Part 40 (1/2)

Miss Ailie stood quite still now, a stiff, thick figure, with a soft, plain face and nervous hands. ”Before you speak,” she said, nervously, ”I have something to tell you that--perhaps then you will not say it.

”I have always led you to believe,” she began, trembling, ”that I am forty-nine. I am fifty-one.”

He would have spoken, but the look of appeal came back to her face, asking him to make it easier for her by saying nothing. She took a pair of spectacles from her pocket, and he divined what this meant before she spoke. ”I have avoided letting you see that I need them,” she said.

”You--men don't like--” She tried to say it all in a rush, but the words would not come.

”I am beginning to be a little deaf,” she went on. ”To deceive you about that, I have sometimes answered you without really knowing what you said.”

”Anything more, Ailie?”

”My accomplishments--they were never great, but Kitty and I thought my playing of cla.s.sical pieces--my fingers are not sufficiently pliable now. And I--I forget so many things.”

”But, Ailie--”

”Please let me tell you. I was reading a book, a story, last winter, and one of the characters, an old maid, was held up to ridicule in it for many little peculiarities that--that I recognized as my own. They had grown upon me without my knowing that they made me ridiculous, and now I--I have tried, but I cannot alter them.”

”Is that all, Ailie?”

”No.”

The last seemed to be the hardest to say. Dusk had come on, and they could not see each other well. She asked him to light the lamp, and his back was toward her while he did it, wondering a little at her request.

When he turned, her hands rose like cowards to hide her head, but she pulled them down. ”Do you not see?” she said.

”I see that you have done something to your hair,” he answered, ”I liked it best the other way.”

Most people would have liked it best the other way. There was still a good deal of it, but the ”bun” in which it ended had gone strangely small. ”The rest was false,” said Miss Ailie, with a painful effort; ”at least, it is my own, but it came out when--when Kitty died.”

She stopped, but he was silent. ”That is all now,” she said, softly; and she waited for him to speak if he chose. He turned his head away sharply, and Miss Ailie mistook his meaning. If she gave one little sob--Well, it was but one, and then all the glory of womanhood came rus.h.i.+ng to her aid, and it unfurled its flag over her, whispering, ”Now, sweet daughter, now, strike for me,” and she raised her head gallantly, and for a moment in her life the old school-mistress was a queen. ”I shall ring for tea,” she said, quietly and without a tremor; ”do you think there is anything so refres.h.i.+ng after a walk as a dish of tea?”

She rang the bell, but its tinkle only made Gavinia secede farther into the cellar, and that summons has not been answered to this day, and no one seems to care, for while the wires were still vibrating Mr. McLean had asked Miss Ailie to forgive him and marry him.

Miss Ailie said she would, but, ”Oh,” she cried, ”ten years ago it might have been my Kitty. I would that it had been Kitty!”

Miss Ailie was dear to him now, and ten years is a long time, and men are vain. Mr. McLean replied, quite honestly, ”I am not sure that I did not always like you best,” but that hurt her, and he had to unsay the words.

”I was a thoughtless fool ten years ago,” he said, bitterly, and Miss Ailie's answer came strangely from such timid lips. ”Yes, you were!” she exclaimed, pa.s.sionately, and all the wrath, long pent up, with very different feelings, in her gentle bosom, against the man who should have adored her Kitty, leapt at that reproachful cry to her mouth and eyes, and so pa.s.sed out of her forever.

CHAPTER XXIX

TOMMY THE SCHOLAR

So Miss Ailie could be brave, but what a poltroon she was also! Three calls did she make on dear friends, ostensibly to ask how a cold was or to instruct them in a new device in Shetland wool, but really to announce that she did not propose keeping school after the end of the term--because--in short, Mr. Ivie McLean and she--that is he--and so on.

But though she had planned it all out so carefully, with at least three capital ways of leading up to it, and knew precisely what they would say, and pined to hear them say it, on each occasion shyness conquered and she came away with the words unspoken. How she despised herself, and how Mr. McLean laughed! He wanted to take the job off her hands by telling the news to Dr. McQueen, who could be depended on to spread it through the town, and Miss Ailie discovered with horror that his simple plan was to say, ”How are you, doctor? I just looked in to tell you that Miss Ailie and I are to be married. Good afternoon.” The audacity of this captivated Miss Ailie even while it outraged her sense of decency.

To Redlintie went Mr. McLean, and returning next day drew from his pocket something which he put on Miss Ailie's finger, and then she had the idea of taking off her left glove in church, which would have announced her engagement as loudly as though Mr. Dishart had included it in his pulpit intimations. Religion, however, stopped her when she had got the little finger out, and the Misses Finlayson, who sat behind and knew she had an itchy something inside her glove, concluded that it was her threepenny for the plate. As for Gavinia, like others of her cla.s.s in those days, she had never heard of engagement rings, and so it really seemed as if Mr. McLean must call on the doctor after all. But ”No,”

said he, ”I hit upon a better notion to-day in the Den,” and to explain this notion he produced from his pocket a large, vulgar bottle, which shocked Miss Ailie, and indeed that bottle had not pa.s.sed through the streets uncommented on.

Mr. McLean having observed this bottle afloat on the Silent Pool, had fished it out with his stick, and its contents set him chuckling. They consisted of a sheet of paper which stated that the bottle was being flung into the sea in lat. 20, long. 40, by T. Sandys, Commander of the Ailie, then among the breakers. Sandys had little hope of weathering the gale, but he was indifferent to his own fate so long as his enemy did not escape, and he called upon whatsoever loyal subjects of the Queen should find this doc.u.ment to sail at once to lat. 20, long. 40, and there cruise till they had captured the Pretender, _alias_ Stroke, and destroyed his Lair. A somewhat unfavorable personal description of Stroke was appended, with a map of the coast, and a stern warning to all loyal subjects not to delay as one Ailie was in the villain's hands and he might kill her any day. Victoria Regina would give five hundred pounds for his head. The letter ended in manly style with the writer's sending an affecting farewell message to his wife and little children.