ONE. CHAPTER THREE
Papa and mamma were paying their annual visit to Dr Malcolm on the other side of the loch, and the three of us sat with Nannie in the kitchen, as we had done since we had been children on the rare occasions they left the manse.
The leaping flames in the well of a fireplace lit the room, casting grotesque shadows on the raftered roof and walls, exaggerating Nannie’s hooked nose and the peaks of her cap. Her brow was so deeply furrowed it looked cut, but the rest of her face was unlined. As she sat at the fireside, a ball of wool stuck with knitting-pins on her lap, she looked as though at any moment she might go up the chimney in a whiff of smoke, leaving behind only two wrinkled boots with their laces out.
‘Do you think,’ said Emmy, ‘that the clock bothers striking when every one is asleep?’ She had toothache and was nursing her cheek on her arm. ‘Where do you think pain goes when it leaves you? I wish I was made of nothing and then I would have nothing to ache. I wish—I wish—oh, so many things!’
‘There’s no guid wishing your whole life awa’,’ remarked Nannie. ‘Time flies quicker than the deil kens.’
‘What is the very first thing you can remember, Nannie?’ Julia asked pensively.
‘The cockleshell on the window-sill and ma brither eating a bannock and no giving me any o’ it.’
‘The first thing I can remember,’ said Julia, ‘is papa rehearsing with zest his sermon before mamma.’
‘Ay, I mind that,’ Nannie said reminiscently, ‘and ye keppit up wi’ his voice wi’ your spoon on the table until he had to check ye.’
‘The first thing I remember,’ put in Emmy, ‘was wakening up mamma when she dozed to go on singing me to sleep.’
‘One of the first things I can remember,’ I said, ‘was the strip of light, like an upside-down L, on our bedroom wall at night which widened when the door was opened farther.’
I did not care to tell them, for some unknown reason, of my earliest memories when I used to lie in bed in the early morning and trace forms in the scrolled pitch pine of the mantelpiece. Then I would lie so motionless I might have been asleep or dead while I said over and over to myself, ‘What am I? Who am I? What am I?’ And always on the brink of discovery, when I had reached that peak where deadly knowledge lay just within grasp, I would bring myself, in the nick of time, with a breathless jerk back to bed.
‘Isn’t it sad to think,’ Julia said after a pause, ‘that every one, no matter how bad, can remember a time, at the beginning of things, when he didn’t know what evil Was?’
‘I’m too auld in the horn to waste muckle sorrow on the bad,’ Nannie told her in her emphatic manner; ‘every man on this earth has his chance and it’s his ain loss if he wilina tak’ it. But he may have ta’en it for a’ we are to ken. It’s no if ye win through that counts, it’s the warsle that it costs ye.’
‘But people change so, don’t they, Nannie?’ asked Julia.
‘If ye can change for the bad, ye can change for the guid.’
‘I wasn’t thinking of change in that way,’ said Julia. ‘But take papa, for instance—why, I can remember when he was as gay as a fiddle the whole day long. Life seems to turn you out quite differently from what you or any one else expect.’
‘That’s because ye get too used to it, and tak’ it as your due. Ye should bide as though to-day was mebbe going to be your last, and then ye wouldna be tethered to this earth wi’ things that graw bigger to ye than life itsel’.’
The log in the fireplace subsided and a shower of sparks shot up the soot-furred chimney.
‘I can see soldiers in the fire,’ Julia said dreamily, her eyes half-closed, ‘a whole column of them, and they fired their muskets just now.’
‘Christine’s future husband is a soldier,’ observed Emmy, sitting on the table and leaning her cheek against the window-pane. ‘Would you like to be married to a soldier? I think I would, and share, even afar off, his danger. You know, it must have been stirring to have lived long ago and seen them go out to battle to the wild crying of the pipes.’
‘It’s only auld maids wha sit on tables,’ remarked Nannie.
‘The heat makes my tooth sorer,’ moaned Emmy, sliding from the table, ‘and cold seems to help it.’
‘Poor Emmy!’ Julia said pityingly.
‘I wonder if I would mind being an old maid,’ reflected Emmy. ‘You remember poor old Tibby MacNaughton whispering to mamma, who thought she was Mrs MacNaughton, “I’m only Miss, but I’m getting ο’er it noo a wee.”
‘There’s worse things than being an auld maid,’ said Nannie, heating a shawl at the fire to wrap round Emmy’s cheek. ‘Marriage ne’er yet cured ill temper and self-mindedness. Ma graundmither used to say lang-back- seen, “Ne’er marry for siller or ye’ll carry a heart heavy as gold and always mind that ‘mithers’ laddies’ mak’ the puirest husbands.”’
‘Christine once burst into tears because she had four gean- stones on her plate,’ said Emmy; ‘it would take more than that to make me cry.’ She joined us again in the glow of firelight which linked us all together and Nannie bound her face in the shawl.
The kettle on the swee began to sing. I sat on the creepie, drowsy and content. Outside early dark had folded away the garden and the winds were beating through the glen like the coming of the Campbells. But within there was flickering flame and singing kettle, and light shining on the window-pane to signal brightly between the trees to some sacred stranger without.
BOOK ONE. CHAPTER FOUR
Visitors who came to the manse were discussed later in detail by the three of us as we sat round the fire in the evening. We saw so few people that we were inclined to magnify the faults or virtues of those who did come, either enjoying their company out of all proportion or exaggerating their foibles. There was little that evaded Emily’s astute analysis or escaped Julia’s glance, while I listened to the ecclesiastical views of Mr Urquhart, papa’s clerical friend, with an absorption I now realise was quite unwarranted.
One afternoon, some weeks after the ball, two visitors, neither of whom I had seen before, paid us a surprise call. They were Christine Strathern and her father who had come to ask my sisters to drink tea with them that afternoon. Mamma was in bed with a bad chill and papa was officiating at a funeral, so while Julia and Emmy put on their outdoor clothes, I sat alone with our guests in the parlour. I could find nothing to say to them but, while the clock’s ticking claimed the silence, I saw everything there was to note about the father and daughter.
Most kind he looked with a benignant brow. I knew his thoughts were elsewhere for he did not seem to know that I sat there, but sometimes frowned and looked about him and at others seemed to listen. She was little and fair, her small face poking forward under her bonnet. Her features were so indeterminate they made no impression upon me; they were like a wax-doll’s which have melted ever so slightly at the fire. Yet she made a charming enough picture in her brown coat with its little capes edged with fur. For the first time I was conscious that Julia’s dress was too big for me and my shoe buttons did not match. I felt myself, for some unaccountable reason, begin to blush.
He
