For the next two days it rained incessantly, and Margot sat in the little parlour of the inn talking to Mrs Macalister, or rather listening while Mrs Macalister talked, and playing draughts with Mr Macalister, who had relapsed into hopeless gloom of mind, and was with difficulty prevented from rushing home by the first train.
“The doctor said we were to keep him from the office for a good month at least, and there’s not three weeks of the time gone by. If he goes back now, what will be the use of spending all this money on travelling and keep, and what not? It will be all clean waste,” sighed the poor dame sadly. “He’s a bit fratchety and irritable, I’m free to admit, but you should not judge a man when his nerves are upset. There’s not a better man on earth than Mr Macalister when he has his health. It’s dull for a man-body to be shut up in an inn, without the comforts of home, and feeling all the time that there’s money going out. It is different when he can be out and about with his fishing and what not.—If you could just manage to amuse him a bit, like a good lassie!...”
The good lassie nodded reassuringly into the troubled, kindly face.
“I’ll do my best. I have an old father of my own, who has nerves too, and I am used to amusing him. I’ll take Mr Macalister in hand till the weather clears.”
It was not a congenial task, for, truth to tell, Mr Macalister was not a beguiling object, with his lugubrious face, lack-lustre eyes, and sandy, outstanding whiskers; nor did he in the first instance betray any gratitude for the attention bestowed upon him. A stolid glance over his spectacles was his first response to Margot’s overtures; his next, a series of grunts and sniffs, and when at last he condescended to words it was invariably to deride or throw doubt on her statements.
“Tut, nonsense! Who told you that? I would think so, indeed!” followed by another and more determined retreat behind the Glasgow Herald.
In the corner of the room Mrs Macalister sat meekly knitting, never venturing a look upwards so long as her spouse was in view, but urging Margot onward by nods and winks and noiseless mouthings, the moment that she was safe from observation.
It had its comic side, but it was also somewhat pathetic. These two good commonplace souls had travelled through life together side by side for over thirty years, and, despite age, infirmity, and “nearves”, were still lovers at heart. Before the wife’s eyes the figure of “Mr Macalister” loomed so large that it blocked out the entire world; to him, even in this hour of depression, “the wife” was the one supreme authority.
Fortunately for herself and her friends, Margot was gifted with sufficient insight to grasp the poetry behind the prose, and it gave her patience to persevere. Solution came at last, in the shape of the wheezy old piano in the corner, opened in a moment of aimless wandering to and fro. Margot was no great performer, but what she could play she played by heart, and Nature had provided her with a sweet, thrush-like voice, with that true musical thrill which no teaching can impart. At the first few bars of a Chopin nocturne Mr Macalister’s newspaper wavered, and fell to his knee. Margot heard the rustle of it, slid gradually into a simpler melody, and was conscious of a heavy hand waving steadily to and fro.
“Ha-ha!” murmured Mr Macalister, at the end of the strain. “Hum-hum! The piano wants tuning, I’m thinking!” It was foreign to his nature to express any gratification, but that he had deigned to speak at all was a distinct advance, and equal to a whole volume of compliments from another man.