'Lisbeth ... Popular edition

Chapter I

On the great highway which links the capitals of North and South, some mile or two before it disap pears under Highgate Archway and is swallowed up in London, there stands, or stood a few years since, a small shabby house fenced off from the road by a ragged patch of garden. On one side the mighty city dominated it, cloud by day and fire by night; on the other there stretched that debatable land which is neither town nor suburb nor genuine pastoral country, but an indeterminate mixture of all three ; a mansion here, a farmyard with its jealously-guarded handful of fields yonder ; a block of workmen's dwell ings rising defiantly, laying its grip on the soil as if to claim it for the heaving multitude, ever bursting its bonds and widening its borders. The little house — a mere strip of a dwelling, too tall for its width — stood upon the very outskirts of civilisation when its owner, Euphemia Grieve, came to occupy it.

It had a further advantage in her eyes in that the scanty garden patch, furnished with one gaunt fir-tree, and a grove of sickly currant and gooseberry bushes, sundered it by but a yard or two from the broad road where, all the summer long, the traffic went merrily by, sprinkling the neglected, broken hedges of her little domain with a fine, white dust. The dust, when it penetrated the badly-fitting windows and fell upon her well-polished furniture, troubled her a little, but she bore with it patiently, 'LISBETH. 6 labouring to remove it, though she was stout, and could not, as she herself expressed it, " hang upon her feet " without paying an after-price in suffering. The inconvenience was balanced by the comfortable assurance that even her infirm, rheumatic limbs could compass the little journey to the gate, whence — her back to London — she could gaze along the sinuosities of the road and tread it in fancy mile by mile as it led to the North.

During the two years she had lived there this had come to be her recreation, the excitement and pleasure of her day — to travel, as it were, after the heart which she had left yonder in the green solitude of her native hills. For those who journeyed southwards she had neither eye nor in terest, but the wayfarers whose faces were set towards the far-off Border she followed wistfully, weaving his tories for them with a vein of romance that seemed strangely incongruous in one of her bulky frame and slow mental processes. All the passion and the poetry of her nature centred themselves, as so often with the provincial Scotch man or woman, in love of her country ; in her loyalty to it she even came to hug her melancholy, to be proud of it, and, in a sense, jealous for it, to court the pain her banishment woke in her.

Euphemia Grieve had been transplanted too late to take root in the alien soil. The wife of an obscure sheep-farmer on the bare, green slopes of the Pent lands, she had been well content with the narrow round of her existence, varied in the earlier years of her marriage only by a rare jaunt to Edinburgh in the milk-cart, taken oftenest in the raw early spring when the Assemblies meet, and Established, Free, and U. P. rub shoulders in the street ; when new bonnets are set forth in the milliners' windows to tempt the rosy-cheeked daughters of the Manse. The seductions of a new bonnet, the joy of bar gaining for it, the pride of possessing it, Euphemia could understand ; the soberer pleasure, too, of a debate in the U. P. Synod, when douce Duncan Grieve, her husband, appeared in all the uncomfort- 'LISBETH. 7 able glory of his Sunday black in the elder's seat ; but set her apart from the surroundings, familiar since childhood, force her out of the track her feet had worn for fifty years, and she was a woman with nothing left her but her past.

No power but the strong tie of kindred would have induced her to leave the land of her birth ; but when Duncan Grieve died, after years of hopeless struggle with poverty and sickness, and the little farm was sold, the childless woman turned instinctively, in the wreck of her life, to her own folk, whose sympathy she was entitled to demand. It was not love that drew her — love of the demonstrative order she had never dreamed either of giving or receiving — it was rather that inbred sense of the sacredness of family claims that makes the Scot count kin to the remotest generation. Four out of her five sisters were married in London, three of them to Scotchmen, long settled there, and the fourth, and youngest, to an English man. That they should thus have turned traitors to their country, content to exile themselves from it, afforded Euphemia a topic which never lost its interest.

She yammered over it and wondered at it as freely after twenty years as when the offence was new ; she never reconciled herself to it even when, her home broken up, she gathered together the gear she had contributed to the household, and followed in the steps of her errant sisters. The fifth out of the six girls who had been born in the lowland farmhouse had long ago migrated to Canada, finding work, and finally settling there. To her, as next in age and closest in tastes and sympathy, Euphemia would most willingly have gone, but the dividing expanse of ocean daunted her ; so she obeyed the mandate of sister Isabella, who, as the head of the family and its most flourishing member, was its self-elected spokeswoman. Isabella, who had married one Thomas Mackie, a hard-working journeyman baker, had proved a useful 'LISBETH. and thrifty wife, standing by her husband in tin early difficulties, which he had overcome with an amazing force of purpose and dogged determination to succeed, and rewarded in her later years by seeing herself a prosperous and even wealthy woman, her husband the owner of many well-known and well patronised bread shops in various quarters of London, she the mistress of a handsomely-appointed house in Pendleton Square, and the mother of a daughter who had all the advantages which English governesses and foreign travel could supply.

To this comfortably and carefully ordered estab lishment Euphemia — commonly called Phemie in the family circle — was bidden, when all that remained of worthy Duncan Grieve was laid beneath the sod in the lonely graveyard among the hills. Thomas Mackie accepted the announcement of this arrangement without comment. He was a tall, narrow-chested man, with light eyes and a sandy fringe of whisker and beard meeting in a circle round a long, well-developed, clean-shaven chin. To that chin he owed a great deal of his success in life : but the portion of his prosperity which was derived from his wife's good management and thrift he was ready to acknowledge handsomely by leaving her a free hand in the household expenditure. His rapidly increasing and thriving concerns fully occupied his own energies, and he was too keen a business man to neglect even the minutest details.

" Do you want me to meet her at the station ? " he asked, when the date of his sister-in-law's arrival was duly fixed. He stooped forward, warming his long, thin, freckled hands at the fire. It was a spring night, and the air was shrewd. " You needn't put yourself out to do anything of the kind," said his wife, knitting rapidly while she spoke. She closed her large-lipped, firm mouth with a snap of decision. She was a comely woman still, with a fresh complexion, and hair untouched with 'LISBETH. 9 grey, and she looked portly, and even dignified, in her black silk and ample lace cap. " Phemie hasn't been much of a traveller, so far as I remember " " She's got a tongue in her head," said Mrs. Mackie, a little sharply, unwilling to admit that a Mitchell could ever find herself at a disadvantage.

" Besides, I saw Marget to-day, and she and that good-for-nothing Niel have made it up to meet Phemie. I'm sure I'm willing they should get the first words over, for Marget is that soft she'll cry if you look at her, and I can't have her upsetting Phemie the minute she gets into the house. Besides, as I've asked them to tea, it'll be one cab fare for the three, though Niel's too great a fool to look at two sides of a shilling." At a certain rough contempt in her mother's tone the young girl who sat in a low chair between her parents looked up and ruffled her pretty brows. In fashioning Effie Mackie, Nature seemed to have been in one of her freakish moods. Inheriting on both sides the sturdy blood of the Scottish peasantry, she bore neither outwardly nor inwardly any per ceptible trace of her origin.

Slight almost to thin ness, with a fragile, delicately-featured, rose-leaf prettiness, she seemed to have drifted from some other sphere, and to find herself in a country where the language was a dead letter to her. Acquiring so easily — that they seemed less an added graft than an inheritance — the refinements and graces imparted by cultured teachers, she yet could take no comfort out of them, since they were but so many hedgerows and barriers to isolate her still further from her kin. The child, who was good and simple by nature, found herself strangely lonely in her little world of art and music and letters — dearly as she loved it — a kingdom her parents never sought to penetrate. To them she was a thing apart, unconnected with their rougher life, at once the symbol and reward of their prosperity; they 'LISBETH. had undauntedly set before them the aim to rise in the social world, and in Effie they had already accomplished the first and most difficult step.

And neither of them guessed how the tender fibres of the girlish heart were bruised for lack of a little homely care. When her father had left the room she drew nearer her mother. " You said Aunt Margaret was coming to tea. Will Elizabeth come too ? " " Like enough," said Mrs. Mackie, indifferentl}7. " 'Lisbeth knows that I'm always ready to do an aunt's duty by her, and that's more than she need look for from her Aunt Phemie, for all the to-do Niel and Marget are making about her." "Am I named for Aunt Phemie?" the girl asked, after a little silence. " No," said Mrs. Mackie, quickly, " you've got your grandmother's name, and she was worth six of Phemie. But you don't favour her. She hadn't your chances." " Perhaps," said Effie, with a laugh that ended in a sigh, " if I hadn't had my chances I should have been like Aunt Phemie.

Do the people who have no chances ever miss them, I wonder ? Mother, I think I could have been very happy at Tarbrax, with Uncle Duncan and the sheep for company.". " Effie, Effie," said her mother, with a reproving shake of the head, " you don't know what you're talking of." She looked at her daughter with secret uneasiness. Effie always looked fragile ; was she going to fall ill < or was it only lassie's nonsense, the freakish fancy of a wilful girl that spoke out in that last sentence ? No, that droop of the pretty head, that dainty pallor, were natural to her. Effie was not ill, and why should she — with her piano, the best that money could buy, her French and German books, her ample dress allowance, her riding horse — be hankering after the sordid life of a struggling farmer's wife ? for so 'LISBETH. 11 from her new plane Isabella Mackie had come to regard the existence she had left behind her.

Next morning she took Effie in the brougham to her dressmaker's, and let the child's good taste make its choice among the dainty fabrics ; she sent her out riding in the afternoon with a carefully-chosen com panion, and when the girl got home again there was the new illustrated edition of Thackeray she had coveted reposing upon her shelves. Thus she was gently but firmly thrust back into her own kingdom ; and though the young, immature creature in her newly-awakened self-consciousness sometimes pro fessed to read a tragedy in her life, there were moments — such as those which found her buried deep in " Esmond " — when she was equally sensitive to its pleasures. And at night she found another kind of satisfac tion in giving the last dainty touches to the supper table set out for the coming guests — in arranging the flowers which were a concession to her refine ment, and therefore an expense to be willingly borne.

The Mackies had kept to the homely customs ot their class, and dined at two and supped at eight, except on the occasions Avhen Effie's friends were to be entertained. Mrs. Mackie would have yielded to the more fashionable arrangement if it would have added to Effie's gentility or comfort ; but the child picked like a bird, and showed herself singularly indifferent to the pleasures of the table. Besides, Thomas Mackie, who interfered but seldom in the house keeper's province, was firm on this one point, and insisted that supper, with a glass of grog to cap it, was an honester meal to end the day with than those many-coursed kickshaws which went by the name of dinner. Effie surveyed the chickens and ham, with their frilled legs, the tongue, round of beef, jellies, and creams with a little more interest than was usually called forth by the periodical tea-parties to which the . 'LISBETH. 12 family was invited.

Her mother was used to display a lavish prodigality on such occasions, to fling expensive viands in the face of her poorer relatives, as who should say, "There, you don't get a meal like that every day," which sometimes offended the daughter's finer instinct ; but to-night the hope of meeting her cousin, Elizabeth Niel, and her wonder about the new aunt, who would bring the air of the hills with her, and come touched and hallowed with a new-born sorrow, tilled and claimed all her thoughts. Her father pushed open the door which stood aj al and paused upon the threshold while she was busy laying a little wreath of leaves round the pink couchant lion, trembling on its crystal dish. She did not see him, and he watched her a moment, clutching with his right hand the sandy fringe of beard, after a way he had.

She was fair to see in her white dress : he noticed the fine, floss-like hair, the darker lashes and brows, the oval of her cheek, the curve of her pretty mouth, the slender fingers, so fastidious over the due arrangement of leaves, with a thrill of pride. She was his, this fair creature ; his industry, his shrewdness, his money had made her what she was. He did not ask that she should kiss him by way of reward for his concession in coming home earlier than usual, or tease him for not coming earlier still, as some daughters might; he was content that the width of the table should divide them, that she should hold herself apart in her grace and refinement — his, but as some cherished thing to put on a shelf and not for daily use. She looked up, suddenly conscious of his presence, and said, with a little show of satisfaction in her work : " Do you think Aunt Phemie will like it, father ?

" " Phemie Grieve ! " he said, and the contempt that had been in her mother's tone was in his too, only it was good-natured contempt. " I'll warrant you she's never seen the like of it, poor woman, in all her born days, nor the like of you," he added, deliberately. 'LISBETH. 13 Effie flushed with a stirring of rebellion. " I'm her niece," she said. " Ay, ay, stick to your own, Effie. That's right enough, but don't you ever let them forget that if you're a Mitchell on your mother's side, you're a Mackie too." If she had had less simplicity of nature she might have smiled. Her father was a baker in a large way, but he had been a little baker once though he now supplied half London with the staff of life, and no household in the big city but had heard of Mackie's Royal Family Biscuits. Her aunt was the widow of a Lowland sheep-farmer, and where, oh where, in the eyes of this mighty, contemptuous London was there one to recognise the difference on which he laid so keen a stress ?

But Effie, beings but a young-, guileless thing, was given to an unquestioning acceptance of statement, and something in her father's words made her throw down the coloured leaves and come to him round the table. He had meant to waken her pride, for he had an honest, unaffected delight in his own success, but he had roused instead her tender scruples. " I'm not likely to forget all you've done for me, father," she said gently ; " but I wanted Aunt Phemie to have a nice welcome. It's so strange to have an aunt one has never seen, and she's got the same name as me." " It's all you have in common, then," he said bluntly ; then, with an effort to meet her humour, " there's enough for her to eat, anyway." Effie laughed, lightly, girlishly. " That's why I've put flowers, just that there might be something that didn't cry out, ' I Avant to be eaten ! ' " Then, in a different tone, half-amused, half-scared, " There's Aunt Jane," she whispered, holding up a finger for silence.

From the hall Avithout came the sound of a voice issuing various directions, apparently to a 'LISBETH. Avaiting attendant, Avho Avas commanded to return for her mistress at ten o'clock, and cautioned in the same breath not to loiter by the Avay. Thomas Mackie stepped back Avith a quick, noiseless movement and softly closed the door. The action had a furtive air of guilt about it that touched the little spring of humour in the girl, and her laugh, in turn, set free some neAv emotion in him. He put his arm about her and droAv her further from the door. He did it aAvkAvardly, as one little used to be demon strate, but she crept closer to him, and held him breathlessly by the lappels of his coat, looking up at him smilingly, till Aunt Jane's heavy, deliberate tread had ascended the stair and Avas heard crossing the room above. If he had but knoAvn it, his little Dresden Shep herdess Avould fain have left her shelf and nestled always there.

Chapter II

When Effie ran upstairs and entered the draAving room, Aunt Jane Avas already seated at the fire in a stiffly-carved, high-backed chair, holding a fringed, bead-Avorked hand-screen betAveen her face and the flame. The drawing-room expressed the honest, un cultured preferences of people Avho had risen from humble circumstances, and Avere not ashamed of it ; and Effie had fine enough instincts to know that any meddling on her part, even by Avay of refinement, would only vulgarise it. As it Avas, there Avas nothing really vulgar in the aspect of the room, since it Avas Avholly in harmony Avith those Avho had planned it and lived in it. That Effie should seem little at home there is but to say once more that she Avas a sprite from another sphere, where roseAvood furniture, car peting of lilies and roses, gilt mirrors, and crystal 'LISBETH. 15 chandeliers Avere not.

A Avorld less solidly uphol stered Avould have ill-suited Aunt Jane, Avhose dull, rich black silk, jet ornaments, and widow's streamers, bore witness in their every line and fold to her intense respectability. To be respectable, to have everything of the best, to live frugally and prudently, so that you should save a good bit of money and be Avell thought of by those Avho came after you — that had been the burning aim of her life : and the soitoavs of her AvidoAv hood Avere greatly softened by the reflection that her im-estments Avere uoav entirely under her OAvn control, and that the deceased tailor, her husband, Avho had spent Avith a free hand, could no longer vex her soul Avith his unthinking charities. She Avas a large-made, bony Avoman, Avith none of the plump comeliness of Mrs. Mackie, and her gold rimmed spectacles, ahvays Avorn, gave her unsmiling expression an added severity.

" I hear that Phemie has sent up the dining-room furniture by sea," she Avas saying, as Effie entered the room. She extended a hand to the girl, Avhich she Avas permitted to shake, Aunt Jane going on Avith her talk all the Avhile. " Such Avaste and nonsense ! As if there Avere no chairs and tables to be had in London. You ought to make that girl take cod-liver oil, Isabella," she interposed, Avithout any change of tone — " she's as Avhite as a Avashed-out rag." " Well, I don't see anything to Avonder at in Phemie Avanting her OAvn furniture about her, Jane," said Mrs. Mackie, loftily ignoring the allusion to Effie. " I ahvays did admire her chairs. They're as good a bit of mahogany as 3'ou'll see, and if Phemie's Avhat she Avas, they'll beat your OAvn in the polish." " Oh," said Aunt Jane, Avith lofty offence, " if you've made up your mind to store her sticks, or to pay for housing them, I've nothing against it.

I'm not the one to be saying you should part Avith good furniture that has cost solid money, as Hendry White kneAv very Avell Avhen he left everything to me ; but I'm not next door to a pauper, thank goodness, 'LISBETH. 16 depending on my family for the meat I put in my mouth and the clothes on my back. I'm Avilling to pay my share of Phemie's keep doAvn every quarter day, as I told Mackie and you, but I set my face against encouraging extravagance, and if Marget had done her duty by me and told me open, that furniture would never have left Leith Dock." " Dear, dear, Jane," said Isabella, Avith that easy good humour that hides a sting, " such a to-do about nothing ! Phemie can store her bits of things here, and Avelcome. There's room enough. Pendleton Square isn't Mechlin Street, and nobody Avould expect you, to take in so much as an extry chair — Avith that big horsehair sofa blocking up the dining-room so as a body can scarcely turn round.

Hoav you ever managed to give suppers, and all, Avhen Hendry Avas alive, dear knows ; but, to be sure, there'll be no more suppers iioav he's gone, honest man ! " Hoav the Avarof Avords might have been Avaged after such a promising beginning history telleth not ; for at that instant sounds of arrival Avere heard be neath, and Isabella rose in a bustle to Avelcome her guests. Sister Jane Avas thus deprived of the cherished last Avord, and it Avas Avith an air of abiding one's moment to pay a score in full that she descended the staircase after her sister. It belonged to family tradi tions that the Avayfarer should be greeted at the door, and even so humble a member as poor Phemie should have all her dues extended to her. Effie Avatched the meeting from a little distance Avith Avide eyes and a heart that beat with keen throbs of interest.

The sen^ant maids, Avho were Scotch, and not troubled Avith any particular delicacy, Avere pressing fonvard to look too. Her father stood midway on the Avide flight of steps ; her mother just AA'ithin the shelter of the door ; Aunt Jane holding herself a little aloof in her offence, and inclined to temper her Avelcome of Phemie Avith coolness, to make up for Isabella's effusion. It seemed to the Avatcher as if the boxes and bundles and queerly- 'LISBETH. 17 shaped parcels handed out of the cab by Uncle Niel, Avho nimbly got doAvn from the seat beside the driver, Avould never come to an end ; then Aunt Niel came blinking and blundering up the steps, carrying the biggest bundle of all, her kind face all quivering Avith tears and smiles as she cried excitedly — " We've brought her. Here she is, poor thing, and oh ! sisters, but you'll never knoAv her ; she's sore changed since the days Avhen Ave Avere lassies together!"

She turned from one to the other, as if to appeal to their forbearance ; then she looked back and cried, " 'Lisbeth, mind these Aveary steps. Your aunt's very infirm in the feet." " Here, Phemie, you just hold on to me," said Thomas Mackie, with a rough, tolerant good humour. " Dan Niel, if you'd move out of the Avay, A\Te'd get on better. There noAv, you've managed it, that's the last step, and there's Isabella Avaiting for you." " Come aAvay in, and Avelcome," said the mistress of the house, in her loud, decided tones. " Dear, dear, but you're a failed Avoman, Phemie — to be younger than Jane and Marget, too ; but it's meat and drink you Avant, and a good bed to lie on, and you'll find them all in Pendleton Square, though there's maybe others that Avould grudge you your bite and sup. You'd better let Mr. Mackie help you ; you're lame in the feet, and the tiles are slippy to them that's not used to them."

But it Avas on Elizabeth Niel's strong protecting young arm that the poor thing stumbled into the hall. At the sight of that large, unwieldy frame, that poor, plain face with a scared, hunted look in the eyes that Avere red-rimmed with long Aveeping, that rusty black, that aspect of battered, dusty, hopeless fatigue, Effie felt a strange shock of disappointment, almost of repugnance. This the aunt Avhose name she bore, Avhose cause she had championed, Avho Avas to haA'e brought with her the clean fragrance and silence of pastoral solitudes to the girl Avho knew Scotland only as a dream and a desire ? Oh, Iioav could she B 'LISBETH. ha\-e been so mistaken, so deceived ? They Avere all standing round her and greeting her now, talking, and shaking the limp, unresisting hand, asking her questions which she neA'er even heard in her dazed bewilderment and confusion — the Avoman of fiftyfive taking her first plunge into the awful, unknown Avorld, meeting after half a lifetime the sisters grown out of all knowledge, all sympathy Avith her quiet, homely, ignorant Avays.

" Why didn't they let her alone ? Didn't they see she was half-dead Avith Aveariness ? " cried Effie to herself, Avith a little rush of indignation and a pang of pity that swept aAvay her disappointment and restored her loyalty. " She only Avants to be let alone," cried Effie, " till she comes to herself," little dreaming hoAv direly this letting alone would have offended the sense of duty to one's kin that Avas animating all these Avorthy people. Even Aunt Niel, avIio Avas so good and kind, could not let Phemie proceed to her room in peace, but must needs be murmuring little Avords of Avonder and condolence and pity : and there Avas Aunt Adkins, neAvly arrived on the scene, dragging forward her knicker-bockered boy by the one hand and her reluctant husband by the other, and struggling for the sole possession of the visitor's ear.

And in the middle of it all Elizabeth Niel stood silent, with patient grave eyes and mouth, supporting the poor thing Avho clung to her as if she found a refuge in her young pity. Yes, it Avas Elizabeth on Avhom she leaned. Already she had found her out. Little Effie, Avho loved this cousin as perhaps she loA-ed no one else, said to herself Avith an exultant throb, " Elizabeth will take care of her ; Elizabeth will see that she is not Avronged." " That boy of yours ought to be in bed, Merran," said Aunt Jane sharply, getting the folds of her rich vilk hastily out of the way of the child's dusty feet as his mother propelled him before her. " In bed ! " cried Mrs. Adkins, a little, fair, .'LISBETH. excitable Avoman — in all respects a contrast to her large-framed, portly sisters — " he Avouldn't be so Avanting in respect to his aunt that he's never set eyes on ; and he the only nepheAv she's got on her OAvn side of the house."

" I didn't Avant to come," said nine-year-old Tommy in an injured voice. " I Avant to go home ; I want to play soldiers Avith Jim Marsh — and father said " But a Avarning tug from his mother silenced further revelations. " Well, I can't say that I remember asking you," said Mrs. Mackie, with the frankness that prevails between relatives ; " but I daresay you'll forget young Marsh and his soldiers when you find yourself set before one of my jellies, Master Tommy. But I'll haA^e no broken A\-ine-glasses this time, mind that. Boys must behave Avhen they come uninAfited." " I'm sure you needn't set Phemie against the poor child the ATery first minute," cried the aggrieved Marion, " as if he Avas a little heathen. George Ad kins, I don't know AA'hat you're made of to hear your child abused and never speak up for him."