‘I’m too auld in the horn to waste muckle sorrow on the bad,’ Nannie told her in her emphatic manner; ‘every man on this earth has his chance and it’s his ain loss if he wilina tak’ it. But he may have ta’en it for a’ we are to ken. It’s no if ye win through that counts, it’s the warsle that it costs ye.’
‘But people change so, don’t they, Nannie?’ asked Julia.
‘If ye can change for the bad, ye can change for the guid.’
‘I wasn’t thinking of change in that way,’ said Julia. ‘But take papa, for instance—why, I can remember when he was as gay as a fiddle the whole day long. Life seems to turn you out quite differently from what you or any one else expect.’
‘That’s because ye get too used to it, and tak’ it as your due. Ye should bide as though to-day was mebbe going to be your last, and then ye wouldna be tethered to this earth wi’ things that graw bigger to ye than life itsel’.’
The log in the fireplace subsided and a shower of sparks shot up the soot-furred chimney.
‘I can see soldiers in the fire,’ Julia said dreamily, her eyes half-closed, ‘a whole column of them, and they fired their muskets just now.’
‘Christine’s future husband is a soldier,’ observed Emmy, sitting on the table and leaning her cheek against the window-pane. ‘Would you like to be married to a soldier? I think I would, and share, even afar off, his danger. You know, it must have been stirring to have lived long ago and seen them go out to battle to the wild crying of the pipes.’
‘It’s only auld maids wha sit on tables,’ remarked Nannie.
‘The heat makes my tooth sorer,’ moaned Emmy, sliding from the table, ‘and cold seems to help it.’
‘Poor Emmy!’ Julia said pityingly.
‘I wonder if I would mind being an old maid,’ reflected Emmy. ‘You remember poor old Tibby MacNaughton whispering to mamma, who thought she was Mrs MacNaughton, “I’m only Miss, but I’m getting ο’er it noo a wee.”
‘There’s worse things than being an auld maid,’ said Nannie, heating a shawl at the fire to wrap round Emmy’s cheek. ‘Marriage ne’er yet cured ill temper and self-mindedness. Ma graundmither used to say lang-back- seen, “Ne’er marry for siller or ye’ll carry a heart heavy as gold and always mind that ‘mithers’ laddies’ mak’ the puirest husbands.”’
‘Christine once burst into tears because she had four gean- stones on her plate,’ said Emmy; ‘it would take more than that to make me cry.’ She joined us again in the glow of firelight which linked us all together and Nannie bound her face in the shawl.
The kettle on the swee began to sing. I sat on the creepie, drowsy and content. Outside early dark had folded away the garden and the winds were beating through the glen like the coming of the Campbells. But within there was flickering flame and singing kettle, and light shining on the window-pane to signal brightly between the trees to some sacred stranger without.
BOOK ONE. CHAPTER FOUR
Visitors who came to the manse were discussed later in detail by the three of us as we sat round the fire in the evening. We saw so few people that we were inclined to magnify the faults or virtues of those who did come, either enjoying their company out of all proportion or exaggerating their foibles. There was little that evaded Emily’s astute analysis or escaped Julia’s glance, while I listened to the ecclesiastical views of Mr Urquhart, papa’s clerical friend, with an absorption I now realise was quite unwarranted.
One afternoon, some weeks after the ball, two visitors, neither of whom I had seen before, paid us a surprise call. They were Christine Strathern and her father who had come to ask my sisters to drink tea with them that afternoon. Mamma was in bed with a bad chill and papa was officiating at a funeral, so while Julia and Emmy put on their outdoor clothes, I sat alone with our guests in the parlour. I could find nothing to say to them but, while the clock’s ticking claimed the silence, I saw everything there was to note about the father and daughter.
Most kind he looked with a benignant brow. I knew his thoughts were elsewhere for he did not seem to know that I sat there, but sometimes frowned and looked about him and at others seemed to listen. She was little and fair, her small face poking forward under her bonnet. Her features were so indeterminate they made no impression upon me; they were like a wax-doll’s which have melted ever so slightly at the fire. Yet she made a charming enough picture in her brown coat with its little capes edged with fur. For the first time I was conscious that Julia’s dress was too big for me and my shoe buttons did not match. I felt myself, for some unaccountable reason, begin to blush.
He suddenly sat back in his chair until it creaked and smiled as though seeing me for the first time. Then he rose and stood looking out of the window.
‘You must be very near the loch,’ he remarked. ‘It never floods your garden, does it?’
I stood beside him in my eagerness to answer.
‘Once it did,’ I said, ‘when I was very small—a long, long time ago.’
I saw him smile, I knew not why.
‘And you,’ he asked, as though struck by some unspoken thought, ‘have you been away to school or have you always lived here?’
‘Papa taught Julia,’ I replied, ‘and Julia taught Emmy and me.’
‘You are very like—Julia,’ he said, looking down at me closely.
‘Julia and I are supposed to be like papa,’ I informed him, ‘and Emmy like what mamma used to be.’
He bowed in acquiescence. At that moment Julia entered and all was ease again. Christine rose and fluttered to her like a little chaffinch.
‘How hidden you are down here, Juley—we all but missed the gate.’
‘We had to come through the wood to find you, Miss Julia,’ he said, and the look he bent on her made my heart leap.
When Emily came down the stairs, they prepared to depart. I was harassed, not knowing whether I should shake hands with Christine or her father first; then, because I liked him so much the better, I advanced towards him.
‘But what is this?’ he asked. ‘You are surely coming with us, certainly you are. You know, I never knew until this afternoon there was another sister. There are no more of you hiding away, are there? And if they ever leave you at home again, I’ll come to fetch you myself.’
We all walked up the path together through the wood to the gate where the grasses that grew at the foot of the dyke and the mosses that clung to its rough stones were the vivid, intense green of things that grow in shaded places. The manse bum, deep as a river, fell far below in its gorge bed with a sound like eternal thunder. The sun struck wildly between the trees, and the shadows of their boles striped the ground.
It was a pleasurable sensation to sit in the carriage and pass all the places which we passed in our everyday walks and which now seemed so unfamiliar. Well-known landmarks looked inconspicuous and we came upon them so swiftly that I felt the road that afternoon was like a shrunken measuring-tape.
The kindly sun glanced on the sullen hill-tops and lit up every blade of grass growing from the tussocky dykes. In its light a sprouting ash looked unearthly beside a ploughed field and the silver birches, with their leafless fronds, were like petrified falling rain. At the sound of the wheels the bleating lambs ran unsteadily to their mothers. Emmy and I always thought lambs had such wise little faces to grow into silly sheep.
It was a drive of some eight miles to the Stratherns’ house, which stood on a hill overlooking the valley of the Dorm. The river, blue as the cold spring sky above, wound through the desolate glen between low red banks, which made me picture Jeremiah digging up his girdle on the shore of the Euphrates, of the kings who came to war against Joshua pitching by the waters of Merom, and of god-lit Elijah standing by Jordan.