Part 17

"Yes, it is. I've always been scared of something. When I was tiny it was the Last Day. I hardly dared go the afternoon walk with Leezie in case it came like a thief in the night and found me far from my home and parents. I walked with my eyes shut, and bumped into people and lamp-posts, because I was sure if I opened them I should see the Angel Gabriel standing on the top of a house with a trumpet in his hand, and the heavens rolling up like a scroll, and I didn't know about parchment scrolls and thought it was a _brandy-scroll_, which made it so much worse."

"Oh! my funny Elizabeth!" Arthur said tenderly. "I wish I could have been there to see you; I grudge all the years I didn't know you."

"Oh," said Elizabeth, "it wouldn't have been much good knowing each other in those days. I was about five, I suppose, and you would be nine. You would merely have seen a tiresome little girl, and I would have seen a superior sort of boy, and I should probably have put out my tongue at you. I wasn't a nice child; mine is a faulty and tattered past."

"When did you begin to reform?" Arthur asked, "for it was a very sedate lady I found in Glasgow. Tell me, Lizbeth, why were you so discouraging to me then? You must have known I cared."

"Well, you see, I'm a queer creature--affectionate but not very _loving_. I never think that 'love' is a word to use much if people are all well and things in their ordinary. And you were frightfully English, you can't deny it, and a monocle, and everything very much against you. And then Aunt Alice's intention of being a sort of fairy godmother was so obvious--it seemed feeble to tumble so easily in with her plans. But I suppose I cared all the time, and I can see now that it was very petty of me to pretend indifference."

"Petty?" said Arthur in fine scorn. "_You_ couldn't be petty. But I'm afraid I'm still 'frightfully' English, and I've still got astigmatism in one eye--are you sure you can overlook these blemishes? ... But seriously, Lizbeth--if I never come back to you, if I am one of the 'costs,' if all you and I are to have together, O my beloved, is just this one perfect afternoon, it will still be all right. Won't it? You will laugh and be your own gallant self, and know that I am loving you and waiting for you--farther on. It will be all right, Lizbeth?"

She nodded, smiling at him bravely.

"Then kiss me, my very own."

* * * * *

The days drew in, and the Setons settled down for the winter. James Seton occupied himself for several hours in the day writing a history of the district, and found it a great interest. He said little about the war, and told his daughter he had prayed for grace to hold his peace; but he was a comforter to the people round when the war touched their homes.

Elizabeth was determined that she would have busy days. She became the Visitor for the district for the Soldiers' and Sailors' Families Association; she sang at war-concerts; she amused her father and Buff; she knitted socks and wrote letters. She went to Glasgow as often as she could be spared to visit her friends in the Gorbals, and came back laden with tales for her father--tales that made him laugh with tears in his eyes, for it was "tragical mirth."

To mothers who lost their sons she was a welcome visitor. They never felt her out of place, or an embarrassment, this tall golden-haired creature, as she sat on a wooden chair by the kitchen fire and listened and understood and cried with them. They brought out their pitiful treasures for her--the half-finished letter that had been found in "Jimmy's" pocket when death overtook him, the few French coins, the picture-postcard of his wee sister--and she held them tenderly and reverently while they told the tale of their grief.

"Oh! ma wee Jimmie," one poor mother lamented to her. "Little did I think I wud never see him again. The nicht he gaed awa' he had to be at the station at nine o'clock, and he said nane o' us were to gang wi' him. I hed an awfu' guid supper for him, for I thinks to masel', 'It's no' likely the laddie'll ever see a dacent meal in France,' an' he likit it rare weel. An' syne he lookit at the time, an' he says, 'I'll awa' then,' an' I juist turned kinda seeck-like when he said it. He said guid-bye to the lasses an' wee John, but he never said guid-bye to me. Na. He was a sic a man, ye ken, an' he didna want to greet--eighteen he was, ma wee bairn. I tell't the ithers to keep back, an' I gaed oot efter him to the stair-heid. He stood on the top step, an' he lookit at me, 'S'long, then, Mither,' he says. An' he gaed doon twa-three steps, an' he stoppit again, an' 'S'long, Mither,' he says. Syne he got to the turn o' the stair, an' he stood an' lookit as if he juist cudna gang--I can see him noo, wi' his Glengarry bunnet cockit that gallant on his heid--and he cried, 'S'long, Mither,' an' he ran doon the stair--ma wee laddie."

It was astonishing to Elizabeth how quickly the women became quite at home with those foreign places with the strange outlandish names that swallowed up their men.

"Ay," one woman told her (this was later), "I sent oot a plum-puddin' in a cloth to ma son Jake--I sent twa o' them, an' I said to him that wan o' them was for Dan'l Scott--his mither was a neebor o' mine an' a dacent wumman an' she's deid--an' Jake wasna near Dan'l at the time, but the first chance he got he tuk the puddin' an' he rum'led a' roond Gally Polly until he fand him--and then they made a nicht o't."

Evidently, in her mind "Gally Polly" was a jovial sort of place, rather like Argyle Street on a Saturday night. As Elizabeth told her father, Glasgow people gave a homely, cosy feeling to any part of the world they went to--even to the blasted, shell-strewn fields of Flanders and Gallipoli.

The winter wore on, and Arthur Townshend got his commission and went to France.

Elizabeth sent him a parcel every week, and the whole household contributed to it. Marget baked cakes, Mrs. Laidlaw made treacle-toffee, Mr. Seton sent books, Buff painted pictures, and Elizabeth put in everything she could think of. But much though he appreciated the parcels he liked the letters more.

In November she wrote to him: "We have heard this morning that Alan's regiment has landed in France. He thinks he may get a few days' leave, perhaps next month. It would be joyful if he were home for Christmas.

"Poor old Walter, hung up in the Secretariat, comforts himself that his leave is due next year, and hopes--hopes, the wicked one!--that the war will still be going on then. Your letters are a tremendous interest. I read parts of them to Father and Buff, and last night your tale of the wild Highlander who was 'King of Ypres' so excited them that Father got up to shut the door--you know how he does when he is moved over anything--and Buff spun round the room like a teetotum, telling it all over again, with himself as hero. That child gives himself the most rich and varied existence spinning romances in which he is the central figure. He means to be a Hero when he grows up (an improbable profession!) but I expect school will teach him to be an ordinary sensible boy. And what a pity that will be! By the way, you won't get any more Bible pictures from him. Father had to forbid them. Buff was allowing his fancy to play too freely among sacred subjects, poor old pet!

"The war is turning everything topsy-turvy. You never thought to acquire the dignity of a second lieutenant, and I hardly expected to come down the social scale with a rattle, but so it is. I am a housemaid. Our invaluable Ellen has gone to make munitions and I am trying to take her place. You see, I can't go and make munitions, because I must stay with Father and Buff, but it seemed a pity to keep an able-bodied woman to sweep and dust our rooms for us when I could quite well do it. Marget waits the table now, and Mrs. Laidlaw helps her with the kitchen work.

"Ellen was most unwilling to go--she had been five years with us, and she clings like ivy to people she is accustomed to--but when her sister wrote about the opportunity for clever hands and that a place was open for her if she would take it, I unclung her, and now she writes to me so contentedly that I am sure that she is clinging round munitions. We miss her dreadfully, not only for her work but for her nice gentle self; but I flatter myself that I am acting understudy quite well. And I enjoy it. The daily round, the common task don't bore me one bit. True, it is always the same old work and the same old dust, but _I_ am different every day--some days on the heights, some days in the _howes_. I try to be very methodical, and I 'turn out' the rooms as regularly as even Mrs. Thomson, that cleanest of women, could desire. And there is no tonic like it. No matter how anxious and depressed I may be when I begin to clean a bedroom, by the time I have got the furniture back in its place, the floor polished with beeswax and turpentine, and clean covers on the toilet-table, my spirits simply won't keep from soaring. You will be startled to hear that I rise at 6 a.m. I like to get as much done as possible before breakfast, and I find that when I have done 'the nastiest thing in the day' and get my feet on to the floor, it doesn't matter whether it is six o'clock or eight. Only, my cold bath is very cold at that early hour--but I think of you people in France and pour contempt on my shivering self. To lighten our labours, we have got a vacuum cleaner, one of the kind you stand on and work from side to side. Buff delights to help with this thing, and he and I see-saw together. Sometimes we sing 'A life on the ocean wave,' which adds greatly to the hilarity of the occasion. By the time the war is over I expect to be so healthy and wealthy and wise that I shall want to continue to be a housemaid....

"I don't suppose life at the Front is just all you would have our fancy paint? In fact, it must be ghastly beyond all words, and how you all stand it I know not. I simply can't bear to be comfortable by the fireside--but that is silly, for I know the only thing that keeps you all going is the thought that we are safe and warm at home. The war has come very near to us these last few days. A boy whom we knew very well--Tommy Elliot--has fallen. They have a place near here. His father was killed in the Boer War and Tommy was his mother's only child. He was nineteen and just got his commission before war broke out. The pride of him! And how Buff and Billy and Thomas lay at his feet! He was the nicest boy imaginable--never thought it beneath his dignity to play with little boys, or be sweet to his mother. I never heard anyone with such a hearty laugh. It made you laugh to hear it. Thank God he found so much to laugh at, and so little reason for tears.

"I went over to see Mrs. Elliot. I hardly dared to go, but I couldn't stay away. She was sitting in the room they call the 'summer parlour.' It is a room I love in summer, full of dark oak and coolness and sweet-smelling flowers, but cold and rather dark in winter. She is a woman of many friends, and the writing-table was heaped with letters and telegrams--very few of them opened. She seemed glad to see me, and was calm and smiling; but the stricken look in her eyes made me behave like an utter idiot. When I could speak I suggested that I had better go away, but she began to speak about him, and I thought it might help her to have a listener who cared too. She told me why she was sitting in the summer parlour. She had used it a great deal for writing, and he had always come in that way, so that he would find her just at once. 'Sometimes,' she said, 'I didn't turn my head, for I knew he liked to "pounce"--a relic from the little-boy days when he was a black puma.' Her smile when she said it broke one's heart. 'If I didn't happen to be here, he went from room to room, walking warily with his nailed boots on the polished floors, saying "Mother! Mother!" until he found me.'

"_How are the dead raised up? and with what bodies do they come?_ I suppose that is the most important question in the world to us all, and we seek for the answer as they who dig for hid treasure. But all the sermons preached and all the books written about it help not at all, for the preachers and the writers are as ignorant as everybody else. My own firm belief is that God, who made us with the power of loving, who thought of the spring and gave young things their darling funny ways, will not fail us here. He will know that to Tommy's mother the light of heaven, which is neither of the sun nor the moon but a light most precious, even like a jasper stone clear as crystal, will matter nothing unless it shows her Tommy in his old homespun coat, with his laughing face, ready to 'pounce'; and that she will bid the harpers harping on their harps of gold still their noise while she listens for the sound of boyish footsteps and a voice that says 'Mother! Mother!' ...

"We read some of the many letters together. They were all so kind and full of real sympathy, but I noticed that she pushed carelessly aside those that talked of her own feelings and kept those that talked of what a splendid person Tommy was.

"There was one rather smudged-looking envelope without a stamp, and we wondered where it had come from. It was from Buff! He had written it without asking anyone's advice, and had walked the three miles to deliver it. I think that grimy little letter did Mrs. Elliot good. We had read so many letters, all saying the same thing, all saying it more or less beautifully, one had the feeling that one was being sluiced all over with sympathy. Buff's was different. It ran:

"'I am sorry that Tommy is killed for he had a cheery face and I liked him. But it can't be helped. He will be quite comfortable with God and I hope that someone is being kind to old Pepper for he liked him too.--Your aff. friend

David Stuart Seton.

"'P.S.--I'm not allowed to draw riligus pictures now or I would have shown you God being very glad to see Tommy.'

"'Old Pepper' is a mongrel that Tommy rescued and was kind to, and it was so like Buff to think of the feelings of the dumb animal.

"Tommy's mother held the letter in her hand very tenderly, and the only tears I saw her shed dropped on it. Then 'Let us go out and look for old Pepper,' she said, 'for "he liked him too."'

"I came home very heavy-hearted, trying to comfort myself concerning those splendid boys.

"To die for one's country is a great privilege--God knows I don't say that lightly, for any day I may hear that you or Alan have died that death--and to those boys the honour has been given in the very springtime of their days.

"Most of us part from our lives reluctantly: they are taken from us, and we go with shivering, shrinking feet down to the brink of the River, but those sons of the morning throw their lives from them and _spring_ across. I think God will look very kindly at our little boys.

"And smug, middle-aged people say, 'Poor lads!' They dare to pity the rich dead. Oh! the dull people dragging out their span of years without ever finding out what living means!

"But it breaks one's heart, the thought of the buried hopes. I have been thinking of the father, the man in business who was keeping things going until his boy would be through and ready to help him. There are so many of them in Glasgow, and I used to like to listen to them talking to each other in the car coming out from business. They boasted so innocently of their boys, of this one's skill at cricket, that one's prowess in the football field.

"And now this cheery business man has no boy, only a room with a little bed in the corner, a bookshelf full of adventure--stories and battered school-books, a cricket bat and a bag of golf clubs; a wardrobe full of clothes, and a most vivid selection of ties and socks, for the boy who lies in France was very smart in his nice boyish way, and brushed his hair until it shone. Oh! I wonder had anybody time to stroke just once that shining head before it was laid away in the earth? remembering that over the water hearts would break with yearning to see it again.

"It isn't so bad when doleful people get sorrow, they at least have the miserable satisfaction of saying they had always known it would come, but when happy hearts are broken, when blythe people fall silent--the sadness of it haunts one.

"To talk of cheerier subjects. Aunt Alice is a heroine. Who would have thought of her giving up her house for a hospital! Of course we always knew, didn't we? that she was the most golden-hearted person in existence, but it has taken a European war to make her practical. Now she writes me long letters of advice about saving, and food values, and is determined that she at least won't be a drag on her country in winning the war.

"Talk about saving, I asked one of my women the other day if she had ever tried margarine. 'No,' she said earnestly, 'I niver touch it; an' if I'm oot at ma tea an' no' verra sure if it's butter, I juist tak' jeely.' I said no more.

"And now, my very dear, it is perilously near midnight, and there is not the slightest sound in this rather frightening old house, and not the slightest sound on the moor outside, and I am getting rather scared sitting up all alone. Besides, six o'clock comes very soon after midnight! I am so sleepy, with all my housework, that, like the herd laddie, I get no good out of my bed.--Goodnight, E."

* * * * *

A more contented woman than Kirsty Hamilton _nee_ Christie it would have been difficult to find. Andrew Hamilton and Langhope Manse made to her "Paradise enow." The little hard lines had gone from her face, and she bustled about, a most efficient mistress, encouraging the small maid to do her best work, and helping with her own capable hands. She planned and cooked most savoury, thrifty dinners, and made every shilling do the work of two; it was all sheer delight to her. House-proud and husband-proud, she envied no one, and in fact sincerely pitied every other woman because she could not have her Andrew.

July, August, and September were three wonderful months to the Hamiltons. They spent them settling into the new house (daily finding new delights in it), working in the garden, and getting acquainted with the congregation.

After their one o'clock dinner, on good afternoons, they mounted their bicycles and visited outlying members. Often they were asked to wait for tea, such a fine farmhouse tea as town-bred Kirsty had never dreamed of; and then they cycled home in the gloaming, talking, talking all the time, until they came to their own gate--how good that sounded, _their own gate_--and having wheeled their bicycles to the shed, they would walk round the garden hand in hand, like happy children.

Andrew had generally something to show Kirsty, some small improvement, for he was a man of his hands; or if there was nothing new to see, they would always go and again admire his chief treasures--a mossy bank that in spring would be covered with violets, a stone dyke in which rock plants had been encouraged to grow, and a little humpbacked bridge hung with ferns.

The war did not trouble Kirsty much. She was rather provoked that it should have happened, for it hurt the church attendance and sadly thinned the choir, and when Andrew had finished reading the papers he would sometimes sit quite silent, looking before him, which made her vaguely uneasy.

Her own family were untouched by it. Archie had no thought of going to train, the notion seemed to him ludicrous in the extreme, but he saw his way to making some money fishing in the troubled waters. The Rev. Johnston Christie confined his usefulness to violent denunciations of the Kaiser from the pulpit every Sunday. He had been much impressed by a phrase used by a prominent Anglican bishop about the Nailed Hand beating the Mailed Fist--neat and telling he considered it, and used it on every possible occasion.

One afternoon in late October the Hamiltons were walking in their garden. They had been lunching at Etterick, and were going in shortly to have tea cosily by the study fire. It was a still day, with a touch of winter in the air--_back end_, the village people called it, but the stackyards were stocked, the potatoes and turnips were in pits, the byres were full of feeding cattle, so they were ready for what winter would bring them.

To Andrew Hamilton, country-born and bred, every day was a delight.

To-day, as he stood with his wife by the low fence at the foot of the gardens and looked across the fields to the hills, he took a long breath of the clean cold air, and said:

"This--after ten years of lodging in Garnethill! Our lives have fallen to us in pleasant places, Kirsty."

"Yes," she agreed contentedly. "I never thought the country could be so nice. I like the feel of the big stacks, and to think that the stick-house is full of logs, and the apples in the garret, and everything laid in for winter. Andrew, I'm glad winter is coming. It will be so cosy the long evenings together--and only one meeting in the week."

Her husband put out his hand to stop her. "Don't, Kirsty," he said, as if her words hurt him.

In answer to her look of surprise, he went on:

"Did you ever think, when this war was changing so much, that it would change things for us too? Kirsty, my dear, I have thought it all out and I feel I must go."

Kirsty was apt to get cross when she was perturbed about anything, and she now said, moving a step or two away, "What in the world d'you mean? Where are you going?"

"I'm going to enlist, with as many Langhope men as I can persuade to accompany me. It's no use. I can't stand in the pulpit--a young strong man--and say Go. I must say Come!"

Now that it was out, he gave a sigh of relief.

"Kirsty," he pleaded, "say you think I'm right."

But Kirsty's face was white and drawn.

"I thought you were happy," she said at last, with a pitiful little sob on the last word.

"So happy," said her husband, "that I have to go. Every time I came in and found you waiting for me with the kettle singing, when I went out in the morning and looked at the hills, when I walked in the garden and knew that every bush in it was dear to me--then I remembered that these things so dear were being bought with a price, and that the only decent thing for me to do was to go and help to pay that price."

"But only as a chaplain, surely?"

Andrew shook his head.

"I'm too young and able-bodied for a chaplain. I'm only thirty-two, and though I'm not big I'm wiry."

"The Archbishop of Canterbury says the clergy _shouldn't_ fight," Kirsty reminded him.

Andrew took her arm and looked very tenderly at her as he answered, laughing, "Oh! Kirsty, since when did an Anglican bishop direct your conscience and mine?" They walked slowly towards the house.

On the doorstep Kirsty turned.

"Andrew," she said, "have you thought it all out? Have you thought what it may mean? Leaving the people here--perhaps they won't keep your place open for you, for no man knows how long the war'll last--leaving your comfortable home and your wife who--who loves you, and going away to a life of hardship and exposure, and in the end perhaps--death. Have you thought of this sacrifice you are making?"