Complete Works of J. M. Barrie

by Unknown

  “No,” the doctor answered gravely, laying his hand on hers, “no, it was just sweet.”

  *

  What McQueen had to say to her was not for Tommy’s ears, and the conversation was but a makeshift until they reached Thrums, where he sent the boy home, recommending him to hold his tongue about the escapade (and Tommy of course saw the advisability of keeping it from Elspeth); but he took Grizel into his parlor and set her down on the buffet stool by the fire, where he surveyed her in silence at his leisure. Then he tried her in his old armchair, then on his sofa; then he put the Mentor into her hand and told her to hold it as if it were a duster, then he sent her into the passage, with instructions to open the door presently and announce “Dinner is ready;” then he told her to put some coals on the fire; then he told her to sit at the window, first with an open book in her hand, secondly as if she was busy knitting; and all these things she did wondering exceedingly, for he gave no explanation except the incomprehensible one, “I want to see what it would be like.”

  She had told him in the gig why she had changed the position of the mirror at Double Dykes, it was to let “that darling” wave good-by to her from the window; and now having experimented with her in his parlor he drew her toward his chair, so that she stood between his knees. And he asked her if she understood why he had gone to Double Dykes.

  “Was it to get me to tell you what were the names in the letter?” she said, wistfully. “That is what everyone asks me, but I won’t tell, no, I won’t;” and she closed her mouth hard.

  He, too, would have liked to hear the names, and he sighed, it must be admitted, at sight of that determined mouth, but he could say truthfully, “Your refusal to break your promise is one of the things that I admire in you.”

  Admire! Grizel could scarce believe that this gift was for her. “You don’t mean that you really like me?” she faltered, but she felt sure all the time that he did, and she cried, “Oh, but why, oh, how can you!”

  “For one reason,” he said, “because you are so good.”

  “Good! Oh! oh! oh!” She clapped her hands joyously.

  “And for another — because you are so brave.”

  “But I am not really brave,” she said anxiously, yet resolved to hide nothing, “I only pretend to be brave, I am often frightened, but I just don’t let on.”

  That, he told her, is the highest form of bravery, but Grizel was very, very tired of being brave, and she insisted impetuously, “I don’t want to be brave, I want to be afraid, like other girls.”

  “Ay, it’s your right, you little woman,” he answered, tenderly, and then again he became mysterious. He kicked off his shoes to show her that he was wearing socks that did not match. “I just pull on the first that come to hand,” he said recklessly.

  “Oh!” cried Grizel.

  On his dusty bookshelves he wrote, with his finger, “Not dusted since the year One.”

  “Oh! oh!” she cried.

  He put his fingers through his gray, untidy hair. “That’s the only comb I have that is at hand when I want it,” he went on, regardless of her agony.

  “All the stud-holes in my shirts,” he said, “are now so frayed and large that the studs fall out, and I find them in my socks at night.”

  Oh! oh! he was killing her, he was, but what cared he? “Look at my clothes,” said the cruel man, “I read when I’m eating, and I spill so much gravy that — that we boil my waistcoat once a month, and make soup of it!”

  To Grizel this was the most tragic picture ever drawn by man, and he saw that it was time to desist. “And it’s all,” he said, looking at her sadly, “it’s all because I am a lonely old bachelor with no womankind to look after him, no little girl to brighten him when he comes home dog-tired, no one to care whether his socks are in holes and his comb behind the wash-stand, no soft hand to soothe his brow when it aches, no one to work for, no one to love, many a one to close the old bachelor’s eyes when he dies, but none to drop a tear for him, no one to—”

  “Oh! oh! oh! That is just like me. Oh! oh!” cried Grizel, and he pulled her closer to him, saying, “The more reason we should join thegither; Grizel, if you don’t take pity on me, and come and bide with me and be my little housekeeper, the Lord Almighty only knows what is to become of the old doctor.”

  At this she broke away from him, and stood far back pressing her arms to her sides, and she cried, “It is not out of charity you ask me, is it?” and then she went a little nearer. “You would not say it if it wasn’t true, would you?”

  “No, my dawtie, it’s true,” he told her, and if he had been pitying himself a little, there was an end of that now.

  She remembered something and cried joyously, “And you knew what was in my blood before you asked me, so I don’t need to tell you, do I? And you are not afraid that I shall corrupt you, are you? And you don’t think it a pity I didn’t die when I was a tiny baby, do you? Some people think so, I heard them say it.”

  “What would have become of me?” was all he dared answer in words, but he drew her to him again, and when she asked if it was true, as she had heard some woman say, that in some matters men were all alike, and did what that one man had done to her mamma, he could reply solemnly, “No, it is not true; it’s a lie that has done more harm than any war in any century.”

  She sat on his knee, telling him many things that had come recently to her knowledge but were not so new to him. The fall of woman was the subject, a strange topic for a girl of thirteen and a man of sixty. They don’t become wicked in a moment, he learned; if they are good to begin with, it takes quite a long time to make them bad. Her mamma was good to begin with. “I know she was good, because when she thought she was the girl she used to be, she looked sweet and said lovely things.” The way the men do is this, they put evil thoughts into the woman’s head, and say them often to her, till she gets accustomed to them, and thinks they cannot be bad when the man she loves likes them, and it is called corrupting the mind.

  “And then a baby comes to them,” Grizel said softly, “and it is called a child of shame. I am a child of shame.”

  He made no reply, so she looked up, and his face was very old and sad. “I am sorry too,” she whispered, but still he said nothing, and then she put her fingers on his eyes to discover if they were wet, and they were wet. And so Grizel knew that there was someone who loved her at last.

  The mirror was the only article of value that Grizel took with her to her new home; everything else was rouped at the door of Double Dykes; Tommy, who should have been at his books, acting as auctioneer’s clerk for sixpence. There are houses in Thrums where you may still be told who got the bed and who the rocking-chair, and how Nether Drumgley’s wife dared him to come home without the spinet; but it is not by the sales that the roup is best remembered. Curiosity took many persons into Double Dykes that day, and in the room that had never been furnished they saw a mournful stack of empty brandy bottles, piled there by the auctioneer who had found them in every corner, beneath the bed, in presses, in boxes, whither they had been thrust by Grizel’s mamma, as if to conceal their number from herself. The counting of these bottles was a labor, but it is not even by them that the roup is remembered. Among them some sacrilegious hands found a bundle of papers with a sad blue ribbon round them. They were the Painted Lady’s loveletters, the letters she had written to the man. Why or how they had come back to her no one knew.

  Most of them were given to Grizel, but a dozen or more passed without her leave into the kists of various people, where often since then they have been consulted by swains in need of a pretty phrase; and Tommy’s school-fellows, the very boys and girls who hooted the Painted Lady, were in time — so oddly do things turn out — to be among those whom her letters taught how to woo. Where the kists did not let in the damp or careless fingers, the paper long remained clean, the ink but little faded. Some of the letters were creased, as if they had once been much folded, perhaps for slipping into secret hiding-places, but none of them bore a
ny address or a date. “To my beloved,” was sometimes written on the cover, and inside he was darling or beloved again. So no one could have arranged them in the order in which they were written, though there was a three-cornered one which said it was the first. There was a violet in it, clinging to the paper as if they were fond of each other, and Grizel’s mamma had written, “The violet is me, hiding in a corner because I am so happy.” The letters were in many moods, playful, reflective, sad, despairing, arch, but all were written in an ecstasy of the purest love, and most of them were cheerful, so that you seemed to see the sun dancing on the paper while she wrote, the same sun that afterwards showed up her painted cheeks. Why they came back to her no one ever discovered, any more than how she who slipped the violet into that three-cornered one and took it out to kiss again and wrote, “It is my first loveletter, and I love it so much I am reluctant to let it go,” became in a few years the derision of the Double Dykes. Some of these letters may be in old kists still, but whether that is so or not, they alone have passed the Painted Lady’s memory from one generation to another, and they have purified it, so that what she was died with her vile body, and what she might have been lived on, as if it were her true self.

  CHAPTER XXXIV

  WHO TOLD TOMMY TO SPEAK

  “Miss Alison Cray presents her compliments to — and requests the favor of their company at her marriage with Mr. Ivie McLean, on January 8th, at six o’clock.”

  Tommy in his Sabbath clothes, with a rose from the Dovecot hot-house for buttonhole (which he slipped into his pocket when he saw other boys approaching), delivered them at the doors of the aristocracy, where, by the way, he had been a few weeks earlier, with another circular.

  “Miss Alison Cray being about to give up school, has pleasure in stating that she has disposed of the goodwill of her establishment to Miss Jessy Langlands and Miss S. Oram, who will enter upon their scholastic duties on January 9th, at Hoods Cottage, where she most cordially,” and so on.

  Here if the writer dared (but you would be so angry) he would introduce at the length of a chapter two brand-new characters, the Misses Langlands and Oram, who suddenly present themselves to him in the most sympathetic light. Miss Ailie has been safely stowed to port, but their little boat is only setting sail, and they are such young ones, neither out of her teens, that he would fain turn for a time from her to them. Twelve pounds they paid for the goodwill, and, oh, the exciting discussions, oh, the scraping to get the money together! If little Miss Langlands had not been so bold, big Miss Oram must have drawn back, but if Miss Oram had not had that idea about a paper partition, of what avail the boldness of Miss Langlands? How these two trumps of girls succeeded in hiring the Painted Lady’s spinet from Nether Drumgley — in the absence of his wife, who on her way home from buying a cochin-china met the spinet in a cart — how the mother of one of them, realizing in a klink that she was common no more, henceforth wore black caps instead of mutches (but the father dandered on in the old plebeian way), what the enterprise meant to a young man in distant Newcastle, whose favorite name was Jessy, how the news travelled to still more distant Canada, where a family of emigrants which had left its Sarah behind in Thrums, could talk of nothing else for weeks — it is hard to have to pass on without dwelling on these things, and indeed — but pass on we must.

  The chief figure at the wedding of Miss Ailie was undoubtedly Mr. T. Sandys. When one remembers his prominence, it is difficult to think that the wedding could have taken place without him. It was he (in his Sabbath clothes again, and now flaunting his buttonhole brazenly) who in insulting language ordered the rabble to stand back there. It was he who dashed out to the ‘Sosh to get a hundred ha’pennies for the fifty pennies Mr. McLean had brought to toss into the air. It was he who went round in the carriage to pick up the guests and whisked them in and out, and slammed the door, and saw to it that the minister was not kept waiting, and warned Miss Ailie that if she did not come now they should begin without her. It was he who stood near her with a handkerchief ready in his hand lest she took to crying on her new brown silk (Miss Ailie was married in brown silk after all). As a crown to his audacity, it was he who told Mr. Dishart, in the middle of a noble passage, to mind the lamp.

  These duties were Dr. McQueen’s, the best man, but either demoralized by the bridegroom, who went all to pieces at the critical moment and was much more nervous than the bride, or in terror lest Grizel, who had sent him to the wedding speckless and most beautifully starched, should suddenly appear at the door and cry, “Oh, oh, take your fingers off your shirt!” he was through other till the knot was tied, and then it was too late, for Tommy had made his mark. It was Tommy who led the way to the school-room, where the feast was ready, it was Tommy who put the guests in their places (even the banker cringed to him), it was. Tommy who winked to Mr. Dishart as a sign to say grace. As you will readily believe, Miss Ailie could not endure the thought of excluding her pupils from the festivities, and they began to arrive as soon as the tables had been cleared of all save oranges and tarts and raisins. Tommy, waving Gavinia aside, showed them in, and one of them, curious to tell, was Corp, in borrowed blacks, and Tommy shook hands with him and called him Mr. Shiach, both new experiences to Corp, who knocked over a table in his anxiety to behave himself, and roared at intervals “Do you see the little deevil!” and bit his warts and then politely swallowed the blood.

  As if oranges and tarts and raisins were not enough, came the Punch and Judy show, Tommy’s culminating triumph. All the way to Redlintie had Mr. McLean sent for the Punch and Judy show, and nevertheless there was a probability of no performance, for Miss Ailie considered the show immoral. Most anxious was she to give pleasure to her pupils, and this she knew was the best way, but how could she countenance an entertainment which was an encouragement to every form of vice and crime? To send these children to the Misses Langlands and Oram, fresh from an introduction to the comic view of murder! It could not be done, now could it? Mr. McLean could make no suggestion. Mr. Dishart thought it would be advisable to substitute another entertainment; was there not a game called “The Minister’s Cat”? Mrs. Dishart thought they should have the show and risk the consequences. So also thought Dr. McQueen. The banker was consulted, but saw no way out of the difficulty, nor did the lawyer, nor did the Misses Finlayson. Then Tommy appeared on the scene, and presently retired to find a way.

  He found it. The performance took place, and none of the fun was omitted, yet neither Miss Ailie — tuts, tuts Mrs. McLean — nor Mr. Dishart could disapprove. Punch did chuck his baby out at the window (roars of laughter) in his jovial time-honored way, but immediately thereafter up popped the showman to say, “Ah, my dear boys and girls, let this be a lesson to you never to destroy your offsprings. Oh, shame on Punch, for to do the wicked deed; he will be catched in the end and serve him right.” Then when Mr. Punch had wolloped his wife with the stick, amid thunders of applause, up again bobbed the showman, “Ah, my dear boys and girls, what a lesson is this we sees, what goings on is this? He have bashed the head of her as should ha’ been the apple of his eye, and he does not care a — he does not care; but mark my words, his home it will now be desolate, no more shall she meet him at his door with kindly smile, he have done for her quite, and now he is a hunted man. Oh, be warned by his sad igsample, and do not bash the head of your loving wife.” And there was a great deal more of the same, and simple Mrs. McLean almost wept tears of joy because her favorite’s good heart had suggested these improvements.

  Grizel was not at the wedding; she was invited, but could not go because she was in mourning. But only her parramatty frock was in mourning, for already she had been the doctor’s housekeeper for two full months, and her father had not appeared to plague her (he never did appear, it may be told at once), and so how could her face be woeful when her heart leapt with gladness? Never had prisoner pined for the fields more than this reticent girl to be frank, and she poured out her inmost self to the doctor, so that daily he discovered something be
autiful (and exasperating) about womanhood. And it was his love for her that had changed her. “You do love me, don’t you?” she would say, and his answer might be “I have told you that fifty times already;” to which she would reply, gleefully, “That is not often, I say it all day to myself.”

  Exasperating? Yes, that was the word. Long before summer came, the doctor knew that he had given himself into the hands of a tyrant. It was idle his saying that this irregularity and that carelessness were habits that had become part of him; she only rocked her arms impatiently, and if he would not stand still to be put to rights, then she would follow him along the street, brushing him as he walked, a sight that was witnessed several times while he was in the mutinous stage.

  “Talk about masterfulness,” he would say, when she whipped off his coat or made a dart at the mud on his trousers; “you are the most masterful little besom I ever clapped eyes on.”

  But as he said it he perhaps crossed his legs, and she immediately cried, “You have missed two holes in lacing your boots!”

  Of a morning he would ask her sarcastically to examine him from top to toe and see if he would do, and examine him she did, turning him round, pointing out that he had been sitting “again” on his tails, that oh, oh, he must have cut that buttonhole with his knife. He became most artful in hiding deficiencies from her, but her suspicions once roused would not sleep, and all subterfuge was vain. “Why have you buttoned your coat up tight to the throat to-day?” she would demand sternly.

  “It is such a cold morning,” he said.

  “That is not the reason,” she replied at once (she could see through broadcloth at a glance), “I believe you have on the old necktie again, and you promised to buy a new one.”