“Gilian,” said she, standing before him, and the light from the window touching her ear so that, beside the darkness of her hair (for she had off her cap), it looked like a pink flower, “Gilian, can you not be telling me? Do you think I cannot guess what ails you, nor fancy something for its cure?”
He saw from the shyness of her face that she had an inkling of at least the object of his interest.
“But I cannot be mentioning it here,” he said, feebly enough. “It’s a matter a man must cherish to himself alone, and not be airing before others. I felt, in there, to have it in my mind before two men who had worked and fought and adventured all their lives, and come to this at last, was a childish weakness.”
She caught hold of his coat lapel, and fingered it, and looked as she spoke, not at the face above her, but at some vision over his shoulder. “Before them, my dear,” she said. “That well might be, though even they have not always been the hard and selfish veterans. What about me, my dear? Can I not be understanding, think you, Gilian?”
“It is such a foolish thing,” said he weakly, “a thing of interest only to the very young.”
“And am I so old, my dear,” she said, “not to have been young once? Do you think this little wee wife with her hair getting grey—not so grey either, though—was always in old maid dolours in her garret thinking of hoasts and headaches and cures for them, and her brothers’ slippers and her own rheumatics on rainy days? Oh, my dear, my dear! you used to understand me as if it had been through glass—ay, from the first day you saw me, and my brother’s sword must be sending me to my weeping; can you not understand me now? I am old, and the lowe of youth is down in its ember, but once I was as young—as young—as—as—as the girl you are thinking of.”
He drew back, overwhelmed with confusion, but she found the grip of his coat again and followed up her triumph.
“Did you think I could not guess so little as that, my dear? Oh, Gilian, sometimes I’ll be sitting in there all my lone greeting my eyes out over darning hose, and minding of what I have been and what I have seen, and the days that will never come any more. The two upstairs will be minding only to envy and to blame—me, I must be weeping as much for my sin as for my sorrow. Do I look so terrible old, Gilian, that you cannot think of me as not so bad-looking either, with a bonny eye, they said, and a jimp waist, and a foot like the honey-bee? It was only yesterday; ah, it was a hundred years ago! I was the sisterly slave. No dancing for me. No romping for Mary at hairst or Hogmanay. My father glooming and binding me motherless to my household tasks, so that Love went by without seeing me. My companions, and she the dearest of them all, enjoying life to the full, and me looking out at this melancholy window from year to year, and seeing the traffic of youth and all the rest of it go by.”
She released his lapel and relapsed, all tears, upon her chair.
“Auntie, Auntie!” he cried, “do not let my poor affairs be vexing you.” He put, for the first time in his life, an arm about her waist, bending over her, with all forgotten for the moment save that she had longed for love and seemingly found it not. At the touch of his arm she trembled like a maiden in her teens and forced a smile upon her face. “Let me go,” she said, and yet she gloried in that contact as she sat in the chair and he bent over her.