ann had been writing steadily for nearly an hour.
her mother, watching her, said:
"i'm afraid, if you write so hard, your brain will go."
ann, as if glad of the interruption, laid her pen in a china dish, pushed away the sheets of paper, sighed deeply, and, rising, came over to the fire.
"i know it will," she said. "i can feel it doing it. it's that old life of yours—i can't make it sound right. sir walter raleigh talks somewhere of men whose true selves are almost completely obscured beneath their ragged and incompetent speech. i'm afraid i'm concealing you completely under my 'ragged and incompetent' words. if you live to be ninety, as you threaten, it will be all right; the children will be able to make their own estimate, but, if they have to depend on my life, i don't quite know what they'll make of you."
ann began to laugh in a helpless way. "it's funny. i know so well what impression i want to give, but when i try to write it down it's just nothing—stilted, meaningless sentences. i want to make a picture of dr. struthers. i've been trying for the last hour, labouring in rowing, covering my brow in wrinkles, with no result. how would you describe him?"
mrs. douglas thought for a minute. "it would be difficult to make a true picture of him. if you simply told of the views that were his, how he wouldn't sing a paraphrase, let alone a hymn, and held the sabbath day as something that must not be broken, you would give an impression of narrowness and rigid conservatism that wouldn't at all be the dr. struthers that we knew. when we heard that the glasgow church had a senior minister, we thought it was a drawback; your father rather wondered how he would comport himself as a 'colleague and successor,' but we didn't know dr. struthers then. sometimes, in glasgow, when we were inclined to regret kirkcaple and the flourishing congregation, and the peaceful time we enjoyed there—but when i say peaceful i mean only comparatively, no minister's wife ever attains to peace in this world!—your father would say, 'but if we had stayed in kirkcaple we would never have known dr. struthers,' and that closed the matter. when i first met him i thought he was more like some fresh, hearty old country laird than a parson. but he was really very frail, and to walk even a short distance was a great effort. he had a place about fifty miles from glasgow, langlands, and as long as he was able he came to preach in martyrs about once a month. the old congregation adored to have him come, but the newcomers, who had no romance about the old man, thought his sermons much too long. and they were too long as sermons go now. we are not the patient listeners our forefathers were. dr. struthers once said to me that no man could do justice to a subject under fifty-five minutes, and we used sometimes to think that he was done before his allotted time, but he just went on."
"we children dearly loved dr. struthers," said ann; "but we did not appreciate the length of his sermons. my friend, mrs. smail—the butcher's wife, you remember?—used to sit with a most forlorn face while he preached; thinking, i expect, that she would be half an hour late, and that the numerous young smails would have fallen in the fire. dear me, it's a long time since i thought of mrs. smail. i liked her very much. there was a sort of bond of sympathy between us, and she invited me sometimes to tea-parties where we got tea and cookies and penny cakes and hot roast beef. i never learned to appreciate the combination, but the rest of the company seemed to enjoy it. i sat beside one gentleman who, after doing full justice to the meal, wiped his forehead with a red silk handkerchief, and, turning to me, said, 'a grand house this for flesh.' after the 'flesh' we all contributed songs and recitations—great evenings. well, what i mean to say is that mrs. smail represented the new people who were impatient of dr. struthers and impatient of all the old traditions of the church which the original members clung to with such pathetic loyalty."
"but in time," said mrs. douglas, "the new-comers got to see how very fine the old man was, and everybody was sorry when he got too frail to preach. it was quite extraordinary how fond you children were of him, for he never told you stories or played with you."
"no," said ann thoughtfully, "he never did anything to make himself popular. we didn't expect it any more than we would have expected a god from mount olympus to jest with a mortal. they say we needs must love the highest when we see it, but that isn't true; often the highest simply irritates. i think it was his simple goodness that made us fond of him, and a certain understanding and sympathy that he had for bad children. and he never talked down to us or became facetious."
mrs. douglas nodded. "i know. children like to be taken seriously, and dr. struthers was certainly not given to making fun of them."
ann clasped her hands round her knees and looked into the fire.
"one thing we liked about the glasgow sundays was that we stayed down in the vestry for lunch. it was our weekly picnic, and the fact that it was eaten in the church premises gave a touch of solemnity to the occasion. when dr. struthers was preaching, we had a more elaborate meal. strong beef-tea was made at home and brought down in a bottle to be heated, for he was often very exhausted after preaching. one never-to-be-forgotten day i was told to watch the pan of beef-tea heating, and i had evidently begun to dream, for the pan fell into the fire and the contents were lost. i felt as badly about it as any of you, but i only made a sulky face. i knew it was a real deprivation for the old man, though he made light of it, and said cocoa would be a nice change, and i felt very unhappy all through lunch. there was a particularly fine orange among some apples on a plate, and you asked dr. struthers to take it, but he looked across at my small sullen face and said, with that most delightful smile of his, 'i think we must give this orange to ann.' i never forgot the way he did it; the 'pretty and sweet manner' of it quite conquered me and made me far sorrier for my carelessness than any scolding would have done. i don't believe scoldings ever do any good, only harm."
"some children," said mrs. douglas, "are the better of scoldings. mark always 'took a telling,' but the more you and robbie were scolded, the worse you got.... generally dr. struthers stayed with his daughter, but now and again he stayed with us. we liked having him, but it made rather an upheaval in our modest establishment. you see, he had to bring his man, samuel thomson, with him, and samuel thomson was such a very superior, silver-haired, apple-cheeked gentleman's gentleman, we could hardly ask him to take his meals in the kitchen, so the boys' study had to be given up to him. davie was very fond of sitting with him, and i once overhead samuel thomson reading aloud to him from the bible some old testament story, and commenting on what he read. those were grand angels, master david,' he was saying. it was the time when davie cared for nothing but to be like a jockey."
"'angels!' he said, 'i thought you were talking about horses,' and he straddled away in deep disgust."
ann laughed. "davie was very much against all things religious at that time, and he wouldn't even say his prayers. marget used to toil up from the kitchen to reason with him, and when he heard her coming he would give a wicked wallop in his bed and say, 'that's marget comin' to convert me.' you know, mother, in some ways davie was a much more abandoned character than we were as children. we reverenced the covenanters, but davie said he preferred claverhouse, and most blasphemously said of john brown, of priesthill—he must have got the expression from marget—'i think john brown was a gey lawd.' speaking of conversion, i think dr. struthers was the only person we didn't mind 'speaking personally' to us. we realised that he, like nehemiah, 'feared the lord above many.' when mark told him he meant to go to oxford and then to the bar, he said, 'look higher than the woolsack, mark.' he spoke kindly to jeanie tod about her home in kirkcaple, and said, 'do you ever think where you are going?' and i shall always remember how one day he laid his big soft hand on my unruly head and said, 'little ann, take jesus.' do you remember one day when he was preaching i announced that i had a sore throat and couldn't possibly go to church, and was allowed to remain at home? dr. struthers missed me, and asked why i wasn't there, and you—not greatly believing, i daresay, in the excuse—said i had a sore throat. mark rushed home between services to tell me that dr. struthers had prayed for me in church, prayed that my bodily affliction might pass from me! guiltily aware of perfect health—my sore throat hadn't kept me from eating apples and reading a story-book—i didn't know what awful consequences the prayer might have. anyway, i flew upstairs, flung on my coat and hat, and was in my place for the afternoon service, determined to ward off any more petitions on my behalf. but i was never frightened for dr. struthers after i found he liked adventure books and didn't even mind the swear words. he was surely a very rich man, mother? ministers don't as a rule have places like langlands, and man-servants and maid-servants. a house and a wife, and a stranger within the gates are about all they ever attain to."
"yes, he was rich, but i never met anyone who gave one so little an impression of great possessions. having his treasure laid up where thieves cannot break through and steal, he cared little for the gold of this world. he gave largely, but so unobtrusively that it wasn't until his death that we realised the extent of his givings. he was the humblest of men, lowly and a peacemaker."
"once," said ann, "robbie and jim and i went from etterick to spend the day at langlands. it was after mrs. struthers died, and miss calder kept house. i somehow think we weren't expected. there was something queer about it, anyway, and miss calder, although she was kind, as she always was, looked very worried. she had some engagement in the village that morning, so she sent us up the hill to play till luncheon. we went obediently up the hill, but as soon as we saw miss calder walk down the avenue, back we pranced. samuel thomson saw us, and, conducting us to the croquet lawn, advised us to have a game. he helped us to put out the hoops, and we began to play. unfortunately robbie and i soon fell into a discussion about the right and wrong way to play, and i regret to say i kicked robbie, who at once retaliated, and the next thing the horrified eyes of samuel thornton saw was robbie and me hitting one another with croquet mallets. it was only the beginning of a thoroughly ill-spent day, and if dr. struthers and miss calder hadn't been the most patient and forgiving of people we would never have been asked back."
"it was odd," said mrs. douglas; "but you and robbie could never behave properly if you were together. i wonder i was so rash as to let you go away for a whole day, and to langlands of all places. its beautiful tidiness seemed to act on you in a pernicious way. it was always a treat to me to go to langlands. i enjoyed the beauty and the peace of it, and it seemed exactly the right setting for dr. struthers. i was thankful that, when the end came, it came at langlands, suddenly, painlessly, and most fittingly on the sabbath day. 'i am going,' he said to samuel thomson, and in a minute he was gone, almost 'translated unaware.'"
"what a beautiful way to die," said ann. "his task accomplished and the long day done. without weariness of waiting, with no pain of parting, suddenly to find his boat in the harbour and to see his pilot face to face."
