There was a time when I could not have answered that question, but that time had long passed. 'I suppose, mother, it was because you were most at home in your own town, and there was never much pleasure to me in writing of people who could not have known you, nor of squares and wynds you never passed through, nor of a country-side where you never carried your father's dinner in a flagon. There is scarce a house in all my books where I have not seemed to see you a thousand times, bending over the fireplace or winding up the clock.'
'And yet you used to be in such a quandary because you knew nobody you could make your women-folk out of! Do you mind that, and how we both laughed at the notion of your having to make them out of me?'
'I remember.'
'And now you've gone back to my father's time. It's more than sixty years since I carried his dinner in a flagon through the long parks of Kinnordy.'
'I often go into the long parks, mother, and sit on the stile at the edge of the wood till I fancy I see a little girl coming toward me with a flagon in her hand.'
'Jumping the burn (I was once so proud of my jumps!) and swinging the flagon round so quick that what was inside hadna time to fall out. I used to wear a magenta frock and a white pinafore. Did I ever tell you that?'
'Mother, the little girl in my story wears a magenta frock and a white pinafore.'
'You minded that! But I'm thinking it wasna a lassie in a pinafore you saw in the long parks of Kinnordy, it was just a gey done auld woman.'
'It was a lassie in a pinafore, mother, when she was far away, but when she came near it was a gey done auld woman.'
'And a fell ugly one!'
'The most beautiful one I shall ever see.'
'I wonder to hear you say it. Look at my wrinkled auld face.'
'It is the sweetest face in all the world.'
'See how the rings drop off my poor wasted finger.'
'There will always be someone nigh, mother, to put them on again.'
'Ay, will there! Well I know it. Do you mind how when you were but a bairn you used to say, "Wait till I'm a man, and you'll never have a reason for greeting again?"'
I remembered.
'You used to come running into the house to say, "There's a proud dame going down the Marywellbrae in a cloak that is black on one side and white on the other; wait till I'm a man, and you'll have one the very same." And when I lay on gey hard beds you said, "When I'm a man you'll lie on feathers." You saw nothing bonny, you never heard of my setting my heart on anything, but what you flung up your head and cried, "Wait till I'm a man." You fair shamed me before the neighbours, and yet I was windy, too. And now it has all come true like a dream. I can call to mind not one little thing I ettled for in my lusty days that hasna been put into my hands in my auld age; I sit here useless, surrounded by the gratification of all my wishes and all my ambitions, and at times I'm near terrified, for it's as if God had mista'en me for some other woman.'
'Your hopes and ambitions were so ******,' I would say, but she did not like that. 'They werena that ******,' she would answer, flushing.
I am reluctant to leave those happy days, but the end must be faced, and as I write I seem to see my mother growing smaller and her face more wistful, and still she lingers with us, as if God had said, 'Child of mine, your time has come, be not afraid.' And she was not afraid, but still she lingered, and He waited, smiling. I never read any of that last book to her; when it was finished she was too heavy with years to follow a story. To me this was as if my book must go out cold into the world (like all that may come after it from me), and my sister, who took more thought for others and less for herself than any other human being I have known, saw this, and by some means unfathomable to a man coaxed my mother into being once again the woman she had been. On a day but three weeks before she died my father and I were called softly upstairs. My mother was sitting bolt upright, as she loved to sit, in her old chair by the window, with a manu in her hands. But she was looking about her without much understanding. 'Just to please him,' my sister whispered, and then in a low, trembling voice my mother began to read. I looked at my sister. Tears of woe were stealing down her face. Soon the reading became very slow and stopped. After a pause, 'There was something you were to say to him,' my sister reminded her. 'Luck,' muttered a voice as from the dead, 'luck.' And then the old smile came running to her face like a lamp-lighter, and she said to me, 'I am ower far gone to read, but I'm thinking I am in it again!' My father put her Testament in her hands, and it fell open - as it always does - at the Fourteenth of John. She made an effort to read but could not. Suddenly she stooped and kissed the broad page. 'Will that do instead?' she asked.
