‘Ay, will there! Well I know it. Do you mind how when you were but a bairn you used to say, “Wait till I’m a man, and you’ll never have a reason for greeting again?”’
I remembered.
‘You used to come running into the house to say, “There’s a proud dame going down the Marywellbrae in a cloak that is black on one side and white on the other; wait till I’m a man, and you’ll have one the very same.” And when I lay on gey hard beds you said, “When I’m a man you’ll lie on feathers.” You saw nothing bonny, you never heard of my setting my heart on anything, but what you flung up your head and cried, “Wait till I’m a man.” You fair shamed me before the neighbours, and yet I was windy, too. And now it has all come true like a dream. I can call to mind not one little thing I ettled for in my lusty days that hasna been put into my hands in my auld age; I sit here useless, surrounded by the gratification of all my wishes and all my ambitions, and at times I’m near terrified, for it’s as if God had mista’en me for some other woman.’
‘Your hopes and ambitions were so simple,’ I would say, but she did not like that. ‘They werena that simple,’ she would answer, flushing.
I am reluctant to leave those happy days, but the end must be faced, and as I write I seem to see my mother growing smaller and her face more wistful, and still she lingers with us, as if God had said, ‘Child of mine, your time has come, be not afraid.’ And she was not afraid, but still she lingered, and He waited, smiling. I never read any of that last book to her; when it was finished she was too heavy with years to follow a story. To me this was as if my book must go out cold into the world (like all that may come after it from me), and my sister, who took more thought for others and less for herself than any other human being I have known, saw this, and by some means unfathomable to a man coaxed my mother into being once again the woman she had been. On a day but three weeks before she died my father and I were called softly upstairs. My mother was sitting bolt upright, as she loved to sit, in her old chair by the window, with a manuscript in her hands. But she was looking about her without much understanding. ‘Just to please him,’ my sister whispered, and then in a low, trembling voice my mother began to read. I looked at my sister. Tears of woe were stealing down her face. Soon the reading became very slow and stopped. After a pause, ‘There was something you were to say to him,’ my sister reminded her. ‘Luck,’ muttered a voice as from the dead, ‘luck.’ And then the old smile came running to her face like a lamp-lighter, and she said to me, ‘I am ower far gone to read, but I’m thinking I am in it again!’ My father put her Testament in her hands, and it fell open—as it always does—at the Fourteenth of John. She made an effort to read but could not. Suddenly she stooped and kissed the broad page. ‘Will that do instead?’ she asked.
CHAPTER X—ART THOU AFRAID HIS POWER SHALL FAIL?
For years I had been trying to prepare myself for my mother’s death, trying to foresee how she would die, seeing myself when she was dead. Even then I knew it was a vain thing I did, but I am sure there was no morbidness in it. I hoped I should be with her at the end, not as the one she looked at last but as him from whom she would turn only to look upon her best-beloved, not my arm but my sister’s should be round her when she died, not my hand but my sister’s should close her eyes. I knew that I might reach her too late; I saw myself open a door where there was none to greet me, and go up the old stair into the old room. But what I did not foresee was that which happened. I little thought it could come about that I should climb the old stair, and pass the door beyond which my mother lay dead, and enter another room first, and go on my knees there.
My mother’s favourite paraphrase is one known in our house as David’s because it was the last he learned to repeat. It was also the last thing she read—
Art thou afraid his power shall fail
When comes thy evil day?
And can an all-creating arm
Grow weary or decay?
I heard her voice gain strength as she read it, I saw her timid face take courage, but when came my evil day, then at the dawning, alas for me, I was afraid.