said Miss Theresa shortly. ‘It’ll have come out at the wrong place. Wait you.’ And laying down the potatoes, she brought a good-sized pudding from the pantry and thrust it on Francie.
‘You can’t take that before the court and swear to it that you’re hungered,’ she said, and shut the door on him.
In the parlour she repeated the conversation.
‘He does all the cooking himself, he tells me. I wouldn’t be any curious about eating it. He stewed a rabbit. “It was gey tough,” he says, “it gart your jaws wonder.”’
‘Fancy the little girl and the rabbits,’ cried Lindsay. ‘That’s the child we saw yesterday, isn’t it, Katie? With the coal-black eyes. She looked a mischief! She’s not like her father, anyway. You’d never suppose she was his daughter.’
‘You never would, for the easy reason that she’s not.’
‘I’m glad to see he calls her his daughter, it’s kindly of the body.’
‘What other could he do? You can’t give a gift a clyte in the mouth, and the bairns were her marriage gift to the craitur, as you might say.’
‘They looked so neglected, these children,’ cried Lindsay. ‘And with their mother ill. Couldn’t we give them a party? They can’t have had much of a Christmas.’
‘Oh, party away at them,’ conceded Theresa. ‘Would you really like it, Lindsay?’
Lindsay was aglow with eagerness. ‘And a Christmas tree?’ she said. ‘Oh, I know it’s January now, but I don’t believe they’ve ever seen a tree. One of those big spruce branches would do.’ She was given over entirely to her excitement. A mere child, thought Theresa. Well, and here was a change of countenance from the earlier days. The affair could not mean much when she threw it off so easily. The pale and moody Lindsay who had gone wanly about the house on her arrival, displeased Miss Theresa, who disliked a piner. Like many robust people, she resented the presence of suffering; pain, physical or mental, was an inconvenience that she preferred not to see. A Lindsay absorbed in trifling with a Christmas tree was a relief Miss Theresa might well afford herself; and she afforded it with grace.
‘Have you time, Kate,’ she asked of her niece Kate Falconer, who was spending her hour of leave at home, ‘to go round on your way back to the Hospital and bid them come?’
‘Why, yes,’ said Kate, ‘if we start at once. You come too, Linny.’
‘Go in by to Craggie,’ pursued Miss Theresa, ‘and bid Mrs Hunter too. We’ve been meaning to have her to tea this while back. She’ll be grand pleased at the tree. She’s like a bairn when you give her a thing.’
Kate went to make ready, and Lindsay would have followed; but as she passed, her grand-aunt detained her with a look. Mrs Craigmyle had few gestures; she held herself still; only her eyes glittered and her lips moved, and often her fingers went to and fro as she knitted—a spider stillness. The film of delicate lace upon hair as fine as itself was not the only thing about her that betokened the spider. One had the sense of being caught upon a look, lured in and held.
Lindsay drew up to her, and stood.
‘So, so, you are to turn my house into a market, Leezie Lindsay?’
‘Why do you call me that, Aunt Leeb?’
Lang Leeb sang from the old ballad.
‘Surely you know,’ she said, ‘that Leezie Lindsay came to Kingcausie with that braw lad she ran away with, and it’s not far from Kingcausie that you’ve come, Mistress Lindsay.’
The scarlet rushed on Lindsay’s brow and stood in splat-ches over neck and chin.
She pushed back her mop of curls and stared at the old woman; and her words seemed to be drawn from her without her will.
‘Kingcausie? That’s—isn’t that the place among trees, a line of beeches and then some scraggy firs? Beyond the Tower there.’
‘Hoots! Never a bit. That’s Knapperley. Daft Bawbie Paterson’s place. Kingcausie lies to the river.’
The scarlet had deepened on Lindsay’s throat. ‘Have I given myself away?’ she was thinking.
She had discovered what she had wanted to know since ever she came to Fetter-Rothnie. Often as she had visited the Weatherhouse, she had not stayed there, and its surroundings were unfamiliar. It had seemed so easy, in imagination, when she walked with Kate, to ask it in a careless way, ‘Isn’t that Knapperley over there, Katie?’ or ‘What place is that among the trees?’ But when the moment came her heart had thumped too wildly; she was not strong enough to ask. Now that she knew she sheered off nervously from the subject, as though to linger were deadly. And she plunged, ‘But why a market, Aunt Leeb? I’m sure we shan’t be very rowdy.’
‘A lot you know about the fisher folk, if that’s your way of thinking. It was them that cracked the Marykirk bell, jingle-janglin’ for a burying.’
‘But they’re not fisher folk here—Francie?’
‘She is.’
And Lindsay, because she was afraid to hear further of the lady who had brought the black-eyed bairns as a wedding gift to her husband, glanced rapidly around, and saw Mrs Falconer put her head in at the door and look at them. There was something pathetic about Cousin Ellen, Lindsay thought—her straying gaze, her muttering to herself. A poor old thing. And what was she wanting now, watching them both like that?
A poor young thing, Ellen was thinking. She must protect her from her mother’s sly and studied jests. So she said, ‘Kate must be off, Linny,’ and the girl fled gladly.
Francie was shouting a lusty song as he worked:
I’ll never forget till the day that I dee
The lumps o’ fat my granny gied me,
The heids o’ herrin’ an’ tails o’cats—
He broke off abruptly and cried, ‘Are ye cleanin’ yersels, littlins? Here’s ladies to see you.’
The children hove in sight, drying their half-washed hands on opposite ends of a towel. Bold-eyed youngsters, with an address unusual in country bairns. Each hurried to complete the drying first and so be saved from putting away the towel; and both dropping it at one moment, it fell in a heap. The children began to quarrel noisily.
‘Put you it by, Stellicky,’ said the man, who stood watching the bickering bairns for awhile with every appearance of content. Francie had a soft foolish kindly face, and while the girl, with black looks, did as she was bidden, he swung the loonie to his shoulder and said, ‘He’s a gey bit birkie, isna he, to be but five year auld?’
‘And how’s the wife?’ said Kate.
Francie confided in her that whiles she took a tig, and he thought it was maybe no more than that.
‘They were only married in August,’ said Kate, laughing, as the girls followed a field path away from the croft.
‘Oh, look,’
