Complete Works. Anna Buchan
said. "I had to take you into a shop on the way home and buy you biscuits. Your father wanted some, too—a handed-round tea was no use to him; he liked a breakfast-cup filled several times. I don't think I was ever guilty of starving children of wedding-cake. I got surfeited with it myself, and a big family from across the way used to come in to help us away with all that was left over from our parties. We were glad to get things eaten up in those days. Both my own mother and your father's mother constantly sent us boxes of eatables as if we had been on a desert island instead of in a city of shops—great mutton-hams, and haggis, and noble Selkirk bannocks; I was afraid of them coming to our little household. How glad I would have been to see them in later years, when I had growing children to feed! But the kind hands that packed them were still.... We could entertain only in a very small way in our very small house, but we were asked to quite a lot of dinner-parties. They were evenings of dread to me. I was so shockingly bad at making conversation. I blushed fiercely when anyone spoke to me, and must have presented an appearance of such callowness that I provoked pity in the hearts of kindly people. One dear old lady said to me, 'My dear, have you cut your wisdom teeth yet?' ... In September Mark was born. It was prayer-meeting night, and Maggie Ann carelessly let the cat eat my canary. They didn't tell me about it until I asked why I wasn't hearing him singing. Mark was a tiny, delicate baby, but he was perfect in our eyes. We looked with distaste at large fat children, who made poor little Mark look so puny and fragile, and told each other that they were 'coarse,' and that we were glad our baby wasn't like that. When I was able to travel we set off with our precious new possession to Etterick. Agatha had been with us most of the summer, but my mother didn't come; she liked to stay in her own house and welcome us there."
"A most detached woman, my grandmother," said Ann.
"You are rather like her, Ann," said Mrs. Douglas.
"Yes, I have the same aversion to staying in other people's houses, and I share her dislike to the casual kissing that so many people indulge in—people who are mere acquaintances. You should only kiss really great friends at really serious times, and then it means something."
Mrs. Douglas laughed. "Nobody ever took a liberty with your grandmother. My father was utterly different, the most approachable of men. People were always asking favours from him; he liked them to. He didn't care how much he went out of his way to help anyone, and his hand was never out of his pocket."
"You must be exactly like grandfather. I think you are one of the very few people left living in the world who do take trouble about their fellow-mortals. The rest of us are too selfish to bother."
"I like to be kind," said Mrs. Douglas, "but I don't take any credit for being kind. It's just my nature to want to give. The people who hate to give and yet make themselves do it are the ones who ought to be commended. It has always been my great desire to add a little to the happiness of the world, and I would never forgive myself if I thought I had added by one jot or tittle to the pain."
"I am very sure you haven't done that," Ann assured her. "You are the very kindest of funny little bodies, and when I call you 'Ella Wheeler Wilcox' I don't really mean it. But you must admit that it is often very vicarious kindness, and the burden of it falls on your family. Oh, the deplorable people who have come to us 'for a stop' because you thought they were lonely and neglected! Of course, they were, but it was because it almost killed people to entertain them; there's a reason for everything in this world. But what a shame to laugh at your efforts! Never mind. There are those
'Who, passing through Baca's vale,
Therein do dig up wells,'
and you are one of them. But to go on with your Life. Didn't you leave Inchkeld quite soon after Mark was born? I know Robbie and Jim and I thought it very hard lines that he should have been born in a lovely old historic city, while the rest of us had to see the light first amid coalpits and linoleum factories. Mark never let us forget it, either."
"Mark was two months old when we left Inchkeld. When the Kirkcaple congregation called your father he felt he ought to go. Oh! but we were a thoughtless couple. It never gave me a thought to leave the people who had been so good to us. I just took everybody's kindness as a matter of course. I was too young to realise how rare such kindness is, and their interest in the baby, and their desire to have us stay in Inchkeld seemed to me no more than natural. I was amused and pleased at the thought of going to a new place and a new house. You can hardly get changes enough when you are eighteen. In middle life one's most constant prayer is that God will let things remain as they are. What was that you were reading me the other night? I think it was from Charles Lamb."
Ann leant back in her chair and pulled a little green book from a bookshelf. "This, I think it was," she said, and read:
"'I am content to stand still at the age to which I am arrived; I, and my friends, to be no younger, no richer, no handsomer. I do not want to be wearied by age, or drop like mellow fruit, as they say, into the grave....'"
"Poor Charles Lamb!" said Mrs. Douglas, shaking her head. "There are times when one would like to stand still, where we seem to reach a pleasant, rich plain and are at our ease, and friends are many, and life is full of zest.... I don't know whether it was wise to leave Inchkeld. Your grandfather Douglas always regretted it. When he visited us at Kirkcaple one remark he always made was: 'A great pity Mark ever left Inchkeld.' We used to wait for it and the funny way he had of clearing his throat after every sentence."
CHAPTER VI
November is a poor time to go to a new place, and Kirkcaple certainly looked a most unattractive part of the world when we arrived on a cold, wet afternoon. 'The queer-like smell' from the linoleum factories, the sea drearily grey and strange to my inland eyes, the drive through narrow streets and up the steep Path, past great factories and mean houses, until we reached the road, knee-deep in mud, where the Manse stood, combined to depress me to the earth. It might have been infinitely worse. I saw that in the light of the next morning. There was a field before the Manse, and though there was a factory and a rope-work and a bleach-field and a coal-pit all in close proximity to it, there was also the Den, where hyacinths grew in spring, and where you could dig fern roots for your garden. The Manse itself stood in a large garden, and in time we forgot to notice the factories. The people were very unlike the courteous Inchkeld people—miners and factory workers, who gave one as they passed a Jack's-as-good-as-his-master sort of nod. We grew to understand them and to value their staunch friendship, but at first they were as fremt as the landscape.
"When the cab lurched through the ruts to the Manse gate and I got out and saw my new home I quailed. From the front it was a gloomy-looking house—one window on each side of the front door, and three windows above, and the kitchen premises on one side. There was a wide gravelled space in front, with a small shrubbery to shelter us from the road. It was a sombre and threatening place to enter on a dark night, and when alone I always made a mad rush from the gate to the front door. One night when I reached my haven I found a tall man standing against it. I had hardly strength to gasp, 'Who are you?' and the man replied, 'Weelum Dodds. I cam' to see the minister aboot gettin' the bairn bapteezed, but the lassie wadna open the door.' I had told the servants, who were young girls, to keep the chain on the door at night, and the poor patient soul had just propped himself up against the door and awaited developments.... The back of the house, looking to the garden, was delightful. You don't remember the garden?"
"Don't I?" said Ann. "I was only about nine when we left Kirkcaple, but I remember every detail of it. Just outside the nursery window there was a bush of flowering currant. Do you remember that? And jasmine, and all sorts of creepers grew up the house. There was a big square lawn before the window, rather sloping, with two long flowerbeds at the top and herbaceous borders round the high walls. Our own especial gardens were at the top of the kitchen garden. Mark had a Rose of Sharon tree in his garden about which he boasted; it seemed to set him a little apart. I had a white lilac tree in mine; Robbie, severely practical, grew nothing but vegetables, while Jim, when asked what his contained, said simply and truthfully, 'Wurrums.' Rosamond was a tiny baby when