With a brusque movement she put an end both to Mrs. Machell’s monologue and to her final dealings with the dresser.
“Let’s get at t’ parlour now, if you don’t mind,” she said, bustling before her into the dismantled room. She was now just as anxious to get the house put back to rights as she had wanted, earlier on, to pull it all to pieces. Subconsciously she was thinking that, when the place was tidy again, the trouble that was growing in her mind might possibly smooth out, too....
The two women had a pleasant hour together arranging the little-used furniture, over which they spent more time than was necessary out of sheer enjoyment. Mattie found Mrs. Machell an entranced auditor as she dwelt upon its merits, pointing out its beauty of shape or gloss or the elegance of its handles. Pictures and vases had their histories related at full length, succeeded by records of clocks and epics of antimacassars. Dolly fingered and valued, praised and exclaimed, wondering to herself all the time how many of the precious objects would come her way at the sale.
“I’ll have a bad time, I doubt, before I’ve settled what we’re to take!” Mattie laughed, handling her treasures more and more fondly under Dolly’s appreciation. “I thought I’d hardened my heart to part with some of them, this morning, but now that I’m looking at ’em again, I’m not so sure! There’s no sense, though, in taking a chair-leg more than we’re obliged. It’ll cost enough, as it is. I doubt, anyhow, I’ll have to make up my mind to leave pictures and knick-knacks behind.”
Dolly’s heart leaped as she looked at a pair of bright pink vases, trimmed with an excellent imitation of sugar icing, seeing them already as her very own.
“Photo-frames and such-like won’t pay for the taking, either,” Mattie was saying hesitatingly, “though wild horses ’emselves wouldn’t make me part with the photos. I’ve a regular stack of ’em as They’ve sent me, year in and year out, especially of the children. Some folks’d say it was nonsense taking photos along when you’re going to see the folks themselves, but I’ve grown that used to them I’ve got to have them.”
She remembered now that she had not yet spent the hour with the grandchildren which she had promised herself earlier, and proceeded to take it, setting them forth to Dolly with that sense of proud showmanship which the first generation almost invariably seems to feel towards the third. It was impossible to believe, listening to her vivid description of its looks and ways, that she had never yet set eyes upon a single member of it. Smiling and happy, she had found for herself again that first ecstasy which she had felt upon awakening from her dream. Canada was again what she had thought it to be, as she laughed and talked, wearing always that inward look of those who ponder upon hidden treasure.
“Luke’s youngest, they say, is as like me as a couple of peas, and Joe’s second takes after Kirkby. He’s a bit darker, perhaps, and he’s brown eyes instead of blue, but there’s no mistaking where he comes from, either in looks or manners. Little Eric, they call him, after his mother’s father, though I don’t know why they need go out of the family when there’s so many good names shouting. I’m right set upon little Eric.... Maggie’s May frames something grand at the piano, and Ellen’s Sally shapes to have a voice.... Luke’s eldest’s getting on for twelve, and can manage a motor-mower ... leastways, they say he can, though I doubt they’re putting it on.”
“Jessie can’t abide Canadian children,” Dolly cut in, introducing that unpleasant person for the first time into the parlour. “Real nasty about ’em, she is. She couldn’t abide English children, either, if it comes to that, judging from what parents and such-like used to say about her when she taught school. But Canadian children, she says, are that uppish and wild there’s no doing anything with them. Like savages, you’d think they were, if you swallowed everything you heard from Jessie. Fine children to look at, she says, and healthy and all that; but that noisy and full of beans they fair make an English person tired.”
Mattie had a horrid vision of a narrow and crowded house, with Kirkby and herself hemmed in by leaping, shouting children. She herself had once rather rejoiced in noise, though Kirkby had always hated it; but she was not so sure now that, after all these years of silence, she would not hate it, too. Luke had two other boys besides young Joe of the motor-mower, as well as a little girl just over a year old. He was fond of company, too, and was never so happy as when extending hospitality. Also he had that piano, she remembered with dismay, upon which both relatives and friends came eagerly to practise....