the habit of years, impelled somehow by his own bitterness, by his own misfortunes, he continued in a low voice, "Ye've brocht up a’ your children bonnie, bonnie. There's Mary now what more could ye wish for than the way she's turned out? I don't know where she is exactly, but I'm sure she'll be doin' ye credit nobly." Then, observing that his wife was attempting to speak, he waited on her words.
"I know where she is," she whispered slowly.
He gazed at her.
"Ay!" he answered. "Ye know she's in London and that's as much as we a' ken as much as ye'll ever know."
Almost incredibly she moved her withered hand, that looked incapable of movement, and lifting it from the counterpane stopped him with a gesture; then, as her shrunken arm again collapsed, she said weakly, and with many tremors:
"Ye mustna be angry with me, ye mustna be angry with her. I've had a letter from Mary. She's a good girl she still is. I see more clearly now, than ever I did that 'twas I that didna do right by her. She wants to see me now, James, and I I must see her quickly before I die." As she uttered the last words she tried to smile at him pleadingly, placatingly, but her features remained stiff and frigid, only her lips parted slightly in a cracked, pitiful grimace.
The colour mounted slowly to his forehead.
"She dared to write to you," he muttered, "and you dared to read it."
"’Twas Doctor Renwick, when you stoppit him comin', that wrote to London and told her I was not not likely to last long. He's aye had a great interest in Mary. He said to me that morning that Mary my daughter Mary was brave, ay, and innocent as well."
"He was a brave man himself to raise that name in my house," returned Brodie, in a low, concentrated tone. He could not shout and rave at her in her present state, prevented only by some shred of compunction from turning violently upon her, but he added, bitterly, "If I had known he was interferin' like that, I would have brained him before he went out the door."
"Don't say that, James," she murmured. "It's beyond me to bear bitterness now. I've had a gey and useless life, I think. There's many a thing left undone that should have been done, but I must oh! I must see Mary, to put things right between her and me."
He gritted his teeth till the muscles of his stubbled jowl stuck out in hard, knotted lumps.
"Ye must see her, must ye," he replied " that's verra, verra touchin'. We should a' fall down and greet at the thought o' this wonderful reconciliation." He shook his head slowly from side to side. "Na! Na! My woman, ye'll not see her this side o' the grave, and I have strong misgivings if ye'll see her on the other. You're never to see her. Never!"
She did not answer, but, withdrawing into herself, became more impassive, more aloof from him. For a long time her eyes remained fixed on the ceiling. There was silence in the room but for the drowsy drone of an insect as it circled around the few sprays of sweet-scented honeysuckle that had been gathered by Nessie and placed by her in a vase that stood beside the bed. At length a faint tremor ran through Mamma's wasted body.
"Weel, James," she sighed, "if you say it, then it maun be so that's always been the way; but I wanted, oh! I did want to see her again. There's times though” she went on, slowly and with great difficulty, "when me pain o' this trouble has been to me like the carryin' of a child so heavy and draggin' like and it's turned my mind to that bairn o' hers that never lived for her to see it. If it had been spared, I would have liket to have held Mary's bairn in these arms" she looked downwards, hopelessly, at the withered arms that could scarcely raise a cup to her lips "but it was the will of God that such things couldna be, and that's all there is about it."
"Woman, you're not squeamish to take such a notion into your head at this time o' day," scowled Brodie. "Have ye not had enough to do with your own children without draggin' out the memory of -of that."
"It was just a fancy," she whispered, "and I've had many o' them since I lay here these six long months so long they've been like weary years." She closed her eyes in a tired fashion, forgetting him as the visions that she spoke of rushed over her again. The sweet perfume of the honeysuckle flowers beside her wafted her thoughts backwards and she was out of the close sickly room, home again on her father's farm. She saw the stout, whitewashed buildings, the homestead, the dairy and the long, clean byre forming the three snug sides of the clean yard; she saw her father come in from the shooting with a hare and a brace of pheasants in his hand. The smooth, coloured plumage delighted her as she stroked the plump breasts.
"They're as fat as you are," her father cried, with his broad, warm smile, "but not near as bonnie."
She had not been a slut then, nor had her form been the object of derision!
Now she was helping her mother with the churning, watching the rich yellow of the butter as it clotted in the white milk like a clump of early primroses springing from a bank of snow.
"Not so hard, Margaret, my dear," her mother had chided her, for the quickness of her turning. "You'll turn the arm off yourself."
She had not been lazy then, nor had they called her handless!
Her thoughts played happily about the farm and in her imagination she rolled amidst the sweet-mown hay, heard the creak of the horses moving in their stalls, laid her cheek against the sleek side of her favourite calf. She even remembered its name. "Rosabelle," she had christened it. "Whatna name for a cow!" Bella, the dairymaid, had teased her. "What way not call it after me and be done wi' it?”
An overpowering wave of nostalgia came over her as she remembered long, hot afternoons when she had lain with her head against the bole of the bent apple tree, watching the swallows flirt like winged, blue shadows around the eaves of the white, sun-drenched steadings. When an apple dropped beside her she picked it up and bit deeply into it; even now, she felt the sweetly acid tang refreshing upon her tongue, cooling its parched fever. Then she saw herself in a sprigged muslin frock, beside the mountain ash that grew above the Pownie Burn and, approaching her, a youth to whose dark, dour strength her gentleness drew near. She opened her eyes slowly.
"James," she whispered, as her eyes sought his with faint, wistful eagerness, "do ye mind that day by the Pownie Burn when ye braided the bonnie red rowan berries through my hair? Do ye mind what ye said then?"
He stared at her, startled at the transition of her speech, wondering if she raved; here was he on the brink of ruin, and she drivelled about a wheen rowans thirty years ago. His lips twitched as he replied, slowly:
"No! I dinna mind what I said, but tell me, tell me what I said."
She closed her eyes as though to shut out everything but the distant past, then she murmured, slowly:
"Ye only said that the rowan berries were not so braw as my bonnie curly hair."
As, unconsciously, he looked at the scanty, brittle strands of hair that lay about her face, a sudden, fearful rush of emotion swept over him. He did remember that day. He recollected the quiet of the little glen, the ripple of the stream, the sunshine that lay about them, the upward switch of the bough after he had plucked the bunch of berries from it; now he saw the lustre of her curls against the vivid scarlet of the rowans. Dumbly he tried to reject the idea that this this wasted creature that lay upon the bed had on that day rested in his arms and answered his words of love with her soft, fresh lips. It could not be yet it must be so! His face worked strangely, his mouth twisted as he battled with the surging feeling that drove against the barrier of his resistance like a torrent of water battering against the granite wall of a dam. Some vast, compelling impulse drove at him with an urge which made him want to say blindly, irrationally, in a fashion he had not used for twenty years:
"I do mind that day, Margaret and ye were bonnie bonnie and sweet to me as a flower." But he could not say it! Such words as these could never pass his lips. Had he come to this room to whine some stupid phrases of endearment? No, he had come to tell her of their ruin and tell her he would, despite this unnatural weakness that had come upon him.
"Auld wife," he muttered, with drawn lips, "ye'll be the death o’ me if ye talk like that. When ye're on the parish ye maun give me a crack like this to cheer me up."
At once her eyes opened enquiringly, anxiously, with a look which again stabbed him; but he forced himself to continue, nodded at her with a false assumption of his old, fleering jocosity.
"Ay!" he cried. "That's what it amounts to now. I'll have no more fifty pounds to fling away on ye. I've shut the door of my business for the last time. We'll all be in the poorhouse soon." As he uttered the last words he saw her face change, but some devilish impulse, aroused by his own present weakness and moving him more fiercely because he knew that in his heart he did not wish to speak like this, made him thrust his head close to her, goaded him to continue, "Do ye hear! The business is gone. I warned ye a year ago don't you remember that wi' your demned rowan berry rot? I tell ye we're ruined! You that's been such a help to me, that's what ye've brought me to. We're finished, finished, finished!"
The effect of his words upon her was immediate and terrible.
When his meaning burst in upon her, a frightful twitching affected the yellow, weazened skin of her features as though a sudden, intense grief attempted painfully to animate the moribund tissues, as though tears essayed with futile effort to well out from the dried-up springs of her body. Her eyes became suddenly full, intense and glowing and, with a tremendous, shivering effort, she raised herself up in the bed. A stream of words trembled upon her tongue but she could not utter them, and as a dew of perspiration broke upon her brow in cold, pricking drops she stammered incoherently, stretched her hand dumbly before her. Then, as her face grew grey with endeavour, suddenly she spoke:
"Matt," she cried in a full, high tone. "Matt! Come to me!" She now stretched out both her quivering arms as though sight failed her, calling out in a weaker, fading tone, "Nessie! Mary! Where are ye?"
He wished to go to her, to start forward instantly, but he remained rooted to the floor; yet from his lips broke involuntarily these words, strange as a spray of blossoms upon a barren tree:
"Margaret, woman Margaret dinna mind what I said. I didna mean the hauf o't!"
But she did not hear him and with a last, faint breath she whispered slowly:
"Why tarry the wheels of thy chariot, O Lord? I'm ready to go to ye!"
Then she sank gently backwards upon the pillow. A moment later a last, powerful expiration shook the thin, withered body with a convulsive spasm and she lay still. Limp and flat upon her back, with arms outstretched upon the bed, the fingers slightly flexed upon the upturned palms, she lay, in shape and stillness, as if she had been crucified. She was dead.
XIII
BRODIE looked around the company assembled uncomfortably in the parlour with a brooding eye which passed over Nessie, Matthew and his mother, lit impatiently upon his wife's cousins Janet and William Lumsden and settled with a scowling finality upon Mrs. William Lumsden. They had just buried all that remained of Margaret Brodie, and the guests, clinging even in the face of Brodie's inhospitable frowns, to the privileges endowed to them by old established precedent, had returned to the house after the funeral to partake of refreshment.
"We'll give them nothing!" Brodie had exclaimed to his mother that morning. His momentary, belated tenderness towards his wife was now forgotten and he resented bitterly the threatened intrusion of her relations. "I don't want them about my house. They can go hame whenever she's ditched." The old woman had herself hoped
for a savoury high tea, but in the face of his remark she had modified her demands.
"James," she had pleaded, "ye maun gie them a sip o' wine and a bite o' cake for the honour o' the house."
"None o' our ain folks are left to come," he growled. "What does it matter about hers? I wish I had choked them off when they wrote."
"They're ower scattered for mony o' them to come," she had placated, "but ye canna get ower offerin' them something. It wouldna be decent to do otherwise."