Phemie Keller

The short October day was drawing to a close when the party reached home; and it had grown so dark by the time they reached the Hill Farm, that candles were lighted and curtains drawn, and the tea-things set, awaiting their arrival. Amazingly cozy looked the parlour, with sofa pulled round beside the fire, a steaming kettle on the hob, and coals piled high blazing up the chimney.

Though the furniture was of the plainest, the room seemed homelike and cheerful to Captain Stondon, who was greeted by Mr. Aggland with—

“You must have found Strammer Tarn unusually attractive this afternoon. Were you watching ‘Autumn like a faint old man sit down—by the wayside a-weary?’ Have you brought an appetite back with you from the hills? Mr. Conbyr has been here begging that you will dine with him to-morrow. So, in common courtesy, you are in for two sermons—two of his sermons—good lack! Nevertheless ’tis a good man ‘Gray, with his eyes uplifted to Heaven.’ I do think Mr. Conbyr does try to keep both eyes and soul uplifted; for which reason I make the children write down his sermons as well as they can after they come from church. In a literary point of view, what he says may not be super-excellent, but the words of a good man must always hold something worth remembering. Now, Phemie, let us have some tea,” finished Mr. Aggland, with the air of a person who felt that, having delivered himself of a Christian sentiment, he deserved some refreshment after it.

Dutifully obedient, the girl poured out the tea, and when he had handed a cup to his wife, who sat knitting by the fire, and another to Captain Stondon, who was contemplating Phemie, Mr. Aggland duly and solemnly stirred up the sugar from the bottom, and then tasted the infusion.

“Wormwood! wormwood!” he exclaimed, surveying the tea with astonishment and Phemie with reproach. “There’s rue for you,” he added, turning to Captain Stondon, “and here’s some for me. We may call it herb of grace o’ Sundays, but it is quite a different matter to drink it any evening in the week. What the deuce, child, have you done to it? Salts and senna—soda and bark! ugh!” and Mr. Aggland began putting all the cups back on the tray.

“I will keep mine,” said Mrs. Aggland defiantly. “If yours does not please you, have some more made. As Phemie was out wasting her time as usual on the hills, I wet the tea; but I won’t wet it again—what I brew never contents you.”

Having concluded this pleasant sentence, Mrs. Aggland resumed her knitting, while Mr. Aggland, having muttered something that sounded very like “Damn the tea!” directed his conversation towards his guest, who had long doubted the prudence of the farmer’s second choice, and who felt more and more convinced of the fact of its imprudence every day he passed in the house.

Not a virago was Mrs. Aggland; not a noisy, headstrong, passionate woman. There was no quarrelling and making up with her. She did not fly into a passion one moment, and calm down the next. She simply “nagged.” There is no other word that I know of to express her mode of proceeding, or I would use it.

Man could not delight her, nor woman neither, if the man and the woman chanced to be of her own household. From the time she rose in the morning till she laid her pinched, discontented face on the pillow at night, the thing was never done, by child or adult, that pleased her; and the person who seemed able to displease her most was Phemie Keller.

In her youth, which takes us back to a somewhat remote period, Mrs. Aggland had been reckoned rather a beauty by the young men in her own class of life. She was a belle of the genteel sentimental style; laced tight, minced her words, drank vinegar to keep herself pale, wore her ugly drab hair in curls, held her head on one side, simpered like a fool when spoken to, and was altogether a superior young person, who married, in her two-and-thirtieth year, Mr. King, a struggling grocer in Lancaster.

Mr. King survived the unhappy event for five years, at the end of which time he died, leaving her a small business and four children. When or how Mr. Aggland first became acquainted with the widow, he never informed his neighbours. All any one could say for certain was, that he took her to wife, and that she brought him some money and the children aforesaid. So much the world knew; but Mr. Aggland knew, besides, that he had made a bad bargain, an irreparable blunder, that life had been a harder struggle with him than ever during the six years which had elapsed since his second marriage.

There were already three young pledges of affection—two aged five years, and a burly child just able to run about alone—born to him of this ill-assorted union.

What the future held, it might be difficult for him to say, but if it held many more children, Mr. Aggland confessed to his own heart that the prospect was not inviting. Had it not been for Phemie, he scarcely knew how the house would have gone on at all; and Mrs. Aggland hated Phemie for reasons which I am about to tell.

Mrs. Aggland had been a beauty relatively, Phemie was a beauty positively. Mrs. Aggland had taken pains to make and keep herself “genteel.” Without any arts or devices Phemie looked a lady even in her aunt’s cast-off finery.

Mrs. Aggland had been given to melody in her younger days. Her rendering of pathetic songs, such as, “Oh! no, we never mention her,” “The Soldier’s Tear,” “The Banks of Allan Water,” and others of the same stamp, had won for her immense applause from her numerous admirers. The high note in the “Banks of Allan Water,” and the rallentando passage in the “Soldier’s Tear,” when very softly and with the help of quavers and semi-quavers the tear is wiped away, used always to produce a sensation, and it was therefore no wonder that Mrs. Aggland resented Phemie’s voice as a personal injury, and detested her for possessing it.

Even the children liked best to hear their cousin sing. They would leave the “Lass of Gowrie” for “Love’s Ritornella,” and “Young Lochinvar” for “Allan-a-dale.” It is not given to every prima donna to make way for a younger comer gracefully, and Mrs. Aggland was only human; for which reason, it may be, she would not have repined against the decrees of Providence if Phemie had caught bronchitis and lost her voice.

Further, though Mrs. Aggland had brought her husband some small dowry, she had brought him incumbrances likewise; and this girl—this Hagar in the household—this Mordecai at the gate—possessed her trifling portion too, a hundred pounds, the principal and interest and compound interest of which were to be hers on coming of age, or on marriage.

Mr. Aggland could have used the money had he liked—taken it in payment for her board and lodging; but he had settled that not even in their blackest distress was the girl’s “tocher” to be touched, and the money was kept intact accordingly.

Heaven help us! Perhaps the man had more than hoped she and Duncan would spend it together, and try and stock a small homestead for themselves, where he could visit them, and smoke and quote and sing in peace.

Had he any other dream? Did he think that Duncan, with his turn for mechanics, with that passion for making a pump and a steam-engine which seems to be the besetting sin of English lads—the snare and the delusion that Satan in these latter days has devised for the disappointment and confusion of parents—with his dogged perseverance, and his intensely Scotch hardheadedness, might rise to eminence in the future? Perhaps that was the reason why he kept the boy at school long after the age when most farmers’ sons had completed their education and relapsed into boorishness for ever.

Mr. Aggland was so fond of talking about Watt, Arkwright, Strutt, Foley, Petty, and a number of other self-made men, as to suggest the idea that far away down in his heart he was nourishing ambitious hopes concerning his eldest son’s worldly advancement. One thing, however, was certain. He wanted Phemie and Duncan to grow up into lovers and to marry in due time, for which reason he encouraged the visits of none of the young men who would perhaps have thought themselves good enough to aspire to the hand of Miss Keller; and consequently Miss Keller had heard as few compliments and blushed as little at pretty rustic speeches as the strictest matron could have desired.

Nevertheless Phemie knew she was pretty, and so did Mrs. Aggland, which mutual knowledge by no means conduced to the maintenance of peace and quietness between the pair.

Moreover, Phemie was far more clever than Mrs. Aggland; more clever and quick not merely at catching up book learning, but at needlework, at household duties, and in all other practical affairs. Given opportunity, there could be no doubt but that the girl would have been as accomplished and well-informed as she was pretty. Even as matters stood, she had got a curious smattering of knowledge into her head. She had read and re-read all the books in her uncle’s singularly miscellaneous library. He had taught her what he knew of French; she had learned to play the guitar almost without his help; and Mrs. Aggland, looking askance, prophesied that such “goings on,” “such ways,” “such notions,” would bring Phemie to ruin; while there were not a few in the neighbourhood—Mr. Conbyr himself, worthy man, amongst the number—who sympathised with Mrs. Aggland, and thought Phemie was being fairly spoiled by her eccentric and imprudent uncle.

“Even to the making of the tea,” muttered Mrs. Aggland, as she went on with her knitting, and with one light-coloured eye watched Phemie pouring out the fresh infusion, “I might as well be nobody. He had better never have married at all.”

Which was undeniably true; at any rate, he had better never have married at all than married her, and he was perhaps thinking something of the kind even while he went on talking to Captain Stondon about indifferent subjects.

All at once Mrs. Aggland broke into the conversation. She did not like being left on one side so completely. Even the pleasure of indulging her bad temper, and seeing other people uncomfortable, was dearly purchased at the price of such neglect; therefore, when Captain Stondon was making some remarks about the loneliness and desolation of Strammer Tarn, she laid down her knitting, a sure sign of truce, and observed that she had not seen Strammer Tarn. “I have never been to Grassenfel since I came home to this house,” she said; “except to church once in a way, and to a chance prayer-meeting at a neighbour’s, I never set foot across the threshold.”

“You find so many home occupations, doubtless,” suggested Captain Stondon.

“Yes, and it is the children,” she replied. “Where there is so much work to be done, and so few to do it, where there are so many mouths to fill, and so much planning needed to fill them, it stands to sense I can’t be running over the hills like a girl. I can’t leave things to go to wrack and ruin by themselves.”

“I am certain,” said Captain Stondon, gallantly, “that nothing can go to ruin in the same house with you.”

“I am sure it is very good of you to think so. It is not every one that would say as much, though I do work early and late, though I can say with a safe conscience I never eat the bread of idleness,” remarked Mrs. Aggland, darting a look towards her husband, who coolly said:—

“If you mean me, Prissy, my dear, you are quite mistaken. I am willing to say all Captain Stondon said, and more; I am willing to say all you said, and more. You rise early, you take your rest late, you do not eat the bread of idleness, you eat that of carefulness—what more? ‘The man in the world who shall report he has a better wife, let him in nought be trusted.’”

“Capital, Mr. Aggland! a most happy quotation,” remarked Captain Stondon. For Phemie’s sake; for Phemie, who was now out of the room putting the younger children to bed, he wanted to throw oil on the waters, to calm the tempest that had literally arisen in a teapot.

“Many a one wondered,” went on Mrs. Aggland, “how I ever could think of marrying again after losing the kind, good, blessed husband, for which I were a-wearing weeds when I met with Mr. A. And, most of all, how I ever came to marry a man with children. I had made up my mind never to leave off widow’s caps no more. I had set down my foot against matrimony and every folly of the sort, when Mr. Aggland came and persuaded me to change my mind. To hear him talk now sometimes, nobody would think he had tried so hard to get me, for I had a’most sworn never to put a step-father over my boys; but you see, sir, what it is to be tempted,” and Mrs. Aggland executed an idiotic giggle, while Captain Stondon answered:—

“See, rather, madam, what it is to be tempting.” Which speech put the ci-devant beauty into a seventh heaven of good temper, and straightway the pair began a little skirmish of assertion and retort.

“He, the captain, was only making fun of an old woman like herself.”

“No, upon his honour, he had merely stated a self-evident fact.”

“Ten years before she might have been, at least some folks had said so; but now, with a growing-up family about her——”

“She failed to rate herself as highly as her friends did,” put in Captain Stondon.

“The care of children soon put all those kind of foolish notions out of a woman’s head; not that even in her youngest days she had been given to vanities, and now she was a mother——

“Ah, Captain Stondon,” she finished pathetically, “you don’t know what it is to be a mother——”

“And he doesn’t want to know, I am sure,” interrupted Mr. Aggland; which statement was so incontrovertibly true, that the officer could not for the life of him help laughing at his host’s way of putting things.

Just then Phemie re-entered the room, carrying a bonnet in one hand and her workbox in the other. Having her little vanities too, she had asked a neighbour to bring her some ribbon from Grassenfel, and her heart was set on trimming her bonnet that very Saturday night with the laudable view of wearing it the next morning in church.

There was no absolute sinfulness, we will conclude, in this desire; but Mrs. Aggland fired up on the spot to denounce such wickedness.

“Was it not enough that she had wasted her whole afternoon? Was she going to waste the evening as well? With a hole in Duncan’s jacket; with the pockets in her uncle’s coat like sieves; with Helen’s plaid dress wanting lining; with all the children needing stockings mended for the morrow, was she going to sit down and make up finery for herself? She, Mrs. Aggland, wondered how Phemie could have the face to go to church after such selfishness. She wanted to know what her Maker would think of her when He saw her sitting there with new trimmings on her bonnet, and the children’s toes, poor dears, coming through their socks.”

“Phemie mended twenty pairs this morning,” said Duncan, who had followed his cousin into the room; “I counted them.”

“Then she can get to Helen’s frock,” answered Mrs. Aggland.

“Now let’s have an end of this,” broke in Mr. Aggland, angrily. “I won’t have the girl made a slave of by anybody. Go on with your bonnet, Phemie.”

But the beauty had been taken off the ribbons for the girl. She could not see them for tears; and so, putting all her little finery aside, she assured her uncle that she did not care, that her work could wait, that she had forgotten Helen’s frock, and would rather do it.

As she spoke, with the tears just trembling in her voice, with her pretty hands putting the lace, and ribbons, and net hurriedly on one side, with her head bent down so that no one might see she was crying, Mr. Aggland suddenly caught Captain Stondon looking earnestly at her with an expression in his face which made the farmer’s heart stand still.

The man loved her! and if winter’s snows had covered the green wheat in May, Mr. Aggland could not have been more shocked or more surprised.

For this he was staying among the hills—for this he was putting up with such poor accommodation as the farm afforded—for this he was complimentary to Mrs. Aggland—for this he had a pleasant word for every man, woman, and child about the place.

For this—— How could he have been so blind? how could he have been such a fool? What was Mrs. Aggland’s scolding in comparison to such a discovery? As to sit and talk without making a fool of himself till he had leisure to think over the matter, it was not to be attempted.

“Perhaps your aunt will give you a holiday to-night, Phemie?” he said; “and let us have some music.”

It was Mr. Aggland who spoke; but his voice sounded so strange and altered, that every one in the room turned and looked at him with involuntary surprise. Even his wife was astonished into saying that if Phemie had done the socks, the other things could “let be;” while Captain Stondon, reading in his host’s face something of what was passing within, woke at the same moment to a vague kind of comprehension that he had dug up his heart from the dead woman’s grave, that he had swerved from the old allegiance at last, and that he was as hopelessly in love with a pair of bright eyes, with a glory of auburn hair, with a young, young girl, as the most foolish lad of nineteen.

Well! well! a man may catch a fever at any age. There is no law in the Statute Book, as far as I am aware, which forbids or prevents his doing so.

Meantime Duncan fetched in his father’s violin, and Duncan’s brother, Donald, together with Helen Aggland and John and Prissy King, came trooping into the room laden with music-books. By degrees a younger Aggland and two more Kings straggled out of the kitchen into the parlour, and if the other children had not been satisfactorily tucked up in bed, they would have toddled down stairs also to hear “the singing.”

When a man’s natural language chances to be music, like Mr. Aggland’s, the household generally is apt to hear a little more melody than proves agreeable. At the Hill Farm, however, everybody’s language seemed to be music. Peggy crooned Scotch ballads all day long in the kitchen; Mrs. Aggland’s shrill treble was to be heard uplifted in “The Maid of Llangollen,” “He was a Knight of low degree,” and other songs of the same style and period. Duncan for everlasting was shouting out, “Sing, sing, sing—who sings?” which performance he occasionally varied with “The Pilgrim Fathers,” while the lesser fry chirped out snatches of old airs, mixing up hymns and Jacobite tunes in the strangest way imaginable. Mr. Aggland himself generally went through his daily duties to the tune of “The Hundredth Psalm,” and swore at his refractory labourers between the bars.

“All people that on earth” was, accordingly, what he selected to lead off with when he had screwed up his violin, and his wife kindly took the treble, which would perhaps have sounded all the better had she not occasionally interrupted her performance to box some of the children’s ears, to “drat their noise,” and to wonder if any woman ever was so plagued as she. With the tears wiped off her cheeks, with her lovely eyes bright as ever, Phemie, stitching away at Helen’s frock, sometimes interposed a sweet second, sometimes, when her sense of the ludicrous was touched, looked mischievously across at Captain Stondon, and made him smile and turn away his head in spite of himself.

“What the devil are you about, Prissy!” was one of Mr. Aggland’s most usual sentences in the middle of a hymn; and when every now and then he hit Duncan a rap over the head for singing a false note, the punishment tested the officer’s gravity severely.

It would have been a curious scene that for any stranger to look in on. By the fire sat Mrs. Aggland, with her cap a little awry, with the corners of her eyes drawn down, with her mouth wide open, with her head on one side. Excepting Mr. Aggland, no one, I think, ever pulled such absurdly ugly faces while singing as the mistress of the Hill Farm; but the master eclipsed her; every hair on his head quivered as he sang; not a muscle remained still as he shook, and quavered, and indulged in extempore roulades. The way he swung himself about, the manner in which he swayed from side to side, the perfect desperation with which he sang, the earnestness with which he cursed,—these things all tended to make Phemie misbehave herself, all conduced to fits of coughing, and to suspicious attention to Helen’s frock.

“Ech, Lord save us!” Peggy was ejaculating in the kitchen; “Maister ’ull burst his pipes, surely. He ought to bring roun’ the forty-foot ladder if he wants to get up to that. My certy, he is at it again!” And Peggy absolutely paused in her work to listen.

A little back from the fire sat Captain Stondon, with a batch of the children round him, thinking of the long ago past, of the pleasant, yet fleeting, present. For his years he was a young-looking man; he carried his fifty-five summers lightly, and stooped no more under them than if fifteen had been subtracted from their number. India had not aged him. There was still about him something of the same dash and bonhommie which had won friends and gained love for the young lieutenant of, say, thirty years before. His brown hair was as yet unmixed with grey, his light-blue eyes had not lost their keenness of vision, their honesty of expression. If there was nothing romantic about his appearance, there was something which yet made any one with whom he came in contact feel instinctively that he was true; if he was not handsome, he was not plain. He looked like what he was, an English squire, of good birth, in easy circumstances, strong, hearty, middle-aged. He had grown younger since he came to the Hill Farm. Perhaps the children climbing up his knees, perhaps the total rest, perhaps the long idle days spent in watching Davy stand on his hind legs smoking; in seeing Duncan getting bare-back on unbroken colts, and gallop them round the fields; in laughing at the tosses the younger fry got while riding a favourite ram and an ill-conditioned calf up and down the paddock; and in wandering over the hills to Strammer Tarn, had contributed to this result: but in any case the fact was undeniable, Captain Stondon had retrograded in years; and if all went on well, he bade fair to retrograde a few more. He would have liked the singing to continue for ever, so that he might look at Phemie’s white hands, and snowy neck, and pretty face, without let or hindrance. But all earthly things must come to an end; and after Mr. Aggland had indulged the company with the serenade from “Don Pasquale” solo, and the assembled congregation had sung the “Evening Hymn,” in no one line of which Phemie could join, for fear of laughing out loud at her uncle, the concert would have concluded, but for this.

“Johnny,” whispered Captain Stondon to one of the young Kings while the “Evening Hymn” was still in progress, “get your cousin to sing something alone to the guitar, and I will send you down the strongest knife I can find in London—one with four blades. Ask her yourself, you know.”

Whereupon the young imp struck his closed mouth with his hand, and the moment Mr. Aggland put aside the violin, began tormenting Phemie for one song—only one—only—only—only——

Which request Captain Stondon seconded, of course, and Duncan then joined in, telling their guest he should hear Phemie singing “Alice Gray.”

“You just ought;” he added, a sentence that of course raised the officer’s curiosity to fever pitch.

“I may never hear it,” he pleaded, “if you do not sing it to-night, for I shall probably have to leave early in the week;” and thus urged, Phemie, blushing a good deal, took the guitar, and after tuning it began—

I dare say there are few who read these pages that know anything of the old ballads which were sung by the grandmothers of the present generation. New words and new music have succeeded to the simple airs and the homely verses that yet had strength enough in them to make many a man’s heart throb faster as he heard; and it is very rarely—once in a dozen years or so—that any one strikes the well-remembered chords and wakes the old harmony once more. Half a lifetime had gone over Captain Stondon’s head since the ballad Phemie Keller sung had sounded in his ears before; but the years seemed to fade away from his memory as he listened, and he was young again, sitting back in a crowded drawing-room, that he might hide the tears he could not help shedding. Ah me! ah me! that men’s hearts should keep so young, whilst their bodies grow so old—that the pains of youth should stay with us when the hopeful buoyancy of youth is gone—that a touch should make the blood flow out fast as ever, when there is no sap left behind to enable the bare tree to put forth green leaves and bright buds of promise—that tears should well up into the eyes when the capacity for smiling has left the lips—that we should live through all the fever and trouble, and fret and worry, we thought left so far behind, at the tone of a voice, at the sound of an air.

The man’s heart had not broken then; was it to be broken now?

Had he kept the toy, defaced and battered though it might be, all these years, to the end that a girl should destroy it at last? Was it only the olden memories that made him pause for a moment ere he thanked Phemie for her song? Was it not rather that a new Alice Gray had crossed his path, more fair, more divine, than the Alice Gray of old? A young, fresh, ingenuous Alice, with the truest eyes, the most exquisite hair, the most heavenly voice, man had ever conceived of? If he should love this Alice, would his heart not break? With nothing before, with everything behind him, what would the hereafter of his life prove, if he had to leave that sweet face amid the Cumberland hills while he went back again into the dreary, lonely world, solitary and objectless. He would win her love, he would make her love him. Surely his position, his wealth, his personal appearance, his manners, were far above anything Miss Keller was likely to meet with at the Hill Farm. He would be so good to her and hers; he would be so tender with her, so thoughtful, that for very gratitude she must learn to love him. He would take her away, he would show her foreign countries, he would surround her with every luxury. She should walk “in silk attire.” Rich and rare should be the gems wherewith he would deck her; life to her should be as a fairy tale; money and lands would be of value to him at last; everything he possessed—name, station, wealth—should be put to a use for her—for this Cinderella, whom he meant to convert into a princess, if it pleased her to let him do so. All the old tales, all the old ballads, came into his head the wrong way at the same moment, for alas! he was the rich suitor, and not the young penniless wooer; it was he who was thinking of offering the “rigs of land, the sheep and the kye, the gowd and the siller,” which never ought to be owned by fortunate lovers. He was reading the poems of all times with an inverted meaning, and he might have gone to bed that night happy, and dreamed the sweet dreams of the long and long ago but for Mr. Aggland.

“Phemie,” said that gentleman, with a certain viciousness of manner, “since you have sung about one of the Grays for Duncan, will you sing about another for me? ‘Auld Robin,’ my dear.”

What were the officer’s thoughts after that, as he lay awake counting the weary hours that seemed to him to be walking slowly and lingeringly, like living things, backwards and forwards, over the eternal hills?

My reader, I scarcely know; but one thing is certain, that they were only a degree more bitter than those indulged in by Phemie’s uncle, who, with eyes wide open, watched through the darkness his air castle vanishing away.