Margaret Sinclair's Silent Money - Page 2

was his own house,
and he was proud of it also, but not half so proud of the house as of
its tiny garden; for there, with great care and at great cost, he had
managed to rear a few pansies, snowdrops, lilies of the valley, and
other hardy English flowers. Margaret and he stooped lovingly over them,
and it was wonderful to see how Peter's face softened, and how gently
the great rough hands, that had been all day handling smoked geese and
fish, touched these frail, trembling blossoms.

"Eh, lassie! I could most greet wi' joy to see the bonnie bit things;
when I can get time I'se e'en go wi' thee to Edinburgh; I'd like weel to
see such fields an' gardens an' trees as I hear thee tell on."

Then Margaret began again to describe the greenhouses, the meadows and
wheat fields, the forests of oaks and beeches she had seen during her
school days in Edinburgh. Peter listened to her as if she was telling a
wonderful fairy story, but he liked it, and, as he cut slice after slice
from his smoked goose, he enjoyed her talk of roses and apple-blossoms,
and smacked his lips for the thousandth time when she described a peach,
and said, "It tasted, father, as if it had been grown in the Garden of
Eden."

After such conversations Peter was always stern and strict. He felt an
actual anger at Adam and Eve; their transgression became a keenly
personal affair, for he had a very vivid sense of the loss they had
entailed upon him. The vague sense of wrong made him try to fix it, and,
after a short reflection, he said in an injured tone:

"I wonder when Ronald's coming hame again?"

"Ronald is all right, father."

"A' wrong, thou means, lassie. There's three vessels waiting to be
loaded, an' the books sae far ahint that I kenna whether I'm losing or
saving. Where is he?"

"Not far away. He will be at the Stones of Stennis this week some time
with an Englishman he fell in with at Perth."

"I wonder, now, was it for my sins or his ain that the lad has sic auld
world notions? There isna a pagan altar-stane 'tween John O'Groat's an'
Lambaness he doesna run after. I wish he were as anxious to serve in
the Lord's temple--I would build him a kirk an' a manse for it."

"We'll be proud of Ronald yet, father. The Sinclairs have been fighting
and making money for centuries: it is a sign of grace to have a scholar
and a poet at last among them."

Peter grumbled. His ideas of poetry were limited by the Scotch psalms,
and, as for scholarship, he asserted that the books were better kept
when he used his own method of tallies and crosses. Then he remembered
Geordie Twatt's misfortune, and had his little grumble out on this