“I have a few porridge in a saucer every morning,” said Milly, proudly, “and May gives me the rest of the cream after papa’s last cup of tea.”
“A few in a saucer!” Miss Jean retorted, with renewed vehemence. (N.B. The Scotch reader does not need to be informed that porridge is plural as well as broth.) “I hope, Marjory Hay-Heriot, that you may never have to give a severe account of the way you’ve brought up that motherless bairn.”
“Cream is not immoral, I hope, aunty?” said Marjory, with rising spirit.
“Immoral! Luxury’s immoral, indulgence is immoral, and they’re immoral that say a word to the contrary,” cried the old lady. “Will you tell me that to bring up a fellow-creature to self-indulgence is no a sinful act? But I never understood the ways of this generation, nor do I want to understand them. You’re all alike—all alike! from Tom’s horse-racing to Milly’s saucer of parritch—it is the same thing over again. What you please! and not what’s your duty, and the best thing for you in this world and the next. Betty, the boiled beef is too plain for these young ladies. Bring it to me, and put the chicken before Miss Marjory. A queen may eat a bit of chicken, but the boiled beef’s aye good enough for me.”
The fact was that the chicken had been added to the meal, expressly for the benefit of Marjory and Milly.
“Bairns are brought up different to what they were in my time,” Miss Jean had said to her cook, benevolently, an hour before. “That chucky’s young and tender, and they’ll like it better than the beef.”
But all this kindness had been turned to gall by the unfortunate delay. Milly took this as a simple necessity of nature—rustled a little in her chair, and ate her chicken; but Marjory resented the ungracious reception.
“I am sorry we have come to trouble you, aunt,” she said. “I would rather not have anything, thank you; I’m not hungry. The wind is cold, and it has given me a headache. If I might go and sit quiet in the drawing-room, while you finish your dinner, I should get well again.”
“The thing for a headache is to eat a meal,” said Miss Jean, alarmed. “Bring me the chicken, Betty, till I cut Miss Marjory a bit of the breast. You cannot carve; that’s why you want to go away. In my day, carving was part of a lady’s education—and cooking too, for that matter. My own mother, as good a woman as ever stepped, took lessons from Mrs. Glass in Edinburgh. I had not that advantage myself, but I know how to divide a chicken. And, Betty, bring in the apple-tart. We’ll all go up to the drawing-room by-and-bye, and before ye go ye shall have a cup of tea.”
Thus the storm fell a little, but still continued to growl at intervals; however, when the dinner was over, and May took her place in the square gable, her headache—if she had one—had disappeared. Miss Jean’s drawing-room was a curious room, stretching the whole width of the house, and wider at the back than at the other end. The narrower part was the gable. It had an end window looking out upon the street, and one on the east side, from which you could see the line of reddish rocks rounding off towards the point on which stood Pitcomlie; the white mansion-house of the present day shining in the sunshine; the old house, with its high, peaked roof and half-ruined tourelles standing up on the top of the cliff hard by, and the sea breaking in a white line underneath upon the rocks. Though she professed no sentiment, that window which commanded Pitcomlie was dear to Miss Jean’s heart.