“Get up, Nellie!” he exclaimed. “What’s the matter of you?”
Wee Johnnie moved his arms exactly as Wully had done.
“Get up, Nellie!” he said. “What’s the matter of you?”
He said all that, plainly, if not perfectly, and before he knew what was happening, his mother had seized him, and was hugging him up against her, in the good old way, kissing him.
“Get up, Nellie!” he cooed. “What’s the matter of you!”
She had been so surprised, so delighted with her son’s first sentence that she had turned, even kissing him, to Wully, no joy complete unless he shared it.
“Did you hear that!” she cried triumphantly, her face blossoming towards him. “Say it again, Lammie!”
And almost before Wully could smile in return, he stopped. He turned around. He thought he heard a groan from his load. He couldn’t even smile at her with that man possibly spying upon them. He looked—and from the end of the wagon that man had lifted his head a little, like a snake, and had seen the smile that Chirstie had turned upon her husband. And Wully—when he saw that face—it was the last thing in the world that he intended doing—but some way, in spite of himself, he achieved generosity—the spoil, it may have been, of ancestral struggle. At the terrible sight of that face, he pitied his enemy. That coward, in his damned way, had loved Chirstie. And in his tormented sunken dying he had seen all the sweet intimacy from which he had been shut out and had sunk back, felled by the blow of that revelation. Wully had foregone revenge. He had forborne running a sword less sharp through his fallen enemy than Chirstie’s wifely smile had been. In a flash Wully saw himself sitting there by the woman, loved, living, not dying, full of strength and generations, while that man, loathed and rejected, was already burning in hell.
The poor devil!
He pulled the horses up suddenly, and gave his wife the lines. He climbed back to lift his cousin into a position less painful. Through holes in the old blanket, straws from beneath were scratching the ghastly face. There was a farmhouse not so far down the road.