This was at the door of the farm-house, where they lingered a moment before going in. The loud laugh of the one and testy exclamation of the other, sounded in through the open windows of the parlour, where the mistress of the house sat with her daughters; probably the entire conversation had reached them in the same way. But of that no one took any thought. This meeting and family consultation was rather “a ploy” than otherwise to all the party. They liked the outing, the inspection, the sense of superiority involved. The sons and the daughters were intent upon making their mother hear reason and putting all nonsense out of her head. She had been foolish in these last years of her life. She had brought up Tom’s bairns, for instance, in a ridiculous way. It was all very well for Robert Campbell’s son, who was able to afford it, to be sent to College, but what right had Charlie Murray to be made a gentleman of at the expense of all the rest? To be sure his uncles and aunts were somewhat proud of him now that the process was completed, and liked to speak of “my nephew the doctor;” but still it was a thing that a grandmother, all whose descendants had an equal right to her favours, had no title to do.
“My bairns are just as near in blood, and have just as good a right to a share of what’s going; and when you think how many there are of them, and the fight we have had to give them all they require,” Mrs. MacKell said to Mrs. Campbell.
“Many or few,” said Mrs. Campbell to Mrs. MacKell, “we have all a right to our share. I’ve yet to learn that being one of ten bairns gives more claim than being an only child. Johnnie ought to be as much to his grandmother as any grand-bairn she has—as much as Charlie Murray that has cost her hundreds. But she never spent a pound note on my Johnnie all his life.”
“There have been plenty pound-notes spent on him,” said the younger sister, “but we need not quarrel, for neither yours nor mine will get anything from their grandmother now. But I hope the men will stand fast, and not yield to any fancies. My mother’s always been a good mother to us, but very injudicious with these children. There’s Jeanie, now, never taught to do a hand’s turn, but encouraged in all her fancies.”
“I would like to buy in the china,” said Mrs. Campbell. “Auld china is very much thought of now-a-days. I hear the Duchess drinks her tea out of nothing else, and the dafter-like the better. You’ll be surprised when you see how many odds and ends there are about the house, that would make a very good show if they were rightly set out.”
“My mother has some good things too, if all the corners were cleared, that are of no use to her, but that would come in very well for the girls,” said Mrs. MacKell; and with these kind and reverential thoughts they met their mother, who perhaps also—who knows?—had in her day been covetous of things that would come in for the girls. This was the easy and cheerful view which the family took of the circumstances altogether. Not one of them intended to be unkind. They were all quite determined that she should “want for nothing;” but still it was, on the whole, rather “a ploy” and pleasant expedition, this family assembly, which had been convened for the purpose of dethroning its head.
CHAPTER V.
The Family Martyr.
I need not say that the feelings with which the old woman awaited the decision of her fate were of a very different character. She had lain awake almost the whole night, thinking over the long life which she had spent within those walls. She had been married at eighteen, and now she was seventy. I wonder whether she felt in herself one tithe of the difference which these words imply. I do not believe she did; except at special moments we never feel ourselves old; we are, to ourselves, what we always were, the same creature, inexhaustible, unchangeable, notwithstanding all vulgar exterior transformation. Poor old Mrs. Murray at seventy, poor, aged, ruined, upon whom her children were to sit that day and give forth her sentence of banishment, her verdict of destitution, never more to call anything her own, to lodge in the house of another, to eat a stranger’s bread—was to her own knowledge the same girl, eighteen years old, who had opened bright eyes in that chamber in those early summer mornings fifty years ago when life was so young. Fifty years passed before her as she lay with her eyes turned to the wall. How many joys in them, how many sorrows! how tired she had lain down, how lightly risen up, how many plans she had pondered there, how many prayers she had murmured unheard of by any but God, prayers, many of them never answered, many forgotten even by herself, some, which she remembered best, granted almost as soon as said. How she had cried and wept in an agony, for example, for the life of her youngest child, and how it had been better almost from that hour! The child was her daughter, Mrs. MacKell, now a virtuous mother of a family; but after all to her own mother, perhaps it would not now have mattered very much had that prayer dropped unheard. How many recollections there are to look back on in seventy years, and how bewildering the effort to remember whether the dreamer lying there is eighteen, or forty, or seventy! and she to be judged and sentenced and know her doom to-day.
She did not shed any tear or make any complaint, but acknowledged to herself with the wonderful stoicism of the poor that it was natural, that nothing else was to be looked for. Jean and her husband would be kind—enough; they would give the worn-out mother food and shelter; they would not neglect nor treat her cruelly. All complaint was silent in her heart; but yet the events of this day were no “ploy” to her. She got up at her usual time, late now in comparison to the busy and active past, and came down with Jeanie’s help to the parlour, and seated herself in the arm-chair where she had sat for so many years. There she passed the morning very silent, spending the time with her own thoughts. She had told Jeanie what to do, to prepare for the early dinner, which they were all to eat together.
“You would be a good bairn,” she had said with a smile, “if you would take it upon you to do all this, Jeanie, and say nothing to me.”