by Unknown
“I came to rub something out.”
He reflected. “A memory?”
“Yes.”
“Of me?”
She nodded.
“An unhappy memory?”
“Not to me,” she replied, leaning on him. “I have no memory of you I would rub out, no, not the unhappiest one, for it was you, and that makes it dear. All memories, however sad, of loved ones become sweet, don’t they, when we get far enough away from them?”
“But to whom, then, is this memory painful, Grizel?”
Again she cast that glance at him. “To her,” she whispered.
“‘That little girl’!”
“Yes; the child I used to be. You see, she never grew up, and so they are not distant memories to her. I try to rub them out of her mind by giving her prettier things to think of. I go to the places where she was most unhappy, and tell her sweet things about you. I am not morbid, am I, in thinking of her still as some one apart from myself? You know how it began, in the lonely days when I used to look at her in mamma’s mirror, and pity her, and fancy that she was pitying me and entreating me to be careful. Always when I think I see her now, she seems to be looking anxiously at me and saying, ‘Oh, do be careful!’ And the sweet things I tell her about you are meant to show her how careful I have become. Are you laughing at me for this? I sometimes laugh at it myself.”
“No, it is delicious,” he answered her, speaking more lightly than he felt. “What a numskull you make, Grizel, of any man who presumes to write about women! I am at school again, and you are Miss Ailie teaching me the alphabet. But I thought you lost that serious little girl on the doleful day when she heard you say that you loved me best.”
“She came back. She has no one but me.”
“And she still warns you against me?”
Grizel laughed gleefully. “I am too clever for her,” she said. “I do all the talking. I allow her to listen only. And you must not blame her for distrusting you; I have said such things against you to her! Oh, the things I said! On the first day I saw you, for instance, after you came back to Thrums. It was in church. Do you remember?”
“I should like to know what you said to her about me that day.”
“Would you?” Grizel asked merrily. “Well, let me see. She was not at church — she never went there, you remember; but of course she was curious to hear about you, and I had no sooner got home than she came to me and said, ‘Was he there?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Is he much changed?’ she asked. ‘He has a beard,’ I said. ‘You know that is not what I really mean,’ she said, and then I said, ‘I don’t think he is so much changed that it is impossible to recognize him again.’”
Tommy interrupted her: “Now what did you mean by that?”
“I meant that I thought you were a little annoyed to find the congregation looking at Gavinia’s baby more than at you!”
“Grizel, you are a wretch, but perhaps you were right. Well, what more did the little inquisitor want to know?”
“She asked me if I felt any of my old fear of you, and I said No, and then she clapped her hands with joy. And she asked whether you looked at me as if you were begging me to say I still thought you a wonder, and I said I thought you did — —”
“Grizel!”
“Oh, I told her ever so many dreadful things as soon as I found them out. I told her the whole story of your ankle, sir, for instance.”
“On my word, Grizel, you seem to have omitted nothing!”
“Ah, but I did,” she cried. “I never told her how much I wanted you to be admirable; I pretended that I despised you merely, and in reality I was wringing my hands with woe every time you did not behave like a god.”
“They will be worn away, Grizel, if you go on doing that.”
“I don’t think so,” she replied, “nor can she think so if she believes half of what I have told her about you since. She knows how you saved the boy’s life. I told her that in the old Lair because she had some harsh memories of you there; and it was at the Cuttle Well that I told her about the glove.”
“And where,” asked Tommy, severely, “did you tell her that you had been mistaken in thinking me jealous of a baby and anxious to be considered a wonder?”
She hid her face for a moment, and then looked up roguishly into his. “I have not told her that yet!” she replied. It was so audacious of her that he took her by the ears.
“If I were vain,” Tommy said reflectively, “I would certainly shake you now. You show a painful want of tact, Grizel, in implying that I am not perfect. Nothing annoys men so much. We can stand anything except that.”
His merriness gladdened her. “They are only little things,” she said, “and I have grown to love them. I know they are flaws; but I love them because — —”
“Say because they are mine. You owe me that.”
“No; but because they are weaknesses I don’t have. I have others, but not those, and it is sweet to me to know that you are weak in some matters in which I am strong. It makes me feel that I can be of use to you.”
“Are you insinuating that there are more of them?” Tommy demanded, sitting up.
“You are not very practical,” she responded, “and I am.”
“Go on.”
“And you are — just a little — inclined to be senti — —”
“Hush! I don’t allow that word; but you may say, if you choose, that I am sometimes carried away by a too generous impulse.”
“And that it will be my part,” said she, “to seize you by the arm and hold you back. Oh, you will give me a great deal to do! That is one of the things I love you for. It was one of the things I loved my dear Dr. McQueen for.” She looked up suddenly. “I have told him also about you.”
“Lately, Grizel?”
“Yes, in my parlour. It was his parlour, you know, and I had kept nothing from him while he was alive; that is to say, he always knew what I was thinking of, and I like to fancy that he knows still. In the evenings he used to sit in the armchair by the fire, and I sat talking or knitting at his feet, and if I ceased to do anything except sit still, looking straight before me, he knew I was thinking the morbid thoughts that had troubled me in the old days at Double Dykes. Without knowing it I sometimes shuddered at those times, and he was distressed. It reminded him of my mamma.”
“I understand,” Tommy said hurriedly. He meant: “Let us avoid painful subjects.”
“I sit still by his armchair and tell him what is happening to his Grizel.”
“It is years,” she went on, “since those thoughts have troubled me, and it was he who drove them away. He was so kind! He thought so much of my future that I still sit by his armchair and tell him what is happening to his Grizel. I don’t speak aloud, of course; I scarcely say the words to myself even; and yet we seem to have long talks together. I told him I had given you his coat.”
“Well, I don’t think he was pleased at that, Grizel. I have had a feeling for some time that the coat dislikes me. It scratched my hand the first time I put it on. My hand caught in the hook of the collar, you will say; but no, that is not what I think. In my opinion, the deed was maliciously done. McQueen always distrusted me, you know, and I expect his coat was saying, ‘Hands off my Grizel.’”
She took it as quite a jest. “He does not distrust you now,” she said, smiling. “I have told him what I think of you, and though he was surprised at first, in the end his opinion was the same as mine.”
“Ah, you saw to that, Grizel!”
“I had nothing to do with it. I merely told him everything, and he had to agree with me. How could he doubt when he saw that you had made me so happy! Even mamma does not doubt.”
“You have told her! All this is rather eerie, Grizel.”
“You are not sorry, are you?” she asked, looking at him anxiously. “Dr. McQueen wanted me to forget her. He thought that would be best for me. It was the only matter on which we differed. I gave up speaking of her to him. You are the only person I have menti
oned her to since I became a woman; but I often think of her. I am sure there was a time, before I was old enough to understand, when she was very fond of me. I was her baby, and women can’t help being fond of their babies, even though they should never have had them. I think she often hugged me tight.”
“Need we speak of this, Grizel?”
“For this once,” she entreated. “You must remember that mamma often looked at me with hatred, and said I was the cause of all her woe; but sometimes in her last months she would give me such sad looks that I trembled, and I felt that she was picturing me growing into the kind of woman she wished so much she had not become herself, and that she longed to save me. That is why I have told her that a good man loves me. She is so glad, my poor dear mamma, that I tell her again and again, and she loves to hear it as much as I to tell it. What she loves to hear most is that you really do want to marry me. She is so fond of hearing that because it is what my father would never say to her.”
Tommy was so much moved that he could not speak, but in his heart he gave thanks that what Grizel said of him to her mamma was true at last.
“It makes her so happy,” Grizel said, “that when I seem to see her now she looks as sweet and pure as she must have been in the days when she was an innocent girl. I think she can enter into my feelings more than any other person could ever do. Is that because she was my mother? She understands how I feel just as I can understand how in the end she was willing to be bad because he wanted it so much.”
“No, no, Grizel,” Tommy cried passionately, “you don’t understand that!”
She rocked her arms. “Yes, I do,” she said; “I do. I could never have cared for such a man; but I can understand how mamma yielded to him, and I have no feeling for her except pity, and I have told her so, and it is what she loves to hear her daughter tell her best of all.”
They put the subject from them, and she told him what it was that she had come to rub out in Caddam. If you have read of Tommy’s boyhood you may remember the day it ended with his departure for the farm, and that he and Elspeth walked through Caddam to the cart that was to take him from her, and how, to comfort her, he swore that he loved her with his whole heart, and Grizel not at all, and that Grizel was in the wood and heard. And how Elspeth had promised to wave to Tommy in the cart as long as it was visible, but broke down and went home sobbing, and how Grizel took her place and waved, pretending to be Elspeth, so that he might think she was bearing up bravely. Tommy had not known what Grizel did for him that day, and when he heard it now for the first time from her own lips, he realized afresh what a glorious girl she was and had always been.
“You may try to rub that memory out of little Grizel’s head,” he declared, looking very proudly at her, “but you shall never rub it out of mine.”
It was by his wish that they went together to the spot where she had heard him say that he loved Elspeth only—”if you can find it,” Tommy said, “after all these years”; and she smiled at his mannish words — she had found it so often since! There was the very clump of whin.
And here was the boy to match. Oh, who by striving could make himself a boy again as Tommy could! I tell you he was always irresistible then. What is genius? It is the power to be a boy again at will. When I think of him flinging off the years and whistling childhood back, not to himself only, but to all who heard, distributing it among them gaily, imperiously calling on them to dance, dance, for they are boys and girls again until they stop — when to recall him in those wild moods is to myself to grasp for a moment at the dear dead days that were so much the best, I cannot wonder that Grizel loved him. I am his slave myself; I see that all that was wrong with Tommy was that he could not always be a boy.
“Hide there again, Grizel,” he cried to her, little Tommy cried to her, Stroke the Jacobite, her captain, cried to the Lady Griselda; and he disappeared, and presently marched down the path with an imaginary Elspeth by his side. “I love you both, Elspeth,” he was going to say, “and my love for the one does not make me love the other less”; but he glanced at Grizel, and she was leaning forward to catch his words as if this were no play, but life or death, and he knew what she longed to hear him say, and he said it: “I love you very much, Elspeth, but however much I love you, it would be idle to pretend that I don’t love Grizel more.”
A stifled cry of joy came from a clump of whin hard by, and they were man and woman again.
“Did you not know it, Grizel?”
“No, no; you never told me.”
“I never dreamed it was necessary to tell you.”
“Oh, if you knew how I have longed that it might be so, yes, and sometimes hated Elspeth because I feared it could not be! I have tried so hard to be content with second place. I have thought it all out, and said to myself it was natural that Elspeth should be first.”
“My tragic love,” he said, “I can see you arguing in that way, but I don’t see you convincing yourself. My passionate Grizel is not the girl to accept second place from anyone. If I know anything of her, I know that.”
To his surprise, she answered softly: “You are wrong. I wonder at it myself, but I had made up my mind to be content with second place, and to be grateful for it.”
“I could not have believed it!” he cried.
“I could not have believed it myself,” said she.
“Are you the Grizel — —” he began.
“No,” she said, “I have changed a little,” and she looked pathetically at him.
“It stabs me,” he said, “to see you so humble.”
“I am humbler than I was,” she answered huskily, but she was looking at him with the fondest love.
“Don’t look at me so, Grizel,” he implored. “I am unworthy of it. I am the man who has made you so humble.”
“Yes,” she answered, and still she looked at him with the fondest love. A film came over his eyes, and she touched them softly with her handkerchief.
“Those eyes that but a little while ago were looking so coldly at you!” he said.
“Dear eyes!” said she.
“Though I were to strike you — —” he cried, raising his hand.
She took the hand in hers and kissed it.
“Has it come to this!” he said, and as she could not speak, she nodded. He fell upon his knees before her.
“I am glad you are a little sorry,” she said; “I am a little sorry myself.”
* * *
CHAPTER XIX
OF THE CHANGE IN THOMAS
To find ways of making David propose to Elspeth, of making Elspeth willing to exchange her brother for David — they were heavy tasks, but Tommy yoked himself to them gallantly and tugged like an Arab steed in the plough. It should be almost as pleasant to us as to him to think that love was what made him do it, for he was sure he loved Grizel at last, and that the one longing of his heart was to marry her; the one marvel to him was that he had ever longed ardently for anything else. Well, as you know, she longed for it also, but she was firm in her resolve that until Elspeth was engaged Tommy should be a single man. She even made him promise not to kiss her again so long as their love had to be kept secret. “It will be so sweet to wait,” she said bravely. As we shall see presently, his efforts to put Elspeth into the hands of David were apparently of no avail, but though this would have embittered many men, it drew only to the surface some of Tommy’s noblest attributes; as he suffered in silence he became gentler, more considerate, and acquired a new command over himself. To conquer self for her sake (this is in the “Letters to a Young Man”) is the highest tribute a man can pay to a woman; it is the only real greatness, and Tommy had done it now. I could give you a score of proofs. Let us take his treatment of Aaron Latta.
One day about this time Tommy found himself alone in the house with Aaron, and had he been the old Tommy he would have waited but a moment to let Aaron decide which of them should go elsewhere. It was thus that these two, ever so uncomfortable in each other’s presence, contrived to keep the pea
ce. Now note the change.
“Aaron,” said Tommy, in the hush that had fallen on that house since quiet Elspeth left it, “I have never thanked you in words for all that you have done for me and Elspeth.”
“Dinna do it now, then,” replied the warper, fidgeting.
“I must,” Tommy said cheerily, “I must”; and he did, while Aaron scowled.
“It was never done for you,” Aaron informed him, “nor for the father you are the marrows o’.”
“It was done for my mother,” said Tommy, reverently.
“I’m none so sure o’t,” Aaron rapped out. “I think I brocht you twa here as bairns, that the reminder of my shame should ever stand before me.”
But Tommy shook his head, and sat down sympathetically beside the warper. “You loved her, Aaron,” he said simply. “It was an undying love that made you adopt her orphan children.” A charming thought came to him. “When you brought us here,” he said, with some elation, “Elspeth used to cry at nights because our mother’s spirit did not come to us to comfort us, and I invented boyish explanations to appease her. But I have learned since why we did not see that spirit; for though it hovered round this house, its first thought was not for us, but for him who succoured us.”
He could have made it much better had he been able to revise it, but surely it was touching, and Aaron need not have said “Damn,” which was what he did say.
One knows how most men would have received so harsh an answer to such gentle words, and we can conceive how a very holy man, say a monk, would have bowed to it. Even as the monk did Tommy submit, or say rather with the meekness of a nun.
“I wish I could help you in any way, Aaron,” he said, with a sigh.
“You can,” replied Aaron, promptly, “by taking yourself off to London, and leaving Elspeth here wi’ me. I never made pretence that I wanted you, except because she wouldna come without you. Laddie and man, as weel you ken, you were aye a scunner to me.”
“And yet,” said Tommy, looking at him admiringly, “you fed and housed and educated us. Ah, Aaron, do you not see that your dislike gives me the more reason only to esteem you?” Carried away by desire to help the old man, he put his hand kindly on his shoulder. “You have never respected yourself,” he said, “since the night you and my mother parted at the Cuttle Well, and my heart bleeds to think of it. Many a year ago, by your kindness to two forlorn children, you expiated that sin, and it is blotted out from your account. Forget it, Aaron, as every other person has forgotten it, and let the spirit of Jean Myles see you tranquil once again.”