The Dew of Their Youth Part 16

Had it been Galligaskins or any seaman of the _Golden Hind_, Boyd would have had him out of the house in spite of his wife and all the wholesome domestic terror she had so long been establishing.

But a Donegal man is from the north after all, and does not easily take to the informer's trade. Besides, this was a gentleman born.

Yet he had better have given hospitality to Galligaskins and the whole crew of pirates who manned the _Golden Hind_ than to this slender, clear-skinned creature who lay raving and smiling in the bedroom of Boyd Connoway's cabin.

[Footnote 1: "Chuckies," white pebbles used, in these primitive times, instead of marbles.]

CHAPTER XVIII

THE TRANSFIGURATION OF AUNT JEN

Never was anything seen like it in our time. I mean the transformation of Aunt Jen, the hard crabapple of our family, after the entrance of the Maitland children into the household of Heathknowes. Not that my aunt had much faith in Irma. She had an art, which my aunt counted uncanny, indeed savouring of the sin of witchcraft. It mattered not at all what Irma was given to wear--an old tartan of my grandmother's Highland Mary days when she was a shepherdess by the banks of Cluden, a severe gown designed on strictly architectural principles by the unabashed shears of Aunt Jen herself, a bodice and skirt of my mother's, dovelike in hue and carrying with them some of her own retiring quality in every line. It was all the same, with a shred or two of silk, with a little undoing here, a little tightening there, a broad splash of colour cut from one of my Uncle Rob's neckcloths--not anywhere, but just in the right place--Irma could give to all mankind the impression of being the only person worth looking at in the parish. With these simple means she could and did make every other girl, though attired in robes that had come all the way from Edinburgh, look dowdy and countrified.

Also she had the simple manner of those who stand in no fear of any one taking a liberty with them. Her position was a.s.sured. Her beauty spoke for itself, and as for the old tartan, the slab-sided merino, the retiring pearl-grey wincey, their late owners did not know them again when they appeared in the great square Marnhoul pew in the parish church, which Irma insisted upon occupying.

I think that a certain scandal connected with this, actually caused more stir in the parish than all the marvel of the appearance of the children in the Haunted House. And for this reason. Heathknowes was a Cameronian household. The young men of Heathknowes were looked upon to furnish a successor to their father as an elder in the little meeting-house down by the Fords. But with the full permission of my grandmother, and the tacit sympathy of my grandfather, each Sabbath day Miss Irma and Sir Louis went in state to the family pew at the parish kirk (a square box large enough to seat a grand jury). The children were perched in the front, Irma keeping firm and watchful guard over her brother, while in the dimmer depths, seen from below as three st.u.r.dy pairs of shoulders against the dusk of a garniture of tapistry, sat the three Cameronian young men of Heathknowes.

Nothing could so completely and fully have certified the strength of my grandmother's purpose than that she, a pillar of the Covenant, thus complacently allowed her sons to frequent the public worship of an uncovenanted and Erastian Establishment.

But there was at least one in the house of Heathknowes not to be so misled by the outward graces of the body.

"Favour is vain and the eye of Him that sitteth in the heavens regardeth it not," she was wont to say, "and if Rob and Thomas and Ebenezer come to an ill end, mother, you will only have yourself to thank for it!"

"Nonsense, Jen," said her mother, "if you are prevented by your infirmities from talkin' sense, at least do hold your tongue. Doctor Gillespie is a Kirkman and a Moderate, but he is--well, he is the Doctor, and never a word has been said against him for forty year, walk and conversation both as becometh the Gospel----"

"Aye, but _is_ it the Gospel?" cried Jen, snipping out her words as with scissors; "that's the question."

"When I require you, Janet Lyon, to decide for your mother what is Gospel and what is not, I'll let ye ken," said my grandmother, "and if I have accepted a responsibility from the Most High for these children, I will do my best to render an account of my stewardship at the Great White Throne. In the meantime, _you_ have no more right to task me for it, than--than--Boyd Connoway!"

"There," cried Jen, slapping down the last dish which she had been drying while her mother washed, "I declare, mother, I might just as well not have a tongue at all. Whatever I say you are on my back. And as if snubbing me were not enough, down you must come on me with the Great White Throne!"

Her aggrieved voice made my grandmother laugh.

"Well-a-well!" she said, in her richly comfortable voice of a mother of consolation, "you are of the tribe of Marthas, Jen, and you certainly work hard enough for everybody to give your tongue a right to a little trot now and then. You will have all the blessings, daughter Janet--except that of the peacemaker. For it's in you to set folk by the ears and you really can't help it. Though who you took it from is more than I can imagine, with a mother as mild as milk and a father----"

"Well, what about the father--speak of the--um-um--father and he will appear, I suppose!"

It was my grandfather who had come in, his face bronzed with the sun and a friendly shaving tucked underneath his coat collar at the back, witnessing that some one of his sons, in the labours of the pirn-mill, had not remembered the first commandment with promise.

His wife removed it with a smile, and said, "I'll wager ye that was yon rascal Rob. He is always at his tricks!"

"Well, what were you saying about me, old wife?" said grandfather, looking at his wife with the quiet fondness that comes of half-a-century of companionship.

"Only that Jen there had a will-o'-the-wisp of a temper and that I knew not how she got it, for you only go about pouring oil upon the waters!"

"As to that, you know best, guidwife," he answered, smiling, "but I think I have heard of a wife up about the Heathknowes, who in some measure possesses the power of her unruly member. It is possible that Jen there may have picked up a thorn or two from that side!"

William Lyon caught his daughter's ear.

"Eh, la.s.s, what sayest thou?" he crooned, looking down upon her with a tenderness rare to him with one of his children. "What sayest thou?"

"I say that you and mother and all about this house have run out of your wits about this slip of a girl? I say that you may rue it when you have not a son to succeed you at the Kirk of the Covenant down by the Ford."

The fleeting of a smile came over my grandfather's face, that quiet amus.e.m.e.nt which usually showed when my grandmother opposed her will to his, and when for once he did not mean to give in.

"It's a sorrowful thing--a whole respectable household gone daft about a couple of strange children;" he let the words drop very slowly.

"Specially I was distressed to hear of one who rose betimes to milk a cow, so that the cream would have time to rise on the morning's milk by their porridge time!"

"Father," said Jen, "that was for the boy bairn. He has not been brought up like the rest of us, and he does not like warm milk with his porridge."

"Doubtless--ah, doubtless," said William Lyon; "but if he is to bide with us, is it not spoiling him thus to give way to suchlike whims? He will have to learn some day, and when so good a time as now?"

Aunt Jen, who knew she was being teased, kept silence, but the shoulder nearest my father had an indignant hump.

"Wheesht, William," interposed grandmother good-naturedly, "if Jen rose betimes to get milk for the bairn, ye ken yoursel' that ye think the better of her for it. And so do I. Jen's not the first whose acts are kindlier than her principles."

But Jen kept her thorns out and refused to be brought into the fold by flattery, till her father said, "Jen, have ye any of that fine homebrewed left, or did the lads drink it a' to their porridges? I'm a kennin' weary, and nothing refreshes me like that!"

Jen felt the artfulness of this, nevertheless she could not help being touched. The care of the still-room was hers, because, though my grandmother could go through twice the work in the day that her daughter could, the brewing of the family small beer and other labours of the still-room were of too exact and methodical a nature for a headlong driver like Mary Lyon.

My grandfather got his ale, of the sort just then beginning to be made--called "Jamaica," because a quant.i.ty of the cheap sugar refuse from the hogsheads was used in its production. In fact, it was the ancestor of the "treacle ale" of later years. But to the fabrication of this beverage, Jen added mysterious rites, during which the door of the still-room was locked, barred, and the keyhole blinded, while Eben and Rob, my uncles, stood without vainly asking for a taste, or simulating by their moans and cries the most utter la.s.situde and fatigue.

William Lyon sat sipping his drink while Jen eyed him furtively as she went about the house, doing her duties with the silence and exact.i.tude of a well-oiled machine. She was a difficult subject, my aunt Jen, to live with, but she could be got at, as her father well knew, by a humanizing vanity.

He sat back with an air of content in his great wide chair, the chair that had been handed down as the seat of the head of the house from many generations of Lyonses. He sipped and nodded his head, looking towards his daughter, and lifting the tankard with a courtly gesture as if pledging her health.

Jen was pleased, though for a while she did not allow it to be seen, and her only repentance was taking up the big empty goblet without being asked and going to the still-room to refill it.

During her absence my grandfather shamelessly winked at my grandmother, while my grandmother shook her fist covertly at her husband. Which pantomime meant to say on the part of William Lyon that _he_ knew how to manage women, while on his wife's side it inferred that she would not demean herself to use means so simple and abject as plain flattery even with a "camsteary" daughter.

But they smiled at each other, not ill-content, and as my grandmother pa.s.sed to the dresser she paused by the great oak chair long enough to murmur, "She's coming round!" But my grandfather only smiled and looked towards the door that led to the still-room, pantries and so forth, as if he found the time long without his second pot of sugar ale.

He was something of a diplomat, my grandfather.

It was while sitting thus, with the second drink of harmless "Jamaica"

before him, my aunt and grandmother crossing each other ceaselessly on silent feet, that a knock came to the front door.

Now in Galloway farm houses there is a front door, but no known use for it has been discovered, except to _be_ a door. Later, it was the custom to open it to let in the minister on his stated visitations, and later still to let out the dead. But at the period of which I write it was a door and nothing more.

Both of these other uses are mere recent inventions. The shut front door of my early time stood blistering and flaking in the hot sun, or soaking--crumbling, and weather-beaten--during months of bad weather.

For, with a wide and n.o.ble entrance behind upon the yard, so well-trodden and convenient, so charged with the pleasant press of entrants and exodants, so populous with affairs, from which the chickens had to be "shooed" and the moist noses of questing calves pushed aside twenty times a day--why should any mortal think of entering by the front door of the house. First of all it was the front door. Next, no one knew whether it would open or not, though the odds were altogether against it. Lastly, it was a hundred miles from anywhere and opened only upon a stuffy lobby round which my grandmother usually had her whole Sunday wardrobe hung up in bags smelling of lavender to guard against the moths.

Nevertheless, the knock sounded distinctly enough from the front door.

"Some of the bairns playing a trick," said my grandmother tolerantly, "let them alone, Janet, and they will soon tire o't!"