“Mary, Mary,” answered her mother, “I fear there is no serious or spiritual interest in you. Your father spoils and humours you. And so you have grown up—not like that godly lad Alexander Gordon the younger, who when he was but three years of his age had read the Bible through nineteen times, and could rattle off the books of the Old and New Testaments whiles I was counting ten.”
“Aye, mother,” replied the lass, “and in addition could make faces behind your back all the time he was doing it!”
But the lady appeared not to hear her daughter. She continued to clasp her hands convulsively before her, and to repeat over and over again the words, “Eh, the blessed laddie—the blessed, blessed laddie!”
How long we might have stood thus in the glaring sun I know not; but, without waiting for her mother to take the lead or to go in of her own accord, Mary Gordon wheeled her round by the arm and led her unresisting towards the courtyard gate. She accompanied her daughter with the same weary unconcern and passionless preoccupation she had shown from the first, twisting and pulling the fringes of the shawl between her fingers, while her thin lips moved, either in covenant-making or in the murmured praises of her favourite child.
The room to which we were brought was a large one with panels of oak carven at the cornices into quaint and formal ornaments.
Mary went to the stairhead and cried down as to one in the kitchen: “Thomas Allen! Thomas Allen!”
A thin, querulous voice arose from the depths: “Sic a fash! Wha’s come stravagin’ at this time o’ day? He will be wantin’ victual dootless. I never saw the like——”
“Thomas Allen! Haste ye fast, Thomas!”
“Comin’, mem, comin’! What’s your fret? There’s naebody in the deid-thraws,[10] is there?”
As the last words were uttered, an old serving-man, in a blue side-coat of thirty years before, with threadbare lace falling low at the neck and hands in a forgotten fashion, appeared at the doorway. His bald and shining head had still a few lyart locks clinging like white fringes about the sides. These, however, were not allowed to grow downward in the natural manner, but were trained as gardeners train fruit trees against walls that look to the south. They climbed directly upward so that the head of Thomas Allen was criss-crossed in both directions by streaks of hair, interlaced like the fingers of one’s hands netted together. But owing to the natural haste with which Thomas did his work, these were never all seen in place at one time. Invariably they had fallen to one side or the other, and being stiffened with candle grease or other greyish unguent, they stood out at all angles like goose quills from a scrivener’s inkpot.