Penny Plain/Chapter 5

HEN Peter Reid arrived at Priorsford Station from London he stood for a few minutes looking about him in a lost way, almost as if after thirty years he expected to see a "kent face" coming to meet him. He had no notion where to go; he had not written for rooms; he had simply obeyed the impulse that sent him—the impulse that sends a hurt child to its mother. It is said that an old horse near to death turns towards the pastures where he was foaled. It is true of human beings. "Man wanders back to the fields which bred him."

After a talk with a helpful porter he found rooms in a temperance hotel in the Highgate—a comfortable quiet place.

The next day he was too tired to rise, and spent rather a dreary day in his rooms with the Scotsman for sole companion.

The landlord, a cheery little man, found time once or twice to talk for a few minutes, but he had only been ten years in Priorsford and could tell his guest nothing of the people he had once known.

"D'you know a house called The Rigs?" he asked him.

The landlord knew it well—a quaint cottage with a pretty garden. Old Miss Alison Jardine was living in it when he came first to Priorsford; dead now, but the young folk were still in it.

"Young folk?" said Peter Reid.

"Yes," said the landlord, "Miss Jean Jardine and her brothers. Orphans, I'm told. Father an Anglo-Indian. Nice people? Oh, very. Quiet and inoffensive. They don't own the house, though. I hear the landlord is a very wealthy man in London. By the way, same name as yourself, sir."

"Do I look like a millionaire?" asked Peter Reid, and the landlord laughed pleasantly and noncommittally.

The next day was sunny and Peter Reid went out for a walk. It was a different Priorsford that he had come back to. A large draper's shop with plate-glass windows occupied the corner where Jenny Baxter had rolled her toffee-balls and twisted her "gundy," and where old Davy Linton had cut joints and weighed out mince-collops accompanied by wise weather prophecies, a smart fruiterer's shop now stood furnished with a wealth of fruit and vegetables unimagined in his young days. There were many handsome shops, the streets were wider and better kept, unsightly houses had been demolished; it was a clean, prosperous-looking town, but it was different.

Peter Reid (of London) would have been the first to carp at the tumbledown irregular old houses, with their three steps up and three steps down, remaining, but Peter Reid (of Priorsford) missed them. He resented the new shops, the handsome villas, the many motors, all the evidences of prosperity.

And why had Cuddy Brig been altered?

It had been far liker the thing, he thought—the old hump-backed bridge with the grass and ferns growing in the crannies. He had waded in Cuddy when he was a boy, picking his way among the broken dishes and the tin cans, and finding wonderful adventures in the dark of the bridge; he had bathed in it as it wound, clear and shining, among the green meadows outside the town, and run "skirl-naked" to dry himself, in full sight of scandalised passengers in the Edinburgh train; he had slid on it in winter. The memory of the little stream had always lain in the back of his mind as something precious—and now to find it spanned by a staring new stone bridge. Those Town Councils with their improvements!

Even Tweed Bridge had not been left alone. It had been widened, as an inscription in the middle told the world at large. He leant on it and looked up the river. Peel Tower was the same, anyway. No one had dared to add one cubit to its grey stature. It was a satisfaction to look at something so unchanging.

The sun had still something of its summer heat, and it was pleasant to stand there and listen to the sound of the river over the pebbles and see the flaming trees reflected in the blue water all the way up Tweedside till the river took a wide curve before the green slope on which the castle stood. A wonderfully pretty place, Priorsford, he told himself: a home-like place—if one had anyone to come home to.

He turned slowly away. He would go and look at The Rigs. His mother had come to it as a bride. He had been born there. Though occupied by strangers, it was the nearest he had to a home. The house in Prince's Gate was well furnished, comfortable, smoothly run by efficient servants, but only a house when all was said. He felt he would like to creep into The Rigs, into the sitting-room where his mother had always sat (the other larger rooms, the "good room" as it was called, was kept for visitors and high days), and lay his tired body on the horsehair arm-chair by the fireside. He could rest there, he thought. It was impossible, of course. There would be no horsehair arm-chair, for everything had been sold—and there was no mother.

But, anyway, he would go and look at it. There used to be primroses—but this was autumn. Primroses come in the spring.

Thirty years—but The Rigs was not changed, at least not outwardly. Old Mrs. Reid had loved the garden, and Great-aunt Alison, and Jean after her, had carried on her work.

The little house looked just as Peter Reid remembered it.

He would go in and ask to see it, he told himself.

He would tell these Jardines that the house was his and he meant to live in it himself. They wouldn't like it, but he couldn't help that. Perhaps he would be able to persuade them to go almost at once. He would make it worth their while.

He was just going to lift the latch of the gate when the front door opened and shut, and Jean Jardine came down the flagged path. She stopped at the gate and looked at Peter Reid.

"Were you by any chance coming in?" she asked.

"Yes," said Mr. Reid; "I was going to ask if I might see over the house."

"Surely," said Jean. "But—you're not going to buy it, are you?"

The face she turned to him was pink and distressed.

"Did you think of buying it yourself?" Peter Reid asked.

"Me? You wouldn't ask that if you knew how little money I have. But come in. I shall try to think of all its faults to tell you—but in my eyes it hasn't got any."

They went slowly up the flagged path and into the square, low-roofed hall. This was not as his mother had it. Then the floor had been covered with linoleum on which had stood two hard chairs and an umbrella-stand. Now there was an oak chest and a gate-table, old brass very well rubbed up, a grandfather clock with a "clear" face, and a polished floor with a Chinese rug on it.

"It is rather dark," said Jean, "but I like it dark. Coming in on a hot summer day it is almost like a pool; it is so cool and dark and polished."

Mr. Reid said nothing, and Jean was torn between a desire to have her home appreciated and a desire to have this stranger take an instant dislike to it, and to leave it speedily and for ever.

"You see," she pointed out, "the little staircase is rather steep and winding, but it is short; and the bedrooms are charming—not very big, but so prettily shaped and with lovely views." Then she remembered that she should miscall rather than praise, and added, "Of course, they have all got queer ceilings; you couldn't expect anything else in a cottage. Will you go upstairs?"

Mr. Reid thought not, and asked if he might see the sitting-rooms. "This," said Jean, opening a door, "is the dining-room."

It was the room his mother had always sat in, where the horsehair arm-chair had had its home, but it, too, had suffered a change. Gone was the arm-chair, gone the round table with the crimson cover. This room had an austerity unknown in the room he remembered. It was small, and every inch of space was made the most of. An old Dutch dresser held china and acted as a sideboard; a bare oak table, having in its centre a large blue bowl filled with berries and red leaves, stood in the middle of the room; eight chairs completed the furniture.

"This is the least nice room in the house," Jean told him, "but we are never in it except to eat. It looks out on the road."

"Yes," said Peter Reid, remembering that that was why his mother had liked it. She could sit with her knitting and watch the passers-by. She had always "infused" the tea when she heard the click of the gate as he came home from school.

"You will like to see the living-room," said Jean, shivering for the effect its charm might have on a potential purchaser. She led him in, hoping that it might be looking its worst, but, as if in sheer contrariness, the fire was burning brightly, a shaft of sunlight lay across a rug, making the colours glow like jewels, and the whole room seemed to hold out welcoming hands. It was satisfactory (though somewhat provoking) that the stranger seemed quite unimpressed.

"You have some good furniture," he said.

"Yes," Jean agreed eagerly. "It suits the room and makes it beautiful. Can you imagine it furnished with a 'suite' and ordinary pictures, and draped curtains at the windows and silver photograph frames and a grand piano? It would simply be no sort of room at all. All its individuality would be gone. But won't you sit down and rest? That hill up from the town is steep."

Peter Reid sank thankfully into a corner of the sofa, while Jean busied herself at the writing-table so that this visitor, who looked so tired, need not feel that he should offer conversation.

Presently he said, "You are very fond of The Rigs?"

Jean came and sat down beside him.

"It's the only home we have ever known," she said. "We came here from India to live with our great-aunt—first me alone, and then David and Jock. And Father and Mother were with us when Father had leave. I have hardly ever been away from The Rigs. It's such a very affectionate sort of house—perhaps that is rather an absurd thing to say, but you do get so fond of it. But if I take you in to see Mrs. M'Cosh in the kitchen she will tell you plenty of faults. The water doesn't heat well, for one thing, and the range simply eats up coal, and there is no proper pantry. Your wife would want to know about these things."

"Haven't got a wife," said Peter Reid gruffly.

"No? Well, your housekeeper, then. You couldn't buy a house without getting to know all about the hot water and pantries."

"There is no question of my buying it."

"Oh, isn't there?" cried Jean joyfully. "What a relief! All the time I've been showing you the house I've been picturing us removing sadly to a villa in the Langhope Road. They are quite nice villas as villas go, but they have only tiny strips of gardens, and stairs that come to meet you as you go in at the front door, and anyway no house could ever be home to us after The Rigs—not though it had hot and cold water in every room and a pantry on every floor."

"Dear me," said Peter Reid.

He felt perplexed, and annoyed with himself for being perplexed. All he had to do was to tell this girl with the frank eyes that The Rigs was his, that he wanted to live in it himself, that if they would turn out at once he would make it worth their while. Quite simple—They were nice people evidently, and would make no fuss. He would say it now—but Jean was speaking.

"I think I know why you wanted to see through this house," she was saying. "I think you must have known it long ago when you were a boy. Perhaps you loved it too—and had to leave it."

"I went to London when I was eighteen to make my fortune."

"Oh," said Jean, and into that "Oh" she put all manner of things she could not say. She had been observing her visitor, and she was sure that this shabby little man (Peter Reid cared not at all for appearances and never bought a new suit of clothes unless compelled) had returned no Whittington, Lord Mayor of London. Probably he was one of the "faithful failures" of the world, one who had tried and missed, and had come back, old and tired and shabby, to see his boyhood's home. The tenderest corner of Jean's tender heart was given to shabby people, and she longed to try to comfort and console, but dared not in case of appearing impertinent. She reflected dismally that he had not even a wife to be nice to him, and he was far too old to have a mother.

"Are you staying in Priorsford?" she asked gently.

"I'm at the Temperance Hotel for a few days. I—the fact is, I haven't been well. I had to take a rest, so I came back here—after thirty years."

"Have you really been away for thirty years? Great-aunt Alison came to The Rigs first about thirty years ago. Do you, by any chance, know our landlord in London? Mr. Peter Reid is his name."

"I know him."

"He's frightfully rich, they say. I don't suppose you know him well enough to ask him not to sell The Rigs? It can't make much difference to him, though it means so much to us. Is he old, our landlord?"

"A man in his prime," said Peter Reid.

"That's pretty old, isn't it?" said Jean—"about sixty, I think. Of course," hastily, "sixty isn't really old. When I'm sixty—if I'm spared—I expect I shall feel myself good for another twenty years."

"I thought I was," said Peter Reid, "until I broke down."

"Oh, but a rest at Priorsford will put you all right."

Could he afford a holiday? she wondered. Even temperance hotels were rather expensive when you hadn't much money. Would it be very rash and impulsive to ask him to stay at The Rigs?

"Are you comfortable at the Temperance?" she asked. "Because if you don't much care for hotels we would love to put you up here. Mhor is apt to be noisy, but I'm sure he would try to be quiet when he knew that you needed a rest."

"My dear young lady," gasped Peter Reid. "I'm afraid you are rash. You know nothing of me. I might be an impostor, a burglar——"

Jean threw back her head and laughed.

"Do forgive me, but the thought of you with a jemmy and a dark lantern is so funny."

"You don't even know my name."

"I don't," said Jean, "but does that matter? You will tell it me when you want to."

"My name is Reid, the same as your landlord."

"Then," said Jean, "are you a relative of his?"

"A connection." It was not what he meant to say, but he said it.

"How odd!" said Jean. She was trying to remember if she had said anything unbecoming of one relative to another. "Oh, here's Jock and Mhor," as two figures ran past the windows; "you must stay and have tea with us, Mr. Reid."

"But I ought to be getting back to the hotel. I had no intention of inflicting myself on you in this way." He rose to his feet and looked about for his hat. "The fact is—I must tell you—I am——"

The door burst open and Mhor appeared. He had forgotten to remove his cap, or wipe his muddy boots, so eager was he to tell his news.

"Jean," he shouted, oblivious in his excitement of the presence of a stranger—"Jean, there are six red puddock-stools at the bottom of the garden—bright red puddock-stools." He noticed Mr. Reid and, going up to him and looking earnestly into his face, he repeated, "Six!"

"Indeed," said Peter Reid.

He had no acquaintance with boys, and felt extremely ill at ease, but Mhor, after studying him for a minute, was seized with a violent fancy for this new friend.

"You're going to stay to tea, aren't you? Would you mind coming with me just now to look at the puddock-stools? It might be too dark after tea. Here is your hat."

"But I'm not staying to tea," cried the unhappy owner of The Rigs. Why, he asked himself had he not told them at once that he was their landlord? A connection! Fool that he was! He would say it now—"I only came——"

"It was very nice of you to come," said Jean soothingly. "But, Mhor, don't worry Mr. Reid. Everybody hasn't your passion for puddock-stools."

"But you would like to see them," Mhor assured him. "I'm going to fill a bowl with chucky-stones and moss and stick the puddock-stools among them and make a fairy garden for Jean. And if I can find any more I'll make one for the Honourable; she is very kind about giving me chocolates."

They were out of doors by this time, and Mhor was pointing out the glories of the garden.

"You see, we have a burn in our garden with a little bridge over it; almost no one else has a burn and a bridge of their very own. There are minnows in it and all sorts of things—water-beetles, you know. And here are my puddock-stools."

When Mr. Reid came back from the garden Mhor had firm hold of his hand and was telling him a long story about a "mavis-bird" that the cat had caught and eaten.

"Tea's ready," he said, as they entered the room; "you can't go away now, Mr. Reid. See these cookies? I went for them myself to Davidson the baker's, and they were so hot and new-baked that the bag burst and they all fell out on the road."

"Mhor! You horrid little boy."

"They're none the worse, Jean. I dusted them all with me useful little hanky, and the road wasn't so very dirty."

"All the same," said Jean, "I think we'll leave the cookies to you and Jock. The other things are baked at home, Mr. Reid, and are quite safe. Mhor, tell Jock tea's in, and wash your hands."

So Peter Reid found himself, like Balaam, remaining to bless. After all, why should he turn these people out of their home? A few years (with care) was all the length of days promised to him, and it mattered little where he spent them. Indeed, so little profitable did leisure seem to him that he cared little when the end came. Mhor and his delight over a burn of his own, and a garden that grew red puddock-stools, had made up his mind for him. He would never be the angel with the flaming sword who turned Mhor out of paradise. He had not known that a boy could be such a pleasant person. He had avoided children as he had avoided women, and now he found himself seated, the centre of interest, at a family tea-table, with Jean, anxiously making tea to his liking, while Mhor (with a well-soaped, shining face, but a high-water mark of dirt where the sponge had not reached) sat close beside him, and Jock, the big schoolboy, shyly handed him scones: and Peter walked among the feet of the company, waiting for what he could get.

Peter Reid quite shone through the meal. He remembered episodes of his boyhood, forgotten for forty years, and told them to Jock and Mhor, who listened with most gratifying interest. He questioned Jock about Priorsford Grammar School, and recalled stories of the masters who had taught there in his day.

Jean told him about David going to Oxford, and about Great-aunt Alison who had "come out at the Disruption"—about her father's life in India, and about her mother, and he became every minute more human and interested. He even made one or two small jokes which were received with great applause by Jock and Mhor, who were grateful to anyone who tried, however feebly, to be funny. They would have said with Touchstone, "It is meat and drink to me to see a clown."

Jean watched with delight her rather difficult guest blossom into affability. "You are looking better already," she told him. "If you stayed here for a week and rested and Mrs. M'Cosh cooked you light, nourishing food and Mhor didn't make too much noise, I'm sure you would feel quite well again. And it does seem such a pity to pay hotel bills when we want you here."

Hotel bills! Peter Reid looked sharply at her. Did she imagine, this girl, that hotel bills were of any moment to him? Then he looked down at his shabby clothes and recalled their conversation and owned that her mistake was not unjustifiable.

But how extraordinary it was! The instinct that makes people wish to stand well with the rich and powerful he could understand and commend, but the instinct that opens wide doors to the shabby and the unsuccessful was not one that he knew anything about: it was certainly not an instinct for this world as he knew it.

Just as they were finishing tea Mrs. M'Cosh ushered in Miss Pamela Reston.

"You did say I might come in when I liked," she said as she greeted Jean. "I've had tea, thank you. Mhor, you haven't been to see me to-day."

"I would have been," Mhor assured her, "but Jean said I'd better not. Do you invite me to come to-morrow?"

"I do."

"There, Jean," said Mhor. "You can't un-vite me after that."

"Indeed she can't," said Pamela. "Jock, this is the book I told you about…. Please, Miss Jean, don't let me disturb you."

"We've finished," said Jean. "May I introduce Mr. Reid?"

Pamela shook hands and at once proceeded to make herself so charming that Peter Reid was galvanised into a spirited conversation. Pamela had brought her embroidery-frame with her, and she sat on the sofa and sorted out silks, and talked and laughed as if she had sat there off and on all her life. To Jean, looking at her, it seemed impossible that two days ago none of them had beheld her. It seemed—absurdly enough—that the room could never have looked quite right when it had not this graceful creature with her soft gowns and her pearls, her embroidery-frame and heaped, bright-hued silks sitting by the fire.

"Miss Jean, won't you sing us a song? I'm convinced that you sing Scots songs quite perfectly."

Jean laughed. "I can sing Scots songs in a way, but I have a voice about as big as a sparrow's. If it would amuse you I'll try."

So Jean sat down to the piano and sang "Proud Maisie," and "Colin's Cattle," and one or two other old songs.

"I wonder," said Peter Reid, "if you know a song my mother used to sing—'Strathairlie'?"

"Indeed I do. It's one I like very much. I have it here in this little book." She struck a few simple chords and began to sing: it was a lilting, haunting tune, and the words were "old and plain."

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Jean rose from the piano. Jock had got out his books and had begun his lessons. Mhor and Peter were under the table playing at being cave-men. Pamela was stitching at her embroidery. Peter Reid sat shading his eyes from the light with his hand.

Jean knelt down on the rug and held out her hands to the blazing fire.

"It must be sad to be old and rich," she said softly, almost as if she were speaking to herself. "It is so very certain that we can carry nothing out of this world…. I read somewhere of a man who, on every birthday, gave away some of his possessions so that at the end he might not be cumbered and weighted with them." She looked up and caught the gaze of Peter Reid fixed on her intently. "It's rather a nice idea, don't you think, to give away all the superfluous money and lands, pictures and jewels, everything we have, and stand stripped, as it were, ready when we get the word to come, to leap into the beyond?"

Pamela spoke first. "There speaks sweet and twenty," she said.

"Yes," said Jean. "I know it's quite easy for me to speak in that lordly way of disposing of possessions, for I haven't got any to dispose of."

"Then," said Pamela, "we are to take it that you are ready to spring across any minute?"

"So far as goods and gear go; but I'm rich in other things. I'm pretty heavily weighted by David, and Jock, and Mhor."

Then Peter Reid spoke, still with his hand over his eyes.

"Once you begin to make money it clings. How can you get rid of it?"

"I'm saving up for a bicycle," the Mhor broke in, becoming aware that the conversation turned on money. "I've got half a crown and a thru-penny-bit and fourpence-ha'penny in pennies: and I've got a duster to clean it with when I've got it."

Jean stroked his head. "I don't think you'll ever be overburdened with riches, Mhor, old man. But it must be tremendous fun to be rich. I love books where suddenly a lawyer's letter comes saying that someone has left them a fortune."

"What would you do with a fortune if you got it?" Peter Reid asked.

"Need you ask?" laughed Pamela. "Miss Jean would at once make it over to David and Jock and Mhor."

"Oh, well," said Jean, "of course they would come first, but, oh, I would do such a lot of things! I'd find out where money was most needed and drop it on the people anonymously so that they wouldn't be bothered about thanking anyone. I would creep about like a beneficent Puck and take worried frowns away, and straighten out things for tired people, and, above all, I'd make children smile. There's no fun or satisfaction got from giving big sums to hospitals and things—that's all right for when you're dead. I want to make happiness while I'm alive. I don't think a million pounds would be too much for all I want to do."

"Aw, Jean," said Mhor, "if you had a million pounds would you buy me a bicycle?"

"A bicycle," said Jean, "and a motor and an aeroplane and a Shetland pony and a Newfoundland pup. I'll make a story for you in bed to-night all about what you would have if I were rich."

"And Jock, too?"

Being assured that Jock would not be overlooked Mhor grabbed Peter round the neck and proceeded to babble to him about bicycles and aeroplanes, motors and Newfoundland pups.

Jean looked apologetically at her guests.

"When you're poor you've got to dream," she said. "Oh, must you go, Mr. Reid? But you'll come back to-morrow, won't you? We would honestly like you to come and stay with us."

"Thank you," said Peter Reid, "but I am going back to London in a day or two. I am obliged to you for your hospitality, especially for singing me 'Strathairlie.' I never thought to hear it again. I wonder if I might trouble you to write me out the words."

"But take the book," said Jean, running to get it and pressing it into his hands. "Perhaps you'll find other songs in it you used to know and like. Take it to keep."

Pamela dropped her embroidery-frame and watched the scene.

Mhor and Peter stood looking on. Jock lifted his head from his books to listen. It was no new thing for the boys to see Jean give away her most treasured possessions: she was a born "Madam Liberality."

"But," Peter Reid objected, "it is rather a rare book. You value it yourself."

"Of course I do," said Jean, "and that is why I am giving it to you. I know you will appreciate it."

Peter Reid took the book as if it was something fragile and very precious. Pamela was puzzled by the expression on his face. He did not seem so much touched by the gift as amused—sardonically amused.

"Thank you," he said. And again, "Thank you!"

"Jock will go down with you to the hotel," Jean said, explaining, when the visitor demurred, that the road was steep and not very well lighted.

"I'll go too," said Mhor, "me and Peter."

"Well, come straight back. Good-bye, Mr. Reid. I'm so glad you came to see The Rigs, but I wish you could have stayed…."

"Is he an old friend?" Pamela asked, when the cavalcade had departed.

"I never saw him before to-day. He once lived in this house and he came back to see it, and he looks ill and I think he is poor, so I asked him to come and stay with us for a week."

"My dear child, do you invite every stranger to stay with you if you think he is poor?"

"Of course not. But he looked so lonely and lost somehow, and he doesn't seem to have anyone belonging to him, and I was sorry for him."

"And so you gave him that song-book you value so much?"

"Yes," said Jean, looking rather ashamed. "But," she brightened, "he seemed pleased, don't you think? It's a pretty song, 'Strathairlie,' but it's not a pukka old one—it's early Victorian."

"Miss Jean, it's a marvel to me that you have anything left belonging to you."

"Don't call me Miss Jean!"

"Jean, then; but you must call me Pamela."

"Oh, but wouldn't that be rather familiar? You see, you are so—so——"

"Stricken in years," Pamela supplied.

"No—but—well, you are rather impressive, you know. It would be like calling Miss Bathgate 'Bella' to her face. However—Pamela——"