Andrew stood all this time with one foot on the steps and his candle in his hand. “The mistress,” he said darkly, in a voice that came from his boots, “has a good right to her whimsey—whatever it’s for.”
“Did we ask your opinion?” cried Robert, angrily. “Put out the light.”
“You will do what Mr Robert bids you, Andrew,” Mrs Ogilvy said.
And for the first time for fifteen years there was no light over the door of the Hewan. It was right that it should be so. Still, there was in Mrs Ogilvy’s mind a vague, unreasonable reluctance—a failing as if of some visionary hope that it might still have brought back the real Robbie, the bonnie boy she knew so well, out of the dim world in which, alas! he was now for ever and for ever lost.
Robert talked much of this before he went up-stairs to bed. Perhaps he was glad to have something to talk of that was unimportant, that raised no exciting questions. “You’ve been lighting up like a lighthouse; you’ve been showing all over the country, so far as I can see. But that’ll not do for me,” he said. “I’ll have to lie low for a long time if I stay here, and no light thrown on me that can be helped. It’s different from your ways, I know, and you have a right to your whimseys, mother, as that gardener fellow says—especially as you are the one that has to pay for it all.”
“Robbie,” she cried, “oh, Robbie, do not speak like that to me!”
“It’s true, though. I haven’t a red cent; I haven’t a brass farthing: nothing but the clothes I’m standing in, and they are not fit to be seen.”
“Robbie,” she said, “I have to go in to Edinburgh in the morning. Will you come with me and get what you want?”
“Is that how it has to be done?” he said, with a laugh. “I thought you were liberal when you spoke of an outfit; but what you were thinking of was a good little boy to go with his mother, who would see he did not spend too much. No, thank you: I’ll rather continue as I am, with Andrew’s shirt.” He gave another laugh at this, pulling the corners of the collar in his hand.
Mrs Ogilvy had never allowed to herself that she was hurt till now. She rose up suddenly and took a little walk about the room, pretending to look for something. One thing with another seemed to raise a little keen soreness in her, which had nothing to do with any deep wound. It took her some time to bring back the usual tone to her voice, and subdue the quick sting of that superficial wound. “I am going very early,” she said; “it will be too early for you. I am going to see Mr Somerville, whom perhaps you will remember, who does all my business. There was something he had taken in hand, which will not be needful now. But you must do—just what you wish. You know it’s our old-fashioned way here to do no business on the Sabbath-day; but the morn, before I go, I will give you—if you could maybe tell me what money you would want——?”