Penny Plain/Chapter 10

NE afternoon Jean called for Pamela to take her to see Mrs. Hope.

It was a clear, blue-and-white day, with clouds scudding across the sky, and a cold, whistling wind that blew the fallen leaves along the dry roads—a day that made people walk smartly and gave the children apple-red cheeks and tangled curls.

Mhor and Peter were seated on The Rigs garden wall as Pamela and Jean came out of Hillview gate. Peter wagged his tail in recognition, but Mhor made no sign of having seen his sister and her friend.

"Aren't you cold up there?" Pamela asked him.

"Very cold," said Mhor, "but we can't come down. We're on sentry duty on the city wall till sundown," and he shaded his eyes with his hand and pretended to peer into space for lurking foes.

Peter looked wistfully up at him and hunched himself against the scratched bare knees now blue with cold.

"When the sun touches the top of West Law," said Jean, pointing to a distant blue peak, "it has set. See—there…. Now run in, sonny, and tell Mrs. M'Cosh to let you have some currant-loaf for tea. Pamela and I are going to tea at Hopetoun."

"Aw," said Mhor, "I hate when you go out to tea. So does Jock. So does Peter. Look out! I'm going to jump."

He jumped and fell prostrate, barking his chin, but no howl came from him, and he picked himself up with dignity, merely asking for the loan of a handkerchief, his own "useful little hanky," as he explained, having been used to mop up a spilt ink-bottle.

Fortunately Jean had a spare handkerchief, and Pamela promised that on her return he should have a reel of sticking-plaster for his own use, so, battered but content, he returned to the house, Peter remaining behind to investigate a mole-heap.

"What a cheery day for November," Pamela remarked as they took the road by Tweedside. "Look at that beech tree against the blue sky, every black twig silhouetted. Trees are wonderful in winter."

"Trees are wonderful always," said Jean. "'Solomon spake of trees'—I do wonder what he said. I suppose it would be the cedars of Lebanon he 'spake' of, and the hyssop that grows in the walls, and sycamores, but he would have been worth hearing on a rowan tree flaming red against a blue September sky. Look at that newly ploughed field so softly brown, and the faded gold of the beech hedge. November is a cheery time. The only depressing time of the year to me is when the swallows go away. I can't bear to see them wheeling round and preparing to depart. I want so badly to go with them. It always brings back to me the feeling I had as a child when people read Hans Andersen to me—the storks in The Marsh King's Daughter, talking about the mud in Egypt. Imagine Priorsford swallows in Egypt!… As the song says:

"What a lovely sound Lowland Scots has," said Pamela. "I like to hear you speak it. Tell me about Mrs. Hope, Jean. I do hope we shall see her alone. I don't like Priorsford tea-parties; they are rather like a foretaste of eternal punishment. With no choice you are dumped down beside the most irrelevant sort of person, and there you remain. I went to return Mrs. Duff-Whalley's call the other day, and fell into one. Before I could retreat I was wedged into a chair beside a woman whom I hope I shall never see again. She was one of those bleak people who make the thought of getting up in the morning and dressing quite insupportable. I don't think there was a detail in her domestic life that she didn't touch on. She told me all her husband could eat and couldn't eat; she called her children 'little tots,' and said she couldn't get so much as a 'serviette' washed in the house. I thought nobody talked of serviettes outside Wells and Arnold Bennett. Mrs. Duff-Whalley rescued me in the nick of time before I could do anything desperate, and then she cross-examined me as to my reasons for coming to Priorsford."

Jean laughed. "What a cheery afternoon! But it will be all right to-day. Mrs. Hope never sees more than one or two people at a time. She is pretty old, you see, and frail, though she has such an extraordinary gift of being young. I do hope you will like each other. She has an edge to her tongue, but she is an incomparable friend. The poor people go to her in flocks, and she scolds them roundly, but always knows how to help them in the only wise way. Her people have been in Priorsford for ages; she knows every soul in the place, and is vastly amused at all the little snobberies that abound in a small town. But she laughs kindly. Pretentious people are afraid of her; simple people love her."

"Am I simple, Jean?"

Jean laughed and refused to give an opinion on the subject, beyond quoting the words of Autolycus—"How blessed are we that are not simple men."

They were in the Hopetoun Woods now, and at the end of the avenue could see the house standing on a knoll by the river, whitewashed, dignified, home-like.

"Talk to Mrs. Hope about the view," Jean advised "She is as proud of the Hopetoun Woods as if she had made them. Isn't it a nice place? Old and proud and honourable—like Mrs. Hope herself."

"Are there sons to inherit?"

Jean shook her head. "There were three sons. Mrs. Hope hardly ever talks about them, but I've seen their photographs, and of course I have often been told about them—by Great-aunt Alison, and others—and heard how they died. They were very clever and good-looking and well-liked—the kind of sons mothers are very proud of, and they all died imperially, if that is an expression to use. Two died in India, one—a soldier—in one of the Frontier skirmishes: the other—an I. C. S. man—from over-working in a famine-stricken district. The youngest fell in the Boer War … so you see Mrs. Hope has the right to be proud. Aunt Alison used to tell me that she made no moan over her wonderful sons. She shut herself up for a short time, and then faced the world again, her kindly, sharp-tongued self. She is one of those splendid people who take the slings and arrows thrown at them by outrageous fortune and bury them deep in their hearts and go on, still able to laugh, still able to take an interest. Only, you mustn't speak to her of what she has lost. That would be too much."

"Yes," said Pamela. "I can understand that."

She stopped for a minute and stood looking at the river full of "wan water from the Border hills," at the stretches of lawn ornamented here and there by stone figures, at the trees thrawn with winter and rough weather, and she thought of the three boys who had played here, who had lived in the whitewashed house (she could see the barred nursery windows), bathed and fished in the Tweed, thrown stones at the grey stone figures on the lawn, climbed the trees in the Hopetoun Woods, and who had gone out with their happy young lives to lay them down in a far country.

Mrs. Hope was sitting by the fire in the drawing-room, a room full of flowers and books, and lit by four long windows. Two of the windows looked on to the lawns, and the stone figures chipped by generations of catapult-owning boys; the other two looked across the river into the Hopetoun Woods. The curtains were not drawn though the lamps were lit, for Mrs. Hope liked to keep the river and the woods with her as long as light lasted, so the warm bright room looked warmer and brighter in contrast with the cold, ruffled water and the wind-shaken trees outside.

Mrs. Hope had been a beautiful woman in her day, and was still an attractive figure, her white hair dressed high and crowned with a square of lace tied in quaint fashion under her chin. Her black dress was soft and becoming to her spare figure. There was nothing unsightly about her years; she made age seem a lovely, desirable thing. Not that her years were so very many, but she had lived every minute of them; also she had given lavishly and unsparingly of her store of sympathy and energy to others: and she had suffered grievously.

She kissed Jean affectionately, upbraiding her for being long in coming, and turned eagerly to Pamela. New people still interested her vividly. Here was a newcomer who promised well.

"Ah, my dear," she said in greeting, "I have wanted to know you. I'm told you are the most interesting person who ever came to this little town."

Pamela laughed. "There I am sure you have been misled. Priorsford is full of exciting people. I expected to be dull, and I have rarely been so well amused."

Mrs. Hope studied the charming face bent to her own. Her blue eyes were shrewd, and though she stood so near the end of the way she had lost none of her interest in the comings and goings of Vanity Fair.

"Is Priorsford amusing?" she said. "Well" (complacently), "we have our points. As Jane Austen wrote of the Misses Bingley, 'Our powers of conversation are considerable—we can describe an entertainment with accuracy, relate an anecdote with humour, and laugh at our acquaintances with spirit.'"

"Laugh!" Jean groaned. "Pamela, I must warn you that Mrs. Hope's laughter scares Priorsford to death. We speak her fair in order that she won't give us away to our neighbours, but we have no real hope that she doesn't see through us. Have we, Miss Augusta?" addressing the daughter of the house, who had just come into the room.

"Ah," said Mrs. Hope, "if everyone was as transparent as you, Jean."

"Oh, don't," Jean pleaded. "You remind me that I am quite uninteresting when I am trying to make believe that I am subtle, or 'subtile,' as the Psalmist says of the fowler's snare."

"Absurd child! Augusta, my dear, this is Miss Reston."

Miss Hope shook hands in her gentle, shy way, and busied herself putting small tables beside her mother and the two guests as the servant brought in tea. Her life was spent in doing small services.

Once, when Augusta was a child, someone asked her what she would like to be, and she had replied, "A lady like mamma." She had never lost the ambition, though very soon she had known that it could not be realised. It was difficult to believe that she was Mrs. Hope's daughter, for she had no trace of the beauty and sparkle with which her mother had been endowed. Augusta had a long, kind, patient face—a drab-coloured face—but her voice was beautiful. She had never been young; she was born an anxious pilgrim, and now, at fifty, she seemed infinitely older than her ageless mother.

Pamela, watching her as she made the tea, saw all Augusta's heart in her eyes as she looked at her mother, and saw, too, the dread that lay in them—the dread of the days that she must live after the light had gone out for her.

During tea Mrs. Hope had many questions to ask about David at Oxford, and Jean was only too delighted to tell every single detail.

"And how is my dear Jock? He is my favourite."

"Not the Mhor?" asked Pamela.

"No. Mhor is 'a'body's body.' He will never lack for admirers. But Jock is my own boy. We've been friends since he came home from India, a white-headed baby with the same surprised blue eyes that he has now. He was never out of scrapes at home, but he was always good with me. I suppose I was flattered by that."

"Jock," said Jean, "is very nearly the nicest thing in the world, and the funniest. This morning Mrs. M'Cosh caught a mouse alive in a trap, and Jock, while dressing, heard her say she would drown it. Down he went, like an avalanche in pyjamas, drove Mrs. M'Cosh into the scullery, and let the mouse away in the garden. He would fight any number of boys of any size for an ill-treated animal. In fact, all his tenderness is given to dumb animals. He has no real liking for mortals. They affront him with their love-making and their marriages. He has to leave the room when anything bordering on sentiment is read aloud. 'Tripe,' he calls it in his low way. Do you remember his scorn of knight-errants who rescued distressed damsels? They seemed to him so little worth rescuing."

"I never cared much for sentiment myself," said Mrs. Hope. "I wouldn't give a good adventure yarn for all the love-stories ever written."

"Mother remains very boyish," said Augusta. "She likes something vivid in the way of crime."

"And now," said her mother, "you are laughing at an old done woman, which is very unseemly. Come and sit beside me, Miss Reston, and tell me what you think of Priorsford."

"Oh," said Pamela, drawing a low chair to the side of her hostess, "it's not for me to talk about Priorsford. They tell me you know more about it than anyone."

"Do I? Well, perhaps; anyway, I love it more than most. I've lived here practically all my life, and my forbears have been in the countryside for generations, and that all counts. Priorsford … I sometimes stand on the bridge and look and look, and tell myself that I feel like a mother to it."

"I know," said Pamela. "There is something very appealing about a little town: I never lived in one before."

"But," said Mrs. Hope, jealous as a mother for her own, "I think there is something very special about Priorsford. There are few towns as beautiful. The way the hills cradle it, and Peel Tower stands guard over it, and the links of Tweed water it, and even the streets aren't ordinary, they have such lovely glimpses. From the East Gate you look up to the East Law, pine trees, grey walls, green terraces; in the Highgate you don't go many yards without coming to a pend with a view of blue distances that takes your breath, just as in Edinburgh when you look down an alley and see ships tacking for the Baltic…. But I wish I had known Priorsford as it was in my mother's young days, when the French prisoners were here. The genteel supper-parties and assemblies must have been vastly entertaining. It has changed even in my day. I don't want to repeat the old folks' litany, 'No times like the old times,' but it does seem to me—or is it only distance lending enchantment?—that the people I used to know were more human, more interesting; there was less worship of money, less running after the great ones of the earth, certainly less vulgarity. We were content with less, and happier."

"But, Mrs. Hope," said Pamela, laying down her cup, "this is most depressing hearing. I came here to find simplicity."

"You needn't expect to find it in Priorsford. We aren't so provincial as all that. I just wish Mrs. Duff-Whalley could hear you. Simplicity indeed! I'm not able to go out much now, but I sit here and watch people, and I am astonished at the number of restless eyes. So many people spend their lives striving to keep in the swim. They are miserable in case anyone gets before them, in case a neighbour's car is a better make, in case a neighbour's entertainments are more elaborate…. Two girls came to see me this morning, nice girls, pretty girls, but even my old eyes could see the powder on their faces and their touched-up eyes. And their whole talk was of daft-like dances, and bridge, and absurdities. If they had been my daughters I would have whipped them for their affected manners. And when I think of their grandmother! A decent woman was Mirren Somerville. She lived with her father in that ivy-covered cottage at our gates, and she did sewing for me before she married Banks. She wasn't young when she married. I remember she came to ask my advice. 'D'you care for him, Mirren?' I asked. 'Well, mem, it's no' as if I were a young lassie. I'm forty, and near bye caring. But he's a dacent man, and it's lonely now ma faither's awa, an' I'm a guid cook, an' he would aye come in to a clean fireside.' So she married him and made a good wife to him, and they had one son. And Mirren's son is now Sir John Banks, a baronet and an M.P. Tuts, the thing's ridiculous…. Not that there's anything wrong with the man. He's a soft-tongued, stuffed-looking butler-like creature, with a lot of that low cunning that is known as business instinct, but he was good to his mother. He didn't marry till she died, and she kept house for him in his grand new house—the dear soul with her caps and her broad south-country accent. She managed wonderfully, for she had great natural dignity, and aped nothing. It was the butler killed her. She could cope with the women servants, but when Sir John felt that his dignity required a butler she gave it up. I dare say she was glad enough to go…. 'Eh, mem, I am effrontit,' she used to say to me if I went in and found her spotless kitchen disarranged, and I thought of her to-day when I saw those silly little painted faces, and was glad she had been spared the sight of her descendants…. But what am I raging about? What does it matter to me, when all's said? Let the lassies dress up as long as they have the heart; they'll have long years to learn sense if they're spared…. Miss Reston, did you ever see anything bonnier than Tweed and Hopetoun Woods? Jean, my dear, Lewis Elliot brought me a book last night which really delighted me. Poems by Violet Jacob. If anyone could do for Tweeddale what she has done for Angus I would be glad…."

"You care for poetry, Miss Reston? In Priorsford it's considered rather a slur on your character to care for poetry. Novels we may discuss, sensible people read novels, even now and again essays or biography, but poetry—there we have to dissemble. We pretend, don't we, Jean?—that poetry is nothing to us. Never a quotation or an allusion escapes us. We listen to tales of servants' misdeeds, we talk of clothes and the ongoings of our neighbours, and we never let on that we would rather talk of poetry. No. No. A daft-like thing for either an old woman or a young one to speak of. Only when we are alone—Jean and Augusta and Lewis Elliot and I—we 'tire the sun with talking and send it down the sky.' … Miss Reston, Lewis Elliot tells me he knew you very well at one time."

"Yes, away at the beginning of things. I adored him when I was fifteen and he was twenty. He was wonderfully good to me and Biddy—my brother. It is delightful to find an old friend in a new place."

"I'm very fond of Lewis," said Mrs. Hope, "but I wish to goodness he had never inherited Laverlaw. He might have done a lot in the world with his brain and his heart and his courage, but there he is contentedly settled in that green glen of his, and greatly absorbed in sheep. Sheep! The country is run by the Sir John Bankses, and the Lewis Elliots think about sheep. It's all wrong. It's all wrong. The War wakened him up, and he was in the thick of it both in the East and in France, but never in the limelight, you understand, just doggedly doing his best in the background. If he would marry a sensible wife with some ambition, but he's about as much sentiment in him as Jock. It would take an earthquake to shake him into matrimony."

"Perhaps," said Pamela, "he is like your friend Mirren—'bye caring.'"

"Nonsense," said Mrs. Hope briskly. "He's 'bye' the fervent stage, if he ever was a prisoner in that cage of rushes, which I doubt, but there are long years before him, I hope, and if there isn't a fire of affection on the hearth, and someone always about to listen and understand, it's a dowie business when the days draw in and the nights get longer and colder, and the light departs."

"But if it's dreary for a man," said Pamela, "what of us? What of the 'left ladies,' as I heard a child describe spinsters?"

Mrs. Hope's blue eyes, callously calm, surveyed the three spinsters before her.

"You will get no pity from me," she said. "It's practically always the woman's own fault if she remains unmarried. Besides, a woman can do fine without a man. A woman has so much within herself she is a constant entertainment to herself. But men are helpless souls. Some of them are born bachelors and they do very well, but the majority are lost without a woman. And angry they would be to hear me say it!… Are you going, Jean?"

"Mhor's lessons," said Jean. "I'm frightfully sorry to take Pamela away."

"May I come again?" Pamela asked.

"Surely. Augusta and I will look forward to your next visit. Don't tire of Priorsford yet awhile. Stay among us and learn to love the place." Mrs. Hope smiled very kindly at her guest, and Pamela, stooping down, kissed the hand that held her own.