Phemie Keller

There is an Indian plant which will grow and flourish in any place, under any circumstances.

Earth it does not ask—care it does not demand. Cut it off from all apparent means of support, and it thrives notwithstanding. Detach a leaf from the parent plant, suspend it by a thread from the ceiling, and behold! the leaf, receiving all the nourishment it requires from the atmosphere alone, puts out roots.

As he lay in bed wearily counting away the long hours of convalescence; as he sat in the family sitting-room; as he followed his host or his host’s children slowly around the farm, Captain Stondon never ceased thinking about that strange plant, and likening it to Mr. Aggland.

Cut off apparently from all temptation to eccentricity—removed from contact with a world which, galling sensitive natures, sometimes produces curious mental sores and running humours in the best—earning his bread in a primitive manner, trying neither to his brain nor to his temper—placed in a station that seems to have been removed by Providence further from slight and aggravation than any other under heaven, Mr. Aggland was yet peculiar in his manners, habits, and ideas,—peculiar to a degree.

Like the air plant, his oddities were self-supporting and self-propagating; the older he grew, the more eccentric he became. Time only increased his prejudices; years only brought his peculiarities into more prominent relief; a large family merely gave him endless opportunities of airing his pet crotchets, of exhibiting his singular stock of information. Never by any chance did he do anything like other people. He had a way and a fashion of his own—even of sowing seeds in his garden; and his ideas on the subject of training and education had produced as singular a flock of argumentative children as could have been found in the length and breadth of “canny Cumberlan’.”

True offspring of the hills—sturdy, self-reliant, self-opinionated, courageous—the Agglands and the Kings composed a remarkable household; one in which, nevertheless, whenever he was able to rise from his bed and limp about the place, Captain Stondon speedily found himself at home.

His first advances towards acquaintanceship had been received by the juvenile fry with caution, not to say suspicion. Distrust of a stranger being, however, mingled with a feeling that they held a kind of property in him, that he was the spoil of their bow and arrow, of their sword and spear, produced a certain—I cannot say graciousness—but unbending of their usual ungraciousness in his favour. They did not know what to make of this “‘gowk’ who had been so feckless as to miss t’rod, and go sossing from wig to wa’ down the hul;” but the very fact of their dog “Davy” having found the injured man in a “soond,” and of their father having procured help and brought him home, and nursed him through his illness, caused the lads to feel a kind of compassionate interest in their new friend.

They had been kept so much out of the sickroom that their curiosity had naturally been excited likewise. Indeed, Captain Stondon’s first interview with Duncan, Mr. Aggland’s eldest born, was held under difficulties, while that young gentleman stood with the chamber-door half open, surveying the man who had lain in bed till they all settled he was never going to rise again.

“Have you got anything to say to me, my lad?” asked Captain Stondon, stretching out one weak hand towards his visitor.

“No; have you got anything to say to me?” replied Duncan, clenching the handle of the door tighter as he spoke.

“I do not know that I have,” answered Captain Stondon, who was rather taken aback by this unexpected question. “Did you do well at school to-day?”

“You do not care to know that; you have no lessons to get,” replied Duncan, with the air of a bird far too old to be caught by such conversational chaff, but he took a step forward into the room notwithstanding.

“Are you no dowly lying there so long?” he asked, after a pause.

“If you tell me what you mean by dowly, I will answer your question,” said Captain Stondon.

“Are you thinking long? You know what that is, I suppose,” explained Duncan, who had learnt the phrase from his Scotch mother.

“I am not exactly sure that I do; but if you want to know whether I am tired of being laid up here, I must answer ‘yes.’ I shall feel very glad to be out of bed, and walking about once more.”

“I will take you to see the Strammer Tarn, if you like, when you are well,” volunteered his visitor.

“Now I tell you what it is, Duncan,” broke in Mr. Aggland at this juncture; “if I ever catch you here again without my permission, I will box your ears. Indeed, I have a very great mind to box them now.”

And straightway the father inflicted condign punishment on his son, who retired howling from the apartment, while Mr. Aggland walked to the window, and looked out, muttering to himself, half-apologetically—

Captain Stondon had not the remotest idea what Mr. Aggland meant by his quotation, but he knew that the man’s face looked softened and sorrowful when he turned from the window, and remarked that “boys would be boys, and that Duncan was his mother’s son all over.”

Of course it was impossible for Captain Stondon to negative this statement, but he thought Duncan greatly resembled his father for all that.

“You will excuse their ill-manners, sir,” proceeded Mr. Aggland. “They see no one, poor things. They can learn no better in a wilderness like this. I do my best to bring them up honest men and women, ‘fearing God, honouring the Queen.’ But for anything else! What can I teach them here in this ‘cell of ignorance,’ as Guiderius happily calls the country.”

“You can teach them what you know, doubtless,” answered Captain Stondon. “Your education seems to have been much better attended to than that of most persons, whether in town or country; and you can surely impart to your children a portion at least of that which you once learnt yourself.”

“Superficial—all superficial,” said Mr. Aggland, with a sigh. “Here a little, there a little—a mere smattering of education. Once, indeed, the fields of learning lay open before me, but I would not when I could; and you know what is the fate of people who trifle with their opportunities. Afterwards I could not when I would; and the result is that I am here, and my children are here, and here we shall all remain till the end of the chapter. The boys, some of them, have fair abilities, and with good fortune, it is probable they may eventually——hold the plough well,” finished Mr. Aggland, abruptly.

Truth was, the father had been going to end his sentence very differently, but feeling that a stranger could scarcely sympathise with his hopes, and knowing that, between the future he desired and the present in which he lived, there was a gap broad as poverty, he substituted other words for those he was about to speak, and before Captain Stondon could reply to his remark, hastened to change the subject.

“I should be sorry to go back into the world again,” he said, “though I do rail at times against this wilderness, and, like Lamb, consign hills, woods, lakes, mountains, to the eternal devil. I abuse nature as men often show their tenderness by speaking disparagingly of the women they love best; and I cannot understand the state of that soul which should find its love of natural scenery satisfied by the ‘patches of long waving grass and the stunted trees that blacken in the old churchyard nooks which you may yet find bordering on Thames Street.’”

“I never was in Thames Street, so far as I recollect,” remarked Captain Stondon, to whom it never occurred that Mr. Aggland was quoting from a book; “but I do not think the scenery to be met with there would satisfy me. Nevertheless, I confess that for the future I shall like mountains better at a distance. Of one thing I am positive, namely, that I shall be content hereafter to admire their beauties from below.”

Mr. Aggland laughed. “You had a bad fall,” he said, “and would have had a long lie of it but for Mr. Conbyr and my dog Davy. Mr. Conbyr could not rest in his bed till he had sent a man over on his Galloway to see if you were safely housed in your inn at Grassenfel; and when the news came back that you had not been heard of, nothing would serve him but that I should turn out and look for you. So Davy and I, and Jack Holms, started on the search. Mr. Conbyr wanted to come with us, but I would have none of him. Davy knew what we were out for as well as if he had been a Christian.”

“What breed is he?” interrupted Captain Stondon: “a St. Bernard?”

“Not a bit of it,” answered Mr. Aggland; “he is something between a Coolie, a Skye, and a Scotch terrier—but what I cannot tell you. Anyhow, he knew what we were looking for, and just when Jack and I thought we must give over the search, he picks up your hat, sir, and brings it to us in his teeth. Then we knew you must be somewhere in the neighbourhood, and Davy hunted about, smelling up and down till he found you behind the rock, and a nice pickle you were in when found. I had no notion but that you were dead. I tell you honestly now, sir, I no more expected ever to hear you speak when we carried you into this house, than I expect the Queen to send for me and make me an earl.”

“I do not think I ever should have spoken much again but for the good care you bestowed upon me.”

“Well, I flatter myself I am a tolerable nurse,” replied Mr. Aggland; “’tis a trick I learned in my early youth. When Mr. Conbyr came here, wanting to have you carried down to the Vicarage, I said him gently nay. ‘You’ll excuse me, Mr. Conbyr,’ I remarked, ‘but out of my house the gentleman does not stir till he is fit to make a choice for himself. You sent him up the hill path, with a storm brewing, as any child could have told you, and I brought him off the mountain side with the rain pouring down heavens hard: so, with your leave, sir, I’ll e’en see to the curing of him myself.’ I suppose, however, when once you are able to limp about on a stick he will have you away, and then—‘for ever and for ever farewell.’”

Here was the opening Captain Stondon had for days been anticipating, and seizing his opportunity, he assured Mr. Aggland he entertained no such passionate friendship for the clergyman as would cause him to desert the Hill Farm for the Vicarage. But at the same time Captain Stondon hinted that sickness brought its attendant expenses, that it entailed various and sundry inconveniences; that, in short, unless Mr. Aggland, who was blessed with a large family, agreed to permit the speaker, who had no children, to——

“In short,” broke in Mr. Aggland at this point, “you want to pay me; you are, I presume, rich; I am, you presume, poor; and there you chance to be quite correct. Whatever troubles I have, I am not ‘perk’d up in a glistering grief;’ I do not ‘wear a golden sorrow.’ Yes, I am a poor man. There is no use in my trying to deny the fact.” And Mr. Aggland took a halfpenny from his pocket, tossed it in the air, then covered it over with his hand, and turning towards Captain Stondon a little defiantly, waited for his answer.

“I do not want to pay you,” said that gentleman; “I never could pay you for the kindness you have shown me. For my life, for the long hours you have sat beside my bed, for all you have done by me, I shall be your debtor always, and I am not of so thankless a nature that I desire to be out of your debt. All I meant was, that as long as a man is alive you cannot keep him for nothing—you must acknowledge the truth of that proposition, Mr. Aggland. There is not a child you have but costs you something every day——”

Up went the halfpenny once again, and once again Mr. Aggland covered it with his hand.

“I, a bachelor,” proceeded Captain Stondon, “should not be a burden on you, that is all. If you are willing to let me feel that I am not a burden, I will stay here, with your leave, till I am strong enough to go back to my own home; but if not, I must try to get over to Grassenfel as soon as may be.”

For the third time Mr. Aggland spun up the halfpenny. “Heads thrice running,” he said, and pocketed the coin gravely.

“You have won, sir,” was his answer to Captain Stondon’s speech. “I am a poor man and money is an object; but for all that, I had rather luck had turned the other way. So long as there is independence, there may be friendship even between a high man and an humble, but once money passes from hand to hand, adieu to even the semblance of equality.” And with this speech Mr. Aggland would have left the room, had not Captain Stondon detained him.

“I have been a poor man myself,” he said. “For years life was a continual struggle; and those years are not so far behind me but that I can still feel more fellowship with, and friendship for, a poor man, than a rich. Because I want to be a little independent, do not think I wish to prevent your being independent likewise.”

And with that he held out his hand, which Mr. Aggland took.

“Shall we be friends?” asked the officer.

“It is a question for you to decide,” answered the other. “I am not a gentleman; I make no pretension to ever having been one; still—

And straightway it was settled that Captain Stondon should remain; that he should stay to be conducted to Strammer Tarn by Duncan; that he should wait to see Davy, the wisest dog in Cumberland; that he should not leave the Hill Farm for the Vicarage, or Grassenfel, or any other place, till he was strong and well once more; that he should not, in one word, leave Tordale till Tordale had become a part of himself—a place destined to remain green in his memory all his life long.