At present the hands of the ornate clock showed twenty minutes past five, and old Grandma Brodie sat in her corner chair by the range, making toast for tea. She was a large-boned, angular woman shrunken but not withered by her seventy-two years, shrivelled and knotted like the bole of a sapless tree, dried but still hard and resilient, toughened by age and the seasons she had seen. Her hands, especially, were gnarled, the joints nodular with arthritis. Her face had the colour of a withered leaf and was seamed and cracked with wrinkles;
the features were large, masculine and firm; her hair, still black, was parted evenly in the middle, showing a straight white furrow of scalp, and drawn tight into a hard knob behind; some coarse short straggling hairs sprouted erratically like weeds from her chin and upper lip. She wore a black bodice and shawl, a small black mutch, a long trailing skirt of the same colour and elastic-sided boots which, although large, plainly showed the protuberance of her bunions and
the flatness of her well-trodden feet.
As she crouched over the fire, the mutch slightly askew from her exertions, supporting the toasting fork with both tremulous hands, she toasted two slices of bread with infinite care, thick pieces which she browned over gently, tenderly, leaving the inside soft, and when she had completed these to her satisfaction and placed them on that side of the plate where she might reach out quickly and remove them adroitly at once, whenever the family sat down to tea, she consummated the rest of her toasting negligently, without interest. While
she toasted she brooded. The sign of her brooding was the clicking of her false teeth as she sucked her cheeks in and out. It was simply an iniquity, she reflected, that Mary had forgotten to bring home the cheese. That girl was getting more careless than ever and as undependable in such important matters as a half-witted ninny. What was tea to a woman without cheese? Fresh Dunlop cheese! The thought of it made her long upper lip twitch, sent a little river of saliva drooling from the corner of her mouth.
As she ruminated, she kept darting quick recriminative glances from under her bent brows at her granddaughter, Mary, who sat in the opposite corner in the horsehair armchair, hallowed to her father's use, and by that token a forbidden seat.
Mary, however, was not thinking of cheese, nor of the chair, nor of the crimes she committed by forgetting the one and reclining in the other. Her soft brown eyes gazed out of the window and were focused upon the far-off distance as if they saw something there, some scene which shaped itself enchantingly under her shining glance.
Occasionally her sensitive mouth would shape itself to smile, then she would shake her head faintly, unconsciously, activating thus her pendant ringlets and setting little lustrous waves of light rippling across her hair. Her small hands, of which the skin wore the smooth soft texture of petals of magnolia, lay palm upwards in her lap, passive symbols of her contemplation. She sat as straight as a wand and she was beautiful with the dark serene beauty of a deep tranquil pool where waving wands might grow. Upon her was the unbroken bloom
of youth, yet, although she was only seventeen years of age, there rested about her pale face and slender unformed figure a quality of repose and quiet fortitude.
At last the old woman's growing resentment jarred her into speech. Dignity forbade a direct attack, and instead she said, with an added bitterness from repression:
"You're sitting in your father's chair, Mary."
There was no answer.
"That chair you're sitting in is your father's chair, do you hear?"
Still no answer came; and, trembling now with suppressed rage, the crone shouted:
"Are you deaf and dumb as well as stupid, you careless hussy? What made you forget your messages this afternoon ? Every day this week you've done something foolish. Has the heat turned your head ?"
Like a sleeper suddenly aroused, Mary looked up, recollected herself and smiled, so that the sun fell upon the sad still pool of her beauty.
"Were you speaking, Grandma?" she said.
"No!" cried the old woman coarsely. "I wasna speakin'. I was just openin' my mouth to catch flies. It's a graund way o' passin' the time if ye've nothing to do. I think ye must have been tryin' it when ye walked doun the toun this afternoon, but if ye shut your mouth and opened your een ye might mind things better."
At that moment Margaret Brodie entered from the scullery, carrying a large Britannia metal teapot and walking quickly with a kind of shuffling gait, taking short flurried steps with her body inclined forward, so that, as this was indeed her habitual carriage, she appeared always to be in a hurry and fearful of being late. She had discarded the wrapper in which she did the housework of the day
for a black satin blouse and skirt, but there were stains on the skirt and a loose tape hung untidily from her waist, whilst her hair straggled untidily about her face. Her head she carried perpetually to one side. Years before, this inclination had been affected to exhibit resignation and true Christian submission in periods of trial or tribulation, but time and the continual need for the expression of abnegation had rendered it permanent. Her nose seemed to follow this deviation from the vertical, sympathetically perhaps, but more probably as the result of a nervous tic she had developed in recent years of
stroking the nose from right to left with a movement of the back of her hand. Her face was worn, tired and pathetic; her aspect bowed and drooping, yet with an air as if she continually flogged her jaded energies onwards. She looked ten years older than her forty-two years. This was Mary's mother, but now they seemed as alien and unrelated as an old sheep and a young fawn.
A mistress from necessity of every variety of domestic situation^ Mamma, for so Mrs. Brodie was named by every member of the house, envisaged the old woman's rage and Mary's embarrassment at a glance.
"Get up at once, Mary," she cried. "It's nearly half-past five and the tea not infused yet. Go and call your sister. Have you finished the toast yet, Grandma? Gracious! You have burned a piece. Give it here to me. I'll eat it. We can't have waste in this house." She took the burned toast and laid it ostentatiously on her plate, then she began needlessly to move everything on the tea table as if nothing had been done right and would, indeed, not be right until she had expiated the sin of the careless layer of the table by the resigned toil
of her own exertions.
"Whatna way to set the table!" she murmured disparagingly, as her daughter rose and went into the hall.
"Nessie Nessie," Mary called. "Tea time tea time!"
A small treble voice answered from upstairs, singing the words:
"Coming down! Wait on me!"
A moment later the two sisters entered the room, providing instantly and independent of their disparity in years for Nessie was twelve years old a striking contrast in character and features. Nessie differed diametrically from Mary in type. Her hair was flaxen, almost colourless, braided into two neat pigtails, and she had inherited from her mother those light, inoffensive eyes, misty with the delicate white-flecked blucncss of speedwells and wearing always that soft placating expression which gave her the appearance of endeavouring continually to please. Her face was narrow with a high delicate white forehead, pink waxen doll's cheeks, a thin pointed chin and a small mouth, parted perpetually by the drooping of her lower lip, all expressive, as was her present soft, void smile, of the same immature and ingenuous, but none the less innate weakness.
"Are we not a bit early to-night, Mamma?" she asked idly as she presented herself before her mother for inspection.
Mrs. Brodie, busy with the last details of her adjustments, waved away the question.