CHAPTER X.
BROTHER AND SISTER.
ALL that evening Elsie tried in vain to secure the attention of Rodie, her brother, her own brother, whom life had already swept away from her, out of her feminine sphere. To be so intimately allied as that in childhood, which is a thing which doubles every joy, at least for the girl, and probably at that early age for the boy also—generally involves the first pang of existence to one at least of these sworn companions. It is, I think, always the girl who suffers, though sometimes no doubt the girl is carried away on the wave of new friendships, especially if she goes to school, and is swept up into the whirl of feminine occupations, before the boy is launched into the circle of contemporaries, who are more absorbing still. But Rodie among “his laddies,” had left his sister more completely “out of it” than any boy in possession of all his faculties can ever be. He was always busy with something, always wandering somewhere with the Seatons, or the Beatons, when he was not in the still more entrancing company of Johnny Wemyss. And they never seemed to be tired of each other’s company, day or night. There were times when he did not even come in to his meals, but went along with his cronies, in the freedom of his age, without invitation or preparation; even he had been known to sit down to the stoved potatoes in the Wemyss’s cottage, though they were not in a class of life to entertain the minister’s son; but what did Rodie care? When he brought in Johnny Wemyss in his turn to supper, Mrs. Buchanan could not shame the rules of hospitality, by giving the fisher lad a bad reception, but her notice of him was constrained, if kind, so that none of the young ones were very comfortable. But Alick Seaton and Ralph Beaton were frequent visitors, taken as a matter of course, and would sit at the end of the table, with Rodie between them, making their jokes, and shaking with convulsions of private laughter, which broke out now and then into a subdued roar, making the elders ask “what was the fun now?” John in special, who was “at the College,” and sported a red gown about the streets, being gruff in his critical remarks: for he had now arrived at an age when you are bound to behave yourself, and not to “carry on” like the laddies. This being the state of affairs, however, it was very difficult to long hold of Rodie, who often “convoyed” his friends home, and came back at the latest moment practicable, only escaping reprimand by a rush up-stairs to bed. It was not therefore till the Sunday following that Elsie had any opportunity of seeing her brother in private, which even then was not with his will: but there was an interval between breakfast and church, which Rodie, with the best will in the world, could not spend with “his laddies,” and which consequently lay undefended, liable to the incursions of his sister. This moment was usually spent in the garden, and often in calculating strokes by which, teeing at a certain spot, he might make sure or almost sure, as sure as the sublime uncertainty of the game permitted, of “holeing” his ball. Naturally, to have taken out a club on Sunday morning, even to the hole in the garden, would have been as good as devoting one’s self to the infernal gods: but thought is free. Rodie had a conviction that Elsie would come bouncing along, through the lilac bushes, to spoil his calculations, as she usually did; but this did not lessen the frown with which he perceived that his anticipation had come to pass. “What are you wantin’ now?” he said gloomily, marking imaginary distances upon the grass.
“Oh, nothing—if you are so deep engaged,” said Elsie, with a spark of natural pride.
“I’m no deep engaged!” said Rodie, indignantly; for he knew father would not smile upon his study, neither would it be appreciated by Alick or Ralph (though they were probably engaged in the same way themselves), that he should be studying the strokes which it was their pride to consider as spontaneous or, indeed, almost accidental. He threw down the cane he had in his hand, and turned away towards the summer-house, whither Elsie followed him.
“I want awfully to speak to you, Rodie——”
“You are always wanting to speak to me,” said the ungrateful boy.
“I’m nothing of the kind; and if I were, want would be my master,” cried Elsie, “for there’s never a moment when you’re free of these laddies. You’re just in their arms and round their necks every moment of your life.”
“I’m neither in their arms nor round their necks,” cried Rodie furious, being conscious that he was not weaned from a certain “bairnly” habit of wandering about with an arm round his cronies’ shoulders. Elsie, however, not sorry for once in a way to find him at a disadvantage, laughed.
“It’s Ralph and Alick, Ralph and Alick, just day and night,” she cried, “or else Johnny Wemyss—but you’re not so keen about Johnny Wemyss because they say he’s not a gentleman; but I think he’s the best gentleman of them all.”
“It’s much you ken!” cried Rodie. His laddies had made him much more pronounced in his Fife sing-song of accent, which the minister, being from the West Country (though it is well known in Fife that the accent of the West Country is just insufferable), objected to strongly.
“I ken just as well as you—and maybe better,” said Elsie. Then she remembered that this passage of arms, however satisfactory in itself, was not quite in accordance with the object of the interview which she desired. “I am not wanting to quarrel,” she said.
“It was you that began,” said Rodie, with some justice. They had by this time reached the summer-house, with its thick background of lilac bushes. The bay lay before them, in all that softened splendour of the Sabbath morning, concerning which so many of us hold the fond tradition that in its lustre and its glory there is something distinct from all other days. The Forfarshire coast lay dim and fair in a little morning haze, on the other side of the blue and tranquil sea, with faint lines of yellow sand, and here and there a white edge of foam, though all was so still, lighting up the distance. The hills, all soft with light and shadow, every knowe and howe visible under the caress of the mild and broad sunshine, the higher rocks upon the near shore half-draped with the intense greenery of the delicate sea-weed, the low reefs, lying dark in leathery clothing of dulse, like the teeth of some great sea monster, half hidden in the ripples of the water, the horizon to the east softening off into a vague radiance of infinity in the great breadth of the German Ocean. I have always thought and often said, that if there is a spot on earth in which one can feel the movement of the great round world through space, though reduced by human limitations to a faint rhythm and swaying, it is there under the illimitable blue of the northern sky, on the shores and links of St. Rule’s.
The pair who came thus suddenly in sight of this landscape, were not of any sentimental turn, and were deeply engaged in their own immediate sensations; but the girl paused to cry, “Oh, how bonnie, how bonnie!” while the boy sat down on the rough seat, and dug his heels into the grass, expecting an ordeal of questioning and “bothering,” in which the sky and the sea could give him but little help. Elsie was much of the mind of the jilted and forsaken everywhere. She could not keep herself from reproaches, sometimes from taunts. But the sky and sea did help Rodie after all, for they brought her back by the charm of their aspect, an effect more natural at sixteen than at fifteen, and to a girl rather than a boy.
“I am not wanting to quarrel, and it’s a shame and a sin on the Sabbath, and such a bonnie day as this. Oh, but it’s a bonnie day! there is the wee light-house that is like a glow-worm at night; it is nothing but a white line now, as thin as an end of thread: and muckle Dundee nothing but a little smoke hanging above the Law——”
“I suppose,” said Rodie, scornfully, “you have seen them all before?”
“Oh, yes, I have seen them all before: but that is not to say that they are not sometimes bonnier at one time than another. Rodie, you and me that are brother and sister, we never should be anything less than dear friends.”
“Friends enough,” said Rodie, sulkily. “I am wanting nothing but just that you’ll let me be.”
“But that,” said Elsie, with a sigh, “is just the hardest thing! for I’m wanting you, and you’re no wanting me, Rodie! But I’ll say no more about that; Marion says it’s always so, and that laddies and men for a constancy they like their own kind best.”
“I didna think Marion had that much sense,” the boy said.
“Oh, dinna anger me over again with your conceit,” cried Elsie, “and me in such a good frame of mind, and the bay so bonnie, and something so different in my thoughts.”
Rodie settled himself on the rude bench, as though preparing to endure the inevitable: he took his hands out of his pockets and began to drum a faint tune upon the rustic table. The attitude which many a lover, many a husband, many a resigned male victim of the feminine reproaches from which there is no escape, has assumed for ages past, came by nature to this small boy. He dismissed every kind of interest or intelligence from his face. If he had been thirty, he could not have looked more blank, more enduring, more absolutely indifferent. Since he could not get away from her, she must have her say. It would not last for ever, neither could it penetrate beyond the very surface of the ear and of the mind. He assumed his traditional attitude by inheritance from long lines of forefathers. And perhaps it was well that Elsie’s attention was not concentrated on him, or it is quite possible that she might have assumed the woman’s traditional attitude, which is as well defined as the man’s. But she was fortunately at the visionary age, and had entered upon her poetry, as he had entered into the dominion of “his laddies.” Her eye strayed over the vast expanse spread out before her, and the awe of the beauty, and the vast calm of God came over her heart.
“Rodie, I want to speak to you of something. It’s long past, and it has nothing to do with you or me. Rodie, do you mind yon afternoon, when we were shut up in the turret, and heard papa studying his sermon?”
“What’s about that? You’ve minded me of it many a time: but if I was to be always minding like you, what good would that do?”
“I wanted to ask you, Rodie—sometimes you mind better than me, sometimes not so well. Do you mind what he was saying? I want to be just sure for once, and then never to think upon it again.”
“What does it matter what he was saying? It was just about one of the parables.” I am afraid the parables were just “a thing in the Bible” to Rodie. He did not identify them much, or think what they meant, or wherein one differed from another. This, I need not say, was not for want of teaching: perhaps it was because of too much teaching, which sometimes has a similar effect. “I mind,” he said with a laugh, “we were just that crampit, sitting so long still, that we couldn’t move.”
“Yes, yes,” said Elsie, “but I want to remember quite clear what it was he said.”
“It did not matter to us what he said,” said Rodie. “Papa is sometimes a foozle, but I am not going to split upon him.” This was the slang of those days, still lingering where golf is wont to be played.
“Do you think I would split upon him?” cried Elsie with indignation.
“I don’t know, then, what you’re carrying on about. Yes, I mind he said something that was very funny; but then he often does that. Fathers are so fond of saying things, that you don’t know what they mean, and ministers worse than the rest. There’s the first jow of the bell, and it’s time to get your bonnet on. I’m not for biding here havering; and then that makes us late.”
“You’re keen about being in time this morning, Rodie!”
“I’m always keen for being in time. When you come in late, you see on all their faces: ‘There’s the minister’s family just coming in—them that ought to set us an example—and we’ve been all here for a quarter of an hour.’”
“We are never so late as that,” cried Elsie, indignantly.
“You will be to-day, if you do not hurry,” he said, jumping up himself and leading the way.
And it was quite true, Elsie could not but allow to herself, that the minister’s family were sometimes late. It had originated in the days when there were so many little ones to get ready; and then, as Mrs. Buchanan said, it was a great temptation living so near the church. You felt that in a minute you could be there; and then you put off your time, so that in the end, the bell had stopped ringing, and you had to troop in with a rash, which was evidently a very bad example to the people. And they did look up with that expression on their faces, as if it were they who were the examples! But the fact that Rodie was right, did not make what he said more agreeable. It acted rather the contrary way. She had wished for his sympathy, for his support of her own recollections, perhaps for surer rectification of her impressions; and she found nothing but high disapproval, and the suggestion that she was capable of splitting upon papa. This reproach broke Elsie’s heart. Nothing would have induced her to betray her father. She would have shielded him with her own life, she would have defended him had he been in such danger, for instance, as people, and especially ministers, were long ago, in Claverhouse’s time—or dug out with her nails a place to hide him in, like Grizel Home. But to fathom the present mystery, and remember exactly what he said, and find out what it meant, had not seemed to her to be anything against him. That it was none of her business, had not occurred to her. And she did not for the moment perceive any better sense in Rodie. She thought he was only perverse, as he so often was now, contrary to whatever she might say, going against her. And she was very sure it was no enthusiasm for punctuality, or for going to church, which made him hasten on before to the house, where his Sunday hat, carefully brushed, was on the hall-table, waiting for him. That was a thing that mother liked to do with her own hands.
The thought of Rodie in such constant opposition and rebellion, overshadowed her through all the early service, and it was not really till the middle of the sermon that a sudden perception caught her mind. Was that what Rodie meant? “He may be a foozle, but I will never split on him.” But papa was no foozle. What was he? A good kind man, doing nobody any wrong. There was nothing to say against him, nothing for his children to betray. Even Elsie’s half-developed mind was conscious of other circumstances, of children whose father might have something to betray. And, in that dreadful case, what would one do? Oh, decline to hear, decline to know of anything that could be betrayed, shut your ears to every whisper, believe not even himself to his own undoing! This idea leapt into her mind in the middle of the sermon. There was nothing in the sermon to make her think of that. It was not Mr. Buchanan who was preaching, but the other minister, his colleague, who did not preach very good sermons, not like father’s! And Elsie’s attention wandered in spite of herself. And then, all in a moment, this thought leapt into her mind. In these circumstances, so different from her own, that would have been the only thing for a child to do. Oh, never to listen to a word against him, not even if it came from himself. Elsie’s quick mind sprang responsive to this thought. This was far finer, far higher than her desire to remember, to fathom what he had meant. And from whence was it that this thought had come? From Rodie, her brother, the boy whom she had been accusing in her mind, not only of forsaking her, but of becoming more rough, more coarse, less open to fine thoughts. This perception surprised Elsie so, that it was all she could do, not to jump up in her place, to clap her hands, to cry out: “It was Rodie.” And she who had never known that Rodie was capable of that! while all St. Rule’s, and the world besides, had conceived the opinion of him that he was a foolish callant. Elsie’s heart swelled full of triumph in Rodie. “He may be a foozle”—no, no, he was no foozle—well did Rodie know that. But was not Elsie’s curiosity a tacit insult to papa, as suggesting that he might have been committing himself, averring something that was wrong? Elsie would have condemned herself to all the pangs of conscience, to all the reproaches against the ungrateful child, who in her heart was believing her father guilty of some unknown criminality, if it had not been that her heart was flooded with sudden delight, the enchantment of a great discovery that Rodie had chosen the better part. There was a true generosity in her, notwithstanding her many foolishnesses. That sudden flash of respect for Rodie, and happy discovery that in this one thing at least he was more faithful than she, consoled her for appearing to herself by comparison in a less favourable light.
And the effect was, that she was silenced even to herself. She put no more questions to Rodie, she tried to put out of her own mind her personal recollections, and every attempt to understand. Did not Rodie say it was not their business, that it did not matter to them what papa said? Elsie could not put away her curiosity out of her heart, but she bowed her head to Rodie’s action. After all, what a grand discovery it was that Rodie should be the one to see what was right.