Pale sunlight flooded the square, white room where, in all its dignified complexity of appurtenance, the simple meal was laid out. From the windows one saw the clear sky, the moor, its summer purple turned to rich browns and golds, and, nearer, the griffins with their shields.
Eppie was a little late in coming, and Gavan, while he and the general finished their wandering consumption of porridge and sat down to bacon and eggs, had time to observe by daylight in Miss Barbara, behind her high silver urn, the changes that in her were even more emphatic than in her brother. She was sweeter than ever, more appealing, more affirmative, with all manner of futile, fluttering little gestures and gentle, half-inarticulate little ejaculations of pleasure, approbation, or distress. Her smile, rather silly, worked too continually, as though moved by slackened wires. Her hands defined, described, ejaculated; over-expression had become automatic with her.
Eppie, when she appeared, said that she had had a walk, stooping to kiss her aunt and giving Gavan a firm, chill hand on her way to the same office for the general. She took her seat opposite Gavan, whistling an Irish-terrier to her from the door and, before she began to eat, dropping large fragments of bannock into his mouth. Her loose, frieze clothes smelled of peat and sunshine; her hair seemed to have the sparkle of the dew on it; she suggested mountain tarns, skylarks, morning gladness: but, with all this, Gavan, for the first time, now that she faced the hard, high light, saw how deeply, too, she suggested sadness.
Her face had moments of looking older than his own. It was fresh, it was young, but it had lived a great deal, and felt things to the bone, as it were.
There were little wrinkles about her eyes; her white brow, under its sweep of hair, was faintly lined; the oval of her cheek, long and fine, took, at certain angles, an almost haggard sharpness. It was not a faded face, nor a face to wither with years: every line of it spoke of a permanent beauty; but, with all the color that the chill morning air had brought into it, it yet made one think of bleak uplands, of weather-beaten cliffs. Life had engraved it with ineffaceable symbols. Storms had left their mark, bitter conflicts and bitter endurances.
While she ate, with great appetite, she talked incessantly, to the general, to Miss Barbara, to Gavan, but not so much to him, tossing, in the intervals of her knife and fork and cup, bits of food to the attentive terrier. He saw why the old people adored her. She was the light, the movement of their monotonous days. Not only did she bring them her life: it was their own that she vivified with her interest. The interest was not assumed, dutiful. There was no touch of the conscious being kind. She questioned as eagerly as she told. She knew and cared for every inch of the country, every individual in the country-side. She was full of sagacity and suggestion, full of anecdote and a nipping Scotch humor. And one felt strongly in her the quality of old race. Experience was in her blood, an inheritance of instinct, and, that so significant symptom, the power of playfulness—the intellectual detachment that, toward firm convictions, could afford a lightness scandalous to more crudely compacted natures, could afford gaieties and audacities, like the flights of a bird tethered by an invisible thread to a strong hand.
Miss Barbara, plaintively repining over village delinquencies, was lured to see comedy lurking in the cases of insubordination and thriftlessness, though at the mention of Archie MacHendrie, the local drunkard and wife-beater, Eppie’s brow grew black—with a blackness beside which Miss Barbara’s gloom was pallid. Eppie said that she wished some one would give Archie a thrashing, and Gavan could almost see her doing it herself.
From local topics she followed the general to politics, while he glanced down the columns of the “Scotsman,” so absorbed and so vehement that, meeting at last Gavan’s meditative eye, she seemed to become aware of an irony he had not at all intended, and said, “A crackling of thorns under a pot, all this, Gavan thinks, and, what does it all matter? You have become a philosopher, Gavan; I can see that.”
“Well, my dear, from Plato down philosophers have thought that politics did matter,” said the general, incredulous of indifference to such a topic.
“Unless they were of a school that thought that nothing did,” said Eppie.