The Ladies Lindores · Chapter 17 (1/2)

XVII

“Oh yes, that’s true⁠—I’m an old Tory. I’m proud of the name,” said Sir James, with his genial countenance. “If you’ll believe me, my young friend, most changes are for the worse. When I remember, before I went to India, what a cheery world it was⁠—none of those newfangled notions were so much as thought of⁠—we were all kindly one with another, as country neighbours should be. The parish school⁠—that was good enough for me. I got the most of my schooling there. We had a grand dominie⁠—there was not a more learned man out of St. Andrews or Aberdeen. Old Robert Beatoun the blacksmith was at the school with me. We’ve been great friends ever since, but I cannot say that he ever took anything upon him in consequence. That’s one of your newfangled notions too⁠—to part all the world into classes, and then, when their habits are formed and their ways of living settled, to proclaim they’re all equal. No, no⁠—they’re not all equal; you may take my word for it, though I’m no Solomon.”

“I don’t think so, either, Sir James; but pardon me, if you found no evil in going to the same school as the old blacksmith⁠—”

“Not a pin, sir⁠—not a pin!” cried the old general. “We respected each other. We were great friends, but not associates. I had my own cronies, and he had his: but we always respected each other. And do you think to sit on the same bench with a wholesome country lad in corduroy breeks was worse for me than being packed up with a set of little dandies, taking care of their books and keeping their hands clean, and sent out of their own country till they’re made strangers to it, as comes to pass with your Eton, and the rest of them⁠—I ask your pardon, Erskine. I forgot you were there yourself⁠—”

“There is no offence,” said John. “I think I agree with you so far; but, Sir James, your theory is far more democratic, far more levelling⁠—”

“Me democratic and levelling!” said Sir James. “That will be news. No, no; that was all in the course of nature. When a lad was to be pushed in the world, his friends pushed him. You cannot do that now. When you saw your friend with a houseful of children, you would say to him, ‘What are you going to do with those fine lads of yours?’ and if you knew a director, or had influence to hear of a writer-ship, or a set of colours.⁠—Now, ye cannot help on your friend’s boys, and ye cease to think of them. What little ye might do, ye forget to do it. Robert Beatoun’s grandson, you’ll tell me, got in high on the list for those competition-wallahs, as they call them. Well, I say nothing against it. The lad is a good lad, though he was never brought up in the way of having men under him, and he’ll feel the want of that when he gets to India. The like of me⁠—we were poor enough, but we had always been used to be of the officer kind. That makes a great difference; and if you think we did our work worse for having no bother about examinations⁠—”

“That has proved itself, Sir James. Nobody pretends to say it did not work well.”

“Then why change it?” said the old man. “And about your hospitals and things. When there was a poor natural, as they call it, in a village, everybody was good to the creature; and do you think the honest folk that had known it all its life would not put up with it, and feel for it, more than servants in an hospital? When we had a burden to bear, we bore it in those days, and did the best we could for our own. We didn’t shuffle them off on the first person’s shoulders that would take them up.”

All this John had brought upon himself by his reference to Lord Lindores’s scheme. Whatever might be well with respect to the election, he had felt that there could be but one voice in respect to a hospital; but John had soon been convinced that in that respect also there certainly was more than one voice.

“But I suppose,” he said, feeling somewhat confused by this style of reasoning, for it was not a subject upon which the young man had thought for himself⁠—“I suppose, for the suffering and miserable⁠—for those out of the common line of humanity, more badly off, less capable than their neighbours⁠—hospitals are necessary.”

“Let those that belong to them care for them, sir,” cried Sir James. “I’m saying it in no hard-hearted way. Do you not think that when a trouble is sent upon a family, it’s far better for the family to make a sacrifice⁠—to draw close together, to bear it, and take care of their own? That’s always been my opinion⁠—that was the practice long syne. If ye had a thorn in the flesh, ye supported it. When one was ill, the rest took care of him. There were no hired sick-nurses in those days. When ye had a fever, your mother nursed you. If you were blind or lame, everyone would give you a little, and nobody grudged your meat or your drink. And that was how Scotland was kept so independent, and the poor folk hated debt and beggary. Once you give your own duty over to other folks, you sacrifice that,” the old soldier said, with conviction. Sir James was of the class of men who are never more entirely at home than when they are exercising the duties of beneficence⁠—the sort of men who manage hospitals and establish charities by nature. Had the county hospital been existing, he it was, and not Lord Lindores, who would have given time and trouble to it; but Sir James was as full of prejudices as a hearty, healthy old gentleman has a right to be. He would not give in to the new thing; and his arguments were shrewd, although he himself would have been the last to be bound by them. He would have taken the burden off a poor man’s shoulders and carried it himself without a compunction. Saying is one thing and doing another, all the world over; only it is usual that people profess not less, but more, benevolent sentiments than are natural to them. Sir James took the other way.

“You must excuse me saying,” the old general went on, “that you must not trust too much to Lord Lindores. Part of it is political, there is no doubt about that. He’s wanting to get a character for being public-spirited and a useful member of his party. They tell me he’s thinking of bringing in his son in the case of an election, but that would never do⁠—that is to say, from my point of view,” said Sir James, laughing; “you’re on the other side?⁠—ah, to be sure, I had forgotten that. Well, I suppose we’re all meaning the same thing⁠—the good of the country; but depend upon it, that’s not to be procured in this way. The Lindores family are very excellent people⁠—very worthy people; but they’re newfangled⁠—they have lived abroad, and they have got foreign notions into their heads.”

“Benevolent institutions are, above all others, English notions⁠—or so, at least, I have always heard,” John said.

This brought a slight flush on the old man’s cheek. “Well, I believe you are right⁠—I think you are right. I will not go against that. Still it is a great pity to bring foreign notions into a quiet country place.”

They were walking up and down the lawn at Chiefswood, where a party of country neighbours were about to assemble. It was a kind of gathering which had scarcely been acclimatised in the North; and the pleasure of sitting out, though the seats were comfortably arranged in the most sheltered spot, was at the best an equivocal one; but fortunately the drawing-room, with its large bright windows overlooking the scene of the gentle gaieties provided for, was behind, and there already some groups had collected. John Erskine, without being aware of it, was the hero of the feast. He was the newcomer, and everybody was willing to do him honour. It was expected that he was to be the chief performer in those outdoor games which were not yet very well known to the young people. And it was somewhat disconcerting that he should have chosen this moment to discourse with old Sir James upon the county hospital, and the poor lunatics and imbeciles of the district, for whose benefit Lord Lindores was so anxious to legislate. Had it been any other subject, the old general would have dismissed the young man to his peers, for Sir James had a great notion that the young people should be left to entertain each other. But as it happened, the theme was one which had disturbed his genial mind. He was vexed at once in his prejudices, and in his honest conviction that the county, to which he was so glad to get back after his long exile, was the best managed and most happy of districts. He had found nothing amiss in it when he came home. It had been welcome to him in every detail of the old life which he remembered so well. There were too many changes, he thought, already. He would have liked to preserve everything. And to have it suggested by a new gingerbread, half-English, half-foreign intruder, with all the light-minded ways that belonged to the unknown races on the Continent, that the beloved county wanted reorganisation, almost betrayed the old man into ill-humour. The guests kept arriving while he talked, but he talked on, giving forth his views loosely upon general questions. “We’re going the wrong road,” he said, “aye seeking after something that’s new. The old way was the best. Communistic plans are bad things, whatever ye may say for them; and shuffling off your sick and your poor on other folk’s hands, and leaving them to the public to provide for, what’s that but communism? You’ll never get me to consent to it,” Sir James said.

“Where is the general?” Lady Montgomery was saying in the drawing-room. “Bless me! has nobody seen Sir James? He cannot expect me to go out without my bonnet, and get my death of cold setting all the young people agoing. No, no, I told him that. I said to him, you may put out the chairs, but if you think Barbara Erskine and me, and other sensible women, are going to sit there in a May day and get back all our winter rheumatism, you are mistaken, Sir James. But now, where is the general? Nora, you must just go and look for him, and say I’m surprised that he should neglect his duty. When I yielded to this kind of party, which is not my notion of pleasure, I told him plainly he must take the lawn part of it upon his own hands.”

“And where’s my nephew John?” said Miss Barbara Erskine, who sat in one of the seats of honour, within pleasant reach of a bright fire. “Nora, when you look for Sir James, you’ll look for him too. I’m affronted, tell him, that he was not the first to find me out.”

“I hear Mr. Erskine is a great friend of the Lindores,” said Mrs. Sempill. “Having no son at home, I have not had it in my power, Miss Barbara, to show him any attention, but I hoped to make his acquaintance today. They tell me he knew the Lindores well in their former circumstances. That is, no doubt, a fine introduction for him to the county.”

“If an Erskine of Dalrulzian wanted any introduction,” said Miss Barbara, “it would be a very ill one, in my opinion. For there are as many that think ill of them as there are that think well of them, and they’re not our kind of people. But John Erskine wants nobody to introduce him, I hope. His father’s son, and my father’s great-grandson, should have well-wishers enough.”

“And a well-looking, well-spoken young man. He minds me of your uncle Walter, the one that went abroad,” said old Mrs. Methven of the Broomlees. She was older than Miss Barbara, older than the imagination could conceive. Her memory slipped all the recent generation, and went back to heights of antiquity unknown. Miss Barbara Erskine was still a young person to this old lady, and Sir James a frisky young soldier. “Walter Erskine was the first person I ever saw that wore his own hair without so much as a ribbon. It had a terrible naked look, but you soon got used to it. This one is like him. But you’ll scarcely mind him. He was young when he left the county. I cannot remember if you were born.”

“He’s like his father, which is not so far back,” Miss Barbara said.

“Bless me, bless me! where is the general?” cried Lady Montgomery. She was standing in front of the great bow-window which looked upon the lawn, with her beautiful Indian shawl on her shoulders. Grouped upon the grass were several parties of the younger people, not quite knowing what to do with themselves. Some of the ladies, wrapped in warm cloaks and shawls, were seated round, waiting for some novelty of amusement with which they were unacquainted, and wondering when it was going to begin. It seemed to Lady Montgomery the most dreadful neglect of duty that there was no one to set the young people agoing. “Will anything have happened to Sir James?” she said, in anxious Scotch, and cast a glance back at the pleasant fire, and wrapped her shawl more closely round, with a sense that Providence might require of her the heroic effort of stepping outside. But just then she perceived in the distance that her general had been captured, and was being led back in triumph to the lawn by Nora and Agnes Sempill, two of his chief favourites. John followed after them, looking by no means triumphant. When Lady Montgomery saw this, she gave a nod of satisfaction, and returned to the fire. “Whatever they’re going to do, it’ll begin now,” she said. “If it’s worth looking at, we can see it from the window; but for my part, I’m very anxious about putting folk to sit on the grass at this time of the year. I would not wonder to hear of bronchitis or inflammation after it⁠—but it’s none of my doing. Sir James is just daft about all the new-fashioned ways of amusing young people. For my part, I say there’s nothing like the old way. Just to clear out the rooms, and get the fiddlers, and let them dance. But that would be a daftish thing too, in daylight,” the old lady said; for she was not at all up to the current of events.

It was, I believe, the venerable game of croquet which was the “new-fashioned thing” in question, and which all the people outside crowded round to see, while a few highly-instructed young persons, who had brought the knowledge from “the South,” proceeded, with much modest importance, to exhibit for the benefit of their neighbours. “It’s quite easy,” they said, each feeling a sort of benevolent missionary. John Erskine was one of these illuminati, and he was the partner of Agnes Sempill, the girl who had trembled for a moment lest Mr. Torrance of Tinto might be going to select her from the many that smiled upon him. She would have married him had this been; but it must be said for her that she was unfeignedly glad to have escaped. This having been the case, it will be apparent that poor Agnes was no longer in her first youth. She was five or six and twenty⁠—young enough, yet not altogether a girl; and she knew, poor young woman, that she must marry the next man who offered himself⁠—they were so poor! and her mother did not fail to impress upon her that she was losing all her chances. She looked upon John Erskine, accordingly, with more critical interest than is ordinarily felt. He was about her own age, but she decided that he was too young; and she hoped, whatever he was going to do in the matrimonial way, that he would show his intentions at once, and not force her mother into unnecessary efforts. “Too young⁠—but he might do very well for Mary,” she said to herself; and then she turned to him to talk about croquet, as if there was no such important subject.

“It is such a thing to have something that can be played out of doors!” she said. “Well, not so much in Scotland, that is true, but still we want a little variety. Do you play golf, Mr. Erskine? The ladies’ golf is very nice; it is only putting⁠—but you won’t understand what that means. At St. Andrews there is the Ladies’ Links⁠—”

“Which sound romantic and picturesque, at least.”