To Mrs. Gourlay the sounds meant nothing; she heard them with her ear, not her mind. The world around her had retreated to a hazy distance, so that it had no meaning. She would have gazed vaguely at a shell about to burst beside her.
In the evening, Janet, who had been in bed all the afternoon, came down and lit the lamp for her mother. It was a large lamp which Gourlay had bought, and it shed a rich light through the room.
"I heard John come in," she said, turning wearily round; "but I was too ill to come down and ask what had happened. Where is he?"
"John?" questioned her mother—"John?... Ou ay," she panted, vaguely recalling, "ou ay. I think—I think ... he gaed ben the parlour."
"The parlour!" cried Janet; "but he must be in the dark! And he canna thole the darkness!"
"John!" she cried, going to the parlour door, "John!"
There was a silence of the grave.
She lit a candle, and went into the room. And then she gave a squeal like a rabbit in a dog's jaws.
Mrs. Gourlay dragged her gaunt limbs wearily across the floor. By the wavering light, which shook in Janet's hand, she saw her son lying dead across the sofa. The whisky-bottle on the table was half empty, and of a smaller bottle beside it he had drunk a third. He had taken all that whisky that he might deaden his mind to the horror of swallowing the poison. His legs had slipped to the floor when he died, but his body was lying back across the couch, his mouth open, his eyes staring horridly up. They were not the eyes of the quiet dead, but bulged in frozen fear, as if his father's eyes had watched him from aloft while he died.
"There's twa thirds of the poison left," commented Mrs. Gourlay.