“The train got to Peel as the sun was setting behind the grim old castle
walls, and when I saw the dear little town again I dropped half a tear,
and even felt an insane desire to run out to meet it. Grandfather was at
the station with old 'Caesar' and the pony carriage, and when I had done
kissing him and he had done panting and puffing and talking nonsense, as
if I had been Queen Victoria and the Empress of the French rolled into
one, I could have cried to see how small and feeble he had become since
I went away. We could not get off immediately, for in his simple joy at
my return he was hailing everybody and everybody was hailing him,
and the dear old Pharisee was sounding his trumpet so often in the
market-place, that he might have glory of men, that I thought we should
never get up to Glenfaba that night. When we did so at length the old
aunties were waiting at the gate, and then he broke into exclamations
again. 'Hasn't she grown tall? Look at her! Hasn't she, now?' Whereupon
the aunties took up their parable with, 'Well, well! Aw, well! Aw, well
now! Well, ye navar!' So that by the time I got through I had kissed
everybody a dozen times, and was as red over the eyes as a grouse.
“Then we went into the house, and for the first five minutes I couldn't
tell what had come over the old place to make it look so small and
mean. It was just as if the walls of the rooms had been the bellows of
a concertina and somebody had suddenly shut them. But there was the long
clock clucking away on the landing, and there was Sir Thomas Traddles
purring on the hearth-rug, and there were the same plates on the
dresser, and the same map of Africa over the fireplace, with a spot of
red ink where my father died.
“The moon was glistening on the sea when I went to bed that night, and
when I got up in the morning the sun was shining on it, and a crow cut
across my window cawing, and I heard grandfather humming to himself
on the path below. And after my long spell in London, and my railway
journey of the day before, it was the same as if I had fallen asleep in
a gale on the high seas and awakened in a quiet harbour somewhere.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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