An Orkney Maid

CHAPTER X

THE ONE REMAINS, THE MANY CHANGE AND PASS

There are epochs in every life that cut it sharply asunder, its continuity is broken and things can never be the same again. This was the dominant feeling that came to Thora Ragnor, as she sat with her mother one afternoon in early January. It was a day of Orkney’s most uncomfortable and depressing kind, the whole island being swept by drifting clouds of vapour, which not only filled the atmosphere but also the houses, so that everything was to the touch damp and uncomfortable. Nothing could escape its miserable contact, even sitting on the hearthstone its power was felt; and until a good northwester came to dissipate the damp moisture, nobody expected much from any one’s temper.

Thora was restless and unhappy. Her life appeared to have been suddenly deprived of all joy and sunshine. She felt as if everything was at an end, or might as well be, and her mother’s placid, peaceful face irritated her. How could she sit knitting mufflers for the soldiers in the trenches, and not think of Boris and also of Ian, whom they had all conspired to send to the same danger and perhaps death? She could not understand her mother’s serenity. It occurred to her this afternoon, that she might have run away with Ian to Shetland and there her sisters would have seen her married; and she did not do this, she obeyed her parents, and what did she get for it? Loneliness and misery and her lover sent far away from her. Oh, those moments when Virtue has failed to reward us and we regret having served her! To the young, they are sometimes very bitter.

And her mother’s calmness! It not only astonished, it angered her. How could she sit still and not talk of Boris and Ian? It was a necessary relief to Thora, their names were at her lips all day long. But Thora had yet to learn that it is the middle-aged and the old who have the power of hoping through everything, because they have the knowledge that the soul survives all its adventures. This is the great inspiration, it is the good wine which God keeps to the last. The old, the way-worn, the faint and weary, they know this as the young can never know it.

However, we may say to bad weather, as to all other bad things, “this, too, will pass,” and in a couple of days the sky was blue, the sun shining, and the atmosphere fresh and clear and full of life-giving energy. Ships of all kinds were hastening into the harbour and the mail boat, broad-bottomed and strongly built, was in sight. Then there was a little real anxiety. There was sure to be letters, what news would they bring? Some people say there is no romance in these days. Very far wrong are they. These sealed bits of white paper hold very often more wonderful romances than any in the Thousand Nights of story telling.

Rahal’s and Thora’s anxiety was soon relieved. A messenger from the warehouse came quickly to the house, with a letter from Ragnor to Rahal and a letter from Ian to Thora. Ragnor’s letter said they had had a rough voyage southward, the storm being in their faces all the way to Leith. There they left the boat and took a train for London, from which place they went as quickly as possible to Spithead, fearing to miss the ship sailing for the Crimea on the eleventh. Ragnor said he had seen Ian safely away to Sebastopol and observed that he was remarkably cheerful and satisfied. He spoke then of his own delight with London and regretted that he had not made arrangements which would permit him to stay a week or two longer there.

Thora’s letter was a genuine love letter, for Ian was deeply in love and everything he said was in the superlative mood. Lovers like such letters. They are to them the sacred writings. It did not seem ridiculous to Thora to be called “an angel of beauty and goodness, the rose of womanhood, the lily on his heart, his star of hope, the sunshine of his life,” and many other extravagant impossibilities. She would have been disappointed if Ian had been more matter-of-fact and reasonable.

So there was now comparative happiness in the house of Ragnor, for though the master’s letters were never much more than plain statements of doings or circumstances, they satisfied Rahal. It is not every man that knows how to write to a woman, even if he loves her; but women have a special divinity in reading love letters, and they know beyond all doubting the worth of words as affected by those who use them.

Ragnor gave himself a whole week in London and before leaving that city for Edinburgh he wrote a few lines home, saying he intended to stay in London over the following Sabbath and hear Canon Liddon preach. On Monday he would reach Edinburgh and on Tuesday have an interview with Dr. Macrae and then take the first boat for home. They could now wait easily, the silence had been broken, the weather was good, they had “The History of Pendennis” and “David Copperfield” to read, their little duties and little cares to attend to, and they were not at all unhappy.

At length, the master was to be home that day. If the wind was favourable, he might arrive about two o’clock, but Rahal thought the boat would hardly manage it before three with the wind in her teeth, or it might be nearer four. The house was all ready for him, spick and span from roof to cellar and a dinner of the good things he particularly liked in careful preparation. And, after all, he came a little earlier than was expected.

“Dear Conall,” said Rahal, “I have been watching for thee, but I thought it would be four o’clock, ere thou made Kirkwall.”

“Not with Donald Farquar sailing the boat. The way he manages a boat is beyond reason.”

“How is that?”

“He talks to her, as if she was human. He scolds and coaxes her and this morning he promised to paint and gild her figurehead, if she got into Kirkwall before three. Then every sailor on board helped her and the wind changed a point or two and that helped her, and now and then Farquar pushed her on, with a good or bad word, and she saved herself by just eleven minutes.”

“And how well thou art looking! Never have I seen thee so handsome before, never! What hast thou been doing to Conall Ragnor?”

“I will tell thee. When I had bid Ian good-bye, I resolved to take a week’s holiday in London and as I walked down the Strand, I noticed that every one looked at me, not unkindly but curiously, and when I looked at the men who looked at me, I saw we were different. I went into a barber’s first, and had my hair cut like Londoners wear it, short and smart, and not thick and bushy, like mine was.”

“Well then, thy hair was far too long but they have cut off all thy curls.”

“I like the wanting of them. They looked very womanish. I’m a deal more purpose-like without them. Then I went to a first-class tailor-man and he fit me out with the suit I’m wearing. He said it was ‘the correct thing for land or water.’ What dost thou think of it?”

“Nothing could be more becoming to thee.”

“Nay then, I got a Sabbath Day suit that shames this one. And I bought a church hat and a soft hat that beats all, and kid gloves, and a good walking stick with a fancy knob.”

“Thou art not needing a walking stick for twenty years yet.”

“Well then, the English gentlemen always carries a walking stick. I think they wouldn’t know the way they were going without one. At last, I went to the shoemakers, and he made me take off my ‘Wellingtons.’ He said no one wore them now, and he shod me, as thou sees, very comfortably. I like the change.”

Then they heard Thora calling them, and Ragnor taking Rahal’s hand hastened to answer the call. She was standing at the foot of the stairway, and her father kissed her and as he did so whispered–“All is well, dear one. After dinner, I will tell thee.” Then he took her hand, and the three in one went together to the round table, set so pleasantly near to the comfortable fireside. Standing there, hand-clasped, the master said those few words of adoration and gratitude that turned the white-spread board into a household altar. Dinner was on the table and its delicious odours filled the room and quickly set Ragnor talking.

“I will tell you now, what I saw in London,” he said. “Ian is a story good enough to keep until after dinner. I saw him sail away from Spithead, and he went full of hope and pluck and sure of success. Then I took the first train back to London. I got lodgings in a nice little hotel in Norfolk Street, just off the Strand, and London was calling me all night long.”

“Thou could not see much, Father, in one week,” said Thora.

“I saw the Queen and the Houses of Parliament, and I saw the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey and the Crystal Palace. And I have heard an oratorio, with a chorus of five hundred voices and Sims Reeves as soloist. I have been to Drury Lane, and the Strand Theatres, to a big picture gallery, and a hippodrome. My dear ones, the end of one pleasure was just the beginning of another; in one week, I have lived fifty years.”

Any one can understand how a new flavour was added to the food they were eating by such conversation. Not all the sauces in Christendom could have made it so piquant and appetizing. Ragnor carved and ate and talked, and Rahal and Thora listened and laughed and asked endless questions, and when the mind enters into a meal, it not only prolongs, it also sweetens and brightens it. I suppose there may be in every life two or three festivals, that stand out from all others–small, unlooked-for meetings, perhaps–where love, hope, wonder and happy looking-forward, made the food taste as if it had been cooked in Paradise. Where, at least for a few hours, a mortal might feel that man had been made only a little lower than the angels.

Now, if any of my readers have such a memory, let them close the book, shut their eyes and live it over again. It was probably a foretaste of a future existence, where we shall have faculties capable of fuller and higher pleasures; faculties that without doubt “will be satisfied.” For in all hearts that have suffered, there must abide the conviction that the Future holds Compensation, not Punishment.

But without forecast or remembrance, the Ragnors that night enjoyed their highly mentalised meal, and after it was over and the table set backward, and the white hearth brushed free of ashes, they drew around the fire, and Ragnor laid down his pipe, and said:

“I left London last Monday, and I was in Edinburgh until Wednesday morning. On Tuesday I called on Dr. Macrae. I had a letter to give him from Ian.”

“Why should Ian have written to him?” asked Rahal, in a tone of disapproval.

“Because Ian has a good heart, he wrote to his father. I read the letter. It was all right.”

“What then did he say to him?”

“Well, Rahal, he told his father that he was leaving for the front, and he wished to leave with his forgiveness and blessing, if he would give it to him. He said that he was sure that in their life-long dispute he must often have been in the wrong, and he asked forgiveness for all such lapses of his duty. He told his father that he had a clear plan of success before him, but said that in all cases–fortunate or unfortunate–he would always remember the name he bore and do nothing to bring it shame or dishonour. A very good, brave letter, dear ones. I give Ian credit for it.”

“Did thou advise him to write it?” asked Rahal.

“No, it sprang from his own heart.”

“Thou should not have sanctioned it.”

“Ian did right, Rahal. I did right to sanction it.”

“Father, if Ian has a clear plan of success before him, what is it? He ought to have told us.”

“He thought it out while we were at sea, he asked me to explain the matter to you. It is, indeed, a plan so simple and manifest, that I wonder we did not propose it at the very first. You must recollect that Ian was in the employ of Dr. Finlay of Edinburgh for three years and a half, and that during that period he acquired both a large amount of medical knowledge and also of medical experience. Now we all know that Ian has a special gift for this science, especially for its surgical side, and he is not going to the trenches or the cavalry, he is going to offer himself to the Surgical and Medical Corps. He will go to the battlefield, carry off the wounded, give them first help, or see them to the hospital. In this way he will be doing constant good to others and yet be forwarding the career which is to make his future happy and honourable.”

“Then Ian has decided to be a surgeon, Father?”

“Yes, and I can tell thee, Thora, he has not set himself a task beyond his power. I think very highly of Ian, no one could help doing so; and see here, Thora! I have a letter in my pocket for thee! He gave it to me as I bid him good-bye at Spithead.”

“I am so happy, Father! So happy!”

“Thou hast good reason to be happy. We shall all be proud of Ian in good time.”

“Did thou give Ian’s letter to his father’s hands, or did thou mail it, Coll?”

“I gave it to him, personally.”

“What was thy first impression of him?”

“He gave me first of all an ecclesiastical impression. I just naturally looked for a gown or surplice. He wanted something without one. He met me coldly but courteously, and taking Ian’s letter from me, placed it deliberately upon a pile of letters lying on his desk. I said, ‘It is from thy son, Doctor, perhaps thou had better read it at once. It is a good letter, sir, read it.’

“He bowed, and asked if Ian was with me. I said, ‘No, sir, he is on his way to Scutari.’ Then he was silent. After a few moments he asked me if I had been in Edinburgh during the past Sabbath. ‘You should have been here,’ he added, ‘then you could have heard the great Dr. Chalmers preach.’ I told him that I had spent that never-to-be-forgotten Sabbath under the blessed dome of St. Paul’s in London. I said something about the transcending beauty of the wonderful music of the cathedral service, and spoke with delight of the majestic nave, filled with mediæval rush-bottomed chairs for the worshippers, and I told him how much more fitting they were in the House of God than pews.” And Ragnor uttered the last word with a new-found emphasis. “He asked, quite scornfully, in what sense I found them more fitting, and I answered rather warmly–‘Why, sir, sitting together in chairs, we felt so much more at home. We were like one great family in our Father’s house.’”

“Are the chairs rented?” asked Rahal.

“Rented!” cried Ragnor scornfully. “No, indeed! There are no dear chairs and no cheap chairs, all are equal and all are free. I never felt so like worshipping in a church before. The religious spirit had free way in our midst.”

“What did Macrae say?”

“He said, he supposed the rush chairs were an ‘Armenian innovation’; and I answered, ‘The pews, sir, they are the innovation.’”

“Did thou have any argument with him? I have often heard Ian say he plunged into religious argument with every one he met.”

“Well, Rahal, I don’t know how it happened, but I quickly found myself in a good atmosphere of contradictions. I do not remember either what I had been saying, but I heard him distinctly assert, that ‘it was the Armenians who had described the Calvinists, and they had not wasted their opportunities.’ Then I found myself telling him that Armenianism had ruled the religious world ever since the birth of Christianity; but that Calvinism was a thing of yesterday, a mere Geneva opinion. Rahal, the man has a dogma for a soul, and yet through this hard veil, I could see that he was full of a longing for love; but he has not found out the way to love, his heart is ice-bound. He made me say things I did not want to say, he stirred my soul round and round until it boiled over, and then the words would come. Really, Rahal, I did not know the words were in my mind, till his aggravating questions made me say them.”

“What words? Art thou troubled about them?”

“A little. He was talking of faith and doubt, especially as it referred to the Bible, and I listened until I could bear it no longer. He was asking what proof there was for this, and that, and the other, and as I said, he got me stirred up beyond myself and I told him I cared nothing about proofs. I said proofs were for sceptics and not for good men who knew in whom they had believed.”

“Well then, Coll, that was enough, was it not?”

“Not for Macrae. He said immediately, ‘Suppose there was no divine authority for the scheme of morals and divinity laid down in this Book,’ and he laid his hand reverently on the Bible, ‘where should we be?’ And I told him, we should be just where we were, because God’s commands were written on every conscience and that these commands would stand firm even if creeds became dust, and Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and Paul, all failed and passed away. ‘Power of God!’ I cried, as I struck the table with my fist, ‘it takes God’s tireless, patient, eternal love to put up with puny men, always doubting Him. I believe in God the Father Almighty, the Maker of heaven and earth!’ I said, ‘and I want no proofs about Him in whom I believe.’ By this time, Rahal, he had me on fire. I was ready to deny anything he asserted, especially about hell, for thou knows, Rahal, that there are hells in this world and no worse needed. So when he asked if I believed in the Calvinistic idea of hell, I answered, ‘I deny it! My soul denies it–utterly!’ I reminded him that God spoke to Dives in hell and called him son and that Dives, even there, clung to the fatherhood of God. And I told him this world was a hell to those who deserved hell, and a place of much trial to most men and women, and I thought it was poor comfort to preach to such, that the next world was worse. There now! I have told you enough. He asked me to lunch with him, and I did; and I told him as we ate, what a fine fellow Ian was, and he listened and was silent.”

“Then you saw Ian’s mother and sister?” asked Thora.

“No, I did not. They had gone for the winter to the Bridge of Allan. Mrs. Macrae is sick, her husband seemed unhappy about her.”

Rahal hoped now that her home would settle itself into its usual calm, methodical order. She strove to give to every hour its long accustomed duty, and to infuse an atmosphere of rest and of “use and wont” into every day’s affairs. It was impossible. The master of the house had suffered a world change. He had tasted of strange pleasures and enthusiasms, and was secretly planning a life totally at variance with his long accustomed routine and responsibilities. He did not speak of the things in his heart but nevertheless they escaped him.

Very soon he began to have much more regular communication with his sons in Shetland, and finally he told Rahal that he intended taking his son Robert into partnership. Such changes grew slowly in Ragnor’s mind, and much more slowly in practice, but Rahal knew that they were steadily working to some ultimate, and already definite and determined end in her husband’s will.

The absent also exerted a far greater power upon the home than any one believed. Ian’s letters came with persistent regularity, and the influence of one was hardly spent, when another arrived of quite a different character. Ian was rapidly realizing his hopes. He had been gladly taken into a surgical corps, under the charge of a Doctor Frazer, and his life was a continual drama of stirring events. Generally he wrote between actions, and then he described the gallant young men resting on the slopes of the beleaguered hill, with their weapons at their finger tips, but always cheerful. Sometimes he spoke of them under terrible fire in their life-or-death push forward, followed by the surgeons and stretcher-bearers. Sometimes, he had been to the trenches to dress a wound that would not stop bleeding, but always he wondered at seeing the resolute grit and calmness of these young men, who had been the dandies in London drawing-rooms a year ago and who were now smoking placidly in the trenches at Redan.

“What is it?” he asked an old surgeon, on whom he was waiting. “Is it recklessness?”

“No, sir!” was the answer. “It is straight courage. Courage in the blood. Courage nourished on their mother’s milk. Courage educated into them at Eton or Rugby, in many a fight and scuffle. Courage that lived with them night and day at Oxford or Cambridge, and that made them choose danger and death rather than be known for one moment as a cad or a coward. It was dancing last year. It is fighting in a proper quarrel this year. Different duties, that is all.”

Every now and then Sunna dropped them letters about which there was much pleasant speculating, for as the summer came forward, she began to accept the disappointments made by the death of Boris, and to consider what possibilities of life were still within her power. She said in May that “she was sick and weary of everything about Sebastopol, and that she wanted to go back to Scotland, far more frantically than she ever wanted to leave it.” In June, she said, she had got her grandfather to listen to reason, but had been forced to cry for what she wanted, a humiliation beyond all apologies.

Her next letter was written in Edinburgh, where she declared she intended to stay for some time. Maximus Grant was in Edinburgh with his little brother, who was under the care and treatment of an eminent surgeon living there. “The poor little laddie is dying,” she said, “but I am able to help him over many bad hours, and Max is not half-bad, that is, he might be worse if left to himself. Heigh-ho! What varieties of men, and varieties of their trials, poor women have to put up with!”

As the year advanced Sunna’s letters grew bright and more and more like her, and she described with admirable imitative piquancy the literary atmosphere and conversation which is Edinburgh’s native air. In the month of November, little Eric went away suddenly, in a paroxysm of military enthusiasm, dying literally the death of a soldier “with tumult, with shouting, and with the sound of the trumpets,” in his soul’s hearing.