A Knight of the Nets

THE “LITTLE SOPHY”

Madame did not go to the Dower House.  Archie was opposed to such a humiliation of the proud woman, and a compromise was made by which she was to occupy the house in Edinburgh which had been the Braelands’s residence during a great part of every winter.  It was a handsome dwelling, and Madame settled herself there in great splendour and comfort; but she was a wretched woman in spite of her surroundings.  She had only unhappy memories of the past, she had no loving anticipations for the future.  She knew that her son was likely to be ruled by the woman at his side, and she hoped nothing from Marion Glamis.  The big Edinburgh house with its heavy dark furniture, its shadowy draperies, and its stately gloom, became a kind of death chamber in which she slowly went to decay, body and soul.

No one missed her much or long in Largo, and in Edinburgh she found it impossible to gather round herself the company to which she had been wont.  Unpleasant rumours somehow clung to her name; no one said much about her, but she was not popular.  The fine dwelling in St. George’s Square had seen much gay company in its spacious rooms; but Madame found it a hopeless task to re-assemble it.  She felt this want of favour keenly, though she need not have altogether blamed herself for it, had she not been so inordinately conscious of her own personality.  For Archie had undoubtedly, in previous winters, been the great social attraction.  His fine manners, his good nature, his handsome appearance, his wealth, and his importance as a matrimonial venture, had crowded the receptions which Madame believed owed their success to her own tact and influence.

Gradually, however, the truth dawned upon her; and then, in utter disgust, she retired from a world that hardly missed her, and which had long only tolerated her for the accidents of her connections and surroundings.  Her disposition for saving grew into a passion; she became miserly in the extreme, and punished herself night and day in order that she might add continually to the pile of hoarded money which Marion afterwards spent with a lavish prodigality.  Occasionally her thin, gray face, and her haggard figure wrapped in a black shawl, were seen at the dusty windows of the room she occupied.  The rest of the house she closed.  The windows were hoarded up and the doors padlocked, and yet she lived in constant fear of attacks from thieves on her life for her money.  Finally she dismissed her only servant lest she might be in league with such characters; and thus, haunted by terrors of all kinds and by memories she could not destroy, she dragged on for twenty years a life without hope and without love, and died at last with no one but her lawyer and her physician at her side.  She had sent for Archie, but he was in Italy, and Marion she did not wish to see.  Her last words were uttered to herself.  “I have had a poor life!” she moaned with a desperate calmness that was her only expression of the vast and terrible desolation of her heart and soul.

“A poor life,” said the lawyer, “and yet she has left twenty-six thousand pounds to her son.”

“A poor life, and a most lonely flitting,” reiterated her physician with awe and sadness.

However, she herself had no idea when she removed to Edinburgh of leading so “poor a life.”  She expected to make her house the centre of a certain grave set of her own class and age; she expected Archie to visit her often; she expected to find many new interests to occupy her feelings and thoughts.  But she was too old to transplant.  Sophy’s death and its attending circumstances had taken from her both personally and socially more than she knew.  Archie, after his marriage, led entirely by Marion and her ways and desires, never went towards Edinburgh.  The wretched old lady soon began to feel herself utterly deserted; and when her anger at this position had driven love out of her heart, she fell an easy prey to the most sordid, miserable, and degrading of passions, the hoarding of money.  Nor was it until death opened her eyes that she perceived she had had “a poor life.”

She began this Edinburgh phase of it under a great irritation.  Knowing that Archie would not marry until Christmas, and that after the marriage he and Marion were going to London until the spring, she saw no reason for her removal from Braelands until their return.  Marion had different plans.  She induced Archie to sell off the old furniture, and to redecorate and re-furnish Braelands from garret to cellar.  It gave Madame the first profound shock of her new life.  The chairs and tables she had used sold at auction to the tradespeople of Largo and the farmers of the country-side!  She could not understand how Archie could endure the thought.  Under her influence, he never would have endured it; but Archie Braelands smiled on, and coaxed, and sweetly dictated by Marion Glamis, was ready enough to do all that Marion wished.

“Of course the old furniture must be sold,” she said.  “Why not?  It will help to buy the new.  We don’t keep our old gowns and coats; why then our old chairs and tables?”

“They have associations.”

“Nonsense, Archie!  So has my white parasol.  Shall I keep it in tissue paper forever?  Such sentimental ideas are awfully behind the times.  Your grandfather’s coat and shoes will not dress you to-day; neither, my dear, can his notions and sentiments direct you.”

So Braelands was turned, as the country people said, “out of the windows,” and Madame hastened away from the sight of such desecration.  It made Archie popular, however.  The artisans found profitable work in the big rooms, and the county families looked forward to the entertainments they were to enjoy in the renovated mansion.  It restored Marion also to general estimation.  There was a future before her now which it would be pleasant to share, and every one considered that her engagement to Archie exonerated her from all participation in Madame’s cruelty.  “She has always declared herself innocent,” said the minister’s wife, “and Braelands’s marriage to her affirms it in the most positive manner.  Those who have been unjust to Miss Glamis have now no excuse for their injustice.”  This authoritative declaration in Marion’s favour had such a decided effect that every invitation to her marriage was accepted, and the ceremony, though purposely denuded of everything likely to recall the tragedy now to be forgotten, was really a very splendid private affair.

On the Sabbath before it, Archie took in the early morning a walk to the kirkyard at Pittendurie.  He was going to bid Sophy a last farewell.  Henceforward he must try and prevent her memory troubling his life and influencing his moods and motives.  It was a cold, chilling morning, and the great immensity of the ocean spread away to the occult shores of the poles.  The sky was grey and sombre, the sea cloudy and unquiet; and far off on the eastern horizon, a mysterious portent was slowly rolling onward.

He crossed the stile and walked slowly forward.  On his right hand there was a large, newly-made grave with an oar standing upright at its head, and some inscription rudely painted on it.  His curiosity was aroused, and he went closer to read the words:  “Be comforted!  Alexander Murray has prevailed.”  The few words so full of hope and triumph, moved him strangely.  He remembered the fisherman Murray, whose victory over death was so certainly announced; and his soul, disregarding all the forbidding of priests and synods, instantly sent a prayer after the departed conqueror.  “Wherever he is,” he thought, “surely he is closer to Heaven than I am.”

He had been in the kirkyard often when none but God saw him, and his feet knew well the road to Sophy’s grave.  There was a slender shaft of white marble at the head, and Andrew Binnie stood looking at it.  Braelands walked forward till only the little green mound separated them.  Their eyes met and filled with tears.  They clasped hands across her grave and buried every sorrowful memory, every sense of wrong or blame, in its depth and height.  Andrew turned silently away; Braelands remained there some minutes longer.  The secret of that invisible communion remained forever his own secret.  Those only who have had similar experiences know that souls who love each other may, and can, exchange impressions across immensity.

He found Andrew sitting on the stile, gazing thoughtfully over the sea at the pale grey wall of inconceivable height which was drawing nearer and nearer.  “The fog is coming,” he said, “we shall soon be going into cloud after cloud of it.”

“They chilled and hurt her once.  She is now beyond them.”

“She is in Heaven.  God be thanked for His great mercy to her!”

“If we only knew something sure.  Where is Heaven?  Who can tell?”

“In Thy presence is fullness of joy, and at Thy right hand pleasures forevermore.  Where God is, there is Heaven.”

“Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard.”

“But God hath revealed it; not a future revelation, Braelands, but a present one.”  And then Andrew slowly, and with pauses full of feeling and intelligence, went on to make clear to Braelands the Present Helper in every time of need.  He quoted mainly from the Bible, his one source of all knowledge, and his words had the splendid vagueness of the Hebrew, and lifted the mind into the illimitable.  And as they talked, the fog enveloped them, one drift after another passing by in dim majesty, till the whole world seemed a spectacle of desolation, and a breath of deadly chillness forced them to rise and wrap their plaids closely round them.  So they parted at the kirk yard gate, and never, never again met in this world.

Braelands turned his face towards Marion and a new life, and Andrew went back to his ship with a new and splendid interest.  It began in wondering, “whether there was any good in a man abandoning himself to a noble, but vain regret?  Was there no better way to pay a tribute to the beloved dead?” Braelands’s costly monument did not realise his conception of this possibility; but as he rowed back to his ship in the gathering storm, a thought came into his mind with all the assertion of a clang of steel, and he cried out to his Inner Man.

“That, oh my soul, is what I will do; that is what will keep my love’s name living and lovely in the hearts of her people.”

His project was not one to be accomplished without much labour and self-denial.  It would require a great deal of money, and he would have to save with conscientious care many years to compass his desire, which was to build a Mission Ship for the deep sea fishermen Twelve years he worked and saved, and then the ship was built; a strong steam-launch, able to buffet and bear the North Sea when its waves were running wild over everything.  She was provided with all appliances for religious comfort and teaching; she had medicines for the sick and surgical help for the wounded; she carried every necessary protection against the agonising “sea blisters” which torture the fishermen in the winter season.  And this vessel of many comforts was called the “Sophy Traill.”

She is still busy about her work of mercy.  Many other Mission Ships now traverse the great fishing-fleets of the North Sea, and carry hope and comfort to the fishermen who people its grey, wild waters; but none is so well beloved by them as the “Little Sophy.”  When the boats lie at their nets on a summer’s night, it is on the “Little Sophy” that “Rock of Ages” is started and then taken up by the whole fleet.  And when the stormy winds of winter blow great guns, then the “Little Sophy,” flying her bright colours in the daytime and showing her many lights at night, is always rolling about among the boats, blowing her whistle to tell them she is near by, or sending off help in her lifeboat, or steaming after a smack in distress.

Fifteen years after Andrew and Archie parted at the kirkyard, Archie came to the knowledge first of Andrew’s living monument to the girl they had both loved so much.  He was coming from Norway in a yacht with a few friends, and they were caught in a heavy, easterly gale.  In a few hours there was a tremendous sea, and the wind rapidly rose to a hurricane.  The “Little Sophy” steamed after the helpless craft and got as near to her as possible; but as she lowered her lifeboat, she saw the yacht stagger, stop, and then founder.  The tops of her masts seemed to meet, she had broken her back, and the seas flew sheer over her.

The lifeboat picked up three men from her, and one of them was Archie Braelands.  He was all but dead from exposure and buffeting; but the surgeon of the Mission Ship brought him back to life.

It was some hours after he had been taken on board; the storm had gone away northward as the sun set.  There was the sound of an organ and of psalm-singing in his ears, and yet he knew that he was in a ship on a tossing sea, and he opened his eyes, and asked weakly: 

“Where am I?”

The surgeon stooped to him and answered in a cheery voice:  “On the ’Sophy Traill!’”

A cry, shrill as that of a fainting woman, parted Archie’s lips, and he kept muttering in a half-delirious stupor all night long, “The Sophy Traill!  The Sophy Traill!” In a few days he recovered strength and was able to leave the boat which had been his salvation; but in those few days he heard and saw much that greatly influenced for the noblest ends his future life.

All through the borders of Fife, people talked of Archie’s strange deliverance by this particular ship, and the old story was told over again in a far gentler spirit.  Time had softened ill-feeling, and Archie’s career was touched with the virtue of the tenderly remembered dead.

“He was but a thoughtless creature before he lost wee Sophy,” Janet said, as she discussed the matter; “and now, where will you find a better or a busier man?  Fife’s proud of him, and Scotland’s proud of him, and if England hasn’t the sense of discerning who she ought to make a Prime Minister of, that isn’t Braelands’s fault.”

“For all that,” said Christina, sitting among her boys and girls, “Sophy ought to have married Andrew.  She would have been alive to-day if she had.”

“You aren’t always an oracle, Christina, and you have a deal to learn yet; but I’m not saying but what poor Sophy did make a mistake in her marriage.  Folks should marry in their own class, and in their own faith, and among their own folk, or else ninety-nine times out of a hundred they marry sorrow; but I’m not so sure that being alive to-day would have been a miracle of pleasure and good fortune.  If she had had bairns, as ill to bring up and as noisy and fashious as yours are, she is well spared the trouble of them.”

“You have spoiled the bairns yourself, Mother.  If I ever check or scold them, you are aye sure to take their part.”

“Because you never know when a bairn is to blame and when its mother is to blame.  I forgot to teach you that lesson.”

Christina laughed and said something about it “being a grand thing Andrew had no lads and lasses,” and then Janet held, her head up proudly, and said with an air of severe admonition: 

“It’s well enough for you and the like of you to have lads and lasses; but my boy Andrew has a duty far beyond it, he has the ‘Sophy Traill’ to victual and store, and send out to save souls and bodies.”

“Lads and lasses aren’t bad things, Mother.”

“They’ll be all the better for the ‘Sophy Traill’ and the other boats like her.  That laddie o’ yours that will be off to sea whether you like it or not, will give you many a fear and heartache.  Andrew’s ’boat of blessing’ goes where she is bid to go, and does as she is told to do.  That’s the difference.”

Difference or not, his “boat of blessing” was Andrew’s joy and pride.  She had been his salvation, inasmuch as she had consecrated that passion for hoarding money which was the weak side of his character.  She had given to his dead love a gracious memory in the hearts of thousands, and “a name far better than that of sons and daughters.”