“Oh, then I suppose,” cried Frank, “it is rather urgent, and we ought to ask for it to preserve our claim.”
There is a universal sentiment in the human heart against a creditor wishing to recover, and in favour of the debtor who is instinctively understood not to be able to pay. Especially strong is this sentiment in the bosom of the young; to lend is a fine thing, but to ask back again is always a mean proceeding. Rodie instinctively hardened himself against the legal rights of his friend.
“There’s men,” he said, “I’ve heard, that are constantly dunning you to pay them. I would rather never borrow a penny if it was to be like that.”
“I would rather never borrow a penny whether it was like that or not,” said the virtuous Frank.
“Oh, it’s easy speaking for you, that have more money than you know what to do with; but if you think of my commission, and where the money is to come from.”
“Most likely,” said Frank, without any special meaning, merely as a conjecture, “if my Uncle Anderson had been living, your father would have got it from him.”
Rodie grew redder than ever under this suggestion. “It might be so,” he said; “but I hope you are not meaning that my father would not have paid the money back, whoever it came from: for if that is what you are meaning, you’re a——”
“I was meaning nothing of the kind,” cried Frank in a hurry; for to have the word leear, even though it is a mild version of liar, flung in his face by Rodie Buchanan, the brother of Elsie, was a thing he did not at all desire. “I hope I know better: but I wish I could speak to your father about my affairs, for I know that he was Uncle Anderson’s great friend, and he is sure to know.”
“To know what?” said Rodie.
“Oh, to know the people that borrowed from my uncle, and did not pay. I hope you don’t think I ought to let them off when they have behaved like that.”
“Behaved like what?” Rodie asked again.
“What is the matter with you, Rodie? I am saying nothing that is wrong. If my uncle lent them money, they ought to pay.”
“And do you think,” cried Rodie, in high indignation, “that my father would betray to you the names of the poor bodies that got a little money from Mr. Anderson to set them up in their shops, or to buy them a boat? Do you think if you were to talk to him till doomsday, that my father would do that?”
“Why shouldn’t he?” said Frank, whose intellect was not of a subtle kind. “People should pay back the money when they have borrowed it. It is not as if it had been given to them as a present; Mr. Buchanan has been very kind to me, and I shouldn’t ask him to do anything that was not right, neither would I be hard on any poor man. I was not told they were very poor men who had got my old uncle’s money; and surely they had not so good a right to it as I have. I don’t want to do anything that is cruel; but I will have my money if I can get it, for I have a right to it,” Frank said, whose temper was gradually rising; yet not so much his temper as a sensation of justice and confidence in his own cause.
“You had better send in the sheriff’s officers,” said Rodie, contemptuously, “and take their plenishing, or the stock in the shop, or the boat. But if you do, Frank Mowbray, mind you this, there is not one of us will ever speak to you again.”
“One of you!” cried Frank, “I don’t want to quarrel with you, Rodie; but you are all a great deal younger than I am, and I am not going to be driven by you. I’ll see your father, and ask his advice, and I shall do what he says; but if you think I am going to be driven by you, from anything that is right in itself, you’re mistaken: and that’s all I have got to say.”
“You are a prig, and a beast, and a cruel creditor,” cried Rodie. “Not the kind for us in St. Rule’s: and good-night to you, and if you find nobody to play with to-morrow, you will just mind that you’ve chosen to put yourself against us, and it’s your own fault.”
Saying which, Rodie made a stride against the little garden gate which led to the Buchanan’s front door, flung it inwards with a clang, and disappeared under the shadow of the dark elder-tree which overshadowed the entrance.
It was not until that moment that Frank realised what the consequence might be of quarrelling with Elsie’s brother. He called after him, but Rodie was remorseless, and would not hear; and then the young man went home very sadly. Everybody knew that Rodie was Elsie’s favourite brother; she liked him better than all the rest. If Rodie asked anything of her, Elsie was sure to grant almost everything to his request: and Frank had been such a fool as to offend him! He could not think how he could have been so foolish as to do it. It was the act of a madman, he said to himself. What was a few hundreds, or even thousands in comparison with Elsie, even if he recovered his money? It would be no good to him if he had to sacrifice his love.
Frank was not a young man who despised either hundreds or thousands, and probably, later, if all went well with him, he might think himself a fool to sacrificing good money for any other consideration; but he certainly was not in this state of feeling now. Elsie and Rodie, and the Statute of Limitations, and the money that Uncle Anderson had strewed about broadcast, jumbled each other in his mind. What did it matter to him if he lost the favour of his love? and on the other hand the pity it would be to lose the money for want of asking for it, and knowing who the man was who had got it, and had not had the honesty to pay. He grew angrier and angrier at these people as he went along, seeing that in addition to this fundamental sin against him, they were also the cause of his quarrel with Rodie, and terrible dismissal by Elsie. The cads! to hold their tongues and conceal who they were, when it was a debt of honour; and to trust in such a poor defence as a Statute of Limitations, and to part him from the girl he loved. He had been more curious than eager before, thinking besides the natural feeling one has not to be robbed, and to recover at all hazard that which is one’s own, however wicked people should endeavour to cheat one out of it—that it would be fun to break through the secret pretences of those people, and force them to disgorge the money they had unlawfully obtained; but now Frank began to have a personal animosity against those defaulters, as his mother called them, who not only had cheated him of his money, but had made him to quarrel with Rodie, and perhaps with Rodie’s sister. Confound them! they should not be let off now. He would find them, though all the world united in concealing them. He would teach them to take away his inheritance, and interfere between him and his love! It was with these sentiments hot in his heart that he hastened home.
Rodie Buchanan plunged into the partial darkness of his father’s house, with a heart still more hot and flaming than that of Frank. He could not have told anyone why he took this so much to heart. It was not that he was unusually tender of his neighbours, or charitable beyond the ordinary rule of kindness, which was current in St. Rule’s. He was one of those who would never have refused a penny to a beggar, or a bawbee to a weeping child, provided he had either the penny or the bawbee in his ill-furnished pockets, which sometimes was not the case; but, having done that by habit and natural impulse, there was no necessity in Rodie’s mind to do more, or to make himself the champion of the poor, so that he really was not aware what the reason was which made him turn so hotly against Frank, in his equally natural determination to get back what was his own. The hall and staircase of Mr. Buchanan’s house lay almost completely in the dark. There was one candle burning on a little table at the foot of the stair, which made the darkness visible, but above there was no light at all. Gas was not general in those days, nor were there lamps in common use, such as those which illuminate every part of our dwellings now. The dark passages and dreadful black corners of stair or corridor, which are so familiar in the stories of the period, those dreadful passages, through which the children flew with their hearts beating, not knowing what hand might grip them in the dark, or terrible thing come after them, must perplex the children of to-day, who know nothing about them, and never have any dark passages to go through. But, in those days, to get from the nursery to the drawing-room by night, unless you were preceded by the nursery-maid with a candle, was more alarming than anything a child’s imagination could grasp nowadays. You thought of it for a minute or two before you undertook it; and then, with a rush, you dared the perils of the darkness, flinging yourself against the door to which you were bound, all breathless and trembling, like one escaped from nameless dangers. Rodie, nearly twenty, big and strong, and fearing nothing, had got over all those tremors. He strode up the dark stairs, three at a time, and flung open the drawing-room door, groping for it in the wall. He knew what, at that hour, he would be likely to find there. It was the hour when Mrs. Buchanan invariably went to the study “to see what papa was doing,” to make sure that his fire was mended, if he meant to sit up over his sermon, or that things were comfortable for him in other ways when fires were not necessary. The summer was not far advanced, and fires were still thought necessary in the evenings at St. Rule’s. Between the fire and the table was seated Elsie, with a large piece of “whiteseam,” that is, plain sewing, on her knee, and two candles burning beside her. Another pair of candlesticks was on the mantelpiece, repeated in the low mirror which hung over it, but these candles were not lighted, neither were those on the writing-table at the other end of the room. When there was company, or, indeed, any visitor, in the evening they were lighted. The pair on the mantelpiece only when the visitor was unimportant, but the whole six when anybody of consequence was there, and then, you may suppose, how bright the room was, lighted al giorus, so to speak. But the household, and Elsie’s little friends, when they came rushing in with some commission from their mothers, were very well contented with the two on the table. They wanted snuffing often, but still they gave, what was then supposed to be, a very good light.
Elsie looked up, pleased to see her brother, and let her work fall on her knee. Her needlework was one of the chief occupations of her life, and she considered the long hours she spent over it to be entirely a matter of course; but, by this hour of the night, she had naturally become a little tired of it, and was pleased to let it drop on her knee, and have a talk with Rodie over the fire. It was considered rather ill-bred to go on working, with your head bent over your sewing, when anyone came in. To be sure, it was only her brother, but Elsie was so glad to see him a little earlier than usual, that, though the task she had given herself for the evening was not quite completed, she was glad to let her seam drop upon her knees. “Oh, Rodie, is that you?” she said.
“Of course it’s me,” said Rodie. “I suppose you were not looking for anybody else at this hour?”
“I am glad you are in so soon,” said Elsie. “And who was that that came with you to the door? Not Johnny Wemyss. I could tell by his foot.”
“What have you to do with men’s feet?” said Rodie, glad to find something to spend a little of his wrath upon. “Lassies must have tremendously little to think of. I am sure I would never think if it was one person’s foot, or another, if I were sitting at home like you.”
“Well,” said Elsie, “you never do sit at home, so you cannot tell. I just notice them because I cannot help it. One foot is so different from another, almost as much as their voices. But what is the matter with you, Rodie? Have you been quarrelling with somebody? You look as if you were in a very ill key.”
“I wonder who wouldn’t be in an ill key? There is that feckless gomeril, Frank Mowbray——” (“Oh, it was Frank Mowbray?” Elsie interjected in an undertone)—“going on about debts and nonsense, and folk in the town that owe him money, and that he’s coming to my father to ask him who they are; as if my father would go and split upon poor bodies that borrowed from old Anderson. I had it in my heart,” cried Rodie, striking with his heel a piece of coal that was smouldering in the grate, and breaking it up into a hundred blazing fragments—“I had it in my heart to take him by the two shoulders, and fling him out like potato peelings into the road.”
“Oh, Rodie, my mother’s gathering coal!” cried Elsie, hastening to extinguish the fiery sparks that had fallen upon the large fur rug before the fire. “Well,” she said, serenely, in a tone which would have disposed summarily, had he heard it, of poor Frank’s hopes, “you are big enough to have done it: but I would not lift my hands, if I were you, on one that was not as big as myself. And what has Frank done? for he never was, that I could see, a quarrelling boy.”
“Oh, not that you could see!” said Rodie, with a snort. “He’s sure to keep a good face before the lassies, and especially you that he’s courting, or trying to court, if he knew the way.”
“He’s not courting me,” cried Elsie, with a blush and a laugh, giving Rodie a sisterly push, “and I wonder you will say such things to me.”
“It’s only because he doesna know the way then,” said Rodie, picking up the pieces of blazing coal from the white hearth. “Will you let me alone, when you see I have the tongs in my hand?”
“Was it for that you quarrelled with Frank?” said Elsie, letting a little careless scorn appear in her tone, as who should say, you might quarrel with many besides Frank if that was the cause. The girls in St. Rule’s, in those days, were not so disproportionate in number as they seem to be now, and she was unpopular, indeed, who had not one or two, at least, competing for her smiles.
“It was not for that!” cried Rodie, expressing, on his side, a scornful conviction that anything so unimportant was not worth quarrelling about. And then he added, “Do ye mind, Elsie, yon day in the turret-room?”
“Oh, I mind it very well,” cried Elsie, with a little start; “I have always minded it. I think of it sometimes in the middle of the night when I wake up and cannot get to sleep.”
“I cannot see what good it can do thinking of it then,” said Rodie, always contemptuous of the ways of lassies. “But you mind how my father went on about the unjust steward. It was awfully funny the way he went on.”
“It was for his sermon,” said Elsie, with a little trouble in her eyes.
“It was not for his sermon. I heard him preach that sermon after, and I just listened, minding yon afternoon. But there was not a word in it about taking your bill, and writing fourscore.”
“Oh, Rodie, you couldn’t remember it as well as all that!”
“Why shouldn’t I remember? I was a big laddie. I remember heaps of things. I mind going to Kinghorn, and crossing in the smack to Leith, years and years before.”
“That was different from hearing a sermon,” said Elsie, with the superiority to sermons which a minister’s daughter naturally possessed.
“I did mind it, however,” said Rodie, “and I knew it was not in the sermon—then where was it? and what was it for? I mind, as if it were yesterday, about taking the bill, and writing fourscore. Now, the question is,” said the young man, laying down the tongs, and gazing unwinking into the glowing abyss of the fire, “what did my father mean by yon? He did not mean just nothing at all. You would not say that.”
“I do not suppose,” said Elsie, with a woman’s quick and barely justified partisanship, “that my father ever said anything that meant just nothing at all.”
“Oh yes, he does, whiles,” said the more impartial boy; “but this was different. What did he mean by it? I will tell you what I have been thinking. Yon gomeril of a Frank has got it into his thick head that everybody in St. Rule’s is in his debt. It is his mother that has put it into his head. Now, just supposing, for the sake of the argument, that it was true——”
“I think,” said Elsie, thoughtfully, “that maybe it was true.”
“Well, then,” said Rodie, “we’ll suppose that papa” (into this babyish title they all fell by moments, though protesting against it) “knew all about it. He generally does know about most things; people put a great deal of trust in him. They tell him things. Now, my opinion is, that old Mr. Anderson told him all about this, and who the folk were, and how they were to pay.”
“Maybe,” said Elsie, doubtfully.
“Maybe? I have no doubt about it; and my conviction is, this is what he was meaning yon afternoon. The old man was dead or dying, and nobody knew but papa—I mean my father. He knew what they had borrowed, and who they were. And most likely he knew that they were far from able to pay. There’s a proverb about borrowed siller,” said Rodie; “I cannot mind, at this moment, what it is—but it means this, that it never does you any good, and that I certainly believe.” Here he made a pause. He had once borrowed a pound, and Rodie had no such harassing recollection in all his experience. He was still owing eighteenpence of that sum, and it had eaten into a whole year of his life.
Elsie said nothing; this sudden revival of the subject awakened many thoughts in her breast, but she sat with her eyes cast down, gazing, as he was, into the dazzling glow of the fire. Rodie was now kneeling on the hearth-rug in front of it, his face illuminated by the ruddy flame.
“I don’t think,” he said, in a steady voice, like that of a man making a statement in which was involved death or life, “that papa was right——”
“Rodie!”
“No,” he repeated, solemnly, “I can’t think it was right. I know you have no business to judge your own father. But I think,” said the lad, slowly, “I would almost rather he had done a wrong thing like that, than one of the good things. Mind, Elsie, he had a struggle with himself. He said it over and over and over, and rampaged about the room, as you do, when you cannot make up your mind. But he knew they could not pay, the poor bodies. He knew it would be worse for them than if they had never got the money. It was an awful temptation. Then, do you mind, he said: ‘the Lord commended the unjust steward.’ In his sermon he explained all that, but I cannot think he was explaining it the same way yon afternoon.”
“Rodie,” said Elsie, with a little awe, “have you been thinking and thinking all this time, or when did you make out all that?”
“Not I,” said the lad; “it just flashed out upon me when Frank was going on about his debtors, and about consulting my father. That’s what made me angry as much as anything. I don’t want papa to be disturbed in his mind, and made to think of that again. It was bad enough then. To be sure he will maybe refuse to speak at all, and that would be the best thing to do; and, considering what a long time has passed, he would be justified, in my opinion,” said Rodie, with great gravity; “but to sit down and write fourscore when it was a hundred—I would stand up for him to the last, and I would understand him,” cried the young man: “but I would rather my father did not do that.”
“And of whom do you think he would be tempted to say that, Rodie?” said his sister, under her breath—Elsie had another thought very heavy at her heart.
“Oh, of the Horsburghs, and the Aitkens, and so forth, and I am not sure but Johnny Wemyss’s folk would be in it,” said Rodie; “and they are all dead, and it would fall upon Johnny, and break his heart. I hope my father will refuse to speak at all.”
Then there was a long silence, and they sat and gazed into the fire. Elsie’s idea was different. She knew some things which her brother did not know. But of these she would not breathe a word to him. They sat for some time quite silent, and there was a little stir over their heads, as if Mrs. Buchanan had risen from her chair, and was about to come down.
“Rodie, you’ll have to be a W. S.,” cried Elsie, “and let Jack go to India; nobody but a lawyer could have put it all out as clear as that.”
Rodie sprang to his feet, and struck out a powerful arm.
“If you were not a lassie,” he cried furiously, “I would just knock you down.”
When Mrs. Buchanan came into the room, this was what she saw against that wavering glow in the chimney; her son’s spring against an invisible foe, and Elsie demurely looking at him, with her work in her hands, from the other side of the fire.
“Eh, laddie,” cried Mrs. Buchanan, “you terrify me with your boxing and your fighting. What ails you at him, and who is the enemy now? And you’ve broken up my gathering coal that would have lasted the whole night through.”
“It’s me he is fechting, mother,” said Elsie, “and he says if I had not been a lassie, he would have knocked me down.”
“You’re never at peace, you two,” said the mother, with much composure; “and we all know that Rodie had aye a great contempt for lassies. Let us just see, Elsie, if some day or other he may not meet a lassie that will give him a good setting down.”
“What do I care about lassies,” cried Rodie, indignant; “you’re thinking of Frank Mowbray and Raaf Beaton. If ever two fellows made fools of themselves! looking as glum as the day of judgment, if Elsie turns her head the other way.”
“Hold your tongue, laddie,” cried Mrs. Buchanan, but with a smothered laugh. She was “weel pleased to see her bairn respected like the lave,” but she was a sensible mother, and would have no such nonsense made a talk of. “Your father is not coming down-stairs again,” she said; “he is busy with his sermon, so you can go to your bed when you like, Rodie. Bless me, the laddie has made the room insupportable with that great fire, and dangerous, too, to leave it burning. Elsie, my dear, I wish you were always as diligent; but you must fold up your seam now for the night.”
After a little while Rodie retired to find the supper which had been waiting for him in the dining-room; for his evening hours were a little irregular, and his appetite large.
“He says Frank Mowbray is very much taken up about people that owe him debts,” said Elsie, to her mother; “and that he is coming to consult my father.”
“Oh, these weariful debts,” said Mrs. Buchanan; “I have always said how much better it would have been to clear them off, and be done with them. It would have been all paid back before this time, and our minds at rest. But Mr. Morrison, he would not hear of it, and your father has never got it off his mind to this very day.”
“Will it disturb him, mother, very much if Frank comes to talk to him?” said Elsie.
“I cannot tell why it should disturb him. The laddie has nothing to do with it, and Mr. Morrison had the old man’s orders. But it will for all that. I think I will speak to Frank myself,” Mrs. Buchanan said.
“Oh, no, mother,” said Elsie.
“And wherefore, oh, no, mother? Many a man have I seen, and many a thing have I done to save your father. But it would be giving too much importance to this laddie. It will be his mother that sets him on. Put away your seam, Elsie, it is time that you were in your bed.”
“I could not sleep a wink,” said Elsie, “if I thought papa was to be troubled about this old thing.”
“You had better think nothing about it,” her mother replied; “for, whatever happens, you can do nothing: and what is the use of making yourself unhappy about a thing you cannot mend?”
Elsie was not so sure that she could do nothing. She thought it highly probable, indeed, that she could do much. But how was she to do it, how signify to Frank that if he disturbed her father, he had nothing to hope from her? Besides, had he anything to hope from her in any circumstances? This was very uncertain to Elsie. She was willing to believe in her own power, and that she could, if she pleased, keep him from rousing up this question; but how to do it, to condescend to allow that her father would be affected by it one way or another? And even in case Frank yielded, as she held it certain he would, to an expression of her will on the subject, was she sure that she was ready to recompense him in the only way which he would desire? While she was thinking, Mrs. Buchanan, who was moving about the room putting by her work, and arranging everything for the night, suddenly sent forth an unintentional dart, which broke down all Elsie’s resolutions.
“At the same time,” Mrs. Buchanan said, pursuing the tenor of the argument, as she had been, no doubt, carrying it on within herself, “I have always felt that I would like to do young Frank a good turn. Elsie, if it’s true they tell me, be you kind to poor Frank. That will make up to him for anything the rest of your family may have done against him. Fain, fain, would I pay him back his siller; but be you kind to him, Elsie, if the other is not to be.”
Mrs. Buchanan was a woman of great sense, yet perhaps she never made use of a more effective argument than that with which she concluded the conversation of that evening. Elsie went up to her room full of thought. It had always been impressed upon her from her earliest consciousness that her father’s peace and comfort, his preservation from all unnecessary cares, from all noises and disturbing influence of every kind was one of the chiefest and most important duties of the family. It had been made the rule of her own childish conduct from the very beginning. “Oh, Miss Elsie, whatever you do, dinna make a noise, and disturb your papaw,” had been the entreaty of the nursery-maid as long as she could remember. And when she was old enough to understand a reason, her mother had explained to her how papa was occupied all day long in the service of God, and for the instruction of common folk not so learned or so wise as himself. “And I think it a great privilege to mind the house and mind the doors, so that none of these small things may trouble him,” her mother had said, “and you should be a proud lassie to think that you can be helpful in it, and do your part to keep everything quiet for the minister, that he may study the word of the Lord in peace.” In our days, it is possible that Elsie might have been inspired by the spirit of revolt, and considered her own comfort of as much importance as her father’s; but such a notion never entered her mind, and the preservation of perfect peace in that mysterious, yet so beloved and familiar study had always appeared to her the most necessary thing in the world. In their latter days, her mind had strayed away instinctively from her first early conception of papa. There had been awe to her in all his surroundings when she was a child, awe, tempered by much affection and perfect confidence, but still partaking much of that vague tremor of respect and veneration with which, but in a higher degree, she was taught to look up to God. But there is no criticism so intense, though often so unconscious, as that with which the children watch, without knowing they are watching, the development of the parent, who gradually comes out of those mists of devotion, and becomes clear and real, a being like themselves to their eyes. Elsie had soon learned in the midst of her semi-worship to be sorry for papa—poor papa who was so easily disturbed, liable to be impeded in his work, and have his composure destroyed by incidents which did not affect her mother in the least, and would not have gained herself an excuse for an imperfectly learned lesson. Why, if she was expected to learn her verbs all the same, whether there was a noise or not, should papa be unable to carry on his studies except in the most carefully preserved silence? She did not give vent to the sentiment, but it added to her reverence and devotion a strong feeling of pity for papa. Evidently he was of finer material than other people, and felt everything more keenly. Pity may be destructive of the highest reverence, but it adds to the solicitude of affection. But that scene, so well remembered in every detail, which had betrayed to her a struggle in him, had greatly heightened this effect. Poor papa! he had to be taken care of more than ever. To preserve his peace no effort was too much.
There had been a long pause in these reflections, as she herself began to be less subject to the delight of making a noise, and even Rodie expended his high spirits out of doors, and learned to respect the decorums of home. But as thought grew in Elsie’s mind, a comprehension of the meaning of life grew with it, a comprehension, much aided by the philosophical remarks of Marion, and by those general views which Mrs. Buchanan was not aware were philosophy, the woman’s philosophy which recognises many mysteries, and accepts many necessities in a manner quite different from the man’s. The subject of her father was one of those upon which she had received much enlightenment. She had learned that the highest regard and the deepest love were quite consistent with a consciousness of certain incurable weaknesses, and a toleration that in other circumstances would have been something like contempt. Probably nobody but a woman can ever understand this extraordinary mingling of sentiment. A man is naturally indignant and angry to think that his sublime self should ever be the object of this unimpassioned consciousness of defect, though no doubt his sentiment towards his womankind is of the same mingled character: but in the woman’s mind it takes away nothing from the attraction, and little from the respect with which she regards her man. Perhaps it even adds to his attraction, as making the intercourse more interesting, and bringing all the varieties of her being into play.
This gave to Elsie an almost tragic sense of the necessity of preserving her father’s peace of mind at all hazards. When she came to think the whole matter over, and to realise what Rodie’s view of the subject was, her mind took a new opening. She took up the Bible which was on her table, and read over the parable of the unjust steward, with this new light upon it. She had not, by some chance, heard her father’s sermon on the subject, and she was not very clear as to how it was that the man was commended for his falsehood, nor did she enter upon that view of the question. Was there something good in it, as Rodie seemed to think, diminishing the burdens of the poor, trying to save those who were struggling, and could not answer for themselves? Elsie, in the silence, shook her young head with its curls over that idea. She had no pretension of knowing better than her teachers and elders. She did not think, because she did not understand, that therefore the Lord who commended the unjust steward must be wrong. She took the matter plainly, without penetrating its other meaning. Was it good, or right, or excusable, a sin that one could forgive to one’s father that he should do this? Rodie seemed to think so. He said he would rather his father had done a wrong thing like that than many right things. Elsie began to cry, dropping hot tears on her Bible, all alone, not understanding, in the midst of the silence and the night. No, no, not that. It would not be so bad, perhaps, as if he had done it for himself. To save the Horsburghs and the Aitkens from ruin, even at the expense of a lie, of teaching them to lie—— Oh no, no, Elsie cried, the tears pouring over her Bible. It might not be so bad in one way, but it was worse in another. It was dictating a lie to others as well as uttering it himself. Was papa guilty of that? Was that what it meant, that struggle long ago, the questioning and the self-conflict? Oh no, no, she cried to herself, oh no, no! Neither for himself, neither for others could he have done that. And yet what did it mean?
There is a point beyond which such a question cannot go. She had no way of settling it. The doubt burned her like fire, it penetrated her heart like a knife: but at last she was obliged, baffled, exhausted, and heart-broken, to leave it alone. Perhaps she never would know what the real meaning was, either of the parable in the book or the still more urgent parable of human conduct here half revealed to her. But there was at least something that she could understand, the old lesson of the house, the teaching of her childhood, to guard her father from all assault, from anything that could disturb his mind or his life. It was not the simple formula now of not making a noise lest it should disturb papa. It was something a great deal more important, not so easily understood, not so easy to perform, but still more absolute and binding. Not to disturb papa, not to allow him to be disturbed, to defend his door, if need were, with her life. To put her arm into the hoops of the bolt like Katherine Douglas in the history—that rash maiden whom every Scots girl holds high, and would emulate if she could. Elsie was faintly aware that this statement of the cause was a little nonsensical, that she would not be called upon to sacrifice her life or to break her arm in defence of her father; but she was very young, and full of passionate feeling, and her thoughts formed into the language of generous extravagance, in spite of herself. What was it really, after the outburst of that fond resolution, that she had to do?
It did not sound so great a matter after all to keep back Frank Mowbray, that was all: to prevent him from penetrating to her father’s room, recalling her father’s painful memories, and his struggle with himself. Her arm within the hoops! it was not so exaggerated an idea after all, it was more than breaking an arm, it might be perhaps breaking a heart: still it was a piece of actual exertion that was required of her on her father’s behalf. Elsie had not given very much serious consideration to Frank Mowbray, but she knew vaguely as much as she had chosen to know, the meaning and scope of his attentions, and the possibility there was, if she did not sharply discourage him, that he would shortly demand a decision from her one way or other. Elsie had not sharply discouraged him; she had been friendly, unwilling to give pain, unwilling to act as if she believed that it could matter to him one way or another: but she had not shown him particular favour. In no way was her conscience guilty of having “led him on.” Her pride sprang up in flames of indignation at the thought of having led any one on. There was Raaf Beaton too: they had both been the same to her, boys she had known, more or less, all her life, whom she liked very well to dance with, even to talk to for an idle moment, whom she would not vex for the world. Oh no, she would not vex them for the world, neither of them! nevertheless, to select one of them, to bind herself to either, to pretend to take either as the first of men? Elsie almost laughed, though her eyes were still hot with tears, at that ridiculous thought.
Yet this was the easiest way of stopping Frank from disturbing her father, oh! the easiest way! She had only to receive him a little more warmly than usual, to listen to what he said, to let him walk with her when they went out of doors, and talk to her when they were within. It is very likely that on both sides this influence also was exaggerated. There was nothing that Frank would not have done for Elsie and her smiles; but after a time no doubt his mind would have returned to his former resolutions, and he would not have felt it necessary to abandon a previously-formed and serious intention on her account. But a girl rarely understands that, nor does the man think of it, in the excitement of such a crisis. Elsie had no doubt that she had the fullest power to turn aside Frank from any attempt on her father’s peace. And then came her mother’s recommendation to be kind to him, to make up to him for something that was past. It was a recommendation that made her blood boil, that she should pay him for some injustice past. Be kind to him, as her mother said, to make up, make as it were money of herself to be a compensation to him! This idea was odious to the girl: but yet it was only another version of the same necessity that she should keep him from disturbing papa.
Naturally, it was not long before the opportunity came. Elsie was walking towards the East Sands with Rodie on the next day, when Frank was seen coming back from that spot, a little wet about the boots, and sandy about the trousers, which was a sign, already beginning to be understood in St. Rule’s, that the wearer of these garments had been among the rocks with Johnny Wemyss, of whom, as a “character,” the town had become, from its height of reprobation, half proud. Frank had been fascinated by him, as everybody else was, though he was vexed to be seen in this plight, after an hour with the naturalist, especially as Rodie, at the sight of him, had the bad breeding to show embarrassment, and even repugnance to meet his former friend.
“I’ll away west,” Rodie said, as soon as he was visible. “There’s Mowbray. I’m not going to stay here, and see him fawning upon you. It is disgusting,” Rodie said, severely. He had not yet himself begun to “fawn” upon any one, and was still intolerant of everything of this kind.
“You are not going away, just after he has seen that we saw him,” cried Elsie, gripping her brother’s arm, in the intensity of her feeling, “letting him see how ill you take it, and that you cannot forget! Man, Rodie, will you run away?”
“I am not running away,” cried Rodie, red with wrath and shame.
“You shall not,” cried Elsie, holding him with a vigorous young grip, almost as strong as his own, out of which he was still attempting to wriggle, when Frank came up, all smiling and beaming.
“Johnny Wemyss has found a new beast,” he reported with a little excitement. “It is not in all the books, there has been none discovered like it. You should see his eyes just jumping out of his head.”
Elsie’s eyes gave a jump too; a warm flush ran over her face. Unconsciously, she held her head high.
“Oh,” she said, softly, “I am not surprised! I am not surprised!”
At this Frank looked at her half alarmed, half suspicious, not quite easy in his mind, why she should take so much interest in Johnny. But after all, he was only Johnny, a fellow wrapped up in “beasts,” and no competitor for anybody’s favour.
Meanwhile, Rodie had twisted his elbow out of Elsie’s hold, who had too much respect for appearances to continue the struggle before strangers.
“I’m away to see it,” cried Rodie. “You’ll come when you are ready,” and off he rushed like a wild deer, with a sulky nod at Frank.
“It appears I have offended Rodie without meaning it,” said Frank, taking the wise way of forestalling any reproach. “I hope he has not prejudiced you against me, Miss Elsie; for all I said that vexed him, was only that I was coming to ask your father’s advice, and I have always heard that everybody asks the minister’s advice. May I walk with you, and tell you about it? I don’t know what he thought I meant.”
“So far as I understood,” said Elsie, “he thought you wanted to make my father betray some poor bodies that trusted in him.” Elsie, too, thought it was wiser to forestall any other statement. But she put forth this bold statement with a high colour and a quaking heart.
“Betray!” cried Frank, growing red, too, “oh, I assure you, I had no such thought.”
“You wanted my father to tell upon the poor folk that had borrowed money, and were not able to pay.” Elsie averted her head for the reason that, sorely troubled by her own guesses and doubts, she could not look Frank in the face: but he interpreted this action in quite another way. He took it for a gesture of disdain, and it roused a spirit even in the bosom of Elsie’s slave.
“Justice is justice,” he said, “Miss Elsie, whether one is poor or rich. To hunt the poor is what I would never do; but if they are right who told me, there are others passing themselves off under the shield of the poor, that are quite well able to pay their debts—more able than we are to do without the money: and that is just what I want to ask Mr. Buchanan, who is sure to know.”
It seemed to Elsie that the sands, and the rocks, and the cliffs beyond were all turning round and round, and that the solid earth sank under her feet. “Mr. Buchanan, who is sure to know,” she said to herself under her breath. Oh yes, he was sure to know. He would look into the face of this careless boy, who understood nothing about it, and he would say—what would he say? It made Elsie sick and faint to think of her father—her father, the minister, the example to all men—brought face to face with this temptation, against which she had heard him struggling, which she had heard him adopting, without knowing what it meant, six years ago. No, he had not been struggling against it. He had been struggling with it, trying to convince himself that it was just and right. This came upon her like a flash of lightning, as she took a few devious steps forward. Then Frank’s outcry, “You are ill, Miss Elsie!” brought her back to herself.
“No, I am not ill,” she said, standing still by the rocks, and taking hold of a glistening pinnacle covered with seaweed, to support herself for a moment, till everything settled down. “I am not ill: I am just thinking,” she kept her head turned away, and looked out upon the level of the sea, very blue and rippled over with wavelets in its softest summer guise, with a faint rim of white showing in the distance against the red sand and faint green banks of the Forfar coast. Of all things in this world to make the heart sick, there is nothing like facing a moral crisis, which some one you love is about to go through, without any feeling of certainty that he will meet it in the one only right way. “Oh, if it was only me!” Elsie sighed, from the bottom of her heart.
You will think it was the deepest presumption on her part, to think she could meet the emergency better than her father would. And so it was, and yet not so at all. It was only that there were no doubts in her mind, and there were doubts, she knew, inconceivable doubts, shadows, self-deceptions, on his. A great many thoughts went through her mind, as she stood thus looking across the level of the calm sea—although it was scarcely for a minute altogether, that she underwent this faintness and sickening, which was both physical and mental. The cold touch of the wet rock, the slipping tangles of dark green leathery dulse which made her grasp slip, brought her to herself, and brought her colour rushing back. She turned round to Frank with a smile, which made the young man’s heart beat.
“But I am awfully anxious not to have papa disturbed,” she said. “You know he is not just like other folk; and when he is interrupted at his writing it breaks the—the thread of his thoughts, and sometimes he cannot get back the particular thing he was meditating upon (it seemed to Elsie that the right words were coming to her lips, though she did not know how, like a sort of inspiration which overawed, and yet uplifted her). And then perhaps it will be his sermon that will suffer, and he always suffers himself when that is so.”
“He has very little occasion to suffer in that way,” cried Frank, “for every one says—and I think so myself, but I am no judge—that there is no one that preaches like him, either in the town or through all Fife. I should say more than that—for I never in London heard any sermons that I listened to as I do to his.”
Elsie beamed upon her lover like the morning sun. It was strictly true to the letter, but, whether there might be anything in the fact, that none of these discredited preachers in London were father to Elsie, need not be inquired. It gave the minister’s daughter a keen pang of pleasure to hear this flattering judgment. It affected her more than her mother’s recommendation, or any of her own serious thoughts. She felt for a moment as if she could even love Frank Mowbray, and get to think him the first of men.
“Come and let me see the new beast,” she said, with what was to Frank the most enchanting smile.
Johnny Wemyss was not perhaps at that moment a figure precisely adapted to please a maiden’s eye, nor would any other lad in St. Rule’s have cared to present himself before a young lady whom he regarded with interest, under his present aspect. His trousers were doubled up as far as was practicable, upon legs which were not models of shapeliness nor even of strength, being thin and wiry “shanks,” capable of any amount of fatigue or exertion, but showing none of these qualities. His arms, much like these lower members, were also uncovered up to the elbow, his blue pea-jacket had a deposit of sand in every wrinkle, and the broad blue bonnet on his head had scraps of very vivid green sea-weed clinging to it, showing how Johnny’s head, as well as his arms and legs, had been in contact with the recesses of the rocks. It was pushed back from his forehead, and he was holding out at the length of his hairy, sinewy arm, a thing which was calculated to call forth sentiments rather of disgust than of admiration, in persons not affected with that sympathetic interest in the researches of Johnny, which St. Rule’s in general was now beginning to feel. It was a variety of that family of the Medusa, called in St. Rule’s jelly fish, which fringe all the sands along that coast after a storm. Elsie had got over the repugnance to touch the clammy creatures, which is common to uninstructed persons, and was eager to have the peculiarity in its transparent structure pointed out to her, which marked it as a discovery. But Johnny was neither so animated in its exposition, nor so enthusiastic over the beauty of his prize, as he had been on many previous and less important occasions. He had been a witness of Elsie’s progress, since Frank Mowbray had joined her. He had seen her pause by the rocks to recover herself from something, he could not tell what. Was it not very likely at least that it was a more full disclosure of Frank’s sentiments—which, indeed, nobody in St. Rule’s had any doubt about the nature of—which suddenly overcame a vigorous, healthful girl like Elsie, and made her lean against the wet rocks which were under water at full tide, and grasp the tangles of the dulse for support? Nothing could be more probable, nay, certain. And when Elsie turned towards her lover with that smile which the other half saw, and most clearly divined, and led him back with her triumphant, what other hypothesis could account for it? Johnny could follow with the most delicate nicety the conclusions that were to be drawn from the transparent lines of colour in the round clammy disc he held quivering in his hand; but he could not tell, how could he; having no data to go upon, and being quite incapable, as science will probably always continue to be of such a task, to decipher what was in a single quivering heart, though it might be of much more consequence to him. He watched them coming along together, Frank Mowbray suddenly changed from the commonplace comrade, never quite trusted as one of themselves by the young men of St. Rule’s, though admitted to a certain cordiality and good fellowship—coming along transfigured, beaming all over, his very clothes, always so much more dainty than anybody else’s, giving out a radiation of glory—the admired yet contemned spats upon his feet, unconsciously stepping as if to music: and altogether with a conquering hero aspect, which made Johnny long to throttle him, though Johnny was perhaps the most peaceable of all the youths of his time. An unconscious “confound him” surged up to the lips of the naturalist, himself so triumphant a minute ago in the glory of his discovery; and for one dreadful moment, Johnny felt disposed to pitch his Medusæ back into the indifferent water, which would have closed over it as calmly as though it had been the most lowly and best known of its kind. For what was the good of anything, even an original discovery, if such a thing was permitted to be under the skies, as that a girl such as Elsie Buchanan should elect out of all the world the like of Frank Mowbray, half-hearted Scot, dandy, and trifler, for her master? It was enough to disgust a man with all the courses of the earth, and even with the finest unclassed Medusæ newly voyaged out of the heart of the sea.
“Oh, Johnny,” Elsie said, hurrying towards him in all that glow and splendour of triumph (as he thought). “I hear you have made a discovery, a real discovery! Let me see it! and will it be figured in all the books, and your name put to it? Wemyssea—or something of that kind.”
“I had thought of a different name,” said Johnny, darkly, “but I’ve changed my mind.”
“What was that?” said Elsie, lightly taking hold of his arm in the easy intimacy of a friendship that had lasted all her life—in order that she might see more clearly the object limply held in his palm. “Tell me the difference,” she said, throwing down her parcel, and putting her other hand underneath his to bring the prize more distinctly within her view. The young man turned deeply red up to his sandy hair, which curled round the edge of his blue bonnet. He shrank a little from that careless touch. And Frank, looking on with a half jealousy, quickly stifled by the more agreeable thought that it was Elsie’s now distinctly identified preference of himself which made her so wholly unconscious of any feeling on the part of the other, laughed aloud out of pure delight and joy of heart.
“What are you laughing at?” said Johnny, gruffly, divining only too well why Frank laughed.
“Show me,” said Elsie, “I think I can see something. You always said I was the quickest to see. Is it this, and this?” she said, bending over the hand which she held.
“Let me hold it for you,” said Frank.
“I can hold up my hand myself,” said Johnny; “I am wanting no assistance. As I found it myself, I hope I am able to show it myself without anybody interfering.”
Elsie withdrew her hand, and looked up surprised in his face, with one of those appeals which are so much less answerable than words. She stood a little aside while he began to expound his discovery. They had all caught a few of the most superficial scientific terms from Johnny. Elsie would never have spoken of the new thing being “figured” in a book, but for those little technicalities of knowledge which he shed about him. And he had said that she was the one of all his interested society who understood best. She was the only one who knew what observation meant, the naturalist said. I think that this was a mistake myself, and that he was chiefly led away by her sympathy and by certain other sentiments of which it is unnecessary to speak.
In the meantime, he explained with a mingled gruffness and languor which Elsie did not understand.
“Oh, it’s perhaps not so great a discovery after all,” Johnny said. “I daresay some fellow has noted it before. That’s what you always find when you take it into your head you have got something new.”
“But you know all about the Medusæ,” said Elsie, “and you would be sure to know if it had been discovered before.”
“I’m not sure that I know anything,” said Johnny, despondently. He cast the jelly fish out of his hand upon the sand. “We’re just, as Newton said, like bairns picking up shells on the shore. We know nothing. It is maybe no new thing at all, but just a variety that everybody knows.”
“Oh, Johnny, that is not like you!” cried Elsie, while the two young men standing by, to whom this mood on Wemyss’s part was quite unknown, gaped at him, vaguely embarrassed, not knowing what to say. Rodie had a great desire to get away from a problem he could not understand, and Frank was feeling a little guilty, he could scarcely tell why. Elsie got down on her knees upon the sand, which was firm though wet, and, gathering a handful of the dulse with its great wet stalks and hollow berries, made a bed for the Medusæ, which, with some repugnance, she lifted on to the little heap.
“You will have to give me a new pair of gloves,” she said, looking up with a laugh, “for I have spoilt these ones that are nearly new; and what will my mother say? But though you think it is very weak, I cannot touch a jelly fish—I am meaning a Medusa, which is certainly a far bonnier name—with my bare hands. There now, it will go easy into a basket, or I would almost carry it myself, with the dulse all about it; but to throw it away is what I will never consent to, for if you think it is a discovery, I know it must be a discovery, and it will be called after you, and a credit to us all.”
“It is a discovery,” cried Johnny, with a sudden change of mien. “I was a fool. I am not going to give it up, whatever happens. The less that comes to me in this world, the more I’ll keep to the little I’m sure of.” When he had uttered this enigmatical sentence, which was one of those mystic utterances, more imposing than wisdom, that fill every audience with confused admiration, he snapped his fingers wildly, and executed a pas of triumph. “It will make the London men stand about!” he said, “and I would just like to know what the Professor will say to it! As for the name——”
“Oh, yes, Johnny, the name?”
“It will be time enough to think of that,” he said, looking at her with mingled admiration and trouble. “Anyway, it is you that have saved it for me,” he said.
“Frank,” said Rodie, “are you meaning to play your foursome with Raaf and Alick, or are you not?”
“I thought you had turned me out of it,” said Frank.
“Oh, go away and play your game!” Elsie commanded in a tone of relief. “It is just the thing that is best for you idle laddies, with never a hand’s turn to do in this world. I am going home as soon as I have seen Johnny take up his new beast like a person of sense, after taking the pet at it like a silly bairn. You are all silly, the whole tribe of you, for so much as you think of yourselves. If you’re late, Alick and Raaf will just play a twosome, and leave you out.”
“That’s what they’ll do,” Rodie pronounced, authoritatively. “Come along, Frank.”
And Frank followed, though torn in pieces by attractions both ways. It was hard to leave Elsie in so gracious a mood, and also with Johnny Wemyss, who had displayed a quite unexpected side to-day: but Johnny Wemyss did not, could not count, whatever he might feel: surely if there was anything a man could calculate upon, it was that. And Frank was sincerely pleased to be taken into favour again by that young despot, Rodie, who in his capacity as Elsie’s brother, rode roughshod over Ralph Beaton and was more respected than he had any right to be by several more of the golf-playing community. So that it seemed a real necessity in present circumstances, with the hopes of future games in mind, to follow him docilely now.
“Why were you so petted, Johnny?” said Elsie, when reluctantly her wooer had followed her brother in a run to the links.
“I was not petted,” said Johnny, with that most ineffectual reply which consists of simple contradiction. In those days petted, that is the condition of a spoilt child, was applied to all perverse moods and causeless fits of ill-temper. I do not think that in current Scots literature, of which there are so many examples, I remember the same use of the word now.
“Oh, but you were,” cried Elsie, laughing, “in a pet with your new beast, and what could go further than that? I would not have been so much surprised if you had been in a pet with Rodie or me.”
“There was occasion,” said Johnny, relapsing a little into the clouds. “Why were you such friends with that empty-headed ass? And coming along the sands smiling at him as if—as if——”
“As if what?” said Elsie. She laughed again, the laugh of conscious power. She was not perhaps so fine a character as, considering all things, she might have been expected to be.
“Elsie,” said the young man, “it’s not me that shall name it. If it really turns out to be something, as I think it will, I am going to call it after you.”
“A grand compliment,” cried the girl, with another peel of laughter. “A jeely fish! But,” she added, quickly, “I think it is awfully nice of you, Johnny; for those are the sort of things, I know, that you like best in the world.”
“Not quite,” said the naturalist. “There are things I care for far more than beasts, and if you don’t know that, you are not so quick at the uptake as I have always thought you; but what is the good when I am nobody, and never will be anybody, if I were to howk and ferret for new beasts till I die!”
“Bide a wee, bide a wee,” said Elsie, laughing, but confused; “you will be a placed minister, and as good as any of them; and what could ye have better than that?”
“I am the most unfortunate man in the world,” said Johnny, “for you know that, which is the only way for a poor lad like me, it is not what I want.”
“And you are not blate to say so to me that am a minister’s daughter, and very proud of it,” cried Elsie, with a flush of offence.
“That’s just the worst of it,” said Johnny, sadly, shaking his head, “for maybe you, and certainly other folk, will believe indeed I am not blate, thinking too much of myself, not to be content with a kirk if I could get one. But you should know it isn’t that. I think too little of myself. Never could I be a man like your father, that is one of the excellent of the earth. It is the like of him, and not the like of me, that should be a minister. And then whatever I was, and wherever I was,” he added, with a humility that was almost comic, “I would always have something inside teasing me to be after the beasts all the same.”
“What are you going to do with it now?” said Elsie, looking down at the unconscious object of all this discussion, which lay semi-transparent, and a little dulled in the delicate mauve colour of its interesting markings, on the bed she had made of the tangles of the dulse at her feet.
“The first thing is, I will draw a picture of it, the best I can,” said Johnny, rousing to something of his usual enthusiasm, “and then I will dissect it and get at its secrets, and I will send the drawing and the account of it to London—and then——”
“And then?” repeated Elsie.
“I will just wait,” he said. His eyes which had been lighted up with eagerness and spirit sank, and he shrugged his shoulders and shook his head. “Just as likely as not I will never hear word of it more. That’s been my fate already. I must just steel myself not to hope.”
“Johnny, do you mean that you have sent up other things like this, and got no good of them?”
“Aye,” he said, without looking up. He was not a cheerful figure, with his head bent on his breast, and his eyes fixed on the strange prize—was it a mere clammy inanimate thing, or was it progress, and fame, and fortune?—which lay at his feet. Elsie did not know what to say.
“And you standing there with wet feet, and everything damp and cold about you,” she cried, with a sudden outburst. “Go home this moment, Johnny Wemyss; this time it will be different. I’m not a prophet and how should I know? But this time it will be different. How are you to get it home?”
He took his blue bonnet from his head, with a low laugh, and placed the specimen in it.
“Nobody minds,” he said, smoothing down his sleeves. “I am as often without my bonnet as with it. They say it’s only Johnny Wemyss: but I’m not fit to walk by the side of a bonnie princess like you.”
“I am coming with you all the same,” Elsie said.
They were, indeed, a very unlikely pair. The girl in all her prettiness of summer costume, the young man, damp, sandy, and bareheaded, carrying his treasure. So far as the sands extended, however, there was no one to mark the curious conjunction, and they went lightly over the firm wet sand within high-water mark, talking little, but with a perfect familiarity and kindness of companionship which was more exquisite than the heats and chills through which Frank Mowbray had passed, when Elsie for her own purposes had led him back. Elsie kept step with Johnny’s large tread, she had an air of belonging to him which came from the intimate intercourse of years; and though the social distinction between the minister’s daughter and the fisherman’s son was very marked, externally, it was evidently quite blotted out in fact by a closer fraternity. Elsie was not ashamed of him, nor was Johnny proud of her, so far as their difference of position was concerned. He was proud of her in another sense, but she quite as much of him.
“I will call it ‘Princess Elsie,’” he said at last. “I will put it in Latin: or else I will call it ‘Alicia:’ for Elsie and Alison and all are from Alice, which is just the bonniest name in the world.”
“Nonsense,” she said, “there are many that are much bonnier. I don’t think Alison is very bonny, it is old-fashioned; but it was my grandmother’s name, and I like it for that.”
“It is just the bonniest name in all the world,” he repeated, softly; but next moment they had climbed from the sands to the smooth ground near the old castle, and from thenceforward Johnny Wemyss was the centre of a moving group, made up of boys and girls, and an occasional golfer, and a fisher or two, and, in short, everybody about; for Johnny Wemyss was known to everybody, and his particular pursuits were the sport, and interest, and pride of the town.
“He has found a new beast.”
“Oh, have you found a new beast? Oh Johnny, let us see it, let us see it! Oh, but it’s nothing but a jeely-fish,” cried, in a number of voices, the little crowd. Johnny walked calmly on, his bare head red in the sunshine, with crisp short curls surrounding a forehead which was very white in the upper part, where usually sheltered by his bonnet, and a fine red brown mahogany tint below. Johnny was quite at his ease amid the encircling, shouting little crowd, from out of which Elsie withdrew at the garden gate, with a wave of her hand. He had no objection to their questions, their jests, their cries of “Let us see it, Johnny!” It did not in the least trouble him that he was Johnny to all the world, and his “new beast” the diversion of the town.