Margaret Ogilvy | Page 8

of her girlhood had upon me since I was a boy of six.
Those innumerable talks with her made her youth as vivid to me as my
own, and so much more quaint, for, to a child, the oddest of things, and
the most richly coloured picture-book, is that his mother was once a
child also, and the contrast between what she is and what she was is
perhaps the source of all humour. My mother's father, the one hero of
her life, died nine years before I was born, and I remember this with
bewilderment, so familiarly does the weather-beaten mason's figure rise
before me from the old chair on which I was nursed and now write my
books. On the surface he is as hard as the stone on which he chiselled,
and his face is dyed red by its dust, he is rounded in the shoulders and a
'hoast' hunts him ever; sooner or later that cough must carry him off,
but until then it shall not keep him from the quarry, nor shall his
chapped hands, as long as they can grasp the mell. It is a night of rain
or snow, and my mother, the little girl in a pinafore who is already his
housekeeper, has been many times to the door to look for him. At last
he draws nigh, hoasting. Or I see him setting off to church, for he was a
great 'stoop' of the Auld Licht kirk, and his mouth is very firm now as
if there were a case of discipline to face, but on his way home he is
bowed with pity. Perhaps his little daughter who saw him so stern an
hour ago does not understand why he wrestles so long in prayer
to-night, or why when he rises from his knees he presses her to him
with unwonted tenderness. Or he is in this chair repeating to her his
favourite poem, 'The Cameronian's Dream,' and at the first lines so
solemnly uttered,
'In a dream of the night I was wafted away,'
she screams with excitement, just as I screamed long afterwards when
she repeated them in his voice to me. Or I watch, as from a window,

while she sets off through the long parks to the distant place where he
is at work, in her hand a flagon which contains his dinner. She is
singing to herself and gleefully swinging the flagon, she jumps the burn
and proudly measures the jump with her eye, but she never dallies
unless she meets a baby, for she was so fond of babies that she must
hug each one she met, but while she hugged them she also noted how
their robes were cut, and afterwards made paper patterns, which she
concealed jealously, and in the fulness of time her first robe for her
eldest born was fashioned from one of these patterns, made when she
was in her twelfth year.
She was eight when her mother's death made her mistress of the house
and mother to her little brother, and from that time she scrubbed and
mended and baked and sewed, and argued with the flesher about the
quarter pound of beef and penny bone which provided dinner for two
days (but if you think that this was poverty you don't know the meaning
of the word), and she carried the water from the pump, and had her
washing-days and her ironings and a stocking always on the wire for
odd moments, and gossiped like a matron with the other women, and
humoured the men with a tolerant smile - all these things she did as a
matter of course, leaping joyful from bed in the morning because there
was so much to do, doing it as thoroughly and sedately as if the brides
were already due for a lesson, and then rushing out in a fit of
childishness to play dumps or palaulays with others of her age. I see her
frocks lengthening, though they were never very short, and the games
given reluctantly up. The horror of my boyhood was that I knew a time
would come when I also must give up the games, and how it was to be
done I saw not (this agony still returns to me in dreams, when I catch
myself playing marbles, and look on with cold displeasure); I felt that I
must continue playing in secret, and I took this shadow to her, when
she told me her own experience, which convinced us both that we were
very like each other inside. She had discovered that work is the best fun
after all, and I learned it in time, but have my lapses, and so had she.
I know what was her favourite costume when she was at