"I can just imagine," she said, "how jolly it must have been. The comfortable old house in the village street, all the rooms with blazing fires, and the kitchen with the flagged, uneven floor, hot and simmering with good things cooking, and the snow outside, and the horses stamping in the cold, frosty air, and the guests coming in laughing and talking. And Father so young and tall and blue-eyed, and you such a nice little white and gold bride, blue-eyed, too (no wonder there is such a lamentable lack of variety in the looks of your children; I do admire a family where some are dark, and some fair, and some red-haired—it isn't so dreadfully monotonous), and the bridesmaids in white with scarlet berries, and your little brothers all agape for good things. It must all have been so young and merry. A good send-off to a very happy married life, eh, Mother?"
Mrs. Douglas looked at her daughter without speaking, the tears slowly gathering in her eyes. Ann bent forward and laid her hand on her mother's. "Just say to me as Marget says, 'Oh, lassie, haud yer tongue!' I know that is what you are feeling like. It breaks your heart to look back. There has been so much happiness and such great sorrow; but the sad bits are as precious as the happy bits, and they all help to make the pattern. On the whole a gay pattern, Mother."
"Oh yes, yes. I have had far beyond my deserts. For many years life was almost cloudless, except for the clouds I made with my own foolish fears and forebodings. Why did nobody shake me for my silliness? Fussing over trifles, worrying about the congregation, feverishly trying to lay by for an evil day. I wonder now how I could ever have made a trouble of anything when I had your father with me and all my children about me. And I knew I was happy, but I daren't say it even to myself, in case I brought disaster. What pagans we are at heart—afraid of envious fates! And then Rosamund died.... We thought we could never be happy again—but we were. It was never quite the same again; we walked much more softly, for the ground seemed brittle somehow, and the sorrow of the world came closer to us, and we went with a different understanding to the house of mourning—but we were happy. I think I must often have been very trying to my friends during those prosperous years. They talked of 'the Douglas luck,' for everything the boys tried for they seemed to get. And the educating being over we had more money in our hands, and you got about to see the world, and we could all go abroad at a time, and I could spend some money on the house—I always made a god of my house. How proud I was of my drawing-room when we got the green velvet carpet that was like moss, and the soft blue walls and hangings, and the big Chesterfield with the down cushions! And the tea-table set out with plates and green knives, while the people round were still handing their visitors a cup in their hand, and cake and scones on a cake-stand! I was a queen and no widow.... Why, Marget, is it nine o'clock already?"
Marget gave her demure, respectful curtsey, which was so oddly at variance with her frank and fearless comments on things in general, and sat down on a chair beside Mysie.
"Ay, Mem, it's nine o'clock. It's juist chappit on the lobby clock." She directed a suspicious glance towards the table where Ann sat. "Is Miss Ann gettin' on wi' yer Life? Dinna let her put in ony lees aboot us. How faur has she gotten? Juist to yer marriage? Oh, that's a' richt. I wasna there then. But I can keep ye richt aboot what happened ony time in the last five-and-thirty years."
CHAPTER IV
"No honeymoon!"
Ann's pen was held aloft in amaze, as she looked across at her mother seated at the other side of the fire in her very own chair that had stood by the nursery fireside in long past days. Well did Ann remember the comfortable squat legs of it from the time when she had lived in that world of chair-legs and the underside of sofas which we all inhabit at the beginning of things.
Ann's mother was knitting as usual, a stocking for a long-legged grandson; but she knitted mechanically, not looking at her work, her eyes on the dancing flames, a little reminiscent smile turning up the corners of her mouth.