Mrs Craigmyle, attentive in the corner, began to hum. No one of course heeded her. She sang a stave through any business that was afoot. She sang now, the hum developing to words:
Wash weel the fresh fish, wash weel the fresh fish,
Wash weel the fresh fish and skim weel the bree,
For there’s mony a foul-fittit thing,
There’s mony a foul-fittit thing in the saut sea.
And Ellen’s anger suddenly flared. A natural song enough for one whose home looked down on the coast villages of Finnan and Portlendie; but it was Ellen the dreamer, not the sagacious Annie or Theresa, who had read in her mother that the old lady’s was an intelligent indifference to life. She took no sides, an ironic commentator. Two and thirty years of Craigmyle wedlock had tamed her natural wildness of action to an impudence of thought that relished its own dainty morsels by itself. Her cruelties came from comprehension, not from lack of it. And had not Mrs Andrew said the word? ‘Contaminating,’ she had said. Ellen did well to be angry. She was angry on behalf of this young girl the secret of whose love was bandied thus among contemptuous women.
‘But I know, I know, I understand,’ she thought. ‘I must help her, be her friend.’ Already her fancy was off. She had climbed her tower and saw herself in radiant light, creating Lindsay’s destiny.
She looked from under bent brows at her mother, who continued to sing, with a remote and airy grace, her long fine fingers folded in her lap. She sat very erect and looked at no one, lost apparently in her song. Ellen relaxed her frown, but remained gazing at the singer, falling unconsciously into the same attitude as her mother, and the singular resemblance between the two faces became apparent, both intent, both strangely innocent, the old lady’s by reason of its much withdrawn, Ellen’s from the enthusiasm of solitary dreaming that hedged her about from reality.
Miss Theresa Craigmyle opened the kitchen door in response to the knock, and saw Francie Ferguson holding a bag of potatoes in his arms.
‘Ay, ay, Francie,’ she said, ‘you’ve brought the tatties. Who would have thought, now, there would be such a frost and us not to have a tattie out of the pit? It was a mercy you had some up.’
‘O ay,’ said Francie, ‘and the frost’s haudin’. There’s the smell o’ snaw in the air. It’ll be dingin’ on afore ye ken yersel.’
Miss Theresa took the potatoes, saying cheerily, ‘And a fine big bag you’ve given us, Francie. But you were aye the one for a bittie by the bargain.’
Francie shuffled to the other foot and rubbed a hand upon his thigh.
‘Well, ye like to be honest, but ye canna be ower honest or ye’d hae naething to yersel.’ He added, spreading a dirty paw against the door-jamb, ‘The missus is to her bed.’
‘Oh,’ said Miss Theresa. She said it tartly. The bag poised in her arms, she was judicially considering its weight. ‘Not so heavy, after all,’ she thought. Francie’s way had formerly been, ‘I just put in a puckle by guess like.’ He hadn’t been long at the school, he said, wasn’t used with your weights and measures. But his lavishness, Miss Theresa could see, was receiving a check: beyond a doubt the work of the missus. Miss Theresa was not disposed to sympathy. ‘She’s a din-raising baggage,’ she reflected, and heard Francie out with a face as set as the frost.
Francie was grumbling heartily at life. He knew fine that the potatoes were scanty measure. He did not confess it, of course, but since Miss Theresa was sure to discover, he detailed the mitigating circumstances: a sick wife, a cow gone dry, forty barren besoms of hens and a daughter soft-hearted to the point of letting all the rabbits off the snares—ay, and giving them a bit of her piece, no less, any one that looked pitiful at her. Francie had remonstrated, of course, but might as well speak to the wind blowing by. ‘A gey-like swippert o’ a queyne, she is that,’ he said, not without a certain conscious pride. And meat-whole, he added, ‘They’re a’ that—the wife as weel.’
‘She would be,’ said Miss Theresa. ‘She’s about stotting off the ground with fat. And what is’t that ails her, like?’
Francie laboured to explain.
‘Oh, a stoun’ of love,’ said Miss Theresa shortly. ‘It’ll have come out at the wrong place. Wait you.’ And laying down the potatoes, she brought a good-sized pudding from the pantry and thrust it on Francie.
‘You can’t take that before the court and swear to it that you’re hungered,’ she said, and shut the door on him.
In the parlour she repeated the conversation.
‘He does all the cooking himself, he tells me. I wouldn’t be any curious about eating it. He stewed a rabbit. “It was gey tough,” he says, “it gart your jaws wonder.”’
‘Fancy the little girl and the rabbits,’ cried Lindsay. ‘That’s the child we saw yesterday, isn’t it, Katie? With the coal-black eyes. She looked a mischief! She’s not like her father, anyway. You’d never suppose she was his daughter.’
‘You never would, for the easy reason that she’s not.’
‘I’m glad to see he calls her his daughter, it’s kindly of the body.’
‘What other could he do? You can’t give a gift a clyte in the mouth, and the bairns were her marriage gift to the craitur, as you might say.’
‘They looked so neglected, these children,’ cried Lindsay. ‘And with their mother ill. Couldn’t we give them a party? They can’t have had much of a Christmas.’
‘Oh, party away at them,’ conceded Theresa. ‘Would you really like it, Lindsay?’
Lindsay was aglow with eagerness. ‘And a Christmas tree?’ she said. ‘Oh, I know it’s January now, but I don’t believe they’ve ever seen a tree. One of those big spruce branches would do.’ She was given over entirely to her excitement. A mere child, thought Theresa. Well, and here was a change of countenance from the earlier days. The affair could not mean much when she threw it off so easily. The pale and moody Lindsay who had gone wanly about the house on her arrival, displeased Miss Theresa, who disliked a piner. Like many robust people, she resented the presence of suffering; pain, physical or mental, was an inconvenience that she preferred not to see. A Lindsay absorbed in trifling with a Christmas tree was a relief Miss Theresa might well afford herself; and she afforded it with grace.
‘Have you time, Kate,’ she asked of her niece Kate Falconer, who was spending her hour of leave at home, ‘to go round on your way back to the Hospital and bid them come?’
‘Why, yes,’