with dark red reps; I was disgusted with the mournful bareness of the apartment, and wondered how I could have been so stupid as to forget that women liked ornaments. I went back to my house and ransacked it furtively for nicknacks, without much success. First, I reviewed the pictures: a regular bachelor's collection they were, not objectionable from a man's point of view, but for ladies----. No, the pictures were hopeless, with the exception of huge engravings, 'The Relief of Lucknow,' and 'Queen Philippa Begging the Lives of the Burgesses,'

which, though perfectly innocuous to a young girl's mind, were not exhilarating to anybody's. Besides, fancy being caught by Ferguson staggering under the burden of those ponderous works of art! I had not known before how meagre were the appointments of my home; my five years of wandering had given me a traveller's indifference to all but necessaries, so that, as I looked round the study, where I spent nearly all the time that I pa.s.sed indoors, I saw little that could be spared. It was a comfortable-looking room enough, with its three big windows, two looking south over the terraced garden and the wooded valley of the Muick, the remaining one east over the lawn and the drive, and more trees. The west wall of the room was filled from floor to ceiling by book-shelves of the plainest kind; these were filled, not with the student's methodically-arranged collection of sombre and well-worn volumes, not with the 'gentleman's' suspiciously neat and bright 'complete sets' in morocco and half-calf, which to remove seems as improper as to sc.r.a.pe off the wall-paper would be; but with the oddest of odd lots of literary ware, in a dozen languages, in all sizes and all varieties of binding and lack of binding, no two volumes of anything together, and not a book that I didn't love among them, from Montaigne, in dear dirty paper covers, hanging by a thread, to Thackeray in a beastly _edition de luxe_.

On the north wall was the fireplace--wide, high, old-fas.h.i.+oned and warm--with a discoloured white marble mantelpiece, decorated with fat bewigged Georgian cupids. Above it hung an old cavalry sword with which my father had cut his way through the Russians at Inkermann.

Close to the fireplace, and with its back to the book-shelves, stood my own especial chair--big, roomy, well worn--covered with dark red morocco, like the rest of the furniture. A reading-table stood in the corner beside it, and on the right hand was a bigger table, piled high with books and papers, cigars, bills and rubbish. There was a writing-table in one corner, at which I never wrote; a sofa covered with more literary lumber; two cabinets crammed with curiosities collected on my travels, tossed in with little attempt at arrangement; a card-table on which stood a quant.i.ty of old-fas.h.i.+oned silver, such as tall candlesticks, goblets, a punch-bowl and a ma.s.sive last-century urn. A stuffed duck, a Dutch tankard, a pair of elk's horns, and a bust of Dante surmounted by a fox's brush, occupied the top of the book-shelves. A high plain fourfold screen, as dark as the rest of the time-worn furniture, hid the door; and close to the screen a dog-kennel, with the front taken out and replaced by a strong iron grating, formed the winter home of a large brown monkey, which I had bought at a sale with the fascinating reputation of being dangerous, but which had belied its character by allowing me to bring it home on my shoulders. To-to, so called for no better reason than that my collie, whose favourite resting-place was now well defined on the goatskin hearthrug, was named Ta-ta, had from our first introduction treated me with such marked tolerance that I, in my loneliness, had begun to feel a sort of superst.i.tious fondness for the brute, and fancied I saw more reason and affection in his blinking brown eyes than in any of the Scotch pebbles which served as organs of vision to my Gaelic neighbours. When I first bought him it was mild enough for him to live in the yard; but when the weather grew cold, and he was brought into the kitchen, he got on so ill with the powers there that I had to take compa.s.sion upon him and them, and remove To-to to the study, where he justified his promotion by the reserve and gravity of his manners, his only marked foible being a furious jealousy of Ta-ta, whose resting-place was just beyond the utmost tether of the monkey's chain. Rarely did an evening pa.s.s without some skirmish between the two. Perhaps Ta-ta, seeing me smile over the book I was reading, and anxious to share my enjoyment, even if she could not understand the joke, would incautiously get up and wag her tail. Whereupon To-to would dash across the hearthrug and a.s.sist her, and much unpleasantness would follow, the dog barking, the monkey chattering, the master swearing--all three members of the menagerie trying to come off conqueror in the _melee_. Or else To-to would fall from the top of his kennel to the floor, with a loud noise, and would lie stiff and still on the rug, as if in a fit; and then the simple Ta-ta would walk over to investigate the case, and the monkey would seize her ears and twist them round with jabbering triumph. I kept a small whip to separate the combatants on these occasions, but I only dared use it very sparingly; as, though its effect upon To-to's coa.r.s.er nature was salutary in the extreme in reducing him to instant love and obedience, as the boot of the costermonger does his wife, the gentler Ta-ta would look up at me with such piteous protest in her dark eyes that I felt a brute for the next half hour.

From this room, the scene of most of my domestic life, I took a pair of silver candlesticks and a Dresden cup and saucer. Into the unused drawing-room, which I had had fitted up years ago in the Louis Quinze style, I just peeped; but there was nothing very tempting in white and gold curly-legged furniture tied up in brown holland on a cold polished floor, so I locked the door again, and carried away my prizes to the cottage, where they certainly improved the look of the sitting-room mantelpiece.

I had no sort of carriage more convenient than a Norfolk-cart, so on my way to Aberdeen I ordered a fly to be at Ballater Station on my return with my new tenants. Both the ladies were already dressed for their journey, and we started at once, Mrs. Ellmer hastening to inform me that she had sent most of her luggage to some friends in London, to account, I fancy, poor lady, for having only one shabby trunk and two stage baskets. Babiole sat very quietly during the railway journey, looking out of window at the now dreary and bleak landscape; and I spoke so little that any one might have thought I would rather have been alone. But, indeed, I was only afraid, from the happy excitement which glowed in the faces of both talkative mother and silent daughter, lest their bright expectations should be disappointed by the simplicity and desolation of the place they persisted in regarding as a palace of delights.

'It's a very homely place, you know,' I said solemnly, after being bantered in a sprightly manner by Mrs. Ellmer upon my artfulness in building myself a fortress up in the hills where, like the knights of old, I could indulge in what lawless pranks I pleased. 'And I a.s.sure you that nothing could possibly be more simple than my mode of life there. Whatever of the bold bad bandit there may have been in my composition ten years back has been melted down into mere harmless eccentricity long ago.'

'Ah! you are not going to make me believe that,' said Mrs. Ellmer, with a giddy shake of the head. 'Why, the very name Larkhall betrays you.'

I believe the dear lady really did think the name had been given in commemoration of 'high jinks' I had held there; but I hastened to a.s.sure her that 'lark' was simply the Highland p.r.o.nunciation of 'larch,' a tree which grew abundantly in the neighbourhood. However, she only smiled archly, and seeing that the imaginary iniquities she seemed bent on imputing to me in no way lessened her exuberant happiness in my society, I left my character in her hands, with only a glance at Babiole, who seemed, with her eyes fixed on the moving landscape, to be deaf to what went on inside the carriage. I was rather glad of it.

When we got to Ballater the little shed of a station was crowded by rough villagers, all eagerly enjoying the splendid excitement of the arrival of the train. A dense, wet Scotch mist enveloped us as we stepped on to the platform, chilled by our cold journey; still, they both smiled with persistent happiness, which grew rapturous when we all got into a roomy fly which Mrs. Ellmer called 'your carriage.'

They were charmed with the village, which looked, through the veil of fine rain, a most depressing collection of stiff stone and slate dwellings to my _blase_ eyes. They were delighted with the cold and dreary drive. They p.r.o.nounced the dark fir-forest through which we drove 'magnificent'; and, finally, after a hushed and reverential silence as we went through the plantation, both were transfixed with admiration at the sight of my modest dwelling. Mrs. Ellmer even went so far as to admire the 'fine rugged face' of Ferguson, who was standing at the hall door scowling his worst scowl. I did not risk an encounter with him, but led the ladies straight into the cottage, where a peat fire was glowing in each of the lower rooms. We went first into the sitting-room; a lighted lamp was in the middle of the table, the tea-things were at one end. I glanced from mother to daughter, trying to read their first impression of their new home.

Mrs. Ellmer's eyes, sharpened by sordid experience to hungry keenness, took in every detail at once with critical satisfaction, while her lips poured forth commonplaces of vague delight. The climax of her pleasure was the discovery of the cup and saucer on the mantelpiece.

By the way in which her thin face lighted up I saw she was a connoisseur. In looking at it she forgot me and for a moment paused in her enraptured monologue.

Babiole took it all differently. She seemed to hold her breath as she looked slowly round, as if determined to gaze on everything long enough to be sure that it was real; then, with a little sob, she turned her head quickly, and her innocent eyes, soft and bright with unspeakable grat.i.tude, fell on me.

You must have been for years an object of horror and loathing to your fellow-men to know what that look, going straight from soul to soul with no thought of the defects of the bodily envelope, was to me.

Perhaps it was because my life had so long been barren of all pleasures dependent on my fellow-creatures that I could neither then, nor later that evening when I was alone, recall any sensation akin to its effect in sweetness or vividness except the glow I had felt after Babiole's girlish confidence to me at the door of the Aberdeen lodging. I suppose I must have stood smiling at the child with grotesque happiness, for Mrs. Ellmer, turning from contemplation of the cup and saucer, drew her thin lips together very sourly.

'And now I will leave you to your tea,' said I hastily. 'I told Janet to put everything ready for you.'

'Thank you, Mr. Maude, you are too good. We require no waiting on, I a.s.sure you,' broke in Mrs. Ellmer, with rather tart civility.

'Oh no, I only told her to put the kettle on in the kitchen,' I protested humbly. And, with ceremonious hopes that they would be comfortable, I retreated, Babiole giving my fingers a warm-hearted squeeze when it came to her turn to shake hands. The child was following me to let me out when her mother interposed and came with me to the door herself.

She took my hand and held it while she a.s.sured me that she was so much overpowered by my distinguished kindness and courtesy that I must excuse her if, in the effort to express her feelings adequately, she found herself without words. I'm sure I wished she would, for she went on in the same strain, making convulsive little clutches at my fingers to emphasise her speech, until both she and I began to s.h.i.+ver. She did not let me go until Babiole appeared behind her, flushed and smiling, in the little pa.s.sage. Then Mrs. Ellmer's fingers sprang up from mine like an opened latch and, dismissed, I raised my hat and hurried off.

I had not gone half a dozen yards when I met Janet on her way to the cottage; she curtseyed and told me, in answer to my question, that she was taking some tea to the ladies. After a moment's hesitation I turned and followed her, proposing to ask them whether they would like some books.

Janet opened the door quietly without knocking, and went into the kitchen on the left, while I stood on the rough fibre mat outside the sitting-room, having grown suddenly shy about intruding again. I heard Babiole's clear childish voice.

'Oh, mamma, if only papa doesn't find us out, how happy we shall be here! Mr. Maude is a good man, I am sure of it!'

'As good as the rest of them, I daresay,' answered her mother in tones of pure vinegar. 'Understand, if you ever meet him when I'm not with you, you are not to speak to him. It makes me ill to look at his hideous wicked face. There's someone in the kitchen, run and see who it is.'

And the poor Beast, thinking he had heard enough, and afraid lest Beauty should catch him eavesdropping, slunk away from the door-mat and made his way home with his tail between his legs.

CHAPTER VII

Those unlucky few words that I had overheard created a great breach between me and my tenants, and, moreover, brought on in the would-be philosopher a fit of misanthropical melancholy. I could not get over the poor little woman's cynical hypocrisy for some days, during which I never went near the cottage; and if I met either mother or daughter in my walks or rides, I contented myself with raising my hat ceremoniously, and giving them as brief a glimpse of my 'wicked hideous face' as possible. Ha! ha! I would show them whether or not I was dependent on their society, and how much of selfish libertinism there had been in my wish to house them comfortably for the winter; a pair of idiots!

But this n.o.ble pride wore itself out in a fortnight, at the end of which time I began to think it was I who was the idiot, to nourish resentment against a pair of helpless creatures who, too poor to refuse an offer which saved them from brutality and starvation, had seen enough of the dark side of human nature to put small faith in disinterested motives, and had no weapon but their own wits wherewith to fight their natural enemy--man. Besides, my solitude had grown ten times more solitary now that, sitting alone in my study at night, with To-to languidly stretching himself on the kennel in front of me, paying no attention to me whatever, and Ta-ta, who really had capacities for sympathy, lying asleep on the rug at my feet, I knew that, not a hundred yards away, there were slender women's forms flitting about, and girlish prattle going on, by a little modest fireside that was a home.

So I suddenly remembered that I ought to call and ask them if they found their new home to their liking. Anxious, for the first time for five years, to make the best of a bad business, so far as my person was concerned, I exchanged the coa.r.s.e tweed Norfolk suit I usually wore for a black coat and gray trousers I used to wear in town, which, though doubtless a little old-fas.h.i.+oned in cut, might reasonably be supposed to pa.s.s muster in the wilds, and even to give me a rather das.h.i.+ng appearance. But, alas! It did not. It showed me, on the contrary, how far I had slipped away from civilisation. My hair was too long, what complexion I had left too weather-beaten, while the seamed and scarred right side of my face looked more hideous than ever. I changed back quickly to my usual coat, scarcely acknowledging to myself that some sort of vague wish to live once more the life of other men was disappointed.

I found Mrs. Ellmer and her daughter in their outdoor dress; they had been driven in by a snow shower, one of the first of the season. The sitting-room looked now cosy and habitable, if a little untidy, the habits of the touring actress being still manifest in a collection of unframed cabinet photographs--not all uncalculated to bring a blush to the Presbyterian cheek--which stood in a row on the mantelpiece. It occurred to me that old Janet might have let out the fact that I turned back with her to the cottage and, perhaps, overheard something to my disadvantage, for Babiole looked frightened and shy, and Mrs.

Ellmer's manner was almost apologetically humble. There was constraint enough upon us all for me to make my visit very short, but as I left I formally invited them to dine with me on the following evening.

With what shamefaced _nonchalance_ I told Ferguson that day to have the drawing-room opened and cleaned on the following morning! With what stolid lowering resignation he extracted my reason for this unparalleled order! However, he made no protest. But next morning, while I was at breakfast, he entered the room in his usual clockwork manner, but with a glow of pleasurable feeling in his cold eyes.

'If you please, sir, Janet would be obliged if you would step into the drawing-room and see if you would still wish to have it prepared for the party this evening.'

Party! I could have broken his neck. But I only followed him in an easy manner into the hall. It was full of blinding smoke, which was pouring forth from the open door of the drawing-room. I dashed heroically into the apartment, only to be met with a denser cloud, which rushed into my mouth and made my eyes smart and burn. Some winged thing, either a bird or a bat, flapped against the walls and ceiling in the gloom. Janet was choking at the fireplace, in great danger of being smothered.

'What is all this?' I choked angrily, getting back into the hall.

'Nothing, sir,' answered Ferguson, with grim delight. 'Nothing but that Janet lit the fire to air the room in obedience to your orders, and that the chimney smokes a little. Would you still wish to have the room got ready, sir?'

But he had gone too far; he had roused the lion.

'Come in here,' I said, in a tone which subdued his happiness; and he followed me back into the room. 'Now t-t-take the tongs,' I continued, as haughtily as coughing would permit, 'and r-ram it up the chimney.'

Cowed, but exceedingly reluctant, he obeyed, and I would not let him relax his efforts until, smothered with soot and dust, dry twigs and blackened snow, he pulled down upon himself a sack, a couple of birds'-nests, and other obstacles which, some from above and some from below, had been deposited in the unused chimney.

'Now,' said I, purple in the face but content, 'you can relight the fire.'

And, satisfied with this moral victory and the prestige it gave me in the eyes of the whole household--for Tim and the outdoor genius who gardened twelve acres and looked after four horses had both enjoyed this domestic scandal from the doorway--I marched back to my cold coffee and congealed bacon.

There were no more difficulties, though, at least none worth mentioning. It is true that on returning from my morning's ride I found the hall so stuffed up with furniture that I had to enter my residence through one of the study windows, five feet from the ground; and that I had to picnic on a sandwich in the study instead of lunching decorously in the dining-room; but these discomforts might be necessary to a thorough cleaning, and could be borne with fort.i.tude.

At six o'clock my guests arrived, and, having left their cloaks in a spare-room opened for the occasion, they were led to s.h.i.+ver in the drawing-room, which still smelt of smoke and soap and water. Mrs.

Ellmer, with chattering teeth, admired the painted ceiling, the white satin chairs bright with embossed roses, the pale screen, and all the fanciful glories of the room, the magnificence of which evidently impressed and delighted her. Babiole seemed unable to take her eyes off two oil-paintings, both portraits of the same lady, which, in ma.s.sive gilt oval frames, occupied a prominent position at the end of the room opposite the fireplace.