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 to _The Scarlet Pimpernel_, to a
_matinée_. 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!"