"Fine, man! Damned, sir, I'm proud o' ye!"
John went round the corner treading on air. For the first time in his life his father had praised him.
He peeped through a kink at the side of the kitchen blind, where its descent was arrested by a flowerpot in the corner of the window-sill. As he had expected, though it was long past midnight, his mother was not yet in bed. She was folding a white cloth over her bosom, and about her, on the backs of chairs, there were other such cloths, drying by the fire. He watched her curiously; once he seemed to hear a whimpering moan. When she buttoned her dress above the cloth, she gazed sadly at the dying embers—the look of one who has gained short respite from a task of painful tendance on the body, yet is conscious that the task and the pain are endless, and will have to be endured, to-morrow and to-morrow, till she dies. It was the fixed gaze of utter weariness and apathy. A sudden alarm for his mother made John cry her name.
She flew to the door, and in a moment had him in her arms. He told his news, and basked in her adoration.
She came close to him, and "John," she said in a smiling whisper, big-eyed, "John," she breathed, "would ye like a dram?" It was as if she was propounding a roguish plan in some dear conspiracy.
He laughed. "Well," he said, "seeing we have won the Raeburn, you and I, I think we might."
He heard her fumbling in the distant pantry. He smiled to himself as he listened to the clinking glass, and, "By Jove," said he, "a mother's a fine thing!"
"Where's Janet?" he asked when she returned. He wanted another worshipper.
"Oh, she gangs to bed the moment it's dark," his mother complained, like one aggrieved. "She's always saying that she's ill. I thocht when she grew up that she might be a wee help, but she's no use at all. And I'm sure, if a' was kenned, I have more to complain o' than she has. Atweel ay," she said, and stared at the embers.
It rarely occurs to young folk who have never left their homes that their parents may be dying soon; from infancy they have known them as established facts of nature like the streams and hills; they expect them to remain. But the young who have been away for six months are often struck by a tragic difference in their elders on returning home. To young Gourlay there was a curious difference in his mother. She was almost beautiful to-night. Her blue eyes were large and glittering, her ears waxen and delicate, and her brown hair swept low on her blue-veined temples. Above and below her lips there was a narrow margin of the purest white.