so you knew Mrs. Swinton? She seems to have been something of a veiled prophet in Kirkmeikle. No one seems actually to have known her.”
“Ah well, you see, she didn’t visit in Kirkmeikle—she wasn’t a woman who made friends—and she always drove to Aberlour to the Episcopal Church there. A fine woman in her way, but the most reactionary old Tory I ever met. She would have turned an ordinary moderate man into a howling red Bolshevist in ten minutes. And yet you couldn’t help admiring her somehow—— Many a time she ordered me out of the house and got Barr from Aberlour or Dawson from Langtoun, but she always came back to me again. And never was a bit abashed to send for me either, that was the funny thing. Like an old woman here, Betsy Curle, who says: ‘I’ve tried Barr, an’ I’ve tried Dawson, but I’ve juist had to fa’ back on Kilgour!’ There’s a great deal in being used to a doctor; it’s natural to like a change, but when people are really ill they want back their old one.”
Lady Jane laughed as she ran up the steps and opened the door.
“There’s more in it than that,” she said. . . . “I think we’ll find the girls in the drawing-room, and tea will be ready shortly. We’re having it early to-day, for Miss Symington is bringing her nephew to see us.”
“A party!” said Dr. Kilgour. “I’m being punished for coming out so shabby. But I might wash my hands at least. . . . Yes, I know the cloak-room, thank you.”
Tea had to be in the dining-room that afternoon, and the striped curtains were drawn at the windows, and candles in red shades gave a festive look to the table. There were crackers too, red crackers, for this was Alastair’s party, and a great iced cake, stuffed not only with raisins and peel, but with threepenny bits and rings and thimbles.
Alastair had never seen such a table in his life and looked at it with grave concerned eyes, saying nothing.
“It’s either a belated Hallowe’en party or a premature Christmas party,” Nicole explained, as they took their places. “Hallowe’en we’d better call it, for we’re going to ‘dook’ for apples. Alastair, are you good at ‘dooking’?”
The child swallowed a bit of bread and butter and said, “I don’t know. I’ve never tried.”
“Alastair has hardly ever been to a party,” his aunt explained. “There are so few children of his age within reach that he rarely has any one to play with.”
But Alastair, not liking to be pitied, broke in:
“I’ve got Annie: she plays, and Mr. Beckett knows heaps of games.”
“I don’t believe, however,” Nicole said, “that Mr. Beckett has ever ‘dooked’ for apples.”
“I haven’t,” that gentleman confessed. “What exactly is the rite?”
Nicole nodded at him. “Wait and see,” she advised.
Dr. Kilgour had already drunk two large cups of tea, and was enormously enjoying the hot scones and the feather-light “dropped” scones.
“Curious eerie time, Hallowe’en,” he remarked; “cold winds, cabbage runts, red apples, and looking-glasses! You know the superstition that if a girl looks into the glass at midnight on Hallowe’en, she’ll see the man she’s to wed? A farmer’s wife near here, I’ve been told, advised the pretty kitchen-maid to go and look. The girl came back—‘Sic blethers,’ she said, ‘I only saw the maister an’ his black dowg.’ ‘Be kind to ma bairns,’ said her mistress, and before Hallowe’en came round again she was dead, and the kitchen-lass reigned in her stead. . . . What d’you think of that, Miss Symington?”
“It’s not very likely to be true,” Miss Symington said prosaically.
Lady Jane laughed. “It’s a good tale, anyway,” she said. “Pass Alastair the chocolate biscuits, Nikky. Babs dear, will you cut the cake. . . .”
Immediately after tea a small wooden tub half full of water was set on a bath-mat by the careful Christina in the middle of the drawing-room floor, the apples were poured in, and Barbara stirred them about with a porridge stick, while Nicole knelt on the seat of a chair, with a fork in her hand.
She was as serious and absorbed as a child as she hung over the back of the chair waiting an opportunity to drop the fork among the rosy bobbing apples. She chose her time badly and the fork slid harmless to the bottom of the tub.
“No good! Now, Alastair, you see how it should be done—or, rather, how it shouldn’t be done.” She knelt beside him on the chair, one arm round him. “Now—very careful. Wait until they slow down a bit and drop the fork into the thick of them. . . . Oh, well done, you almost got one there: the fork knocked off a bit of skin.”
Immensely encouraged, Alastair descended to the floor, and asked whose turn it was next. “Mr. Beckett’s, perhaps?” he suggested.
“Miss Symington first, I think,” Nicole told him, “and then comes my mother and Barbara.”
Miss Symington found herself meekly accepting the fork and mounting the chair. It was a thing she had never expected to do again in this life, but she dropped it with precision, and it was fished out sticking in a large apple.
Barbara wiped the apple and presented it to the victor.
“We’ll put Mr. Beckett next,” Lady Jane said, and Alastair nearly tumbled into the tub in his anxiety that his friend should succeed: but he failed.
“It was too difficult,” Alastair said loyally, “they were going round so fast.”
“If Barbara wouldn’t stir so lustily,” Lady Jane complained. “Let them settle. Now, you see, I’ve got one.”
Alastair secured half-a-dozen apples before he could bear to see the tub removed, and endeavoured to stow them all about his person for future consumption.
“Fireworks now,” Nicole told him.
“I must go,” said Dr. Kilgour. “I’ve stayed far too long already, but it’s been fun. Thank you for my good tea, Lady Jane. . . . I’ll send you that book, Beckett, I think it’ll interest you.”
The fireworks were produced and set off, to the almost solemn joy of Alastair. Everything was warranted harmless, but the place stank of brimstone, and when Miss Symington saw confetti bombs explode, and sparklets shed flying sparks of light in all directions, and fire balloons ascend to the ceiling, she felt that this was no amusement for the drawing-room.
She stared in sheer amazement at the almost girlish abandon of Lady Jane, who was the most reckless conductor of fireworks. “Apply a light,” she said, without troubling to read the directions, and immediately applied a light to anything she saw which had an end sticking out. And these girls, too! working so hard to make a child happy, throwing themselves heart and soul into his entertainment, not playing down to him but playing with him, and obviously enjoying it. All this trouble about a little boy! Miss Symington could not understand it. She had been brought up to believe that children should be seen, not heard. Alastair would be past bearing if he were made to feel so important. Mr. Beckett spoiled him, too; Annie said he played with him for hours, just like Lady Jane and these girls. They were all quite different from the people she was accustomed to meet—much simpler and at the same time very puzzling, full of fervour about things of no moment, and
