Ann and Her Mother

CHAPTER I

Mrs. Douglas and her daughter Ann sat together in their living-room one November night.

It was a wonderfully comfortable room, brightly yet softly lit, and warmed by a noble fire. There was a pleasant space and emptiness about it, an absence of ornaments and irrelevant photographs; each piece of furniture, each of the few pictures, was of value.

Mrs. Douglas had a book in her lap and in her hand a half-finished stocking, for she considered that she was wasting time if she did not knit while reading.

"I wish," she said, without looking up, "I do wish I knew more about gardening. I can't make out from this what will grow best with us.... Don't you think, Mother, it is almost l’se-majest’ to call a rose Queen Mary, and describe it as 'a gross feeder? Oh, and this! Mr. Asquith, 'very compact in form, rosy in colour.' What humourists the compilers of seedsmen's catalogues are! And what poets! Where was it we read that article about catalogues? It said that the very names were like a procession of princes—'amber and carmine Queens, and Princes' Feathers, and Cloth of Gold.' The names tempt one simply by the glory of the sound.

"H'm," said her mother in a dry voice, "at present you have only the hilltops. I haven't imagination enough to picture the hot sun and the lawn and the blue delphiniums."

It always rains in November, but that's nobody's fault, and you might at least try to look as if you didn't mind. Nobody ever said a glen was a cheery place in winter, but, myself, I like it frightfully. When Uncle Bob left me the Green Glen for my very own I determined that somehow or other I would manage to build a house in it’a little white-faced house among the heather. Not big, but big enough to hold us all’six good bedrooms, one big living-room, a hall we could sit in, a smaller room to feed in. You all made objections’all except Charlotte, who encouraged me. You pointed out all the disadvantages: six miles from a station, a steep hill road, carting difficult!

"I thought you hated new houses?"

"So I do, except when it is my own house in my own Green Glen. And you will admit that it is comfortable."

"It's very bare," Mrs. Douglas said.

Their heads have been gummed on so often they fall off if you look at them. Davie was always being entreated by you to mend them, and he found, finally, that Moses' head (or was it Eli?) would only remain on if turned the wrong way about’so his beard was down his back! ... To return to 'Dreams,' I admit the garden is still unmade, and the road a mere track, but wait and you will see it blossom like the rose. We shan't have any fences’there is no need for them among the hills, and the heather will grow to the edges of our shaven lawns, and we'll have herbaceous borders as gay as a carnation ribbon, and beds of mignonette..." Mrs. Douglas laid down her stocking and looked at her daughter.

"No fences? And rabbits nibbling the mignonette’it's a thing they have a particular fancy for; and sheep eating the vegetables..." "Go on with your stocking, Motherkin, and don't try to be crushing. We'll have fences then, and wire to keep out the rabbits, and we'll cover the fences with rambler roses’the bright red single kind; I don't like Dorothy Perkins. And there's simply no end to what we can do with the burn; it would make any garden fairyland, with those shining brown pools fringed with heather. What luck to have a burn! Before the house we are going to have a paved bit, so that you can go out and take the air without getting your feet wet.

Ann clasped her hands round her knees, and rocked herself in joyful anticipation.

But, Mother, is this really going to bore you terribly? Do you miss so badly the giddy round of Priorsford? The pavements? The shops? The tea-parties?" Mrs. Douglas gave a long sigh. "I don't want to grumble, but, you know, I always did say it was rash to attempt to stay a winter in the Green Glen. It's well enough in the summer (though even then I would prefer to be nearer civilisation), and fine for the children, but in November, with the fields like sponges, and the road a mere Slough of Despond, and the hills covered with mist most of the time, and the wind coming down the glen howling like an evil spirit, and the station six miles away, and only a pony trap between us and complete burial; Mark and Charlotte in India, and Jim in South Africa, and the children in Oxfordshire with their other grandmother, I feel like a pelican in the wilderness.