Chapter VIII Edmund Rechristens Mr. Wycherly
“Time was,” the golden head
Irrevocably said;
“But time which none can bind,
While flowing fast away, leaves love behind.”
R.L.S.
“It is just a year to-day since the children came,” said Miss Esperance, smiling across the table at Mr. Wycherly, as they sat together at breakfast in his room.
“In some ways,” he replied thoughtfully, “it seems as though they must always have been here: it is impossible to conceive of life without them—now. In others, the time has gone so fast that it might be but yesterday they came.”
“When I was younger,” Miss Esperance went on in her gentle, old voice, “I used to look forward with such dread to a lonely old age. I used to think ‘what would life be if my father and my brothers died?’; and one by one they were all taken from me, and Archie was the last of our family—and he is dead. But the Lord has been very merciful. First he sent you to me, and then the children to us both: ‘Goodness and mercy all my life have surely followed me.’”
Miss Esperance paused, still smiling in the happy confidence of the peace that wrapped her round.
If Mr. Wycherly did not answer it was not because he did not agree with Miss Esperance as to the wonderful workings of Providence. But speech on such subjects was to him almost impossible; and she, looking wistfully into his face, partly realised this. But she was not quite satisfied. Religion was, for her, so entirely the mainspring of her every impulse, her every action, that it was impossible for her in any way to separate it from the most ordinary daily doings; and to her it was as easy and as natural to confess her faith and her deepest feelings with regard to these matters as it was impossible to him. This inability on his part formed to a certain extent a barrier between them: a barrier which can only be broken down by mutual consent; and while he would have done, as in very truth he did, anything in the world to give her pleasure and peace of mind: this thing which she would have valued most, he could not give her. He could not talk about his religious views.
In the silence that followed it is possible that there recurred to the minds of both an incident not wholly without bearing on their future intercourse. One Sabbath evening, shortly after he had gone to live with Miss Esperance at Remote, she asked him to “engage in prayer” at family worship—the “family” consisting of herself and Elsa.
Mr. Wycherly complied readily enough, for he knew plenty of prayers: but when he prayed, he prayed for “the bishops and curates and all congregations committed to their charge”; he prayed for the “good estate of the Catholic Church here upon earth”; and, worst of all—it being the collect for the day—he prayed that “as thy Holy Angels always do thee service in heaven, so by thy appointment they may succour and defend us on earth.” Never was such a scandal in a strictly Presbyterian household. Elsa proclaimed throughout the village that Miss Esperance had been induced to harbour an undoubted Puseyite, and it would not have surprised her in the least if he had prayed for the Pope himself.
And Miss Esperance, knowing the length and strength of Elsa’s tongue, felt herself constrained to explain (she did it with considerable humour) to the Reverend Peter Gloag what had really happened. Whereupon the minister dismissed Mr. Wycherly and all his works as being “fettered by formula?”: and to the great relief of this prisoner in the chains of ecclesiasticism he was never again asked to conduct family worship. He innocently wondered why, for he imagined with some complacency that he had acquitted himself gracefully in what had been rather a trying ordeal.
The tender smile of Miss Esperance, as she reflected upon her many mercies, had changed to a smile of no less tender amusement as she recalled those by-gone days, and Mr. Wycherly, ever quick to notice any change in the dear old face he loved so well, felt that he might now venture upon more familiar ground.
“You look amused,” he remarked; “would it be a safe conjecture to say that you are probably thinking of Edmund?”
“That reminds me,” Miss Esperance exclaimed, without committing herself. “I do wish that we could induce that dear little boy not to call you ‘man.’ It is so disrespectful.”
It had never struck Mr. Wycherly in that light. In fact he had found considerable secret comfort in the fact that Edmund, at all events, had from the very first considered him deserving of that epithet. Mr. Wycherly was sensitive, and he knew perfectly well in what sort of estimation most of the inhabitants of Burnhead held him.
“Do you think it matters?” he asked mildly, “what such a baby calls me?”
“Not to you, certainly,” Miss Esperance replied promptly; “but I do think it matters for him. He is three now, and it’s time he knew better.”
“Surely three is not a very great age?” Mr. Wycherly pleaded.
“It is old enough for Edmund to want his own way, and generally to take it,” Miss Esperance rejoined as she rose from the table; “and it is old enough for him to learn that he must be dutiful and obedient.”
As Mr. Wycherly held the door open for her to go out, he remarked deferentially, “But, don’t you think, dear Miss Esperance, that either ‘Mr.’ or ‘Sir’ is a somewhat formal mode of address to exact from such a baby?”
“I called my honoured father ‘Sir’ from the time I could speak at all, and when I was young it would never for one moment have been permitted to us to address any grown-up person otherwise than with respect,” Miss Esperance continued, as she paused in the doorway. “I will see what I can do about it this very day. I feel sure that if we reason with that dear child, we can induce him to find some more suitable way of addressing you.”
When Miss Esperance had gone, and Mr. Wycherly had shut his door, he shook his head and laughed. Two or three times lately he had tried a fall with Edmund, and that lusty infant invariably came off an easy victor.
It was the daily custom for both the little boys to visit Mr. Wycherly for a few minutes after breakfast, when biscuits were doled out and there was much cheery good-fellowship. Mr. Wycherly himself made periodical visits to Edinburgh to purchase these biscuits, which were adorned with pink and white sugar, and were of a delectable flavour. Once the biscuits were consumed—they had three each—Montagu settled down to his lessons, and Edmund, ever unwillingly, departed with Robina.
Through the open window that morning there floated an imperative baby voice. “See man,” it insisted, “me go and see man.”
Mr. Wycherly looked out and Edmund looked up. He stretched out his fat arms, balancing himself first on one foot and then on the other, as though poised for flight, while in the thrush-like tones that were always irresistible to Mr. Wycherly he gave his usual cry of “Uppie! Uppie! deah man.”
When Edmund called him “deah man” there was nothing on earth that Mr. Wycherly could withhold. “Bring Edmund up, Montagu,” he said, leaning out of the window. “We’ll have a holiday to-day, it’s a kind of birthday. Just a year since you came.”
But the gentle voice of Miss Esperance interposed. “Edmund must say ‘Please, Mr. Wycherly,’ or ‘please, sir,’ then he can go up.”
“See man, me go and see man,” Edmund persisted, absolutely ignoring his aunt’s admonition and jumping up and down as though he could reach Mr. Wycherly that way.
“No, Edmund,” Miss Esperance said firmly; “you must say, ‘Please, Mr. Wycherly.”
Edmund looked at his aunt and his round chubby face expressed the utmost defiance. “I sall say man, and I will go to man,” he announced loudly and distinctly, “he’s my man, and I ’ove him—I don’t ’ove you,” he added emphatically.
“Edmund, my son, come here.” There was no resisting the resolution in that very gentle voice. Miss Esperance seated herself on the garden seat under Mr. Wycherly’s window, and Edmund came at her bidding, to stand in front of her, square and sturdy and rebellious.
Mr. Wycherly had withdrawn from the window when Miss Esperance first began her expostulation with Edmund. Now it struck him as rather shabby to leave her to wrestle with that young sinner alone over a matter which certainly referred to himself; so he hastened downstairs and joined her in the garden.
On his appearance Edmund began his dance again, and his petition of “Uppie! Uppie!”
Mr. Wycherly went and sat on the seat beside Miss Esperance, trying hard to look stern and judicial, and failing signally, while the chubby culprit made ineffectual attempts to climb upon his knee.
“Edmund must say ‘Please, Mr. Wycherly,’ or ‘Please, sir,’” Miss Esperance repeated.
“Peese, Mittah Chahley,” echoed Edmund in tones that would have melted a heart of stone.
Now if “man” was a disrespectful and familiar mode of address, “Chahlee” seemed a singularly inappropriate pseudonym for Mr. Wycherly.
Even Montagu giggled.
The matutinal service of biscuits was long overdue, Edmund grew impatient, and the corners of his rosy mouth drooped. “I’ve said ‘Chahley,’” he announced reproachfully, “and you don’t take me.”
Mr. Wycherly looked beseechingly at Miss Esperance. “I think he has done his best,” he said in deprecating tones, “it is a difficult name for a baby.”
“Chahlee! Chahlee!” chirped Edmund, beginning to dance again. “Uppie! Uppie!” then turning to his aunt—“I’ve said ’im.”
“You haven’t said it right—but perhaps—” Miss Esperance wavered.
Edmund marched up to his aunt, placed both his dimpled elbows on her knees, and gazing earnestly into her face with bunches of unshed tears still hanging on his lashes, remarked vindictively: “I wis a gate bid ball would come and bounce at you.”
Miss Esperance burst out laughing and stooped to kiss the red, indignant baby-face. “All the same, my dear son, you must learn to do what you are told.”
“Me go wiv—Chahlee,” Edmund announced triumphantly, as Mr. Wycherly lifted him up.
“Am I to call you Charlie, too?” asked Montagu, who was rather jealous where his tutor’s favour was concerned.
“Pray, don’t!” exclaimed that gentleman hastily.
“Chahlee, Chahlee,” crowed Edmund from the safe vantage ground of Mr. Wycherly’s arms as he was carried upstairs. “Deah man, Chahlee.”
Miss Esperance sat on where she was. Her interference had certainly not improved matters, and she was really perturbed. That she should in any way, however inadvertently and innocently, have rendered Mr. Wycherly in the smallest degree ridiculous was most distressing to her.
Had the baby done his best, or was it but one more instance of his supreme subtlety in the avoidance of doing what he was told?
Miss Esperance adored Edmund. He was a Bethune from the top curl of his fair hair to his small, straight, pink toes. Handsome, ruddy, with very blue eyes; eyes that changed in colour with his every emotion, even as the sea so many of his forbears had served changes with the passing hours; he was the image of Archie Bethune, his father. He was like her brother, whose name he bore, and still stronger was his likeness to the admiral, her father, that generous and choleric sailor whose memory she so revered.
Yet no one knew better than Miss Esperance the faults of the Bethune temperament. Had she not suffered from them herself in the past? And she was painfully anxious to keep in check the wilful impulsiveness so strongly marked in her great-nephew—that taking of their own way, no matter at what cost in tribulation to themselves or suffering to others. How many Bethunes had it ruined in the past! And yet if she rebuked him now it might confuse the baby: and above all, Miss Esperance desired to be just in her dealings with these small creatures committed to her charge.
As she sat in the sunshine, with the children’s voices borne to her on the soft winds of early summer, she prayed for guidance.
Suddenly the children’s voices ceased, for Mr. Wycherly was reading aloud. It was his habit to read to them odd scraps of anything that had happened to please himself, while they munched their biscuits. Sometimes they, or at all events Montagu, understood; as often they did not: but both found some sort of pleasure in the fine English gracefully read. Miss Esperance listened, and as if in answer to her prayer she heard, in Mr. Wycherly’s gentle, cultivated tones, these words: “Love is fitter than fear, gentleness better than beating, to bring up a child rightly in learning.”
So for a while Baby Edmund was allowed to call Mr. Wycherly very much what he pleased. He occasionally conceded something to convention by addressing him as “Mittah man” or “Mittah Chahlee”—but as a rule he took his own way; finally adopting for Mr. Wycherly Elsa’s usual style of address toward himself, namely, “Dearie.”
It had never occurred to Mr. Wycherly as possible that anyone should address him as “Dearie,” and this particular term of endearment did sound somewhat of an anachronism.
But he liked it, he liked it amazingly: and seeing this, Miss Esperance interfered no more.
In the end, however, it was Montagu who found a pet name for Mr. Wycherly. “What are you to me?” the little boy asked one day. “Are you an uncle?”
“No,” said Mr. Wycherly, “I am your guardian.”
“What’s a guardian?”
“Someone who takes care of a child who has lost his parents.”
“May I call you guardian?”
“Certainly, if you wish it.”
“May Edmund?”
“Assuredly.”
“Then we will—it’s more friendlier than ‘Mr.,’ don’t you think?”
And it ended in Guardian being abbreviated into ‘Guardie,’ so that Mr. Wycherly was, after all, the only member of the household who was permitted a diminutive.