The Able McLaughlins by Margaret Wilson (small books to read .TXT) 📕

about by the hour, after all, the gossipers had to remember her mother, and, sighing, grant the daughter some little toleration. And then, however proud that Isobel McLaughlin might be, there was hardly a family in the community which had not, upon arriving from the old country, made “Uncle John McLaughlin’s” their convenient home till another could be built. Moreover, Wully had always been particularly indulgent to those who were his aunts and uncles. Greatest of all, he was a soldier. Not so far down the creek, a Quaker soldier had come home from war without a leg, and his congregation had said if only he would say, even privately, that he was sorry he had fought, he would again be received into their communion. But he refused to say he was sorry. And they refused to take him again to their approval. That didn’t seem to trouble the soldier very much. But it had troubled the Scotch, where he had come to work, extremely. They loved to belittle the Quakers for what they considered a meanness to a man who had fought. So it behooved them to treat their own veterans with more consideration. On the whole, there might have been much more gloating than there was. There might have been battles. Great, quiet, simple men like Wully, however, people seem instinctively to avoid exciting to fury.

So Chirstie had scarcely had occasion to feel the awkwardness of her position till the afternoon early in April when her stepmother came over with the finished dress to try on her. Chirstie had donned the beautiful, rich, wine-colored thing, to be sure it hung right, and set right, and standing forth so that Isobel McLaughlin might view the effect, she turned round and round while Barbara McNair smoothed out even imaginary wrinkles. It was pronounced perfect. Mrs. McNair admired it as if it were not her skill but the girl’s beauty that made the gown remarkable. Then, beaming, as much as her little pale weak face could beam, she unwrapped a hat⁠—a hat all wine-colored and black, and set it jauntily on Chirstie’s head, so that the long feather swept down over the brown coil of hair low on her neck. Chirstie was radiant. She had never seen so lovely a hat in her life, she said. And she stood looking at herself in the little glass, in surprise, a very happy surprise, to see how she looked in such soft, rich things. Then, with a command, Barbara McNair took all the joy out of her face.

She simply demanded that Chirstie wear that conspicuously beautiful outfit the second Sabbath to come, when the winter’s crop of babies was to be formally dedicated to the Lord. Chirstie went suddenly crimson, standing there, blankly, fingering the feather on her neck.

Mrs. McNair insisted on an answer.

“Oh!” cried Chirstie meekly, her eyes appealing to her mother-in-law. “Our baby⁠—” she began to say it wasn’t to be baptized, but she had to turn away. She started for her room, to take the dress off.

The girl was so sensitive, Isobel started to say⁠—But Barbara called after her to come back, breaking forth into the broadest Glasgow accent. They weren’t to suppose she didn’t understand! She had known it all the time. That innocent laddie had told her, unconsciously. (More innocent then than now, she might have added, if she had known.) And she thought, indeed, that Chirstie had great reason for shame, and not of her bonnie wee Johnnie, either, but of her own heathen ingratitude. Chirstie lifted her face upon hearing that, from the towel upon which she was wiping it, and Mrs. McNair demanded that moment if she expected the Lord to sit studying the almanac all the year for her convenience. She was sure that if she had been in Chirstie’s place, and the Lord had given her a son, she wouldn’t have gone sulking, no matter what the month might have been. Was it not better to have one any time than none at all? she demanded, with such a passion of regret for her own childlessness that Chirstie was left speechless. She had never imagined anyone speaking in such a strain. She looked at her mother-in-law, who seemed mildly amused. The idea that she had been deriding the Lord’s chronological calculations was in itself sobering to one of so tender a conscience. The giver of all her good clothes went scolding away at her, till she promised at least to wear the new things the week after the baptisms.

Chirstie kept thinking of the scolding as she drove in the wagon of that harassed man, Alex McNair, with her stepmother and her mother-in-law, to see the new house that was getting about ready for her occupancy. Wully had to lay a plank for a walk hurriedly from the wagon to the house, for the new Mrs. McNair still wore such boots that one step in the thawing black mire would have ruined them. It was always that way. That little insignificant-looking person refused to adjust herself to the new country. She just sat tight, and let the great significant country adjust itself to her as best it might. The house towards which she neatly walked was not perhaps, to disinterested eyes, a very inviting place. But to Wully and Chirstie it was their very palace of love. It stood a story and a half high on a slight rise of ground, a decent way back from the path that has since become one of the nation’s highways, built of shining new lumber, the tall grass around it trampled into the black ground littered with bits of boards and yellow curling shavings. From the front door, just hung that day, the women looked down over fifteen miles of prairie, an occasional plowed square humanizing the distances, which sloped with so gentle an incline that one standing on any one of the acres could scarcely have told it was not level. From the windows of the parlor the women saw