Margaret Ogilvy | Page 4

sent her into the world - it
was to open the minds of all who looked to beautiful thoughts. And that
is the beginning and end of literature. Those eyes that I cannot see until
I was six years old have guided me through life, and I pray God they
may remain my only earthly judge to the last. They were never more
my guide than when I helped to put her to earth, not whimpering
because my mother had been taken away after seventy-six glorious
years of life, but exulting in her even at the grave.
She had a son who was far away at school. I remember very little about

him, only that he was a merry-faced boy who ran like a squirrel up a
tree and shook the cherries into my lap. When he was thirteen and I was
half his age the terrible news came, and I have been told the face of my
mother was awful in its calmness as she set off to get between Death
and her boy. We trooped with her down the brae to the wooden station,
and I think I was envying her the journey in the mysterious wagons; I
know we played around her, proud of our right to be there, but I do not
recall it, I only speak from hearsay. Her ticket was taken, she had
bidden us goodbye with that fighting face which I cannot see, and then
my father came out of the telegraph-office and said huskily, 'He's
gone!' Then we turned very quietly and went home again up the little
brae. But I speak from hearsay no longer; I knew my mother for ever
now.
That is how she got her soft face and her pathetic ways and her large
charity, and why other mothers ran to her when they had lost a child.
'Dinna greet, poor Janet,' she would say to them; and they would
answer, 'Ah, Margaret, but you're greeting yoursel.' Margaret Ogilvy
had been her maiden name, and after the Scotch custom she was still
Margaret Ogilvy to her old friends. Margaret Ogilvy I loved to name
her. Often when I was a boy, 'Margaret Ogilvy, are you there?' I would
call up the stair.
She was always delicate from that hour, and for many months she was
very ill. I have heard that the first thing she expressed a wish to see was
the christening robe, and she looked long at it and then turned her face
to the wall. That was what made me as a boy think of it always as the
robe in which he was christened, but I knew later that we had all been
christened in it, from the oldest of the family to the youngest, between
whom stood twenty years. Hundreds of other children were christened
in it also, such robes being then a rare possession, and the lending of
ours among my mother's glories. It was carried carefully from house to
house, as if it were itself a child; my mother made much of it, smoothed
it out, petted it, smiled to it before putting it into the arms of those to
whom it was being lent; she was in our pew to see it borne
magnificently (something inside it now) down the aisle to the
pulpit-side, when a stir of expectancy went through the church and we
kicked each other's feet beneath the book-board but were reverent in
the face; and however the child might behave, laughing brazenly or

skirling to its mother's shame, and whatever the father as he held it up
might do, look doited probably and bow at the wrong time, the
christening robe of long experience helped them through. And when it
was brought back to her she took it in her arms as softly as if it might
be asleep, and unconsciously pressed it to her breast: there was never
anything in the house that spoke to her quite so eloquently as that little
white robe; it was the one of her children that always remained a baby.
And she had not made it herself, which was the most wonderful thing
about it to me, for she seemed to have made all other things. All the
clothes in the house were of her making, and you don't know her in the
least if you think they were out of the fashion; she turned them and
made them new again, she beat them and made them new again, and
then she coaxed them into being new again just for the last time, she let
them out and took them in and put on new braid, and added a piece up
the back, and thus they passed from one member of the family to
another until they reached the youngest, and