Janet was left with nothing. Alec had never taken out insurance of any kind, and both husband and wife had lived up to every cent of income. There were many bills to be paid—caterer’s bills; dressmaker’s bills—useless debts, most of them, and the furniture of Kensington Villa had to be sold to pay them. Aye, Janet was suffering and paying the price of folly, and the double load of sorrow and recrimination was all that she could bear.
The huge tidal wave that swept McKenzie and his men to their graves in the chilly depths of the Atlantic did more than that. It swept the McKenzies from comparative affluence into stark poverty. It also cleared from Janet’s eyes the scales of false pride, and she was not too proud to go down and mourn with poor McGlashan’s widow ere she left Glasgow and her fair-weather friends.
The bos’n’s wife would get along. An older son was out earning a little, and Joak would have to do his bit also. Aye, she would manage. She had a few pounds laid by and wouldn’t starve. Poor Joak was “greeting” when Donald bade him “Good-bye.” “I’ll meet you again some day, Joak,” he said, “and I’ll write you, never fear!”
The management of Sutton’s had sent a cautiously-worded letter of regret, and took the liberty of “enclosing our check for fifty pounds, which no doubt would be useful.” They presumed, with the good salary that Captain McKenzie had enjoyed, that Mrs. McKenzie would have prepared for possible contingencies, and that she would be comfortable.
The fifty pounds represented Janet’s sole capital after all debts had been paid, and with this in her purse and a few boxes and trunks of personal clothing, she and Donald vanished from the ken of the aristocratic denizens of Maxwell Park. The tired-looking, dull-eyed woman in deep mourning who left the suburb that cold January morning, had but little resemblance to the haughty and conceited Jeanette McKenzie of a month before. Janet had commenced to learn a new lesson—a lesson which is oft intoned in cold Scotch kirks, “Beware of sinful pride! The pride of thine heart has deceived thee and though thou shouldest make thy nest as high as the eagle, I will bring thee down from thence, saith the Lord!” Aye, better the sight of eyes that see humbly than the blindness of vanity and desire!
Mother and son landed in a sea-port town not fifty miles from Glasgow and Janet rented a small furnished house in a modest street. The neighbors wondered who the “stylish lookin’” newcomers were, yet they evinced no great surprise when a printed placard was hung up in the front window with the legend, “Furnished Lodgings.” Buchan Road gossip sized the matter up in a few words. “Weedah-wumman left sudden-like an’ naethin’ pit by!” Such incidents were common in that locality.
And thus they lived for a space. The mother relapsed to the honest toil of her former days and just “managed” and no more to make ends meet, and Donald earned a few shillings per week as boy in the office of a local ship-yard. Both worked hard and were happy, and life went along uneventfully for two years.
Then came Mrs. McKenzie’s decision. Donald was not getting ahead in the shipyard office. The boy was restless and found it hard to apply himself to ledgers and journals. He had no liking for a clerical life, and he was reaching the age where he did not know what he wanted to do. Mrs. McKenzie had her secret ambition to see her son an architect, but in her present circumstances she couldn’t afford it. There was one source of possible assistance she had never appealed to. She would try it right away.
On a drizzling spring day, the mother, still comely and dressed in black, accompanied by Donald—a bit taller, perhaps, but unchanged in features, and clad in carefully brushed clothes and with a clean white collar on and shining black boots—stopped in front of an office building in Bothwell Street, Glasgow. A brass plate bore the legend they sought—“D. McKenzie & Co., Ship Owners & Ship Brokers.”