"I didn't
allude to Mr. Macdonald."
"Don't you suppose I know to whom you
alluded, dear? Is not your
style so simple, frank, and direct that a wayfaring girl can read it
and not err
therein? No, I am not sitting on your feet, and it is
not time to go to sleep; I wonder you do not tire of making those
futile protests. As a matter of fact, we began this
literarydiscussion
yesterday morning, but were interrupted; and
knowing that
it was sure to come up again, I prepared for it with Salemina. She
furnished the
ammunition, so to speak, and I fired the guns."
"You always make so much noise with blank cartridges I wonder you
ever
bother about real shot," I remarked.
"Penelope, how can you abuse me when I am in trouble? Well, Mr.
Macdonald was prating, as usual, about the
antiquity of Scotland and
its aeons of
stirring history. I am so weary of the venerableness
of this country. How old will it have to be, I wonder, before it
gets used to it? If it's the
province of art to
conceal art, it
ought to be the
province of age to
conceal age, and it generally is.
`Everything doesn't improve with years,' I observed sententiously.
"'For instance?' he inquired.
"Of course you know how that question
affected me! How I do dislike
an
appetite for
specific details! It is simply paralysing to a good
conversation. Do you remember that silly game in which some one
points a stick at you and says, `Beast, bird, or fish,--BEAST!' and
you have to name one while he counts ten? If a beast has been
requested, you can think of one fish and two birds, but no beast.
If he says `FISH,' all the beasts in the
universe stalk through your
memory, but not one finny, sealy, swimming thing! Well, that is the
effect of `For instance?' on my faculties. So I stumbled a bit, and
succeeded in re
calling, as objects which do not improve with age,
mushrooms, women, and chickens, and he was obliged to agree with me,
which nearly killed him. Then I said that although America is so
fresh and
blooming that people
persist in
calling it young, it is
much older than it appears to the
superficial eye. There is no real
propriety in dating us as a nation from the Declaration of
Independence in 1776, I said, nor even from the
landing of the
Pilgrims in 1620; nor, for that matter, from Columbus's discovery in
1492. It's my opinion, I asserted, that some of us had been there
thousands of years before, but nobody had had the sense to discover
us. We couldn't discover ourselves,--though if we could have
foreseen how the sere and yellow nations of the earth would taunt us
with youth and inexperience, we should have had to do something
desperate!"
"That theory must have been very
convincing to the philosophic Scots
mind," I interjected.
"It was; even Mr. Macdonald thought it
ingenious. `And so,' I went
on, `we were alive and awake and
beginning to make history when you
Scots were only bare-legged savages roaming over the hills and
stealing cattle. It was a very bad habit of yours, that cattle-
stealing, and one which you kept up too long.'
"'No worse a sin than your stealing land from the Indians,' he said.
"'Oh yes,' I answered, `because it was a smaller one! Yours was a
vice, and ours a sin; or I mean it would have been a sin had we done
it; but in
reality we didn't steal land; we just TOOK it, reserving
plenty for the Indians to play about on; and for every hunting-
ground we took away we gave them in exchange a serviceable plough,
or a school, or a nice Indian agent, or something. That was land-
grabbing, if you like, but it is a habit you Britishers have still,
while we gave it up when we reached years of discretion.'"
"This is very illuminating," I interrupted, now
thoroughly wide
awake, "but it isn't my idea of a
literary discussion."
"I am coming to that," she responded. "It was just at this point
that, goaded into secret fury by my
innocent speech about cattle-
stealing, he began to belittle American
literature, the poetry
especially. Of course he waxed
eloquent about the royal line of
poet-kings that had made his country famous, and said the people who
could claim Shakespeare had reason to be the proudest nation on
earth. `Doubtless,' I said. `But do you mean to say that Scotland
has any nearer claim upon Shakespeare than we have? I do not now
allude to the fact that in the large sense he is the common property
of the English-speaking world' (Salemina told me to say that), `but
Shakespeare died in 1616, and the union of Scotland with England
didn't come about till 1707, nearly a century afterwards. You
really haven't anything to do with him! But as for us, we didn't
leave England until 1620, when Shakespeare had been
perfectly dead
four years. We took very good care not to come away too soon.
Chaucer and Spenser were dead too, and we had nothing to stay for!'"
I was obliged to relax here and give vent to a burst of
merriment at
Francesca's absurdities.
"I could see that he had never regarded the matter in that light
before," she went on gaily, encouraged by my
laughter, "but he
braced himself for the
conflict, and said `I wonder that you didn't
stay a little longer while you were about it. Milton and Ben Jonson
were still alive; Bacon's Novum Organum was just coming out; and in
thirty or forty years you could have had L'Allegro, Il Penseroso and
Paradise Lost; Newton's Principia, too, in 1687. Perhaps these were
all too serious and heavy for your national taste; still one
sometimes likes to claim things one cannot fully
appreciate. And
then, too, if you had once begun to stay,
waiting for the great
things to happen and the great books to be written, you would never
have gone, for there would still have been Browning, Tennyson, and
Swinburne to delay you.'
"'If we couldn't stay to see out your great bards, we certainly
couldn't afford to remain and
welcome your minor ones,' I answered
frigidly; `but we wanted to be well out of the way before England
united with Scotland,
knowing that if we were
uncomfortable as
things were, it would be a good deal worse after the Union; and we
had to come home anyway, and start our own poets. Emerson,
Whittier, Longfellow, Holmes, and Lowell had to be born.'
"'I suppose they had to be if you had set your mind on it,' he said,
`though
personally I could have spared one or two on that roll of
honour.'
"'Very probably,' I remarked, as
thoroughly angry now as he intended
I should be. `We cannot expect you to
appreciate all the American
poets; indeed, you cannot
appreciate all of your own, for the same
nation doesn't always furnish the writers and the readers. Take
your precious Browning, for example! There are hundreds of Browning
Clubs in America, and I never heard of a single one in Scotland.'
"'No,' he retorted, `I dare say; but there is a good deal in
belonging to a people who can understand him without clubs!'"
"O Francesca!" I exclaimed, sitting bolt
upright among my pillows.
"How could you give him that chance! How COULD you! What did you
say?"
"I said nothing," she replied
mysteriously. "I did something much
more to the point,--I cried!"
"CRIED?"
"Yes, cried; not rivers and freshets of woe, but small brooks and
streamlets of
helpless mortification."
"What did he do then?"
"Why do you say `do'?"
"Oh, I mean `say,' of course. Don't
trifle; go on. What did he say
then?"
"There are some things too
dreadful to describe," she answered, and
wrapping her Italian blanket majestically about her she
retired to
her own
apartment, shooting one enigmatical glance at me as she
closed the door.
That glance puzzled me for some time after she left the room. It
was as
expressive and interesting a beam as ever darted from a
woman's eye. The
combination of elements involved in it, if an
abstract thing may be conceived as existing in
component parts, was
something like this:-
One-half, mystery.
One-eighth, triumph.
One-eighth, amusement.
One-sixteenth, pride.
One-sixteenth, shame.
One-sixteenth, desire to confess.
One-sixteenth,
determination to
conceal.
And all these
delicate,
complex emotions played together in a circle
of arching
eyebrow, curving lip, and
tremulous chin,--played
together, mingling and melting into one another like fire and snow;
bewildering, mystifying, enchanting the beholder!
If Ronald Macdonald did--I am a woman, but, for one, I can hardly
blame him!
Chapter XXII. Francesca entertains the green-eyed monster.
`"O has he chosen a bonny bride,
An' has he clean forgotten me?"
An' sighing said that gay ladye,
"I would I were in my ain countrie!"'
Lord Beichan.
It rained in torrents; Salemina was darning stockings in the
inglenook at Bide-a-Wee Cottage, and I was
reading her a Scotch
letter which Francesca and I had concocted the evening before. I
proposed sending the
document to certain chosen spirits in our own
country, who were pleased to be facetious
concerning our
devotion to
Scotland. It contained, in sooth, little that was new, and still
less that was true, for we were confined to a very small vocabulary
which we were obliged to
supplement now and then by a dip into Burns
and Allan Ramsay.
Here is the letter:-
Bide-a-Wee Cottage,
Pettybaw,
East Neuk o' Fife.
To my
trusty fieres,
Mony's the time I hae ettled to send ye a screed, but there was aye
something that cam' i' the gait. It wisna that I couldna be fashed,
for aften hae I thocht o' ye and my hairt has been wi' ye mony's the
day. There's no' muckle fowk frae Ameriky hereawa; they're a' jist
Fife bodies, and a lass canna get her tongue roun' their thrapple-
taxin' words ava', so it's like I may een drap a' the
sweetness o'
my good mither-tongue.
`Tis a dulefu' nicht, and an awfu' blash is ragin' wi'oot. Fanny's
awa' at the gowff rinnin' aboot wi' a bag o' sticks after a wee bit
ba', and Sally and I are hame by oor lane. Laith will the lassie be
to weet her bonny shoon, but lang ere the play'll be ower she'll wat
her hat aboon. A gust o' win' is skirlin' the noo, and as we luik
ower the faem, the haar is risin', weetin' the green swaird wi'
misty shoo'rs.
Yestreen was a calm
simmer gloamin', sae sweet an' bonnie that when
the sun was sinkin' doon ower Pettybaw Sands we daundered ower the
muir. As we cam' through the scented birks, we saw a trottin'
burnie wimplin' `neath the white-blossomed slaes and hirplin' doon
the
hillside; an' while a herd-laddie lilted ower the fernie brae, a
cushat cooed leesomely doon i' the dale. We pit aff oor shoon, sae
blithe were we, kilted oor coats a little aboon the knee, and
paidilt i' the burn, gettin' geyan weet the while. Then Sally pu'd
the gowans wat wi' dew an' twined her bree wi' tasselled broom,
while I had a wee crackie wi' Tibby Buchan, the flesher's dochter
frae Auld Reekie. Tibby's nae giglet gawky like the lave, ye ken,--
she's a sonsie maid, as sweet as ony hinny pear, wi' her twa pawky
een an' her cockernony snooded up fu' sleek.
We were unco gleg to win hame when a' this was dune, an' after
steekin' the door, to sit an' birsle oor taes at the bit blaze.
Mickle thocht we o' the gentles ayont the sea, an' sair grat we for
a' frien's we kent lang syne in oor ain countree.
Late at nicht, Fanny, the bonny gypsy, cam' ben the hoose an' tirled
at the pin of oor bigly bower door, speirin' for baps and bannocks.
"Hoots, lassie!" cried oot Sally, "th' auld carline i' the kitchen
is i' her box-bed, an' weel aneuch ye ken is lang syne cuddled
doon."
"Oo ay!" said Fanny, strikin' her curly pow, "then fetch me
parritch, an' dinna be lang wi' them, for I've lickit a Pettybaw lad