The Heather-Moon
desperately want to find out what everything means? I do. But I suppose
you know everything by now. Well, I began to read without being so very
much interested. Then, suddenly, my mind seemed to wake up. It was a
wonderful feeling, just as if I stood near to a man who was playing
marvellous and startling music on the grandest organ ever made. And the
man who played could sing too. He sang in a voice sometimes harsh and
sometimes sweet. It seemed to me as I read the book that it was humorous
and sad, tender and stern at the same time. And till the very end I was
carried along on the wave of that organ music, which had in it always a
thrill of the divine. I never found any other book in the library that
made me feel exactly like that, except Shakespeare--and Grandma had all
the Shakespeare volumes carted off to the garret after she came in one
day when I was eleven, and found me reading 'Macbeth.' As for the
picture of Carlyle, it shows him, sitting in a chair, with a look on his
face of a sad man alone in a gray world."
"Whistler's portrait! You shall have all Carlyle's works and
Shakespeare's for your own. I'll give them to you," said Sir Somerled,
looking at me with an interested look, as if suddenly he liked me better
than he had before.
"Oh, you _are_ good, and I should love to have them," I said. "But now
there'll be my mother I shall have to ask permission of for everything.
I must do just what she wants me to do, for I shall die if she doesn't
love me."
"Yes. I'd forgotten," said he.
"I hadn't, for a minute," I answered. "But I suppose, as mother is a
great actress, she loves Shakespeare and has all his works; and perhaps
she has Carlyle, too, in her library."
"Perhaps," he echoed.
"Don't you like her?" I asked. "You always look odd, and speak in a
short, snappy way when I talk of my mother."
"I like and admire her immensely," he answered, in that remote tone
which tries to frighten me, and does almost--but not quite. "All the
same, I don't think you'll find Carlyle in her library, so you'll have
to let me give him to you. But meanwhile, you shall learn to understand
him better by seeing the little village where he was born, and the house
his father the stonemason built."
So we started off in the car, going back to the highway and along a road
which perhaps would not have seemed extraordinary if it hadn't been made
surpassingly beautiful by men who lit the path of history with a shining
light. I had a gay, irresponsible feeling, sitting beside Sir S. on the
springy front seat of the luxurious motor-car, as if I were a neat
little parcel clearly addressed to my destination, and going there
safely by registered post. By this time even Mrs. James had ceased to
"bite her heart" when she saw another motor dashing toward us, or a man
sauntering across the road and filling the whole horizon. The car is so
singularly intelligent that you feel it is a friend, too kind-hearted
and chivalrous a creature to let anything bad happen. Of course, about
every ten minutes something _almost_ happens, but that is invariably the
fault of other people's cars. You dash up to the mouth of a cross-road
which you couldn't possibly have seen, because it is subtly disguised as
a clump of trees or a flowery knoll; and you discover its true identity
only because another motor--a blundering brute of a motor--bursts out at
fifty miles an hour in front of your nose. If you'd reached that point
an instant later, your own virtuous automobile and the wretch that isn't
yours would certainly have telescoped, and you'd have been sitting in
the nearest tree with your head in your lap. But already I begin to
notice that you may pretty well count on reaching the danger point
(produced by alien autos) at precisely the right instant, never the
wrong one, and this gives you a beautiful confidence in your luck and
your driver: although the real secret must lie in the acuteness of your
guardian angel or patron saint. Vedder, who when young was a champion
boxer, is very superstitious, and Mr. Somerled allows him a large gold
medal of St. Christopher on the dashboard. St. Christopher, it seems,
has undertaken the spiritual care of motor-cars, and as by this time he
has millions under his guidance, his plans for keeping them out of each
other's way must be as complicated as the traffic arrangements of a
railway superintendent. When I contrasted the angelic behaviour of our
car with the appalling perversity of other people's, Sir S. burst out
laughing, and said that evidently I was born with the motor instinct:
that he'd seen women who took days or weeks learning these great truths,
whereas I came by them naturally. "It's remarkable what a lot of
valuable knowledge can be picked up by an enterprising princess in a
glass retort, when the dragon isn't looking!" said he.
"Princesses in glass retorts are perhaps forced to learn lessons tabooed
by dragons," I replied to this; "so if I know things or have thought
things that every other girl doesn't think or know, it's because they
were forbidden fruit. They were my only fun."
"They've made you a splendid little 'pal,' if you know what that means,"
said he. "I'm not sure the glass-retort system hasn't some advantages
for the bringing up of women. The proverb is that truth lies at the
bottom of a well. I begin to think it may be looked for in glass retorts
in the land of dragons."
"You mean that I'm truthful?" I asked.
"Yes. I'm inclined to believe, up to date, that you've remained as
transparent as the glass of your late prison."
"What makes you think so?" I wanted to know.
"Observation--partly. And the way you talk to me."
"What way?"
"Well--that's a knotty question. I can hardly explain, but----"
"I wonder," I began to think out aloud, "whether you mean that I say
what comes into my mind without being afraid you mayn't like it?"
"Er--um--perhaps that covers a good deal of the ground. But what put the
idea into your head? Why should you be afraid of me?"
"I'm not. Only--I've thought that it would be more respectful if I were.
You are so celebrated, you see. That's the first thing I heard about
you--I mean, about your being such a famous artist. I heard you were
rich too, but of course that didn't interest me so much."
"No? That proves the benefit of the glass-retort system."
"Why--how, please?"
"Because princesses who haven't been bottled up in them, but have lived
in the lap of luxury--and in the laps of luxurious mothers--understand
the value of money, and consider men famed for their millions worth a
dozen who've wrapped themselves up in a few rags of some lesser kind of
fame."
"You call being a great artist a lesser kind of fame?"
"I didn't once. But since I've got into the money-making habit, I've
accepted the world's opinion."
"Pooh!" said I rudely. "I don't believe you have, because the first
minute I saw you, I felt sure you were a _real_ man. That's why I just
had to speak to you in the station, instead of one of the others. I
knew--by instinct, I suppose, as you say I know about motors. Think of
the glory of being able to _create_ beautiful things!"
"Think of being able to buy them! Jewels and castles and yachts, and all
sorts of things that women love. Motor-cars for instance."
"You could buy motor-cars with money you earned by painting pictures,
couldn't you?"
"Yes; but not castles or yachts: and not enough jewels to please
princesses who haven't spent eighteen years in a glass retort."
"Well," I said, "I may be no judge, but I think jewels and castles would
be a bother, and I should be seasick in yachts. Give me a man who brings
beautiful things out of his soul, not out of his pockets. You're very
nice now; but you must have been much nicer before you buried your
talents under the shields and bracelets you told me about. Even I know
what you mean by them--and what happened to Tarpeia."
"_Even_ you! I begin to think you were born knowing about a good many
things besides motor-cars. And you are entirely right. I was much nicer
before I began to collect the shields and bracelets."
"Can't you give a lot of them away, and do what I said--go back to the
time before you bargained for them?"
"You don't understand how difficult it is to go back."
"But you are back--in Scotland."
"You're right. Now's my one chance to return to my youth and ideals.
Bright little Princess, thank you for polishing up the dulled surface of
my soul."
"It's only the surface that needs polishing," said I. "The inside part
is shining, even when the outside looks dim. But I'm afraid you're
making fun of me?"
"I was never more in earnest. I'm crossing more than one border with you
to-day."
"Borders you like crossing?"
"Great heavens, yes!"
"I'm glad of that," said I, in a self-satisfied way, "for then you won't
miss Mrs. West so much."
"Miss Mrs. West? Good Lord, I'd forgotten her!"
"That's very ungrateful and horrid of you, then," I scolded him,
"because you and she were friends, and she knows how to be perfectly
charming."
"Yes. She knows how."
"She knows just what to do and say."
"Yes. She's an agreeable--and experienced--woman."
"And if it hadn't been for me, she'd be sitting by you now."
"I have little doubt of that."
"And you would have been happy."
"I should have been contented. There's a big difference between
contentment and happiness. You can't have learned it, yet."
"Oh, can't I! It's all the difference between--between--well, the
difference between this borderland seen on a dark day and seen on a day
of sunshine. It's the same landscape, but it doesn't look the same to
the eyes or give the same feelings to the heart. The dark-day feelings
would be calm and quietly pleasant; the sunshine feelings would be full
of thrills and heartbeats--as to-day."
"By Jove, you've hit it!" he exclaimed as if to please me by agreeing.
"Full of thrills and heartbeats--as to-day."
"Then you _do_ feel the romance of everything in this sunshine?" I
asked, quick to drag a "yes" from him while he was in the mood.
"I should say I did. And I'm not ashamed, with you to back me up. But
I've a sneaking idea I should have been ashamed of it with Mrs. West.
And I shouldn't have felt the thrills, only a calm, peaceful pleasure,
as in the gray days--contentment. I shouldn't have known what I was
missing, perhaps. I should have respected myself for outgrowing my
enthusiasms. But--in my best moments, Princess, I've pitied people more
for not knowing what they miss in life than for missing the things."
"Yes," I answered, "because it's better to know there are beautiful
things, and to want them in vain, than grub along without knowing of
their existence. But all that's got nothing to do with Mrs. West."
"Perhaps not. Yet it has something to do with me. No need to bother
about the connection."
"I won't bother about anything!" I laughed in my joy of life and of
motoring, which seemed one and indivisible just then. "I'm wrapped up in
the magic golden web that Sir Walter Scott and Burns have woven round
every mile of this land across the border--_our_ land, yours and mine."
"So am I, caught in the web, lost in it--to my own surprise." He laughed
as he drove, his eyes alert and young. "Burns, by the way, came to
Ecclefechan, where we're arriving now. He had an uproarious time, and
wrote verses to the Lass of Ecclefechan, which shows the place must have
been a good deal livelier then than now. Or else, which is as likely, he
had a faculty of squeezing the juice out of the driest, most unpromising
fruit--the same faculty you have."
"Perhaps the fruit dried up later," I suggested. "Burns died soon after
Carlyle was born, didn't he? And maybe people began to be primmer when
they were forgetting his influence."