Leaving Logan with his friends, Allison returned downstairs in a none-too-pleasant frame of mind. It was disgraceful how they were all treating the man—giving him the best guestroom, waiting on him hand and foot, allowing his coarse and smelly friends the run of the house.
Yet all those things had not irritated her half as much as her mother asking her to show the visitors up to Macintyre’s room. They had servants for such tasks!
Her mother and father both knew what sort of person he was; Allison had made a point of telling exactly how she had found him in town the other day when they had mentioned they were going to hire him. If she had tried to befriend such a person, they would have objected strenuously.
When she reached the bottom of the stairs, she was carrying a taut, sour expression on her face, which Joanna could hardly have missed. The perceptive mother had a vague idea of the cause, for she had seen the protest in her daughter’s eyes the moment she had been asked to escort Logan’s guests upstairs. Joanna often doubted whether or not she was approaching her daughter’s problems wisely, thrusting her into situations that would challenge and expose her arrogant attitude for what it was. She’d hoped that when Allison saw herself in her true light, it would have a much greater impact than a mother’s preaching. Joanna told herself over and over to exercise patience and to stand faithful in prayer for her daughter—those would be her greatest weapons against this thing that was eating away at Allison. But sometimes it was so hard to keep from saying what sprang to her mind.
“Mother!” said Allison in a remonstrative tone, as a master rebuking a servant. “How could you? It’s hardly suitable for a member of the family to be showing a mere employee his guests! How do you expect to maintain order around here? And such guests!”
The arrogant tone of her daughter’s words taxed Joanna’s resolve to the limit. Perhaps what she needs is a good hard spanking! Joanna thought to herself. But instead she took a breath, then answered calmly, “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“You wouldn’t, Mother,” replied Allison. “Sometimes you just let them walk all over you!”
“Do I . . . ?”
Allison nodded, looking as though she were expecting a verbal attack from her mother on another flank. But then Joanna went on in the same controlled voice. “I’m on my way out to the greenhouse.” With the words, Allison noticed for the first time the basket her mother was carrying. “Dorey said there were some lovely rhododendrons ready to pick. Would you care to join me?”
Allison hesitated.
There seemed no threat in the invitation. Still it was a little odd. Why hadn’t her mother given her the usual sermon on treating everyone as equals? She and her mother used to take walks over the grounds all the time. Why had they stopped, she wondered? She was about to make some excuse for refusing when suddenly she found herself saying, “Yes.”
It was not a day particularly conducive to a morning stroll. A steady wind had arisen and was now blowing in from the north, filled with portents of another rainstorm. It whipped Allison’s hair in her face, and she pulled her sweater snugly about her. It would have been impossible to talk as they walked without yelling in one another’s ears.
The moment they stepped into the greenhouse, they seemed to enter another realm altogether. The glass walls immediately cut off the roar of the wind and they were surrounded by a still, quiet, humid warmth.
Joanna smiled as she looked about.
“I remember the first time I came into this place,” she said reflectively. “Your father and I had sneaked onto the grounds through a breach in the hedge. I was trembling when we came through this door, and with good reason, for I was a common trespasser—an unwelcome interloper.”
“I’ve heard the story many times, Mother.”
“Yes . . . I suppose you have.” Joanna took down a pair of shears from a hook on the wall. “I guess I’m telling you now because I hoped it would help you understand why I feel as I do toward the folk around here.”
“Because you were one of them once?”
“Yes. I was an outsider too. A commoner. I have never stopped being ‘one of them,’ as you put it.” She walked to several rhododendron bushes laden with large deep red blossoms. “I suppose it’s my own background that made me realize there wasn’t anything magical about being a Duncan. And when I began to learn about some family history, I learned there wasn’t even anything very desirable about it.”
“Mother! How can you say such a thing?”
“There’s nothing special about us, dear, except in God’s eyes—where every one of His children is infinitely special.” Joanna clipped one of the blooms and laid it in her basket. “Several hundred years ago a man by the name of Ramsay happened to save a king’s life, and the king gave him some land and a title for his reward. It could have happened to anyone.”
“But it didn’t.”
“Andrew Ramsay, then, was special. He was a courageous man who placed another’s life above his own. That was special and he deserved what he got. But the rest . . . in a sense, they belonged no more to that reward than I belonged in the greenhouse that day.”
“We’ve earned our place by faithfully administering the estate,” argued Allison.
“You know,” said Joanna, attempting a new train of thought, “your brother wants to go to America; he may decide to live there permanently. Nat has no interest in being a country squire—I think he’d much rather be a fisherman. Thus, the mantle of Stonewycke will no doubt fall to you, Allison.”
Allison had never heard her mother talk like this. It was a little sobering, even frightening. Allison did not like fear, and she responded by trying to protect herself with a hard, cool shell. For the moment she said nothing.
“I agree with you in one sense,” Joanna continued. “We do have a unique responsibility to the community. They look to us for a kind of stability and leadership, which is a good thing when wisely used. But it is not because of who we are, or even what we are, but rather because of what Stonewycke is, what it represents in the minds of the people and in the history of this community, what it has always stood for. Allison, we have been placed here as servants to the folk around us. To serve—that is the highest calling of all.”
“I knew you would find a way to twist it around to that,” retorted Allison angrily. “No one expects servanthood from us, least of all the people in Port Strathy. They like to flaunt their resident nobility, just like all common people do. I think it embarrasses them the way this family sometimes behaves, acting as if we were not better than they.”
“And you do think we’re better?”
“Maybe better was an unwise word. But yes, we’re supposed to be set apart, higher in society. It’s for their good too, don’t you see? They need us to be above them.”
“And you think we should lord it over them because of our position?”
“Do you know what the real problem is, Mother?” asked Allison, ignoring her mother’s question.
Joanna simply raised her eyebrows inquisitively, knowing her daughter’s answer was going to come no matter what she said.
“I think you’re afraid of what your position really means, afraid you won’t be able to measure up to real nobility.” Joanna stared, too stunned by her daughter’s reasoning to respond. “I think you’re hiding behind all this servant rhetoric!” Allison added in one final outburst.
Joanna closed her eyes and let the shears slip from her hand. “Oh, Allison . . .” she breathed, the pain evident in her voice. “I . . . I can see we can’t talk about this,” she tried to go on, then stopped. Her lip trembled as she tried to hold back the tears, for she knew they would not draw Allison’s sympathy, and might even induce her contempt.
Joanna could not utter another word. She was hurt, disappointed, even a little angry in a quiet sort of way, and afraid of what, at that point, she might say—what terrible things might lash out at her own daughter.
She turned, and still clutching the basket of Dorey’s lovely flowers, hurried out of the greenhouse.
Allison watched, but her own fancied indignation on the side of truth shielded her from feeling her mother’s poignant and heart-wrenching emotion. She hadn’t noticed the soft shuffling sound behind her, and had no idea someone had entered the greenhouse by the back door while she had made her cruel speech to her mother.
“I didn’t mean to intrude,” came a soft, aged voice.
Startled at the sound, she jerked herself around, glaring at whoever had the gall to frighten her so. It was Dorey.
“Oh, Grandpa,” she said, quickly rearranging her features into a look of deference, for he was one of her elders whose opinion she still respected. “You frightened me.”
“You frightened me, dear,” he replied in a calm tone, sounding not at all like one who had been frightened in anything like a normal manner.
“Me?”
Appearing to ignore her questioning tone, Dorey hobbled slowly over to the place where Joanna had dropped the shears. He inched his frame gingerly down and picked them up. “They’ll rust if they lay there and chance to get wet,” he said quietly. He laid them carefully on a worktable.
“Were . . .” Allison began hesitatingly, “were you here the whole time?”
“I haven’t yet fallen into the habit of common eavesdropping.”
“I’m sorry, Grandpa. That’s not what I meant.”
“When I came in, you and your mother were too intent on one another to notice me. I was rather at a disadvantage, and at the moment I tried to make my presence known, your mother walked out.”
“She’s impossible to talk to,” said Allison with a defensive edge to her voice.
“A common malady between mothers and daughters, I expect,” said the old man.
“I’m afraid she didn’t understand me.”
“I think she understands you only too well,” replied Dorey, his brow furrowed with a rebuke his soft-spoken voice did not carry. “As I also understood you.”
“What do you mean?” she asked. She really didn’t want to ask the question, but somehow it almost seemed expected, and she could not help herself.
He came toward her and took her hands into his—gnarled old hands, coarse with their work in the soil and trembling slightly with age. But his grasp was firm and warm, filled with a love he knew his great-granddaughter was unwilling to acknowledge openly.
“I heard something in your voice,” he said, his voice forever soft, as a man who gave little credit to his own wisdom. “I see it now in your eyes, and it does frighten me, my dear, dear Ali.” He was the only one she permitted to call her by that name. “As much as we would like to, we cannot forget that his blood flows through your veins. But I saw it so clearly in your eyes just now. They were his eyes . . . I could never forget them.”
“Whose, Grandpa?” Allison’s voice trembled a bit now too. Her great-grandfather was as lucid a man as there ever was, but she knew he had suffered greatly and had had some mental disorder many years ago; and every now and then, not often, he said something that reminded her of that fact.
“James Duncan’s,” he replied tightly. The name would always be difficult for him to say.
“He was rather a scoundrel, wasn’t he?”
“He was your great-great-grandfather,” was Dorey’s only reply. He brought her hands to his wrinkled lips and kissed them softly.
“Mother didn’t get any pink rhodies,” Allison said with a forced tightness in her voice. She blithely released herself from Dorey’s grasp, picked up the shears, and flitted about the flowers like a butterfly.
Dorey shook his head sadly. “Will you apologize to your mother?” he asked.
“I don’t see why,” said Allison, frantically clipping blossoms.
“You hurt her terribly.”
“I didn’t mean to.”
“We never mean to hurt those we love,” he said as he let out a weary sigh. “But it happens only too often. You mustn’t let such things fester between you.”
“Well . . . I suppose I should have used a different tone,” she conceded, though reluctantly, appearing to do so only to please her grandfather. “That should be enough pink ones, don’t you think?” She dropped the shears on the table and skitted to the door. “Luncheon should be ready soon, Grandpa, so don’t be too long.”
She was out the door and gone before he could even reply.
Dorey sighed heavily. “Dear Lord,” he prayed softly, “don’t let her go that way—his way. Draw her to you early in her life, my Father, so that she may have that many more years to enjoy your love. She needs you so. Help her to realize her need . . .”
As he passed, he thought of a young man so many, many years ago, and what it had taken for him to acknowledge his need for God. The thought made him wince in pain for Allison. But the dread was even greater when he recalled James Duncan’s terrible glint in his dear Ali’s eyes.
“Do whatever you must, Father.” They were hard words to say. And perhaps would have been impossible if he did not know he was saying them to a loving and merciful God.