Afterwards she was glad to leave him, to go up-stairs and help Janet, whose steps she heard overhead in the room so long unused—his room, where she had always arranged everything herself, and spent many an hour thinking of her boy, among all the old treasures of his childhood and youth. It was a room next to her own—a little larger—“for a lad has need of room, with his big steps and his long legs,” she had many a time said. She found Janet hesitating between two sets of sheets brought out from Mrs Ogilvy’s abundant store of napery, one fine, and one not so fine. “It’s a grand day his coming hame,” Janet said. “Ye’ll mind, mem, a ring on his finger and shoes on his feet: it’s true that shoon are first necessaries, but no the ring on his finger.”
“Take these things away,” said Mrs Ogilvy, with an indignation that was more or less a relief to her, pushing away the linen, which slid in its shining whiteness to the floor, as if to display its intrinsic excellence though thus despised. She went to the press and brought out the best she had, her mother’s spinning in the days when mothers began to think of their daughter’s “plenishing” for her wedding as soon as she was born. She brought it back in her arms and placed it on the bed. “He shall have nothing but the best,” she said, spreading forth the snowy linen with her own hands. Oh! how often she had thought of doing that, going over it, spreading the bed for Robbie, with her heart dancing in her bosom! It did not dance now, but lay as if dead, but for the pain of its deadly wounds.
“And, Janet,” she said, “how it is to be done I know not, but Andrew must hurry to the town to get provisions for to-morrow. It will be too late to-night, and who will open to him, or who will sell to him on the Sabbath morning, is more than I can tell; but we must just trust——”
“Mem,” said Janet, “I have sent him already up Esk to Johnny Small’s to get some trout that he catched this afternoon, but couldna dispose o’ them so late. And likewise to Mrs Loanhead at the Knowe farm, to get a couple of chickens and as many eggs as he could lay his hands on. You’ll not be surprised if ye hear the poor things cackling. We’ll just thraw their necks the morn. I maun say again, as I have aye said, that for a house like this to have nae resources of its ain, no a chicken for a sudden occasion without flying to the neebors, is just a very puir kind of thing.”
“And what would become of my flowers, with your hens and their families about?”
“Flooers!” said Janet, contemptuously: and her mistress had not spirit to continue the discussion.
“And now,” she said, “that all’s ready, I must go down and see after my son.”
“Eh, mem, but you’re a proud woman this night to say thae words again! and him grown sic a grand buirdly man!”
The poor lady smiled—she could do no more—in her old servant’s face, and went down-stairs to the dining-room, which she found to her astonishment full of smoke, and those fumes of whisky which so often fill a woman’s heart with sickness and dismay, even when there is no need for such emotion. Robert Ogilvy sat with his chair pushed back from the table, a pipe in his mouth, and a tumbler of whisky-and-water at his hand. The whisky and the food had perhaps given him a less hang-dog look, but the former had not in the least affected him otherwise, nor probably had he taken enough to do so. But the anguish of the sight was not less at the first glance to his mother, so long unaccustomed to the habits of even the soberest men. She said nothing, and tried even to disguise the trouble in her expression, heart-wrung with a cumulation of experiences, each adding something to those that had gone before.
“Your room is ready, Robbie, my dear. You will be wearied with this long day—and the excitement,” she said, with a faint sob, “of coming home.”