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MRS. SCLATER.
Gibbie was in a dream of mingled past and future delights, when his
conductor stopped at a large and important-looking house, with a
flight of granite steps up to the door. Gibbie had never been
inside such a house in his life, but when they entered, he was not
much impressed. He did look with a little surprise, it is true, but
it was down, not up: he felt his feet walking soft, and wondered for
a moment that there should be a field of grass in a house. Then he
gave a glance round, thought it was a big place, and followed Mr.
Sclater up the stair with the free mounting step of the Glashgar
shepherd. Forgetful and unconscious, he walked into the
drawing-room with his bonnet on his head. Mrs. Sclater rose when
they entered, and he approached her with a smile of welcome to the
house which he carried, always full of guests, in his bosom. He
never thought of looking to her to welcome him. She shook hands
with him in a doubtful kind of way.
"How do you do, Sir Gilbert?" she said. "Only ladies are allowed to
wear their caps in the drawing-room, you know," she added, in a tone
of courteous and half-rallying rebuke, speaking from a flowery
height of conscious superiority.
What she meant by the drawing-room, Gibbie had not an idea. He
looked at her head, and saw no cap; she had nothing upon it but a
quantity of beautiful black hair; then suddenly remembered his
bonnet; he knew well enough bonnets had to be taken off in house or
cottage: he had never done so because he never had worn a bonnet.
But it was with a smile of amusement only that he now took it off.
He was so free from selfishness that he knew nothing of shame.
Never a shadow of blush at his bad manners tinged his cheek. He
put the cap in his pocket, and catching sight of a footstool by the
corner of the chimney-piece, was so strongly reminded of his creepie
by the cottage-hearth, which, big lad as he now was, he had still
haunted, that he went at once and seated himself upon it. From this
coign of vantage he looked round the room with a gentle curiosity,
casting a glance of pleasure every now and then at Mrs. Sclater, to
whom her husband, in a manner somewhat constrained because of his
presence, was recounting some of the incidents of his journey,
making choice, after the manner of many, of the most commonplace and
uninteresting.
Gibbie had not been educated in the relative grandeur of things of
this world, and he regarded the things he now saw just as things,
without the smallest notion of any power in them to confer
superiority by being possessed: can a slave knight his master? The
reverend but poor Mr. Sclater was not above the foolish
consciousness of importance accruing from the refined adjuncts of a
more needy corporeal existence; his wife would have felt out of her
proper sphere had she ceased to see them around her, and would have
lost some of her aplomb; but the divine idiot Gibbie was incapable
even of the notion that they mattered a straw to the life of any
man. Indeed, to compare man with man was no habit of his; hence it
cannot be wonderful that stone hearth and steel grate, clay floor
and Brussels carpet were much the same to him. Man was the one
sacred thing. Gibbie's unconscious creed was a powerful leveller,
but it was a leveller up, not down. The heart that revered the
beggar could afford to be incapable of homage to position. His was
not one of those contemptible natures which have no reverence
because they have no aspiration, which think themselves fine because
they acknowledge nothing superior to their own essential baseness.
To Gibbie every man was better than himself. It was for him a
sudden and strange descent -- from the region of poetry and closest
intercourse with the strong and gracious and vital simplicities of
Nature, human and other, to the rich commonplaces, amongst them not
a few fashionable vulgarities, of an ordinary well-appointed house,
and ordinary well-appointed people; but, however bedizened, humanity
was there; and he who does not love human more than any other nature
has not life in himself, does not carry his poetry in him, as Gibbie
did, therefore cannot find it except where it has been shown to him.
Neither was a common house like this by any means devoid of any
things to please him. If there was not the lovely homeliness of the
cottage which at once gave all it had, there was a certain
stateliness which afforded its own reception; if there was little
harmony, there were individual colours that afforded him delight -- as
for instance, afterwards, the crimson covering the walls of the
dining-room, whose colour was of that soft deep-penetrable character
which a flock paper alone can carry. Then there were pictures, bad
enough most of them, no doubt, in the eyes of the critic, but
endlessly suggestive, therefore endlessly delightful to Gibbie. It
is not the man who knows most about Nature that is hardest to
please, however he may be hardest to satisfy, with the attempt to
follow her. The accomplished poet will derive pleasure from verses
which are a mockery to the soul of the unhappy mortal whose business
is judgment -- the most thankless of all labours, and justly so.
Certain fruits one is unable to like until he has eaten them in
their perfection; after that, the reminder in them of the perfect
will enable him to enjoy even the inferior a little, recognizing
their kind -- always provided he be not one given to judgment -- a
connoisseur, that is, one who cares less for the truth than for the
knowing comparison of one embodiment of it with another. Gibbie's
regard then, as it wandered round the room, lighting on this colour,
and that texture, in curtain, or carpet, or worked screen, found
interest and pleasure. Amidst the mere upholstery of houses and
hearts, amidst the common life of the common crowd, he was, and had
to be, what he had learned to be amongst the nobility and in the
palace of Glashgar.
Mrs. Sclater, late Mrs. Bonniman, was the widow of a merchant who
had made his money in foreign trade, and to her house Mr. Sclater
had flitted when he married her. She was a well-bred woman, much
the superior of her second husband in the small duties and graces of
social life, and, already a sufferer in some of his not very serious
grossiŠret‚s, regarded with no small apprehension the arrival of one
in whom she expected the same kind of thing in largely exaggerated
degree. She did not much care to play the mother to a bear cub, she
said to her friends, with a good-humoured laugh. "Just think," she
added, "with such a childhood as the poor boy had, what a mass of
vulgarity must be lying in that uncultivated brain of his! It is no
small mercy, as Mr. Sclater says, that our ears at least are safe.
Poor boy!" -- She was a woman of about forty, rather tall, of good
complexion tending to the ruddy, with black smooth shining hair
parted over a white forehead, black eyes, nose a little aquiline,
good mouth, and fine white teeth -- altogether a handsome woman -- some
notion of whose style may be gathered from the fact that, upon the
testimony of her cheval glass, she preferred satin to the richest of
silks, and almost always wore it. Now and then she would attempt a
change, but was always defeated and driven back into satin. She was
precise in her personal rules, but not stiff in the manners wherein
she embodied them: these were indeed just a little florid and wavy,
a trifle profuse in their grace. She kept an excellent table, and
every appointment about the house was in good style -- a favourite
phrase with her. She was her own housekeeper, an exact mistress,
but considerate, so that her servants had no bad time of it. She
was sensible, kind, always responsive to appeal, had scarcely a
thread of poetry or art in her upper texture, loved fair play, was
seldom in the wrong, and never confessed it when she was. But when
she saw it, she took some pains to avoid being so in a similar way
again. She held hard by her own opinion; was capable of a mild
admiration of truth and righteousness in another; had one or two pet
commandments to which she paid more attention than to the rest; was
a safe member of society, never carrying tales; was kind with
condescension to the poor, and altogether a good wife for a minister
of Mr. Sclater's sort. She knew how to hold her own with any who
would have established superiority. A little more coldness, pride,
indifference, and careless restraint, with just a touch of rudeness,
would have given her the freedom of the best society, if she could
have got into it. Altogether it would not have been easy to find
one who could do more for Gibbie in respect for the social rapports
that seemed to await him. Even some who would gladly themselves
have undertaken the task, admitted that he might have fallen into
much less qualified hands. Her husband was confident that, if
anybody could, his wife would make a gentleman of Sir Gilbert; and
he ought to know, for she had done a good deal of polishing upon
him.
She was now seated on a low chair at the other side of the fire,
leaning back at a large angle, slowly contemplating out of her black
eyes the lad on the footstool, whose blue eyes she saw wandering
about the room, in a manner neither vague nor unintelligent, but
showing more of interest than of either surprise or admiration.
Suddenly he turned them full upon her; they met hers, and the light
rushed into them like a torrent, breaking forth after its way in a
soulful smile. I hope my readers are not tired of the mention of
Gibbie's smiles: I can hardly avoid it; they were all Gibbie had for
the small coin of intercourse; and if my readers care to be just,
they will please to remember that they have been spared many a he
said and she said. Unhappily for me there is no way of giving the
delicate differences of those smiles. Much of what Gibbie perhaps
felt the more that he could not say it, had got into the place where
the smiles are made, and, like a variety of pollens, had impregnated
them with all shades and colours of expression, whose varied
significance those who had known him longest, dividing and
distinguishing, had gone far towards being able to interpret. In
that which now shone on Mrs. Sclater, there was something, she said
the next day to a friend, which no woman could resist, and which
must come of his gentle blood. If she could have seen a few of his
later ancestors at least, she would have doubted if they had
anything to do with that smile beyond its mere transmission from
"the first stock-father of gentleness." She responded, and from
that moment the lady and the shepherd lad were friends
Now that a real introduction had taken place between them, and in
her answering smile Gibbie had met the lady herself, he proceeded,
in most natural sequence, without the smallest shyness or suspicion
of rudeness, to make himself acquainted with the phenomena
presenting her. As he would have gazed upon a rainbow, trying
perhaps to distinguish the undistinguishable in the meeting and
parting of its colours, only that here behind was the all-powerful
love of his own, he began to examine the lady's face and form,
dwelling and contemplating with eyes innocent as any baby's. This
lasted; but did not last long before it began to produce in the lady
a certain uncertain embarrassment, a something she did not quite
understand, therefore could not account for, and did not like. Why
should she mind eyes such as those making acquaintance with what a
whole congregation might see any Sunday at church, or for that
matter, the whole city on Monday, if it pleased to look upon her as
she walked shopping in Pearl-street? Why indeed? Yet she began to
grow restless, and feel as if she wanted to let down her veil. She
could have risen and left the room, but she had "no notion" of being
thus put to flight by her bear-cub; she was ashamed that a woman of
her age and experience should be so foolish; and besides, she wanted
to come to an understanding with herself as to what herself meant by
it. She did not feel that the boy was rude; she was not angry with
him as with one taking a liberty; yet she did wish he would not look
at her like that; and presently she was relieved.
Her hands, which had been lying all the time in her lap, white upon
black, had at length drawn and fixed Gibbie's attention. They were
very lady-like hands, long-fingered, and with the orthodox long-oval
nails, each with a quarter segment of a pale rising moon at the
root -- hands nearly faultless, and, I suspect, considered by their
owner entirely such -- but a really faultless hand, who has ever
seen? -- To Gibbie's eyes they were such beautiful things, that, after
a moment or two spent in regarding them across the length of the
hairy hearthrug, he got up, took his footstool, crossed with it to
the other side of the fire, set it down by Mrs. Sclater, and
reseated himself. Without moving more than her fine neck, she
looked down on him curiously, wondering what would come next; and
what did come next was, that he laid one of his hands on one of
those that lay in the satin lap; then, struck with the contrast
between them, burst out laughing. But he neither withdrew his hand,
nor showed the least shame of the hard, brown, tarry-seamed, strong,
though rather small prehensile member, with its worn and blackened
nails, but let it calmly remain outspread, side by side with the
white, shapely, spotless, gracious and graceful thing, adorned, in
sign of the honour it possessed in being the hand of Mrs.
Sclater, -- it was her favourite hand, -- with a half hoop of fine
blue-green turkises, and a limpid activity of many diamonds. She
laughed also -- who could have helped it? that laugh would have set
silver bells ringing in responsive sympathy! -- and patted the lumpy
thing which, odd as the fact might be, was also called a hand, with
short little pecking pats; she did not altogether like touching so
painful a degeneracy from the ideal. But his very evident
admiration of hers, went far to reconcile her to his, -- as was but
right, seeing a man's admirations go farther to denote him truly,
than the sort of hands or feet either he may happen to have received
from this or that vanished ancestor. Still she found his
presence -- more than his proximity -- discomposing, and was glad when
Mr. Sclater, who, I forgot to mention, had left the room, returned
and took Gibbie away to show him his, and instruct him what changes
he must make upon his person in preparation for dinner.
When Mrs. Sclater went to bed that night she lay awake a good while
thinking, and her main thought was -- what could be the nature of the
peculiar feeling which the stare of the boy had roused in her? Nor
was it long before she began to suspect that, unlike her hand beside
his, she showed to some kind of disadvantage beside the shepherd
lad. Was it dissatisfaction then with herself that his look had
waked? She was aware of nothing in which she had failed or been in
the wrong of late. She never did anything to be called wrong -- by
herself, that is, or indeed by her neighbours. She had never done
anything very wrong, she thought; and anything wrong she had done,
was now a far away and so nearly forgotten, that it seemed to have
left her almost quite innocent; yet the look of those blue eyes,
searching, searching, without seeming to know it, made her feel
something like the discomfort of a dream of expected visitors, with
her house not quite in a condition to receive them. She must see to
her hidden house. She must take dust-pan and broom and go about a
little. For there are purifications in which king and cowboy must
each serve himself. The things that come out of a man are they that
defile him, and to get rid of them, a man must go into himself, be a
convict, and scrub the floor of his cell. Mrs. Sclater's cell was
very tidy and respectable for a cell, but no human consciousness can
be clean, until it lies wide open to the eternal sun, and the
all-potent wind; until, from a dim-lighted cellar it becomes a
mountain-top.
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