Mrs. Jo of Auchendorass. A novel

Chapter I

The day was nearly done ; the sun had just dropped behind the hill, but his radiance remained in the pure atmosphere, and Ben Torthor stood out boldly, in darkest ultramarine blue, against the deep golden sky. The lustre of the river was something wonderful, each burnished wavelet tipped with a diamond spark. Here and there floated a ball of rose-tinged snow, or what appeared to be such, until a flat head on a long neck suddenly shot out of it, and it swam revealed as one of the Manse ducks, glorified, like everything else, by the magic of the sunset. Even the white washed walls of Auchendorass Manse looked less bare and grim than was their wont. The Manse stood on a small piece of rising ground overlooking the river. It was a long low house, built of the red stone found in the locality, and easily found too, for the country thereabouts was little besides rock, sparsely covered with poor soil, from which the bones of the world protruded at every opportunity.

The house then was built of the red stone, but it A being the custom of the country to cover this agree ably coloured material with whitewash, the barbarous tradition had been duly carried out on the Manse walls. The building was surrounded, in the first instance, by what represented a lawn, and flower-pots, but the grass was chiefly moss and dandelions, and the flower-beds oscillated between being tangled wilder nesses or bare earth, according to the time of the year. On one side the ground led down to the river, through winding terraced walks, black with ashes laid down for the extermination of the slugs, and much choked with brambles. On this steep little hillside lay the kitchen garden, kept in better trim than the rest of the small domain, and at its foot, between that and the river-path, was the orchard, where would be seen in the Autumn a fair show of hardy apples, with a sprinkling of pears and plums, which last never ripened in that Northern latitude, but came to an untimely end as " green preserves."

The exterior unattractiveness of the Manse was a truthful index of the ugliness within it. The entrance was by a very small stone-flagged hall, from which led a somewhat larger one, also stone flagged, and always dark. Here ofttimes the unsus picious stranger stumbled over the rudimentary go cart constructed by the twins out of rough boards, and artfully abandoned by them in the most obscure part of the lobby. The cocks and hens,which wandered about that passage at their own sweet will, would make a shrieking scutter for the open door when that much expected " accident " occurred. Two rooms opened out of this stony passage. The dining-room was an apartment difficult to de scribe, from its want of what may be called the salient points of that kind of room ; of which, with the exception of the table, it had not the usual furni ture.

A sofa of frayed and rusty horse-hair stood against the wall ; one of its legs being gone, a simple substi tute had been found for it in a block of wood, with the bark still on, just as it had left the wood-shed. On the sofa reposed in perpetuity a large basket filled with home-knitted stockings, waiting to be mended. A few chairs, all more or less invalided, a carpet, so faded that its own maker would not have known it, and an old " kist " for holding peats, finished off the cheerful inventory. The drawing-room, only used on Sabbaths or on the rare occasion of visitors, was a degree higher in the scale of civilisation. There was an old piano in it, with a deerskin spread reverently at its feet ; quaint chairs stood at regular distances around, and besides the ordinary window, there was a long altogether-out of-regulation one, that just held a low-cushioned seat, jutting out of one corner, forming a sort of tiny alcove.

The wainscotting of the house was unpainted throughout ; so likewise were the doors, so were the window-sashes. In places about the passages the wall-paper hung in loose strips, waving in the abundant draughts ; and a rich flavour of earthiness and mustiness pervaded the entire dwelling ; it was, all things considered, rather a depressing abode. But out of doors the rooks were coming home in shoals, calling to each other with that derisive cry which is so peculiarly their own ; the river takes a more steely glitter ; a cool air sweeps up the bank, and rustles through the firs, and a girl runs round the angle of the stable, into a yard, calling, " Janet ! Ja-anet ! are ye no going to milk the cows the nicht ? " Janet responds from the field, and presently the cows come in sight, making for the byre, with Janet at their tails.

" Muckle fash wi' yon wee beastie the nicht, Miss Jo," she remarks, touching the second and most re fractory animal with a hedge-stake as she speaks. Jo stood looking at them as they passed, till they and the flushed Janet were lost in the obscurity of the byre, whence shortly issued a hissing sound of milk falling into pails. Jo sauntered into the barn, and coming out again with a sieve of Indian corn, leant against the wall, and began scattering the grain, and calling the pigeons to their supper, to which they came in crowds ; for though they were supposed to be there as adjuncts to the table, none had ever been slaughtered within the memory of man. They flocked down and about Jo, blue rocks, pouters, fantails, and mongrels ; nor was her invitation disdained by the more lawful occupants of the yard, but the hens and ducks came up, as well as two old " muscovies," called by the Manse children the "widows," an allusion to their black bodies and white heads, and not to the many bereavements they had sustained.

Jo leant up against the wall, and contemplated the pushing, struggling crew, now and then breaking out into a short laugh, as some creature showed a more than ordinary capacity for outwitting his fellows, and getting more than his proper share ; but she always helped the stupid ones, for she had a strong sense of justice. It was rapidly growing dusk, when a strange rattling noise became audible, in the far distance at first, but in the space of a moment increasing to a loudness that might have been alarming, if Jo had not been perfectly accustomed to it. She was not at all surprised when the go-cart, " The Lobby Trap," as the twins aptly named it, dashed round the corner, propelled by the boys, with the Baby seated com posedly in it. " Oh ! Jo ! Father's come back ; he says he's just wearying for his tea, and Mr. Murray's come with him, and Flop won't come down because she hasn't got her hair done, and I'm sure she's been all the afternoon doing it, and Baby's been and knocked over the egg-board in the dairy and smashed — Hi !

Crack ! drop it, sir ! drop it ! " — and the twins sped away after their treasure, a terrier pup, that was chasing the hens in the exuberance of its youthful gladness. The Baby descended with precaution from her carriage, and, taking Jo's hand, walked with her to wards the house. The Baby was not really entitled to that name, for she was eight years old ; but she was small for her age, and her close-cropped hair gave her an infantile appearance, moreover, " Babie " stands for Barbara, her full style and title being Barbara M'Kim Chalmers. As she herself modestly observed, " I am Babie and Baby, and there's a pun in that." She was always on the look-out for puns, in common with her brothers, the twins, boys of twelve, whose names of Andrew and Neil were familiarly merged in the less pretentious ones of " Bolster " and " The Bimble."

" Bolster " was, in the first instance, a pointed hint at the roly-polyness of childhood ; but all trace of the origin of " The Bimble " was gone. ' Why didn't that tiresome Flop come down ? " asked Jo angrily. " Me dinna ken," said Babie. She had a curious little drawl. "She asked me if it was a man or a gentleman. I said it was a gentleman, 't anyrate he had quite good, decent clothes on. Bolster said it was Mr. Murray ; and they're in the study looking out something in the eggcyclompedia," she added grandly. Jo hurried round to the back door, and into the kitchen. It was all tidied up, the fire burning low, and the big black kettle puffing lazily with a luxurious purring sound, as it hung over the fire, suspended by a thick chain. The wooden arm chair, with a patchwork cushion on it, stood in its own place.

On the table lay a half-knitted stocking with the wires in it, ready to be taken up at any moment. Janet had carried in the tray the last thing before going out to see after the cows, and Jo had nothing to do except take the great plate of scones out of the oven and make the tea. This was soon done, and while it was drawing, she ran upstairs to see that she, as well as Flop, was in proper trim to receive visitors. The room she entered, after a little delay, caused by having to reassure the unbelieving Flop as to her being unaccompanied by the twins, was as far re moved as possible from the ideal apartment of a beautiful girl. It was like all the rest of the house, ugly, with a deep and ingrained ugliness, unrelieved by any object that might have given a picturesque turn to its homeliness ; it was shabby likewise, and scant of furniture.

The principal object in it was the old four-post bedstead, beneath whose canopy of dimmest damask Jo and Flora had slept as long as they could remember. There were strips of faded, sandy-looking carpet here and there on the boards ; and between the two windows, innocent of curtains, and with the blinds torn up as high as they could go, stood a little dressing-table, ornamented with a diminutive and mould-spotted looking-glass. Alto gether, this room was not calculated to foster either self-indulgence or vanity in its happy possessors. There was a little place leading out of it, scarcely bigger than a cupboard, that just held the Babie's small iron crib, and a rough box full of her toys. Jo went up to the looking-glass, and peered at her low-toned double. " There's one good thing about a sunbonnet, odious as it is, it does keep your back hair tidy," she remarked reflectively, as she took off the article in question, and, flinging it over on to the bed, set to work upon her front locks, which the wind had stirred into wilder frizziness than was allowable in the Manse.

Here I had better, perhaps, take advantage of the opportunity, and try to give some idea of what Jo and her sister are like. The idea must necessarily be but a dim and im perfect one, scarcely better than the dulled reflection Jo's old mirror returns her, for how is it possible to render the vividness of life and youth and health into black and white without taking the colour out of them ? Therefore I find myself in such reduced circum stances that I must needs say in plain words, that Josalin Chalmers is as charming and dainty a maiden as ever ran over her native heath in such frightful, wooden-soled clogs as those which she is now, heaven be praised, exchanging for nattier house-shoes. Josalin was not a small girl ; she stood five feet five and a half in her stocking-feet. I know, because I have seen her height, together with the other Manse children's recorded and dated, as they were measured, from year to year, on the inside door of the minister's study, and Josalin's last and abiding score stands as J. C, 5ft. $i-.

Jo, then, was tall, and at present rather too thin for perfection of form ; she was slender with the slenderness of extreme youth. Of a Northern type, she was late in developing, but it was not difficult to see that there were potentialities for fine lines about her figure. The shape of her face was a delicately drawn oval, more inclining to roundness than length ; the nose short and straight in itself, but not straight with the forehead ; the mouth mobile and lovely, short and full, with an exquisite finish about the curve of the lips, and the softly rounded corners ; her eyes were that darkest blue, that sometimes sparkles into the brightness of a sapphire, sometimes deepens into the softest grey, like the sky on a summer night. Her hair was the darkest gold, the gold that is no washy tint, but has a strong dash of red in it, enough to enrich the brown of the shadows, and give a splendid burnish to the ripples in the high lights.

Jo's eyebrows, slight as they were, were perhaps the most powerful factors in her face : they were set rather high up from the eye itself, and were lightly drooped at the corner nearest the ear. They gave a sort of plaintive, questioning look that was exceedingly becoming to her. Flora only found it irritating ; she had not this expression herself ; it was a monopoly of Jo's. Flora, however, resembled her sister considerably, but she was too young to have much beyond the promise of future beauty. She had more daring about her, and was a bolder spirit into the bargain. Jo had reached the age when the restless activity of childhood gives place to the dreaming and ques tioning of early girlhood ; the vague possibilities of life were dawning upon her inner consciousness — the great " why am I myself ?

" mystery was beginning to trouble her. As a general thing she had time enough and to spare for brooding and speculating, for the Manse was not often disturbed by visitors, and the minister's daughters went nowhere, except to a farm or two. Day followed day, bringing no variation in the routine of existence. The house and the Babie's lessons took up the morning ; then came the dinner, not a specially agreeable episode to Jo, Janet's cooking being none of the most refined. In the after noon, if the weather was tolerable, the girls took their books and the stocking-basket down to the " Burn," an otherwise nameless tributary stream, that, hidden between steep fern-covered banks, ran across the farthest corner of the Manse policy, and fell into the river that flowed past the minister's domain.

There Jo mended the family stockings, or knitted fresh ones, for the capacious maw of the basket was insatiable ; there, too, she mused and pondered, and filled her pretty head with cloudy chimeras and romantic notions, from such light literature as she could lay her hands on ; and when that source ran dry, as it too frequently did, from the fancies of her own visionary brain. In spite of its apparent advantages, such as freedom and fresh air, the life in reality was far from a health}' one. Always inclined to be introspective, she was too much thrown back on herself, and having none of her own standing at hand for comparison, it was natural that she should find herself much the most interesting of all subjects to think about. Had she been the only child of the house, she would probably have become thoroughly self-concentrated ; and as time went on, and she discovered that she possessed qualities wherein her neighbours were undoubtedly deficient, there is reason to believe that she would have developed that conceit that so easily besets the solitary.

But kindly providence having ordained that she should be merely a unit in a rather large family, all high-flown notions of her own merits had been battered and beaten and bruised out of her with the flails of rough and ready sarcasm and the simple, not to say rude, directness of fraternal taunts, exercises that were rather encouraged by the minister, who valued plain speaking (unless when directed at himself), and so Jo was now in more danger of falling into the opposite depths of over humility and lack of confidence in herself. " Where is that Baby ? Do find her and see that she is tidy, Flop," she said, hastily arranging a lace necktie around her collar. " I must go down ; don't be long ; Father will be worrying ; tea is all ready ; " as she left the room. On the stairs she met the breathless Babe, dripping with water, and leaving a track along the passage ; she had seized the chance to tumble into the Burn, an accident of daily occurrence.

" What ! again," cried Jo. " Go to Flora and get your things changed, you bad bairn !" " It was no my fault," began the Babie in wheedling tone. " If the stones would slip — " " Tuts ; I know you. Don't tell me any nonsense of that sort ; it won't do." " It's no lees, Jo," persisted the brat. But Jo swept down the stairs with great majesty, and the Babe with a derisive chuckle, ran up to her room, making as much clatter with her little clogs as she could. An indistinct hum of voices came from the study, a very small room edged into the corner of the hall ; the door was safely shut, and Jo brought the teapot and scones along to the dining-room without any misadventure of meeting the visitor on the way. It would have annoyed her very much if such a misfortune had happened, for she had a morbid horror of being caught at any work that is usually done by the servants of the house. The truth must out, poor Jo was ashamed of her poverty.

Chapter II. The

Auchendorass minister's wife had been a young English girl, whom he had met in one of his rare visits to Edinburgh. She had been staying at the house of one of his old friends, not perhaps without design on the part of the old friend's wife. Some how, he had been taken with the girl's gentle refinement, and she, an orphan and a governess, of all beings the most lonely, lost no time in weaving a regular mesh of romance around the minister, of whom she knew little ; the people, of whom she knew less ; and the life, of which she knew nothing what ever, and for which she was thoroughly unfitted. For some years, she tried to make head against her circumstances, working hard to gain the respect of the dour people of the district, who, however, mistrusted her efforts, and spoke of her as a " foreigner " to the last.

She had tried to make the Manse pretty by little arts of ornamentation much contempted of the minister ; she had tried to bring up her wee girls as she was accustomed to believe they should be reared ; this again in opposition to her husband's opinion. He had thriven on the old rough and tumble style himself, and was convinced that it was the only right one, so he disapproved of her attempts at teaching the children, and especially '3 the boys, such small accomplishments as she pos sessed, and threw cold water on any schemes that savoured of modern innovations. What had sufficed for his fathers should be good enough for him, and, if he could manage it, for his children, and his children's children also. In this he showed as much reasoning power as the lordly Arab, who, seeing for the first time a railway line and an engine coming along, puts out his foot in a lazy languid way to stop it, and is greatly surprised at the result.

Neither the climate nor the life suited Mrs. Chalmers. She was a frail creature, who needed petting and cosetting ; and the dullness, the grimness, the hard work of an uninteresting kind, the uncongeniality, in fact, wore her out; and she drooped and withered, and finally died about six years before my story begins, prematurely old, a woman weary with struggling for the utterly im possible. Let us hope she was more comfortable in the world she went to; she had always been out of place in this. But her teaching bore some fruit after all; Jo remembered her example and her little precepts and she again took up the burden of progress when it slipped from her mother's overladen shoulders and with her pitiable childish might she endeavoured to keep along in the same track, failing, of course • and the old traditions had nearly died out, when one summer the minister's brother, who had lately taken to himself a wife, brought his bride on a short, very short visit to the Manse.

The advent of this elegant lady revived all Jo's instinctive ambitions. She was in her teens by that time, and waking to the feminine love of the beautiful and the befitting. She saw how doubly hideous the Manse and all its belongings seemed contrasted with the belongings of the pretty girl who dressed three times a day, and was Mondaine to the finger tips. The new aunt did not remain long at Auchen dorass, but a new era began for Jo from that time. Mrs. Gilbert Chalmers had been rather interested in the shy hobbledehoy girl, and every now and then would send her a fashion journal or a society paper, by way of showing she kept her young niece in mind. Silence had reigned for at least five minutes, the silence, that is to sa)-, that is so full of sound, the silence of the open air. Boughs rustled, birds called to each other ; above all was the voice of the Burn, as it ran down the little glen, playing its way to the river.

"Jo," sighed Flora, "if you don't put down that horrid book and talk to me I shall be driven to stoning you." And she picked a pebble from its sandy bed, and aimed it at a tribe of top-knotted ducks that were very busy in the Burn. The ducks scattered with much indignant protest. ' Do look at that pompous old thing ; isn't it exactly like Mrs. M'Cabe in her company cap, when she has a tea-party. Oh ! " as the animal, feeling it was being noticed, turned a reproachful eye upon her. "Oh, I am sure it is Mrs. M'Cabe! She's a witch, and turns into a duck instead of a hare ! I'll pelt her ! " She sent a shower of sand at the lady with the top-knot, who departed very deliberately, followed by her quacking friends, climbing over the moss covered rocks, paddling through the shallows, till they took the final plunge into the river, and swam off, leaving a silvery comet-like track, whereof the offending duck formed the nucleus, in their wake.

The minister's daughters were sitting this sunny afternoon by the Burnside. It was a steep little glen, worn out of rocks and earth by the stream. The stream was a raving torrent in winter, but had now only enough water in it to keep it moving and trickling among the great gray boulders, whose broad tops were thick with moss. One bank was steep and entirely covered with ferns ; the nearer one, belonging to the Manse, was flatter, and there was a narrow path running through it, trodden out by the feet of the children. But if the ferns were not so tall and plumey on this side the stream, they were of rarer varieties. Flora made this place her treasure garden, and cherished the little fronds, and though often disappointed by the floods, that would carry off her pet roots bodily, she still indulged in hopes of future success.

On both sides large trees sprang up and made an arch over the water. The girls had been out here since the early dinner. Flora was sitting on a low piece of rock ; she had taken off her shoes and stockings, and was dabbling her toes in the clear, shallow water. Jo, hard by was lying along the soft moss, face down, her chin held between her palms, her white sunbonnet tilted over her eyes, absorbed in a magazine spread open on the moss before her. It was a magazine chiefly devoted to knotty questions and heavy essays, but there was always a serial story in it, thrown in scornfully, as a sop to the frivolity of the age, and this was what Jo was studying. A little apart from her elder sisters, the energetic Baby might have been observed hard at work, con ducting with enormous propriety the funeral of a doll, that even she had been obliged to allow, was not only defunct, but decomposed.

Jo shut up the magazine, sat up, yawned, stretched her arms. " There, I've done that ; what a bore it is having to wait so long for the next instalment ! I wish we could afford to belong to a library." The magazine had merely been borrowed from a neighbouring manse. " I'm glad we don't; you'd never speak to me at all," said Flora. " I should be more neglected than I am now ; that's bad enough." Flora was working herself up to one of her snappy moods, and Jo, who had spent most of the morning in retrimming Flora's hat, because she fancied she knew a way of making it more becoming, was con siderably stung by the remark. She sat in dignified silence, looking down at the dimpling water, trying to wink away the mist that had come over her eyes, without attracting the notice of the acute Flop. B It was a very sore point with Jo her responsibility towards her sisters ; for though the difference in age between her and Flora was not great, she had quite taken upon herself the maternal part, and tried to act up to it, and even beyond it.

Of course things frequently went awry, and gave her hours of misery and self-reproach ; for it seldom occurred to her to blame circumstances, or anything else, but herself and her own stupidity. Flora's complaint, which was addressed to the universe at large, struck her as flung at her own in capacity. Flora saw she had gone too far, so she affected an air of lightness and gaiety as she swung her feet and hummed a tune. " I'm just wearying of this silly old Burn," she said presently. " If I were as old as you, Jo, I should make an effort to go away somewhere." " I believe you're just a heartless creature ; you don't care a snap for any of us," retorted Jo, her feel ings still hurt, and her feathers standing up, so to speak. Flora was charmed to find that she had roused Jo up to showing symptoms of a disposition to talk ; in stead of going away, as she had feared, she con tinued, with an innocently ingenuous air : " If I could only write poetry, I could make such a good thing about solitude, but you know I can't make the rhymes !

It's when we go along the lanes, in the shandrydan, and the cows, and ponies, and things, run up to the hedges, and look after us as long as they can, I always think of it ; it's only IQ the first three lines, I can't get any further—here it's— " The silly sheep that crop the grass, They look at me as I do pass, They seem to say, ' You are an ass ! ' :' Here she exploded. " Oh, I say," from Jo. Flora resumed — " If I were free as you are free, " That's all ; I never can think of what they want to advise me to do." " Perhaps we shall find out in time," said Jo. " I suppose we may see some other places than this some day, though it doesn't seem very likely now; after all, we mightn't find them so nice." She looked up at the deep-blue sky shining through the dark-green leaves, and then at the ferns that were bowing to her from the bank across the stream.

" It's very lovely," said she simply. " Lovely," said Flop discontentedly, " I daresay it is lovely ; I wouldn't mind some ugliness for a change. Is Donald's ugliness the sort that is interesting, Jo) " with a significant drawl. " Tuts, he's just a boy, and no interesting at all," said Jo. " His Mammaw thinks all the world of him ; she was going on about him last Sabbath, till at last I agreed with her, and said I really thought he was better than he was bonny. You should have seen her face ! " " You will get into trouble one of these days with your tongue," said Jo. Flora took no heed ; she was carefully drying her toes on her handkerchief, giggling the while at the facer she had treated Mrs. Donaldson to. The Baby having finished the interment of her doll, and placed a decent stone over its head, was standing near, her hands clasped behind her small back, her bright hazel eyes and tiny hooked nose looking out of her sunbonnet with immense intelligence.