(But the little touches of my mother in it are not so bad.) Let us try the story about the minister.
My mother's first remark is decidedly damping. 'Many a time in my young days,' she says, 'I played about the Auld Licht manse, but I little thought I should live to be the mistress of it!'
'But Margaret is not you.'
'N-no, oh no. She had a very different life from mine. I never let on to a soul that she is me!'
'She was not meant to be you when I began. Mother, what a way you have of coming creeping in!'
'You should keep better watch on yourself.'
'Perhaps if I had called Margaret by some other name - '
'I should have seen through her just the same. As soon as I heard she was the mother I began to laugh. In some ways, though, she's no' so very like me. She was long in finding out about Babbie. I'se uphaud I should have been quicker.'
'Babbie, you see, kept close to the garden-wall.'
'It's not the wall up at the manse that would have hidden her from me.'
'She came out in the dark.'
'I'm thinking she would have found me looking for her with a candle.'
'And Gavin was secretive.'
'That would have put me on my mettle.'
'She never suspected anything.'
'I wonder at her.'
But my new heroine is to be a child. What has madam to say to that?
A child! Yes, she has something to say even to that. 'This beats all!' are the words.
'Come, come, mother, I see what you are thinking, but I assure you that this time - '
'Of course not,' she says soothingly, 'oh no, she canna be me'; but anon her real thoughts are revealed by the artless remark, 'I doubt, though, this is a tough job you have on hand - it is so long since I was a bairn.'
We came very close to each other in those talks. 'It is a queer thing,' she would say softly, 'that near everything you write is about this bit place. You little expected that when you began. I mind well the time when it never entered your head, any more than mine, that you could write a page about our squares and wynds. I wonder how it has come about?'
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.