Instead of answering, she bent over him till his grey head lay on her shoulder and rested there. He was silent for a little.
“When I saw him younder to-day, smooth and smiling, standing so well with his fellow-men, my heart rose up against him; I daredna bide, lest I should cry out in the kirk before them all and call God’s justice in question—God that lets Jacob Holt go about in His sunshine, with all men’s good word on him, when our lad’s light went out in darkness so long ago. Is it just, Katie? Call ye it right and just?”
She did not answer a word, but soothed him with hand and voice as she might have soothed a child. She had done it many times before during the forty years that she had been his wife, but she had never, even in the time of their sorest troubles, seen him so moved. She sat down quietly beside him and patiently waited.
“Has anything happened, or is anything threatening that I dinna ken of?” asked she after a little.
“No, nothing new has happened. But I am growing an old failed man, Katie, and no’ able to stand up against my ain fears.”
“Ay, we are growing old and failed; our day is near over, and so are our fears. Why should we fear? Jacob Holt canna move the foundations of the earth. And even though he could, we needna fear, for ‘God is our refuge and strength.’”
He was leaning back with closed eyes, tired and fainthearted, and he did not answer.
“There’s no fear for the bairns,” she went on, cheerfully. “They are good bairns. There are few that hae the sense and discretion of our Katie, and her mother’s no’ without judgment, though she is but a feckless body as to health, and has been a heavy handful to us. They’ll be taken care of. The Lord is ay kind.”
And so she went on, gentle soothing alternating with more gentle chiding, all the time keeping away from the sore place in his heart, not daring for his sake and for her own to touch it till this rare moment of weakness should be past.
“You are wearied, and no wonder, with the heat and your long fast; lie down on your bed and rest till it be time to catechise the bairns—though I’m no’ for Sabbath sleeping as an ordinary thing. Will you no’ lie down? Well, you might step over as far as the pasture-bars and see if all is right with old Kelso and her foal, for here come the bairns and their mother, and there will be no peace with them till they get their supper, and your head will be none the better for their noise.”