in time he bought Deneholm. It seemed an awful lift in the world to me! We had just the one girl at Abbotsford, and we started here with three experienced women. My! I was miserable with them for a while: I always thought they were laughing to each other when I went into the kitchen, and so they were, mebbe, but I got used to it; and you’ve to live a long time after you’re laughed at! The Rutherfurds’ butler’s staying on with us, that’s a comfort, for he’ll keep the other servants in order. He wanted to go with Lady Jane—quite the old family servant in a book—but they said they couldn’t do with him in a small house. Miss Nicole said to me that it would never do for them to have a butler in Kirkmeikle, it would be ‘trailing clouds of glory,’ though what she meant by that I don’t know. It’s a hymn, isn’t it? That’s the worst of people like the Rutherfurds, you don’t know half they mean; they so seldom talk sense. I can discuss a subject quite well if people’ll stick to it, but when they suddenly fly off and quote things. . . . I want to ask you, Andy, d’you think I’ll ever be able to take my place at Rutherfurd?” She did not wait for an answer, but went on:
“I was seeing Mrs. McArthur the other day and she fairly depressed me. I’ve known her so long and she’s been such a good friend, and now she seems to have turned against me. I could see she thought I’d be a figure of fun at Rutherfurd, and she was quite bitter about your father, said he was a climber. . . . I think myself men are quicker at picking up things than women. I’m sure when your father married me he didn’t know anything about pictures, and old furniture, and the things he cares so much about now. He was quite pleased with our little house, and worked in the garden on Saturday afternoons. I sometimes wish that we’d never got on in the world and that we still lived at Abbotsford.”
Andrew knocked his pipe against the fender and put it on the edge of the mantelpiece.
“I wouldn’t worry, Mother,” he said, in his quiet voice. “You never pretend to be anything you’re not, so you’ll get on splendidly. Nobody’s going to laugh in an unkindly way at you so long as you’re sincere. And it doesn’t matter greatly if we do amuse our neighbours. What would Punch do without jokes about the New Rich? It’s better to amuse people than bore them, any day. You laugh too, Mother—then the laughter won’t hurt you.”
“I see what you mean, Andy. . . . But surely nobody would ever think of laughing at your father?”
“I suppose not. But the best-liked people are those that you can laugh at in a kindly way. And no one has more friends than you, my dear.”
“In Glasgow—but I doubt there’ll be none of my kind near Rutherfurd. Mrs. McArthur says . . .”
“Never mind Mrs. McArthur. She’s a thrawn old body sometimes.”
She still looked at her son with troubled eyes.
“And you’re a beautiful speaker, Andy, from being at an English school, though I whiles wonder how you’ve kept it, for my Glasgow accent would corrupt a nation. I doubt Mrs. McArthur’s right—but, anyway, I’ll always have you. You’ve been my great comfort all your life.”
“That’s nonsense,” said Andrew, beginning to smash up the fire.
His mother took the poker from him, for it vexed her economical soul to see a good fire spoiled.
“No, it’s the truth. . . . Well, well, everything has an end. Somehow, I never thought we’d leave Deneholm. I wonder who’ll buy it, and sit in this room? Mebbe children’ll play here.” She looked wistfully at her son. “I wish you’d marry, Andy. Mind, you’re getting on. Thirty-two—and I never saw you so much as look at a girl.”
CHAPTER VII
“Tush man—mortal men, mortal men.”
Henry IV.
Kirkmeikle was a very little town, merely a few uneven rows of cottages, occupied chiefly by fishermen, and the workers in a small rope-factory, known locally as “the Roperee,” half-a-dozen shops, and a few houses of larger size built a century ago. But, on the top of the green brae, crowning it hideously, stood three staring new villas.
The large square one, Ravenscraig, was inhabited by Miss Janet Symington.
It had many large windows hung with stiff lace curtains and blinds of mathematical neatness. Inside there was a bleak linoleum-covered hall containing a light oak hat-and-umbrella stand, a table with a card tray, and two chairs, a barometer hung on the wall above the table. To the right of the front door was the drawing-room, a large, light, ugly room; to the left was the dining-room, another very light room, with two bow windows, a Turkey carpet, and crimson leather furniture. A black marble clock stood on the black marble mantelpiece, and on the walls hung large seascapes framed heavily in gilt.
The late Mr. Symington had been a wealthy manufacturer, and profoundly pious. He was a keen business man, but outside his business his interest centred in religious work. He gave liberally to every good cause, he was not only a just but a generous master, and the worst that could be said of him was that he was a dull man. That he most emphatically was—quiet, dour, decent, dull. He never opened a book unless it was the life of a missionary or a philanthropist; he could not read fiction because it was not true, therefore a waste of time. He had thought highly of his minister, Mr. Lambert, until, one day, he found that honest man reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets; after that he regarded him with suspicion. To Mr. Symington life was real, life was earnest, and not to be frittered away in reading Shakespeare.
His wife had been a delicate, peevish woman, who seldom went out, but who enjoyed amassing quantities of wearing apparel, more especially expensive shoes and gloves, which she never wore. She was proud of the fact that all her life she had never needed to soil her hands with house-work, and liked to hold them out to visitors saying, “Such useless hands!” and receive compliments on their shape and whiteness. She never read anything but the newspapers, and was not greatly interested even in her children. She died a few months before her husband, not much lamented and but little missed.
Janet was like her father. She had the same rather square figure and large head, the same steady brown eyes and obstinate chin. Mr. Symington had always looked like a lay preacher in his black coat and square felt hat, and his daughter dressed so severely as to suggest a uniform, in a navy blue coat and skirt, a plain hat of the sailor brand, and a dark silk blouse made high at the neck.
There had been a brother younger than Janet, but he had never been anything but a worry and disappointment. Even as a child David had resented the many rules that compassed the Symington household, while Janet had been the reproving elder sister, pursing her lips primly, promising that she would “tell,” and that David would “catch it.” At school his reports were never satisfactory, at college he idled, and when he entered his father’s business he did his work listlessly and without interest. When war broke out he seemed to wake to life, and went “most jocund, apt, and willingly.” That hurt his father more than anything. That war should be possible at this time of day nearly broke his heart, and to see David keen and enthusiastic, light-hearted and merry as he had never been at home, to hear him say that these were the happiest years of his life, simply appalled him. When it was all over David came home with a D.S.O. and the Croix de guerre, and a young girl with bobbed flaxen hair, neat legs, and an impudent smile, whom he had met in France and married in London when they were both on leave.
For one hectic month all abode together in Ravenscraig, a month of strained conversation, of long silences,
