Phemie Keller

It was the middle of October. The September harvest had been reaped and carried; the sickles were laid aside for another year, and the barns were full to overflowing; it was getting late in the season for any stranger to be lingering among the hills, but still Captain Stondon remained on at the Farm contentedly. Had there been no outside world at all,—had there been no Norfolk estates, no London clubs, no Paris, no Vienna,—he could not have seemed better satisfied to stay, more loth to stir than was the case.

Each week, it is true, he said he must soon be journeying southward; but then each fresh week found him still loitering across the valley to the Parsonage; still contemplating the effects of the autumnal tints on heather, grass, and tree; still watching the changing leaves on the branches that overhung the waterfall; still climbing the mountain sides, or wending his way to Strammer Tarn.

His arm had knit by this time, and although he continued to carry a stick, his ankle was almost strong again. He had drunk in a new draught amid the hills; he had gone back years, seated by the ingle nook, wandering among the heather; he had forgotten the weary years of his lonely manhood; and he was taking his youth—his unenjoyed, unprofitable youth—once more in the autumn of existence, and living it out again, thoroughly, happily, among the mountains of Cumberland.

He had found rest; he had found contentment. He had put the gloom of the shadow that formerly rested over his soul aside, and in that strange household, surrounded by young people, by nature, by activity, by life, and hope, and strength, he grew light-hearted, and with boys became as a boy, capable of enjoying each day that dawned upon the earth.

To be sure, at first he found it no easy matter either to understand what the lads said, or to make them comprehend exactly what he said in return. They had run so wild about the hills; they had mixed so much with the boys in the valley; they had grown up so entirely amid Cumberland sounds and Cumberland associations, that their every sentence contained some word which seemed strange and unaccustomed in the ear of their guest.

But, as a rule, Phemie was close at hand to comprehend and to explain. She it was who told him what Duncan meant by a “bainer” way to Strammer Tarn; by a “whang” of bread; by Mrs. Aggland being in a “taaking,” and by calling Davy a “tyke.”

With her lovely face turned up to his she would laugh out at his perplexities, and then make darkness clear before him. She would scold Duncan in a pretty womanly way for using the Cumberland dialect, and then “draw him out” for the officer’s benefit. She would dance over the moors and the heather, as Duncan sometimes told her, like a “rannigal,” and then she would sit down quietly at the edge of the Black Tarn, and talk to Captain Stondon about her childhood, while she pulled off her bonnet and wreathed the broom and the wild flowers into garlands for her hair.

It was not an exciting life, but it was peaceful, without being solitary. Since his boyhood, since the time which lay almost half a century behind him, Captain Stondon had never known what it was to enter any house, not even his own, and to feel he was crossing the threshold of home. To rest and be thankful; to live and rejoice; to look on the merest excursion as a pleasure; to understand that leisure was never given to man solely that he might employ his leisure in killing time,—these things were to Captain Stondon almost like revelations, and he accepted the new light and lay down and basked in its glory joyfully.

Home! What makes a home, I wonder? Looking back in the after days to that queer old Cumberland farm-house across the sea, thinking of its quiet, and its happiness, even whilst surrounded by the warmth, and the beauty, and the gaiety of southern climes, Captain Stondon came to believe that home is not so much one great fact, as the total of an aggregation of trifles; that the way the sunbeams steal into the windows, the particular description of rose that is trained round the casements, the scent of the honeysuckle which climbs over the porch, the plan of the house, the position of the doors, the placing of the furniture, the eccentricities of the servants, the tricks of the animals,—all these odds and ends frame and fit together so as to make one great and perfect whole, which shall remain stamped on the memory when the soul has sickened of lordly mansions, and the brain refuses to remember the cold bare discomfort of houses that are not homes, that lack the thousand-and-one charms which oftentimes form a chain strong enough to bind the heart of some great man to the lowliest cottage standing by the wayside of life. It is the sunlight on the floor, it is the trees that overshadow the roof, it is the springing of the turf under foot, it is the perfume of the flowers stealing in through the open windows, it is the grouping of a circle round a blazing fire, it is the tone of the voices, it is a series of sensations which engross the soul, and forge fetters around the wisest and the best.

The Hill Farm had every element of home strong about it. The sunbeams seemed never weary of shining on it, as if they loved the very stones in its walls; the roses put out buds and bloomed even in the frost. There was no such piece of grass in any nobleman’s park as Mr. Aggland boasted beneath his parlour windows. Most part of the year the little garden was a blaze of flowers, but specially in the autumn the place seemed on fire with scarlet verbenas and Tom Thumb geraniums, with nasturtiums, and stately dahlias, and heliotropes, and fuchsias.

The poor man’s flowers, when he takes care of them, always bloom before the buds burst in the parterre of his richer neighbour. As though God loved best him to whom He gives the least, He seems to send His sun and His rain with richer blessing to the one than to the other, and the little crop comes up more abundantly before the door of the cottager than the great crop is ever seen to do in the broad fields that are owned by his landlord and master the squire. It was thus at any rate with the Agglands—what they planted, they gathered; what they watered and tended, grew up to perfection. The great man of Grassenfel, Lord Wanthorpe, who kept six gardeners, could not for wages obtain such efficient help as Mr. Aggland brought round him after school-hours every afternoon.

Delving and digging, watering and wheeling, clearing and weeding, was fun to the lads—exercise to their father. With all his quotations, he did not bring them up in idleness: not one of the boys but could clean a horse, harness and drive him, saddle and ride him, as well as any groom in the country.

They could have bought and sold, those lads; you might have sent them to market, and trusted their judgment of a drove of beasts as well as that of any bailiff. They would argue—Duncan more particularly—with their father, knotty points of colour, vein, and shape; they would stand with their hands in their pockets, and criticise a two-year-old as gravely as any habitué of Tattersall’s. They were great on sheep; they were learned about dogs; occasionally they were pleased to drop some words of wisdom about hens and chickens for the edification of Captain Stondon; and concerning geese and turkeys they were a vast deal better informed than the person who took charge of those interesting animals in the poultry yard at Marshlands.

Altogether, brought up in the country, the boys were au fait in matters appertaining to the country. They knew all about soils; they spoke lovingly of manures. In advance of their farming brethren in the matter of rotation crops, they were apt, following their father’s lead, to be a little dogmatical and wearisome on the subject of exhausting and recruiting the ground.

Mr. Aggland piqued himself on having brought the “best ideas of all nations” into practical use on his little farm; and the days came when, knowing more about the man, about the difficulties he had surmounted, the troubles he had struggled through, Captain Stondon acknowledged that, possibly, no other individual could have made as much of the Hill Farm as Mr. Aggland; that he had kept a large family well, and brought them up respectably, where a different father might have found it a hard struggle to provide such a tribe of children with dry bread off so bare and inhospitable a corner of the earth.

The Hill Farm was cheap, the Hill Farm was picturesque, but it was likewise poor and inaccessible.

“No man before me was ever able to pay his rent out of the ground,” said Mr. Aggland, with excusable vanity; “each successive tenant planted on the hill, as he would have planted in the valley, and the result was disappointment and ruin. I, who had never been a farmer, was looked upon as a madman for supposing I should succeed where practical men had failed; but, remembering Seneca’s axiom, that ‘Science is but one,’ I laboured on with patience and in hope. And through all my labour I had pleasure. I have been happier here than I was in the days when my prospects were brighter. Did you ever read Burns’ ‘Twa Dogs,’ sir?”

If Captain Stondon had thought saying “Yes” would have saved him the quotation, he might have replied falsely; but, knowing that the verse was sure to come in any case, he answered “No.”

“The poem is neither more nor less than a comparison between riches and poverty,” explained Mr. Aggland. “It is a conversation between two dogs; between one whose

and another—

The gentleman—‘Cæsar’—is made to say—

Was not it, sir, a clever notion putting in the mouth of a dog the thought that passes so often through the heart of a man?”

“And what does the other answer?” asked Captain Stondon.

“He says with truth that ‘they are nae sae wretched’s ane wad think,’ and then goes on to what I was going to remark at first,—

That was it, sir. After I had done my day’s work I could enjoy rest as I had never enjoyed anything in the time when I was idle and earning my bread easily, and, as I think now, meanly. And even now I feel it a pleasure to see the seed I have helped to sow springing up, and bearing fruit in the Lord’s due season. Although toil has been my lot, I can sing, with the sweetest of our modern poets,

Look at the farm, sir. It was like moorland when I came here first, and now I pay my rent and keep my family off it, and I have a trifle besides in the Grassenfel Bank. To be sure, if I were to die, things might go hard with the wife and children, but there are few in any station who can do more than support their boys and girls, and give them education. Duncan certainly might soon take the farm, and Phemie would help him. It may be that some day they will make a match, and then——”

“The man is come over from Grassenfel about the sheep, uncle,” interrupted Phemie at this juncture; and as Mr. Aggland left Captain Stondon to attend to business, the officer turned and looked strangely at the girl whose probable future he had just heard sketched out.

There was a colour in her face which seemed to imply that she had heard likewise; but, half-an-hour afterwards, when she and all her cousins, Duncan included, accompanied their guest up the hill and over the heather to Strammer Tarn, her step was as light and her laugh rang out as clear as though there were no such thing as marrying or giving in marriage on earth.

“A nice fate truly,” thought Captain Stondon, savagely; “to keep a girl like that making butter and darning stockings all her life. Such hair, such features, such a complexion, such grace wasted on a raw-boned Cumberland lout. Great Heavens! such sacrilege should not be permitted in a Christian country. What would she like, I wonder. It might be worth while trying to get to know what she thinks on the subject.”

But, frank as she seemed, what she hoped, what she feared, what she dreamed, were things Phemie Keller was never going to tell to Captain Stondon. In the world she had but one confidante; the hard-featured, high-cheeked, loud-voice Scotchwoman, who had been with her from her childhood, who had come with her from Scotland, who had served the first Mrs. Aggland, and was now serving the second, and who loved blue-eyed, bright-haired, laughing, light-hearted Phemie Keller with a love passing the love of woman.

Sitting on the boulders that lay near the edge of the Strammer Tarn, with her cousin Helen’s head resting on her lap, with the clear October sky above, with the black rocks frowning on her girlish beauty, with the dark water at her feet, Phemie talked to the stranger of everything save the dreams she dreamed when she lay wide awake in her little bed at night, save the romantic future she and Peggy sketched out when “croonin’” together over the winter fire in the kitchen, or basking in the glorious sunlight of some summer Sunday afternoon.

Did he think the girl unconscious of her loveliness?—did he imagine that, though she might seem merely “pretty” to her neighbours, Phemie Keller did not know she was the making of as beautiful a woman as ever turned men’s heads and caused honest hearts to ache for love of her? Is not beauty a talent, and did not she know God had given her that one talent, at any rate? He had lived long, and he had seen much, but he fell into error here. Phemie was fully aware of the extent of her own charms. All her earlier years she had been “my bonnie, bonnie bairn” to somebody; and now her glass, small though it might be, told the little lady she was beautiful, whilst, if other proof were wanting, Mr. Conbyr’s entreaties that she would set her face against vanity, and the whispered compliments of young Mr. Fagg, the surgeon, from Grassenfel, should have fully convinced her of the fact.

And so while they talked together, and while Captain Stondon thought he was reading this girl’s nature as though it were an easy book Phemie was keeping back the dreams and the visions that made her young life tolerable to her. She could sit contentedly at work because airy castles rose to the sky at her lightest bidding; she could go about the housework cheerily, thinking of the future day which was to dawn and free her from all drudgery and all toil, and she could talk frankly and naturally to this middle-aged man, who tried to draw her out because he was as far from her ideal of a lover, or a husband, or a hero as Mr. Fagg, or even her hard-headed cousin Duncan himself.

“My father was an officer too,” Phemie was pleased to explain on the afternoon in question; “but he was only a lieutenant,—Lieutenant Keller; I have got his portrait at the farm, if you would like to see it. He looks so young and so handsome,” the girl added, with a tremor in her voice, and she bent her head over her favourite Helen, touching the child’s dark locks lovingly as she spoke.

“You resemble him then, doubtless,” suggested Captain Stondon, gallantly.

“I believe I do,” she said, apparently without noticing the implied compliment; “but my mother was fair too. I remember her with such a colour in her face that, if people had not known to the contrary, they would have said she was painted. She died when she was only one-and-twenty; but I remember her. Uncle tells me they were both little more than boy and girl—boy and girl,” Phemie repeated, with her eyes straining over the Black Tarn, as though she saw the shadowy forms of those dead parents standing on the opposite shore.

Up to that moment Captain Stondon had taken Mr. Conbyr’s statement for granted; but now he began to waver in his faith. If she were really illegitimate, Phemie’s uncle would never have spoken to her about her parents so unreservedly; she would never have been suffered to retain the portrait of which she had just made mention.

Hitherto the question of her birth had been one studiously avoided by the officer; but suddenly he became desirous to know all about Miss Keller’s parents, and began to insinuate questions accordingly.

“Was her father dead or abroad?” he ventured, after a pause.

“Oh, he died before my mother,” Phemie answered; “and she never held up her head after, Peggy says. It was at Malta we were then, and my mother brought his body back to his own people, and then returned to her father’s house with me.”

“Why did she not remain with her husband’s family?” asked Captain Stondon.

“Because they would not have her remain, and because she thought a Scotch Duncan as good as an English Keller any day, and would not be looked down on by them. The Kellers are great folks somewhere, or think themselves great folks; and they never forgave my father for marrying a poor minister’s daughter. He told her to go to them after his death for my sake, and she went because he bade her; but they turned her from the door, and—and——”

Phemie bowed her head and sobbed aloud as she tried to finish her sentence. She had heard her mother’s wrongs so often spoken of,—she had heard Peggy M‘Nab tell so pathetically how that young creature, repulsed by her husband’s kindred, had travelled home to the old manse to die, that she could not speak without weeping as she recalled the story.

Home to die! home to the familiar places she had left so few years before to look her last on them ere she passed from earth for ever;—home to the lonely manse by the desolate sea-shore;—home to the well-remembered rooms where she could lie and listen to the long roll of the Atlantic waves as they came booming up against the rocky coast;—home to the haunts and the friends of her girlhood;—home—or, as Peggy said so plaintively—

“Hame, hame, puir thing, to dee.”

Phemie could not talk of it calmly; Phemie could scarcely talk of the manse itself calmly, let alone of her mother; and whilst Captain Stondon retraced his steps towards Tordale in the gathering twilight, with Duncan and Helen and Phemie beside him, and the other children running on towards home as fast as their little legs could carry them, he made up his mind to have some talk with Mr. Aggland, and discover how he might best advance that eccentric individual’s views, and do something at the same time for Phemie Keller.