Isobel was determined to have a change of subject.
“They say it beats all the great buildings they have now in Chicago. It’ll be changed since we saw it.”
“I saw no buildings but the barns. It passes me why they have so many. There was a real old gentleman standing by the door in one, waiting for something done to his carriage. His son went to California in ’49, and he still seeks him. He said he would be looking for my Peter. Yon was a fine old man.”
Isobel tried to talk about the train, which was nothing common yet. Libby told her in reply what each man and woman in her car had answered when she asked if any had seen her poor sick laddie. Isobel was constrained to tell what one and another of the neighbors hoped about the lost. The Squire had said that he would be coming back in the spring. The boy could never stay in the city when the spring came, he prophesied. Whereupon his mother replied that he wouldn’t stay away now if he could by any means get back to his home. And then she wailed, through a moment of silence;
“If I but knew he was dead, Isobel! Not wanting, some place! Not grieving!”
“That’s true, Libby. I know that well. I felt that way when I knew Allen was dead. There was—rest, then. No fear, then.”
They sat silent. Chirstie bestirred herself guiltily to offer her bit of hope. She felt always in a way responsible for Peter’s departure, however much Wully scouted the idea. Wully hadn’t told him not to write to his silly mother, had he? Hadn’t Peter always been whining about going west? He would have gone, Chirstie or no Chirstie. Wully told her she naturally blamed herself for everything that happened. And she acknowledged that in some moods it did seem to her that she was the cause of most of the pain she saw about her. She began now about the uncertainty of the mails. Didn’t her auntie know that Wully never got but a few of the letters that had been sent him during the war? It was Chirstie’s opinion that Peter had written home, maybe many times, and the letters had miscarried. Maybe he had written what a good place he had to work, and how much wages he was getting. They considered this probability from all sides.
And Libby’s attention was diverted to the girl. Isobel McLaughlin was not one of those, by any means, who saw in Libby’s search something half ridiculous. Her boys had been away too many months for that. She had deep sympathy for her, and for that reason Libby came to her more often than to others nearer of kin. But now she did wish Libby would stop asking Chirstie those pointed, foreboding questions about her condition; stop sighing terribly upon each answer. She was making the girl nervous, and in that house there was no place for nervousness. Libby dwelt pathetically upon the details of her daughter’s death, upon the symptoms of her abnormal pregnancy. She kept at it, in spite of all Isobel’s attempts to divert her until she was about to go. She rose then, and gave a sigh that surpassed all her other sighs, adequate to one oppressed by the whole scheme of life. She said;
“It oughtn’t to be. There should be some other way of them being born, without such suffering and pain. With the danger divided between the two. I think——”
But what she thought was too much for Isobel, who had no patience with those who fussed about the natural things of life.