Chapter XIII The Unattainable
My work took me daily to Tammas’s cottage. There was nothing so restful to me as these two good people, and their sweetness and cheer, and Elsie held my interest. I had always been fond of her, and now that she had grown into this rare, delicate flower, so sensitively turned, so romantically original, I found the greatest pleasure in studying her, and, in humoring her, as everybody did who came into her sphere. She commanded obedience as readily as she gave it. Every day was a different mood, and always a romance with her. One day she had on a large white apron, and was helping Tammas with the churning.
“I am playing a new game, to-day, Jack,” she said, pulling me to a corner of the dairy where the spring water whirled through the stone troughs. “You’ll laugh when you hear it,” she added, her eyes shining into mine.
“I’ll not,” I said, “I’ll be more apt to play with you. What is the game to-day?”
She laughed merrily. “Well, to-day I am a duke’s daughter, who was secretly exchanged in her cradle with the dairyman’s baby. Now only three people know it; the dairyman, who is old, and about to die; and who is so sorry that he ever did it, but he did so want his own daughter to be a lady in the land; and me, whom he has told at the last minute, and the bad, bold knight, very dashing, who has bribed the dairyman to tell him, and who wishes very much to marry me. But I want to marry my own bonny prince, you see.”
“I should think he’d be proud and loyally love his dairymaid bride,” I laughed, pinching her cheek.
“But, Jack, you are so stupid,” she said, pouting. “You don’t catch on. I can’t play a game by myself. I want you to play the prince.”
Tammas stood looking on, his face in its favorite Scotch grin. “Weel, weel, did ye ever hear the like o’ that, an’ it’s no’ leap-year either!”
I could see that he was pleased and proud.
“And it is the prince I’ll play from now on, my ane braw lassie,” I said, dropping into her own dialect. “Isn’t that what you call them in Scotch?” I asked.
“An’ noo,” said Tammas, “a’ lasses get unco thrang when their lovers are aboot, to gar them think they are unco worthy.”
Elsie laughed and went vigorously to work, molding butter pounds. I stood watching her while I talked to Tammas. She was not all a child. There was a certain queenliness, a quiet dignity about her that was very attractive. In her fine-cut face, deep down in her great blue eyes, in her very poise there was a quiet naturalness, a pretty aloofness which spoke of reserve forces, that seemed to soothe me. God only knew how I needed it!
After an hour with her and Tammas I felt, as I went down the wooded path, under the great trees of the dairy lot, as I had when I heard for the first time, in the deep hours of the night, the chimes of the bells of Munich. I had not cared for the service with all its symbols and, to me, its meaningless metaphors; but I had loved its music, the great bells which calmed my soul.
I wish to join a new church. I am tired of these which preach. I want to join one where there is no preaching, no talking, nothing but music, music which makes you feel God. Why all this preaching anyway? God and talk do not go together. Religion is not a science to be proven, not a thesis to be demonstrated, not a problem to be solved, but a silent Soul-Force to be felt.
Preachers and priests in their vanity to be heard, or their zeal to proselyte, or their over-humanness just to talk, talk, talk, have robbed the church of half its sweetness and power. Will they never learn that God’s house was made for God’s children and in it they should do as God does,—be silent and worship? And if there be a voice to break it, let it be the Voice of that which is nearest to God on earth—Music.... It was this feeling that Elsie gave me—of calmness, of restfulness, of devotion. There are those who irritate us, and they cannot help it; there are those who provoke us, anger us, madden us by their very presence. There are others who stir us up for trade and money-making; the sound of whose very voice makes us wish to own land, or buy stock or build houses; and there are those—God help them—whose talk, be it ever so brief, falls over us like an unwholesome thing.
Elsie read much of romance, and her small library was choice; but the love-poems of Burns she knew best of all, and she always read them to me when I was about to leave, as if she would hold me longer. Then I would remember them far into the night and the radiant-faced, spiritual girl with the deep eyes, reading them. I needed the restfulness which Elsie’s friendship gave. I needed her sweetness that calmed me, her fresh friendship that was like a great rose at the window of my soul. In her utter unseekingness, her loyal trustfulness, I saw that she did not even suspect that I loved Eloise.
I stayed all day at the cottage and she flitted around with her great white apron on, now and then calling me her bonny prince, especially if Tammas and Marget were not around. I humored her, seeing how much pleasure she took in it.
“If I am your Prince,” I said, when I had her alone in the butter room, “I am going to call you my Heart’s-Ease.”
She looked up quickly and a faint blush came into her face. She did not reply, but busied herself about the house, while Tammas and I talked of the new test of Lass o’ Lowrie, one of his cows, which, from five gallons of milk daily was making three pounds of butter.
“Dae ye ken Mr. Jack, whit’s daeing it?” said the old man. “It’s nae ither than the auld Top Sawyer bluid!”
Elsie, daintily gowned in a pretty white frock and for the first time with her hair up in a comical little Scotch top-knot, walked with me down the wooded path to the parting of our ways. A tiny heart’s-ease had just thrust out its fragrant leaves in the rich mold under the trees. She plucked the leaf, and there was the faintest trace of a twinkle in her blue eyes as she came up and pinned it on my lapel.
“Here is your heart’s-ease, my Prince,” she said slyly.
I felt a flush upon my cheek. She was silent, and then she said slowly, “Do you know Mr. Jack—Jack, that I believe every prince at times has need of a heart’s-ease friend, and—and—well, maids need a prince to help them.”
I looked at her quickly.
“I am your good Knight always if I can help you, Elsie.”
She flushed and turned her face aside that I might not see it.
“And you won’t misunderstand?” she asked.
“I don’t think I could misunderstand you, Elsie. I don’t think anybody could.”
She came up closer.
“Well, it’s this, Jack. Sit down here by me. I have no one I can confide in but you. You know how kind you have always been to me. Ever since I was a wee bairn in a strange land. I can’t talk to Tammas about it, but I feel there is something strange between Colonel Goff and me. I feel that there is—”
I started. She was pale, but went on.
“Well, you know, I didn’t come here with them. I didn’t come here with them—with my grandparents; that was so long ago I don’t remember what is back of it. Anyway, soon after I came I remember Colonel Goff. And do you know,” she went on, “he has been so good to me that—that I cannot understand it at all—only I feel when I am with him that I am drawn to him so! Oh, I have seen so much in him that others don’t see—and when I see him watching me so closely and saying nothing, it hurts me.”
She did not finish, but looked down the path, up which Colonel Goff, himself, was riding towards us.
Elsie paled and then flushed quickly. He was smiling at us, his little eyes twinkling kindly. He gave us a quick military salute.
“My word, a tête-à-tête, and a bloomin’ fool it is who’d break in on it. Hello, lassie—Jack!”
He got down from his horse, shaking hands with us gravely. I noticed that he was watching Elsie, and she, knowing it, was reddening.
“You are a good guesser, Colonel,” I said, with feigned lightness, for I felt that he was taking it too seriously, “and pray tell me who would not like to be with so fine a lassie?”
He looked at me quickly. “If you mean that, Jack,” he said, in his blunt, unseeing English way, “here is my hand.”
Elsie broke into a little confused laugh. “The idea of pinning Mr. Jack down like that,” she said, looking bravely into Goff’s eyes. “What else could he say? Now give me that box of candy. I see it sticking out of your pocket.”
Goff pulled out the box of candy, and catching her to him, kissed her on the cheek.
“She is my own lassie, Jack,” he said, holding her an instant in his arms. “I have loved her since she was so high.” He paused. “Well, perhaps it was because I was an exile in your country, and she is the Scotch flower I found blooming here. Eh, lassie?”
Elsie kissed his cheek.
“You have been mighty good to me, Colonel Goff. But go your way. Tammas said he wanted to see you if you came by and—well—Mr. Jack and I want some candy!”
For a moment he looked at us queerly, trying to smile. He glanced into my eyes, but I met his squarely and unflinchingly. He was not a man whose mental action was quick. He saw but one side of things at a time. I saw that he was embarrassed in his slow way. Very awkwardly he left us, going up to Tammas’s cottage. Elsie walked on with me.
The wind blew her hair around her temples and the reflection of the blue hills of Scotland was in her eyes. “This is such an inconsistent world, Jack,” she said after a while. “I can’t ever learn it, and I get so lonely up here with only Tammas and Marget, I often wish that they would tell me more of myself. I should so love to know who my father is.”
“Did it ever occur to you that it might not be at all pleasant for you to know? They love you and they want you to be happy.”
She paled. “I had never thought of that. I had never thought of that—oh, why didn’t I think of it!”
“Elsie,” I said, taking her hand in mine, and drawing her to me as I had when she was a child, and I her big brother, “you have no better friend than I. Tell me what it is that is troubling you?”
“You would hate me, Jack,” she said, looking up quickly into my face with great, earnest eyes.
“Hate you? Nonsense,” and I laughed, pinching her ear. “Tell me,” I pleaded, smiling.
“Nay, nay, bide a wee—bide a wee,” she said abstractedly falling into her childhood’s dialect as she so often did when she forgot. “And first,” she went on, “why, first I’d have to kind of explain it, Jack; but it is like this now: suppose one was not satisfied with one’s lot and had those feelings I have been telling you of.”
I nodded.
“And suppose—now this is the worst of it—now suppose one really loved another—one found one’s soul dream,” she paused, blushing.
“Soul dreams, Elsie, ay, I think I understand,” I said. “I too have them—they are the great, unattainable things of our life. Do you know I think that their being unattainable is what makes them great?”
She looked up. “If it is worth so much—this unattainable thing—why then does it hurt so?”
“Ay, ay, that’s it. It is the things that hurt which count. ‘Our sweetest love is always sweetest pain,’” I said, quoting the line of a poem.
“Oh,” she said, clasping my arm. “You have said it, Jack.”
I looked at her quickly.
“Elsie,” I said, “you once told me—do you remember what you said to me and Aunt Lucretia—about your hand being sought in marriage? Is it the same person you now speak of?”
“It is Captain Rutherford,” she said, her face drawn tensely.
I started, angry, flushed.
“Elsie, this will never do. Do you love him at all?”
“No, Jack, not as compared to the other—the unattainable. Well, I should say about as the difference between a—well—say a star and a little firefly.”
A dry, fighting anger clinched my throat and I could scarcely speak. I could have throttled Braxton Bragg then!
“Tell me, Elsie,” I said, controlling my anger and trying to speak calmly, “tell your big brother all.”
But she was silent, her face turned from me; at last she said, “It is all so strange, Jack; those we love, love us not, and those we do not love want to marry us even if they are not fit to.”
“Not fit to hold your shoe, let alone your heart,” I added angrily.
She put her hand over my mouth.
“Have I done wrong? Have I said too much? Come, I must go. I see the Colonel waiting for me.”
I took her by both hands, holding her before me, for I was strangely worried and I wished to know—I looked earnestly into her eyes.
“Do you love me, Elsie?”
She blushed crimson. In an instant her arms were around my neck.
Shamed and stricken with my own thoughtlessness I tore her arms from me.
“Elsie, forgive me, you don’t understand!”
In reply she gave me one shamed, hurt look and fled up the path. I saw Goff waiting for her.