“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 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.
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 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 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 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.