“Oh, she will just bide on,” said Marion; “she has always expected it. She has her friends. There’s the church quite near, and she’ll go to all the prayer meetings. She aye says she has no time as long as we’re here, but that when we’re away, she will go to them, every one. But I think she’ll change her mind,” said the girl with a laugh, “and go out to her tea.”
Archie had caught his father’s eye, and was much confused. “It’ll not be any the worse for her?” he said.
Before the question could be answered, Mrs. Brown came in, a little flushed but beaming. “The dinner is just ready,” she said. “Bairns, did I not tell you to take up your papaw to the drawing-room till the cloth was laid. And you’ll be hungry, Jims, just off your journey.” She spoke as if she supposed him to have come straight from India without any chance of a meal upon the way.
The dinner was a curious mixture of what was excellent and what was bad. The hotch-potch, for which Mrs. Brown apologised, was excellent. It is a soup made with lamb and all the fresh young vegetables, which, in the characteristic Scotch cuisine, supplies the place in summer of the admirable broth. Rowland had never tasted anything better; but it was followed by what Mrs. Brown called a “made dish,” which was as bad as the other was excellent, but of which the good woman was very proud. “You see my hand has no forgotten its cunning,” she said, with a smirk across the table; and Rowland then recollected with dismay that in the distant ages, almost beyond his own recollection, Jane, his wife’s elder sister, had exercised the craft of a cook.
“Weel,” she said, after the meal, herself taking him upstairs to the glories of the drawing-room, “you’re satisfied? you would be ill to please if you were not, with these two bonnie bairns. And just as good as they are bonnie—Archie as steady as a rock, aye in to the minnint, though thae student lads are no that careful. Eh, Jims, what a pleasure it would have been to my poor sister to have seen them grown up like that.”
This softened, even while it exasperated Rowland—for no doubt poor Mary’s imagination, like her sister’s, could have gone no further than the pert intelligence of Marion and the steadiness of her boy. “I should have liked better if they had been kept to some occupation,” he said, “not suffered to lead useless lives.”
“Eh!” said the aunt in astonishment, “useless! but what would ye have them to be, and you a rich man? You wouldna have had me bring them up like a puir body’s bairns? They are just as well conditioned as can be, bidable, and pleased with what’s set before them. I’ve had no trouble with them: they will never have given me a sore heart but when they’re taken from me—Oh, I’m no saying a word! It’s your right and it’s your duty too. They maun go, and I’ve aye counted upon it—and God’s blessing’ll go with them. They’ve never given me a sleepless night nor a day’s trouble. Oh, man, be thankful! There’s no mony that can say as much. The first sore heart they’ll give me is when they go away.”
The good woman sat down upon one of the many gilded and decorated chairs of which she was so proud, and put her handkerchief over her face as she might have done the apron which she was no longer happy enough to wear, and lifted up her voice and wept: “My hoose will be left to me desolate,” she said, “me that has been, though with none of my ain, a joyful mother of children. But I’ll no say a word. It’s just what I’ve known would happen this many and many a year. And it’s my pride and pleasure to think that I give them back to you, everything that two good bairns should be.”
Rowland was silenced once and for all. He had not a word to say to the woman thus deeply conscious of having fulfilled her trust. There was something pathetic in the thought that the two children who were so unsatisfactory, so disappointing and incomplete to him were to this kind woman the highest achievement of careful training, everything that boy and girl could be, and that their mother would have been of the same opinion had she lived to see this day.