III
To
ISOBEL CUNNINGHAM
"To whatsoever things are fair
We know, through you, the road;
Nor is our grief the less thereby;
O swift and strong and dear, Good-bye."
"In this age of opulence and refinement whom can such a character please? Such as are fond of high life will turn in disdain from the simplicity of a country fireside. Such as mistake ribaldry for humour will find no wit in this harmless conversation: and such as have been taught to deride religion will laugh at one whose chief stores of comfort are drawn from futurity."
Oliver Goldsmith.
CHAPTER I
Mrs. Douglas and her daughter Ann sat together in their living-room one November night.
It was a wonderfully comfortable room, brightly yet softly lit, and warmed by a noble fire. There was a pleasant space and emptiness about it, an absence of ornaments and irrelevant photographs; each piece of furniture, each of the few pictures, was of value.
Mrs. Douglas had a book in her lap and in her hand a half-finished stocking, for she considered that she was wasting time if she did not knit while reading.
Ann sat on a stool by the fire, poring over a seedsman's catalogue, a puzzled frown on her brow.
"I wish," she said, without looking up, "I do wish I knew more about gardening. I can't make out from this what will grow best with us.... Don't you think, Mother, it is almost lèse-majesté to call a rose Queen Mary, and describe it as 'a gross feeder? Oh, and this! Mr. Asquith, 'very compact in form, rosy in colour.' What humourists the compilers of seedsmen's catalogues are! And what poets! Where was it we read that article about catalogues? It said that the very names were like a procession of princes—'amber and carmine Queens, and Princes' Feathers, and Cloth of Gold.' The names tempt one simply by the glory of the sound. 'Love-in-a-Mist ... Love-Fire, a rich cream with a faint suggestion of apricot primrose in petal'—and with a drop one learns that this beauty can be bought for the sum of tuppence! ... Delphiniums we must have—dozens of them. I can picture us next summer lying on the lawn in deck-chairs on hot, sunny days, looking between tall, blue delphiniums to green hilltops. Won't it be lovely, Mother?"
"H'm," said her mother in a dry voice, "at present you have only the hilltops. I haven't imagination enough to picture the hot sun and the lawn and the blue delphiniums."
"Mother!" said Ann, wheeling round on her stool and facing her parent, who was knitting with provoking calm, "there's nothing sporting about you at all. It always rains in November, but that's nobody's fault, and you might at least try to look as if you didn't mind. Nobody ever said a glen was a cheery place in winter, but, myself, I like it frightfully. When Uncle Bob left me the Green Glen for my very own I determined that somehow or other I would manage to build a house in it—a little white-faced house among the heather. Not big, but big enough to hold us all—six good bedrooms, one big living-room, a hall we could sit in, a smaller room to feed in. You all made objections—all except Charlotte, who encouraged me. You pointed out all the disadvantages: six miles from a station, a steep hill road, carting difficult! You told me that building in these days was only the pastime of a millionaire, but—the house is built and, because the architect was a man of sense and listened to what I wanted, it is exactly the house I meant it to be in my dreams, so 'Dreams' it will be called."
"I thought you hated new houses?"
"So I do, except when it is my own house in my own Green Glen. And you will admit that it is comfortable."
"It's very bare," Mrs. Douglas said.
"Well, I like it bare. And your own room is far from bare. It is more like a museum than anything else, with so many mementoes of other days hung on the walls, and photographs of us all at every age and in every attitude, and shelves and shelves of devotional books, not to speak of all the little stucco figures you have cherished for years. Their heads have been gummed on so often they fall off if you look at them. Davie was always being entreated by you to mend them, and he found, finally, that Moses' head (or was it Eli?) would only remain on if turned the wrong way about—so his beard was down his back! ... To return to 'Dreams,' I admit the garden is still unmade, and the road a mere track, but wait and you will see it blossom like the rose. We shan't have any fences—there is no need for them among the hills, and the
