Mrs. McArthur looked complacently round at her incandescent mantles in pink globes, then began to pour out the tea. . . . “Will the house need much?”
Her guest, glad of this slight show of interest, responded volubly.
“All the bedrooms need new paper and paint. The Rutherfurds were never very well-off for their position, and money’s been getting scarcer with them every year. The hall and the public rooms will be left with all the furniture, just as they are; they’re panelled, you know. . . .” She leant forward impressively. “Mrs. McArthur, would you believe it, there’s no carpet on the stairs.”
“Fancy! As poor as all that, are they? It’s a good thing you’ve got a handsome one to lay down. It’s just about two years since you got it. . . .”
Mrs. Jackson nodded. “Two years past in September. It is rich, isn’t it? I’m awful fond of crimson, and it’s a really good carpet, made for us. But——” she hesitated and glanced deprecatingly at her friend, “all the same, I don’t think we’ll put it down at Rutherfurd. It’s not the thing if you’ve got a fine old staircase—antique, you know—to cover it.”
Mrs. McArthur laid down her tea-cup, and after a moment’s pause addressed her old friend, gazing at her the while as if she had suddenly observed in her some new and most unpleasing trait.
“I must say I’m surprised at you, Bella Jackson, giving in to that sort of thing. At your time of life! It’s all very well for artists, it’s part of their trade to be daft-like, but I never thought to see you with a stair like a perpetual spring-cleaning.”
“Oh, not as bad as that. You don’t miss a carpet, somehow the bare steps are all of a piece with the rest of the house. You must come and see for yourself.”
“I’ll not do that,” Mrs. McArthur said with great decision.
“Oh, mebbe you will. . . . The house is empty now. Lady Jane Rutherfurd and her daughter and niece have taken a small house in Fife. I’m sorry for them, I am indeed. It’s not very easy to rise in the world, but it must be worse to come down. I’m going to ask the daughter to visit me. She’s an awful nice girl with no airs at all. I think Andy’ll like her, and she’ll be a great help to me, for goodness knows what I’ll do when all the people come to call!”
She sighed as she rose to go, and Mrs. McArthur, remaining seated, said: “Well, I’m glad I’m not in your place. You’ll only regret once leaving Pollokshields and that’ll be all the time. But wha will to Cupar maun to Cupar. I always knew your husband was a climber. Many a time I’ve said to myself: ‘Look at that wee Jackson worming himself in here and there, doing public work for his own ends, thinking he’ll get a knighthood out of it. . . .’ But you were always an honest soul, Bella, and to hear you talking about ‘the county’ and ‘Lady Jane’ and not putting on a stair-carpet makes me fair sick. You can tell your husband from me that a queer sight he’ll be as a laird.”
She laughed unpleasantly, and rose to her feet, while Mrs. Jackson, flushed and distressed, meekly held out her hand.
“Well, good-bye. You’ll be far too grand to remember me when you’re the lady of Rutherfurd. I’ll miss you, and I’ll miss Andy. What does he say about all this?”
But Mrs. Jackson murmured something and fled from the place where so often she had found rest and refreshment, feeling that she had, in very truth, been wounded in the house of her friend.
What Andrew Jackson thought of the change no one ever heard. That young man was not given to confiding his feelings to the world at large. He was respectful to his parents—oddly so in this disrespectful age—and if he sometimes did permit himself to smile at them both, no one knew.
He was an ordinary-looking young man, neither tall nor short, with frank eyes, and a pleasant smile. His mother thought him wonderfully handsome. In the War he had won a well-deserved Military Cross, and since coming home to his father’s business much of his spare time had been spent helping with various schemes for the boys and young men of his own city.
Sitting with his mother in her very own parlour one evening before they left Deneholm for good, he looked round the room, which with all its ugliness had an air of homely comfort about it, and said, “You’ve been happy here, Mother?”
Mrs. Jackson, who was tidying out a large work-basket, looked up at the question.
Andrew was lying back in one of the shabby red velvet chairs smoking a pipe, and watching his mother. She loved to sit so with her son. Her husband was always busy, out at a meeting or a public dinner, or looking over papers in his own room, but Andrew spent many evenings in “the parlour.”
“Happy, Andy? Yes, of course I’ve been happy.”
She spoke in an abstracted way, her attention obviously still on the work-basket. Presently she held out a photograph, saying: “It’s queer to come across something you haven’t seen for years. It’s a school group. . . . That’s me, that fat one in the front with the curls! Eh, my my, I couldn’t sleep wondering what I’d be like, and I got such a disappointment. . . .”
Her son studied the faded picture gravely.
“Where was this taken, Mother?” he asked.
“At the first school I was ever at, a private school in Myrtle Park. My home was in Crosshill, of course. We sat on benches in an upper room and learned out of wee paper books. There were pictures to help us on, and I remember getting a rap over the fingers for spelling t u b—bucket. . . . I wore a white pinafore. Children never wear pinafores now. I daresay they’re neater, but I don’t know—there was something awful fresh about a clean pinny.”
She was disentangling some silks and rolling them neatly on cards as she talked.
“The master was a queer man. I forget how it came up in the class one day, but he was talking about servants of God, and he said to me, ‘Bella, have you ever seen a servant of God?’ I said I had not, and he told me to come out into the middle of the floor, and he solemnly shook hands with me and said, ‘Now you can say you’ve shaken hands with a servant of God.’ . . . But, of course, I was thinking of prophets with long white beards. Jeremiah, you know. . . .”
“Of course,” said Andrew.
“It was a queer Glasgow in those days. Crosshill was like a village, and there was a long stretch of vacant ground from it to Eglinton Toll. You’ll hardly mind of it like that? And at the foot of Myrtle Park there were big pools or bogs or something that we could skate on in winter. And there were only horse-cars going in and out to town, and they didn’t go further than the Park Gate. . . . I stayed at the Myrtle Park school till I was ten and then I went to another private school in Kelvinside till I was seventeen, but I don’t think I ever learned much. . . . I got engaged to your father when I was twenty. He was a deacon in the church we went to, and read papers at the Literary Society. . . . He took to walking home with me from meetings and dropping in to supper, but it was long before I could believe he meant anything, for, you see, I wasn’t clever, and he was a promising young man. We weren’t married for some years because, of course, we had to save, but I was awful happy making my things, and going out with your father to concerts and socials.”
She stopped to deal patiently with a very tangled skein, and her son asked where their first house had been.
“D’you not remember it, Andy? Uch, you must. We left it when you were six. It was called Abbotsford, a house in Maxwell Road, a
