"What are you going on about? Are you gone silly?" bawled Brodie. "Has the thunder turned your reason to make ye stand like a drunken fishwife?"
Still she was silent, and it then dawned upon him, from her manner, that some disaster had occurred.
"What is it?" he shouted roughly, "Is it Nessie? Has the lightning
hit her? Is she hurt?"
Mamma shook her whole body in a frantic negation the catas-
trophe was worse than that!
"No! No!" she gasped. "It's her her!" She raised her hand accusingly against Mary. Not even the most shadowy instinct of protection was in her. Her terror of Brodie in this awful calamity was so unbounded that her only impulse was to disclaim all responsibility, all knowledge of the crime. She must at all costs defend herself from any charge of liability in the matter.
"For the last time," raged Brodie, "I ask ye what it is. Tell me, or by God I'll come up to ye both."
"It wasn't my fault," cringed Mrs. Brodie, still shielding herself from the undelivered charge, "I've brought her up always like a Christian girl. It's her own natural badness." Then, realising that she must tell or be beaten, she strained her body to the utmost, threw her head back and, as if each word cost her an unbearable effort of ejaculation, sobbed:
"If you must know. She's going she's going to have a child."
Mary stiffened, whilst the blood drained from her face. Her mother, like Judas, had betrayed her. She was lost trapped her father below, her mother above.
Brodie's great frame seemed to shrink imperceptibly; his bellicose eyes became faintly bemused and, in a muddled fashion, he looked at Mary.
"What wha' " he muttered. He raised his eyes uncomprehendingly to Mamma, saw her frantic plight, and again lowered his gaze upon Mary. He paused, whilst his mind grappled with the inconceivable, unfathomable news. Suddenly he shouted,
"Come here!"
Mary obeyed. Each step she took seemed to lower her into her own tomb. Brodie seized her roughly by the arm and looked her up and down. A sickening feeling went through him.
"My God!" he repeated to himself, in a low tone. "My God! I believe it's true. Is it?" he cried thickly. Her tongue lay mutely in her mouth from shame. Still holding her arm, he shook her unmercifully, then, releasing her suddenly, allowed her to recoil heavily upon the floor.
"Are you with child ? Tell me quickly or I'll brain you," he shouted.
As she told him, she thought he would surely kill her. He stood there looking at her as if she were a viper that had stung him. He raised his arm as if to strike her, to crush her skull with one blow of his hammer fist, to wipe out with one blow her obliquity and his dishonour. He wanted to strike her, to trample on her, grind her under the heels of his boots into a mangled, bloody pulp. A vast
brutal passion seethed in him. She had dragged his name into the mire. The name of Brodie! She had lowered his heritage into the slime of ill fame. The whole place would reek of it. He would see the smirks, the sneers, the significant nods as he strode down the High Street; at the Cross he would hear the stray word of mockery and the half -muffled laugh of derision. The niche he had cut and was still carving for himself would be shattered; the name, the reputation
he had made for himself would be ruined and he himself cast down-wards in contumely through this thing that lay weeping at his feet. But he did not strike her. The intensity of his feeling burned suddenly into a heat which turned his gross rage into a subtle and more dangerous channel. In a different manner he would show her! He saw sharply a means of vindicating his honour. Yes, by God! He would show them in the Borough how he dealt with this sort of thing. They would see the stand that he was taking. She was now no daughter of his. He would cast her from him as unclean.
Then, suddenly, a second, loathsome suspicion came into his mind, a suspicion which gathered in aversion, becoming more certain the longer he contemplated it. He touched Mary with his huge, heavy boot.
"Who was the man?" he hissed at her. "Was it Foyle?" He saw from her look that he was right. For the second time that hateful young upstart had dealt him a crushing blow, this time more deadly than before. He would rather it had been any one, the basest and most beggarly scoundrel in the town, any one but Foyle! But it was he, the smooth-faced, blarneying, young corner boy who had possessed the body of Mary Brodie; and she, his child, had suffered him to do so. A lucid mental picture, revolting in its libidinous detail, rose up and tortured him. His face worked, the skin around his nostrils twitched, a thick, throbbing vessel corded itself upon his temple. His features, which had at first been suffused with a high angry flush, now became white and hard as chiselled granite. His jaw set ruthlessly like a trap, his narrow forehead lowered with an inhuman barbarity. A cold ferocity, more terrifying than the loud-mouthed abuse which he usually displayed, tempered his rage like an axe blade. He kicked Mary viciously. The hard sole of his boot sank into her soft side.
"Get up, you bitch!" he hissed, as he again spurned her brutally with his foot. "Do you hear me? Get up."
From the staircase the broken voice of Mamma senselessly repeated,
"I'm not to blame! I'm not to blame!" Over and over came the words, "I'm not to blame. Don't blame me." She stood there abjectly, cringingly, protesting ceaselessly in a muttering voice her inculpability, whilst behind her the terrified figures of Nessie and the old woman were dimly outlined. Brodie gave no heed to the interruption. He had not heard it.
"Get up," he repeated, "or I'll help ye up"; and, as she rose, he lifted
her to her feet with a final jerk of his foot.
Mary staggered up. Why, she thought, did he not kill her and be done with it? Her side, where he had kicked her, stabbed with a piercing hurt. She was too terrified to look at him. She felt that he was torturing her only to destroy her in the end.
"Now," he ground out slowly from between his clenched teeth, with words that bit into her like vitriol, "you'll listen to me."
As she stood there, bent and drooping, he moved his head slightly and thrust forward his hard, relentless face into hers. His eyes gleamed closely, with a concentrated, icy glitter that seared her with its chill.
"You'll listen to me, I say. You'll listen to me for the last time. You are not my daughter any longer. I am going to cast you out like a leper! Like a leper you filthy slut! That's what I'm going to do to you and your unborn bastard. I'm going to settle with your fancy man in my own time, but you you're going out to-night."
He repeated the last words slowly, whilst he pierced her with his cold eyes. Then, as though reluctant to abandon the satisfaction of her abasement under his glare, he turned slowly, walked heavily to the door and flung it open. Immediately a terrific inrush of wind and rain filled the hall, clattering the pictures on the walls, billowing the hanging coats on the stand, and rushing upwards with the force of a battering-ram towards the clinging group upon the stairs.
"It's a beautiful night for a stroll," snarled Brodie, with drawn lips. "It's dark enough for you to-night! You can walk the streets to your heart's content to-night, you strumpet!"
With a sudden thrust of his arm he caught her by the neck and compressed it within his huge, prehensile grasp. No sound but the
howling of the wind filled the hall. Of the three terrorised onlookers,
the uncomprehending child, the mother, and the half -fearful, half-
gloating old woman, not one spoke. They stood paralysed to silence.
The feel of her soft yet resistant throat fascinated him ; he wanted to
squeeze it like a pipestem until it snapped, and, for an instant, he stood
thus, fighting the impulse; but he started violently and, with a sudden
tug, dragged her to the door.
"Now," he shouted, "you're going out and you'll never come back not until you crawl back and grovel down to lick these boots that have kicked you."
At that, something within Mary spoke. "I will never do that," she whispered from her pale lips.
"No!" yelled Brodie. "You will never come back, you harlot!"
He pushed her, with a violent, final thrust, from him. She disappeared into the raging blackness beyond. As she vanished completely to sight and sound, as though she had stepped over a precipice, he stood there in an ecstasy of passion, his fists clenched, filling his lungs with the wet, saline air, shouting at the pitch of his voice, "Don't come back, you whore! you whore!" He shouted the last word again, and again, as if its repetition afforded him, in its coarse vituperation, a satisfaction, an alleviation of his fury. Then he turned upon his heel and shut her out into the night.
XI
MARY rested where she had fallen. She felt stunned, for Brodie's final, brutal thrust had thrown her heavily, flat upon her face, into the rough, gravel courtyard. The rain, driven in straight, parallel spears, impinged painfully upon her lightly covered body and spattered the surface of the puddle in which she lay. Already she was soaked to the skin, but the wetness of her rain-saturated clothing brought, at that moment, only a refreshing coolness to the fever that burned within her. She had felt under her father's terrible eyes that
he would surely murder her and now, although her bruised and aching body still burned, a sense of escape filled her mind and transfigured its terror to lightness and relief. She had been cast out shamefully, but she was alive; she had left for ever a home which had become lately a hated prison; and now she plucked together her shattered forces and bravely fixed her mind upon the future.
Denis, she became aware amongst the fearful confusion of her thoughts, was perhaps sixty miles away; she was enveloped in a storm of unprecedented magnitude; she had no coat, no hat, insufficient clothing and no money; but now she had courage. Firmly she compressed her wet lips as she desperately endeavoured to examine her position. Two courses lay open to her: the one to attempt to reach the cottage at Garshake, the other to go to Denis' mother at Darroch.