Pink Sugar

O. Douglas

Description

Kirsty Gilmour makes a home for herself in the Scottish Borders and takes under her wing a gentle old aunt and three motherless children; Barbara, Specky and Bad Bill. Originally written in the 1920s, Pink Sugar is full of perfectly drawn characters with old-fashioned values from a vanished world; a world of kindness and good manners, of generosity and self-restraint, and yet a world where poverty, illness and bereavement are just below the surface. In this society of women, the plot centers around the trials and tribulation of daily life in Scotland in the years after the First World War.

Sujets

• Fiction
• Family Life

Informations

• Publié par: Rare Treasure Editions
• Date de parution: 06 novembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781774643136
• Langue: English

Extrait

Pink Sugar
by O. Douglas

First published in 1924
This edition published by Rare Treasures
Victoria, BC Canada with branch offices in the Czech Republic and Germany
[e-mail]
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except in the case of excerpts by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

PINK SUGAR

by
O. Douglas

TO

JOHN AND SUSAN BUCHAN

BECAUSE OF BILL
CHAPTER I

‘ Now Mercy was of a fair countenance
and therefore the more alluring. ’
THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS
‘ I described myself as a spinster without encumbrances.I don’t know quite what I meant by it, but I thought itsounded well.’
Kirsty Gilmour stood in the window in the springsunshine, arranging daffodils in a wide bowl, and laughed.
Blanche Cunningham, lying back comfortably in alarge armchair, looked at her friend appraisingly.
‘How old are you, Kirsty?’ she asked lazily, choosingwith care a chocolate from an opulent-looking box thatlay on her knee.
‘I’m thirty,’ said Kirsty, ‘but you shouldn’t make mesay it out loud like that.’
‘How would you like to be forty, my dear?—that’swhat I’ll be on my next birthday. But you don’t lookthirty, child. You can stand in that glare of revealing sunand work with spring flowers and fear nothing. You’rerather like a daffodil yourself, now that I come to thinkof it, with that green frock and cloud of pale yellow hair—youreyes are green too. Did you know that?’
‘Of course,’ said Kirsty, attempting to make a weak-kneeddaffodil stand upright, ‘that’s why I’m so fondof jade. . . . Now, isn’t that pretty? They look as ifthey were growing in the moss. I like best the smallsingle daffodils that grow almost wild, they have such aneager look.’
‘Very pretty,’ Mrs. Cunningham said, glancing carelesslyat the bowl of flowers. ‘But, Kirsty, it’s absurdthat you should be a spinster. How have you managedit?’
‘I wonder! Blanche, you married so young that, asI’ve often told you, you’ve acquired the male attitudeof mind. No man ever allows himself to believe that awoman is single from choice, and, in your heart, neitherdo you.’
‘Pouf!’ Mrs. Cunningham waved the imputationaside and searched diligently in the chocolate-box. ‘I’mafraid I’m making a dreadful mess of your chocolates.I’m looking for a hard one, and I’ve squashed all the softones pinching them. . . . You forget, my dear, whenyou accuse me of unbelief that I was on the spot and sawat least two aspirants to your hand—at Cannes, youremember? There was the hidalgo from the Tyne (I’veforgotten his name), just baroneted, with all his blushinghonours thick upon him. How red the back of his neckwas! And there . . .’
‘Blanche,’ Kirsty was smiling, but there was a note ofappeal in her voice. ‘ Need you talk about ugly thingsthe first real day of spring? I’ve had no luck in suitors—letus leave it at that. . . . You really aren’t behavingvery nicely. I’ve looked forward so to your visit, and,instead of giving me a week as you promised, you areonly staying a miserable few hours—you arrived atluncheon-time and you say you must leave by the earlytrain to-morrow morning. I’ve so much to tell you andto show you, and you don’t seem interested . . . it’svery disappointing.’
Blanche Cunningham sprang up impulsively, upsettingthe box of chocolates in her haste, and attempted to grabKirsty, and the bowl of flowers she was carrying, in herarms. ‘But I am interested, Kirsty dear,’ she cried;‘I’m dying to see every corner of this delectable place.How did you find it? Little Phantasy. I love the name.’
‘Just see what you’ve made me do!’ said Kirsty, carryingthe flowers to a place of safety, and proceeding tomop up the water spilt on the floor with her handkerchief.Then she sat down on the arm of her friend’s chair andtried to dry her wet fingers with her wet handkerchief.
‘It was the name that fascinated me,’ she said. ‘Assoon as I read the advertisement I knew I simply mustlive here. But I’ll tell you about that later.—To beginjust where we are, do you approve of this room?’
She looked proudly round the gay white room withits wide windows of small-paned glass, and before herfriend could reply, went on: ‘You don’t think thechintzes too bright, do you? I like a lot of colour in acountry room, and I thought the white-panelled wallscould stand the tulips and the parrots. Isn’t it luck thatthere should be such a good oak floor when we have somany rugs? I collected them for years all over theplace, hoping that some day I might find a use forthem. That Bokhara one is my special find. When Ishowed it to Mrs. Paynter—you remember the delightfulAmerican lady?—she took it in her arms and hugged itand said, “I don’t care how much you paid for this, itcouldn’t be too much.” ’
Blanche laughed. ‘Yes, but I like best the big onein the middle. It makes me think of a meadow ofbright flowers. . . . But it’s all charming: the dark oldmahogany, and the white walls, and the bright chintzes,and the gentle colours of the rugs. Somehow I’m surprised.I never seem to have thought of you as a homemaker.’
Kirsty shook her head rather mournfully.
‘You see,’ she said, ‘it’s the very first home I’ve everhad, though I am thirty.’
Blanche was silent, remembering the Kirsty she hadfirst known, a rather listless girl, dragged from one smarthotel to another by a valetudinarian but sprightly stepmother.Change had been the breath of life to LadyGilmour. Plaintively seeking health, she had movedfrom one to another Pool of Bethesda, where in verytruth she ‘troubled the waters.’
Thinking of Lady Gilmour, Blanche was consciousagain of the hot wave of dislike that had so often engulfedher when she had come in contact with thatlady in life. She remembered the baby-blue eyes, theappealing ways, the smooth sweet voice that could saysuch cruel things, the too red lips, the faint scent ofviolets that had clung to all her possessions, the carefullythought-out details of all she wore, her endless insistentcare for herself and her own comfort, her absolute carelessnessas to the feelings of others. Blanche told herselfthat she had done more than dislike Lady Gilmour,she had almost hated the woman—chiefly on Kirsty’saccount.
She had first met Kirsty and her stepmother ten yearsbefore at an hotel in Mentone where she was recruitingafter an illness in India. She had been interested atonce in both of them, the pretty fragile mother and theyoung daughter with the cloud of pale gold hair andgrave green eyes. They made a charming picture, shethought, but they were so constantly surrounded by acrowd of admirers, both male and female, that it wassome time before an opportunity came to speak to thegirl. When it came she found her shy and, for suchan attractive creature, oddly grateful for attention andresponsive to kindness. When she heard that Mrs. Cunninghamwas Scots she cried, ‘But so am I, through andthrough. Kirsty Gilmour—that sounds Scots enough,doesn’t it?’
‘And you live in Scotland?’ she had asked.
‘No. You see my stepmother hates Scotland. Itmakes her ill, she says: so draughty and cold. We seemto go everywhere but to Scotland. D’you know, Ihaven’t been home—to Scotland, I mean—since I waseight. Not since my father died.’
Blanche had laughed at the woeful droop of the girl’ssoft mouth and said, ‘What part of Scotland do youbelong to? The Borders? Ah well, you must see thatyou marry a Scotsman and make your home there.’
Later on she had been introduced to Lady Gilmour,and had found her sweet and friendly and quite intolerable.For the sake of seeing something of Kirsty shehad tried to dissemble her dislike and make one of theadmiring crowd that murmured at intervals, ‘DearLady Gilmour, so frail, so touching’; but at all timesBlanche dissembled with difficulty, and Lady Gilmourhad herself seemed to feel the antagonism and return itwith interest. She had done her best to wean Kirstyfrom her new friend, but Kirsty was staunch, and sheand Blanche had corresponded regularly and met atintervals all through the ten years.
Lady Gilmour had been dead about six months, andKirsty had come, like a homing bird, to the Borders.
‘Kirsty,’ Blanche laid her hand on her friend’s arm.‘However did you stand it all those years? What anintolerable woman she was!’
Kirsty sat looking in front of her.
‘She’s dead,’ was all she said.
‘Well,’ Mrs. Cunningham retorted briskly, ‘beingdead doesn’t make people any nicer, does it?’
‘No—but it makes them so harmless and unresentful.’
‘As to that, Lady Gilmour wouldn’t be harmless if shecould help it, you may be sure of that. I never met awoman with such a genius for mischief-making. . . .You were a model of discretion, my dear, the most dutifulof stepdaughters, but you aren’t naturally stupid—you must have seen.’
Kirsty looked out to the wild garden where the daffodilsdanced in the April sun. All the light had gone out ofher face, the very gold of her hair seemed dulled. Shewas again the listless girl who had followed apatheticallyin the train of her egotistical stepmother.
When she spoke her voice too had changed: it draggedtonelessly. ‘Oh, don’t you see? If I had ever even tomyself put it into words, I couldn’t have stood it anotherday. I never let myself say to myself how I hated it,I just went on—dreary day after dreary day. And afterall, Marmee was all I had, she needed me, and perhapsshe did care for me a little in her own way, though shecouldn’t help always stinging me like a gadfly. I’vebeen thinking since that my misery was greatly my ownfault. If I had been a different kind of girl I might hav