Ann and Her Mother

by O. Douglas

"I wonder, too," said Ann, "with the world in the state it is in. But I do agree, there is nothing so trying as a facetious person! I wish I hadn't such high spirits. No wonder, Mother, that you are such a depressed wee body: to have had a husband and family who were always in uproarious spirits was enough to darken anybody's outlook on life. The first thing I remember about Glasgow is that you had a curly yellow coat and a sort of terra-cotta bonnet."

Mrs. Douglas' face lit up with a smile that made her look almost girlish. "That coat! I do remember it well. It was 'old gold' trimmed with plush of the same shade. My father bought it for me. I met him one day in Princes Street, and I must have looked very shabby, for he looked me up and down and said, 'Nell, surely the Sustentation Fund is very low,' and he took me into Jenner's, and got me that coat and bonnet. He got you a coat, too, and a delicious little astrakhan cap like a Cossack's. You were the prettiest thing in it, for your hair curled out under it like pure gold."

"I must have been a picturesque child," said Ann complacently, "for several times, you remember, artists asked me to sit for them." Then she laughed. "But I needn't boast about that, for my pride once got a severe fall. One day, at Etterick, we came on an artist (he turned out to be someone quite well known) sketching up the burnside. I obligingly posed myself in the foreground, and—he gave me sixpence to go away. And I took it!"

Mrs. Douglas smiled at the reminiscence, but her thoughts were still with the "old gold coat."

"It always pays to get a good thing. That coat wore and wore until everybody got tired of seeing me wear it, and it never really got very shabby—the bonnet, too."

"I suppose you would be about thirty," Ann said. "You said to us walking down to church one day that you were thirty, and then you said you would need to get a new bonnet. I looked at you and thought to myself: 'I shan't say it, but I'm quite sure it isn't worth while for Mother to get a new bonnet; she can't live much longer.' I was shocked to hear that you had attained to such a great age, for I thought at thirty one was just toppling into the grave. Wasn't Glasgow a great change from Kirkcaple? 'East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.'"

"Oh, we hadn't much time to worry over East and West; we had our work to do. We were very fortunate in getting a suitable house in a nice district. We might have been miles from a city in that road of decent grey houses, each in its own quiet garden. And the gardens all opened into an avenue of beautiful trees that had once been the entrance to the big house of the district. We couldn't have been more happily situated, and it was a comfortable house with good-sized rooms and—what your father specially prized—a well-placed staircase with shallow steps. It also contained what we had never had before, a basement flat; but it wasn't as bad as it sounded, for the house was built on a slope, and the kitchen, though downstairs, was on a level with the garden."

"We children didn't mind the basement," said Ann; "it was a joy to us, full of funny corners, excellent for hide-and-seek. One door had the legend Dark Room painted on it, and was an endless source of speculation. Could the former tenant have been a Nihilist? or a murderer? In the bright hours of the morning we liked to dally with those thoughts, but when the shadows lengthened we told each other that he was only a man who tried to develop his own negatives. We never felt in the least cabined or confined in Glasgow. It was a joke against me for long that when we first arrived I reproved Mark and Robbie for walking on the garden wall, saying, 'We must be very genteel now that we live in Glasgow.'"

"You didn't live up to that counsel of perfection, my dear. Anything less genteel than your behaviour! One of the first things you and Mark did was to attend a wedding in the avenue—and when I say 'attend,' I mean you stood outside the gate of the house with a lot of other abandoned children and shouted, 'Hard up!' when the bride and bridegroom left without scattering pennies. Jeanie Tod nearly wept with shame when she told me of it."

"I remember Jeanie Tod," said Ann. "She was small, but very determined. She had a brother a sailor, and used to let me read his letters. One of them described the writer riding in a rickshaw, and finished: 'By Jingo, dear sister, you should have seen your Brother that Day.' ... It must have been difficult for you, Mother, to leave friendly Kirkcaple and go to a great city where you knew almost no one. Weren't you lonely at first?"