The next evening when Ann sat down with an air of determination at the writing-table she asked: "Shall I make another stride, Mother? Go on another seven years? It's fine to wear seven-league boots and stride about as one likes among the years. What I ought to do, really, before I write any more, is to read one of the books Mr. Philip Scott sent me this morning. They are lives of different people, and he thinks they might help me a lot with yours."
"It was kind of him to send them," Mrs. Douglas said.
"Oh, thoughtful, right enough, as Glasgow people say. I shall thank him in a sentence I found in Montaigne—here it is. 'They who write lives,' says Montaigne, 'by reason that they take more notice of counsels than events, more of what proceeds from within doors than of what happens without ... are the fittest for my perusal.' Mr. Scott will be rather impressed, I should think."
Mrs. Douglas appeared to take little interest in Montaigne. She was looking over a book that Mr. Sharp had brought her to read that afternoon.
"Mr. Sharp was telling me," she said presently, "how good the Miss Scotts are about helping with anything in the village. He is very keen about getting up a club for the young men, and he told them about it, and they at once promised to have that empty house at the top of the village put in order, and their nephew, Mr. Philip Scott, sent a sum of money and is going to supply papers and books and magazines. Mr. Sharp was quite excited about it, quite boyish and slangy when he told me about the football and cricket clubs he hoped to start; you would hardly have known him for the shy, douce young man coming solemnly as a parson to talk to an old woman. I hadn't realised how young he was until to-day."
"I wish I had seen him," said Ann. "I hadn't thought of him as caring for football and cricket. When do his people come?"
"Oh, not till just before New Year. And the housekeeper has already begun to hold it over his head that the extra work will probably prove too much for her, and says that perhaps she ought to go now."
"Better not tell Marget that," Ann warned her mother. "She is so sorry for Mr. Sharp that she is quite capable of going to the Manse and publicly assaulting the woman. But he would be much better to get rid of her at once; there shouldn't be much difficulty about getting another."
Mrs. Douglas looked doubtful. "Better rue sit than flit," she quoted. "Unless there happened to be a suitable woman in the district, I'm afraid it wouldn't be easy to induce one to come to such an out-of-way place. And they ask such outrageous wages now. When Marget came to me she said, 'I doot ye'll think I've an awfu' big wage. I've been gettin' seven pound in the half-year.' And she said it in a hushed voice as if the very sound of the sum frightened her."
Ann laughed and quoted:
"'Times is changed,' said the cat's-meat man.'Lights is riz,' said the cat's-meat man.'
The days are over when people could be passing rich on fourteen pounds in the year. Mother, are you quite sure you want to stay here over Christmas? It is such a deadly time at the best. Won't you go and stay with some of the people who have asked us?"
"No, I think not. I wouldn't like to be with anyone but my very own at Christmas time, and it would be ridiculous to bring the children so far—so we shall just stay quietly here."
"Very well," said Ann. Then, after a pause, "I'm asking you, Mother, but you won't pay any attention, where shall I begin to-night? I have written about the South African trip, shall I go on another seven years?"
"Seven years," her mother repeated. "That makes Mark thirty-one. Oh, a tremendous lot happened in those seven years, Ann. Robbie went to India; Jim left Oxford and had just finished his law studies when Uncle Bob died and he had to take his place; Mark married; you went to India. And you talk glibly about writing it in one evening."
"It is rather a spate of events," Ann confessed. "Did they really all happen in seven years, before Davie was fourteen? First, Robbie sailed for India. One of the church people who deeply deplored his going said, 'He's far ower bonnie a laddie for India.'"
"So he was," said Robbie's mother. "It was like cutting off a right hand to let him go."
"But, Mother," Ann said, "I don't think we need grudge the years he was in India, for he was never really divided from us, his heart was always at home. People there told me that though he loved his work he was always talking of Scotland, his heart was full of the 'blessed beastly place' all the time. D'you remember his first leave? Long before it was sanctioned he had engaged a berth and given us elaborate instructions about writing to every port. It was only three months—six weeks at home—but it was enough, he said, to build the bridge. He was just the same, the same kind simple boy, eager to spend his money buying presents for every one; then, of course, his money went done! I can see him now, lying on the floor with a bit of paper and a pencil trying to make out if he had any money to go back with.... I wonder what made Robbie so utterly lovable? If we could only recapture the charm and put it into words—but we can only remember it and miss it. I think it was partly the way he had of laughing at himself, and the funny short-sighted way he screwed up his eyes—when he missed a shot he would call himself a 'blind buffer.' I always remember his second leave as being, I think, almost the happiest time in my life."
"Yes. It was the last time we were all together—two years after Mark's marriage. Mark took Fennanhopes, which held us all comfortably, and there was good shooting. Alis was a year old, and the idol of her uncles. Davie was about fourteen, I suppose. Robbie was particularly pleased that Davie showed signs of being a good shot, and poor Davie was so anxious to please that he fired at and brought down a snipe, and then suffered agonies of remorse over killing what he described as 'that wee long-nebbit bird.'"
"I remember that," said Ann. "Mother, wasn't it odd how like Robbie and Davie were? Plain little Davie and Robbie who was so good-looking. After Robbie was gone, when Davie and I were together in a room, I used to shut my eyes and make myself almost believe it was Robbie talking to me—and both were so like Father. It must have been the way they moved, and the gentle way they touched things—and the way they fell over things! Mark called Davie 'light-footed Ariel,' from his capacity for taking tosses. They were such friends, Father and the four boys, and Father was the youngest of the lot."
Mrs. Douglas sat with her hands clasped in her lap, looking straight before her. When she spoke it was as if she were speaking to herself.
"Robbie used to say that it was a mistake for a family to be too affectionate, for when we were parted we were homesick for each other all the time. But he wrote once: 'Foreign service must be a cheerless business for the unclannish....'"
"Mother," Ann said gently, "I think you can almost say Robbie's letters by heart. It wasn't so bad saying good-bye to him, after his first leave—at least, not for me, for I was going out to him for the next cold weather. And Mark's marriage was our next excitement; we were frightfully unused to marriages in our family, for you had no brothers or sisters married, and Father had none. Had you and Father proved such an awful example?"
"It is odd," Mrs. Douglas agreed; "but some families are like that. Others flop into matrimony like young ducks into water. Mark's engagement gave me a great shock. It came as a complete surprise, and we knew nothing about Charlotte, and it seemed to me that it must break up everything, and that I must lose my boy."
"It might have meant that, Mother, if Charlotte hadn't been Charlotte. I know young wives who have taken their husbands completely away from their own people. I don't think Mark would have allowed himself to be taken, and I am very sure that Charlotte never tried. How odd it is to remember that first visit she paid to us after she got engaged. None of us had ever seen her, and we wondered what we would talk to her about for a whole fortnight. And if it was bad for us to have a stranger come in amongst us, how infinitely worse it was for poor Charlotte to have to face a solid phalanx of—possibly hostile—new relations! We have often laughed at it since, and Charlotte has confessed that she had a subject for each of us. To you, Mums, she talked about the poor; to Jim, poetry; to Father, flowers; Davie needed no conversation, only butter-scotch; my subject was books. The great thing about Charlotte was that she could always laugh, always be trusted to see the funny side if there was one, and as a family we value that more than anything. And we are pagans in our love for beauty, and Charlotte was very good to look at. We weren't really formidable, Charlotte says. Father she loved at once. Having no brothers of her own, she was delighted to adopt Robbie and Jim and Davie. You and I were the snags, Mother."
"I?" said Mrs. Douglas in a hurt voice. "I'm sure I tried to be as kind as——"
"Of course you did, you couldn't be anything else if you tried; but you had just a little the air of a lioness being robbed of its whelps—and you sighed a good deal. Mark and I had been so much to each other always that it wouldn't have been surprising if Charlotte had disliked the person that she was, in a way, supplanting—but we both liked Mark too well to dislike each other, so we became friends. I never hear a joke now but I think 'I must remember to tell Charlotte that,' and I never enjoy a book without thinking 'I wish Charlotte were here that we might talk it over.' We have laughed so much together, and we have cried so much together, that I don't think anything could come between us. And she has been so good about letting us share the children—What an event the wedding was! D'you remember the hat you chose for it in the middle of a most tremendous thunderstorm? It didn't seem to matter much what hat you took for we expected to be killed any minute, and it always rather solemnised you to put it on."
"It was too youthful for me," Mrs. Douglas said gloomily. "Weddings always depress me, and when it's one of your own it's worse."
"You enjoyed it in spite of yourself," said her daughter. "I know I enjoyed it—one of the seven bridesmaids in pink and silver, and I know Davie enjoyed it, flying about in his kilt. It was his very first visit to London, and we took him toThe Scarlet Pimpernel, to amatinée. When we came out into the sunny street after three hours' breathless excitement, he was like an owl at noonday; I think he had forgotten entirely that he lived in the twentieth century. It was hard luck that Robbie couldn't be at the wedding. He was so amused when we wrote to him about Father kissing the bride—kissing was an almost unheard-of thing with us in those days. He wrote: 'To think of my elderly, respectable father kissing his daughter-in-law and jaunting over to Paris! He'll be losing his job one of these days.' We went on to Paris after the wedding and then to the Lakes, and all got more or less seedy. Father and I were the only two who kept quite well, and we had to go and buy hot-water bags for the rest of you. Davie was in Jim's room, and in the middle of the night, feeling ill, he thought he would go and tell me about it, and on his way to my room he saw in the moonlight a statue on the landing, and in his fright he fell down a whole flight of stairs. And none of you could eat the good dinners—it was all very provoking."
"Yes," said Mrs. Douglas; "it is very provoking to pay for meals you haven't eaten. And no sooner did we get home than we were all as hungry as hunters! We had to begin after that to get your clothes ready for going to India."
"That was great fun. I did enjoy getting all the new frocks and the hundred and one things I needed. My bridesmaid's frock made a very pretty evening-dress, and I had a white satin one for my presentation, and a pale green satin that was like moonlight. Robbie was dreadfully given to walking on my train when we went out to dinner; I was usually announced to the sound of the rending of gathers. I wonder if other people find as much to laugh at in India as Robbie and I did? Practically everything made us laugh. I can never be sufficiently thankful that I was allowed to have that six months alone with him. It is something precious to remember all my life.... But the leaving him was terrible. By some wangling he managed to get down the river with me; that gave us a few more hours together. He had just left me, and I was standing straining my streaming eyes after the launch, when another boat came to the side of the ship and a man sprang out and came up to me. It was one of Martyrs' young men, Willie Martin, a clerk in a shipping office, who had watched for my name on the passenger list and had come to say good-bye. It was very touching of him. I expect I reminded him of home."
"His people were so pleased that you had seen him," Mrs. Douglas said. "You had to go the minute you came home and tell them all you could about him. He never came home, poor boy! When war broke out he joined up in India, and was one of the missing."
"I know. A decent laddie he was. When we were in Calcutta Robbie and I invited him to tea one Sunday afternoon, and he came, and was so nice and modest and shy; Robbie was loud in his praises because he went away directly after tea. You see, I had got the names of several young men from Scotland who were in business in Calcutta, and we asked them to tea on Sunday afternoons, when they were free, and Robbie didn't like the ones who sat on and on making no move to go away. Some we had to ask to dinner because they hadn't gone away at eight o'clock!"
"... It was our favourite occupation, your father's and mine, when we had an hour together by the fire, to dream of the good times we would have when he retired. When we got very tired of plodding along with our faces against the wind, when people seemed indifferent about our efforts and ungrateful, when something we had taken immense pains about proved a failure, when term-time came and family after family whom we had learned to count on moved away to outlying suburbs, leaving gaps that couldn't be filled, your father would say to me, 'Never mind, Nell; it'll be all over some day and we'll get away to the country,' and we would talk about and plan what we would do when we had no longer a congregation to tend. But, inside me, I was always sceptical about the dream ever coming true. I knew he wouldn't leave his work until he had to; and I had visions of going on and on until we were old and grey-headed. One should never let oneself weary in this world, for everything stops so soon."
Ann sat on the fender stool sharpening a pencil, very absorbed in the point she was making. When it was done to her satisfaction she turned round to her mother.
"Did you really ever weary in well-doing, Mother? Ah, well! 'Rejoice that ye have time to weary in.' But it was a pretty uphill job you and Father had in that district. There was one thing, though the congregation was small it was tremendously appreciative. You remember Mr. Gardner, the elder? I used to like to watch his face when Father preached—it was a study. He had the nicest little doggy face, with honesty written all over it. And his friend, great big Mr. Law who sat in the seat behind him—he was exactly my idea of the Village Blacksmith."
"Mr. Law should have been put into a book," Mrs. Douglas said. "Don't you remember how he used to stand up and square his great shoulders and speak in broad Lowland Scots?"
"I should think so. Mr. Law's addresses were our great delight. He began one on Evolution with: 'Some folk say that oor great-grandfathers hoppit aboot on the branches.' He always talked of 'the Apostle Jims,' and do you remember the description he gave us of some picture he had seen of the 'Last Judgment,' by Michael Angelo? I don't know where this masterpiece is hung, but Mr. Law said that it depicted 'Michael Angelo creepin' oot o' a hole aneath the throne and a look o' hesitancy on the face of God!' And he told us one day that he was sure the Apostle Paul had never been to Scotland or he most certainly would have put on record that Ben Lomond was the finest hill that he had ever set eyes on."
Mrs. Douglas smiled. "Mr. Law was a fine man and a most original speaker, but he felt so strongly on certain things that he was apt to upset other members."
"Ah," said Ann, shaking her head wisely, "one dreads that class of lad in a church."
"John Gardner, on the other hand," Mrs. Douglas went on, "was an undiluted blessing in the church. He was willing to do—indeed he liked doing—all the work that brought no kudos, all the dull jobs that most people try to evade. And he was always there. No matter how bad the night, you were always sure that his 'doggy' face would beam on you. 'Thank God,' your father used to say, 'thank God for the faithful few.'"
"Yes," said Ann. "I remember I was discussing with the boys, in our usual rather irreverent way, who of the people we knew would be 'farthest ben' in the next world. We denied admittance to quite a number of people famous for their good works; others, we thought, might just scrape in. 'But,' said Mark, 'I back Father and Dr. Struthers and wee Gardner to be sitting on the very next steps of the Throne.'"
"Oh, Ann!" her mother expostulated. "I never did like the way you and the boys spoke of sacred things; it sounded so flippant. But 'wee Gardner,' as you call him, was a great gift to us. Oh, and there were others almost as good. And the young men and women were really rather special."
"They were," said Ann. "The books they read and the wideness of their interests put me to shame. You know, Mother, it must have been very interesting for them, for they found their whole social life in the church. What fun they had at the social meetings! I almost envied them. At one social a girl said to me that she wished the men would come up—I suppose they were talking and smoking in the lower hall—and I said, stupidly, that I thought it was nicer without the men, and the girl replied with some sagacity, 'you wouldn't say that if they were your own kind of men.' A church is a great matchmaker. Old Mrs. Buchanan, talking one day of the young men and maidens in the choir, said, 'They pairjust like doos.' There is one good thing about a small congregation—everybody knows everybody else. We were like one big family. It is touching to hear them talk now about those days; they look back on them as a sort of Golden Age. And the presents they gave us! And they were so poor. Each of the boys got a gold watch and chain when they left home, and when I went to India I had quite a collection of keepsakes, some very odd, but all greatly valued by me, their owner. Mother, why are you sitting 'horn idle,' as Marget would say? Have you finished your knitting?"
Mrs. Douglas looked at her idle hands. "My knitting is like Penelope's web," she said; "there is no end to it. I'm simply sitting idle for a change, sitting thinking about days that are past, and about people I shall never see again on this side of time. I think a great deal of Martyrs, and I feel very humble when I think of the affection and loyalty given to us."
"But, Mother, you can't have liked everybody in the church. The thing's not possible. Think of Mr. Philip Scott and the 'acid' he thinks necessary, and say something really unkind.... You know you never liked Mrs. Marshall, the elder's wife—she was a terrible tale-bearer, and always making mischief."
"Yes, she was, poor body. But, Ann, she was kind when Rosamund was ill, and——"
Ann threw up her hands. "Mother, you are hopeless. I'm not going to try to put any acid into you. You're just like strawberry jam. I'm afraid I've got your share of acid as well as my own, that's why I've such an 'ill-scrapit tongue.'"
But Mrs. Douglas wasn't listening. She was looking before her, dreaming. Presently she said:
"Ann, it doesn't seem a very complimentary thing to say to you, but I look back on the winter you were in India with very great pleasure. We were quite alone, your father and I, for the first time almost since we were married, and he often said, laughing, 'We're never better than when we're alone, Nell.' The letters were such a pleasure—Mark's every morning, Jim's every other morning, a curious scrawl from little Davie once a week, and on Saturday Robbie's letter and your great budget. Oh, Ann, Ann, why was I not deliriously happy? All of you well, all of you prospering, my man beside me, and life full of sunlight."
"Ay, Mother, you should have been down on your knees thanking heaven fasting—and if the truth were known I dare say you were. But it's only afterwards you realise how happy you have been!"
"Yes, afterwards," said Mrs. Douglas. "It was when you came home from India that you noticed that your father was failing. Living with him I had noticed nothing."
"There was hardly anything to notice. He didn't walk with the same light step. He sometimes wondered why his congregation always chose to live up four flights of stairs, and one night he said to me, half laughing, half serious: 'I'm beginning to be afraid of that which is high.' But he was well for a year or two after that, till he had the bad heart attack, and the doctor warned us that it was time he was thinking of giving up his work."
Ann got up and stood with both hands on the mantelshelf looking into the fire.
"I remember," she went on, "the curious unreal feeling I had, as if the solid earth had somehow given way beneath my feet when I realised that Father's life was in danger. And then, when days and weeks passed, and he didn't seem to get worse, we just put the thought away from us and told ourselves that doctors were often mistaken, and that if he took reasonable care all would be well."
"He was only sixty-one," Mrs. Douglas said, "and the doctors assured us that if he gave up preaching he might have years of fairly good health. He had worked himself done. Twenty-two years in Glasgow had been too much for him."
Ann nodded. "He never said a word, but the fact was Father hated cities. Rosamund used to call the Park 'the policeman's country,' because of the notices to keep off the grass, and she called Etterick 'God's country.' Father longed all the time for 'God's country.' He would have been supremely happy as minister of some moorland place, with time to write, and time to love his books and flowers, and instead he had to spend his days toiling up and down endless stairs, never getting away from the sight of squalor and misery, doing the King's work through the unfeatured years. And yet he was perfectly content. He was able to find a Sabbath stillness in the noise, and from some hidden spring he could draw wells of living water to make in that dreary place a garden 'bright with dawn and dew' to refresh a haggard world.... You must have felt very bad about leaving Martyrs, Mother?—after all those years."
"Oh.... We felt it to be almost treachery on our part to leave some of those poor people. They depended on us. We considered whether we ought to stay on in Glasgow and still help a little, unofficially, as it were, but you were all against that, and finally we took a house in Priorsford to be near Jim. I was glad when it was settled, and glad when those last months in Glasgow were over. It was miserable work dismantling the house and packing up and saying good-bye."
"Everything has an end," said Ann, "'and a pudden has twa,' to quote Marget's favourite saying. But I could hardly believe we were finished with Martyrs, that we would tramp no more that long road, and sit no more in that back pew to the side of the pulpit, and look up at Father Sunday after Sunday—Mother, surely Father was a very good preacher?"
Mrs. Douglas sat up very straight, as if she were challenging anyone to contradict her, and said proudly: "He was the best preacher I ever heard. And if he were here he would laugh at me for saying so."
"He would," said Ann; "but I think I agree with you."
"A communion in Martyrs," her mother went on; "what an occasion it was! Except for length—our services were always short—I expect it was the same service that the Covenanters held, fearfully, as hunted men. 'Following the custom of our fathers'—can't you hear him say it?—your father always 'fenced' the tables and read the warrant. Then we sung those most mournful words:
''Twas on that night when doomed to knowThe eager rage of every foe';
and your father took his place among the elders round the table in the choir seat. He always held a slice of the bread, and, breaking it, said, 'Mark the breaking of the bread,' and after the tables were served he said a few concluding words. I used to listen for his voice falling on the stillness—'Communicants!' It seemed to me very beautiful."
"I know. But what will always remain with me is the way he said the Benediction. He was a very vigorous preacher, my father. There was no settling down to sleep 'under' him. Sometimes he would describe the fate of those who wilfully refused salvation, very sadly, very solemnly, and then he would shut the big Bible and, leaning over the side of the pulpit, he would say, 'But, brethren, I am persuaded better things of you.' Then came the Benediction, and I listened for the swish of the silk of the Geneva gown as he stretched his arms wide over the people, and his voice came healing, soothing, restful as sleep: 'May the peace of God which passeth all understanding...' On that last Sunday—the last time he ever preached—he gave us no farewell words, and I was thankful, for he had an uncanny gift of pathos; but he offered us, as he had offered us every time he preached in that pulpit, Christ and Him crucified. We sang 'Part in Peace,' and then he looked round the church, slowly, searchingly, round the wide galleries and through the area. Was he seeing again all those brave old figures who had so loyally held up his hands until they had to step out into the Unknown? In twenty-two years one sees many go. Then he held out his arms—the swish of the Geneva gown—and for the last time the listeners heard that golden voice saying, 'May the peace of God which passeth all understanding keep your hearts and minds.' ..."
There were tears standing in Ann's grey eyes as she said, "I know it's a ridiculous thing to say, but it seems to me that the people who knew Father and were blessed by him have a better idea of what that peace means—oh, Mother, aren't we a couple of foolish women sitting lauding our own!"
"No," Mrs. Douglas said stoutly; "we're not. If Martyrs' people were in the room now I'm sure they would say 'Amen' to all you say of your father. And I lived with him for thirty-four years and I couldn't imagine a better man. He was a saint, and yet he was human and funny and most lovable, and that isn't too common a combination. There can be nothing more terrible than to be married to a sanctimonious saint. Imagine beingforgivenall the time! Every time you lost your temper or spoke maliciously or unadvisedly, to see a pained expression on his face!"
"It would drive one to crime," said Ann solemnly.
Marget stood in the middle of the room pleating her black silk apron between her fingers. She wanted to be asked to sit down, for she had heard Ann and her mother talking of the removal from Glasgow, and she felt that what she had to say on the subject was of value.
"Cornel and Mrs. Moncrieff 'll be comin' next week," she reminded them. "I'm airin' the rooms an' pitten' bottles in the beds noo for I'm never verra sure aboot unused rooms in a new hoose. Ye'll no' can write when they're here, Miss Ann. It'll tak' ye a' yer time to crack wi' the Cornel."
"Oh, but it's a long time till next week, Marget," Ann said, as she went over to the bureau to address a parcel she had been wrapping up. "I'll have finished my writing by then."
"Is that sweeties for the bairns?" Marget asked, eyeing the parcel and sitting down as if by accident. "Ye'll file their stomachs."
"It's only Miss Smart's tablet. I never go to Priorsford without getting them some tablet at their dear Miss Smart's. Rory said to me solemnly the last time he was here, after a very successful visit to the shop, 'There's nobody in England like Miss Smart.'"
"I dare say not," said Mrs. Douglas. "London shops don't encourage small boys to poke in behind the counter. Miss Smart is so good-natured that her shop is a sort of Aladdin's Cave to all young Priorsford—Ann, have you remembered to put in myLifeabout Alis and the others being born?"
"Goodness gracious, I have not," cried Ann. "But I haven't got to that time yet, have I? You shouldn't give me unnecessary frights, Mother. Imagine leaving out Alis! Davie would have been annoyed. He was the proudest young uncle—was he thirteen?—and Alis adored him. 'My saucy Uncle Boy' she named him, when she could speak; and they were inseparable. He was a mixture of playmate and kind old Nannie to her. If anyone made Alis cry, in a moment Davie appeared and snatched her up and dried her tears. 'You don't know how I love my Uncle Boy,' I heard her telling some one. 'He's my favourite of men.' No, Davie wouldn't like Alis forgotten."
"I used to hear Alis boast," Mrs. Douglas said, "about her young uncle to Mary Elizabeth, and when Mary came to stay she warned her, 'He is my Uncle Boy, you know, Mary, not yours,' and Mary said nothing until she got Davie alone, then she whispered to him, 'Uncle Boy, will you be my Daddy,' and thought she had scored off poor Alis completely."
"A' the bairns likit Davie," Marget put in. "He had sic a cheery face an' he was aye lauchin'. I've seen me lauch mysel' in the kitchen when I heard him lauchin' up the stairs. He fair hated to be vexed aboot onything. Ye mind when you were ill, Mem, he took it awfu' ill-oot."
"All our troubles began after we left Glasgow," Ann said gloomily. "All those years we had been extraordinary healthy; doctors would have starved if they had had to depend on us. I know I used to look pityingly at sick people and wonder to myself if they wouldn't be quite well if they only made an effort. We talked bracingly about never having people ill in bed in our house. 'We treat our patients on their feet,' we said, with what must have been an insufferably superior air. And then we had been so lucky for so long; the boys got everything they tried for, and everything prospered with us, so I suppose it was time we got a downing; but that didn't make it any easier when it came. We left Glasgow knowing that father's health would always be an anxiety; but we didn't bargain for your crocking up, Mums."
"I'm sure I didn't want to 'crock up' as you call it," said Mrs. Douglas, looking aggrieved.
"Of course you didn't," Ann hastened to soothe her mother's ruffled feelings. Then she began to laugh. "But it was rather like you, Mother, to go and take a most obscure disease! We can laugh at it now because you got better, but we put in a terrible year. First the removing to Priorsford in May—taking the books alone was like removing mountains, though we gave away armfuls to anyone who could be induced to take them—and we were no sooner settled down in our new house than you began to feel seedy. It began so gradually that we thought nothing of it. You looked oddly yellow, and seemed to lose strength; but you said it was nothing, and I was only too glad to believe it. When at last we got the doctor he said you were very seriously ill, sent you to bed, and got a trained nurse."
"Eh, I say," Marget began. "I'll never forget that winter. We juist got fricht efter fricht. It was something awfu'. It was a guid thing we left the new hoose and gaed to live wi' Mr. Jim."
"It was," said Ann; "we needed Jim beside us. Those awful attacks of fever when you lay delirious for days at a time! We dragged you through one turn and got you fairly well, only to see you take another. It was most disheartening. No wonder poor Davie stamped with rage. Doctors and nurses walked in and out of the house, specialists were summoned from Edinburgh and Glasgow. All our money was spent on physicians, and, like the woman in the Bible, you were none the better, but rather the worse. None of them gave us any hope that you would recover. One evening we were told you couldn't live over the night, and Mark and Charlotte came flying up from London, only to find you sitting up knitting a stocking! I never really believed that you wouldn't get better. You weren't patient enough somehow; indeed, my dear, there was nothing of the story-book touch about you at all when you were ill. What a thrawn, resentful little patient you were! You occupied your time when you were fairly well upbraiding me for keeping the house so extravagantly. You said you were sure there was great leakage. I'm sure there was, but I couldn't help it. It took me all my time to nurse you and keep things comfortable in the house and see that Father didn't over-exert himself. Marget's whole time was taken up cooking—illness makes such a lot of extra work—and, fortunately, we had a very good housemaid. But if you didn't shine as a patient, I certainly didn't shine as a nurse. I'm afraid I hadn't the gentle, womanly touch of the real ministering angel, smoothing pillows and such like. I knew nothing about nursing, and you said I heaved hot-water bags at you."
"So you did; but you were an excellent nurse for all that. But, oh, I did feel so guilty keeping you hanging round me. It was more than a year out of your life, just when you would have been having such a good time."
"Oh," said Ann, "I don't grudge the year—I've had heaps of good times. The only really bad times were when the attacks of high fever came and you got unconscious; then you wouldn't let a nurse into the room. Jim and I had to sit up with you for nights on end. But you were very brave, and you never let your illness get on our nerves. You just bounded up from an attack like an india-rubber ball. The doctors simply gasped at you. You said good-bye to us so often that we began to take it quite casually, merely saying, 'Well, have some beef-tea just now, anyway'; and Father used to laugh and say, 'You'll live and loup dykes yet.'"
"I'm sure I wasn't at all keen to live, Ann. When you get very far down dying seems so simple and easy; but I did want to see Robbie again. I think that kept me alive. When did you take me to London? In spring, wasn't it?"
"Yes, in March. You weren't getting a bit better, and some one told Mark about the vaccine treatment, and he thought it might be worth trying. We were told that the journey would certainly kill you, but you said, 'No such thing,' so off we set, you and I, all on a wild March morning. You stood the journey splendidly; but two days after you arrived you took the worst fever turn of all. The London doctors came and told me you wouldn't live over the night, and I really thought they were going to be right that time. I telephoned to Priorsford, and it was Davie answered me, 'Is that you, Nana?' I was sorry to worry the boy, but I had to tell you were very ill, and that I thought Jim should come up by the night train. But you warstled through again, and then Mark brought Sir Armstrong Weir to see you. We had seen several London doctors, very glossy and well dressed, with beautiful cars, and we wondered if this great Sir Armstrong would be even smarter. But the great man came in a taxi, and wasn't at all well dressed—grey and bent and very gentle."
"He looked old," Mrs. Douglas said; "but he couldn't have been so very, for he told me his own mother was living. He was very kind to me."
"He cured you," said Ann.
"Oh no," said Mrs. Douglas.
"Well, it was partly his vaccine and partly your own marvellous pluck."
"Oh no. It wasn't pluck or vaccine or anything, but just that I had to live more days on the earth."
"'Deed ay," said Marget, nodding in agreement with her mistress. "Ye never did ony guid until ye had given up doctors a'thegither. As soon as we got quat o' them ye began to improve."
"Now, now, Marget," said Ann, "you get carried away by your dislike of doctors. We've been very thankful to see them many a time."
"Oh, they're a' richt for some things; but whenever it's ony thing serious ye canna lippen to them. When there's onything wrang wi' yer inside naebody can help ye but yer Maker."
Ann laughed. "What a gloomy view to take, Marget. You remind me of the old lady who said that she gave to Dr. Barnardo's Homes 'because he has no one to help him but God.' I won't let you malign doctors. The best kind of doctor is about the highest type of human being. What are you snorting at, Marget?"
"I could wish them a better job! Hoo onybody can like clartin' aboot in folks' insides! Doctorin's a nesty job, and I'm glad nane o' oor laddies took up wi't. They a' got clean, genteel jobs."
"Such as soldiering?"
"Oh, I'm no' heedin' muckle aboot sodgerin' aither," said Marget. Then, turning to her mistress, she said, "As you say, Mem, nae doctor can kill ye while there's life in the cup. D'ye think it was mebbe the flittin' that brocht on yer trouble? Ye ken ye washt a' the china yersel'."
Mrs. Douglas smiled at her. "All the years you've known me, Marget, have you ever heard of housework doing me any harm? No. It was some sort of blood-poisoning that went away as mysteriously as it came. Though what I was spared for I know not. If I had died, how often you would have said of me, 'She was taken from the evil to come.'"
"Poor darling!" said Ann. "Do you think you were spared simply that you might receive evil things? Say, rather, that you were spared to help the rest of us through the terrible times.... Father, mercifully, had kept wonderfully well through your illness. He had accepted his limitations and knew that he must not attempt a hill road, or fight against a high wind, or move quickly; and really, looking at him, it was difficult to believe that anything ailed him."
"But it must have been very bad for him, Ann, all the scares he got with my illness. It's dreadful for me to think that the last year of his life was made uncomfortable and distressed by me."
"But you mustn't think that. Even in those stormy days he seemed to carry about with him a quiet, sunny peace. What a blessing we had him through that time; the sight of him steadied one."
"And I'm sure I couldn't have lived through that time without him," Mrs. Douglas said; "although I sometimes got very cross with him sitting reading with a pleased smile on his face when I felt so miserable."
"I think he really enjoyed his restricted life," said Ann. "To be in the open air was his delight, and he was able to take two short walks every day and spend some time pottering in the garden, going lovingly round his special treasures, those rock plants that he was trying to persuade to grow on the old wall by the waterside. We wanted him to drive, but he hated driving; he liked, he said, to feel the ground under his feet. He never looked anything but well with his fresh-coloured face."
"He got younger lookin'," Marget said. "I suppose it was no havin' a kirk to worry aboot, the lines on his face got kind o' smoothed oot. D'ye mind when he used to come into the room, Mem, you aye said it was like a breath o' fresh air."
"Yes, Marget, I mind well. Neil Macdonald said when he was staying with us once that when Father came into the room he had a look in his eyes as if he had been on a watch-tower, 'As if—Neil said, in his soft, Highland voice—'as if he had been looking across Jordan into Canaan's green and pleasant land.'"
Ann smiled. "I know what he meant. D'ye remember Father's little Baxter'sSaints' Restthat he carried about with him in his pocket and read in quiet moments? And his passion for adventure books? I think Jim got him every 'thriller' that was published. And the book on Border Poets that he was writing? He always wrote a bit after tea. No matter who was having tea with us, Father calmly turned when he was finished to the bureau, pulled forward a chair—generally rumpling up the rug, and then I cried, 'Oh,Father!'—and sat quietly writing amid all the talk and laughter. He had nearly finished it when he died.... That last week he seemed particularly well. He said his feet had such a firm grip of the ground now. I didn't want him to go out because it was stormy, and he held up one foot and said, 'Dear me, girl, look at thosesplendidsoles!'"
Marget put her apron up to her eyes. "Eh, lassie, ye're whiles awfu' like yer faither."
There was a silence in the room while the three women thought their own thoughts.
At last Ann said, "What pathetic things we mortals are! That Saturday night when we sat round the fire my heart was singing a song of thankfulness. You were still frail, Mother, but you were wonderfully better, and to have you with us again sitting by the fire knitting your stocking was comfort unspeakable. Jim had been reading aloud theVailima Letters, and the letters to Barrie and about Barrie sent us toThe Little Minister, and I read to you Waster Luny's inimitable remarks about ancestors, 'It's a queer thing that you and me his nae ancestors.... They're as lost to sicht as a flagon-lid that's fa'en ahint the dresser.' I forget how it goes, but Father enjoyed it greatly. I think anything would have made us laugh that night, for the mornin's post had brought us a letter from Robbie with the unexpected news that he had been chosen for some special work and would be home shortly—he thought in about three months' time. And as I looked at you and Father smiling at each other in the firelight I said in my heart, like Agag, 'Surely the bitterness of death is past!' and the next day Father died."
Mrs. Douglas sat silent with her head bowed, but Marget said, "Oh, lassie! lassie!" and wept openly.
In a little while Ann spoke again:
"It isn't given to many to be 'happy on the occasion of his death,' but Father was. His end was as gentle as his life. He slipped away suddenly on the Sabbath afternoon, at the hour when his hands had so often been stretched in benediction. He died in his boyhood's home. The November sun was going down behind the solemn round-backed hills, the familiar sound of the Tweed over its pebbles was in his ears, and though he had to cross the dark river the waters weren't deep for him. I think, like Mr. Standfast, he went over 'wellnigh dry shod.' And he was taken before the storm broke. Three months later the cable came that broke our hearts. Robbie had died after two days' illness on his way to Bombay to get the steamer for home."
They had been talking of many things, Ann and her mother, and had fallen silent.
The wind was tearing through the Green Glen, and moaning eerily round the house of Dreams, throwing at intervals handfuls of hail which struck against the panes like pistol-shots.
"A wild night," Mrs. Douglas said, looking over her shoulder at the curtained windows, and drawing her chair nearer the fire. "This is the sort of night your father liked to sit by the fireside. He would lift his head from his book to listen to the wind outside, look round the warm, light room and give a contented sigh."
"I know," said Ann; "it was very difficult doing without Father. He had always enjoyed the good things of life so frankly there seemed no pleasure any longer in a good dinner, or a fine morning, or a blazing fire, or an interesting book, since he wasn't there to say how fine it was. Besides his very presence had been a sort of benediction, and it was almost as if the roof of life had been removed—and it was much worse for you, poor Mother. We were afraid you would go, too."
"Oh, Ann," Mrs. Douglas, claspingHours of Silence, raised tearful eyes to her daughter, "I'm sure I didn't want to live. I don't know why I go on living."
Ann caught her mother's hands in her own. "You funny wee body! You remind me of the Paisley woman who told me she had lost all her sons in the war, and was both surprised and annoyed that she hadn't died of grief. 'An' ma neebor juist lost the one an'shede'ed, and folk said she niver liftit her heid efter her laddie went, and here wis me losin' a' mine and gaun aboot quite healthy! An' I'm sure I wis as vext as whit she wis. It's no want o' grievin' for I'm never dune greetin'—I begin early i' the mornin' afore I get ma cup o' tea.'"
"Oh, the poor body!" said Mrs. Douglas. "I know so well what she meant. It sounds funny, but it isn't a bit.... Your father's death was sheer desolation to me. I remember, a long time ago at Kirkcaple, going to see a widow who had brought up a most creditable family, and, looking round her cosy kitchen, I said something about how well she had done, and that life must be pleasant for her with her children all up and doing well. And the brisk, active little woman looked at me, and I was surprised to see tears in her rather hard eyes.
"The bairns are a' richt," she said; "but it maks an awfu' difference when ye lose yer pairtner....' And then I have so many things to regret...."
"Regret?" Ann laughed. "I don't think you have one single thing to regret. If ever a man was happy in his home it was my father."
"Ah, but I was bad to him often. I pretended to be a Radical—a thing I never was really—simply from contrariness. If I had him back——"
"Now what would you change if you could?" Ann asked.
"Well, for one thing I would never contradict him, or argue..."
"Oh, how Father would have loathed that. Arguing was the breath of life to him, and he hated to be agreed with."
Mrs. Douglas went on. "And I would never worry him to do things that went against his judgment. When people took atirraveeand sent for their lines he always wanted to give them to them at once, but I used to beg him to go and reason with them and persuade them to remain. They generally did, for they only wanted to be made a fuss of, but I see now I was quite wrong; people so senseless deserved no consideration. And I wouldn't worry him to go and ask popular preachers to come to us for anniversary services and suchlike occasions! That was the thing he most hated doing."
"I don't wonder," said Ann. "To ask favours is never pleasant, and popular preachers are apt to get a bit above themselves and condescend a little to the older, less successful men who are living in a day of small things. But I don't think any of us, you least of all, need reproach ourselves with not having appreciated Father. And yet, when he went away it seemed quite wrong to mourn for him. To have pulled long faces and gone about plunged in grief would have been like an insult to the happy soul who had finished his day's work and gone home. It wasn't a case of
'Better by far you should forget and smile,Than that you should remember and be sad.'
It was simply that we had so many happy things to remember we couldn't but smile. We wouldn't have had anything changed. To the very end his ways were ways of pleasantness and all his paths were peace. But when Robbie died——"
Ann stopped, and her mother took up her words:
"When Robbie died we seemed to sink into a black pit of horror. We didn't want to see anyone. We could hardly look at the letters that poured in; their lamentations seemed to add to our burden. Only Miss Barbara's was any use, and all she said was, 'I have prayed for you that your faith fail not.'"
"It seemed sounfair," Ann said slowly. "In a shop one day the woman who was serving me asked so kindly for you, and wanted to know how you were bearing up. Then she said suddenly: 'When thae awfu' nice folk dee div ye no juist fair feel that ye could rebel?' Rebel! Poor helpless mortals that we are!"
Mrs. Douglas shook her head. "If there is one lesson I have learned it is the folly of kicking against the pricks. To be bitter and resentful multiplies the grief a thousandfold. There is nothing for it but submission. Shall we receive good at the hand of the Lord and not receive evil? There is an odd text that strikes me every time I come to it: 'And David was comforted concerning Ammon because he was dead.' I don't know what it means, perhaps that Ammon fought with David so David was glad he was dead, but it always has a special meaning for me. We had to come to it, Ann, you and I, when we tramped those long walks by Tweedside rather than sit at home and face callers and sympathy. It was Robbie himself who helped us most. The thought of him, so brave and gay and gentle, simplymadeus believe that in a short time he had fulfilled a long time, and that God had taken him against that day when He shall make up His jewels. We could only cling to the fact that God is Love, and that it was to Himself He had taken the boy who seemed to us so altogether lovely."
Mrs. Douglas took off her spectacles and rubbed them with her handkerchief, and Ann said:
"Yes, Mother, at moments we felt all that, and were comforted, but there are so many days when it seems you can't get above the sense of loss. Those nights when one dreamed he was with us, and wakened. There's not much doubt about Death's sting.... But what kept me from going under altogether was the thought of Davie. I tried never to let him see me with a dull face. All his life the child had dreaded sadness, and it seemed hard that he should so early become 'acquainted with grief.' After Robbie's death, when he came into a room the first thing he did was to glance quickly at our faces to see if we had been crying, and if we looked at him happily his face cleared. If anybody mentioned Robbie's name he slipped quietly out of the room. Jim was the same. I think men are like that. Women can talk and find relief, but to speak about his grief is the last thing an ordinary man can do. That's why I was sorrier for the fathers in the war than the mothers.... I was glad Davie was at college and busy all day. I think he dreaded coming home that Easter."
"But I don't think he found it bad, Ann. He had his great friend Anthony with him, and we all tried our best to give him a good time. And at seventeen it isn't so hard to rise above trouble."
"Oh no," said Ann; "and Davie was so willing to be happy." She laughed. "I never knew anyone so appreciative of a joke—any sort of joke. When he was a tiny boy if I said anything which I meant to be funny, and which met with no response, Davie would say indignantly: 'Nana's made a joke and nobody laughed.' He always gave a loud laugh himself—'Me hearty laugh,' he called it."
"Oh, I'd forgotten that," cried Davie's mother; "'me hearty laugh.' We all treated Davie as a joke, and didn't bother much whether his school reports were good or only fairly good. He wasn't at all studious naturally, though he was passionately fond of reading, and I'm afraid we liked to find excuses to let him play. Only Robbie took him seriously. You remember when he was home on leave he protested against Davie bounding everywhere and having no fixed hours of study. 'We've got to think of the chap's future,' he said."
"Robbie and Davie adored each other," Ann said. "They were so funny together—Davie a little bashful with the big brother. I remember hearing Davie telling Robbie about some Fabian Society that he belonged to, and what they discussed at it, and Robbie stood looking at him through his eyeglass with an amused grin on his face, and said, 'Stout fellow!' That was always what he said to Davie, 'Stout fellow!' I can hear him now.... But the odd thing was that Davie seemed to take no interest in his own future. It was almost as if he realised that this world held no future for him. Mark, always careful and troubled, used to worry about a profession for him. He wanted him to go into the Navy, but you vetoed that as too dangerous; it mustn't be India, because we couldn't part with our baby."
Mrs. Douglas leaned forward to push in a falling log. "I was foolishly anxious about Davie always; never quite happy if he was away from me. I worried the boy sometimes, but he was patient with me. 'Poor wee body,' he always said, and put his arms round me—he learned that expression from Robbie."
"I have an old exercise book," said Ann, "in which Davie made his first efforts at keeping accounts—DavidDouglas in account with self. It is very much ornamented with funny faces and not very accurate, for sums are frequently noted as 'lost.' It stops suddenly, and underneath is scrawled, 'The war here intervened.' We didn't need to worry about his work in the world. That was decided for him when—
'God chose His squires, and trained their handsFor those stern lists of liberty.'"
Mrs. Douglas caught her breath with a sob. "At once he clamoured to go, but he was so young, only eighteen, and I said he must only offer for home defence; and he said, 'All right, wee body, that'll do to start with,' but in a very short time he was away to train with Kitchener's first army."
"He was miserable, Mother, until he got away. Jim was refused permission from the first, and had to settle down to his job, but for most of us the bottom seemed to have fallen out of the world, and one could settle to nothing. In the crashing of empires the one stable thing was that fact that theScotsmancontinued its 'Nature Notes.' That amused Davie.... He began an album of war poetry, cutting out and pasting in verses that appeared in theTimesandSpectatorandPunchand other papers. 'Carmina Belli' he printed on the outside. He charged me to go on with it when he went away, and I finished it with Mark's poem on himself:
'You left the line with jest and smileAnd heart that would not bow to pain—I'll lay me downe and bleed awhile,And then I'll rise and fight again.'"
Ann got up and leaned her brow on the mantel-shelf, and looking into the fire, said:
"D'you know, Mother, I think that first going away was the worst of all, though he was only going to England to train. Nothing afterwards so broke me down as seeing the fresh-faced boy in his grey tweed suit going off with such a high heart. I don't know what you felt about it, but the sword pierced my heart then. You remember it was the Fair at Priorsford! and the merry-go-rounds on the Green buzzed round to a tune he had often sung, some ridiculous words about 'Hold your hand out, you naughty boy.' As I stood in my little swallow's-nest of a room and looked out over the Green, and saw the glare of the naphtha lamps reflected in the water, and the swing-boats passing backwards and forwards, through light into darkness, and from darkness into light, and realised that Davie had been born for the Great War, every chord seemed to strike at my heart."
"Oh, Ann," Mrs. Douglas cried, "I never let myself think. It was my only chance to go on working as hard as ever I was able at whatever came to my hand. I left him in God's hands. I was helpless."
The tears were running down her face as she spoke, and Ann said, "Poor Mother, it was hardest for you. Your cry was the old, old cry: 'Joseph is not, Simeon is not, and ye will take Benjamin away....' But our Benjamin was so glad to go. And he never found anything to grumble at, not even at Bramshott, where there was nothing fit to eat, and the huts leaked, and the mud was unspeakable, and his uniform consisted of a red tunic made for a very large man, and a pair of exceedingly bad blue breeks. When he came at Christmas—he made me think of one of Prince Charlie's men with his shabby uniform and yellow hair—how glad he was to have a real wallowing hot bath, with bath salts and warm towels, and get into his own tweeds. He was just beginning to get clean when he had to go again! In a few weeks he got his commission, and in the autumn of 1915 he went to France—'as gentle and as jocund as to jest went he to fight.'"
There was a silence in the pleasant room as the two women thought their own thoughts, and the fire crackled and the winter wind beat upon the house.
Mrs. Douglas spoke first. "It was a wonderful oasis in that desert of anxiety when Davie was wounded and at home. Those nights when we had lain awake thinking of him in the trenches, those days when we were afraid for every ring at the bell, and hardly dared look when we opened the hall door after being out, in case the orange envelope should be lying on the table. To have all that suddenly changed. To know that he was lying safe and warm and clean in a white bed in a private hospital in London, 'lying there with a face like a herd,' Mark wrote, with nothing much the matter with him but a shrapnel wound in his leg—it was almost too much relief. And we had him at Queensferry all summer. We were greatly blessed, Ann."
"And it wasn't quite so bad letting him go the second time," Ann said. "He had been there once and had got out alive and he knew the men he was going to, and was glad to go back; and Mark wasn't far from him, and could see him sometimes."
"His letters were so cheery. From his accounts you would have thought that living in the trenches was a sort of jolly picnic. Oh, Ann, do you remember the letter to me written in the train going up to the line, when he said he had dreamt he was a small boy again, and 'I thought I had lost you, wee body, and I woke up shouting "Mother," to the amusement of the other men in the carriage?'"
"Some people," said Ann, "go through the world afraid all the time that they are being taken advantage of. Davie never ceased to be amazed at the kindness shown him. He was one of those happy souls whose path through life is lined with friends, and whose kind eyes meet only affectionate glances. His letters were full of the kindness he received—the 'decent lad' in his platoon who heard him say his dug-out was draughty, and who made a shutter for the window and stopped up all the cracks; the two corporals from the Gallowgate who formed his bodyguard, and every time he fell into a shell-hole or dodged a crump shouted anxiously, 'Are ye hurt, sirr?' You remember he wrote: 'These last two years have been the happiest in my life,' and other men who were with him told us he never lost his high spirits."
"That was such a terribly long, hard winter," Mrs. Douglas said. "The snow was never off the hills for months. And then spring came, but such a spring! Nothing but wild winds and dreary sleet. We hoped and hoped that Davie would get leave—he was next on the list for it—but he wrote and said his leave had gone 'very far West.' We didn't know it, but they were getting ready for the big spring offensive. Then one day we saw that a battle had begun at Arras, and Davie's letter that morning read like a farewell. Things may be happening shortly, but don't worry about me. I've just been thinking what a good life I've had all round, and what a lot of happiness I've had. Even the sad parts are a comfort now....'"
"Mother, do you see," said Ann, "there's your text about Ammon. Out there, waiting for the big battle, Davie didn't feel it sad any more than Father and Robbie had gone out of the world—he wascomforted concerning them because they were dead. We were thinking of him and praying for him every hour of the day, but he felt them nearer to him than we were."
"To think that when that letter came he was dead! To think that I was in Glasgow with Miss Barbara talking of him nearly all the time, for Miss Barbara loved the boy, and nothing told us he was no longer in the world. To think of the child—he was little more—waiting there in the darkness for the signal to attack. He must have been so anxious about leading the company, so afraid——"
"Anxious maybe," said Ann, "but not really afraid. Don't you remember what his great friend Captain Shiels wrote and told us, that while they waited for the dawn Davie spoke 'words of comfort and encouragement to his men.' I cry when I think of that...."
"My little boy—my baby. Away from us all—alone...."
"No. No, Mother, never less alone; 'compassed about with a great cloud of witnesses.' I have a notion that all the great army of men who down through the centuries have given their lives for our country's bright cause were with our men in that awful fighting, steeling the courage of those boy-soldiers.... And Father and Robbie were beside him, I am very sure, and Father would know then that all his prayers were answered for his boy—the bad little boy who refused to say his prayers, the timid little boy who was afraid to go into a dark room—when he saw him stand, with Death tapping him on the shoulder, speaking 'words of comfort and encouragement to his men.' I think Robbie would say, 'Stout fellow.' That was the 9th. The telegram came to us on the afternoon of the 11th. Jim and I were terribly anxious, and I had been doing all the jobs I hated most with a sort of lurking, ashamed feeling in my heart that if we worked our hardest and did our very best Davie might be spared to us."
Ann stopped, and went on, half-laughing, half-crying:
"Like poor Mrs. Clark, one of my women. She told me how she had gone out and helped a sick neighbour, and coming home had seen some children, whose father was fighting and whose mother was ill, playing in the rain, and she had taken them in and given them a hot meal. As they were leaving the postman brought her a letter saying her son was dead in Mesopotamia. She said to me, defiantly, as if she were scoring off Providence, 'I'm no gaun taepraynae mair,' and I knew exactly what she felt."
"Oh, the poor woman," said Mrs. Douglas weeping.
"I thought," Ann went on, "that if no wire came that day it would mean that Davie had got through—but at tea-time it came. I went into Glasgow next morning by the first train to tell you. Phoebe was washing the front door steps at No. 10, and she told me you and Miss Barbara were in the dining-room at breakfast. I stood in the doorway and looked at you. You were laughing and telling Miss Barbara something funny that had been in one of Davie's letters. I felt like a murderer standing there. When I went into the room your face lit up for a moment, and then you realised. 'It is the laddie?' you whispered, and I nodded. You neither spoke nor cried, but stood looking before you as if you were thinking very deeply about something, then 'I would like to go home,' you said...."
"And to think," Mrs. Douglas said, breaking a long silence, "that I am only one of millions of mothers who will go mourning to their graves."
"I know, Mother. I know. But you wouldn't ask him back even if that were possible. You wouldn't, if you could, take 'the purple of his blood out of the cross on the breastplate of England.' Don't you love these words of Ruskin? It's the proudest thing we have to think about, and, honestly—I'm not just saying this—I believe that the men who lie out there have the best of it. The men who came back will, most of them, have to fight a grim struggle, for living is none too pleasant just now, and they will grow old, and bald, and ill-tempered, and they have all to die in the end. What is twenty more years of life but twenty more years of fearing death? But our men whose sacrifice was accepted, and who were allowed to pour out the sweet, red wine of youth, passed at one bound from glorious life to glorious life. 'Eld shall not make a mock of that dear head.' They know not age or weariness or defeat."
The December day had run its short and stormy course and the sun was going down in anger, with streaks of crimson and orange, and great purple clouds. Only over the top of the far hills was one long line of placid pale primrose, like some calm landlocked bay amid seas of tumbling waters.
Mrs. Douglas, crossing the room to get a paper from the table, paused at the wide window and looked out. Desolate the landscape looked, the stretch of moorland, and the sodden fields, and the empty highroad running like a ribbon between hills now dark with rain.
She sighed as she looked.
Ann was writing at the bureau, had been writing since luncheon, absorbed, never lifting her head, but now she blotted vigorously the last sheet, put the pen back in the tray, shut the lid of the ink-bottle, and announced:
"Now, then, Mother, that's yourLifewritten!"
Mrs. Douglas looked at the finished pile of manuscript and sighed again.
Ann got up and went over to the window. "You are sighing like a furnace, Mother. What's the matter? Does it depress you to think that I've finished my labours? Oh, look at the sunset! It bodes ill for the Moncrieffs ever getting over the door, poor lambs! Look at that quiet, shining bit over the Farawa, how far removed it looks from tempests! D'you know what that sky reminds me of, Mother? The story of your life that I've just finished. The clouds and the angry red colour are all you passed through, and that quiet, serene streak is where you are now, the clear shining after rain. It may be dull, but you must admit it is peaceful."
"Oh, we are peaceful enough just now, but think of Jim in South Africa, and Charlotte and Mark in India—who knows what news we may have of them any day? I just live in dread of what may happen next."
"But, Mother, you've always lived in dread. Mark used to say that the telegraph boys drew lots among themselves as to who should bring the telegrams to our house. You used to rush out with the unopened envelope and implore the boy to tell you if it were bad news, and when you did open it your frightened eyes read things that never were on the paper. If we happened to be all at home when you were confronted with a wire you didn't care a bit—utterly callous. It was only your husband and your children you cared about—ah, well, you had the richest, fullest, happiest life for more than thirty years, and that's not so small a thing to boast of."
"Oh, Ann, I'm not ungrateful, only——"
"Only you're like Davie when we told him to go away and count his blessings. 'I've done it,' he came back to tell us, 'and I've six things to be thankful for and nine to be unthankful for.'"
Mrs. Douglas laughed as she went back to her chair by the fire and took up her knitting. "No, I've nothing to be unthankful for, only I think so much of me died with your father and Robbie and Davie that I seem to be half with you and half with them where they are gone."
Ann nodded. "That may be so, but you are more alive than most of us even now. I don't know anybody who takes so much interest in life, who has such a capacity for enjoyment, who burdens herself with other people's burdens as that same Mrs. Douglas who says she is only half-alive and longs to depart—and here is Mysie with the tea."
Mysie lit the lamp under the kettle and arranged the tea-things. She drew the curtains across the windows, shutting out the last gleam of the stormy sunset, and turned on the lights, then she stood by the door and, blushing, asked if she might go out for the evening, as she had an engagement.
"Now where"—cried Mrs. Douglas as the door closed behind the little maid—"where in the world can Mysie have an engagement in this out-of-the-world place on this dark, stormy night?"
Ann smiled. "She's so pretty, Mother, so soft and round and young, and have you forgotten:
'For though the nicht be ne'er sae dark,An' I be ne'er sae weary O,I'll meet ye by the lea-rig,Ma ain kind dearie O.'
I haven't a doubt but that pretty Mysie has got a 'lawd.' And what for no? I do hope Marget isn't too discouraging to the child."
Ann sat on the fender-stool with her cup and saucer, and a pot of jam on the rug beside her, and a plate with a crumpet on her lap, and ate busily.
"Life is still full of pleasant things, Mums, pretty girls and crumpets, and strawberry jam, and fender-stools, and blazing fires, and little moaning mothers who laugh even while they cry. Your pessimism is like the bubbles on a glass of champagne—oh, I know you have been a teetotaller all your days, but that doesn't harm my metaphor."
"Ann, you amaze me. How you can rattle on as if you hadn't a care in the world—you who have lost so much!"
Ann looked at her mother in silence for a minute, then she looked into the dancing flames. "As you say, it is amazing—I who have lost so much. And when you think of it, I haven't much to laugh at. I've got the sort of looks that go very fast, so I'll soon be old and ugly—but what about it"?
"'I may never live to be old,' says she,'For nobody knows their day....'
And I've got work to do, and I've still got brothers, and I've got Charlotte and the children, and I've more friends than I sometimes know what to do with. It's an odd thing, but I do believe, Mother, that I'm happier now than when I was twenty and had all the world before me. Youth isn't really a very happy time. You want and want and you don't know what you want. As you get older you realise that you haveno right to bliss, and must make the best of what you have got. Then you begin to enjoy things in a different way. Out of almost everything that happens there is some pleasure to be got if you look for it, and people are so funny and human and pitiful you can't be dull. Middle age brings its compensations, and, anyway, whether it does or not it is a most miserable business to be obsessed by one's own woes. The only thing to do is to stand a bit away from oneself and say, 'You miserable atom, what are you whining about? Do you suppose the eternal scheme of things is going to be altered becauseyoudon't like it?'"
Mrs. Douglas laughed rather ruefully. "You're a terribly bracing person, Ann; but I'm bound to confess that you practise what you preach."
"But I've really no right to preach at all!" Ann said. "I always forget one thing, the most important of all. I've always been perfectly well, so I've no right to sit in judgment on people who struggle all their lives against ill-health. It is no credit to me—I who hardly know what it means to have a headache—to be equable and gay. When I think of some people we know, fighting all the time against such uneven odds, asking only for a chance to work and be happy in working, and knocked down time and again, yet always undefeated, I could go and bury my head ashamed. Don't ever listen to me, Mother, when I preach to you; squash me at once."
"Well, I'll try to—but, Ann, there is one thing that worries me. Remember, I will not have you sacrifice your life to me."
"No fear of that," said Ann airily. "There's nothing of the martyr about me."
"That Mr. Philip Scott——" Mrs. Douglas hesitated.
"Oh, him!" said Ann, "or, to be more grammatical, oh, he! I had a letter from him this morning—did I forget to show it you? He says he is to be at Birkshaw for Christmas."