‘We’ll go to town, I suppose,’ said Theresa, who liked company.
‘Fient a town. We’ll go to Andra Findlater’s place.’
Annie and Theresa stared.
Andra Findlater was a distant cousin of their mother, dead long since. A stonemason to trade, he had lived in a two-roomed cottage on the edge of their own farmlands. When his daughters were seven and eight years old, Mrs Findlater decided that she wanted the ben-end kept clear of their muck; and Andra had knocked a hole in the back wall and built them a room for themselves: a delicious room, low-roofed and with a window set slanting.
‘But if I could big a bit mair—’ Andra kept thinking. Another but-and-ben stood back from theirs, its own length away and just out of line with the new room—now what could a man do with that were he to join them up? Be it understood that Andra Findlater had no prospect of being able to join them up; but the problem of how to make the houses one absorbed him to his dying day. It helped, indeed, to bring about his death; for Andra would lean against a spruce tree for hours of an evening, smoking his pipe and considering the lie of the buildings. He leaned one raw March night till he caught cold; and died of pneumonia.
Lang Leeb, as mistress of the big square farmhouse, had always time for a newse with her poor relations. She relished Andra. Many an evening she dandered across the fields, in her black silk apron and with her shank in her hands, to listen to his brooding projects. She loved the site of the red-tiled cottages, set high, almost on the crest of the long ridge; she loved the slanting window of the built-out room. A month after her husband’s death she dandered down the field one day and asked the occupant of the cottage to let her see the little room again. ‘It’s a gey soster,’ said she. ‘The cat’s just kittled in’t.’ Lang Leeb went home and told her daughters she was henceforth to live at Andra Findlater’s place; and her daughters stared.
But Leeb knew what she was doing. She took the cottages and joined them. Andra’s problem was, after all, easy enough to solve. She had money: a useful adjunct to brains. She knocked out the partition of Andra’s original home and made of it a long living-room with a glass door to the garden; and between the two cottages, with the girls’ old bedroom for corridor, she built a quaint irregular hexagon, with an upper storey that contained one plain bedroom and one that was all corners and windows—an elfin inconsequential room, using up odd scraps of space.
The whole was roofed with mellowed tiles. None of your crude new colourings for Leeb. She went up and down the country till she had collected all she required, from barns and byres and outhouses. Leeb knew how to obtain what she wanted. She came back possessed of three or four quern stones, a cruisie lamp and a tirl-the-pin; and from the farm she brought the spinning wheel and the old wooden dresser and plate racks.
The place grew quaint and rare both out of doors and in. One morning Leeb contemplated the low vestibule that had been a bedroom, humming the gay little verse it often brought to her mind:
The grey cat’s kittled in Charley’s wig,
There’s ane o’ them livin’ an’ twa o’ them deid.
‘Now this should be part of the living-room,’ said she. ‘It’s dark and awkward as a passage. We’ll have it so—and so.’
She knew exactly what she wanted done, and gave her orders; but the workman sent to her reported back some three hours later with instructions not to return.
‘But what have you against the man?’ his master asked.
‘I’ve nothing against him, forbye that he’s blind, and he canna see.’
She refused another man; but one day she called Jeames Ferguson in from the garden. Jeames was a wonder with his hands. He had set up the sundial, laid the crazy paving, and constructed stone stalks to the querns, some curved, some tapering, some squat, that made them look like monstrous mushrooms. ‘Could you do that, Jeames?’ ‘Fine that.’ Jeames did it, and was promptly dismissed to the garden, for his clumps of boots were ill-placed in the house. Mrs Craigmyle did the finishing herself and rearranged her curious possessions. Some weeks later Jeames, receiving orders beside the glass door, suddenly observed, ‘I hinna seen’t sin’ it was finished,’ and strode on to the Persian rug with his dubbit and tacketty boots. But no Persian rug did Jeames see. Folding his arms, he beamed all over his honest face and contemplated his own handiwork.
‘That’s a fine bit o’ work, ay is it,’ he said at last.
‘You couldn’t be angered at the body. He was that fine pleased with himself,’ said Mrs Craigmyle.
But the house once to her mind, Mrs Craigmyle did no more work. Dismissing her husband in a phrase, ‘He was a moral man—I can say no more,’ she sat down with a careless ease in the Weatherhouse and gathered her chapbooks and broadsheets around her:
Songs, Bibles, Psalm-books and the like,
As mony as would big a dyke—
though, to be sure, daughter of the manse as she was, the Bible had scanty place in her heap of books. Whistle Binkie was her Shorter Catechism. She gave all her household dignity for an old song: sometimes her honour and kindliness as well; for Leeb treated the life around her as though it were already ballad. She relished it, but having ceased herself to feel, seemed to have forgotten that others felt. She grew hardly visibly older, retaining to old age her erect carriage and the colour and texture of her skin. Her face was without blemish, her hands were delicate; only the long legs, as Kate Falconer could have told, were brown with fern-tickles. Kate had watched so often, with a child’s fascinated stare, her grandmother washing her feet in a tin basin on the kitchen floor. Kate grew up believing that her grandmother ran barefoot among tall bracken when she was young; and probably Kate was right.
So Lang Leeb detached herself from active living. Once a year she made an expedition to town, and visited in turn the homes of her three Lorimer nephews. She carried on these occasions a huge pot of jam, which she called ‘the berries’; and having ladled out the Andrew Lorimers’ portion with a wooden spoon, replaced the pot in her basket and bore it to the Roberts and the Johns. For the rest, she sat aside and chuckled. Life is an entertainment hard to beat when one’s affections are not engaged. Theresa managed the house and throve on it, having found too little scope at the farm for her masterful temper. Her mother let her be, treating even her craze for acquisition with an ironic indulgence. Already with the things they had brought from the farm the house was full. But Theresa never missed a chance to add to her possessions. She had a passion for roups. ‘A ga’in foot’s aye gettin’,’ she said.
‘She’s like Robbie Welsh the hangman,’ Lang Leeb would chuckle, ‘must have a fish out of ilka creel.’ And when Mrs Hunter told Jonathan Bannochie the souter, a noted hater of women, that Miss Theresa was at the Wastride roup, ‘and up and awa wi’ her oxter full o’ stuff,’ she was said to have added, ‘They would need a displenish themsels in yon hoose, let alane bringin’ mair in by.’ ‘Displenish,’ snorted Jonathan. ‘Displenish, said ye? It’s a roup o’ the fowk that’s needed there.’
Miss Annie too, when she gave up the farm brought part of her plenishing. Ellen was the only one who brought nothing to the household gear. Ellen brought nothing but her child; and there was nowhere to put her but the daft room at the head of the stairs that Theresa had been using for lumber.
‘It’s a mad-like place,’ Theresa said. ‘Nothing but a trap for dust. But