ROWLAND’S ideas of the absence of society in his new home were confounded by the number of visits his wife received within the first six weeks of their stay at Rosmore. It had, I have no doubt, been noised abroad that the wife of the great railway man was, in the loose but convenient phraseology of the time, “a lady,” and that there was therefore no appreciable peril to the gentility of her caller, from making her acquaintance. Lady Jean, of course, was one of the first to call upon her brother’s tenant. Her arrival was attended by circumstances of which James Rowland could never think afterwards without shame and humiliation. Indeed it all but happened to him to turn the little shabby old lady who was trudging through the woods in short petticoats and a waterproof to the kitchen door as the natural entrance. Lady Jean was a little woman of about fifty, who had long ceased to take the least pride in her appearance, or to care what people thought on the subject. This last presumption was of course quite unnecessary in the parish of Rosmore, where everybody knew who she was, and where, had she gone about in cloth of gold, it would have made no particular difference. She wore tweed accordingly with the most reckless indifference to quality (I believe the quality was generally good—it came in bales from Romans and Paterson, which the Glasgow shopkeepers thought disloyal to them, and unpatriotic)—one society gown after another being manufactured for her as need arose; and she was fond of giving a gown-piece to any girl that might strike her fancy, walked well, and was, as she expressed it in pregnant Scotch, “purpose-like.” This is not to say that Lady Jean could not be every inch the Earl’s sister when occasion demanded, and strike terror into the Radical multitude, or that she did not possess, and occasionally wear, a wardrobe more fitted to her condition.
Her arrival at Rosmore had nearly led to disastrous effects, as I have said. For when Mr. Rowland saw the little old lady nimbly climbing the hill, with the tweed petticoats reaching to her ankles, and her hat bearing traces of encounters with several showers, he had not a doubt in his mind that she was a friend of the housekeeper or some of the servants. He had said “Hi!” and he was hurrying along partly out of kindness, for the way to the servants’ entrance was shorter than the one which swept round to the front of the house, when he saw Archie meet and pause to answer the old lady’s questions. His father, deeply critical, yet not so critical as he would have been had he known who the visitor was, saw his son turn and accompany her, taking off his hat, which Rowland thought unnecessary (though to be over civil was always better than being rude) not to the servants’ door, but up to the left hand, to the front of the house. He had another “Hi!” on his very lips, but stopped, thinking he might as well leave it to Archie, no great harm being possible. If the housekeeper’s friend did get admission at the great door, what then? He gave a regretful thought to the evident fact that Archie was more at home with the old lady than he was with people in his own position. Mr. Rowland shook his head sadly over this, and said to himself that it was in the boy’s blood, and that he would never make a gentleman: yet comforted himself next moment and justified Archie by declaring to himself with some warmth that he had a better opinion of a lad when he was civil to those who had but little claim to the civility of their neighbours.
Consequent upon this, however, a little curiosity about this old lady came into Rowland’s mind. She was perhaps some ancient sempstress—some old pensioner of “the family,” which was a title only accorded by the public in general to the Clydesdale family, not to the interlopers at present at the house. The old person was very nimble, whoever she was, and she had “neat feet,” Mr. Rowland remarked, who had always an eye for a good point in a woman—very neat feet—shod with strong, purpose-like shoes. If Marion would only learn to have shoes like that instead of the things like paper she went about in. He went on very much at his leisure, following till the old lady disappeared under the colonnade. It would do her good to get a glimpse of the hall with its Indian carpets and wonderful hangings. It’s fine to show a poor old body like that once in a way what wealth can do. It would be a thing for her to make a great gossip about in the village when she got home. Mr. Rowland was still smiling with the pleasure of this benevolent view when he saw Archie come out again. “Who is that old dame you were showing in? I’m glad to see you so civil,” said the father.
“Civil!” said the young man. And then he added with his usual look of suppressed indignation, “I’m surprised you did not know her: it is Lady Jean.”
“Lady Jean!!” But a thousand notes of admiration could not express the dismay of Rowland when he found out that he had very nearly called out “Hi!” to Lady Jean.
Lady Jean was greatly pleased with Mrs. Rowland, whom she described as “probably a little too English for this place—but very well meaning, and a gentlewoman. It appears I once knew her grandmother,” said Lady Jean. This, so far as the point was concerned, was as good as a patent of nobility. Her grandmother!—it added the charm of antiquity to all the rest—though, indeed, Lady Jean was not more than a dozen years older than Mrs. Rowland. Evelyn had besought the Earl’s sister to let her take charge of “the poor” in the village, which gave Lady Jean occasion for a lecture, which pleased her. “But I must ask you not to call them the poor. They are neighbours not so well off in this world’s goods as we are. ‘Poor folk’ is an allowable phrase, meaning a large class; and it is mostly neighbourly kindness, not charity, that you will be called on to give. Something off your own table to the sick and ailing—that’s a fashion of speaking—something off your housekeeper’s table, not French dishes, will be the best, and a helping hand with the schooling, and a kind thought of the old people. That is what you want here.”
“But that is very much what is wanted everywhere,” Evelyn said.
“Very true, but there are Scotch susceptibilities which you must respect,” said Lady Jean. She liked to make this explanation, and then to laugh at it, with a twinkle in her eye.
But her conclusion was that Mrs. Rowland was a most creditable person. “Rich, oh richer than anybody has a right to be—but not much the worse, considering—just a well-looking, well-mannered gentlewoman.”
Nothing could be more satisfactory than this report. It ran up the loch and across the mountains. The Duchess heard of it in her quarters among the hills. It flew east to another duchess on the lowland side. Of course I need not say to people who know the country which was the one duchess and which the other. In the course of time they both called, which was a prodigious distinction: and so did all the smaller gentry, and some of those great Glasgow potentates who build themselves new castles upon the banks of the Clyde. Some of them were very fine gentlemen indeed, but they were “mixed,” and some were only “Glasgow builders” of a kind quite unknown to Evelyn. One whose carriage would have made a sensation in Hyde Park, even in the days of hammercloth, with two powdered footmen behind, had the manners still of the blacksmith he had originally been. Mr. Rowland rather liked these personages, especially the old gentleman who had been a blacksmith. He stood up in a group with two or three of them who represented among them heaven knows how many millions, and thrust his hands into his pockets and talked investments and money. Why should not people talk money who have more of that than of anything else? Painters talk of their pictures, and literary men of their books. Why not millionaires of that which makes them so? Rowland was very intelligent, and he liked to talk upon money subjects; but an occasional laying of the heads together with a few other rich men over the subject of money was refreshing to him, as it is refreshing to an artist after long deprivation to find himself once more among his own kind.
With all this flash of fine society, however, which so soon made an end of Rowland’s fears, it is astounding how much in the foreground of the picture was Miss Eliza, briefly described as “of the Burn,” in the nomenclature of the parish. What Miss Eliza’s surname was, and what was implied by the designation “of the Burn,” it was really quite unnecessary to add. The same surname is so very general in Scotch west country parishes, that it confers little distinction in itself. Miss Eliza came to call in a little wickerwork carriage, called a clothes-basket by her friends, with a russet pony to draw it and equally russet groom or stable-boy to look after the vehicle when she made a call. Miss Eliza drove the pony herself, with Colin generally behind, to whom she threw a word occasionally when a longer time than usual elapsed without meeting anybody on the road: but as the kind woman knew everybody, from the fishwife who came over with her creels from Kilrossie during the season of the saut water, up to the Earl himself, when he happened to be seen in those regions, or even the Duchess, who was a still more rare visitor, there was but little time for her to entertain Colin with a special remark. “How do you do the day?” she said with a wave of her whip in salutation of her friends. “How’s a’ with you, David? I hope the hoast is better, and that you like the lozenges.—Good morning, Mrs. Dean, and isn’t it just a pleasure to see such a fine day: grand for the hay, as I have been saying all the way down the loch, fifty times if I’ve said it once. I’m hoping they’ll get it all well carted in at Rowanson, and a fine heavy crop it is, just a pleasure to see.—Eh, is that you, Lizzie, with your basket? It’s awfu’ heavy for you, my poor lass, and you not got up your strength yet. Climb up beside Colin: I’ll take ye a bittie of the way.—Good day to ye, minister. Ye see I’ve got Lizzie Chalmers in the basket. Ye must just give her a good talking to, for she’s come out before she has got up her strength. Would you like any of her fish at the Manse? I would call and leave them on my way back, with pleasure, and it would aye be something for her to take home. I will have some of the herrings and the little haddies myself, though the haddies are not equal to the Fife haddies, and the herrings are not so good as Loch Fyne. Oh yes, I am just going to Rosmore. I hear she’s just an uncommon nice person, and a credit to the loch-side.—Dear me, there’s Lady Jean. It’s a sight for sore eyes to see you now, and a sore trouble to think you’re in the parish no longer, and I can scarcely offer to give you a lift when I have Lizzie Chalmers in the cart. Isn’t she just a very presentable sort of person? I’m meaning the new lady at the house, no Lizzie: we all know everything there is to know about her. And I hope his lordship is quite well, and you are not finding Ardnachrean damp.—Dear, bless me, there is the doctor, and I want to ask him about young Rankin, and make him speak his mind to Lizzie there. Good-day to you all, good-day.”
If it may be suggested that a country lady driving her own machine could scarcely be likely to meet so much company on a country road, I must say in my own defence that it was the same day on which Lady Jean had paid her visit to Mrs. Rowland, which accounted for her; and as for the usual inhabitants of Rosmore, from the minister down to old David, they were all to be met with in the afternoon, within a few hundred yards. Lizzie Chalmers, it is true, was from Kilrossie, and did not come every day, but she was the only one of the party with the exception of Lady Jean who was not to be met with about the same hour on the same road every day.
“Is he any better, doctor?” said Miss Eliza, coming down upon the doctor with a little rush of the russet pony, prompted by a smarter than ordinary flourish of the whip. “Yes, I was afraid it was his own fault, the foolish fellow. Men are just idiots rushing upon destruction, and him so sensible when he is himself. There is Lizzie Chalmers, behind me in the basket, just as silly in another way, coming out with her heavy creel before she is well over her trouble. I would wish you to speak very seriously to her, doctor. You must just lay me out my herrings and haddies, and the codfish for the manse, it will make your creel the lighter. And Colin, fill you that long basket with grass to make a nice caller bed for the fish.—And here we are at the gate of Rosmore, and to take you further would just be to take you out of your way. Help her out, Colin, and you can put out the biggest codfish—if it’s too much for them, I’ll make them a present of it, and they can send the rest to that ne’er-do-weel’s poor wife, poor thing. And Lizzie, my woman, here’s another shilling for you. Stay at home and look after the bairns, and don’t come out to-morrow. Now, Rufus, on you go, my man. It’s a stiff brae, and I know you don’t like it; but we’ll just make Colin get out and run. Come away, my bonnie man,” said Miss Eliza, with a chirrup, as she slanted the pony’s head towards the brae. Having no one else to speak to, she talked to Rufus, who was very well used to it, and responded by little shakings of his head and jinglings of his harness. “Come away,” she added, meaning “go on”; “It’s a stey brae, but ye must just go at it with a stout heart, and it will be over in a moment. Come away, my bonnie man! Just jump in to Colin, and not let him cool after that fine burst, for I like to come in at the door with a dash, and Rufus can do it if he likes. Now down with ye again, and give a good peal to the bell.—Will Mrs. Rowland be in this afternoon?” she added, with a sweep of the whip towards the footman at the door. Then Miss Eliza got down a little more dexterously than an inexperienced spectator would have looked for. She went into Rosmore in the same cheerful manner, talking all the way. The footman, it is true, was English, and an unknown quantity, but even to him Miss Eliza found something to say.
“They will be in, both Mrs. Rowland and the young lady? That is very lucky for me, for in a fine day like this most people are on the road. They will be using the long drawing-room with the view? Well, I do not blame them: it is best, though Lady Jean used to keep it for company.—Who will ye say? Oh, there is my card, that is the most sensible way.—My dear Mrs. Rowland, I am very glad to make your acquaintance. We have heard just everything that is good of you, and I have been most anxious to welcome you to the parish. And this is Miss Rowland? Dear me, how delighted all the young folk will be to hear of such an addition. And now that you have got settled down a little, I hope you like the house?”
“The house is delightful,” said Evelyn, “and so are the views. My husband prepared me for the beauty of the country, but he said very little about the excellence inside.”
“He would know but little,” said Miss Eliza. “They’re not noticing about houses, the men folk. And as for the views, we have been settled here this forty years since we came quite young creatures ourselves; but I’ve never tired of this. I’ve never got indifferent, as you generally do, with what you’ve seen every day: it’s just as new to me now as it was at the first.”
“It is a beautiful country,” said Evelyn civilly.
“Is it not—just a blessed country! Eh, if the people were but equal. ‘Every prospect pleases,’ you remember the hymn says, ‘and only man—’ No, no, I will not say that man is vile: that is a great deal too strong. What I complain of in very religious folk is that they are censuring their neighbours, when perhaps, if the truth was known, their neighbours—But we must not pursue that subject. Man is not vile, but he’s not so satisfying as the everlasting hills.”
“Oh,” said Marion, with the little fictitious intonation which copied Evelyn’s, “but men are more amusing than the mountains.” She herself was not by any means so amusing in her diction since she had become an echo of Mrs. Rowland in her gesture and voice.
“The young ladies,” said Miss Eliza with a laugh, “are mostly of that opinion, and I should not say nay, for I have not less than six nephews coming to-morrow for tennis, and everything that they can find that is diverting. They are either at the college, for there’s a summer session in the scientific classes, or else they’re in offices, and they come down to us on Saturday to play. I hope you’ll come up to the Burn, you and your brother, to meet my young men. There will be a view or two as well. And after the diversion there will be a kind of supper, and then they will see you home.”
Marion did not know how to act in such an emergency, but it was understood that the invitation was accepted. And Miss Eliza returned after half-an-hour’s talking, full of the genius of the mistress of the house, and the wealth of its fitting up. “There would need to be something very sustaining in the sense of good old blood in your veins, and a family that has existed for generations,” she said, “for if I was Lady Jean, I could not bear to see how the house is changed, just by the railway man. For it was always a bare, cauldrife sort of house. I used to feel that there were not carpets enough on the floor, nor coals enough in the grate. Now it’s just all blazing and shining with warmth—curtains that just clothe the place, and pictures on the walls, and grand carpets that your foot sinks in. It may not be such good taste, but it is far more comfortable. And Mrs. Rowland is a most personable woman, and him a very good sort of a man.”
“And the daughter, Aunt Eliza?” cried the miss, to whom this was the most interesting part of all.
“The daughter—well she’s just a young lady like the rest. I asked her to come to-morrow, and you can judge for yourself,” Miss Eliza said.
The minister and his wife formed a still more interesting part of the immediate society of the little place, and puzzled Evelyn, who had been brought up in the somewhat narrow creed of her country to ignore everything but “the Church,” and to look with small respect upon dissenters in general as a community of uneducated people. She did not at all know what to make of the trim and well dressed pair who called upon her, he in garments almost more sacerdotal than if he had been a priest of All Saints, Elizabeth Street, and she with the fashionable cut of her dress shadowed by the inevitable mackintosh. This was the Scotch minister whom she had met with in pictures in a very different aspect, but of whom she knew nothing in real life except that she had a puzzled comprehension that he did not belong to “the Church,” but yet was—what was he?—a kind of vicar or rector after another fashion, like yet quite unlike the vicars and rectors whom she knew. Mrs. Rowland had her limitations like others, and did not know what to think. But she was, as ever, charmingly polite, and did her best to please these bewildering neighbours. She apologised for not having yet been to church, giving some excuse of tiredness or headache. As a matter of fact the headache had been a result of the same bewilderment which made her so curious and so unassured about the position of Mr. Dean. A Scottish gentlewoman in England would have had no such ignorance; which is a curious fact, and one, perhaps, which proves the superiority of the wealthier and more remote ecclesiastical economy.
“I dare say,” said Mrs. Dean, “that you were not sure if you should come to our church. There is an Episcopalian Chapel in Kilrossie. As you are English, Mrs. Rowland, it’s perhaps there you should go.”
“Indeed, I cannot say,” said Evelyn, “I have never gone anywhere but to the parish church—but—I don’t quite understand—”
“We both understand perfectly,” said Mrs. Dean, “that you would miss the ritual and your beautiful prayer-book. We have a great sympathy for that. There is nothing in the prayer-book, I am sure, that would be a stumbling-block to my husband, and he sometimes takes a collect just straight out of it without any kind of clipping or trimming. There is a great movement in Scotland, which perhaps you are not acquainted with, to improve the baldness of our services, and make them more generally attractive. We have a harmonium,” Mrs. Dean said with pride, “and I am happy to say that our choir is beginning to chant just extraordinarily well. You will see no such terrible difference as maybe you think.”
Evelyn held her peace, being more and more bewildered with every word. She wondered what Mrs. Reuben Butler, née Jeanie Dean, who was once the minister’s wife of this parish, would have thought of this statement. She only bowed in reply, not being for her own part at all qualified to speak.
“Alexander will explain to you far better than I can, and you will find no intolerance in him. He perhaps agrees better with you,” she added, with a smile, “than with the old-fashioned folk who insist upon keeping up all the difference.—Alexander, Mrs. Rowland would like you to explain the way we’re trying to bridge over the debateable land between our establishment and the other. Just come here. I will change places with you.” The good wife, with these words, rose and took a chair beside Rowland, to whom her husband had been talking, which was very self-denying on the part of the minister’s wife, there being nothing at all novel in the gentleman of the house, whereas there was a great deal that was novel in the lady, and therefore interesting. She relinquished the post to the minister, who was perhaps better able to expound—was he better able to expound?—the problem of that ecclesiastical movement in Scotland which is so much more puzzling to unsophisticated English understandings, prepared for polemics and opposition, than the good old conventional figure of the Presbyterian Calvinist, which is a primitive type that everybody knows.
“I don’t know what there is to explain,” said Mr. Dean, taking, nothing loth, the chair his wife had vacated: he too preferred the mistress to the master of the house. “Our services—but then Mrs. Rowland will understand them better when she has seen them.”
“Oh, I was very tired after my long journey—and I had a headache.”
“She was not out of her bed,” replied Rowland, as if his wife were being blamed.
“I am sure,” said Mr. Dean, “that if I was Mrs. Rowland, I should not go through the tedious drawl of the old-fashioned Scotch church on any account, or listen to a sermon an hour long, which is what some of our neighbouring clergymen still indulge in. But it is modified in Rosmore church, and I promise you you shall not have more of me than twenty minutes. We have very decent music, thanks to my wife. In short, for a country service in an out-of-the-way place like this, I’m glad to think that we are making it much more attractive.”
“Attractive?” Evelyn said, more bewildered than ever. “To whom were they intended to be attractive? To the persons to whom they were addressed?”
“It is in no way necessary,” said the minister, “that music and everything that is pleasant should be appropriated by one body. We can take up our inheritance in that way just as fitly as the Episcopalians. I am not a bigoted Presbyterian,” he said, “even in the way of Church government, which is really the only peculiar part of our economy. I think it is just as good as the other. I don’t think that either of them is divinely appointed. I am used to presbytery, you are used to bishops—very well. We need not go to loggerheads about that. I know a bishop or two, and I’ve always found them very friendly, without being inclined to bow down to kiss the pastoral ring any more than the papal toe.”
“You are not so peaceably inclined when you come home from a Presbytery meeting, Alexander,” said the wife of his bosom. “For my part I am rather fond of the lawn sleeves. I think equality of ministers is just as great nonsense as equality generally. Don’t you think so, Mr. Rowland? When young Lord Rosmore says to me we are all born equal, I just say to him, Bah! As if anybody in his senses would put my husband and Johnny Shanks at the head of the loch upon the same level! You will remember Johnny Shanks? just a nobody; whereas Alexander——”
“My wife,” said Mr. Dean, while this was going on, “likes the decorative side. Lawn sleeves and gaitered legs take her fancy. But if there is one thing convenient in our simplicity, it is that we are saved all the millinery questions. And that, I think, goes for a great deal.”
Evelyn had never been ecclesiastically minded, and was but vaguely aware what the millinery question meant. As for the rest, though she was an intelligent woman, these two people might as well have talked Hebrew to her: there was no understanding in her mind.