During her absence my grandfather shamelessly winked at my grandmother, while my grandmother shook her fist covertly at her husband. Which pantomime meant to say on the part of William Lyon that he knew how to manage women, while on his wife’s side it inferred that she would not demean herself to use means so simple and abject as plain flattery even with a “camsteary” daughter.
But they smiled at each other, not ill-content, and as my grandmother passed to the dresser she paused by the great oak chair long enough to murmur, “She’s coming round!” But my grandfather only smiled and looked towards the door that led to the still-room, pantries and so forth, as if he found the time long without his second pot of sugar ale.
He was something of a diplomat, my grandfather.
It was while sitting thus, with the second drink of harmless “Jamaica” before him, my aunt and grandmother crossing each other ceaselessly on silent feet, that a knock came to the front door.
Now in Galloway farm houses there is a front door, but no known use for it has been discovered, except to be a door. Later, it was the custom to open it to let in the minister on his stated visitations, and later still to let out the dead. But at the period of which I write it was a door and nothing more.
Both of these other uses are mere recent inventions. The shut front door of my early time stood blistering and flaking in the hot sun, or soaking—crumbling, and weather-beaten—during months of bad weather. For, with a wide and noble entrance behind upon the yard, so well-trodden and convenient, so charged with the pleasant press of entrants and exodants, so populous with affairs, from which the chickens had to be “shooed” and the moist noses of questing calves pushed aside twenty times a day—why should any mortal think of entering by the front door of the house. First of all it was the front door. Next, no one knew whether it would open or not, though the odds were altogether against it. Lastly, it was a hundred miles from anywhere and opened only upon a stuffy lobby round which my grandmother usually had her whole Sunday wardrobe hung up in bags smelling of lavender to guard against the moths.
Nevertheless, the knock sounded distinctly enough from the front door.
“Some of the bairns playing a trick,” said my grandmother tolerantly, “let them alone, Janet, and they will soon tire o’t!”
But Jen had showed so much of the unwonted milk of human kindness that she felt she must in some degree retrieve her character. She waited, therefore, for the second rap, louder than the first, then lifted a wand from the corner and went “down-the-house,” quietly as she did all things.
Aunt Jen concealed the rod behind her. Her private intention was to wait for the third knock, and then open suddenly, with the deadly resolve to teach us what we were about—a mental reservation being made in the case of Baby Louis, who (if the knocker turned out to be he) must obviously have been put up to it.