Page images
PDF
EPUB

rainy days like a wall of marble, and he came behind her, compassing her figure with his glance, perplexed by something in her manner. Her dog ran on ahead, questing among tufts of bleached long grass with which the Schawfield folk made up their beds in spring.

Suddenly she stopped for a second, withdrew as it were in alarm from the ledge to which the path diminished, wheeled round, and retraced her steps.

"Let us go back," she said. "After all, you can see Pen any time."

"I never wanted to see her less than at this moment," he exclaimed, and walked obediently beside her.

But when they had got down the path a little way he observed that the dog had not turned back with her. He stopped and whistled.

low us by-and-by," said Norah quickly.

"I'll find him," he said, relieved by the opportunity of doing anything to break a spell that seemed to have fallen on them, and hastily returned to the spot where the dog had left her.

"Come back!" she cried, peremptorily, but he paid no heed, and a moment later she saw him pause abruptly.

From the point where he stood-where she had so suddenly paused and turned-he could see a stretch of the lower road. The dog was dashing down the slope pursuing rabbits, but his interest in the dog was lost immediately by reason of a spectacle revealed between the opening in the trees.

He stared incredulously: Pen was standing in the arms of

"Never mind! He will fol- Maurice!

CHAPTER XXXIII.

Only for a second he gazed with a startled eye, doubtful of the scene that he beheld or of the pair's identity; but of that there was no mistake. They stood on the road, surrounded by the trees, confident of its privacy, and oblivious that any part of the higher path could overlook them. Chance had made him witness of the very climax of the joke he had himself originated, and at the same time made the purpose of his chase ridiculous. He felt immense relief, to be followed instantly by bewildering thoughts of what this

VOL. CLXXXVIII.—NO. MCXLI.

meant for Norah. The abruptness of her turning back was now accounted for; she had seen what he had seen, and yet she had said nothing-shown neither grief nor indignation. Or, on second thoughts, had she really seen? With the dog at his heels he rejoined her quickly, holding himself composed, intending to keep silence. Sooner or later she must know of Maurice's disloyalty, but it would not be from him.

No, she had not seen,-the glance with which she met him when he joined her seemed

2 z

conclusive: she was undisturbed; she had regained her old serenity.

She chided the dog that gambolled round her, quite unconscious that it had a vital part in the comedy of mankind: they went down the road together.

The wind, that had scarcely rustled the sheltering hedges of Fancy Farm, had risen a little, or was more apparent on those higher levels. It filled the wood with rumours; all the trees communed in their lofty tops.

There were murmurs in the undergrowth and whispers in the dry bog grass. The trunks of the oaks, the gnarled old rogues, maintained their attitude of motionless indifference, having seen so much of the ways of hart and hind and men and women; the innuendo was all on the part of their giddy branches.

"We were talking about perfection," he remarked. "Do you know, I have discovered that while I'm always fascinated by perfection as a goal, as an ideal, I prefer the imperfect for everyday

use."

Norah smiled. She could long ago have told him that. There was never a man on earth who better loved the broken melody, the column incomplete, the first rough sketches. His family motto, Non inferiora secutus, was a motto that for him referred to incorporeal things.

"There is no perfection," he proceeded, "and a good thing too! The dream of it compels us always to be striving for

[merged small][ocr errors]

"It is the imperfections of our friends that make them tolerable-unless we are monsters of righteousness ourselves," said Norah. "I think you

told me that yourself, a year ago, with a good deal of inconsistency, considering that what you wanted was a perfect Pen."

"Quite so!" he agreed. "I overlooked the fact that I wasn't worthy of a perfect Pen or perfect anybody else. But even Pen is incapable of perfection: I can't say yet whether I'm glad or sorry to find that out."

"I have yet to discover any weakness in her," answered Norah, generously warm.

He glanced from the corners of his eyes at her with pity, thinking of what he had seen. "I have thought of late," he said, "that she was hardly loyal to yourself."

She stopped immediately and faced him with a penetrating scrutiny. "Oh!" she exclaimed, "you saw them up there, then, when you turned?" "Good heavens!" he cried, "did you?"

She nodded, smiling and confused.

"I'm sorry," he said with genuine feeling.

66

"Why?" she asked him. "Maurice-_____” he stammered, and she laughed.

"Exactly! It was I who sent him along the low road after her. The penetration of the surviving Schaws appears to be confined to Aunt Amelia. What do you fancy Maurice

[merged small][merged small][ocr errors]

"My dear, I let you assume! It was you-or Jean, who first suggested, in so many words, that I was in love with Reggy, and all I did was not to contradiot you. In any case it takes two to come to an understanding, and you might have seen that Reggy never had more than a philanderer's interest in me. Had there been the slightest danger of his feelings being more ardent he should not have been so often here."

"But why?" said Captain Cutlass.

She would not stop to listen, but hurried down the path. "Why did you let me think -?" he persisted, keeping step with her.

[blocks in formation]

also she was amused as she had been amused to witness Maurice running across the fields; men were all in some respects like one another. It seemed to her that the underwoods knew what he was blind to,-that the very oaks, the ancient ones, with difficulty kept themselves from mocking; she grew shy of those old rogues.

If she had come up the hill with a pack of cares she went down it as if her footstep could not bruise the moss. He looked at her sideways with delight, as if he had never seen her hitherto, released himself of those constraints imposed on him so long by his delusion, and saw her frankly with a lover's eye.

"Stop!" he said, with a hand upon her shoulder. She faced him shyly, all her amusement gone.

"I come back again to my whim," said he. "That vision of perfection. You remember the qualities I wanted-an exceedingly fastidious and exigent gentleman! There was that in Pen that seemed to make a good beginning, she was in so many respects like you. thought I wanted a new creation, and all the time I find I was thinking of a duplicate. The more she became like you the more I liked her. Could she have been exactly you, I would have loved her."

I

"Oh, Andy, Andy!" she exclaimed. "You are as circumlocutory as Reggy Maurice. I had to tell him that the ploughman has a better way of putting things at times than the poet has.'

[ocr errors]

He looked vexed. "Then Maurice-?"

She broke in hurriedly: "No, no, not to me. Let us have no more misunderstandings. He was trying to make Pen see that he wanted her, and he did the thing so stupidly that she thought he referred to

me.'

He still had a hand on her shoulder, gripping now SO tightly that it pained, but she bore it without complaint. He caught her other shoulder and looked into unflinching eyes, profound as wells, but only for a moment: her lashes fell to keep the deeps of passion from his scrutiny.

"Oh, Norah !" he said"Lord! the very name is like a song! and I've been making a fool of myself as usual. If I knew you loved me, I swear you have seen the last of my caprices."

"I hope not," she replied. "Without an odd vagary at times you would not be Andy Schaw. What else should I love you for?"

He drew her to his arms and kissed her. For a moment she stood in his embrace, and then released herself, shy of the espionage of those sly old trees that were looking over his shoulder.

"You kissed me last on my eighteenth birthday," she faltered, as it seemed irrelevantly.

"When my nineteenth came and you stopped the practice, I was sorry that I was growing old."

"I remember," he exclaimed. "Yes, you remember, when tell you," she replied; "but I was different, I never forgot!"

I

"I feel," said he, "like a man that has been dragged from the brink of a precipice. Do you know what I contemplated?"

She nodded. "It was because I knew that I sent you the wrong road. You see I have lost all shame, now that I am confident."

"But yet I want to know," said he, "why you let me think so long that you were in love with Maurice."

She bit her nether lip. "If you can't guess that," she said, "I'll never tell you." And whether he guessed or not, he asked no more.

The wind grew fresher in the forest's privacy. The treetops hummed more loudly; surviving little trees in a patch of coppice that had seen the coquetry of young folk peeling bark in summer, nudged when they remembered. And when the two were gone, and the kissing wicket clashed behind them, Strongarra gave itself to merriment from end to end.

THE END.

A SERVANT OF THE QUEEN.

THE volume1 before us contains the Letters of the Great Marquess of Dalhousie to his oldest and most intimate friend Sir George Couper. The first letter was written in August 1837, when the writer was twenty-five years old and had just been elected to sit in Parliament for his native county; the last is dated June 1858when the hand of death was heavy on him. They cover therefore a period of twentyone years of Dalhousie's life, the first ten of which were spent in Great Britain, the next eight in India, and the last three as a broken and dying man in Europe. The correspondence during the first ten years was scanty, because Lord Dalhousie was able to see his friend continually. For long and interesting correspondence separation by time and distance is a necessary condition. The art of letterwriting, it is said, has been lost. It has been lost because it is not wanted. A penny post and many deliveries have rendered us independent of it. When the time shall come that every one shall carry a Marconi apparatus at the end of his walking-stick, and shall be linked to his friends by invisible telephones, pen and paper will be found only in the British Museum. But in Dalhousie's time the post to India

took from six to eight weeks. There was no telegraph wire. People did not run out to India to see their friends. Dalhousie, if he wished to keep in touch with his friend, had perforce to write. His letters are charming. They are also, as historical documents, full of interest. In this respect the publication is complementary to the very complete 'Life of the Marquis of Dalhousie,' written by Sir William Lee-Warner, and noticed by 'Maga' in June 1904. These private letters show Dalhousie as a man. will be the object of this paper to draw from his own words the salient features of his character, and to gain some idea of the life of a Governor-General of India sixty years ago.

It

It was on the 11th of November 1847, in H. M. frigate Sidon, that Lord and Lady Dalhousie sailed for Alexandria. They were met at Suez by one of the East India Company's ships, and landed in Calcutta on the 12th January 1848, after an uneventful voyage. The first letter from India is dated 18th January, and describes festivities before his predecessor, Lord Hardinge, sailed as "fearful. Two dinners of 150 each, two of 50, and a ball of 800, closed with a breakfast to 90." All this goes on much the same in the twentieth century, but perhaps people in

the

1 Private Letters of the Marquess of Dalhousie. Edited by J. G. A. Baird. William Blackwood & Sons.

« PreviousContinue »