Sad enough! Ay, in all truth so they had. Few but Jack could have told how sad.
“Fire away, little Ruby red,” is Jack’s rejoinder.
They are in the smoking-room, Jack stretched in one easy chair, Ruby curled up in another. Jack has been away in dreamland, following with his eyes the blue wreaths of smoke floating upwards from his pipe to the roof; but now he comes back to real life—and Ruby.
“This is it,” Ruby explains. “You know the day we went down to Inverkip, dad and I? Well, we went to see mamma’s grave—my own mamma, I mean. Dad gave me a shilling before he went away, and I thought I should like to buy some flowers and put them there. It looked so lonely, and as if everybody had forgotten all about her being buried there. And she was my own mamma,” adds the little girl, a world of pathos in her young voice. “So there’s nobody but me to do it. So, Jack, would you mind?”
“Taking you?” exclaims the young man. “Of course I will, old lady. It’ll be a jolly little excursion, just you and I together. No, not exactly jolly,” remembering the intent of their journey, “but very nice. We’ll go to-morrow, Ruby. Luckily the yard’s having holidays just now, so I can do as I like. As for the flowers, don’t you bother about them. I’ll get plenty for you to do as you like with.”
“Oh, you are good!” cries the little girl, rising and throwing her arms round the young man’s neck. “I wish you weren’t so old, Jack, and I’d marry you when I grew up.”
“But I’m desperately old,” says Jack, showing all his pretty, even, white teeth in a smile. “Twenty-six if I’m a day. I shall be quite an old fogey when you’re a nice young lady, Ruby red. Thank you all the same for the honour,” says Jack, twirling his moustache and smiling to himself a little. “But you’ll find some nice young squatter in the days to come who’ll have two words to say to such an arrangement.”
“I won’t ever like anybody so well as you, anyway,” decides Ruby, resolutely. In the days to come Jack often laughingly recalls this asseveration to her. “And I don’t think I’ll ever get married. I wouldn’t like to leave dad.”
The following day sees a young man and a child passing through the quaint little village of Inverkip, lying about six miles away from the busy seaport of Greenock, on their way to the quiet churchyard which encircles the little parish kirk. As Ruby has said, it looks painfully lonely this winter afternoon, none the less so that the rain and thaw have come and swept before them the snow, save where it lies in discoloured patches here and there about the churchyard wall.
“I know it by the tombstone,” observes Ruby, cheerfully, as they close the gates behind them. “It’s a grey tombstone, and mamma’s name below a lot of others. This is it, I think,” adds the child, pausing before a rather desolate-looking grey slab. “Yes, there’s her name at the foot, ‘Janet Stuart,’ and dad says that was her favourite text that’s underneath—‘Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so come, Lord Jesus.’ I’ll put down the flowers. I wonder,” says Ruby, looking up into Jack’s face with a sudden glad wonder on her own, “if mamma can look down from heaven, and see you and me here, and be glad that somebody’s putting flowers on her grave at last.”