IT was growingly inevitable that the news, the determined news, must be broken. Wully, with his whole heart shrinking from the task, made light of it to Chirstie. Wasn’t having her better than anything he had ever imagined! He hadn’t really known at all at the time how greatly he was enriching himself. If he had been ready then to shoulder whatever blame there might be, he was ready now to do it a dozen times over. He didn’t mind in the least telling his parents about it. Accidents of the sort happen among even the most respectable people from time to time. It was in vain that he tried to reassure her. It might be all very well for him to talk so, but when everyone knew about her— Oh, what should she do then! Was it that she doubted him, then? Wasn’t he going to be with her? If by chance there should be one neighbor rash enough to see anything not perfect about his marriage, he would tell her for sure there would never be another! It was his mother she thought most about! What would his mother ever do when she heard it? That was nothing! Wully would go and explain it all to her, after his fashion—falsely, his wife insisted on saying wretchedly. His mother would be angry, of course, at first, and give him the scolding[78] of his life. But she’d soon get over it, and come over bringing Chirstie a lot of baby clothes. Chirstie would see if she wouldn’t! Why hadn’t he explained it to her then, the last time he went over for that purpose, if it was so light a matter? The children happened to be all at home that day because the teacher was ill, and he had got no word alone with her. He didn’t add that he had been highly relieved to find them all there. He would go over at once, so that the burden would be off Chirstie’s mind. Having arrived at the scene of his humiliation the next morning, he saw his father coming from the cornfield with his hands and pockets full of chosen ears of seed corn. Wully met him in the path just behind the barn, and they greeted each other without a sign of affection. What did Wully think of these ears? Wully felt them critically, one after another, with his thumb, and found them good. His father started on towards the barn.
“I want to tell you something, father.”
He stopped without a word, and stood listening.
“We’re going to have a baby.”
“’Tis likely.”
“I mean—in December.”
“December? In December!”
“Yes. That’s what I mean.”
John McLaughlin’s long keen face, which changed expression only under great provocation, now surrendered to surprise. He stood still, looking at his son penetratingly a long time. Wully[79] kicked an imaginary clod back and forth in the path. Presently the father said, with more bitterness than Wully had ever heard in his voice,
“It seems we have brought the old country to the new!”
Wully pondered this unexpected deliverance without looking up.
After a little the older man added, sighing,
“I prayed my sons might be men who could wait.”
“A lot he knows about waiting!” thought Wully, half angrily. “Thirteen of us!”
“You tell mother about it, father,” he pleaded, knowing his entreaty useless.
“I will not!”
“I wish you would. I can’t—very well!”
“You’d best!”
Wully stood watching him tie the yellow ears into clusters on the sheltered side of the barn. He was trying with all his might to gather courage to face his mother. He hadn’t felt such a nervous hesitancy since the first time he went into action. He remembered only too well the last time he had really stirred her displeasure. Allen and he had quarreled, and had nursed their anger, in spite of her remonstrances, for two days. He had growled out something to his brother across the supper table, and after that, she had put the little children to bed, and had set her two sons down before the fireplace—it was in the first house they were living then. She had drawn her chair near them, and had[80] proceeded quietly and grimly to flay them with her tongue. She had continued with deliberateness till they were glad to escape half crying to bed. He remembered still how she had begun. It might be natural, she said, for brothers to quarrel. But she believed that it would never again be natural for her sons to quarrel in her presence. And she had been perfectly right about that. What she would say now, upon an occasion like this with her dismaying self-control, he couldn’t even imagine. It would be nothing common, he felt sure.
On the bed which she had just finished spreading with a “drunkard’s path” quilt, they sat down together in a low room of the second story, where three beds full of boys were accustomed to sleep. She kissed him fondly when he came to her, saying it was a lonely house with him away so much. She wondered why they had not been at church. Was Chirstie not well again?
“I have something to tell you, mother,” he stammered.
“I’m listening,” she said encouragingly, her eyes studying him tenderly. How beautiful a head he had! How beautiful a man he was!
“We’re going to have a baby! In December, mother!”
Over her face there spread swiftly a smile of soft amusement. She had always looked that way when one of her children said something especially innocent and lovable.
“You don’t mean December, Wully! Dinna[81] ye ken that? The wee’uns can’na just hurry so!”
He couldn’t look at her.
“I know what I mean!” he said, doggedly. “I mean December. I understand.” The silence became so ominous that at length he had to steal a look at her. Her incredulous face was flushed red with shame and anger. He rose to defend his love from her.
“You aren’t to say a word against her. It wasn’t her fault!”
Then the storm broke.
“Do you think I’m likely to say a word against the poor, greetin’ bairn!” she cried. “Her sitting there alone among the wolves and snakes, and a son of mine to bring her to shame! I’ll never lift my head again!” Her rush of emotion quite choked her.
“My fine, brave soldier of a son!” she burst out, recovering herself. “You did well, now, to choose a lassie alone, with neither father nor mother to defend her from you!”
“Mother!” he cried.
“Jeannie’s wee Chirstie!” she went on. “No one else could please you, I suppose! Oh, she did well to die when her son was but a laddie!”
Wretchedly ashamed of his deceit as he was, he was not able to take more of her reproof without trying to defend himself.
“I didn’t mean any harm!” he mumbled. “I didn’t think.” That was what Peter had said.
“And why did you not think!” she demanded,[82] furiously. “Have you no mind of your own! You didn’t know what you were doing, I suppose! Oh, that I should have a son who is a fool!”
How terrible mothers are! Fool was a word she hated so greatly that she never allowed her children to pronounce it. It was her ultimate condemnation. He had never heard her use it before. And now she used it for him!
“This is why you have been ailing all summer! You’d reason to be! Did you think you could do evil and prosper?”
He wasn’t going to stand any more of that tone. He got up.
“I’ll be going,” he exclaimed. “There’s no place for me here!” No sooner had he used those words than he regretted them. They might seem to appeal to her pity. That was what he had said once when he was a little lad, upon seeing a new baby in her arms, and afterwards, whenever she had shown him a new child, she had reminded him of it gayly.
“Don’t go!” she answered, unrelenting. “There is always a place for you, whatever you elect to do. This is a sore stroke, Wully!” Then she added, wearily and passionately,
“When I was a girl, I wanted to be some great person. And when you all were born, I wanted only to have you great men. And when you grew up, I prayed you might be at least honest. And I’m not to have even that, it seems.”
He had heard her say that before. He was so[83] sorry for her pain that he hardly knew what to do. If only there had been any other way out! Maybe Chirstie had been right in demanding he tell at least his mother the truth. But he would not! He would share his wife’s blame.
“I’m sorry about it, mother,” he pleaded. “I’m sick about it. I’ve done what I could to make it right!”
“To make it right! Do you think you can ever make wrong right! You have spoiled your own marriage. You’ll never be happy in it!”
“Don’t worry about that!”
“And you the oldest!” she added, suddenly. “I suppose the other six will be doing the same, now!”
“If a brother of mine did a thing like that, I’d kill him!” cried Wully fiercely.
It soothed her to have something not tragic to reprove him for.
“Wully,” she said severely, “don’t you speak words like them here! ’Tis something you learned in the army! A fine one you’d be to say who should live and who should die! We dinna say the like here!”
“I can’t please you any way!” he cried, stung by her upbraidings.
“Strange ways you have of trying!” she retorted. He said nothing. She cried again, presently,
“If only it had been some other girl, Wully! Not Jeannie’s!”
What could he answer?
[84]“Mother, you come and see her! She needs someone!”
“Thanks to you! To my son! I won’t can speak to her, that shamed I’ll be of you!” She thought a bitter moment. “Alex McNair’ll be home before December. You’d best come here to me! Wully, if any other mouth in the world had told me this, I wouldn’t have believed it! You were always a good boy. Always! Before the war!”
“I’ve got to go!” he cried in answer. He rushed away, damning Peter Keith into the nethermost hell. The open air was some relief. If only women wouldn’t take these things so hard! Well, that was over. The worst part. Any taunt that he might ever have to defend himself from would be easy, after that.
After her unkissed son had gone, Isobel McLaughlin, reeling from the blow he had dealt her, sat with her hands covering her face. Nothing but Wully’s own recital could ever have made her believe such a story! It was even thus incredible. If only it had been any other girl but Jeannie’s! And her dead! Scarcely dead, either, till her son, betraying years of trust, had shamed her daughter! If Jeannie had been alive, she would have gone to her, in humiliation, though it killed her! Now there was not even that comfort! There was only Chirstie left, and her in such a state! It was not possible to believe her good, beautiful son had done such a base thing! If it had been any boy but Wully! Had he ever given her a moment of anxiety[85] before? Did not the whole clan like him, knowing him for a quiet, honorable, sweet-tempered boy, eminently trustworthy! And now a thing like this to fall upon her! She refused to remember that Allen’s irresponsibility, his extravagant pleasure in the society of women, of any size or kind of woman, had made her anxious many an hour. That son, from the time he was twelve, had fairly glowed when there was a woman about to admire him. But Wully had only chuckled over his brother’s kaleidoscopic love affairs, things so foreign to his nature. His mother, remembering Allen’s escapades, exempted the dead loyally from blame. If Wully had been like that, she might have understood this tale. But he was not like that. He had never been at all like that. It must be the army that had wrought such evil changes in him. That was what had undone her years of teaching. That was what had made all this frontier sacrifice barren. Was it not for the children’s sake they had endured this vast wilderness, and endured it in vain if the children were to be of this low and common sort? In their Utopia it was not to have been as it had been in the old country, with each family having a scholar or two in it, and the rest toilers. Here they were all to have been scholars and great men. And now the war had taken away Wully’s schooling and Allen’s life—and not only Wully’s schooling, which was after all, not essential to life, but that ultimate gift, his very sense of being a McLaughlin.
[86]Some Americans might have smiled to know that this immigrant family never for a moment considered Americans in general their equal, or themselves anything common. They were far too British for that. Until lately it had never occurred to them that anyone else might manage some way to be equal to a Scot. Until the war, when some young McLaughlin had shown signs of intolerable depravity, his father had entirely extinguished the last glimmer of it by saying, as he took his pipe out of his economical mouth, “Dinna ye act like a Yankee!” So withering was that reproach that no iniquity ever survived it. Now that that Yankee of the Yankees, Harvey Stowe, had been a very brother to Wully through campaigns and prisons, that denunciation was to be heard no more. But surely, Isobel McLaughlin moaned, her husband and herself had not let the children think that they were anything common. Had she not hated all that democracy that justified meanness of life, and pointed out faithfully to her children its fallacy? She remembered the first time she had taken them all to a Fourth of July celebration in the Yankee settlement, where a barefooted, tobacco-spitting, red-haired orator of the day, after an hour of boastings and of braggings, had shouted out his climax, saying that in this free land we are all kings and queens. “A fine old king, yon!” she had chuckled again and again, explaining his folly to her flock. A man like that[87] had no idea what a king was! He most likely had never even seen a gentleman!
She recalled that Wully, once when he was quite a small boy, had alone and unaided found and identified a gentleman whose team was struggling in a swamp. He was a poor old gentleman, trying manfully to get an orphan grandson to a son’s home farther west, and Wully had brought him proudly home, and his mother had “done” for him till he was able to travel on. Having him in the house had been like having a pitiable angel with them. When he was better, they had called all the neighbors in, and the old New Englander had preached them a sermon. He had preached to the children about the Lamb of God, using as his text the lamb tied near the door, and they had never forgotten how gentleness, he said, had made God great. And when he had been starting on, John McLaughlin had taken a bill from his pocket—and bills were things not often seen by the children—and given it to him humbly, for the benefits his presence had bestowed upon the family. Afterwards when his mother had asked Wully how he had known the stranger would be welcome, he had said he knew he was some great man by the way he spoke to his floundering horses. Oh, surely in that wilderness Wully had known the better ways of living. And he had chosen despicable ways! She was only an old, tired, disappointed woman.
If her first-born, that lad Wully, had done a thing like this, what might not the rest of them[88] choose to do! Pride did not let her remember that if the family had been in no generation without a man of more or less eminence, neither had it been without a precedent for Wully’s conduct. She was a woman who had sympathy with the mother of Zebedee’s sons. If she had been there with Christ, she would have asked unashamed for four places on his right, and for four on his left, the nearest eight seats for her eight sons. What dreams she had dreamed for them! Once she had beheld the President of the United States consulting his cabinet, and behold, her Wully was the President, and Allen the Vice-President, and the Cabinet consisted of her younger lads, even young Hughie sitting there, still only nine, with a freckled little nose, and a wisp of a curling lock straying down from his cowlick towards eyes shining with contemplated mischief. She had felt at the time that such a dream might be somewhat, perhaps, foolish, and profiting by Joseph’s distant but well-known experience, she had told it only to her husband. He diagnosed her case in one instant. “You dreamed that wide awake, woman!” She had thought at times that Allen was to be another Burns, a maker of songs for a new country. In her dreams, to be great was to be one of three things, a Burns, a Lincoln, or a Florence Nightingale. And now one dream, her first and longest, was permanently over. Wully was a man now, and a man who brought women to ruin. Sometimes it seemed to her as she lay there moaning[89] that surely the girl must have enticed him into this evil. Then she came swiftly to blaming the whole thing on Alex McNair. If he had come home when he should have, if he had not left the girl unprotected there, this would never have happened. Blaming Alex violated no fond loyalty. In time it came to seem to her that the whole fault was his.
But that afternoon, the small McLaughlins coming home from school found a state of affairs new in their experience. There was absolutely no sign of a baby in the house, and yet their mother was in bed! Once she said when they asked her anxiously, that her head ached. And once she said that her heart was troubling her.