People Like Ourselves (Scottish Historical Novels). Anna Buchan
quiet place.
The next day he was too tired to rise, and spent rather a dreary day in his rooms with the Scotsman for sole companion.
The landlord, a cheery little man, found time once or twice to talk for a few minutes, but he had only been ten years in Priorsford and could tell his guest nothing of the people he had once known.
"D'you know a house called The Rigs?" he asked him.
The landlord knew it well—a quaint cottage with a pretty garden. Old Miss Alison Jardine was living in it when he came first to Priorsford; dead now, but the young folk were still in it.
"Young folk?" said Peter Reid.
"Yes," said the landlord, "Miss Jean Jardine and her brothers. Orphans, I'm told. Father an Anglo-Indian. Nice people? Oh, very. Quiet and inoffensive. They don't own the house, though. I hear the landlord is a very wealthy man in London. By the way, same name as yourself, sir."
"Do I look like a millionaire?" asked Peter Reid, and the landlord laughed pleasantly and noncommittally.
The next day was sunny and Peter Reid went out for a walk. It was a different Priorsford that he had come back to. A large draper's shop with plate-glass windows occupied the corner where Jenny Baxter had rolled her toffee-balls and twisted her "gundy," and where old Davy Linton had cut joints and weighed out mince-collops accompanied by wise weather prophecies, a smart fruiterer's shop now stood furnished with a wealth of fruit and vegetables unimagined in his young days. There were many handsome shops, the streets were wider and better kept, unsightly houses had been demolished; it was a clean, prosperous-looking town, but it was different.
Peter Reid (of London) would have been the first to carp at the tumbledown irregular old houses, with their three steps up and three steps down, remaining, but Peter Reid (of Priorsford) missed them. He resented the new shops, the handsome villas, the many motors, all the evidences of prosperity.
And why had Cuddy Brig been altered?
It had been far liker the thing, he thought—the old hump-backed bridge with the grass and ferns growing in the crannies. He had waded in Cuddy when he was a boy, picking his way among the broken dishes and the tin cans, and finding wonderful adventures in the dark of the bridge; he had bathed in it as it wound, clear and shining, among the green meadows outside the town, and run "skirl-naked" to dry himself, in full sight of scandalised passengers in the Edinburgh train; he had slid on it in winter. The memory of the little stream had always lain in the back of his mind as something precious—and now to find it spanned by a staring new stone bridge. Those Town Councils with their improvements!
Even Tweed Bridge had not been left alone. It had been widened, as an inscription in the middle told the world at large. He leant on it and looked up the river. Peel Tower was the same, anyway. No one had dared to add one cubit to its grey stature. It was a satisfaction to look at something so unchanging.
The sun had still something of its summer heat, and it was pleasant to stand there and listen to the sound of the river over the pebbles and see the flaming trees reflected in the blue water all the way up Tweedside till the river took a wide curve before the green slope on which the castle stood. A wonderfully pretty place, Priorsford, he told himself: a home-like place—if one had anyone to come home to.
He turned slowly away. He would go and look at The Rigs. His mother had come to it as a bride. He had been born there. Though occupied by strangers, it was the nearest he had to a home. The house in Prince's Gate was well furnished, comfortable, smoothly run by efficient servants, but only a house when all was said. He felt he would like to creep into The Rigs, into the sitting-room where his mother had always sat (the other larger rooms, the "good room" as it was called, was kept for visitors and high days), and lay his tired body on the horsehair arm-chair by the fireside. He could rest there, he thought. It was impossible, of course. There would be no horsehair arm-chair, for everything had been sold—and there was no mother.
But, anyway, he would go and look at it. There used to be primroses—but this was autumn. Primroses come in the spring.
Thirty years—but The Rigs was not changed, at least not outwardly. Old Mrs. Reid had loved the garden, and Great-aunt Alison, and Jean after her, had carried on her work.
The little house looked just as Peter Reid remembered it.
He would go in and ask to see it, he told himself.
He would tell these Jardines that the house was his and he meant to live in it himself. They wouldn't like it, but he couldn't help that. Perhaps he would be able to persuade them to go almost at once. He would make it worth their while.
He was just going to lift the latch of the gate when the front door opened and shut, and Jean Jardine came down the flagged path. She stopped at the gate and looked at Peter Reid.
"Were you by any chance coming in?" she asked.
"Yes," said Mr. Reid; "I was going to ask if I might see over the house."
"Surely," said Jean. "But—you're not going to buy it, are you?"
The face she turned to him was pink and distressed.
"Did you think of buying it yourself?" Peter Reid asked.
"Me? You wouldn't ask that if you knew how little money I have. But come in. I shall try to think of all its faults to tell you—but in my eyes it hasn't got any."
They went slowly up the flagged path and into the square, low-roofed hall. This was not as his mother had it. Then the floor had been covered with linoleum on which had stood two hard chairs and an umbrella-stand. Now there was an oak chest and a gate-table, old brass very well rubbed up, a grandfather clock with a "clear" face, and a polished floor with a Chinese rug on it.
"It is rather dark," said Jean, "but I like it dark. Coming in on a hot summer day it is almost like a pool; it is so cool and dark and polished."
Mr. Reid said nothing, and Jean was torn between a desire to have her home appreciated and a desire to have this stranger take an instant dislike to it, and to leave it speedily and for ever.
"You see," she pointed out, "the little staircase is rather steep and winding, but it is short; and the bedrooms are charming—not very big, but so prettily shaped and with lovely views." Then she remembered that she should miscall rather than praise, and added, "Of course, they have all got queer ceilings; you couldn't expect anything else in a cottage. Will you go upstairs?"
Mr. Reid thought not, and asked if he might see the sitting-rooms. "This," said Jean, opening a door, "is the dining-room."
It was the room his mother had always sat in, where the horsehair arm-chair had had its home, but it, too, had suffered a change. Gone was the arm-chair, gone the round table with the crimson cover. This room had an austerity unknown in the room he remembered. It was small, and every inch of space was made the most of. An old Dutch dresser held china and acted as a sideboard; a bare oak table, having in its centre a large blue bowl filled with berries and red leaves, stood in the middle of the room; eight chairs completed the furniture.
"This is the least nice room in the house," Jean told him, "but we are never in it except to eat. It looks out on the road."
"Yes," said Peter Reid, remembering that that was why his mother had liked it. She could sit with her knitting and watch the passers-by. She had always "infused" the tea when she heard the click of the gate as he came home from school.
"You will like to see the living-room," said Jean, shivering for the effect its charm might have on a potential purchaser. She led him in, hoping that it might be looking its worst, but, as if in sheer contrariness, the fire was burning brightly, a shaft of sunlight lay across a rug, making the colours glow like jewels, and the whole room seemed to hold out welcoming hands. It was satisfactory (though somewhat provoking) that the stranger seemed quite unimpressed.
"You have some good furniture," he said.
"Yes," Jean agreed eagerly. "It suits the room and makes it beautiful. Can you imagine it furnished with a 'suite' and ordinary pictures, and draped curtains at the windows and