“But consider, Mrs. Lyon,” he went on tranquilly, while my relative stood in the road and eyed him with bitter scorn, “there’s my wife, now she’s up early and late. She’s scrubbing and cleaning, and all for what?—just that yonder pack o’ children o’ hers should go out on the road and come trailing back in ten minutes dirtier than ever. She runs to Shepstone Oglethorpe’s to give his maid a help in the mornings, all for a miserable three shillings a week. She takes no rest to the sole of her foot, nor gives nobody any either! Poor Bridget—I am sorry for Bridget. ‘Take things easier, and you will feel better, Bridget,’ I say. ‘Trust in Providence, Bridget!’ ‘Think on what the Doctor said three Sundays but one ago from the very pulpit.’ And would ye believe me, Mistress Lyon, that poor woman, being left to herself, threw all the weights at me one after the other—aye, and would have thrown the scales too if I had not come away!”
Here Connoway sighed and stretched himself luxuriously, rubbing the stiff fell of his hair meditatively as he did so.
“Ah, poor Bridget,” he continued, with pathos in his voice, “Bridget is so dreadfully unresigned, Mistress Lyon. Often have I said to her, ‘Be resigned, Bridget—trust in Providence, Bridget!’ But as sure as I point out Bridget’s duty, there is something broken in our house!”
“Pity but it was your head, Boyd Connoway! Come away, child!” cried my grandmother, “quick—lest I do that man an injury. He puts me in such a state that I declare to goodness I am thankful I have not a poker in my hand! Now there’s your grandfather——”
But she went no further in the discussion of her own lesser household burden. For there right in front of us was the great gate, the battered notice to trespassers, the broken standard on which the padlock, now removed, had worn a rusty hollow, and in its place we read the little white notice concerning the hours at which the mistress of the mansion could receive visitors.
“Oh, the poor young things!” said my grandmother, her anger (as was its wont) instantly cooling, and even Boyd Connoway dropping back into his own place as perhaps a necessary factor in an ill-regulated but on the whole rather bearable world.
The gate creaked open slowly. My grandmother drew herself up. For did she not come of the best blood of the Westland Whigs, great-granddaughter of that Bell of Whiteside, kinsman of Kenmure’s, who was shot by Lag on the moor of Kirkconnel, near to the Lynn through which the Tarff foams white?
For me, I was chiefly conscious of the bushes and shrubs on either side the avenue, broken and trampled in the tumultuous rush of the populace on the day of the discovery. I felt guilty. By that way Gerty Greensleeves and I had passed, Gerty very close to my elbow. And now, like the rolling away of a panorama picture in a show, Gerty Greensleeves, and all other maids save one, had passed out of my life. Or so, in my ignorance, I thought at the time.
For no woman ever passes wholly out of any man’s life—that is, if he lives long enough. She steals back again with the coming of life’s gloaming, with the shadows of night creeping across the hills, or the morning mists swimming up out of the valley. Sometimes she is weeping, but more often smiling. For there is time enough, since the man last thought of her, for all tears to be wiped from her eyes. But come she will. Yet sometimes it is not so. She does not smile. She only stands on the threshold of a man’s soul with reproachful eyes, and lips drawn and mute. Then it is not good to be that man.
But in those days, being a boy, carried along in the waft of my grandmother’s skirt, I knew nothing about such things.