She simply demanded that Chirstie wear that conspicuously beautiful outfit the second Sabbath to come, when the winter’s crop of babies was to be formally dedicated to the Lord. Chirstie went suddenly crimson, standing there, blankly, fingering the feather on her neck.
Mrs. McNair insisted on an answer.
“Oh!” cried Chirstie meekly, her eyes appealing to her mother-in-law. “Our baby—” she began to say it wasn’t to be baptized, but she had to turn away. She started for her room, to take the dress off.
The girl was so sensitive, Isobel started to say—But Barbara called after her to come back, breaking forth into the broadest Glasgow accent. They weren’t to suppose she didn’t understand! She had known it all the time. That innocent laddie had told her, unconsciously. (More innocent then than now, she might have added, if she had known.) And she thought, indeed, that Chirstie had great reason for shame, and not of her bonnie wee Johnnie, either, but of her own heathen ingratitude. Chirstie lifted her face upon hearing that, from the towel upon which she was wiping it, and Mrs. McNair demanded that moment if she expected the Lord to sit studying the almanac all the year for her convenience. She was sure that if she had been in Chirstie’s place, and the Lord had given her a son, she wouldn’t have gone sulking, no matter what the month might have been. Was it not better to have one any time than none at all? she demanded, with such a passion of regret for her own childlessness that Chirstie was left speechless. She had never imagined anyone speaking in such a strain. She looked at her mother-in-law, who seemed mildly amused. The idea that she had been deriding the Lord’s chronological calculations was in itself sobering to one of so tender a conscience. The giver of all her good clothes went scolding away at her, till she promised at least to wear the new things the week after the baptisms.
Chirstie kept thinking of the scolding as she drove in the wagon of that harassed man, Alex McNair, with her stepmother and her mother-in-law, to see the new house that was getting about ready for her occupancy. Wully had to lay a plank for a walk hurriedly from the wagon to the house, for the new Mrs. McNair still wore such boots that one step in the thawing black mire would have ruined them. It was always that way. That little insignificant-looking person refused to adjust herself to the new country. She just sat tight, and let the great significant country adjust itself to her as best it might. The house towards which she neatly walked was not perhaps, to disinterested eyes, a very inviting place. But to Wully and Chirstie it was their very palace of love. It stood a story and a half high on a slight rise of ground, a decent way back from the path that has since become one of the nation’s highways, built of shining new lumber, the tall grass around it trampled into the black ground littered with bits of boards and yellow curling shavings. From the front door, just hung that day, the women looked down over fifteen miles of prairie, an occasional plowed square humanizing the distances, which sloped with so gentle an incline that one standing on any one of the acres could scarcely have told it was not level. From the windows of the parlor the women saw the plot that Wully’s father had insisted on breaking the year before, along one side of which the maple seeds he had planted were presently to appear as slight as spears of sprouting grass. From the kitchen window they saw a row of elms as thick as broomsticks, which Wully had brought the fall before from the creek. In a long furrow there, the walnut trees that were to make gunstalks for the World War were still waiting in their shells for a warmer sun to bring them forth, and to the north the trench was ready for the red and white pines that are nowadays a pride to the family. Chirstie pointed to the piece of ground that was to be fenced for a garden. Whereupon Mrs. McNair asked anxiously if the fence was to be painted white.
Wully heard his father-in-law move impatiently behind him, and, though he hadn’t before thought of such a thing, he answered that it would be painted white as soon as he had the money for the paint. The stepmother-in-law sighed with relief, and began inspecting the kitchen closet. Wully pointed out with malicious glee the finish of the cupboards, making light of the expense and difficulty of building, while his father-in-law poked about glooming, refusing to admire the conveniences which the little woman coveted with so gentle a simplicity. He still had a grudge against that man, and aired it whenever he could without Chirstie seeing him. He knew McNair disapproved of the size of the windows. But what business of that man’s was it what his windows cost?
The Sabbath of the Communion Wully unabashed, and shame-filled Chirstie wearing the appealing old coat of her mother, and the bedecked wee Johnnie went to church for the first time since the baby’s birth. But let no one suppose that they attracted much attention. What chance for consideration could even the most unholy child have had that morning, sitting in front of the Glasgow fashions in the person, or on the person, of his stepgrandmother? Wasn’t she wearing a most stunning little hat with a dark green feather curling down over a chignon of red hair, sitting there in the pew just behind Mrs. McLaughlin, who wore with grace and satisfaction the bonnet a lamenting friend in Ayrshire had made for her in fifty-four, and just in front of Mrs. Whannel, whose headpiece was conceived in the spring of fifty-eight, and across from Mrs. McTaggert, who had bought somewhat more expensively than was necessary in sixty-one, but who, considering the well-preserved condition of her purchase, had really nothing to regret. One skilled in millinery might have reckoned from the mother’s bonnets more or less accurately, the year of each family’s immigration, although the array of such young girls as were not away at school would have slightly vitiated his calculations. And now, this Sabbath morning, there sits down in this world, so remote from others, a Metternich jacket, a cape-like affair trimmed with fur, and a skirt spreading gracefully, but without hoops, a floating veil, and gloves embroidered in faint gray! If wee Johnnie had been baseborn twins, he could never have attracted more than a stray thought to himselves on that occasion.