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.