Elizabeth and Buff were in the drawing-room when the doctor came that evening. It was a clear, cold March night, and a bright fire burned on the white hearth; pots of spring flowers stood about the room, scenting the air pleasantly.
Buff had finished learning his lessons and was now practising standing on his head in the window, his heels perilously near the plate glass. Both he and Elizabeth were in great spirits, the cloud of their father's illness having lifted. Elizabeth had been anxious, how anxious no one knew, but to-night she welcomed the doctor without a qualm.
"Come to the fire, Dr. Nelson," she said; "these March evenings are cold. Well, and did you find Father very stiff-necked and rebellious? He is going to defy you and get up to-morrow, so he tells me. His work is calling him—but I don't suppose we ought to allow him to work for a time?"
Then the doctor told her that her father's work was finished.
With great care he might live for years, but there was serious heart trouble, and there must be no excitement, no exertion that could be avoided: he must never preach again.
* * * * *
A week later Elizabeth wrote to Arthur Townshend:
"Thank you for your letters and your kind thoughts of us. Aunt Alice wasn't hurt, was she? that we didn't let her come. There are times when even the dearest people are a burden.
"Father is wonderfully well now; in fact, except for occasional breathless turns, he seems much as usual. You mustn't make me sorry for myself. I am not to be pitied. The doctor says 'many years'; it is so much better than I dared to hope. I wonder if I could make you understand my feeling? If you don't mind a leaf from a family journal, I should like to try.
"'Tell me about when you were young,' Buff sometimes says, and it does seem a long time ago since the world began.... When I remember my childhood I think the fairy pipes in Hans Andersen's tale that blew everyone into their right place must have given us our Mother. She was the proper-est Mother that ever children had.
"'Is Mother in?' was always our first question when we came in from our walks, and if Mother was in all was right with the world. She had a notion—a blissful notion as you may suppose for us—that children ought to have the very best time possible. And we had it. Funny little happy people we were, not penned up in nurseries with starched nurses, but allowed to be a great deal with our parents, and encouraged each to follow our own bent.
"Our old nurse, Leezie, had been Father's nurse, and to her he was still 'Maister Jimmie.' You said when you were here that you liked the nursery with its funny old prints and chintzes, but you should have seen it with Leezie in it. She kept it a picture of comfort, and was herself the most comfortable thing in it, with her large clean rosy face and white hair, her cap with bright ribbons, and her most capacious lap. Many a time have I tumbled into that lap crying from some childish ache—a tooth, a cut finger, perhaps hurt feelings, to be comforted and told in her favourite formula 'It'll be better gin morning.' She had no modern notions about bringing up children, but in spite of that (or because of that?) we very rarely ailed anything. Once, when Alan's nose bled violently without provocation, Mother, after wrestling with a medical book, said it might be connected with the kidneys. 'Na, na,' said Leezie, and gave her 'exquisite reason' for disbelief, 'his nose is a lang gait frae his kidneys.' In the evenings she always sat, mending, on a low chair beside a table which held the mending basket and a mahogany workbox, a gift to her from our grandmother. As a great treat we were sometimes allowed to lift all the little lids of the fittings, and look at our faces in the mirror, and try to find the opening of the carved ivory needlecase which had come from India all the way. Our noise never disturbed Leezie. 'Be wise, noo, like guid bairns,' she would say when we got beyond reason; and if we quarrelled violently, she would shake her head and tell herself, 'Puir things! They'll a' gree when they meet at frem't kirk doors'—a dark saying which seldom failed to quell even the most turbulent.
"On Sabbath evenings, when the mending basket and the workbox were shut away in the cupboard, the little table was piled with vivid religious weeklies, such as The Christian Herald, and Leezie pored over them, absorbed, for hours. Then she would remove her glasses, give a long satisfied sigh, and say, 'Weel, I hev read mony a stert-ling thing this day.'
"Above the mantelshelf hung Leezie's greatest treasure—a text, Thou God seest me, worked in wool, and above the words, also in wool, a large staring eye. The eye was, so to speak, a cloud on my young life. I knew—Mother had taken it down and I had examined it—that it was only canvas and wool, but if I happened to be left alone in the room it seemed to come alive and stare at me with a terrible questioning look, until I was reduced to wrapping myself up in the window curtains, 'trembling to think, poor child of sin,' that it was really the eye of God, which seems to prove that, even at a very tender age, I had by no means a conscience 'void of offence.'
"We were brought up sturdily on porridge (I can hear Leezie's voice now—'Bairns, come to yer porridges') and cold baths, on the Shorter Catechism, the Psalms of David, and—to use your own inelegant phrase—great chunks of the Bible. When I read in books, where people talk of young men and women driven from home and from the paths of virtue by the strictness of their Calvinistic parents and the narrowness and unloveliness of their faith, I think of our childhood and of our father, and I 'lawff,' like Fish. Calvinism is a strong creed, too apt, as someone says, to dwarf to harsh formality, but those of us who have been brought up under its shadow know that it can be in very truth a tree of life, with leaves for the healing of the nations.
"Why do some families care so much more for each other than others? Has it anything to do with the upbringing? Is it the kind of mother one has? I don't know, but I know we grew up adoring each other in the frankest and most absurd way. Not that we showed it by caresses or by endearing names. The nearest we came to an expression of affection was at night, when the clamour of the day was stilled and bedtime had come. In that evening hour Sandy, who fought 'bitter and reg'lar' all day but who took the Scriptures very literally, would say to Walter and Alan, 'Have I hit you to-day? Well, I'm sorry.' If a handsome expression of forgiveness was not at once forthcoming, 'Say you forgive me,' he warned them, 'or I'll hit you again.'
"When we were safely tucked away in bed, my door being left open that I might shout through to the boys, Sandy would say, 'Good-night, Lizbeth,' and then 'Wee Lizbeth' and I would reply, 'Good-night, Sandy. Wee Sandy.' The same ceremony was gone through with Walter and Alan, and then but not till then, we could fall asleep, at peace with all men.
"We were none of us mild or docile children, but Sandy was much the wickedest—and infinitely the most lovable. Walter and Alan and I were his devoted slaves. He led us into the most involved scrapes, for no one could devise mischief as he could, and was so penitent when we had to suffer the consequences with him. He was always fighting boys much bigger than himself, but he was all tenderness to anything weak or ugly or ill-used. At school he was first in both lessons and games, and as he grew up everything seemed to come easy to him, from boxing to sonnet writing.
"It isn't always easy to like beautiful, all-conquering sort of people, but I never heard of anyone not liking Sandy. He had such a disarming smile and such kind, honest eyes.
"He was easily the most brilliant man of his year at Oxford; great things were predicted for him; he seemed to walk among us 'both hands full of gifts, carrying with nonchalance the seeds of a most influential life.' And he died—he died at Oxford in his last summer-term, of a chill got on the river. Even now, after five years, I can't write about it; my eyes dazzle.... Three months later my mother died.
"We hardly realized that she was ill, for she kept her happy face and was brave and gay and lovely to the end. Mother and Sandy were so like each other that so long as we kept Mother we hadn't entirely lost Sandy, but now our house was left unto us desolate.
"Of course we grew happy again. We found, almost reluctantly, that we could remember sad things yet be gay! The world could not go on if the first edge of grief remained undulled—but the sword had pierced the heart and the wound remains. On that June night when the nightingale sang, and the grey shadow crept over Sandy's face, I realized that nothing was too terrible to happen. Before that night the earth