"It's a game that never palls," Ann said; "planning what you would do if you got a sudden fortune. I'm quite sure the real owners of riches don't get half as much pleasure out of their wealth as the paupers who have it only in dreams. And what followed after the large breakfast? Did you spend the whole day in the assembling of yourselves together? Attending the Assembly is like some sort of insidious drug: the more you do it, the more you want to do it. Since I have been your companion at its deliberations I have found that I can sit in it quite happily for hours. You wouldn't miss the Assembly week for a lot even now, would you? It is odd how the sight of ministers in the mass seems to do you good. Absolutely you get quite sleek by merely looking at them. Do you remember when you were so very ill in London you kept worrying Sir Armstrong to know if you would be better for the Assembly, and the poor doctor said to Mark, 'Your mother is very anxious to go to some assembly; but she couldn't dance?'"
Mrs. Douglas laughed and then sighed. "I enjoy it still," she said; "but the Assembly Hall is a place of ghosts to me now. There are so few of the faces that once I knew. I look up at my old place in the Ladies' Gallery—I never aspired to the Moderator's Gallery in those days. I always sat in the same seat, and then your father knew where to look up and smile to me during debates. I often sat very nervous, for he had a dreadful way of always being on the wrong side—I mean by that the unpopular side—and it wasn't nice for me to hear him shouted at. I thought he cared far too little for what people thought; he had no interest in which way the cat was going to jump; he never thought of taking the safe course simply because it was safe and would pay best. I remember after one stormy debate in which he had held the most unpopular view a lady beside me said, 'Can you tell me who that unpleasant minister is?' and I said, 'I think he comes from Glasgow.' But my sins found me out almost at once, for, on his way out to vote, your father stood and grinned up at me, looking like a mischievous schoolboy who knows he's going to get a row, and I had to smile at him—and the lady beside me glared at us both suspiciously."
"It was odd," said Ann, "that in public he was such a fighter, for in his home life, if ever man carried in his right hand gentle peace, it was my Father. There was a time, when Mark and I first grew up, that we thought we knew infinitely more about everything in heaven and earth than our parents. There was a time when Father's beliefs filled me with a kind of tender scorn: they were so hopelessly out of date. I used to argue with him in my pert way that Free Will and Election could not be reconciled, and he would reply, with a twinkle, 'Ann, I sometimes think you are a very ignorant creature. Give me another cup of tea.' I remember Father's innocence amused us very much. He was so far away from the ugliness and the vulgarity and the idiotic smartness of modern life. He once heard Robbie singing an absurd song, and asked him to repeat the words—I forget what they were, something very silly and rather funny about:
'How often to myself I've said,
Cheer up, Cully, you'll soon be dead,
A short life but a gay one.'
Father listened and said gravely, 'If the wretched fellow had had any hope of an after life...'
"And we said, 'Isn't Father quaint!'"
"And when he was no longer there to stand up for his old-fashioned beliefs there wasn't one of us but would have died gladly for those same beliefs because they had been his.... When Robbie got the cable of his death he wrote from India: 'The best man in Scotland is gone—now he knows what his beliefs meant to all of us'; and Davie, that advanced young thinker, once came back from hearing a preacher of renown, and said fiercely, 'No, I didn't like him. He sneered at the Shorter Catechism.'"
CHAPTER XVIII
"Here's a nice state of things," said Ann.