Stevenson left alone with a hero, a heroine, and a proposal impending (he does not know where to look). Sir Walter in the same circumstances gets out of the room by making his love- scenes take place between the end of one chapter and the beginning of the next, but he could afford to do anything, and the small fry must e'en to their task, moan the dog as he may. So I have yoked to mine when, enter my mother, looking wistful.
'I suppose you are terrible thrang,' she says.
'Well, I am rather busy, but - what is it you want me to do?'
'It would be a shame to ask you.'
'Still, ask me.'
'I am so terrified they may be filed.'
'You want me to - ?'
'If you would just come up, and help me to fold the sheets!'
The sheets are folded and I return to Albert. I lock the door, and at last I am bringing my hero forward nicely (my knee in the small of his back), when this startling question is shot by my sister through the key-hole-
'Where did you put the carrot-grater?'
It will all have to be done over again if I let Albert go for a moment, so, gripping him hard, I shout indignantly that I have not seen the carrot-grater.
'Then what did you grate the carrots on?' asks the voice, and the door-handle is shaken just as I shake Albert.
'On a broken cup,' I reply with surprising readiness, and I get to work again but am less engrossed, for a conviction grows on me that I put the carrot-grater in the drawer of the sewing-machine.
I am wondering whether I should confess or brazen it out, when I hear my sister going hurriedly upstairs. I have a presentiment that she has gone to talk about me, and I basely open my door and listen.
'Just look at that, mother!'
'Is it a dish-cloth?'
'That's what it is now.'
'Losh behears! it's one of the new table-napkins.'
'That's what it was. He has been polishing the kitchen grate with it!'
(I remember!)
'Woe's me! That is what comes of his not letting me budge from this room. O, it is a watery Sabbath when men take to doing women's work!'
'It defies the face of clay, mother, to fathom what makes him so senseless.'
'Oh, it's that weary writing.'
'And the worst of it is he will talk to-morrow as if he had done wonders.'
'That's the way with the whole clanjam-fray of them.'
'Yes, but as usual you will humour him, mother.'
'Oh, well, it pleases him, you see,' says my mother, 'and we can have our laugh when his door's shut.'
'He is most terribly handless.'
'He is all that, but, poor soul, he does his best.'
CHAPTER VII - R. L. S.
These familiar initials are, I suppose, the best beloved in recent literature, certainly they are the sweetest to me, but there was a time when my mother could not abide them. She said 'That Stevenson man' with a sneer, and, it was never easy to her to sneer. At thought of him her face would become almost hard, which seems incredible, and she would knit her lips and fold her arms, and reply with a stiff 'oh' if you mentioned his aggravating name. In the novels we have a way of writing of our heroine, 'she drew herself up haughtily,' and when mine draw themselves up haughtily I see my mother thinking of Robert Louis Stevenson. He knew her opinion of him, and would write, 'My ears tingled yesterday; I sair doubt she has been miscalling me again.' But the more she miscalled him the more he delighted in her, and she was informed of this, and at once said, 'The scoundrel!' If you would know what was his unpardonable crime, it was this: he wrote better books than mine.
I remember the day she found it out, which was not, however, the day she admitted it. That day, when I should have been at my work, she came upon me in the kitchen, 'The Master of Ballantrae' beside me, but I was not reading: my head lay heavy on the table, and to her anxious eyes, I doubt not, I was the picture of woe. 'Not writing!' I echoed, no, I was not writing, I saw no use in ever trying to write again. And down, I suppose, went my head once more. She misunderstood, and thought the blow had fallen; I had awakened to the discovery, always dreaded by her, that I had written myself dry; I was no better than an empty ink-bottle.