very good and the very old who died, Nannie, unmoved, would tell me.
BOOK ONE. CHAPTER ONE
A pale green light poured down from the wintry sky, as though this earth were lit by chance rays from some other world. Grey sheep silently ate split turnips in the brown fields. The snow had melted in the low lands, leaving everything sad dun shades, and only streaked the mountains, where it lay like the skeletons of huge, prehistoric animals. The shouldering outline of the mountains cut against the horizon, their detail of burn, crag and ravine lost in the immensity of their shadowed bulk. It was as though, in those transient windless seconds between dawn and daylight, the world had resolved itself again into the contours and substances that composed it before man trod on its earth and drank in its air.
It was not yet breakfast-time when I entered the manse. I sat on the window-seat in the parlour and waited for it, looking out at the moss-covered garden wall and reading over to myself ‘The Unquiet Grave’ from my Book of Songs. The house I had left so still when I started out on my lonely walk was stirring now. I could hear Julia’s raised voice in the room above and knew she was telling Emmy she really must rise, and Nannie’s loudened footsteps as she swooped across the kitchen to snatch the boiling-over kettle from the swee.
Mamma was the first to join me in the parlour. She was a big woman and her step was heavy. Unlike papa, she was childlike in her faith; hope lit her exuberant heart and enthusiasms warmed her life, keeping her ever young. Her belief in prayer was unbounded and so had never failed her; now her confidence had grown to such an extent that she refused to contemplate even the most probable happening unless she so wished it.
She was still a handsome woman although she no longer paid any attention to her appearance. Looking back now, I realise, when I think of her carefree upbringing and lively youth, how uneventfully the days must have passed in the Barnfingal manse, yet she accepted them without question or regret, and never thought of herself as other than happy. But as she sewed at the parlour fire or sat at the table covering Nannie’s jam pots (she sat to do most things nowadays), memories must have flickered in and out of her mind, like moths uneasily attracted to a candle-flame, until she would feel life was leaving her with nothing but anniversaries.
‘I’m so glad the wind’s died down,’ she remarked, looking under the cosy to discover if Nannie had brought in the tea, ‘I don’t like to hear it—it’s like some one keeping on arguing with you.’
Nannie entered with breakfast, stretching her long arms across the table. The effect the constant wind had on her was to make her always talk louder than was necessary. At the door she stood aside, in her crackling apron and wrapper faded with many washings, to let papa pass.
There was nothing rambling about papa’s discourse as there was about mamma’s. He said what he wanted as shortly as possible, then retired within himself to dwell on his own thoughts. His preoccupation was such that he only knew people by the places in which he usually found them. He spent most of the day alone in his study, with his papers, dictionaries and Cruden’s Concordance, writing or collecting heads for his sermon on Sunday.
Julia joined us but Emmy was late, and I waited apprehensively as I heard her rush from place to place in the room above and pull out one noisy drawer after another. She came in when we were half-way through breakfast, and I saw her watch papa out of the corner of her eye, trying to estimate the effect her lateness was going to have on him.
‘If this happens again,’ he said, letting his glance light on her, ‘you will go without breakfast.’
‘I wouldn’t mind going without breakfast if I could have a longer time in bed,’ muttered Emmy, with a hidden defiance that I was terrified might flame into open insurrection at any moment.
‘You mustn’t go without breakfast,’ said mamma, thundering into the breach with complications, ‘you’re just at the age when you need all the nourishment you can have.’
‘You will not be late again,’ papa declared coldly, ‘therefore there will be no need for you to go without breakfast.’
At any other time his tone alone would have been quite sufficient to silence Emmy, but that morning she was ready to battle with any one, even with papa. She pulled at the collar of her dress, turned her face towards him and opened her mouth to speak.
‘It is a beautiful text, papa,’ Julia said smoothly, referring to the conversation Emmy’s entrance had interrupted, ‘one of the most beautiful—why, I feel I could write a sermon on it myself.’
Papa was always the first to leave the room after breakfast was over. That morning the door had barely shut behind him when Emmy demanded:
‘Why can’t I be late if I want to? It’s my breakfast that grows cold and no one else’s.’
‘It keeps the dishes on the table and Nannie back,’ said mamma.
‘It’s my hair that takes so long to do,’ sighed Emmy, ‘and it’s not as though I had coils and coils to show for all the trouble it gives me, but there were tugs in it like spiders this morning, just when I was in a hurry. What was the text you were talking about, Julia?’
‘“Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life,”’ Julia quoted in her softly deep voice.
‘Yes,’ said Emmy, after a pause, ‘I like that. What do you suppose a crown of life is?’
‘Immortality, of course,’ said mamma, troubled in case an unorthodox meaning was going to be culled from it, ‘it says life most distinctly.’
‘It says a crown of life,’ insisted Emmy, moving over to the piano, ‘but who’s to say that that means life? Anyway, what does the crown matter as long as you are faithful unto death?’
She began to play. Emmy was the only one who used the piano, and it was so inextricably bound up with her that I felt if any one else had touched its yellowed keys, no matter where her spirit lay, it would quiveringly awake and her fingers tremble to feel them once again.
In the afternoon papa, standing on a kitchen chair, hung up the print of ‘Coming of Age in the Olden Time’ which had fallen down from the stairway wall the previous week, making Nannie think the end of the world had come. We all stood grouped at the foot of the stairs, looking up at him, for when papa did anything about the house, he always liked people to be round him, ready with tools. He was straightening the picture to Julia’s direction when a knock sounded on the door.
‘Who’s that?’ papa asked us, quite unreasonably.
Nannie opened the door and found the ferryman, a mere paring of a man, without. He had been west at Dormay and seen two letters for us in the post office which he had brought with him that we might have them early. He handed one to Julia and one to Emmy, and would have remained, standing inquiringly on the step, as though anxious to hear their contents, if Nannie had not firmly closed the door.
‘What pretty little envelopes—who can they be from?’ Julia asked wonderingly, turning hers over.
‘They’re from Christine,’ said Emmy, ‘I know her t’s—as though they were raising their hats. Oh, Julia, they’re invitations to a ball. I never dreamed of such a thing. Won’t that be wonderful? “… Desires the presence of Miss Emily Lockhart
