The infamy of Chirstie’s condition, becoming known, had been scarcely
less interesting than the scandal of Isobel McLaughlin’s attitude
toward it. She herself had told her sister and her sisters-in-law
what was soon to be expected from the girl, and all her cousins and
friends. She had informed them of it casually, without the flutter
of an eyelid, as if, to be sure, a little less haste might have been
from some points of view desirable, but, after all, Wully’s marriage
was the one she would have chosen for him if she had had her choice,
and the young pair would be happier with a baby. The neighbors had
certainly never expected Isobel McLaughlin to “take on” in such a
fashion. Some of them had been annoyed at times by her self-reliance,
her full trust in her own powers, and were not exactly sorry to hear
of this affair which must “set her down a notch.” But not a notch
down would she go! Her pride, it appeared, was too strong for even
this blow. The way she talked about her expectations scandalized the
righteous. Maggie Stewart said one would have supposed Wully had
waited ten years for that baby.
It had been bad enough in the beginning, but after the child was born
it grew out of all bounds. Her husband’s younger sister, Janet, a
woman still of childbearing age, came to remonstrate with her. For
the sake of the other young people in the community, to say nothing
of her own family of half-grown boys and girls, she really ought to
moderate her raptures somewhat. She was just encouraging them in
wrongdoing! But Isobel replied simply that since she had always had
to be painfully modest in praising her own children, she was going to
say exactly what she thought about this grandchild. She philosophized
shamelessly about the privileges of grandmothers. And, after all, if
she was his own grandmother who was saying it, Janet would have to
acknowledge that the baby was an unusually fine child.
Janet did have to grant that. She was the first one, too, to notice
the remarkable resemblance the child bore to his father. Isobel was
grateful to her for that hint, and after that day no visitor departed
without agreeing that wee Johnnie was a living picture of great
Wully. Isobel would recall her son’s infant features. Wully’s nose
had been just like that. And his eyes. She minded it well, now. This
child brought it all back to her. She had occasion to repeat these
reminiscences, for baby-judging, giving a decision about his family
traits, was nothing less than a ritual among these Scots. A woman
could hardly acquit herself with distinction in it with less than six
or eight of her own. And men, even fathers of thirteen, knowing how
far short of the occasion they would come, generally avoided it as
best they might.
Squire McLaughlin, of course, was just brazen enough to enjoy
such a ceremony. He may have had some secret sympathy for Wully’s
predicament, for he came over to inspect the child only a few days
after it was born. The Squire was the playboy of the community.
None of them ever took him seriously, and none failed to welcome
him heartily in for a “crack.” It appears that even his absurd
pretensions endeared him to his friends. He fancied himself a great
lord, before an acre of his “estate” was subdued, and sang a silly
song about gravel walks and peacocks. He never hauled a load of
gravel to fill the mudhole before his cabin door. But he did the
easier thing. He managed to have some gullible soul send him a pair
of peacocks. They died promptly upon arrival. He said, laughing with
the neighbors at himself, that it was the shock of seeing their
laird barefooted that killed them. He was a farmer who rode forth
to preside at theorizing agricultural meetings, while the forests
of weeds on his land grew unchecked up to the heavens. (Even two
years ago, the wild sunflowers near a culvert on that farm reached
the telephone wires.) He was later on one of the first men west of
the Mississippi to have pure-bred bulls, and east or west, no man
confused pedigrees more convivially. From the first he considered
it his duty to see that no Scottish folly was forgotten in the new
world, or even hogmanay allowed to pass unobserved. He was the man
who all but popularized curling in the west. Three times he had
been left an undaunted widower with a family of small, half-clothed
children, his esteemed heirs and heiresses of only his gay fancies.
Just now he was looking for a fourth helper to relieve him of the
responsibilities of his family, and such a man he was that, in spite
of his follies, all wished him success in the venture. He consulted
Isobel about various possibilities and she gave him her opinion,
with the frank statement that she pitied any woman who married him.
However, he still liked her. He had always liked her since that time
in Ayrshire, soon after she had married his older brother, when
she had saved him from a long and well-earned term in prison for
poaching. His successful pursuers were almost upon him when they
turned suddenly in the wrong direction, from which they had just
heard firing. She had seen his plight, and fired cunningly into the
air, and when the men had rushed into her cottage they found only a
young woman demurely sewing on baby clothes. Now since, of course, it
was impossible to poach in a land where not even God preserved game,
he was a reformed man, and an eminent huntsman. But sometimes he
still said jovially that he might as well have gone to prison as to
have to listen to all she said to him on that occasion. Even yet he
was not averse to giving her occasions of finding fault with him.
So when she lifted the baby up for his inspection, he rose, and
squinted down thoughtfully upon the little bundle. He turned his head
appraisingly from one side to the other. Then, knowing very well
what she thought, he said recklessly;
“He’s a perfect little McNair, Isobel. He’s like Alex. That nose of
his----”
She enlightened him stoutly. He persisted in his error, and only
asked:
“What’s he called?”
Now what to name the child was a question not altogether easy for
Wully, who had been standing near his mother, looking with proper
paternal pride upon the child. Each McLaughlin named his first-born
son, not boastingly, for himself, but gratefully, for his father;
so that Johns and Williams came alternatingly down through the
generations. That was the rub. Perhaps John McLaughlin might not
relish having this irregular child bear his name. So Wully was too
proud to seem to desire it.
“He’s such a husky little fighter for what he wants, we thought we’d
call him Grant. There’s no better name than that, is there?”
His father was sitting by the stove, smoking, seeming as usual
absorbed in a dream and only half-conscious of what was going on
about him. At this he took his pipe from his mouth and said, without
a sign of emotion;
“I wonder at you, Wully. The laddie’s name is John.”
Wully was greatly relieved.
“Oh, well,” he said lightly. “Maybe that would be better. There
won’t be more than fourteen or fifteen John McLaughlins about in
twenty years. Grant’ll keep. We’ll save it for the next one.”
Wully had rejoiced beyond measure at the child’s birth, not for the
reason some supposed, but solely because Chirstie was safely through
her ordeal. So gay he had become, so light-hearted, after that burden
of anxiety for her had been taken from him, that he seemed quite
like a rejoicing young father. It had been terrible for him to see
her time unescapably approaching. Those days seemed to him now like
a nightmare. He had planned what he would say to his wife when he
adopted her baby for his own. He would go blithely in, and cry to her
gayly, “Where’s my son, Chirstie?” And the child would be his. He had
planned that. But it had been different. That one irrepressible moan
he had heard from her before his mother had sent him for the doctor
had driven him through the night cursing. Cursing that man, whose
very name he hated to recall, cursing any man who lightly forced such
hours upon any woman--to say nothing of a dear woman like Chirstie.
He wanted to kill such men, to pound them to bits. And yet, lightly
or not lightly, what would his love of her bring her to, eventually,
if not to such hours as these! It was a hellish night. Afterwards he
had gone in to see her, not blithely, but otherwise. He had found her
lying there, hollow-eyed, exhausted, all her strength taken from her,
and her roundness, leaving her reduced, it seemed, to her essential
womanhood. And then suddenly he had not been able to see her for the
tears that burned his eyes. He had knelt down beside her, to put his
face near hers, so unseeing that she had cried sharply, “Don’t! Be
careful!” He had hurt her! But her hand was seeking for his. When she
had shown him the child--well he remembered that she had never asked
him for pity for herself. But now her eyes were praying, “My baby!
Love my baby, Wully!” With her lying there, even her familiar hands
looking frail, her hair lying wearily against her pillow, if she had
asked him to love a puppy, would he not have bent down to kiss it!
Later he had marveled to see her with the child. A farmer, a man
judging his very female animals by the sureness of their instincts
for their young, he wouldn’t have wanted a wife not greatly maternal,
he told himself. It came to be soon that in loving the child he was
playing no rôle; he liked all his wife’s adornments.
So the terrible days passed away. His wife became altogether his.
And wee Johnnie slept and thrived, his tiny hands doubled against
his little red face, in the cradle that had served the five younger
McLaughlins. When he opened his bonnie blue eyes, he saw only
adoration bending over him. He felt only delighted and reverent
hands lifting him. His grandmother, who “just couldn’t abide a house
without a baby in it,” would sometimes allow one of her children,
sitting carefully in just a certain chair, to hold him a little while
as a mark of her favor. If Johnnie was a shame to the household,
he was certainly an entertaining and a well-fed shame; if he was a
disgrace, he was surely an amusing and a hungry one.
It was wonderful how completely Chirstie was sheltered from reproach.
Though her humiliation was gossiped about by the hour, after all,
the gossipers had to remember her mother, and, sighing, grant the
daughter some little toleration. And then, however proud that Isobel
McLaughlin might be, there was hardly a family in the community
which had not, upon arriving from the old country, made “Uncle John
McLaughlin’s” their convenient home till another could be built.
Moreover, Wully had always been particularly indulgent to those
who were his aunts and uncles. Greatest of all, he was a soldier.
Not so far down the creek, a Quaker soldier had come home from war
without a leg, and his congregation had said if only he would say,
even privately, that he was sorry he had fought, he would again be
received into their communion. But he refused to say he was sorry.
And they refused to take him again to their approval. That didn’t
seem to trouble the soldier very much. But it had troubled the
Scotch, where he had come to work, extremely. They loved to belittle
the Quakers for what they considered a meanness to a man who had
fought. So it behooved them to treat their own veterans with more
consideration. On the whole, there might have been much more gloating
than there was. There might have been battles. Great, quiet, simple
men like Wully, however, people seem instinctively to avoid exciting
to fury.
So Chirstie had scarcely had occasion to feel the awkwardness of her
position till the afternoon early in April when her stepmother came
over with the finished dress to try on her. Chirstie had donned the
beautiful, rich, wine-colored thing, to be sure it hung right, and
set right, and standing forth so that Isobel McLaughlin might view
the effect, she turned round and round while Barbara McNair smoothed
out even imaginary wrinkles. It was pronounced perfect. Mrs. McNair
admired it as if it were not her skill but the girl’s beauty that
made the gown remarkable. Then, beaming, as much as her little pale
weak face could beam, she unwrapped a hat--a hat all wine-colored
and black, and set it jauntily on Chirstie’s head, so that the long
feather swept down over the brown coil of hair low on her neck.
Chirstie was radiant. She had never seen so lovely a hat in her life,
she said. And she stood looking at herself in the little glass, in
surprise, a very happy surprise, to see how she looked in such soft,
rich things. Then, with a command, Barbara McNair took all the joy
out of her face.
She simply demanded that Chirstie wear that conspicuously beautiful
outfit the second Sabbath to come, when the winter’s crop of babies
was to be formally dedicated to the Lord. Chirstie went suddenly
crimson, standing there, blankly, fingering the feather on her neck.
Mrs. McNair insisted on an answer.
“Oh!” cried Chirstie meekly, her eyes appealing to her mother-in-law.
“Our baby--” she began to say it wasn’t to be baptized, but she had
to turn away. She started for her room, to take the dress off.
The girl was so sensitive, Isobel started to say--But Barbara called
after her to come back, breaking forth into the broadest Glasgow
accent. They weren’t to suppose she didn’t understand! She had known
it all the time. That innocent laddie had told her, unconsciously.
(More innocent then than now, she might have added, if she had
known.) And she thought, indeed, that Chirstie had great reason for
shame, and not of her bonnie wee Johnnie, either, but of her own
heathen ingratitude. Chirstie lifted her face upon hearing that, from
the towel upon which she was wiping it, and Mrs. McNair demanded
that moment if she expected the Lord to sit studying the almanac all
the year for her convenience. She was sure that if she had been in
Chirstie’s place, and the Lord had given her a son, she wouldn’t have
gone sulking, no matter what the month might have been. Was it not
better to have one any time than none at all? she demanded, with such
a passion of regret for her own childlessness that Chirstie was left
speechless. She had never imagined anyone speaking in such a strain.
She looked at her mother-in-law, who seemed mildly amused. The idea
that she had been deriding the Lord’s chronological calculations was
in itself sobering to one of so tender a conscience. The giver of
all her good clothes went scolding away at her, till she promised at
least to wear the new things the week after the baptisms.
Chirstie kept thinking of the scolding as she drove in the wagon
of that harassed man, Alex McNair, with her stepmother and her
mother-in-law, to see the new house that was getting about ready
for her occupancy. Wully had to lay a plank for a walk hurriedly
from the wagon to the house, for the new Mrs. McNair still wore such
boots that one step in the thawing black mire would have ruined
them. It was always that way. That little insignificant-looking
person refused to adjust herself to the new country. She just sat
tight, and let the great significant country adjust itself to her
as best it might. The house towards which she neatly walked was not
perhaps, to disinterested eyes, a very inviting place. But to Wully
and Chirstie it was their very palace of love. It stood a story and
a half high on a slight rise of ground, a decent way back from the
path that has since become one of the nation’s highways, built of
shining new lumber, the tall grass around it trampled into the black
ground littered with bits of boards and yellow curling shavings.
From the front door, just hung that day, the women looked down over
fifteen miles of prairie, an occasional plowed square humanizing the
distances, which sloped with so gentle an incline that one standing
on any one of the acres could scarcely have told it was not level.
From the windows of the parlor the women saw the plot that Wully’s
father had insisted on breaking the year before, along one side of
which the maple seeds he had planted were presently to appear as
slight as spears of sprouting grass. From the kitchen window they saw
a row of elms as thick as broomsticks, which Wully had brought the
fall before from the creek. In a long furrow there, the walnut trees
that were to make gunstalks for the World War were still waiting in
their shells for a warmer sun to bring them forth, and to the north
the trench was ready for the red and white pines that are nowadays a
pride to the family. Chirstie pointed to the piece of ground that was
to be fenced for a garden. Whereupon Mrs. McNair asked anxiously if
the fence was to be painted white.
Wully heard his father-in-law move impatiently behind him, and,
though he hadn’t before thought of such a thing, he answered that it
would be painted white as soon as he had the money for the paint.
The stepmother-in-law sighed with relief, and began inspecting the
kitchen closet. Wully pointed out with malicious glee the finish
of the cupboards, making light of the expense and difficulty of
building, while his father-in-law poked about glooming, refusing
to admire the conveniences which the little woman coveted with so
gentle a simplicity. He still had a grudge against that man, and
aired it whenever he could without Chirstie seeing him. He knew
McNair disapproved of the size of the windows. But what business of
that man’s was it what his windows cost?
The Sabbath of the Communion Wully unabashed, and shame-filled
Chirstie wearing the appealing old coat of her mother, and the
bedecked wee Johnnie went to church for the first time since the
baby’s birth. But let no one suppose that they attracted much
attention. What chance for consideration could even the most unholy
child have had that morning, sitting in front of the Glasgow fashions
in the person, or on the person, of his stepgrandmother? Wasn’t she
wearing a most stunning little hat with a dark green feather curling
down over a chignon of red hair, sitting there in the pew just behind
Mrs. McLaughlin, who wore with grace and satisfaction the bonnet a
lamenting friend in Ayrshire had made for her in fifty-four, and
just in front of Mrs. Whannel, whose headpiece was conceived in the
spring of fifty-eight, and across from Mrs. McTaggert, who had bought
somewhat more expensively than was necessary in sixty-one, but who,
considering the well-preserved condition of her purchase, had really
nothing to regret. One skilled in millinery might have reckoned
from the mother’s bonnets more or less accurately, the year of each
family’s immigration, although the array of such young girls as were
not away at school would have slightly vitiated his calculations. And
now, this Sabbath morning, there sits down in this world, so remote
from others, a Metternich jacket, a cape-like affair trimmed with
fur, and a skirt spreading gracefully, but without hoops, a floating
veil, and gloves embroidered in faint gray! If wee Johnnie had been
baseborn twins, he could never have attracted more than a stray
thought to himselves on that occasion.