A Witch of the Hills, v. 1

'I was afraid you would forget to come, perhaps,' she said, in the prim little way I remembered, as she led the way into a small room, in which no one less used to the shifts of travel than I was could have detected the ingenious artifices by which a washhand-stand became a sideboard, and a wardrobe a book-case. The popular Scotch plan of sleeping in a cupboard disposed of the bed.

Mrs. Ellmer looked better. Whether influenced by her daughter's keen perception that I was a friend in time of need, or pleasantly excited at the novelty of receiving a visitor, there was more spontaneity than I had expected in her voluble welcome, more brightness in the inevitable renewal of her excuses for the simplicity of their surroundings. To me, after my long exile from everything fair or gentle in the way of womanhood, the bare little room was luxurious enough with that pretty young creature in it; for Babiole, though she had lost much of her childish beauty, and was rapidly approaching the 'gawky' stage of a tall girl's development, had a softness in her blue eyes when she looked at her mother, which now seemed to me more charming than the keen glance of unusual intellect. She had, too, the natural refinement of all gentle natures, and had had enough stage training to be more graceful than girls of her age generally are. Altogether, she interested me greatly, so that I cast about in my mind for some way of effectually helping them, without destroying all chance of my meeting them soon again.

Babiole brought in the tea herself, while Mrs. Ellmer carefully explained that Mrs. Firth, the landlady, had such odd notions of laying the table and such terribly noisy manners, that, for the sake of her mother's nerves, Babiole had undertaken this little domestic duty herself. But, from a glimpse I caught later of Mrs. Firth's hands, as she held the kitchen-door to spy at my exit from behind it, I think there may have been stronger reasons for keeping her in the background when an aristocratic and presumably cleanly visitor was about.

Babiole did not talk much, but when, in the course of the evening, I fell to describing Larkhall and the country around it, in deference to poor Mrs. Ellmer's thirsty wish to know more of the rollicking luxury of my bachelor home, the girl's eyes seemed to grow larger with intense interest; and, after a quick glance at my face, which had, I saw, an unspeakable horror for her, she fixed her eyes on the fire, and remained as quiet as a statue while I enlarged on the good qualities of my monkey, my birds, my dog, and the view from my study window of the Muick just visible now between the bare branches of the birch-trees.

'I should like to live right among the hills like that,' she said softly, when her mother had exhausted her expressions of admiration.

'Would you? You would find it very lonely. In winter you would be snowed up, as I shall most certainly be in a week or two; and even when the roads are passable you don't meet any one on them, except, perhaps, a couple of peasants, whose language would be to you as unintelligible as that of wild animals going down into the village to get food.'

'But you can live there.'

'Circumstances have made me solitary everywhere.'

She looked up at me; her face flushed, her lips trembled with unutterable pity, and the tears sprang to her eyes.

Custom had long since made me callous to instinctive aversion, but this most unexpected burst of intelligent sympathy made my heart leap up. I said nothing, and began to play with the tablecloth.

Mrs. Ellmer, in the belief that the pause was an awkward one, rushed into the breach, and disturbed my sweet feeling rather uncouthly.

'I am sure, Mr. Maude, no one thinks the worse of you for the accident, whatever it was, that disfigured you. For my part, I always prefer plain men to handsome ones; they're more intelligent, and don't think so much of themselves.'

Babiole gave her mother an alarmed pleading look, which happily absorbed my attention and neutralised the effect of this speech. I could have borne worse things than poor Mrs. Ellmer's rather tactless and insipid conversation for the sake of watching her daughter's mobile little face, and I am afraid they must have wished me away long before I could make up my mind to go. Babiole came to the outer door with me, and I seized the opportunity to ask her what they were going to do.

'Mrs. Ellmer doesn't look strong enough to act again at present,' I suggested.

The girl's face clouded.

'No. And even if she were, you see–' She stopped.

'Of course. Her place would be filled up?'

'Yes,' very sorrowfully. Then she looked up again, her face grown suddenly bright and hopeful, as with a flash of sunshine. 'But you needn't be afraid for us. Mamma is so clever, and I am young and strong; we shall be all right. We should be all right now if only–'

'If only?'

'Why, you see, you mustn't think it's mamma's fault that we are left in a corner like this; you don't know how she can save and manage on—oh! so little. But whenever she has, by care and making things do, saved up a little money, it—it all goes, you know.'

The sudden reserve which showed itself in her ingenuous manner towards the last words was so very suggestive that the true explanation of this phenomenon flashed upon my mind.

'Then somebody else puts in a claim,' I suggested.

The girl laughed a little, her full and sensitive red lips opening widely over ivory-white even teeth, and she nodded appreciation of my quick perception.

'Somebody else wants such a lot of things that somebody else's wife and daughter can do without,' she said, with a comical little look of resignation. And, encouraged by my sympathetic silence, she went on, 'And he has so much talent, Mr. Maude. If he would only go on painting as poor mamma goes on acting, he could make us all rich—if he liked. And instead of that–'

'Babiole!' cried her mother's voice, rather tartly.

'Yes, mamma.' Then she added, low and quickly, with a frightened glance back in the dusk, towards the door of their room, 'It's high treason to say even so much as this, but it is so hard to know how she tries and yet not to speak of it to any one. I don't mean to blame my father, Mr. Maude, but you know what men are–'

It seemed to occur to her that this was an indiscreet remark, but I said 'Yes, yes,' with entire concurrence; for indeed who should know what men were better than I? After this she seemed as anxious to get rid of me as civility allowed, but I had something to say.

I gabbled it out fast and nervously, in a husky whisper, lest mamma's sharp ear should catch my proposal, and she should nip it in the bud.

'Look here, Miss Babiole; if you like the hills, and you don't mind the cold, and your mother wants a rest and a change, listen. I was just going to advertise for some one to act as caretaker in a little lodge I've got—scarcely more than a cottage, but a little place I don't want to go to rack and ruin. If you and she could exist there in the winter—it is a place where peat may be had for the asking, and it really isn't an uncomfortable little box, and I can't tell you what a service you would be doing me if you would persuade your mother to live in it until—until I find a tenant, you know. In summer I can get a splendid rent for the place, tiny as it is, if only I can find some one to keep it from going to pieces in the meantime. It's not badly furnished,' I hurried on mendaciously, 'and there's an old woman to do the housework–'

But here Babiole, who had been drinking in my words with parted lips and starlight eyes like a child at its first pantomime, dazzled, bewildered, delighted, drew herself straight up, and became suddenly prim.

'In that case, Mr. Maude,' said she, with demure pride that resented the suspicion of charity, 'if the old woman can take care of the house, surely she doesn't want two other people to take care of her.'

'But I tell you she's dead!' I burst out angrily, annoyed at my blundering. 'There was an old woman to look after the place, but she was seventy-four, and she died the week before last, of old age—nothing infectious. Now, look here; you tell your mother about it, and see if you can't persuade her to oblige me. I'm sure the change would do her good; for it's very healthy there. Why, you know the Queen lives within eight miles of my house, and you may be sure her Majesty wouldn't be allowed to live anywhere where the air wasn't good. Now, will you promise to try?'

She said 'Yes,' and I knew, from the low earnest whisper in which she breathed out the word, that she meant it with all her soul. I left her and almost ran back to my hotel, as excited as a schoolboy, longing for the next morning to come, so that I could go back to Broad Street, and learn the fate of my new freak. Any one who had witnessed my anxiety would have decided at once that I must be in love with either the mother or the daughter; but I was not. The promise of a new interest in life, of a glimpse of pleasant society up in my hills, and the fancy we all occasionally have for being kind to something, were all as strong as my pity for the mother, my admiration for the daughter, and my respect for both.

I was debating next morning how soon it would be discreet to call, when a note was brought to me, which had been left 'by a young lady.' I tore it open like a frantic lover. It was from Mrs. Ellmer, an oddly characteristic letter, alternately frosty and gushing, but not without the dignity of the hard-working. She said a great deal ceremoniously about my kindness, a great deal about her friends in London, her position and that of 'my husband, a well-known artist, whom you doubtless are acquainted with by name.' But she wound up by saying that since her health required that she should have change of air, and since I had been so very kind that she could scarcely refuse to do me any service which she could conscientiously perform, she would be happy to act as caretaker of my house, and to keep it in order during the winter for future tenants, provided I would be kind enough to understand that she and her daughter would do all the work of the house, and further that they might be permitted to reside in a strictly private manner.

'Strictly private!' I laughed heartily to myself at this expression. The dear lady could hardly wish for more privacy than she would get with four or five feet of snow piled up before her door. I was quite light-hearted at my success, and I had to tone down my manner to its usual grave and melancholy pitch before I knocked again at their door.

Mrs. Ellmer opened the door herself, thus disappointing me a little; Babiole's simple confidences, which I liked to think were the result not only of natural frankness, but of instinctive trust in me, were pleasanter to listen to than her mother's more artificial conversation. We were both very dignified, both ceremoniously grateful to each other, and when we entered the sitting-room and began to discuss preliminaries in a somewhat pompous and long-winded manner, Babiole sat, quiet as a mouse, in a corner, as if afraid to disturb by a breath the harmonious settlement of a plan on which she had set her heart.

At last all was arranged. It was now Monday; Mrs. Ellmer and her daughter were to hold themselves in readiness to enter into possession by the following Friday or Saturday, when I should return to Aberdeen to escort them to Larkhall Lodge. I rose to take my leave, not with the easy feeling of equality of the day before, but with deep humility, and repeated assurances of gratitude, to which Mrs. Ellmer replied with mild and dignified protest.

But, in the passage, Babiole danced lightly along to the door like a kitten, and holding up her finger as a sign to me to keep silence, she clapped her hands noiselessly and nodded to me several times in deliciously confiding freemasonry.

'I worked hard for it,' she said at last in a very soft whisper, her red lips forming the words carefully, near to my ear. 'Good-bye, Mr. Maude,' she then said aloud and demurely, but with her eyes dancing. And she gave my hand a warm squeeze as she shook it, and let me out into the nipping Scotch air in the gloom of the darkening afternoon, with a new and odd sense of a flash of brightness and warmth into the world.

Then I walked quickly along, devising by what means that cottage, which my guilty soul told me was bare of a single stick, could be furnished and habitable by Friday. And a cold chill crept through my bones as a new and hitherto unthought-of question thrust itself up in my mind:

What would Ferguson say?

CHAPTER VI

I made a hasty tour of the second-hand shops in Aberdeen, being wise enough to know that if she were to find the cottage too spick and span, Mrs. Ellmer would in a moment discover my pious fraud. Having got together in this way a very odd assortment of furniture, I was rather at a loss about kitchen utensils, when I was seized with the happy inspiration of buying a new set of them for my own service, and handing over those at present in use in my kitchen to Mrs. Ellmer. Not knowing much about these things, I had to buy in a wholesale fashion, more, I fancy, to the advantage of the seller than to my own. However, the business was got through somehow, the things were to be sent on the following day, and I sneaked back to Ballater by the 4.35 train, wondering how I should break the news to Ferguson, and wishing that by some impossible good luck the immaculate one might have committed in my absence some slight breach of discipline which would give me for once the superior position. If I could only find him drunk! But though second to none in his fondness for whiskey, nobody but himself could tell when he had had more than enough; so that hope was vain.

It was not that I was afraid of Ferguson; far from it. But his punctuality, his unflagging mechanical industry, his many uncompromising virtues made him a person to be reckoned with; and it would have been easier to own to a caprice inconsistent with one's principles to a more intellectual person than to him.

It was getting dark before the train stopped at Ballater, a few minutes before six. I had to go through the village, over the rickety wooden bridge—for the new one of stone was not built then—and along the road which lies on the south side of the Dee. The hills were on my left, their bases covered with slim birch-trees, whose bare branches swayed and hissed like whips in the winter wind; on the right, below the road, ran the crooked turbulent little stream of Dee, now swollen with late autumn rains, swirling round its many curves, and rushing between the piles of the bridge till the wooden structure rocked again. Would those two delicate women be frightened away by the cold and the loneliness from the nest I was building for them, I wondered, as I turned to the right to cross the little stone bridge that arches over the Muick just before that stream runs into the Dee. I stopped and looked around me. There was a faint white light over the western hills which enabled me to see dim outlines of the objects I knew. Just beyond the bridge was the forsaken little churchyard of Glenmuick, which not even a ghost would care to haunt, where now a cluster of gaunt bare ash-trees thrust up spectral arms from the ground among the mildewed grave-stones. The lonely manse, a plain stone house shadowed by dark evergreens, stood back a little from the road on the opposite side. A mile away, with the rushing Dee between, the spire of Ballater church stood up among the roofs of the village, flanked by fir-crowned Craigendarroch on the north, and the Pannanich Hills on the south. Straight on my road lay between flat Lowland fields to a ragged fringe of tall firs behind which, on a rising ground, the shell of an old deserted dwelling, known as Knock Castle, served in summer as a meagre shelter for the Highland sheep in sudden storms. At this point the road turned sharply to the left, the fringe of fir-trees growing thicker upon the skirts of the forest; a few paces farther this road divided into two branches which struck off from each other in the form of a V, the southernmost one leading to Larkhall through a mile of fir-forest. Would the very approach to their new abode through this dark and winding road depress the poor little women into looking upon the cottage as a prison, after the life and movement they were used to?

The private road which led through my own plantation to the house was divided from the public thoroughfare by no lodge, no gate, but ran modestly down between borders of grass, which grew long and rank in the summer time, for about half a mile, until, the larches and Scotch firs growing more sparsely to the south, one caught wider and wider glimpses of broad green meadows where two or three horses were turned out to find a meagre pasture. Here the drive was carried over a little iron ornamental bridge, which crossed a stream that was but a thread in the warm weather; and leaving the grass and the trees behind, one came upon a broad lawn which ran right up to the walls of the house, flanked to the north by more grass and more trees, which shut out the view of the stables and of the unused cottage. To the south the land made a sudden dip, and the hollow thus formed was laid out as a garden, while the great bank that sheltered it formed a succession of terraces from which one caught glimpses of the rushing Muick between the birches that lined the banks of the impetuous little stream.

The house was a most unpretentious building, in the plainest style of Scotch country-house architecture, with rough cream-coloured walls, a tiled roof, small irregular windows, and a mean little porch. It was only saved from ugliness by a growth of ivy over the lower portion and by a freak of the designer, whereby one end was raised a story above the rest, and the roof of this portion made to slope north and south, instead of east and west, like that of the rest of the building. At the back the firs and larches rose to a great height, the house seeming to nestle under their protection whenever the winter storms burst over the bleak hills around.

Ferguson was glad to see me, and welcomed me back with a cordiality which made my mind easier on the subject of the announcement I had to make to him. I went up to my room and, finding everything prepared for me, told him I was ready for dinner. Instead of going downstairs, he only said, 'Yes, sir; it is coming up,' and knelt down to pull off my boots.

'All right,' said I; 'I can do that. I'm very hungry.'

'No doubt of it, sir,' he answered, but did not stir. 'The fact is, sir, that knowing you would come home hungry, and maybe very much fatigued, and that to be in the kitchen serving dinner and up here attending upon you at the same time is a moral impossibility, I made bold to ask an old and very respectable female that was staying in the village to give me a little help—just for this evening, sir. She is very clean in her ways, sir, and a most respectable and God-fearing body.'

I jumped at the news, and congratulated him upon his forethought with great heartiness.

'I have no more objection to seeing a woman's face about the place than you have yourself, Ferguson,' I said cordially; 'in fact I have just given permission to two poor ladies to pass the winter in the cottage at the back, and I want you to help me to put the place straight a bit for them. They come in on Friday. I don't want the place to fall to pieces with dry rot for want of some one to live in it.'

'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 titles 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 assurances 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 furnishing. 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, passing 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 passed 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 scrape 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 édition de luxe.