Phemie Keller

“You are right,” said Mr. Aggland. “Home-keeping youth have ever homely wits;” but the sentence did not flow glibly off his tongue, and the farmer stood for a moment after he had answered Captain Stondon, looking with his outward eyes it is true down the fair valley of Tordale, but trying with his mental vision to penetrate into the future which had suddenly become so misty and uncertain.

It was early in the week following that Saturday night when knowledge had come to two at least of the party at the Hill Farm. Captain Stondon was going to spend a few days at the Rectory before turning his back on Cumberland, and ere leaving the man who had been his friend in such sore need, he was trying to show his gratitude for the past, and to secure Mr. Aggland’s services in the future—a double purpose which fettered his speech a little, and placed at once a certain embarrassment between himself and his host.

He was pleading to be allowed to do something for Duncan; to be permitted to hold out a helping hand at this the turning point of his whole life.

“He has abilities,” remarked Captain Stondon. “Why should he not have an opportunity of turning them to account? He has brains; why keep him here, where he will never have a chance of making a fortune out of them? Let the boy go away and see the world. He will learn more in six months outside these mountains than he could learn in as many years under their shadow.”

And in reply Mr. Aggland remarked, as already stated: “You are right. Home-keeping youth have ever homely wits. And yet——” he proceeded after a moment’s pause, “judging from my own experience, I think it better for people who must content themselves with an humble sphere, never to be lifted above it. It is happier to be independent than rich; it is a fine thing to rise in the world, but it is a cursed thing to be patronised. My opinion is, that a man worth calling a man, ought to be able to say he owes all he owns, all he has enjoyed, to no other man living,—only to God and himself.”

“But God makes men his instruments,” suggested Captain Stondon.

“He may; but I doubt it,” replied Mr. Aggland; “at least, I think we have no right to say the instruments we deliberately choose for ourselves were put in our way by the Almighty. Look at me. Should not I have been a happier man had no one ever said to me, ‘Come out of your station, and be a gentleman, Aggland?’ A gentleman, good lack, a gentleman?” and the farmer drew his hand up and down the sleeve of his threadbare coat, and looked at his patched shoes, at his coarse grey stockings, at his well-worn trousers, contemptuously as he spoke.

“Should you dislike telling me your story?” asked Captain Stondon, after a moment’s hesitation. “Pardon me, if I seem impertinent; but your boy’s case might be anything rather than analogous to your own.”

“You are right again,” was the reply, “since no two lives are ever precisely analogous, and yet each man who precedes us leaves his warning signal behind, showing where possible danger is lurking. Now, my life was cursed by patronage; and you offer patronage to my lad. You see my argument? My story, certainly. I will tell thee tales—

I will tell you the ‘lamentable fall of me,’ albeit it may be—

“Let me be the judge of that,” answered Captain Stondon, smiling in spite of himself; “let me hear your experience first, and then we can talk of Duncan’s future afterwards.”

“I must begin at the beginning, I suppose,” said Mr. Aggland. “If you are not weary, shall we walk along the hill path while we talk? Where was I? oh, at my own birth, which happened on the sixth of April, eighteen hundred and one; you can reckon that up, sir, hereafter, and find how old a man I am.”

The blow was not intended, but Captain Stondon winced. He had made his début on this world’s stage on the fourteenth of June, seventeen hundred and ninety, and it did not take him long to calculate how much older than Mr. Aggland that fact made him. Meantime the farmer proceeded:—

“I was not born of prosperous parents; I was, on the contrary, born in ‘poverty’s low barren vale,’ which is not nearly so desirable a vale to inhabit as poets usually imply. My father was a country schoolmaster, one who might have sat to Goldsmith for his picture. He loved children, he loved teaching, he loved learning; but neither teaching, learning, nor children brought him much money. I can see him now,” went on Mr. Aggland; “see him sitting just where the sunbeams had cleared a space out for themselves in the middle of the dusty floor. The boys and girls are all quiet at their sums; he is holding a slate, and explaining the Rule of Three to a child who stands beside him. That child was myself. I never knew him to be other than patient and gentle with me, for I was the youngest of a large family, the Benjamin of his age to him.”

Mr. Aggland paused. For a moment the Cumberland hills faded from his eyes, and the old home, left so long before, yet remembered so distinctly, arose out of the years, and stood by the roadside, with the elder-tree shading it, with the duck-pond in front of it, with the half-acre of garden all a-glow with flowers surrounding it. He could see the sycamore under which he had lain whilst conning his Virgil and labouring through Ovid; and then the whole vision passed away, and he was looking at the reality of his life on a fine October morning, with Skillanscar and Helbeck towering to the sky, and the man whose life he had saved amongst those very rocks and crags walking beside him, waiting for him to proceed.

“He knew more than is usual with persons of his class,” went on Mr. Aggland, “and he taught me to love learning as he did—to love it for its own sake, not for the sake of any money it might bring, of any advantage that might accrue from it. What he meant me to be, whether a schoolmaster like himself, or a clerk, or a labourer, I do not know, for at sixteen I had the misfortune to meet with a rich gentleman who took an interest in me. It happened in this way. My father had a brother living in a little seaport in Wales. He was a tailor, and pretty well to do, and he used to make us welcome to spend a week with him every summer, as the holidays came round. It was the last day of our stay, and I was hanging about the shore loth to leave the sea, for I loved it, when all at once there was a cry and a shout, and I saw a boy who had been bathing washed away by a wave and disappear. I guessed in a minute how it was; the lad had gone out beyond his depth, and could not swim. There were places where the sea deepened suddenly, and he had dropped on one of them. I did not know who he was, and if I had it would have made no difference; one life is as valuable as another I think now, and I suppose I thought the same then, if I thought at all. One boy is as good as another, whether he be the son of a king or the son of a peasant. I did not know who he was, and God is witness that, not knowing, I risked my life to save him willingly.”

“And you did save him?” asked Captain Stondon.

“I ran a race with the sea for him,” answered Mr. Aggland, a flush overspreading his hollow cheeks; “I fought for him, I got mad with the waves for trying to beat me out. Though it is thirty years since—thirty years within a trifle—I can remember, as if it was but yesterday, looking out over the waves seaward, and thinking I could follow him to Ireland, if need were, sooner than the waters should beat me. He went down twice. As he rose the third time I had him. I stretched my arm out over a wave and caught him. I could not have brought him back to land; but looking over the water, not towards Ireland this time, I saw help coming; and I kept him up till we were both pulled into the boat that had pushed off after me. I liked the sea up to that minute, sir; I have hated it ever since. I could not put into words what I thought about it as I struggled to keep him and myself afloat till the boat came. I have never had a bad illness since, when that minute has not been reproduced for my benefit. I suppose it was fear came over me; but I seemed to be in the power of some cruel enemy, with whom I could not reason, against whom I could not struggle; I felt as if I was alone in the world out there—alone with the waters round and about me. I remember trying to hold on by the waves, and then after that there was a blank.”

“Did they recover both of you?” asked Captain Stondon.

“Yes—but they had hard work bringing the boy to life again. He was a small delicate lad, though two years older than myself; a motherless lad, an only son—the heir to a great property. His name was Worton; and from the time he opened his eyes that day when I fought for him with the sea, till the hour when I closed the lids over them in Ischia, he never could bear me to leave him. And I never did leave him.

“Mr. Worton, who had seen the whole of the accident, was grateful, more grateful than there was any necessity for, and he offered to take me and bring me up with his own boy and provide for me, and allow my father a small annuity.

“If we had asked half his fortune, I think he would have given it to us, when he heard his son speak again. He need not have been so liberal as he was, and I have often wished since he had let us alone; but it seemed a fine thing to us then, and I went back with them to Worton Court as Master Reginald’s friend—companion—what you will.

“We led an awfully idle life. All Mr. Worton’s time was devoted to thinking what would best please his son; all Master Reginald’s time was taken up trying to keep himself out of the grave. As Burns says, ‘he met every face with a greeting like that of Balak to Balaam: “Come, curse me that East wind, and come, defy me the North.”’ It was such a labour to him to live, that I have often wondered since he did not wish to

But he desired nothing of the kind. He enjoyed existence as much as I have ever known any one. He used to like lying on the sofa in the winter time; lying on the grass in the summer. He liked being read to, he liked to hear music; he was fond of travelling by very slow stages, in a very easy carriage; he enjoyed society, and he loved me.

“We loved one another,” went on Mr. Aggland, after a pause. “‘We were so mixed as meeting streams, for he was I, I he.’ The day came when they tried to separate us, tried to make me believe he would be better without me—tried to make him believe I was no fit companion for him; but we could not part till death took him, and then I stood in the world alone. They had made me what I was. Reginald had a tutor, but we never learnt anything—never were expected to learn. All my life had been for eight years spent in keeping him alive; for eight years I did nothing but that; for eight years I read, but never studied. I amused him, but never worked myself. I stood between him and a woman who wanted to become his stepmother; and at the end of that time, at twenty-four years of age, I was cast adrift, with a fair library of books, and fifty pounds in my pocket. The poor fellow had left me all his mother’s small property, four thousand pounds; but there were such things said of me by that cruel woman, and Reginald’s deluded father, that I flung the legacy to them, and, shaking the dust from my feet, left the house for ever. Mr. Worton would have had me back. He offered me money, he offered me any apology I chose to ask. He offered to ‘advance my views;’ but I cursed him and his patronage too, cursed the day he took me from my own station, and gave me a taste for luxuries I could never command.

“‘You have had the best years of my life,’ I finished; ‘you have unfitted me for work; you have made me as useless as if I had been born a gentleman. You let them try to turn your son’s heart against me; and when they failed in that, you allow them to saddle his legacy with such slanders as force me, for my own credit’s sake, to go out into the world a beggar, rather than be beholden to the bounty of my dead friend. And all for what? All because a woman wants to marry you; all because you want an heir to Worton Court—an heir that I hope, and pray, and believe will never be born to you. For God is just, and He will not forget Reginald, and He will not forget me.’”

“Hard words,” said his auditor.

“They were too hard,” answered Mr. Aggland,—“too hard to speak to a misguided, childish old man. I thought about them afterwards, till I could bear the recollection no longer, and wrote to apologise, to retract. Madam returned the letter, with a note, stating that ‘Mr. Worton appreciated my present regret as highly as my former services; and concluding want of money had procured him the honour of my communication, inclosed me a cheque for a hundred pounds, the acknowledgment of which she begged might end the correspondence.’ I sent back the cheque, and have since fought out my fight alone. What I have done during the years which have come and gone between this time and that could scarcely interest you. There are few things I have not tried my hand at; I have prospered in life, and was able moreover to keep my father without letting him take another sixpence from Mr. Worton; but it was hard work, beginning existence, as one may say, with soft hands—no profession, no useful learning—at four-and-twenty. Now, sir, you know why I do not desire patronage for my son—why I had rather see him earning his bread by the sweat of his brow than eating it, as I did, at a rich man’s table. Going over my own story has made me see clearly that which is best for him; and I decline your offer, sir, though I thank you most heartily for it.”

There was an awkward silence after this. Captain Stondon looked across at Skillanscar, and along the defile to the broken stone bridge, ere he began to say, in a voice so low that it almost seemed as though he were telling some secret which he feared being overheard—

“I have not been quite frank with you, Mr. Aggland. I wish to do something for Duncan, but I want much more earnestly to do something for myself. Will you aid me in the matter? May I count on your help?”

“What is it? What help do you need?” And the two men stopped and faced each other, seeing nothing for the moment but the shadowy future, which was coming towards them both as a reality and a substance, with giant strides across the hills.

“Can you not guess?” asked Captain Stondon.

“I would rather be certain,” answered Mr. Aggland, drily.

“Well, then, it is this,” said Captain Stondon, plunging desperately into his confession. “I want to marry your niece. I love her. I will try to make her happy; I will——”

“Stop a moment,” interrupted Mr. Aggland, and he sat him down on a stone by the side of the path, and turned his face away from his companion, while he watched the hopes and the plans of his later life frustrated, the last fragment of his fancy castle levelled with the ground. If Phemie married this man she was lost to him and his. No matter how well Duncan got on in the years to come, Phemie might never be wife to him; there would be no cozy farm-house among the hills, to which he could wend his steps when the summer glory was lying on tree and grass and heather; there would be no ingle nook in the dark winter days to come, where he might be always sure of being greeted with looks of love and words of welcome. The doors of the modest house he had imagined for the pair were shut violently in his face. But for Phemie? while he stood without in the cold, there were other doors opened for her to pass through: she might be rich, she might become a great lady. Had he any right to stand between her and such a future? Dare he condemn her to seclusion certainly, to poverty possibly? Could he tell her to go afoot through life, whilst there was a carriage waiting to take her easily and pleasantly along the highways of a world, where struggles for daily bread and anxieties for the morrow were unknown?

Should he, for any selfish feeling—for any dread of losing her—for any personal consideration—stand between her and the prospect her beauty had opened out for her? Mr. Aggland thought he would try to be disinterested both ways: he thought he would try to forget, on the one hand, that if Captain Stondon married Phemie he should lose her, and he determined, on the other, that he would not sell the girl for any benefit likely to accrue to him or his from her change of position. He would think of Phemie, and Phemie alone. He would try to do his duty by her, and listen to all Captain Stondon had to say, quietly and dispassionately. Having made up his mind to which prudent course, Mr. Aggland turned to his companion, and said:—

“I was beginning to fear this; you perhaps think I ought to have seen it before, but I did not. Not even a suspicion crossed my mind until Saturday night, and I have been trying ever since to get rid of that suspicion. I mean nothing ungracious, sir; but I wish anybody else rather than myself had picked you up from there——” and Mr. Aggland flung a stone down the path to the exact spot where Davy discovered the traveller; “and I wish it had pleased you to fall in love with any other girl in Cumberland sooner than with Phemie Keller.”

“You need not distress yourself about the matter,” answered the officer: “tell me to go, and I will go. Though it would have been better for me had you left me to die on the hill-side, still, tell me to give up all hopes of future happiness, all chance of domestic contentment, and I will do it. I will pay you for my life with my happiness, and though the bargain be a hard one, hold to it honestly.”

“I believe you would,” said Mr. Aggland, looking with a certain admiration at the man who made this offer. “I believe you would. I believe you to be honest and honourable, generous and true, and that makes it all the harder for me to say what I want to say. I am between two stools—I am on the horns of a dilemma—

“Let me speak first, then,” suggested Captain Stondon, seating himself as he spoke on a piece of rock close by Mr. Aggland. “Let me tell you I have not run into temptation wittingly—that I have not remained in your house, eaten your bread, partaken of your hospitality, with any deliberate intention of frustrating your wishes, and taking your niece from you. Knowledge has come upon me as it has come upon you, suddenly; all I ask is for you to consider my proposal well before you give me any answer. I know what you have desired; I know you want Miss Keller to become your son’s wife. I see you have set your heart on this match; but I entreat you not to prejudice her mind against me on this account. I implore you not to influence her against me, because you wish her to marry him.”

Then Mr. Aggland tossed back his hair,—his hair which was like the mane of a wild horse,—and said, “‘Is thy servant a dog that he should do this thing?’ Do you think I am ‘moulded of such coarse metal’ as all that comes to? Do you imagine I have no love for anything but myself—that, though I have reared her as my own child—though I do not deny that the idea of her leaving me, of her marrying you, is ‘like the tyrannous breathing of the north,’ which ‘shakes all our buds from growing,’—that I cannot still desire her happiness, and try for her sake—for the sake of the dead and gone—to see clearly? I see two things: I see you can give her wealth and position; but——”

“But what?” asked Captain Stondon, as the farmer paused.

“She is little more than a child,” said Mr. Aggland, hesitatingly, “and you are middle-aged.”

“A man can love in middle age as well as in his earliest youth,” answered Captain Stondon.

“True; but can a girl love that man?” asked the other. “I could not think of any one of Phemie’s age except as a daughter, and I should say that you are as old as I am.”

“If he only knew,” thought Captain Stondon.

“It is too like May and December for my taste,” Mr. Aggland went on, firmly. “She is in the very earliest spring-time of life; she has got her April and May—her glorious summer-tide—all before her; and you, like myself, are travelling on towards the frosts and snows of winter. Is it a right thing, I ask you? I put it dispassionately—is it right?”

“Love takes no account of years,” replied the officer.

“On the one side. I am talking of the other side. Phemie is but little over sixteen, and you are, say five-and-forty. Look at that, sir; thirty years—half a lifetime—between you. Only think of it—thirty years at the wrong end; bad enough between thirty and sixty, but downright madness between twenty and fifty. And she will not be even twenty for more than three years to come! She is too young, sir, far and away too young.”

“The difference is on the right side,” replied Captain Stondon. “Does not your favourite Shakespeare advise—

“Yes; but I am not aware that Shakespeare advises a woman in any case to marry her father,” retorted Mr. Aggland.

“She is older than Duncan, and you would have had her marry him,” persisted Captain Stondon. “You would give her to him without a regret; you would shut her within the walls of this mountain prison for ever, and never sigh over such a waste of grace and beauty. You could see her working about her husband’s house—working like a servant—and never wish she had been born to a different lot.”

“You are wrong in some of your statements,” answered Mr. Aggland; “yet she might be happy among these hills; and, if she were happy, I do not know that I ought to desire anything more for her. The Queen on her throne can be but that. If the peasant be happy, he is as prosperous a man as the peer; for happiness is the acme of earthly bliss. It is the Bathmendi of the Persian tale which we wander all over the world to find, while it lies awaiting us in some sequestered nook like Tordale.”

Leaning his elbow on his knee, supporting his chin on his hand, Mr. Aggland looked thoughtfully and sorrowfully down the defile as he spoke.

All truth contains an echo of sadness; and it is for this reason, I suppose, because it is sad as well as solemn, that a man never speaks it either to his own heart or to his fellow without feeling graver for the utterance.

Some thought of this kind passed through Captain Stondon’s mind even while he answered—

“Your argument will bear turning. A peer may be as happy as a peasant; the wife of a rich man as happy as the wife of a poor. If I have found my Bathmendi in Tordale, there is surely no reason why I should not carry it back with me to Marshlands. God knows I have waited long and travelled far. Do not send me out again into the world—desolate.”

And growing eloquent in the very extremity of his fear that he should be cast forth from this earthly heaven into which he had strayed all unwittingly, Captain Stondon told the story of his life—of his cold, cheerless, lonely life—to his attentive auditor. He told of the years he had lived unloved; he spoke of the romantic affection of his boyhood—of the attachment he had cherished—of the end which had come to it, and to all the dreams of his youth. He told how he had never thought to love again—never thought to marry, or settle down, or hear the prattle of children, or look for an heir to all the broad acres of Marshlands. As a man he appealed to a man. There was nothing he said with which Mr. Aggland could not sympathise; and, as he proceeded, the farmer began to see more and more that the match would be a good one for Phemie; that if she could but love him, she had every chance of happiness.

A just man and a true, a faithful man and a forbearing; a man whose heart was as young as a boy’s, who would be a husband, a lover, a friend, all in one; who would feel for the girlish thing he was taking from among the mountains to the bustle and stir of the world; who would take thought for her inexperience; who would stand by her in trouble; who would be staunch till death; who did not consider love a light thing, or woman a toy, but who would take Phemie as a sacred trust, for the care of which he should have to answer before the throne of God.

And further—for it would be but half-telling a story to keep back any of the truth—Mr. Aggland could not be blind to the fact that, in a worldly point of view, Captain Stondon was a most excellent parti. He had thought his guest well-off, but he had never known how well-off he was, till the officer spoke at length of his position, of the value of Marshlands, of the nature of the settlements he could make; of the extent of the property his son—if he had one—would inherit.

“I see,” he said, at last, “that, putting aside the one obstacle, it would be a wonderful match for Phemie to make. Though she is well born, she has no fortune, and a pretty face is a poor substitute for a dowry anywhere. I know she will never get such an offer again, and if you can win her, wear her. Take her from us, for you can do better for her, I fear, than we can. The children will break their hearts to be parted from her, but that cannot be helped.”

“Why should they be parted?” asked Captain Stondon.

“Because, though Phemie has walked with us long,” answered Mr. Aggland, “we have come to the cross-roads now, and her way lies different from ours. That is, it will lie different if she elect to go with you.”

And, having uttered this sentence, which he spoke mournfully, the farmer rose to go back along the mountain path, cherishing no hope in his mind that Phemie would refuse her wealthy suitor, feeling a conviction that the girl would soon be leaving Tordale—leaving the old familiar scenes far behind her for ever.

But he did not interfere—he did not advise; there were plenty of people to tell her what a great match she might make, what a grand lady she might become, without his opening his lips on the subject. Gradually the neighbours began to talk. The young surgeon from Grassenfel twitted Phemie when he met her in the valley about having grown proud and distant. He supposed it was that fine gentleman lover of hers who had made her turn up her nose at humble suitors like himself. Then Mr. Conbyr threw out some hints in a decorous, clerical kind of manner, which showed that he evidently thought Miss Keller an amazingly lucky young person; not long after that, Duncan grew sulky, and Mrs. Aggland deferential; and Peggy, ay, even Peggy M‘Nab, began to sound Captain Stondon’s praises in her darling’s ears.

Phemie had her senses. Phemie could not be blind—she knew what was coming; and when at last it did come, and she took counsel with her uncle, the pair cried in each other’s arms, and then decided that Phemie should think the matter over, and give Captain Stondon an answer when she had thought it out quietly, and alone.

Sitting up in her little bed that night, with the ghostly white draperies looking still more white and ghostly in the moonlight, her head on Peggy’s shoulder, her tears falling on Peggy’s bosom, Phemie talked about Captain Stondon and his offer till she grew sick and weary. I think if Peggy had remained firm to the creed in which she was answerable for having brought her nursling up, Phemie would scarcely have relinquished her dream husband without a greater struggle; but, as it was, Peggy turned traitor, and, in the face of reality, scouted the vision she had so often conjured up.

“I dare say he is very good,” finished Phemie, “and I do like him very well; but he is not in the least like the lord you promised should come for me in a coach-and-four whenever I grew tall enough to be married.”

“That was na’ to be expectit,” answered Peggy M‘Nab, oracularly; and who may say but that Peggy’s observation was strictly true? Perhaps its very truth made the remark all the more irritating to Phemie, who, laying her head on her pillow, cried herself to sleep, feeling that between the romance of her life and the reality there was indeed all the difference!