O. Douglas - Taken by the Hand

“Both, please, and a good kitchen cup. I’m old-fashioned, I suppose, but I must say I get tired of the people who say, ‘Two spoonfuls of milk and hot water,’ or ‘Neither sugar nor cream, and very weak. . . .’ Yes, it’s the way we must all go, Mrs. Murray. D’you know, I sometimes find myself wondering why the world was made so full of interesting things and beautiful places, and why we’re allowed to get so fond of each other when we’ve got such a short time in it. And Janie Dobie was enjoying life so heartily . She always did everything with such gusto. I can’t picture her ill and weak. . . . I’ll call again to-morrow and ask to see poor Be’trice. It must be so lonely for her with only strange nurses, though, of course, there’s always Fairlie. She was nurse, you know, and stayed on as sewing-maid, housekeeper, a bit of everything, and she’s devoted to Be’trice. . . . I don’t know of any relations on the Boyd side: Janie was an only child; and I don’t know of any on the Dobie side either, except the step-son Samuel, Sir Samuel. Did you ever meet his wife, Mrs. Murray?”

“Never,” said Mrs. Murray firmly. “Does she come here much?”

Mrs. Lithgow pursed her lips. “She used to come years ago, and she was glad enough to send her children—she has a son and daughter—when she and her husband wanted a holiday on the Continent, but now she’s too busy ascending the social ladder—you see her name and her photograph often in the papers, in connection with charity balls and things—to trouble about the humble connections in Glasgow. I’m told she says Glasgow’s so common.”

“Poor thing,” said Mrs. Murray, quite sincerely. “And will Be’trice have to make her home with her?”

“Well, I don’t know what else she could do. It isn’t as if she was a girl with a lot of spirit and enterprise. At her age—she’s nearly twenty-five—with plenty of money she could give herself a splendid time, travel and see the world, or take up some special work, there’s no end to what she might do. It’s what the girl of to-day’s always asking, freedom to live her own life, but I doubt if poor Be’trice’ll see it in that light. It’s the way she’s been brought up. If she’d been sent to a good school where she’d have got to know all sorts of girls, and got accustomed to the rough and tumble of life, instead of going about with a governess, for all the world like a cloistered nun. I’m sure Janie Dobie meant it for the best, but she didn’t show her usual good sense in bringing up her girl. She taught Be’trice to depend on her for everything—and now what’s to happen?”

* * * * *

Mrs. Dobie lay in her large, comfortable bedroom, surrounded with gifts from her many friends—flowers, books, baskets of fruit. It was the same room she had shared for fifteen years with her husband, and every day of the fifteen years she had wished in her heart that she could get rid of every article of furniture it contained. The first Mrs. Dobie had had a sombre taste in bedrooms, and everything was dark and heavy, and so good that there was no hope of its getting shabby in reasonable time.

His first wife had been a favourite topic with Joseph Dobie. Her portrait hung above the dining-room mantelpiece (a tall woman in a Liberty gown of olive green) and his eyes often sought it at meal-times while he recalled some instance of her philanthropic zeal. Indeed, so much was said of “Isabella’s” excellencies that her successor, half-irritated, half-amused, sometimes felt that it would have evened things a little had she had a first husband whose portrait she could have hung above the drawing-room mantelpiece and whose virtues she could have extolled. But, untroubled by jealousy, Janie Dobie bore no grudge to the dead women either for her excellencies or her taste in furniture; all the same when Joseph Dobie died she wasted no time in reforming her bedroom.

Ten happy years had followed. She enjoyed the importance that her position as Joseph Dobie’s widow gave her. In a small way she blossomed into a personage. Other women recognised in her the makings of a leader. When she spoke she was listened to. When some one was wanted to plead a cause, or preside at a function, Mrs. Dobie’s was often the name suggested. As one of her friends said: “Mrs. Dobie has both common sense and mother-wit, she’s easy to look at, and there’s a sort of cosy you-and-me-ness about the way she addresses people that puts any meeting in a good humour, and then—she’s a good woman.”

When first she realised she was ill Mrs. Dobie had been inclined to be resentful. She, the healthiest of women, who hardly knew what it meant to have a headache or a common cold, who had always pitied half-contemptuously her feebler sisters as they coughed and ached their way through a Glasgow winter! Why, she enjoyed the cold weather, she often said, and always began the winter with eagerness. Summer was all very well and it was delightful at Greenbraes, their house on the west-coast, but how exhilarating to get back to Glasgow in the end of September, back to all her friends and interests, back to a telephone that was always ringing— Mrs. Dobie: Mrs. Dobie ; she seemed in request everywhere. Her engagement book was full, she dove-tailed engagements, she had rarely one hour all day to herself, and when people in wonder asked her how it was done, she would laugh, and say with perfect truth, “I like it!”

It was in June that she first began to feel that all was not well with her; she became conscious of a feeling of malaise, something quite intangible yet oddly compelling, and she told her friends that she was “run down,” and smiled wryly as she said it—that she should own to such a thing! And all her friends agreed that what she needed was a real rest. Mrs. Dobie worked far too hard, they said, put far too much of herself into everything she did; no wonder she was tired out. “What about a voyage?” they asked. She ought to get right away from every one and recuperate in new scenes.

Mrs. Dobie listened to them and appeared to be weighing the advantages of this scheme and that, but all the time she was saying to herself, “I won’t go anywhere; I’m too tired to start; all I need is to get into my own comfortable bed at Greenbraes and lie there till I’m rested.” But to her great disappointment she found that she was just as tired in bed.

In the middle of September she came back to the house in Park Place to be X-rayed, and when the result was known she asked only one, question. It was answered truthfully, and she began to set her house in order.

One day she was lying thinking over matters. Having always had a tidy mind and methodical ways she had not now to wrestle with a mass of things left in confusion, but there was some money of her own which she wanted to go where it would be most needed. Beatrice would have more than she could easily spend, the old servants were provided for, but Mrs. Dobie knew of several people to whom a hundred or two would make all the difference in life. She thought of them as she lay there propped up with pillows, and, reaching out to the table beside her for a pencil and block, wrote down some names and addresses.

There was that poor man George Clark with the delicate wife. He had come back from the War to find his little business ruined, and she had interested herself in him, and got him started again. He was working day and night to keep a footing: he deserved encouragement. And the boy with hip-joint disease whom she visited in his eyrie in a gloomy tenement near the river: the doctors said if he were kept in the country he might be cured. And Alice Wilson who had given her youth to an invalid mother, and for long years had kept herself with sewing, she was now in deadly fear that she would break down before she could claim the Old Age Pension—how good to set her free from anxiety. There were others, too . . . she would think of them later, and what was left would go to the Aged and Infirm Ministers’ Fund and the Indigent Gentlewomen.