Margaret Ogilvy | Page 6

might win another. I had less confidence, but he

was the mysterious man whom you ran for in the dead of night (you
flung sand at his window to waken him, and if it was only toothache he
extracted the tooth through the open window, but when it was
something sterner he was with you in the dark square at once, like a
man who slept in his topcoat), so I did as he bade me, and not only did
she laugh then but again when I put the laugh down, so that though it
was really one laugh with a tear in the middle I counted it as two.
It was doubtless that same sister who told me not to sulk when my
mother lay thinking of him, but to try instead to get her to talk about
him. I did not see how this could make her the merry mother she used
to be, but I was told that if I could not do it nobody could, and this
made me eager to begin. At first, they say, I was often jealous, stopping
her fond memories with the cry, 'Do you mind nothing about me?' but
that did not last; its place was taken by an intense desire (again, I think,
my sister must have breathed it into life) to become so like him that
even my mother should not see the difference, and many and artful
were the questions I put to that end. Then I practised in secret, but after
a whole week had passed I was still rather like myself. He had such a
cheery way of whistling, she had told me, it had always brightened her
at her work to hear him whistling, and when he whistled he stood with
his legs apart, and his hands in the pockets of his knickerbockers. I
decided to trust to this, so one day after I had learned his whistle (every
boy of enterprise invents a whistle of his own) from boys who had been
his comrades, I secretly put on a suit of his clothes, dark grey they were,
with little spots, and they fitted me many years afterwards, and thus
disguised I slipped, unknown to the others, into my mother's room.
Quaking, I doubt not, yet so pleased, I stood still until she saw me, and
then - how it must have hurt her! 'Listen!' I cried in a glow of triumph,
and I stretched my legs wide apart and plunged my hands into the
pockets of my knickerbockers, and began to whistle.
She lived twenty-nine years after his death, such active years until
toward the end, that you never knew where she was unless you took
hold of her, and though she was frail henceforth and ever growing
frailer, her housekeeping again became famous, so that brides called as
a matter of course to watch her ca'ming and sanding and stitching: there
are old people still, one or two, to tell with wonder in their eyes how
she could bake twenty-four bannocks in the hour, and not a chip in one

of them. And how many she gave away, how much she gave away of
all she had, and what pretty ways she had of giving it! Her face beamed
and rippled with mirth as before, and her laugh that I had tried so hard
to force came running home again. I have heard no such laugh as hers
save from merry children; the laughter of most of us ages, and wears
out with the body, but hers remained gleeful to the last, as if it were
born afresh every morning. There was always something of the child in
her, and her laugh was its voice, as eloquent of the past to me as was
the christening robe to her. But I had not made her forget the bit of her
that was dead; in those nine-and-twenty years he was not removed one
day farther from her. Many a time she fell asleep speaking to him, and
even while she slept her lips moved and she smiled as if he had come
back to her, and when she woke he might vanish so suddenly that she
started up bewildered and looked about her, and then said slowly, 'My
David's dead!' or perhaps he remained long enough to whisper why he
must leave her now, and then she lay silent with filmy eyes. When I
became a man and he was still a boy of thirteen, I wrote a little paper
called 'Dead this Twenty Years,' which was about a similar tragedy in
another woman's life, and it is the only thing I have written that she
never spoke about, not even to that daughter she loved the best. No one
ever spoke of it to her,