What mockery the words seemed; merest commonplaces, easy to say, but hard, impossible to give an ear to. Despair? what else was there left for the man who was about to see his son die?
CHAPTER VI.
He lingered the greater part of the day. Marjory took her place permanently by his bedside, where Fanshawe had been seated when she first appeared. She had allowed herself to be entreated to say nothing to him; but a certain fixed awe and pain in her look communicated themselves to Tom’s mind without a word said. He noticed this at first with an uneasy laugh.
“Ah, I see you think badly of me, May. You think I am going, though I deceive myself. Don’t deny it. If I was not so sure by my feelings that you are wrong, you would make me think so too.”
“I am anxious,” she said. “You know what papa says, Tom, it is a woman’s fault.”
“Ay, so he did,” said her brother; “he has sense enough for half-a-dozen. I wish I had minded him more. May, you needn’t be so frightened. If I am going, as you think—well, well! there would be nothing to be so dismal about. It has to be one time or another. If it were not for all those tangled threads, and things done that shouldn’t have been done, and left undone that should have been done, like the Prayer-book. I suppose it’s the common way. Good and bad would not say it every Sunday, if it were not the common way.”
“It is the very commonest way of all, Tom.”
“I thought so. Then I’ll be forgiven, too, like the rest, if that’s all. The old doctor at Comlie would be harder on a fellow than the Prayer-book is. You’re great for the Kirk, May, and I suppose, as we’re Scotch, you’re right; but if I were a religious fellow, which I’m not, I would go in for the Prayer-book, mind you; it’s kinder; it asks fewer questions. We have done what we ought not to have done; we have left undone—If I had time just now, and felt up to it, I would like to tell you something, May.”
“Tell me, Tom,” she said, eagerly. “We are quiet now; there’s nobody here.”
“Presently,” he said; and then fell into a musing state, from which she could not rouse him. Now and then he would brighten up, and call her attention to a fly on the ceiling; to the pattern of the paper on the walls; to an old picture over the mantel-piece; smiling and commenting upon them.