She was still nodding her head, but her lips had ceased to move. So he addressed her again:
‘How did you come to stay at home while Miss Mary took over the shop?’
Ann, without knowing it, might have been affected by the sympathy in his voice; at any rate she now answered him simply and directly:
‘Because I aye had to keep the house, you see. Mother was like me, helpless wi’ rheumatism for years an’ years, and I was the handiest in the house. She couldna bear to see Mary flinging the things aboot, so I bude to bide, and Mary gaed to help father in the shop. And she just stayed on there. I never got a chance to do anything else. I’ve just been buried alive here – buried alive.’
Her high voice quavered.
‘I dare say,’ said the minister, ‘you didn’t feel like that while your father was at home? He must have liked you to keep house for him?’
‘I aye got on fine wi’ father,’ said Ann. ‘I aye got on fine wi’ father…. But Mary wadna let me in the shop. An’ I’ll no’ let her in father’s chair. Na, I’ll no’.’
‘And yet,’ said the minister, ‘she and you are all that’s left on this earth of your father.’ He put his hand on hers. ‘You were bairns together,’ he said.
Ann’s mouth opened in amazement. But what she was going to say remained unspoken as her eye met the minister’s.
‘We’re all bairns together,’ he went on: ‘bairns frightened to believe in the love that’s behind everything, the love of our Heavenly Father. There’s a lot of love in you, Miss Ann, that has never had a chance.’
The Reverend William Murray walked down the lane much more briskly than he had come. Ann had suffered him to read ‘a chapter’, and had even asked him to put up ‘a bit prayer’. Instinctively his eye sought the pale sky, now veiled with insubstantial clouds through which the light of the declining sun was softly diffused. The firmament, he said to himself, with a new realization of the word. A firm basis. An enduring reality. It did not even enter his mind that there were people in the world who might regard his firmament as a mere illusion of beauty woven of light and air. The Reverend William Murray did not doubt the universal validity of his personal experiences.
THREE
I
Mr and Mrs John Shand, as was fitting, gave a dinner in the evening to welcome the bride and bridegroom, a family function, the only other guest being Miss Janet Shand.
The dinner itself was a success. Mabel had studied even more intensively than usual her stock of ladies’ magazines, and the table decorations, the glass, the silver, the modish little mats recommended instead of an enveloping tablecloth by Lady Fanny of The Ladies’ Fashionmonger, had all attained the high standard set by that arbiter of refinement. And had knocked Elizabeth flat, decided Mabel.
Such a satisfactory conclusion ought to have made her happy. But a hostess, a figure who carries the main burden of civilization, whose difficult task it is to invent a progressive notation for mankind’s faith in the ability of the human spirit to surpass itself, cannot ignore the more rarefied ingredients of a dinner-party, the blending of temperaments, the flavour of conversation, the pleasant aroma of expanding minds. A dinner-party that provokes quarrels is like a bouquet containing nettles, and it was undeniable that all three of them now remaining by the fireside, Mabel, John and Aunt Janet, were nettled.
John was standing with his back to the fire. He was a tall, bulky man with reddish fair hair; his features were large but harmonious, and the beard he wore dignified his appearance. In spite of the beard, however, there was something simple and childlike in his face; perhaps it was the candid expression of his blue eyes which had no eyebrows to give them depth.
‘She’s much too good for him,’ he said.
Aunt Janet laid down her knitting again. It was a custom that she should spend the night with John and Mabel after dining there.
‘You have always misjudged Hector,’ she objected.
‘I think his wife has misjudged him. A quiet, sensible girl like that: what induced her to marry him I can’t think.’
Great lump that she is, said Mabel to herself, with irritation.
A hostess is only human, and Mabel had had a trying afternoon before her dinner-party began. Ned Murray had not proved amenable. She did not mind so much his absent answers to her questions – although it is annoying to have someone answer ‘Yes, yes,’ to everything one says – but she could not stand his behaviour to the other people on the links. She would never been seen in public with him again. A man who scowls at people and mutters and turns round to glare at them is a compromising partner. And on top of that Hector had been almost rude to her.
‘Hector has a most affectionate and loving nature, and nobody is more unhappy than he is when he does wrong, poor boy,’ said Aunt Janet.
John tut-tutted. ‘He has no moral sense. And his loving nature is too promiscuous for my taste.’
‘He’s too sensitive, John, that’s all. Girls simply throw themselves at his head. He can’t help being so attractive to women.’
‘Tut!’ said John again; ‘he uses women to feed his vanity. You’re not going to tell me that that poor girl he ruined – Duncan, wasn’t she called? – threw herself at his head whenever he bought a cigarette from her? Much he cared for her! His sensitive heart didn’t keep him from clearing out to Canada when he was given the chance.’
‘But he confessed the whole story to me, John, with tears in his eyes.’
‘That was just another way of getting rid of it. A few tears are an easy price to pay. You’re too soft with him.’
Janet Shand’s short-sighted eyes filled with tears.
‘I know him, John, as well as if I were his mother.’
‘Well, well.’ John stroked his beard. ‘Let us hope his wife will take a stronger line with him.’
Aunt Janet picked up her knitting with a sigh.
‘Elizabeth is very young, of course.’
Elizabeth, she felt, was not quite the right kind of wife. There was something about Elizabeth that made one uncertain….
‘Four years younger than Hector, isn’t she?’
‘Yes, John; only twenty-two.’
‘Well,’ said John, ‘Mabel’s only twenty-three, and she has sense enough.’
‘Too much sense to marry Hector,’ said Mabel, preparing to go upstairs.
‘I think Hector’s insufferable,’ she burst out as she was brushing her hair. ‘I wish he’d go and live somewhere else. Must you take him into the mill, John?’
‘I can’t very well keep him out. He’s a Shand, after all.’
‘He’s a bad Shand.’
‘I didn’t know you disliked him so much.’
‘I detest him,’ said Mabel, brushing her long hair furiously.
‘I haven’t much use for him myself…. But I passed my word that if he settled down I’d take him on…. You needn’t see much of him, you know; and Elizabeth’s a sensible girl, don’t you think?’
‘I think,’ said Mabel, and bit the words short.
‘I’m sorry for her,’ she added. But she deserves what she’ll get, her thoughts ran on, as she brushed and brushed the long strands of her bright brown hair.
After he turned out the