Chapter 16

THE PAINTED LADY

It had been the ordinary dwelling room of the unknown poor, the mean
little "end"--ah, no, no, the noblest chamber in the annals of the
Scottish nation. Here on a hard anvil has its character been fashioned
and its history made at rush-lights and its God ever most prominent.
Always within reach of hands which trembled with reverence as they
turned its broad page could be found the Book that is compensation for
all things, and that was never more at home than on bare dressers and
worm-eaten looms. If you were brought up in that place and have
forgotten it, there is no more hope for you.

But though still recalling its past, the kitchen into which Tommy and
Elspeth peered was trying successfully to be something else. The
plate-rack had been a fixture, and the coffin-bed and the wooden bole,
or board in the wall, with its round hole through which you thrust your
hand when you wanted salt, and instead of a real mantelpiece there was a
quaint imitation one painted over the fireplace. There were some pieces
of furniture too, such as were usual in rooms of the kind, but most of
them, perhaps in ignorance, had been put to novel uses, like the
plate-rack, where the Painted Lady kept her many pretty shoes instead of
her crockery. Gossip said she had a looking-glass of such prodigious
size that it stood on the floor, and Tommy nudged Elspeth to signify,
"There it is!" Other nudges called her attention to the carpet, the
spinet, a chair that rocked like a cradle, and some smaller oddities, of
which the queerest was a monster velvet glove hanging on the nail that
by rights belonged to the bellows. The Painted Lady always put on this
glove before she would touch the coals, which diverted Tommy, who knew
that common folk lift coals with their bare hands while society uses the
fringe of its second petticoat.

It might have been a boudoir through which a kitchen and bedroom had
wandered, spilling by the way, but though the effect was tawdry,
everything had been rubbed clean by that passionate housewife, Grizel.
She was on her knees at present ca'ming the hearth-stone a beautiful
blue, and sometimes looking round to address her mother, who was busy
among her plants and cut flowers. Surely they were know-nothings who
called this woman silly, and blind who said she painted. It was a little
face all of one color, dingy pale, not chubby, but retaining the soft
contours of a child's face, and the features were singularly delicate.
She was clad in a soft gray, and her figure was of the smallest; there
was such an air of youth about her that Tommy thought she could become a
girl again by merely shortening her frock, not such a girl as gaunt
Grizel, though, who would have looked a