the mortified despair of her occasional revulsions from her fairyland.
It did not occur to her that when Lindsay Lorimer came to Fetter-Rothnie her fairyland would vanish into smoke.
Lindsay came to stay at the Weatherhouse on this wise: her mother, Mrs Andrew Lorimer, arrived one day in perturbation.
‘We don’t know what to do with Lindsay,’ she confessed. ‘If you would let her come here for a little—? We thought perhaps the change—and away from the others. These boys do tease her so. They can’t see that she’s ill.’
‘She’s ill, is she?’ said Theresa. ‘And what ails her, then?’
Mrs Andrew took some time to make it clear that Lindsay’s sickness was of the temper.
‘Not that we have anything against him,’ she said. ‘He’s an excellent young man—most gentlemanly. When he likes. But she’s so young. Nineteen. Her father won’t hear of it. “All nonsense too young,” he says. But I suppose she keeps thinking, well, and if he doesn’t come back. It’s this war that does it.’
‘It’s time it were put a stop to,’ said Miss Annie.
‘Yes,’ sighed Mrs Andrew. ‘And let things be as they were.’
‘But they won’t be, said Ellen.
‘No,’ she answered. ‘Frank’ll never go to college now. He swears he won’t go to the University and won’t. And it’s all this Captain Dalgarno. It’s Dalgarno this and Dalgarno that. Frank’s under him, you know. I wonder what the Captain means by it. He’s contaminating Frank. Putting ideas into his head. He was only a schoolboy when it began, you must remember—hadn’t had time to have his mind formed. And now he swears he won’t go to the University and won’t enter a profession. All my family have been in the professions.’
She sighed again.
‘He wants to do things, he says. Things with his hands. Make things. “Good heavens, mother,” he said to me, just his last leave—the Captain was home with him on his last leave, you know; it was then that Lindsay and he wanted to get married, and her father just wouldn’t have it. “Good heavens mother, we’ve un-made enough, surely, in these three and a half years. I want to make something now. You haven’t seen the ruined villages. The world will get on very well without the law and the Church for a considerable time to come,” he said, “but it’s going to be jolly much in need of engineers and carpenters.” Make chairs and tables, that seems to be his idea. “Even if I could make one table to stand fast on its feet, I’d be happy. I won’t belong to a privileged class,” he said. “There aren’t privileges. There’s only the privilege of working.” It sounds all right, of course, and I’m sure we all feel for the working man. But if Lindsay marries him I don’t know what we shall all come to.’
Mrs Craigmyle, attentive in the corner, began to hum. No one of course heeded her. She sang a stave through any business that was afoot. She sang now, the hum developing to words:
Wash weel the fresh fish, wash weel the fresh fish,
Wash weel the fresh fish and skim weel the bree,
For there’s mony a foul-fittit thing,
There’s mony a foul-fittit thing in the saut sea.
And Ellen’s anger suddenly flared. A natural song enough for one whose home looked down on the coast villages of Finnan and Portlendie; but it was Ellen the dreamer, not the sagacious Annie or Theresa, who had read in her mother that the old lady’s was an intelligent indifference to life. She took no sides, an ironic commentator. Two and thirty years of Craigmyle wedlock had tamed her natural wildness of action to an impudence of thought that relished its own dainty morsels by itself. Her cruelties came from comprehension, not from lack of it. And had not Mrs Andrew said the word? ‘Contaminating,’ she had said. Ellen did well to be angry. She was angry on behalf of this young girl the secret of whose love was bandied thus among contemptuous women.
‘But I know, I know, I understand,’ she thought. ‘I must help her, be her friend.’ Already her fancy was off. She had climbed her tower and saw herself in radiant light, creating Lindsay’s destiny.
She looked from under bent brows at her mother, who continued to sing, with a remote and airy grace, her long fine fingers folded in her lap. She sat very erect and looked at no one, lost apparently in her song. Ellen relaxed her frown, but remained gazing at the singer, falling unconsciously into the same attitude as her mother, and the singular resemblance between the two faces became apparent, both intent, both strangely innocent, the old lady’s by reason of its much withdrawn, Ellen’s from the enthusiasm of solitary dreaming that hedged her about from reality.
Miss Theresa Craigmyle opened the kitchen door in response to the knock, and saw Francie Ferguson holding a bag of potatoes in his arms.
‘Ay, ay, Francie,’ she said, ‘you’ve brought the tatties. Who would have thought, now, there would be such a frost and us not to have a tattie out of the pit? It was a mercy you had some up.’
‘O ay,’ said Francie, ‘and the frost’s haudin’. There’s the smell o’ snaw in the air. It’ll be dingin’ on afore ye ken yersel.’
Miss Theresa took the potatoes, saying cheerily, ‘And a fine big bag you’ve given us, Francie. But you were aye the one for a bittie by the bargain.’
Francie shuffled to the other foot and rubbed a hand upon his thigh.
‘Well, ye like to be honest, but ye canna be ower honest or ye’d hae naething to yersel.’ He added, spreading a dirty paw against the door-jamb, ‘The missus is to her bed.’
‘Oh,’ said Miss Theresa. She said it tartly. The bag poised in her arms, she was judicially considering its weight. ‘Not so heavy, after all,’ she thought. Francie’s way had formerly been, ‘I just put in a puckle by guess like.’ He hadn’t been long at the school, he said, wasn’t used with your weights and measures. But his lavishness, Miss Theresa could see, was receiving a check: beyond a doubt the work of the missus. Miss Theresa was not disposed to sympathy. ‘She’s a din-raising baggage,’ she reflected, and heard Francie out with a face as set as the frost.
Francie was grumbling heartily at life. He knew fine that the potatoes were scanty measure. He did not confess it, of course, but since Miss Theresa was sure to discover, he detailed the mitigating circumstances: a sick wife, a cow gone dry, forty barren besoms of hens and a daughter soft-hearted to the point of letting all the rabbits off the snares—ay, and giving them a bit of her piece, no less, any one that looked pitiful at her. Francie had remonstrated, of course, but might as well speak to the wind blowing by. ‘A gey-like swippert o’ a queyne, she is that,’ he said, not without a certain conscious pride. And meat-whole, he added, ‘They’re a’ that—the wife as weel.’
‘She would be,’ said Miss Theresa. ‘She’s about
