“Now, Kitty, look after your own things. You must be ready to leave the house with me by ten o’clock tomorrow morning. After my train has left, you can then take the carriage direct to the Greenock Station for your own journey.”
There was very little more for me to do, and the day threatened to be sixty hours long. So about noon I resolved to take a walk up Argyle Street, go through the Arcade to Buchanan, and get my luncheon at McLaren’s. It was to be a kind of farewell walk over the well known pavements and I thought if I saw a pretty brooch or bracelet made of Scotch pebbles, I would buy it as a memorial of the happy days, I had spent in Glasgow. The unhappy ones, I was determined to forget. I went into a jeweler’s on Buchanan Street, and turned over a lot of those queer ornaments made of various colored agates set in silver. They were all heavy and ungraceful, but I paid a pound for a pair of bracelets, and I wonder even today what made me do it. I have no love for what is called jewelry, it always looks barbaric to me, and this Scotch jewelry is neither pretty nor rare, nor had I ever before thought of buying it. We do 135 queer things in those hours of anxious suspense, that can find no natural outlet or relief.
As I came out of the jeweler’s with my purchase in my hand, I met Mrs. McIntosh face to face. She smiled, and put out her hand, and I could have cried with pleasure:
“Oh, how glad, how glad I am to see you!” I exclaimed. “Let us go into McLaren’s, and have a hot pie and a cup of tea, and talk about old times.”
So we did, and I told her how I had fretted over their desertion, and how pleasantly I remembered the dances with both old and young Peter, and that I never, never, had such happy evenings in any other house in Glasgow. We laughed, talked, recalled this and that, and ate our pies and drank our tea to delightful memories, that neither of us had forgotten. More than thirty-five years after this happy lunch, I was in Glasgow again, and I had a call from Mrs. McIntosh’s grandson, and an invitation from his family to come down to their seaside home to spend a few days with them. For an unavoidable reason I could not accept the invitation, but I was glad to think they had remembered me so long, because they were still young and fresh in my memory, and never will be old.
My meeting with Mrs. McIntosh made me very happy, and the day got over better than I expected, although Robert was half an hour later than usual. Every wife knows what that unusual half-hour means. It is as long as half a dozen hours; it is filled with fears and shadows of fears, about accidents possible and impossible. For it is not the troubles we are fighting, that weary and depress us; it is the ills we fear, and that never come, that give us our worst hours—the ills that have no message for us, that are passing by our dwelling even while we wait for them. I doubt if there lives a man or a woman who cannot say,
“Oh, the anxious hours I’ve spent,
For ills that never came!”
Indeed when Robert did come he was more cheerful than I expected, and after dinner he told me that he had sold the 136 furniture just as it stood to the man who made it, adding, “he will not remove it until Monday, the twenty-second.”
I smiled faintly, but could not speak, and there was a little silence. Then Robert said, “Sing us a song, Milly.”