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Penelope's Progress, a fiction by Kate Douglas Wiggin |
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Part 1. In Town - Chapter 13 |
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_ PART I. IN TOWN CHAPTER XIII "I think I was never so completely under the spell of a country as I am of Scotland." I made this acknowledgment freely, but I knew that it would provoke comment from my compatriots. "Oh yes, my dear, you have been just as spellbound before, only you don't remember it," replied Salemina promptly. "I have never seen a person more perilously appreciative or receptive than you." "'Perilously' is just the word," chimed in Francesca delightedly; "when you care for a place you grow porous, as it were, until after a time you are precisely like blotting-paper. Now, there was Italy, for example. After eight weeks in Venice you were completely Venetian, from your fan to the ridiculous little crepe shawl you wore because an Italian prince had told you that centuries were usually needed to teach a woman how to wear a shawl, but that you had been born with the art, and the shoulders! Anything but a watery street was repulsive to you. Cobblestones? 'Ordinario, duro, brutto! A gondola? Ah, bellissima! Let me float forever thus!' You bathed your spirit in sunshine and color; I can hear you murmur now, 'O Venezia benedetta! non ti voglio lasciar!'" "It was just the same when she spent a month in France with the Baroness de Hautenoblesse," continued Salemina. "When she returned to America it is no flattery to say that in dress, attitude, inflection, manner, she was a thorough Parisienne. There was an elegant superficiality and a superficial elegance about her that I can never forget, nor yet her extraordinary volubility in a foreign language,--the fluency with which she expressed her inmost soul on all topics without the aid of a single irregular verb, for these she was never able to acquire; oh, it was wonderful, but there was no affectation about it; she had simply been a kind of blotting-paper, as Miss Monroe says, and France had written itself all over her." "I don't wish to interfere with anybody's diagnosis," I interposed at the first possible moment, "but perhaps after you've both finished your psychologic investigation the subject may be allowed to explain herself from the inside, so to speak. I won't deny the spell of Italy, but I think the spell that Scotland casts over one is quite a different thing, more spiritual, more difficult to break. Italy's charm has something physical in it; it is born of blue sky, sunlit waves, soft atmosphere, orange sails and yellow moons, and appeals more to the senses. In Scotland the climate certainly has naught to do with it, but the imagination is somehow made captive. I am not enthralled by the past of Italy or France, for instance." "Of course you are not at the present moment," said Francesca, "because you are enthralled by the past of Scotland, and even you cannot be the slave of two pasts at the same time." "I never was particularly enthralled by Italy's past," I argued with exemplary patience, "but the romance of Scotland has a flavor all its own. I do not quite know the secret of it." "It's the kilts and the pipes," said Francesca. "No, the history." (This from Salemina.) "Or Sir Walter and the literature," suggested Mr. Macdonald. "Or the songs and ballads," ventured Jean Dalziel. "There!" I exclaimed triumphantly, "you see for yourselves you have named avenue after avenue along which one's mind is led in charmed subjection. Where can you find battles that kindle your fancy like Falkirk and Flodden and Culloden and Bannockburn? Where a sovereign that attracts, baffles, repels, allures, like Mary Queen of Scots,--and where, tell me where, is there a Pretender like Bonnie Prince Charlie? Think of the spirit in those old Scottish matrons who could sing:-- To buy my lad a tartan plaid,
"Sympathy for the under dog, as Miss Monroe's countrywomen would say picturesquely," remarked Mr. Macdonald. "I don't see why all the vulgarisms in the dictionary should be foisted on the American girl," retorted Francesca loftily, "unless, indeed, it is a determined attempt to find spots upon the sun for fear we shall worship it!" "Quite so, quite so!" returned the Reverend Ronald, who has had reason to know that this phrase reduces Miss Monroe to voiceless rage. "The Stuart charm and personal magnetism must have been a powerful factor in all that movement," said Salemina, plunging hastily back into the topic to avert any further recrimination. "I suppose we feel it even now, and if I had been alive in 1745 I should probably have made myself ridiculous. 'Old maiden ladies,' I read this morning, 'were the last leal Jacobites in Edinburgh; spinsterhood in its loneliness remained ever true to Prince Charlie and the vanished dreams of youth.'" "Yes," continued the Dominie, "the story is told of the last of those Jacobite ladies who never failed to close her Prayer-Book and stand erect in silent protest when the prayer for 'King George III. and the reigning family' was read by the congregation." "Do you remember the prayer of the Reverend Neil McVicar in St. Cuthbert's?" asked Mr. Macdonald. "It was in 1745, after the victory at Prestonpans, when a message was sent to the Edinburgh ministers, in the name of 'Charles, Prince Regent,' desiring them to open their churches next day as usual. McVicar preached to a large congregation, many of whom were armed Highlanders, and prayed for George II., and also for Charles Edward, in the following fashion: 'Bless the king! Thou knowest what king I mean. May the crown sit long upon his head! As for that young man who has come among us to seek an earthly crown, we beseech Thee to take him to Thyself and give him a crown of glory!'" "Ah, what a pity the Bonnie Prince had not died after his meteor victory at Falkirk!" exclaimed Jean Dalziel, when we had finished laughing at Mr. Macdonald's story. "Or at Culloden, 'where, quenched in blood on the Muir of Drummossie, the star of the Stuarts sank forever,'" quoted the Dominie. "There is where his better self died; would that the young Chevalier had died with it! By the way, doctor, we must not sit here eating goodies and sipping tea until the dinner-hour, for these ladies have doubtless much to do for their flitting" (a pretty Scots word for "moving"). "We are quite ready for our flitting so far as packing is concerned," Salemina assured him. "Would that we were as ready in spirit! Miss Hamilton has even written her farewell poem, which I am sure she will read for the asking." "She will read it without that formality," murmured Francesca. "She has lived and toiled only for this moment, and the poem is in her pocket." "Delightful!" said the doctor flatteringly. "Has she favored you already? Have you heard it, Miss Monroe?" "Have we heard it!" ejaculated that young person. "We have heard nothing else all the morning! What you will take for local color is nothing but our mental life-blood, which she has mercilessly drawn to stain her verses. We each tried to write a Scottish poem, and as Miss Hamilton's was better, or perhaps I might say less bad, than ours, we encouraged her to develop and finish it. I wanted to do an imitation of Lindsay's
Of course there was a chorus of laughter when the young wretch exhibited my battered pencil, bought in Princes Street yesterday, its gay Gordon tints sadly disfigured by the destroying tooth, not of Time, but of a bard in the throes of composition. "We bestowed a consolation prize on Salemina," continued Francesca, "because she succeeded in getting _hoots_, _losh_, _havers_, and _blathers_ into one line, but naturally she could not maintain such an ideal standard. Read your verses, Pen, though there is little hope that our friends will enjoy them as much as you do. Whenever Miss Hamilton writes anything of this kind, she emulates her distinguished ancestor Sir William Hamilton, who always fell off his own chair in fits of laughter when he was composing verses." With this inspiring introduction I read my lines as follows:-- THE MUSE BEING SOMEWHAT UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF I canna thole my ain toun, The collops an' the cairngorms, How can I leave the marmalade I lo'e the gentry o' the North, So fetch me tartans, heather, scones, For Charlie, bonnie Stuart Prince,
Mr. Macdonald flung himself gallantly into the breach. He is such a dear fellow! So quick, so discriminating, so warm-hearted! "Don't pick flaws in Miss Hamilton's finest line! That picture of a fair American, clad in a kilt and mutch, decked in heather and scones, and brandishing a claymore, will live forever in my memory. Don't clip the wings of her imagination! You will be telling her soon that one doesn't tie one's hair with thistles, nor couple collops with cairngorms." Somebody sent Francesca a great bunch of yellow broom, late that afternoon. There was no name in the box, she said, but at night she wore the odorous tips in the bosom of her black dinner-gown, and standing erect in her dark hair like golden aigrettes. When she came into my room to say good-night, she laid the pretty frock in one of my trunks, which was to be filled with the garments of fashionable society and left behind in Edinburgh. The next moment I chanced to look on the floor, and discovered a little card, a bent card, with two lines written on it:--
I will not betray her to Salemina, even to gain a victory over that blind and deaf but much beloved woman. How could I, with my heart beating high at the thought of seeing my ain dear laddie before many days! |
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