not going to lose her victory and she added as she rose
with a swish of her skirts : "It does not take you, Tom,
to teach me how many beans make five, and success in
business does not absolve a man from his duty to his
parents." Tom was very angry. He was cutting a poor
figure in front of Agnes, with whom he had thought his
mother would help him. Talk of saving the family!
She was as dense as Jamie and as incapable of seeing
which side of her bread was buttered. He remembered
with a cold shiver his mother's trick of talking of them
as though they were still children. What might she not
have told Agnes? How he was very proud of his long
aristocratic feet and kept his toe-nails very carefully,
perhaps! She was quite capable of it. "Aren't you
going to lie down before supper, mother? You must
be tired." "I am not tired, and I cannot sleep in a
strange bed." '"Would you like me to read to you?"
asked Agnes, relieved at the passing of the strain. "She
hates being read to," jerked Tom. "I think," said Mar-
garet, "I prefer my own company." And she sailed
away to Mrs. Donald's boudoir which had been placed
at her disposal.

Tom was left speechless. How to explain? How to re-
cover the lost ground? He did not know how much
ground he had lost. He swung his right leg and stroked
his chin, but not a word could he say. Agnes smiled,
smoothed out her skirts and waited. Tom had always
been so confident ; his present furious anxiety was a wel-
come change. At last to help him out she said: "She



202 THREE SONS AND A MOTHER

is such a character, such a fine character." Tom mut-
tered : "She is simply incomprehensible. I have been a
good son to her, and she behaved like that, almost rudely,
to you." "Perhaps," replied Agnes, "perhaps she is shy,
or perhaps she is feeling the loss of your brother." "She
is disappointed, I know. It is not the marriage any of
us would have chosen for him." "But Sophia is the
dearest child." "We Lawries," cried Tom, "are ambi-
tious. We aim always at the highest." '"Perhaps," said
Agnes, "your brother could see no higher." "Ah!" said
Tom gallantly, "but I do. I see myself I see myself

er " He caught Agnes' eye and became tongue-tied

again. "I see myself " "Yes?" asked she sweetly.

"That's enough," he snarled, his fury returning. "I
will put up with things from my mother that I will not
stand from you. I asked you this morning if you would
marry me. You said 'No.' I ask you now. Will you
marry me, and your answer shall be "

He was not allowed to finish for Mary entered the
room and sat by Agnes taking her hand in hers. She
looked up at her brother and said: "Go on, Tom."-
Agnes clutched Mary's hand tight and squeezed it. She
had nearly been frightened into giving Tom the answer
he desired. "Go on, Tom. Were you making a speech ?"
""I was saying," said he, "that the Lawries are ambi-
tious." "They are always convinced that they are in
the right." "Oh ! dear," said Agnes, "so are the Greigs."
>"We generally are right," observed Tom, "but our
women-folk will never listen to us." "Perhaps," said
Mary, "they like to be wrong for a change." "You may
laugh," replied Tom. "You may regard me as a fool,
if you like, but I know what I am doing and I mean to
do it."

He was fascinated by the sight of Agnes' white hand



AGNES OF THE LAKE 203

in Mary's. It looked as though they would never be
separated. He was going back in the morning. He might
not have another opportunity. He decided to lie.
"Mother was asking for you, Mary." '"Was she? I
expect she has found Maggie by now." "Maggie is out
dining with Mrs. Donald." "Jamie came in with me.
He has gone to look for her." "I was having a most
interesting conversation with Agnes." He saw Agnes
press Mary's hand and draw it towards her. Those
women! These abominable women! Was a man noth-
ing but a joke to them? Had they no feeling? No
sense of proportion? Could they not see that a man's
schemes for his future were of vital importance ? Little
plain Mary made Agnes look superb and beautiful. Tom
drew himself up to his full height and felt that he was
a man of whom she was worthy. He had, he believed,
a strong face, but these women seemed able to baffle
strength. Let them wait. They should see. Once mar-
ried to him, Agnes should feel his strength. Mary said :
"I shall not see Agnes again for years. You are never
so far away. Was he being so very interesting, Agnes?"
"I was not," said Tom. "I keep my brains for my
business. Are you staying to supper, Agnes?" "No.
I promised I would be at home." '"Then perhaps I may
walk with you." "If Mary will come too." "I have
walked so far," said Mary, "but I will ask Jamie."
"Jamie!" cried Tom. "I admire your brother so much,"
murmured Agnes. And at that moment Jamie came in
to say that Margaret was asking for Tom. "She seems
to be unhappy about you. I don't know what you have
been doing." Tom took out his watch, put it back again,
twiddled the chain, pulled down his waistcoat, swung his
right leg, stroked his chin. "I was blunt with her," he
said at length. "And she's been blunt with me, so you'd



204 THREE SONS AND A MOTHER

better go and be kind to her," said Jamie, "or the Greigs
will think us the most quarrelsome family in the world."
He stole a shy glance at Agnes and she was very beau-
tiful to him. "I shall not be long," said Tom and with
absurd conscious dignity he strode from the room. Mary
pounced on her opportunity and bade Jamie take Agnes
home. She bundled them out of the house and Jamie
walked miserably by the side of the woman he loved
best in the world two paces away from her. He had a
stick in his hand and he kept changing it from one arm
to the other, carrying it across the small of his back,
with his arms crooked round it, or across his shoulder,
and every now and then he dropped it. At last, very
timidly, he managed to say: "My sister, Mary, likes
you very much." "I like Mary, too. I think she is a
dear." "She has more brains than the rest of us put
together." "My grandfather used to say: 'Character,
passionate character is what counts.' " "He must have
been a grand man." '"He was." "Hubert talks about
him." Within himself Jamie said: "I don't want to
talk about Hubert. I don't want to talk at all. O!
Agnes, Agnes, it is an agony to be with you." But Agnes
was happy with Hubert for a subject. He was so entirely
different from all she disliked in the Greigs. Jamie said
at length: "It must be grand to live among all this love-
liness." "But I feel sometimes," said Agnes, "that I
have not earned it, that I have not seen ugliness enough
to be able to love its beauty." "God forbid," said Jamie,
"that you should ever see an ugly thing or suffer any
hurt." "Sometimes," answered Agnes, "I long to suf-
fer. It is almost suffering in itself." She had begun to
feel suddenly happy with this handsome and romantic
cousin of hers. He was difficult and shy. If she could
only make him open out to her, he might a little satisfy



AGNES OF THE LAKE 205

her longing. She felt almost pity for him, though she
had no reason to think he needed it. Mary had described
him as wonderful. They walked on through a long si-
lence which he broke at last with a laugh: "Cousin
Agnes," he said, "I take you from one comfortable
house to another. Would it surprise you if I told you
that from the bottom of my heart I hate comfortable
houses?" "No," she said, "not altogether. I would not
be surprised at anything you told me." "And yet you
must have everything of the best, and I would not have
you have less. What I hate about you I cannot hate in
you." Agnes was pained. She did not know why. She
said: "But you yourself will one day be rich and im-
portant." "I! Never. I have no thought in my head
that will fit into such houses as these, and indeed I know
of no place where my thoughts will fit." He was quite
cheerful about it, taking refuge from the fierce emotions
with which he was beset in intellectual probing, in a new
irony which he had lately discovered in his mind. "I
am glad you have told me so much," said she. "I hope
one day you will tell me more." "Why! I have told
you nothing. But I'd give my ears to see you in love."
Agnes' thoughts flew guiltily to Tom. He added : "Then
I could tell you something." "What?" "My whole
abominable soul." He felt that he had alarmed her. He
was astonished to find himself talking so to her. Never
had he been so free with anyone. He was so much in
love with her that he could not but be disinterested. He
could not assert any claim to her. If she could not feel
what he felt for her, so much the worse for him. Words
would spoil it, drag it down, make what he had to give
unworthy of the giving. Complications on complications
delightful to his irony. He was sorry for her, vastly
sorry for her, as he often was for his mother, because



206 THREE SONS AND A MOTHER

she was a woman and emotionally confined. But in his
heart there was an agony because he could not think of
her apart from his brother. His shyness was his master.
It was one thing to sound her for interest in himself ; an-
other to follow up that interest when discovered. Tom
and she ! The combination was so fantastic as to be only
too probable. Life had been made so easy and smooth
for her: she would always look for the easy and the
obvious. O well! There would be no subtility about
iTom, while she set himself winding through the most in-
tricate complications in the effort to arrive at the burn-
ing emotion she roused in him. He would never do it.
She would never help him. It was horrible how clearly
he saw all that. She would have her comfortable home,
the comfortable adorations with which she was sur-
rounded and the tenderness, the passion in her would
never be roused. He was, he saw, just interesting to
her. It was grimly comical to be walking through the
rough March evening with her, the splendid captive
woman, untouched, unmoved, child-like. These child-
ish English! Would life always be a pretty game to
them? Would they never suffer, never be crushed into
humility; would they always shut themselves in against
life and never go out upon adventure, never seek adven-
tures within themselves ? Agnes seemed to Jamie then to
be the true figure of that England which he had set out
to conquer, so beautiful, so unapproachable, so isolated.
And her isolation was not that of thought or feeling but
that of a sweet unfailing discretion. What she was not
seemed to him so much more moving than what she was.
With a man she would be more submissive than re-
sponsive. Jamie could appreciate the irony of this love
of his which had brought him none of love's blindness.
He said: "The Lawries won't be Englished yet awhile/'



AGNES OF THE LAKE 207

And she answered : "That sounds like a warning. Is
it?" '"You can take it so, if you've a mind to. We've
fared hard, and everything we have in our lives must be
hard or we will have none of it." "Even love?" asked
Agnes timidly. '"It would be a rare woman would find
and keep the tenderness in a Lawrie," said he, and she
felt that she was getting out of her depth and jerked back
to her placid conventional mode of thinking. "You are
a strange man, Cousin Jamie," she said. "Not so
strange," said he, "if you should come to know me, but
that is none too easy, with me or any man."

Her father's house was nearer the lake, and the path
they had taken led by its shores, where the water lapped
upon the pebbles and sucked among the reeds. There
was a wild sky, with torn hurrying clouds and behind the
fells the light of a little new-risen moon. They stood
and gazed over the water: "You'd never know," he
said, "the feeling that English is a foreign language to*
you and that you have no true speech of your own."
"No-o," said Agnes, mystified. "Dod," he said, "what
a fool I am, and a haverer. I've been talking to you as
I might to wee Mary and what I've wished to say I
could not say." '"I wish you had tried," said Agnes
feeling dissatisfied with herself and anxious to do better.
"Then," said Jamie, "I wish you were a wild thing. I
wish you could be a kind of pixie dwelling in the lake and
that I could be a wizard to call you forth and make you
human." "Oh! yes," said Agnes, half comprehending
and trembling upon the threshold of his mood. "Love
is like that to me," he added, "wizardry." "Wizardry,"
echoed Agnes and her eyes began to see the familiar
scene as they had never seen it before, as a thing com-
posed, designed, vibrant, calling to her and waking a
call in her heart. It fluttered her heart, and she was in



208 THREE SONS AND A MOTHER

the most delicious pain. More and more beautiful to
her was the lake under the moving sky. Jamie as yet
had no share in it. He was a dark figure standing by
the lake, mysterious and wizard-like, almost intolerably
inhuman. The pain grew in poor Agnes. She was in-
articulate and helpless. She turned to him for pity, for
comfort, and terribly she was almost aware of him as
a man. She wanted to cry out to him but could make no
sound. She was afraid. Behind them footsteps sounded,
and another coarser fear came to her aid. "Tom!" she
cried, though she could not possibly have seen him in
the darkness under the trees. Jamie gave a noise that
was between a snarl and a chuckle, for he had truly been
under a spell and it was hateful to him to be brought
out of it and by Tom. Tom and Agnes! -"Where's
your wizardry now?" he said to himself. "Agnes!"
called Tom. "You will catch your death of cold."
"Yes, Tom," said she, shivering. "You must be mad,
Jamie, to keep her out on a night like this." Jamie made
no reply. Tom took Agnes by the arm and walked her
briskly away. "Tom's the boy," said Jamie, "to play
with diamonds as though they were marbles, and may
the Lord have mercy on me. O dear, O dear, if I could
but have the rages that were on me when I was a boy.
When life becomes a joke it is hardly bearable."

He pursued this line of thought with Mary in her room
that night and she promised to send him some books
which she hoped would help him, also translations of
some of Goethe's poems. "It is a shame," she said. "I
am having the life you ought to have had." "I think
not," said Jamie. "I'd be using my fists on your philoso-
phers before I'd been with them a week. Instead of that
I use my brains on dear, good, foolish living men and
that's nigh as stupid." "Oh ! Jamie," cried Mary, sitting



AGNES OF THE LAKE 209

up in her bed and looking like a lively mischievous little
girl, "if only I could be your wife, I'd make something
of you." "What would you make of me, wee Mary?"
"The dearest, oddest, kindest man in all the world,"
said she. "You're a funny little sparrow," he said,
stooping over her and kissing her, "but the English don't
want dear, kind men any more. Poor Shelley's dead and
they have forgotten Toby Shandy." "O! O! O!" cried
Mary, "I wouldn't waste you on the dirty English. I'd
have all Edinburgh running after you like the children
after the Pied Piper of Hamelin." "Then," replied
Jamie, "you don't know me, for, if they did, then I'd
turn and spit in their faces. I hate a crowd."



CHAPTER XX

HUBERT AS DEVIL/S ADVOCATE



r A HE return to Thrigsby was melancholy. John's
* absence made a difference in the household, for he
was the most loquacious member of the family and
the rest had to loosen their tongues whether they liked
it or not. The result was a nightly sparring between
Jamie and Tom. Their hostilities made Margaret acutely
unhappy and she decided to counter them with a change.
She had been very busy preparing John's house in a
suburb on the other side of Thrigsby, and she chose a
new house in the Harporley Road, which, while it was
twice as big as the Murray Street house, would only cost
half as much again in rent. She flattered Jamie's literary
propensities by telling him that he could have one of
the upstairs rooms for himself, and Tom's self-impor-
tance by according him the private use of the dining-
room out of meal-times. They moved and the brothers
avoided each other. Tibby was given a servant to help
her, and the existence of the family was to outward
appearances prosperous, peaceful and monotonous. At
half-past eight the front door opened and Tom would
appear in his sober suit of black and walk off down the
road: at a quarter to nine James would appear, almost
equally sober in garb with a coloured tie and waist-
coat and walk off up the road. On Saturday nights
John and his wife would come to supper.

210



HUBERT AS DEVIL'S ADVOCATE 211

There was a social advance and they were no longer
dependent on the church for their status. Perhaps be-
cause of this, perhaps because they had other interests,
they went to church less regularly.

An effort was made and Margaret was able to repu-
diate her pension and also to pay back all the money she
had from the Scottish fund for the widows of ministers.
Jamie was made to feel that Tom was responsible for
nine-tenths of this triumph of domestic economy and,
in so doing, had postponed almost indefinitely any inten-
tion he might have had in marrying. Jamie was so an-
noyed that he said: "Is it worth it?" "Worth it?"
cried Tom. "Worth it, to have our mother holding her
head up once more?" "She could hardly hold it higher,"
retorted Jamie, "but since you have paid, you are entitled
to your satisfaction." "I should like to know," said
Tom, "what you do with your money." "Exactly what
I should like to know myself." "You're a fine banker."
"Perhaps it is being careful with other folk's money
makes me careless of my own."

As a matter of fact Jamie knew perfectly well what
became of his money. Miss Selina, Mrs. Bulloch, Henry
Acomb and Mr. Wilcox all had their share in it, and, had
it not been for him, Tibby would have gone without
clothes from one year's end to the other, for she still
had only enough in wages to keep herself in print frocks
for the house.

From that visit to the Greigs Jamie returned in a tor-
ment of which he could make nothing. He laughed at
himself over that strange idealisation of Agnes which
made his feeling for her so impersonal, but laughter
could not change it and he did not wish to change it.
It had flicked him out of life, given him a power in him-
self that was quite useless in any^ other walk of his exist-



212 THREE SONS AND A MOTHER

ence. There was simply nothing to be done with it. There
was no way of getting rid of it. "Oh! well," he said,
"that settles it." Yet he knew not what it was that was
"settled." He did, however, become aware that he was
altered, that he now regarded everything and everybody
in a cool, detached, humorous fashion. It was sometimes
extremely painful, but more often vastly amusing. He
was emotionally so clear and sure, and removed from
any temptation to waste emotion on things and people
that were unworthy of it. Tom had become almost a
figure of farce. He would get on: nothing would stop
him getting on ; but he would get nowhere. Jamie's own
occupation had become rather ludicrous to him. It was
practical, ingenious, interesting, serviceable, but it was
fatuous to pretend that it was anything more. A man
should work to live; men who lived in order to work
were tiresome, and must be, he thought, in the long run
mischievous. There was no doubt that Thrigsby worked,
but did Thrigsby live? What did it make of birth and
death, of the life of the mind, of the desire of the heart?
Was Thrigsby justified by the rapidly growing markets
for its cotton fabrics in all parts of the world? As
these questions were not very amusing but, rather, tor-
menting, he did not trouble about answering them, but,
to shelve them, turned more and more to things theatrical,
collecting his articles in The Critic into a book and pleas-
ing himself with the idea that he was becoming something
of an authorty. The leading actors who came down
from London wished to make his acquaintance and he
took this as tribute to his powers rather than to his posi-
tion. He had become, secretly, Selina's lover. She had
played with him, until, opportunity presenting itself, they
had embarked light-heartedly upon that enterprise which
promises more satisfaction than, as a rule, it gives. Se-



HUBERT AS DEVIL'S ADVOCATE 213

lina's previous experience had been so unhappy that she
was agreeably surprised, while Jamie with his new in-
tuition was able to measure the relationship exactly and
to expect from it no more than was forthcoming. They
were amazingly happy. Selina had no wish but it was
gratified; Jamie had no dark mood but she could tease
and tickle him out of it. What nonsense to call the
theatre an outpost of damnation ! At any rate, if damna-
tion be one half so pleasant, then let the prigs have
heaven. They deserve it. So thought and so said Jamie
when he was well embarked upon this adventure. It had
rid him of one of the most deep-seated notions of his
upbringing that a passion to be worthy of the name must
be hopeless, and because he had a great respect for Selina
he was unable to think of her as not respectable. It was
his delight on a Sunday night to drive Selina out in a
dog-cart, with Mrs. Bulloch up behind, to Hubert's farm
at Chapel, half-way up a craggy hill, in country that,
because it contained no Greigish mansions, seemed al-
most more remote than Westmoreland. This country
was even more beautiful because it had had no poets to
sing its praises and turn certain corners into shows.
Jamie liked to think that every man in it was his own
poet, but this idea would not let him off thinking that
every man in Thrigsby also was his own poet with the
song of his life swelling up beneath its freakish appear-
ances. And so happy was he with Selina that he did not
reject such thoughts, but told himself that the sound of a
man's heart was as absurdly out of place in Thrigsby as
Selina was in the country, as absurdly out of place and
as delicious. The country meant nothing to her. She
would not walk a yard. But she loved the luxury of
Hubert's house and its rich taste and comfort. "O! O!
O !" she cried, "the darling little bed ! I never knew there



214 THREE SONS AND A MOTHER

were such houses. O ! When I'm a great actress I shall
have ten houses like this. You shall live in one, Quint,
and Ma Bulloch shall live in another, and Henry in
another and when my Papa is dead I shall have the
nicest of all for my mother." "If the girls take to keep-
ing separate establishments I don't know what the world
will come to," said Mrs. Bulloch. "And if all this mag-
nificence is going to turn your head, my dear, I'll be no
chaperon." The old woman knew perfectly well what
was going on and was very pleased, but she pretended
to know nothing and had either of them betrayed the
matter in her presence she would have refused any more
to be a party to it. "Times," she said, "are not what
they were in my young day, and a girl cannot be too
careful. But when a horse has got a blind eye, you know
which side to go of it. There's all the difference be-
tween making merry and making free." "What shall
we do," asked Jamie, "when Selina goes to London ?"-
"When Selina goes to London," replied Mrs. Bulloch,
"I shall go too, if it is only to be her dresser. They
don't write parts for me nowadays since the theatre got
so finicking. Broad I may be in my speech and my meth-
ods but old women are old women and they can't be
treated as if they were innocents. My own children
are grown-up and ungrateful and Selina is like a daugh-
ter to me, couldn't be more so if I'd washed her precious
body and told her everything she ought to know." '"O !
be quiet, Ma," said Selina, "Quint wants to read my part
to me." That was their fiction, that Jamie took her
down into the country to go over her new parts with
her, and Mrs. Bulloch acquiesced in it delightfully with
roguish compliments on the quietness with which they
learned the words. '"Nothing like whispering," she



HUBERT AS DEVIL'S ADVOCATE 215

would say, "till you've got it pat" And on the word
pat she would slap the back of her fat left hand.

They had a grand Christmas party to which Henry
Acomb was bidden and Hubert invited himself. Hubert
was delighted with the affaire Selina and its effect on his
young relation, who had grown in grace through it and
was beginning to appreciate the pleasure of being charm-
ing for its own sake. Hubert had been afraid that Jamie
would succumb to the besetting sin of the Keiths and the
Greigs earnestness. There had been signs of his tak-
ing the theatre much too seriously, and, when the first
enthusiasm had worn off, his writing had become rather