The Weeping Ash

  Learning also that Fanny could play the harp, had learned to play while still in her father’s house, the Pagets had the extravagant impertinence to send off to a shop in Chichester and order one, which, during a brief period of thaw, was delivered by carrier’s cart. And then there was no end to the twangling and jangling, even Bet sometimes taking a hand. “You never told me that you could play the harp!” said Thomas resentfully to Fanny, and she replied, “I was afraid that if I mentioned it you might interpret it as a request for one; and I knew that you could not afford that, for you told Bet so.” Fanny always had some piece of self-justification for everything!

  Another cause of irritation to Thomas was the fact that his real liking for and interest in his cousin Scylla—now there was a fine girl, if you like, spirited, lively, pretty, yet always showing a proper deference to Thomas’s opinion—his relations with Scylla were constantly being hampered and obstructed by the strong tie between her and her brother. Any remark in the nature of a setdown to him always had an immediately quelling effect on her. It was a most infernal situation! And the worst of it was that, if Cal’s leg did not recover sufficiently to allow him to go back to sea; he and Scylla talked of removing to London and setting up house together there—a scatterbrained project which Thomas could not at all approve.

  There was no real resemblance between Cal and Thomas’s deceased half brother Ned—how could there be, indeed?—yet sometimes Thomas found himself possessed by the crazy notion that Cal was an embodiment of long-forgotten Ned, come back to plague him.

  * * *

  “I am afraid this is all a dismal bore for you,” Scylla said to Cal one day in the stable. She had come out to find him taking refuge here, visiting Goble, with whom he spent hours talking about the navy and life at sea. Goble, at the moment, was next door in the harness room, making a careful adjustment to the base of Cal’s wooden leg in order to change the angle where it met the stump, so that he could walk more comfortably.

  “Oh, it might be worse!” Cal’s tone was flippant, but his dark eyes were serious. “Fanny is the one I feel for. How can she bear him? And she such a rare creature—”

  “Pray take care, Cal!” his sister said urgently. “If Thomas had the least excuse to suspect—”

  “Don’t fret your head, love. He shall have no cause. He hates me simply because I am younger and luckier.”

  “Luckier! When you have lost your leg—and he only his finger—”

  “That is one of the reasons why he hates me. He had to take his own off. Fate took care of me.”

  “You mean he amputated his own finger and thumb? But why? How can you be sure?”

  “Why? Men do. So as to have a pretext for leaving the navy. How can I be sure? I feel it in my bones.”

  Thinking it over, Scylla felt sure too. Another cause for Thomas to hate his cousin, who had been honorably wounded, who had sufficient justification to leave the service, yet intended to go back if he could.

  “At least Phillimore was not a hypocrite,” she said thoughtfully.

  “Compared with our cousin, he was a paragon of honesty and uprightness!”

  “Cal, tell me—what did happen to Phillimore?”

  “Gough, MacBride, and I picked him up and threw him overboard. It was not at all difficult—we took him completely by surprise.”

  “Whose idea was it?”

  “Mine. But they were quite in agreement. Phillimore made no secret of what he had done. And none of us felt a single qualm afterward.” He added in a matter-of-fact tone, “It is a pity we are not in the Bay of Biscay now!”

  “Cal! You cannot simply dispose of anybody you happen to dislike!”

  “Why not? I only dislike bad people. Now run along back indoors, or Thomas will think we are conspiring against him. Besides, I want to try to write, and I can’t do that in the house.”

  “Oh, very well.”

  Still feeling the reverberations of shock—this was a new Cal indeed—she jumped down from the stall partition where she had been sitting. At that moment Goble returned with Cal’s wooden leg, saying:

  “’Ere, now, Mus Cal, you try ’er on an’ see how she do feel.”

  “Ah, that is a great deal better, thank you, Goble; I shall be dancing a cotillion in no time.”

  He tried a few steps with his crutch out in the snow, slipped, went white with pain, but recovered himself and laughed.

  * * *

  That evening Fanny shyly revealed that, while she had been helping Mrs. Strudwick chop fruit and suet and prepare the Christmas puddings, a tune had come into her head for Cal’s Weeping Ash poem. “It came all of itself!” She played it to them on the harp.

  “Again!” said Cal. “Fanny, it is exquisite! It suits the words to a nicety—haunting, mysterious, yet swiftly moving. Scylla, you can sing it?”

  “Play it over again, Fanny!”

  Scylla had a clear, light soprano which had been carefully trained by Mr. Winthrop Musson. She sang:

  “All-Father! Odin! who did sacrifice

  One eye to drink at Mimir’s mystic spring.

  The lore obtained at such a cruel price

  Wrought havoc far beyond imagining!”

  “Bravo, Scylla! Try it a trifle faster!”

  Scylla sang again, this time Fanny softly joining in, while Bet looked on enviously, wishing she had the courage to take part.

  “Ash upon elm our fathers rasped, to bring

  Fire leaping from the wood. Those fires now rage

  Unquenched in every breast, and, ravening,

  Devour the world, and will from age to age

  The furious fires of love, that nothing can assuage!”

  Thomas, who had been checking his clerk’s accounts in the dining room, came in angrily, intending to say, “Can you contrive to make less commotion, pray?” But, on seeing that it was Scylla who was the singer, he lingered, eyeing her with reluctant admiration.

  “That is my poem about your weeping ash tree, Cousin Thomas,” said Cal when the verse was sung.

  “I am sure I do not know why you are all making such a to-do about this weeping ash!”

  “Do you not think it strange, Cousin Thomas, that Cal and I should have dreamed about it before ever we saw it?”

  “Dreams! Fiddlestick!” Thomas did not utter aloud his opinion that the twins had invented their dream in order to impress Fanny, but his feelings were plain from his expression.

  “You do not believe, Cousin Thomas, that dreams are a portent of things to come?”

  “If I did, I wish I might dream that my mill would make a handsome profit,” said Thomas sourly. “It is high time, Bet, that you were abed.”

  With which strong hint he returned to his accounts.

  * * *

  Christmas passed quietly. Fanny was too careful of Thomas’s touchy mood to provide more in the way of festivities than an excellent dinner of beef sirloin, plumb pudding, and mince pies, but the Paget twins produced gifts for everybody, small fairings bought by Scylla at the Petworth shops, and books. In consequence of which, Thomas was obliged to confiscate and burn Fanny’s gift from Cal, a volume of poems by a Scotsman, Robert Burns, which he considered grossly indelicate and unsuitable for a female’s eyes.

  “I am truly sorry for that,” Cal apologized to Fanny several days later when—Thomas having ridden out on press gang business—they were able to converse in comfort without his watchful jealous eye marking every nuance of expression. As the snow had temporarily melted, and only a thick white hoarfrost covered the grass, they were attempting a cautious promenade in the yew-tree walk, Cal in a greatcoat, balancing on his crutch, Fanny in a thick shawl and pattens.

  “Pray do not regard it, Cousin! I think, whatever you had given me, it would have been the same.” Fanny then looked conscience-stricken and added quickly, “But I am very sorry, because
the poems were so delightful. I loved especially the one describing the flowery banks of bonnie Doon—it made me think of this valley in summer. I wish you could see it then!”

  “I hope that I may be able to, sometime. But it is beautiful now: see how the movement of the sun creates shadows of frost, which are outstripped by the shadows of light.”

  Fanny turned to look at the gray-green slopes and the ghostly darkness of the leafless woods beyond.

  Cal was watching her profile; he said suddenly:

  “There is another poem by a Scot that reminds me of you, Fanny: I read it last week, up in Lord Egremont’s library. It is by a writer with an uncouth name—James Hogg!—but it has the very feel of you about it: a poem about a girl called Kilmeny—do you know it?”

  Shy at having his attention thus focused on her, Fanny said she did not, and asked what the poem was about.

  “Well! Kilmeny goes out and falls asleep in the wood and vanishes quite away. And then, after a long, long time, when all hope for her has been given up, she comes home again: ‘Late, late in the evening, Kilmeny came home.’ And she is strangely changed.

  “As still was her look, and as still was her e’e,

  As the mist that sleeps on a waveless sea

  For Kilmeny had been, she knew not where,

  And Kilmeny had seen what she could not declare.

  “And where had she been?” Fanny’s attention was engaged, she looked wonderingly at Cal. Had Scylla—could she have?—divulged Fanny’s confidence, told him about her visit to London? But there was no consciousness in the look he gave her, only a kind of tender gravity.

  “She had been to a land of thought—a land of love and light—oh, you will have to read it!—it is a long and beautiful poem. I will borrow it from Liz Wyndham.

  “But to sing the sights Kilmeny saw,

  So far surpassing nature’s law,

  The singer’s voice would sink away,

  And the string of his harp would cease to play.”

  “You have that very look, sometimes, Fanny—of a person who has been away, and come back with reluctance, and still retains memories and secrets from another world.”

  “Perhaps you have been there too, Cousin? A poet must visit many different words.”

  “Perhaps I have! I think some unseen bond unites us—do you feel it too?”

  “Oh, pray do not—” she exclaimed in a kind of terror, turning to look up at him, huddling the shawl about her as if for protection against him.

  “I love you, Fanny. I think you must know that. Do not be alarmed!” he said, smiling faintly at her stricken look. “I am not about to importune you in any way—I do not wish the wrath of Thomas to descend upon you! I have a notion that wrath is visited on you too often as it is, and most undeservedly. I would be the last person in the world to wish to add to that burden. But when I am back at sea I shall miss you sorely—” She made an involuntary sound of protest at that thought, but he continued, “I cannot stay here forever, after all. Firstly it would drive Thomas into a frenzy. Secondly I might—who knows?—give way to temptation, be overcome by the longing to make love to you. So I am going, the very minute I can manage this wooden pin.”

  “But must you go to sea?”

  “It is a good life, Fanny. My friend Howard is hoping to get command of a sloop, and if he does so he has promised me a berth as senior lieutenant. I shall have no time to think of you; or not too much.”

  With his finger he gently outlined the curve of her lip.

  “But can you go—like that? Will—will they take you?”

  “In time of war—yes, I think I have a good chance. Fanny: I have not asked—I dared not—what—if ever you think of me?”

  She looked up at him slowly. The lip that he had touched was quivering; she drew a long breath.

  “I should not have asked.” His tone was full of remorse. “Forgive me! Consider the question unasked. You are cold; we should return to the house.”

  He took her arm; they moved up the slope in the direction of the weeping ash.

  “I have planted a mass of snowdrops under it,” Fanny said shakily. “I wonder if you will be here long enough to see them come up.”

  “Not if I can help it,” Cal said.

  Scylla came out to them through the garden door. She was holding a paper.

  “Cal! There you are.” Her expression, studying them, suggested she felt her interruption had come not a moment too soon. “Only think! I have had a letter from our guardian.”

  “From Miss Musson? Famous! Did she reach Boston in safety?”

  “Oh, I am so glad for you!” Fanny exclaimed. “I know how anxious you have been about her. I will leave you to read it together.”

  She hurried away to fetch little Thomas from his crib and try to persuade him to take a few reluctant steps. Thomas was now so furious at the baby’s lack of progress that Fanny feared he might begin to punish the child for what he called “infernally stupid laziness.” Thomas had commenced to study other children, when he encountered them, and was beginning to understand just how far behind the normal state of development his own son had fallen; he was in a state of constant, simmering rage about it, unsure where to lay the blame; consequently Fanny spent hours with the baby each day, endeavoring to stimulate him into some activity or response.

  Cal saw that there were tears in Scylla’s eyes.

  “What is it, love? She does not send bad news?”

  “Oh, Cal, she has gone blind! That was why—that must have been why—she was often so silent toward the end of our journey. Do you not remember?”

  “Of course I do,” he said. “I thought it was because she wished to remain and become a female anchorite along with the Holy Pir. Did she find her brother?”

  “Yes—but he is dying—well, read the letter.”

  He took the several sheets, crossed and recrossed. The letter had been started by Miss Musson, but her writing became more and more disjointed and shaky and the final sheet was in a different hand.

  “Poor Miss Musson,” said Scylla in a choked voice. “She, of all people! So independent, so active—”

  “Hush, I am reading.” But Cal, sitting by her in the window seat, slipped his arm around her waist. When he had finished he looked up, remained silent for a moment, and then said, “Famous! Selling that great ruby, using the proceeds to found a Friends’ Home for poor old people—herself as warden, and her brother, while he is still alive—what could be more suited to her talents and disposition? Do not be a goosecap, Scylla! Shed a tear or two for me, if you like, but do not waste sorrow on our guardian. She will always arrange her life in the best possible manner for herself and everybody about her.” He looked down at the letter again. “What is this postscript she mentions: ‘I wrote the postscript first, in case my sight failed before I came to the end.’ Where is this postscript? I do not see it.”

  With a certain hesitation Scylla produced a scrap of paper.

  “It is about Cameron,” she said in a low voice.

  “Cameron? What—?” He read it.

  Priscilla, my child: this for you,

  At various points along our journey I talked with Rob about you. I hope you may understand by this time that he loves you very sincerely. He has, I know, lived a somewhat roving and disreputable life and, I don’t doubt, entered into various short-lived and discreditable relationships.

  “Humph!” Cal broke off. “Cannot you just hear our guardian sniff there!” He laughed. “Poor Rob!”

  But now I believe that his affections are sincerely engaged; he has spoken of you many times, with such understanding and devotion that I believe, if you accept him, you will have ensured for yourself a truly suitable and lasting partnership.

  Cal broke off again. “But, Scylla—I thought you said—”

  “Go on!” Her voice was strangled. Sh
e clenched her hands together.

  He asked whether I considered it proper for him to offer marriage to you; in fact he had suggested this several times in a very diffident manner, due to the disparity of age and his wandering way of life. At first, indeed, I could not agree to such a union; and indeed he did not feel himself a suitable partner for you. He looks upon you and Cal as such rarefied beings—far above him! Also he felt it unfair to your youth and inexperience that he should attempt to engage your affections before you had a chance to see the world and encounter other applicants.

  “Other applicants!” Scylla broke in bitterly. “He should have seen Captain Phillimore! He should see—but go on.”

  As he put it: “The lass ought to have a chance to go to Almack’s, since that appears to be the crown of her ambition. If I snapped her up before she had done that, I fear she might always hold it against me.” Upon our parting at Acre, however, being by that time quite convinced of the sincerity of his feelings, I urged that he should make you an offer before you, too, embarked. I strongly hope that he did so, my dear child, and that you accepted him; nothing could make me happier. If he did not summon up the courage, I take the opportunity to tell you now of the depth, true strength, and disinterested attachment of his feeling for you; it may hinder you from contracting in England any shallow or fleeting connections which you might later come to regret.