“I do not propose it. On the contrary I ask you to take her. I am not easy about her. I would not like to have her left here.”
“Do you think because you could not put up with your home that nobody can put up with it?” said Mary. “Ye are just far mistaken, Kirsteen. Jeanie is a contented creature, of a quiet mind, and she’ll do very well and keep very happy doing her duty to her father. None of us want to be hard upon you, but perhaps if my mother had not had all the charge left upon her, poor body, she might have had a longer and a more peaceful life; when the daughters of the house just take their own way—”
“You did not stay long after me,” said Kirsteen, out of patience.
“I was very different,” said Mary, holding up her head. “I had my duty to my husband to think of; a married woman cannot please herself. You,—it was just your own fancy, but I had to think of Glendochart, for the Scripture says ye are to leave your parents and your father’s house.”
Kirsteen was silent and said no more.
CHAPTER XVI.
The funeral, according to the dreary custom of the time, did not take place for nearly a week, and in the meantime there was a great subdued bustle in the house of mourning. It was rather the house of what they all called mournings, or murninse, in the plural, than of grief. The mistress lay still and white in her coffin, locked up and shut away, more drearily separated from all living thoughts and ways than had she been in the grave; but the black gowns and bonnets that were intended to “show respect” to her were being manufactured everywhere, in almost every room but hers. Miss Macnab was throned in the parlour as at the time when she came to make the ball dresses, and not less absorbed in the perfection of her art and the fit of every garment, while Kirsteen looked on with something of the suppressed amusement with which a great scholar contemplates the village pedagogue who taught him his first Latin, or an artist the house-painter who first showed him the uses of the brush. How far already had all their thoughts drifted from the dead mother who was the cause of this subdued commotion, and of so much more stir and life than for a long time had been in the house! But yet there were many things that were intimately connected with that poor lady. All her little secrets were disclosed. Mary began almost immediately to clear out the drawers and wardrobes in which her mother’s old dresses and old stores of every kind had accumulated. She turned out the old pockets of which Mrs. Douglas had many, some made in silk to wear outside her gown, some of strong linen to wear below, and which were emptied out with all their countless stores, pathetically insignificant, not without many a critical remark. “There was never anybody like my mother for rubbish in her pockets. It’s just like a clatter of old iron to hear the keys jingling. And what did she ever do with keys?—with everything in Marg’ret’s hand. I cannot tell what to do with these old gowns, unless we give them to the old bodies in the clachan, for they’re past fashion and past wearing, and just rubbitch like all the rest.”
“Could you not let them be? Such as they are, they are part of my mother—at least to me,” said Kirsteen.
“Why would I let them be? Just to gather dust and cumber the earth, and fill presses that there may be need of for living folk. I am not a wasteful person, as maybe in London and among all your heaps of claes you may be tempted to be. They are little more than old rags, and what my mother could mean by keeping them, I cannot divine, but still they might be of use to the old bodies in the clachan. Just bring them all down into the parlour in your arms, Merran, and I’ll sort them there. And ye can clear out the big hanging press; it might be wanted for Miss Jeanie, or when I come over myself on a visit, for there’s very little room for hanging up a good gown in this house.”