Patsy

by S. R. Crockett

At the end of the long red-tiled kitchen in which the family meals were served opened out a sort of back-kitchen to which a wooden extension had been added. It was a sort of Court of the Young Lions, where herd-boys, out-workers of the daily-wage sort, turnip-singlers, Irish harvesters, Stranryan "strappers" and "lifters," crow-boys, and all the miscellany of a Galloway farm about the end of the Napoleonic wars ate from wooden platters, with only their own horn spoon and pocket-knife to aid their nimble fingers. There was no complaint, for Glenanmays was "a grand meat house," and with the broth served without stint and the meats rent asunder by the hands of the senior ploughman, the Young Lions did very well.

If quarrels arose, the senior ploughman kept a stick of grievous crab-tree handy, and was not loath to use it. Usually, however, his voice upraised in threatening sufficed. For Rob Dickson could stir the Logan Stone with his little finger. He had escaped from the press-gang on his way from Stanykirk Sacrament, and had carried away the slash of a cutlass with him, the scar of which was plain to be seen of all, beginning as it did a little below his ear and running to the point of the shoulder-blade. This made the prestige of Rob Dickson notable, especially among the Irish. Had he not resisted authority? So of him chiefly they sought counsel and direction—so much so that old Diarmid, quick to notice what made for the good of his farm, caused Rob Dickson to act as a kind of "grieve" during the time of harvest, when the land was overrun with "Islanders," "Paddies" and "Paipes"—for the religious hatred, though never crossing the North Channel, has yet made of the Irish Catholic in Wigtonshire a hewer of wood and a drawer of water to his Presbyterian masters.

Few things Adam Ferris liked better than a look at the Court of the Lions during feeding time, when Rob Dickson rose in his place to salute him and the Young Lions bent lower over their wooden platters, "eating away like murther" lest any neighbour should get ahead of them in the race. When their own proper broth was finished and the flesh sodden in it had all been distributed, the Young Lions were made free of the debris of the high table, and never were bones cleaned with greater dispatch. Scarce did those which were saved for the rough-tailed, soft-eyed collies, waiting expectant outside, emerge with a higher polish. The herds had to see to this final distribution themselves, each feeding his own pair at different corners of the yard, ready to check growlings which might end in fights with the stern toe of a mountain boot, very proper to the purpose.

Even oftener than her father, Patsy came to Glenanmays. It was good to get away from the dear but dull house of Cairn Ferris, the schooled and disciplined servants, the gentle but constant and masterful supervision of her old nurse, Annie McQuilliam.

She loved her home. She loved all who were in it. But there was no one of her own age at Cairn Ferris, and here at Glenanmays she could dip deep in the fountain of youth. Of the four girls, Faith and Elspeth were her seniors, and she looked up to them, sitting at their feet and keeping her secrets as carefully from them as she would have done from her own father.

But the third, Jean, a tall slight girl with head coiled about by swathes of fair hair, was year for year, month for month, Patsy's own age. And neither had any secrets from the other. Hopes, fears, anticipations were exchanged, but cautiously and in whispers, like young bathers who test the chill of the sea with bent, temerarious toes. So they touched and paused, shivering on the brink of the incoming tide of life.

Ménie Garland, the youngest of all, was then a slim girl still at Stranryan Grammar School, with the softest eyes and the most wonderful voice, round-throated and full-chested even at the ungrateful age of fourteen.

Not the three brothers Garland, Fergus, Stair and Agnew, stalwart and brown, nor yet the two elder girls—not little Ménie coming singing like a linnet over the moor, brought Patsy so often that way. But the quiet talks with Jean—Jean who had learned wisdom from her sisters' love affairs, from the escapades of her brothers, and who, by the rude rule of fact, could reduce to cautious verity the fiction which Patsy had learned from her Uncle Julian's books.

So Patsy went often to Glenanmays, and without interrupting the busy round of the afternoon's duties, prescribed by Diarmid for each member of his family, she made her way to the little shed hidden by the burnside, on the green in front of which the clothes-lines were strung, and clean garments fluttered in the sea-wind, fresh and glad as ship's bunting.

"Yes," Jean Garland would say after the girls had kissed one another, "I was up early this morning—soon after dawn. Madge Blair and I had our arms in the tubs by half-past three, and she had got the pot to boil before that. So now I am ready for the ironing, and—"