“And when the great arrive to call,” said Aunt Jen, with sour insight, “you, mother, will stop the churning just when the butter is coming to put on your black lace cap and apron. You will receive the lady of the manse, and Mrs. General Johnstone, and——”
“And if I do, Jen,” cried her mother, “what is that to you?”
“Because I have enough to do as it is,” snapped Jen, “without your butter-making when you are playing the lady down the house!”
Grandmother’s black eyes crackled fire. She turned threateningly to her daughter.
“By my saul, Lady Lyon,” she cried, “there is a stick in yon corner that ye ken, and if you are insolent to your mother I will thrash you yet—woman-grown as ye are. Ye take upon yourself to say that which none of your brothers dare set their tongue to!”
And indeed there is little doubt but that Mary Lyon would have kept her word. So far as speech was concerned, my Aunt Jen was silenced. But she was a creature faithful to her prejudices, and could express by her silence and air of injured rectitude more than one less gifted could have put into a parliamentary oration.
Her very heels on the stone floor of the wide kitchen at Heathknowes, where all the business of the house was transacted, fell with little raps of defiance, curt and dry. Her nose in the air told of contempt louder than any words. She laid down the porridge spurtle like a queen abdicating her sceptre. She tabled the plates like so many protests, signed and witnessed. She swept about the house with the glacial chill which an iceberg spreads about it in temperate seas. Her displeasure made winter of our content—of all, that is, except Mary Lyon’s. She at least went about her tasks with her usual humming alacrity, turning work over her shoulder as easy as apple-peeling.
Being naturally lazy myself (except as to the reading of books), I took a great pleasure in watching grandmother. Aunt Jen would order you to get some work if she saw you doing nothing—malingering, she called it—yes, and find it for you too, that is, if Mary Lyon were not in the house to tell her to mind her own business.
But you might lie round among grandmother’s feet for days, and, except for a stray cuff in passing if she actually walked into you—a cuff given in the purest spirit of love and good-will, and merely as a warning of the worse thing that might happen to you if you made her spill the dinner “sowens”—you might spend your days in reading anything from the Arabian Nights in Uncle Eben’s old tattered edition to the mighty Josephus, all complete with plans and plates—over which on Sundays my grandfather was wont to compose himself augustly to sleep.
Well, Miss Irma and Sir Louis came to my grandmother’s house at Heathknowes. Yes, this is the correct version. The house of Heathknowes was Mary Lyon’s. The mill in the wood, the farm, the hill pastures—these might be my grandfather’s, also the horses and wagons generally, but his power—his “say” over anything, stopped at the threshold of the house, of the byre of cows, at the step of the rumbling little light cart in which he was privileged to drive my grandmother to church and market. In these places and relations he became, instead of the unquestioned master, only as one of ourselves, except that he was neither cuffed nor threatened with “the stick in the corner.” All the same, this immunity did not do him much good, for many a sound tongue-lashing did he receive for his sins and shortcomings—indeed, far more so than all the rest of us. For with us, my grandmother had a short and easy way.