Ann and Her Mother

by O. Douglas

"I only visited between the boys' vacations, then we were all together at Uncle Bob's. What angels he and Aunt Katharine were to us! The rest of the time I paid visits, and very nearly had a bad nervous breakdown through having to be consistently pleasant for nine months at a stretch. You see, I stayed with such very different people, and the effort to adjust myself to each in turn was rather wearing. When the boys went back for the summer term, Uncle Bob took Aunt Katharine and me over to Touraine. We stayed at Tours, and made expeditions all round to the lovely old châteaux, and came home by Paris and London and finished up at Oxford for Eights' Week. Wasn't it kind of Uncle Bob? Oh, I do wish all the nice people weren't dead! Each one that goes takes so much of the light away with him.... You didn't regret taking the trip, Mother?"

"Not for a minute, except, perhaps, when Davie supped a whole tin of condensed milk and nearly perished, and your father was poisoned by a mosquito bite and was blind for two days. It did me a world of good to come across people who had never heard of the United Free Church of Scotland and who had no desire to hear about it, and who interested me enormously by the way they looked at life. Mark always used to tell me that with me journeys ended in Mothers' Meetings, and I was too much like that. I hadn't, perhaps, realised that people might be opposed to everything I thought right and proper and yet be good people. I worried a good deal about you children at home—it wouldn't have been me if I hadn't had a trouble—but your father and Davie were blissfully happy."

"You wrote splendid letters," said Ann, "telling every detail. Father hated writing letters—we used to tell him that he would rather walk five miles than write a p.c.—and his efforts were quite short and chiefly confined to statements such as: 'What a beautiful blue the ocean is'; 'the veldt is much what I thought it would be.' Davie wrote delicious letters on oily scraps of paper—oily because he was generally anointed with a lotion for mosquito bites—which invariably ended: 'Now I must finch up.' He never ceased to mourn the little mongoose that died before he could bring it home, but he did fetch a giant tortoise, which snowked about at Etterick until a specially cold winter finished it. And you brought home a gorgeous fur rug and piles of ostrich feathers. How did you collect so many presents?"

"Well, you see, part of the time your father was taking services for a minister home on leave, and the kindness and hospitality of the people were boundless. And I felt so mean about doing so little to entertain them when they turned up in Glasgow. We had a few to stay, but most of them were only asked to luncheon, and it sounded so shabby."

"Oh, but it's different out there," Ann said comfortably. "I felt I could never repay the hospitality of the people I met in India. But Robbie didn't at all take up that attitude. 'It's jolly nice for them to have you,' was what he said, and I suppose he meant that visitors from 'home' are sure of a welcome from exiles from 'home.' You are a stranger in the land of their adoption, and they want you to see the best side of things. It is different when they come back, then we are all at home together. Aha, tea at last, and Marget bringing it in!"

"Ay," said Marget, putting the kettle on the spirit-lamp, and carrying the covered dish of muffins to the brass stool in the fireplace. "Mysie went awa' doon to the village, seein' it was fresh again. She's young, ye ken, and juist deein' for a crack wi' some o' her frien's. There's a mune, and somebody'll see her hame I've nae doot. Will I licht the lichts the noo?"

Mrs. Douglas smiled at the old woman. "I think we'll have tea in the firelight, Marget. I'm glad Mysie has gone out for a little. It's a dull life up here for a young girl."

"Oh, her," said Marget, dismissing her niece and her possible dullness with a gesture. "D'ye mind, Mem, the maister never likit his tea in the dark. He said he couldna see the road to his mooth. 'Marget,' he would say to me, 'let's have some light on the subject.' That was aye what he said."

Marget stood in the firelight and looked at the two women at the tea-table.

"D'ye ken what I was thinkin' this afternoon when I was ma lane? I was thinkin' how queer it was that a' oor men-folk are awa' and three weemen's a' that's left."