Perhaps it would be well for Janet’s sake not to inquire into the
history of that Sabbath afternoon. Friends arrived from Edinburgh, as
Mrs Ogilvy had divined, carefully choosing that day when they were so
little wanted. There were some people who walked, keeping up an old
habit: the walk was long, but when you were sure of a good cup of tea
and a good rest at a friend’s house, was not too much for a robust
walker with perhaps little time for walking during the week: and
some--but they kept a discreet veil on the means of their
conveyance--would come occasionally by the wicked little train which, to
the great scandal of the whole village, had been permitted between
Edinburgh and Eskholm in quite recent days, by the direct influence of
the devil or Mr Gladstone some thought, or perhaps for the convenience
of a railway director who had a grand house overlooking the Esk higher
up the stream. It may well be believed, however, that nobody who visited
Mrs Ogilvy on Sunday owned to coming by the train. They could not resist
the delights of the walk in this fine weather, they said, and to breathe
the country air in June after having been shut up all the week in
Edinburgh was a great temptation. They all came from Edinburgh, these
good folks: and there was one who was an elder in the Kirk, and who said
that the road had been measured, and it was little more, very little
more, than a Sabbath-day’s journey, such as was always permitted.
Sometimes there would be none of these visitors for weeks, but naturally
there were two parties of them that day. Mrs Ogilvy, out in the garden
behind the house, sat trembling among Andrew’s flower-pots in his
tool-house, feeling more guilty than words could say, yet giving Janet a
certain countenance by remaining out of doors, to justify the statement
that the mistress just by an extraordinary accident was out. Robert was
in his room up-stairs with half a shelfful of the Waverleys round him,
lying upon his bed and reading. Oh how the house was turned upside down,
how its whole life and character was changed, and falsity and
concealment became the rule of the day instead of truth and openness!
And all by the event which last Sabbath she had prayed for with all the
force of her heart. But she did not repent her prayer. God be thanked,
in spite of all, that he had come back, that he that had been dead was
alive again, and that he that had been lost was found. Maybe--who could
tell?--the prodigal’s father, after he had covered his boy’s rags with
that best robe, might find many a thing, oh many a thing, in him, to
mind him of the husks that the swine did eat!
Meantime Janet gave the visitors tea, and stood respectfully and talked,
now and then looking out for the mistress, and wondering what could have
kept her, and saying many a thing upon which charity demands that we
should draw a veil. She had got Andrew off to his kirk, which was all
she conditioned for. She could not, she felt sure, have carried through
if Andrew had been there, glowering, looking on. But she did carry
through; and I am not sure that there was not a feeling of elation in
Janet’s mind when she saw the last of them depart, and felt the full
sweetness of success. The sense of guilt, no doubt, came later on.
“And I just would take my oath,” said Janet, “that they’re all away back
by _that_ train. Ye needna speak to me of Sabbath-day’s journeys, and
afternoon walks. The train, nae doubt, is a great easement. I ken a
sooth face from a leeing one. They had far ower muckle to say about the
pleesure of the walk. They’re just a’ away back by the train.”
“It’s not for you and me to speak, Janet, that have done nothing but
deceive all this weary day!”
“Toots!” said Janet, “you were out, mem, it was quite true, and just
very uncomfortable--and they got their rest and their tea. And I would
have gathered them some flowers, but Mrs Bennet said she would rather no
go back through the Edinburgh streets with a muckle flower in her hands,
as if she had been stravaigin’ about the country. So ye see, mem, they
were waur than we were, just leein’ for show and appearance--whereas
with us (though I leed none--I said ye were oot, and ye _were_ oot) it
was needcessity, and nae mair to be said.”
Mrs Ogilvy shook her head as she rose up painfully from among the
flower-pots. It was just self-indulgence, she said to herself. She had
done harder things than to sit in her place and give her acquaintances
tea; but then there was always the risk of questions that old friends
feel themselves at liberty to ask. Any way, it was done and over; and
there was, as Janet assured her, no more to be said. And the lingering
evening passed again, oh so slowly--not, as heretofore, in a gentle
musing full of prayer, not in the sweet outside air with the peaceful
country lying before her, and the open doors always inviting a wanderer
back! Not so: Robert was not satisfied till all the windows were closed,
warm though the evening was, the door locked, the shutters bolted,
every precaution taken, as if the peaceful Hewan were to be attacked
during the night. He caught Andrew in the act of lighting that light
over the door which had burned all night for so many years. “What’s that
for?” he asked abruptly, stopping him as he mounted the steps, without
which he could not reach the little lamp.
“What it’s for I could not take it upon me to tell you. It’s just a
whimsey of the mistress. They’re full of their whims,” Andrew said.
“Mother, what’s the meaning of this?” Robert cried.
She came to the parlour door to answer him, with her white shawl and her
white cap--a light herself in the dim evening. It was perhaps too dim
for him to see the expression in her eyes. She said, with a little
drawing of her breath and in a startled voice, “Oh, Robbie!”
“That’s no answer,” he said, impatiently. “What’s the use of it? drawing
every tramp’s attention to the house. Of course it can be seen from the
road.”
“Ay, Robbie, that was my meaning.”
“A strange meaning,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “You’d better
leave it off now, mother. I don’t like such landmarks. Don’t light it
any more.”
Andrew stood all this time with one foot on the steps and his candle in
his hand. “The mistress,” he said darkly, in a voice that came from his
boots, “has a good right to her whimsey--whatever it’s for.”
“Did we ask your opinion?” cried Robert, angrily. “Put out the light.”
“You will do what Mr Robert bids you, Andrew,” Mrs Ogilvy said.
And for the first time for fifteen years there was no light over the
door of the Hewan. It was right that it should be so. Still, there was
in Mrs Ogilvy’s mind a vague, unreasonable reluctance--a failing as if
of some visionary hope that it might still have brought back the real
Robbie, the bonnie boy she knew so well, out of the dim world in which,
alas! he was now for ever and for ever lost.
Robert talked much of this before he went up-stairs to bed. Perhaps he
was glad to have something to talk of that was unimportant, that raised
no exciting questions. “You’ve been lighting up like a lighthouse;
you’ve been showing all over the country, so far as I can see. But
that’ll not do for me,” he said. “I’ll have to lie low for a long time
if I stay here, and no light thrown on me that can be helped. It’s
different from your ways, I know, and you have a right to your whimseys,
mother, as that gardener fellow says--especially as you are the one that
has to pay for it all.”
“Robbie,” she cried, “oh, Robbie, do not speak like that to me!”
“It’s true, though. I haven’t a red cent; I haven’t a brass farthing:
nothing but the clothes I’m standing in, and they are not fit to be
seen.”
“Robbie,” she said, “I have to go in to Edinburgh in the morning. Will
you come with me and get what you want?”
“Is that how it has to be done?” he said, with a laugh. “I thought you
were liberal when you spoke of an outfit; but what you were thinking of
was a good little boy to go with his mother, who would see he did not
spend too much. No, thank you: I’ll rather continue as I am, with
Andrew’s shirt.” He gave another laugh at this, pulling the corners of
the collar in his hand.
Mrs Ogilvy had never allowed to herself that she was hurt till now. She
rose up suddenly and took a little walk about the room, pretending to
look for something. One thing with another seemed to raise a little keen
soreness in her, which had nothing to do with any deep wound. It took
her some time to bring back the usual tone to her voice, and subdue the
quick sting of that superficial wound. “I am going very early,” she
said; “it will be too early for you. I am going to see Mr Somerville,
whom perhaps you will remember, who does all my business. There was
something he had taken in hand, which will not be needful now. But you
must do--just what you wish. You know it’s our old-fashioned way here
to do no business on the Sabbath-day; but the morn, before I go, I will
give you--if you could maybe tell me what money you would want----?”
“There’s justice in everything,” he said, in a tone of good-humour. “I
leave that to you.”
Then he went to his room again, carrying with him another armful of
Waverleys. Was it perhaps that he would not give himself the chance of
thinking? It cheered his mother vaguely, however, to see him with the
books. It was not reading for the Sabbath-day; but yet Sir Walter could
never harm any man: and more still than that--it was not ill men, men
with perverted hearts, that were so fond of Sir Walter. That was
Robbie--the true Robbie--not the man that had come from the wilds, that
had come through crime and misery, that had run for his life.
She left him a packet of notes next morning before she went to
Edinburgh. This must not be taken as meaning too much, for it was
one-pound notes alone which Mrs Ogilvy possessed. She was glad to be
alone in the train, having stolen into a compartment in which a woman
with a baby had already placed herself. She did not know the woman, but
here she felt she was safe. The little thing, which was troublesome and
cried, was her protection, and she could carry on her own thoughts
little disturbed by that sound: though indeed after a while it must be
acknowledged that Mrs Ogilvy succumbed to a temptation almost
irresistible to a mother, and desired the woman to “give me the bairn,”
with a certainty of putting everything right, which something magnetic
in the experienced touch, in the soft atmosphere of her, and the
_frôlement_ of her silk, and the sweetness of her face, certainly
accomplished. She held the baby on her knee fast asleep during the rest
of the short journey, and that little unconscious contact with the
helpless whom she could help did her good also. And the walk to Mr
Somerville’s office did her good. On the shady side of the street it is
cool, and the little novelty of being there gave an impulse to her
forces. When she entered the office, where the old gentleman received
her with a little cry of surprise, she was freshened and strengthened by
the brief journey, and looked almost as she had looked when he found
her, fearing no evil, in the great quiet of the summer afternoon two
days before. He was surprised yet half afraid.
“I know what this means,” he said, when he had shaken hands with her and
given her a seat. “You’ve made up your mind, Mrs Ogilvy, to make that
dreadful journey. I see it in your face--and I am sorry. I am very
sorry----”
“No,” she said; “you are mistaken. I am not going. I came to ask you, on
the contrary, after all we settled the other day, to do nothing
more----”
“To do nothing more!--I cabled as I promised, and I’ve got the man ready
to go out----”
“He must not go,” she said.
“Well---- I think it is maybe just as wise. But you have changed your
mind very quick. I will not speak the common nonsense to you and say
that’s what ladies will do: for no doubt you will have your reasons--you
have your reasons?”
She looked round her, trembling a little, upon the quiet office where
nobody could have been hidden, scarcely a fly.
“Mr Somerville,” she said, “you were scarcely gone that day--oh, how
long it is ago I know not--it might be years!--you were scarcely gone,
when my son came home.”
“What?” he cried, with a terrifying sharpness of tone.
Her face blanched at the sound. “Was it an ill thing to do? Is there
danger?” she cried; and then with deliberate gravity she repeated, “You
were scarcely gone when, without any warning, my Robbie came home.”
“God bless us all!” said the old gentleman. “No; I do not know that
there is any danger. It might be the wisest thing he could do--but it is
a very surprising thing for all that.”
“It is rather surprising,” she said, with a little dignity, “that having
always his home open to him, and no safeguards against the famine that
might arise in that land--and indeed brought down for his own part, my
poor laddie, to the husks that the swine do eat--he should never have
come before.”
“That’s an old ferlie,” said Mr Somerville; “but things being so that he
should have come now--that’s what beats me. There’s another paper with
more particulars: maybe he was well advised. It’s a far cry to Lochow.
That’s a paper I have read with great interest, Mrs Ogilvy, but it would
not be pleasant reading for you.”
“But is there danger?” she said, her face colouring and fading under her
old friend’s eye, as she watched every word that fell from his lips.
“Well,” he said, “with a thing like that hanging over a man’s head, it’s
rash to say that there’s no danger; but these wild offeecials in the
wild parts of America--sheriffs they seem to call them--riding the
country with a wild posse, and a revolver in every man’s hand--bless me,
very unlike our sheriffs here!--have not their eyes fixed on Mid-Lothian
nor any country place hereaway, we may be sure. They will look far
before they will look for him here.”
“But is it him--him, my son--that they are looking for, my Robbie?” she
said, with a sharp cry.
“I think I can give you a little comfort in that too--it’s not him in
the first place, nor yet in the second. But he was there--and he was one
of them, or supposed to be one of them. Mistress Ogilvy,” said the old
gentleman, slowly and with emphasis, “we must be very merciful. A young
lad gets mixed in with a set of these fellows--he has no thought what
it’s going to lead to--then by the time he knows he’s so in with them,
he has a false notion that his honour’s concerned. He thinks he would be
a kind of a traitor if he deserted them,--and all the more when there’s
danger concerned. I have some experience, as you will perhaps have
heard,” he said, after a pause, with a break in his voice.
“God help us all!” she said, putting out her hand, her eyes dim with
tears. He took it and grasped it, his hand trembling too.
“You may know by that I will do my very best for him,” he said, “as if
he were my own.” Then resuming his business tones, “I would neither hide
him nor put him forward, Mrs Ogilvy, if I were you. I would keep him at
home as much as possible. And if the spirit moves him to come and tell
me all about it---- Has he told you----?”
“Something--about not being one to stand an examination even if he
should get off, and about some man--some man that might come after him:
but he will not explain. I said, Was it a man he had wronged? and he
cried with a great No! that it was one that had wronged him.”
“Ah! that’ll just be one of them: but let us hope none of these
American ruffians will follow Robert here. No, no, that could not be;
but, dear me, what a risk for you to run in that lonely house. I always
said the Hewan was a bonnie little place, and I could understand your
fancy for it, but very lonely, very lonely, Mrs Ogilvy. Lord bless us!
if anything of that kind were to happen----! But no, no; across half the
continent and the great Atlantic--and for what purpose? They would never
follow him here.”
“I have never been frighted of my house, Mr Somerville; and now there is
my son Robbie in it, a strong man, bless him!--and Andrew the
gardener--and plenty of neighbours less than half a mile off--oh, much
less than half a mile.”
“Do you keep money in the house?”
“Money! very little--just enough for my quarter’s payments, nothing to
speak of--unless when William Tod at the croft comes up to pay me my
rent.”
“Then keep none,” said Mr Somerville; “just take my word and ask no
questions--keep none. It’s never safe in a lonely house; and let in no
strange person. A man might claim to be Robert’s friend when he was no
friend to Robert. But your heart’s too open and your faith too great.
Send away your money to the bank and lock up your doors before the
darkening, and keep every strange person at a safe distance.”
“But,” said Mrs Ogilvy, “where would be my faith then, and my peace of
mind? Nobody has harmed me all my days--not a living creature--if it
were not them that were of my own house,” she added, after a moment’s
pause. “And who am I that I should distrust my neighbours?--no, no, Mr
Somerville. There is Robbie to take care of me, if there was any danger.
But I am not feared for any danger--unless it were for him--and you
think there will be none for him?”
“That would be too much to say. If he were followed here by any of those
ill companions---- Mind now, my dear lady. You say Robert will take care
of you. It will be far more you that will have to take care of him.”
“I have done that all his days,” she said, with a smile and a sigh;
“but, oh, he is beyond me now--a big, strong, buirdly man.”
They were Janet’s words, and it was in the light of Janet’s admiration
that his mother repeated them. “I am scarcely higher than his elbow,”
she said, with a more genuine impulse of her own. “And who am I to take
care of a muckle strong man.”
“Mind!” cried the old gentleman, with a kind of solemnity, “that’s just
the danger. If there’s cronies coming after him, Lord bless us, it may
just be life or death. Steek your doors, Mrs Ogilvy, steek your doors.
Let no stranger come near you. And mind that it is you to take care of
Robert, not him of you.”
She came away much shaken by this interview. And yet it was very
difficult to frighten her, notwithstanding all her fears. Already as she
came down the dusty stairs from Mr Somerville’s office, her courage
began to return. Everybody had warned her of the danger of tramps and
vagabonds for the last twenty years, but not a spoon had ever been
stolen, nor a fright given to the peaceful inhabitants of the Hewan. No
thief had ever got into the house, or burglar tried the windows that
would have yielded so easily. And it could not be any friend of Robbie’s
that would come for any small amount of money she could have, to his
mother’s house. No, no. Violence had been done, there had been quarrels,
and there had been bloodshed. But that was very different from Mr
Somerville’s advices about the money in the house. Robbie’s friends
might be dangerous men, they might lead him into many, many ill ways;
but her little money--no, no, there could be nothing to do with that.
She went home accordingly almost cheerfully. To be delivered from her
own thoughts, and brought in face of the world, and taught to realise
all that had happened as within the course of nature, and a thing to be
faced and to be mended, not to lie down and die upon, was a great help
to her. She would lock the doors and fasten the windows as they all
said. She would watch that no man should come near that was like to harm
her son. To do even so much or so little as that for him, it would be
something, something practical and real. She would not suffer her
eyelids to slumber, nor her eyes to sleep. She would be her own
watchman, and keep the house, that nothing harmful to her Robbie should
come near. Oh, but for the pickle money! there was no danger for that.
She would like to see what a paltry thief would do in Robbie’s hands.
With this in her mind she went back, her heart rising with every step.
From the train she could see the back of the Hewan rising among the
trees--not a desolate house any longer, for Robbie was there. How ill to
please she had been, finding faults in him just because he was a boy no
longer, but a man, with his own thoughts and his own ways! But to have
been parted from him these few hours cleared up a great deal. She went
home eagerly, her face regaining its colour and its brightness. She was
going back not to an empty house, but to Robbie. It was as if this, and
not the other mingled moment, more full of trouble than joy, was to be
the mother’s first true meeting with her son after so many years.