“Aunty!” cried the young man; the tears bursting from his eyes, “Do you think I’m guilty, then: you! you think I did it—you! Oh, Lord! who will believe me, then?” he cried, stretching out despairing hands.
“Me?” cried Mrs. Brown; “me think ye did it, or any ill thing! I would as soon, oh, far sooner, believe it of mysel!”
He burst into a low fit of hysterical laughter. “Then why should ye hide me?” he said.
The good woman was taken aback for a moment. “What were ye meaning, then, Archie, about the pollisman? and you to bide till he came? Ye shall bide as lang as you please, my bonny boy; and everything we can do to make you comfortable, Bell and me. Bless me! I’m speaking to my ain lad as if he was a strange gentleman, and didna ken. What ails ye, Archie? you are just as white as a sheet, and laughing and greeting like a lassie.”
“I have had no breakfast,” he said, “and I’ve walked——”
But here he was interrupted by another shout from Mrs. Brown, who rushed away to the kitchen, appearing again in a moment or two with a tray, upon which was piled everything she could think of, from cold beef to strawberry jam. He was not hungry: any such feeling had abandoned him some time ago, but he was faint from want of food. And it was only when he had eaten and rested, in the quiet of the afternoon, that he was able to tell his tale coherently, and that she was sufficiently composed to hear.
The exclamations with which that tale was accompanied and interrupted, her dismay, her wrath—her triumph in Archie’s defiance of his father and resolution to shake the dust of Rosmore from off his feet, were endless; but when he came to his interview with Mrs. Rowland, Jane began to shake her head.
“It would be her wyte all through,” she said. “Eh, I would not have you lippen to her! It is just her that has been at the bottom of it a’ through.”
Archie’s momentary softness towards his stepmother was gone. He had begun to remember his griefs, real or imaginary, against her, and to persuade himself that her pity had been fictitious and theatrical. But he made a protest against this view.
“She could not have forged the cheque, in order to get me into trouble,” he said.