“Hold your peace!” cried the Mistress, with a break in her voice; “how dare ye say the like of that to your mother? Are you not my eldest son, the stay of the house? Wherefore do ye say this to me?”
“Because it’s true, mother,” said Huntley, firmly; “and though it’s true I’m not discouraged. The worst is, I see nothing I can do near you, as I might have done if I had been younger, and had time to spare to learn a trade. Such as it is, I’m very well content with my trade, too; but what could I do with it here? Get a place as a grieve, maybe, through Tyneside’s help, and the minister’s, and be able to stock a small farm by the time I was forty years old. But that would please neither you nor me. Mother, you must send me away!”
The Mistress did not look up, did not move—went on steadily with her rapid knitting—but she said:—
“Where?” with a sharp accent, like a cry.
“I’ve been thinking of that,” said Huntley, slowly; “If I went to America, or Canada, or any such place, I would be like to stay. My mind’s against staying; I want to come back—to keep home in my eye. So I say Australia, mother.”
“America, Canada, Australia!—the laddie’s wild!” cried the Mistress. “Do you mean to say ye’ll be an emigrant? a bairn of mine?”
Emigration was not then what it is now; it was the last resort—sadly resisted, sadly yielded to—of the “broken man;” and Huntley’s mother saw her son, in imagination, in a dreary den of a cabin, in a poor little trading ship, with a bundle on the end of a stick, and despair in his heart, when he spoke of going away.
“There’s more kinds of emigrants than one kind, mother,” said Patie.
“Ay,” said the Mistress, her imagination shifting, in spite of her, to a dismal family scene, in which the poor wife had the baby tied on her back in a shawl, and the children at her feet were crying with cold and hunger, and the husband at her side looking desperate. “I’ve seen folk on the road to America—ay, laddies, mony a time. I’m older than you are. I ken what like they look; but pity me, did I ever think the like of that would be evened to a bairn of mine!”
“Mother,” said Huntley, with a cheerfulness which he did not quite feel, “an emigrant goes away to stay—I should not do that—I am going, if I can, to make a fortune, and come home—and it’s not America; there are towns there already like our own, and a man, I suppose, has only a greater chance of getting bread enough to eat. I could get bread enough in our own country-side; but I mean to get more if I can—I mean to get a sheep farm and grow rich, as everybody does out there.”