They sat and looked at each other across the little area of the peaceful room. He, stretching half across it, too big almost for the little place. She, in her white shawl and her white cap, its natural occupant and mistress. Her stocking had dropped into her lap, and she looked at him with a pathos and wistfulness in her eyes which were scarcely concealed by the anxious smile which she turned upon him. They were not equal in anything, in this less than in other particulars—for he was indifferent, asking her the question without much care for the answer, while she was moved to her finger-ends with anxiety on the subject, thrilling with emotion and fear. She looked at him for her inspiration, to endeavour to read in his eyes what answer would suit him best, what she could say to follow his mood, to please him or to guide him as might be. Mrs Ogilvy had not many experiences that were encouraging. She had little confidence in{161} her power to influence and to lead. If she could know what he would like her to say, that would be something. She had in her heart a feeling which, though very quiet, was in reality despair. She did not know what to do with him—she had no hope that it would matter anything what she wanted to do. He would do what he liked, what he chose, and not anything she could say.
“My dear,” she said, “when this calamity is over-past, and you have got settled a little, there will be plenty of things that you could do.”
“That’s very doubtful,” he said; “and you have not much faith in it yourself. I’ve been used to do nothing. I don’t know what work is like. Do you think I’m fit for it? I had to work on board ship, and how I hated it words could never tell. I was too much of a duffer, they said, to do seaman’s work. They made me help the cook—fancy, your son helping the cook!”
“It is quite honest work,” she said, with a little quiver in her voice—“quite honest work.”
He laughed a little. “That’s like you,” he said; “and now you will want me to do more honest work. I will need to, I suppose.” He paused here, and gave her a keen look, which, fortunately, she did not understand. “But the thing is, I’m good for nothing. I cannot dig, and to beg I am ashamed. I’ve done many things, but I’ve not worked much all my life. I will be left on your hands—and what will you do with{162} me?” He was not so indifferent, after all, as when he began. He was almost in earnest, keeping his eye upon her, to read her face as well as her words. But somehow she, who was so anxious to divine him, to discover what he wished her to say—she had no notion, notwithstanding all her anxiety, what it was he desired to know.
“My bonnie man!” she said, “it’s a hard question to answer. What could I wish to do with you but what would be best for yourself? I have made no plan for you, Robbie. Whatever you can think of that you would like—or whatever we can think of, putting our two heads together—but just, my dear, what would suit you best——”
“But suppose there is nothing I would like—and suppose I was just on your hands a helpless lump——”
“I will suppose no such thing,” she said, with the tears coming to her eyes; “why should I suppose that of my son? No, no! no, no! You are young yet, and in all your strength, the Lord be praised! You might have come back to me with the life crushed out of you, like Willie Miller; or worn with that weary India, and the heat and the work, like Mrs Allender’s son in the Glen. But you, Robbie——”
“What would you have done with me,” he repeated, insisting, though with a half smile on his face, “if it had been as bad as that—if I had come to you like them?”{163}
“Why should we think of that that is not, nor is like to be? Oh! my dear, I would have done the best I could with a sore heart. I would just have done my best, and pinched a little and scraped a little, and put forth my little skill to make you comfortable on what there was.”
“You have every air of being very comfortable yourself,” he said, looking round the room. “I thought so when I came first. You are like the man in the proverb—the parable, I mean—whose very servants had enough and to spare, while his son perished with hunger.”
She was a little surprised by what he said, but did not yet attach any very serious meaning to it. “I am better off,” she said, “than when you went away. Some things that I’ve been mixed up in have done very well, so they tell me. I never have spent what came in like that. I have saved it all up for you, Robbie.”
“Not for me, mother,” he said; “to please yourself with the thought that there was more money in the bank.”
“Robbie,” she said, “you cannot be thinking what you are saying. That was never my character. There is nobody that does not try to save for their bairns. I have saved for you, when I knew not where you were, nor if I would ever see you more. The money in the bank was never what I was thinking of. There{164} would be enough to give you, perhaps, a good beginning—whatever you might settle to do.”
“Set me up in business, in fact,” he said, with a laugh. “That is what would please you best.”
“The thing that would please me best would be what was the best for you,” she said, with self-restraint. She was a little wounded by his inquiries, but even now had not penetrated his meaning. He wanted more distinct information than he had got. Her gentle ease of living, her readiness to supply his wants, to forestall them even—the luxury, as it seemed to him after his wild and wandering career, of the long-settled house, the carefully kept gardens, the little carriage, all the modest abundance of the humble establishment, had surprised him. He had believed that his mother was all but poor—not in want of anything essential to comfort, but yet very careful about her expenditure, and certainly not allowing him in the days of his youth, as he had often reflected with bitterness, the indulgences to which, if she had been as well off as she seemed now, he would have had, he thought, a right. What had she now? Had she grown rich? Was there plenty for him after her, enough to exempt him from that necessity of working, which he had always feared and hated? It was, perhaps, not unreasonable that he should wish to know.
“I told you,” he said, after a short interval, “that I{165} was good for nothing. If I had stayed at home, what should I have been now? A Writer to the Signet with an office in Edinburgh, and, perhaps, who can tell, clients that would have come to consult me about where to place their money and other such things.” He laughed at the thought. “I can never be that now.”
“No,” she said, in tender sympathy with what she was quick to think a regret on his part. “No, Robbie, my dear; I fear it’s too late for that now.”
“Well! it’s perhaps all the better: for how could I tell them what to do with their money, who never had any of my own? No; what I shall do is this: be a dependent on you, mother, all my life; with a few pounds to buy my clothes, and a few shillings to get my tobacco and a daily paper, now that the ‘Scotsman’ comes out daily—and some wretched old library of novels, where I can change my books three or four times a-week: and that’s how Rob Ogilvy will end, that was once a terror in his way—no, it was never I that was the terror, but those I was with,” he added, in an undertone.
Mrs Ogilvy’s heart was wrung with that keen anguish of helplessness which is as the bitterness of death to those who can do nothing to help or deliver those they love. “Oh, my dear, my dear,” she said, “why should that be so? It is all yours whatever is mine. It’s not a fortune, but you shall be no{166} dependent—you shall have your own: and better thoughts will come—and you will want more than a library of foolish books or a daily paper. You will want your own honest life, like them that went before you, and your place in the world—and oh, Robbie! God grant it! a good wife and a family of your own.”
He got up and walked about, with large steps that made the boards creak, and with the laugh which she liked least of all his utterances. “No, mother, that will never be,” he said. “I’m not one to be caught like that. You will not find me putting myself in prison and rolling the stone to the mouth of the cave.”
“Robbie!” she cried, with a sense of something profane in what he said, though she could scarcely have told what. But the conversation was interrupted here by Janet coming to announce the early dinner, to which Robert as usual did the fullest justice. Whatever he might have done or said to shock her, the sight of his abundant meal always brought Mrs Ogilvy’s mind, more or less, back to a certain contentment, a sort of approval. He was not to............