But the unceremonious porter is apparently unwilling to gratify me so far, having, in his preparations for the sale, pushed a tall half-tester bedstead right in front of my view of the chest of drawers and bookcase.
This alteration has brought to light an old armchair among a crowd of odd window-poles and bed-bottoms, a kind of bewilderment and shyness in its wrinkled features, as if it hardly felt at home in this nineteenth-century saleroom, rubbing shoulders, so to speak, with pompous old sideboards, and gouty old sofas and stuff-bottomed chairs, and wishing it were back to the earthen cottage floor again. From its shape and the colour of its wood, it looks more than a hundred years old. My Aunt S——, who was a paralytic, had just such a chair, which she sat in for ten years before she died. It had belonged to her mother’s mother; and she took great pride in averring that Burns—who, her own mother told her, was a crony of her father’s—had many a time sat in it. I think I see herself sitting in it at this moment, with her great black piercing eyes, and hear her clever critical tongue wagging as of old.
This ancient armchair, stuffed away amid the dust and lumber of the saleroom, touches my feelings more nearly than any other object joined together with hands. Its low, firm, but narrow seat, its solid curved arms, its straight sloping back with three spars in the centre, recall the tottering gait of silvery-haired grandfathers in knee-breeches and ‘rig-an’-fur’ stockings, and hale old grandmothers with white bordered ‘mutches’ or caps on their heads, and tartan napkins about their stooping shoulders; and old-fashioned Scotch kitchens with eight-day clocks, and wooden dressers, and clean-clayed roomy fireplaces with big-bellied pots hanging from the links on the ‘swee’ or crane.
But what household god is this which is the subject of whispering criticism behind me? Turning round, I observe two women, evidently intending purchasers from their remarks, and not idle dreamers like myself, moving away from a large chest to inspect some dishes they have suddenly caught sight of on a side-table at the further end of the room. This chest I have seen before, especially about the term-time, mounted on the footboard of a cab beside the driver, while its ‘sonsie’ proprietress—unaccustomed as she is to ride in carriages—sits on the edge of the cushioned seat inside, staring apologetically at the foot-passengers on the pavement. It is the same kind of thing thrifty housewives in the country used to keep their blankets in, before the trunks and tin boxes came so much into vogue. It is painted an oak colour, though to my mind it resembles more a musty gingerbread; and it has a black line forming a square on each of its plain panels. Instinctively I lift the lid and peep in. Its white wood is covered with a wall-paper pattern of moss-roses. It has a ‘shuttle’ too, with a little drawer underneath; the same as was in the chest I had when a bachelor. I used to keep all my valuables in that little drawer, such as love-letters. How those epistles accumulated! I remember I had to press them down before the drawer would shut, when I happened to be refreshing my memory with some of their pleasant sentiments. Peg’s portrait used to lie here in a corner of this same charmed sepulchre. If I were to tell my young readers how often I made an excuse to go into my chest for something or other, and never withdrew my head without taking a peep at Peg’s face, they would no doubt call me spooney, though they know quite well they do the same thing themselves.
The bustling old porter, who kept hovering in my vicinity—a kind of astonished interest looking out of his not unkindly gray eyes—here cut short my amorous reminiscences by shutting down the lid of the chest, and, apparently with a view to economise space—for odd customers were beginning to drop in—lifting a cradle on to the top of it. The cradle is one of the old-fashioned wooden sort, with good solid rockers, which used to be seen in the houses of plain folks in my young days, and was usually of some antiquity, being considered an heirloom, and descending from parent to eldest son. I remember another cradle just like this one, in our old home. It was painted a bluish-green colour inside, and a loud mahogany colour outside, interspersed with numberless artificial black knots, more like figures in the hangings, or wall-paper, than the grains of wood. That cradle had rocked no end of generations of my progenitors; and when baby visitors gave over showing their chubby little red pudding faces at our house, my sister and I used to play at ‘shop’ and ‘church’ in it on wet days. On these occasions, though I allowed her—as I no doubt thought became her good-for-nothing sex—the full management of the shop, yet I always insisted on being the clergyman, turning the cradle on its end, and preaching from under its hood, which served as a canopy.
That oldest and ever newest tragedy which we must all, some time or other, be witnesses of, or chief performers in, has been enacted in this hollow little bed ere now. I see the worn and anxious mother seated on a stool bending over the little sufferer in the cradle. She has not had her clothes off for nearly a week, but she will not be persuaded to lie down. She could never forgive herself if those glazed little windows, so set-like now in their deep sockets, under the ashy pale brow, were to be darkened for ever, and she not see the final darkening. She wets continually the livid and senseless little lips, and sighs as if her heart would burst, as she watches, in her own words, ‘the sair, sair liftin’ o’ the wee breist, an’ the cauld, cauld dew on the little face!’ The struggle will not last long now, and the mother’s pent-up feelings will ere long get relief.
Whether desirous of diverting my thoughts from this harrowing scene, or merely thinking it a pity that I should be exercising my mind over a lot of lifeless old sticks, the porter, with a delicacy of insight that I would hardly have credited him with, has brought two pictures, and without a word has put them up against the backs of two mahogany chairs in front of me. If that porter had been my friend the biggest half of his natural lifetime—which, judging from the furrows on his lean face and the whiteness of his scant locks, was already anything but a short one—he could not have selected two works of art more pat to my taste or my present mood; and I inwardly blessed him for his thoughtful trouble, though I had a vague suspicion that there might be a gentle touch of irony in his ministrations.
The largest picture, ‘Crossing the Sands,’ is a gloaming or twilight subject, somewhere, I fancy, on the Ayrshire coast. Its features are as familiar to me as the streets and houses in my native town. It brings to mind the days of my childhood, when the old folks used to hire a garret at the seaside for a few brief—for us youngsters all too brief—days in the summer; and the lonely walks and talks of later years, when the sun had gone down, and the newly awakened winds blew all the stronger and fresher in our faces for their afternoon’s slumber, and our voices mingled with the rhythmic murmur of the waves as they broke at our feet.
The artist, I suppose, has named his picture from the dim outline of a horse and cart, with two figures sitting in it, crossing the darkening sands. The tide is far out, and has left long zigzag shallow pools of water lying in the uneven places on the sands, into which the swift vanishing day, through a break in the dark saffron clouds, is casting wistful looks. The same pale reflection is glimmering faintly along the wave-broken verge of the distant sea; while the denser flood, where it stretches out to meet the gray skyline, wears something of a sad melancholy in its cold blue depth. In comfortable contrast with this lonesomeness, sitting among the deepening shadows on a dark clump of moorland, or bent, on the left-hand corner of the picture, is the dreamiest little hut, with the rarest blue smoke rising out of its crazy chimney, and floating like a spirit among the dark grays and purples sleeping on the hillsides.
The smaller upright picture is a street in Dieppe—the time, evening, from the green tinge in the blue of the sky, and the roseate hue of the low-lying clouds. It is just such an old French street as one would delight in strolling through at that poetic hour, to feast one’s eyes on the bewitching mixture of sunlight and shadow, reclining side by side, or locked in loving embrace among the sombre reds, and rich browns, and warm ochres on the quaint roofs and gables and walls; and to note the leisurely figures of the picturesque women in white caps, blue shortgowns, and red petticoats, chatting in the mellow sunlight at the street corner, or moving along in the shadow under the eaves of the overhanging gables; or the slow cart in the middle of the street, its wheels resting on that streak of sunshine slanting from the old gable at the corner; or the decrepit vegetable-woman at her stand on the opposite side of that gutter, the fresh green colour of her vegetables—all the fresher and greener against the daub or two of bright red—wafting one’s thoughts away to cottage gardens and pleasant orchards.