and the houses full of strangers oppressed me, and I was woefully homesick. Your grandmother, my mother-in-law—she died before you were born, and you missed knowing one of the kindest women that ever lived—sent her cook, Maggie Ann, a capable girl from the Borders, to be my servant, and she was as homesick as I was. One day we saw an old tinker body who visited Etterick regularly on her rounds walking down the road with her box of small wares slung on her back. The sight to us was like cold water to a thirsty man. Maggie Ann rushed out and brought her in, and we feasted the astonished old woman and bought up nearly all her wares. The thought that she would be seeing Etterick soon, that she would sleep in our barn, would hear the soft Lowland tongue and see all my own people made that old beggar-wife a being to be envied by me.... Poor Maggie Ann was very patient with her inefficient mistress, and was young enough rather to enjoy my effort to housekeep. She said it reminded her of when she was a bairn and played at a wee house. We tried all sorts of experiments with food, but I don't remember that anything turned out very well. I'm afraid we wasted a good deal. It was a very long, cold winter, that winter in Inchkeld. The snow lay on the ground, and the frost held late into March, and even my sealskin coat could not keep out the cold. We grew tired of skating, and I took to moping in the house——"
"Really, Mother," said Ann, "it sounds frightfully unlike you as I have always known you—a little bustling hurricane of a woman, waking up all the dreaming ones, spurring the idle to work, a reproach to the listless, an example to all—and you tell me you sat in the house and moped and cried."
Mrs. Douglas shook her head. "I wasn't always a bustling hurricane. I think I became that because I married such a placid man; just as I became a Radical because he was such a Tory; just as I had to become sternly practical because he was such a dreamer. If we had both been alike we would have wandered hand-in-hand into the workhouse. Not that Mark spent money on himself—bless him—but nobody ever asked him for help and was refused; and he did like to buy things for me. I found I just had to take control of the money. Not at first, of course; it came to it by degrees. And your father was only too glad; money was never anything but a nuisance to him. I don't think I'm inordinately fond of money either, but I had to hain so that for years it had an undue prominence in my mind. Well, I sighed for the South Country, and one day, when I was miserably moping over the fire, your father said to me: 'Come on, Nell, I'm going to visit a sick girl about your own age. She's always asking me questions about you, and I said you would go and see her.'
"I didn't want to go, for I was shy of sick people—the being ill in bed seemed to put them such a distance away—but I put on my best clothes to make a good impression, and went.... We were taken into a clean, bright room, with a dressing-table dressed crisply in white muslin over pink. A girl was lying high up on the pillows, and I thought at first she couldn't be ill, she had such shining blue eyes and rose-flushed cheeks; her yellow hair hung in two plaits over her shoulders. Then I saw that her hands were almost transparent, and that her breath came in quick gasps between her red, parted lips, and I knew that this pretty child was dying quickly of consumption. I couldn't speak as I took her hand, but I tried hard to keep the tears from my eyes as she looked at me—two girls about an age, the one beginning life at its fullest, the other about to leave the world and youth behind. I stood there in my wedding braws, hating myself almost for my health and happiness. Your father talked to her until I got hold of myself, and then she seemed to like to hear me tell about the little house and my attempts to cook. As we were leaving she held your father's hand, and said, in her weak, husky voice, 'Mr. Douglas, tell the folk on Sabbath that Christ is a Rock....' I think I realised then, for the first time, what religion meant. A sentence in that book we were reading, Green Apple Harvest, reminded me of that girl.... You know when Robert is dying and his brother Clem says to him:
"'Oh, Bob, it seems unaccountable hard as you should die in the middle of May!'
"And Robert replies: '.... I've a feeling as if I go to the Lord God I'll only be going into the middle of all that's alive.... If I'm with Him I can't never lose the month of May....'
"I went home crying bitterly for the girl who was dying in the May morning of her days. I don't think I moped any more."
CHAPTER V
Inchkeld was a most pleasant place in which to have one's home—a city set among hills and watered by a broad river; and surely no young and witless couple ever had a kinder and more indulgent congregation than we had.
"The first Sunday I appeared in church I was almost dead with fright. I had to walk through the church to reach the Manse seat, and every eye seemed to be boring into me like a gimlet. As if that weren't bad enough, I was accosted on my way out by a tall, bland elder, who said he supposed I would want to teach a class in the Sabbath school. As a matter of fact, he supposed quite wrong, for it had never entered into my head that such an awful duty would be required of me. Think—until a short time before I myself had been a scholar (and a restless, impertinent one at that!), and the very thought of trying to control a class made my brain reel. But I was as clay in the hands of this suave Highland potter, who went on to tell me that the last minister's wife had carried on a most successful class for older girls. 'She, of course,' he added, 'was a niece of the late Lord Clarke,' as if that fact explained any amount of talent for teaching the young. He led me away—I was now in a state of passive despair—and introduced me to a class as their new teacher. There were seven of them, girls about fifteen—always, I think, the worst and a most impudent age (you were a brat at fifteen, Ann!), and they fixed me with seven pairs of eyes, round brown eyes, rather like brandy-balls—I suppose they couldn't all have had brown eyes, but the general effect was of brandy-balls—silently taking me in. I heard the elder telling them how honoured they were to have the minister's wife as teacher; then I was left with them. Later on, when I got to know the girls, I sometimes laughed at the terror of the first Sunday. They were the nicest girls, really, gentle and kind; but that day they seemed to me inhuman little owls. They told me the lesson—one of the parables—but my mind was a blank, and I could think of no comment to make over it. I stumbled and stuttered, every moment getting more hot and ashamed, and finally went home, feeling, in spite of my sealskin coat and prune bonnet, the most miserably inadequate minister's wife that had ever tried to reign in a manse, scourged as with whips by the thought of the late Lord Clarke's niece. What a comfort your father always was! He made it seem all right in a twinkling, assured me that I needn't teach a class unless I liked, but vowed that if I did no one could teach it half so well; and as for the late Lord Clarke's niece, he had never seen her, but he was sure she was a long-faced woman, with no sense of humour."
"I know," said Ann. "Father was always singularly comforting. When we hurt ourselves, you and Marget invariably took the gloomiest view, looked up medical books and prophesied dire results. Once I got my thumb badly crushed and the nail torn off while swinging on a see-saw. Marget at once said 'lock-jaw!' I hadn't a notion what that was, but it had an eerily fatal sound, and I crept away to Father's study to try and lose my fears in a book. Presently Father came in, and I rolled out of the arm-chair I had cuddled into and ran to show him my bandaged hand.
"'Oh, Father!' I cried, 'will I take lock-jaw and will I die?' I can see him now, all fresh from the cold air, laughing at me, yet sorry for me, lifting me up in his strong arms, saying, 'Poor wifie, were they frightening you? Lock-jaw? No. Let's look at it. Yes, I see the nail's off. Had we better get a celluloid one till the new one grows? Try and keep a cloth on it, like a good lassie, and it will soon be well.' And then peace slid into my soul, and I sat on his knee and he told me a story. I can quite see what a wonderful minister my father was. It was that air of surety, of steadfastness, that gave people such a lift, and that firm, comforting hand that touched things so gently. Robbie had the same; so had the little lad.... But to go back to Inchkeld and the congregation——"
"Yes. It was a very flourishing congregation.
