“What?” he cried, with a terrifying sharpness of tone.
Her face blanched at the sound. “Was it an ill thing to do? Is there danger?” she cried; and then with deliberate gravity she repeated, “You were scarcely gone when, without any warning, my Robbie came home.”
“God bless us all!” said the old gentleman. “No; I do not know that there is any danger. It might be the wisest thing he could do—but it is a very surprising thing for all that.”
“It is rather surprising,” she said, with a little dignity, “that having always his home open to him, and no safeguards against the famine that might arise in that land—and indeed brought down for his own part, my poor laddie, to the husks that the swine do eat—he should never have come before.”
“That’s an old ferlie,” said Mr Somerville; “but things being so that he should have come now—that’s what beats me. There’s another paper with more particulars: maybe he was well advised. It’s a far cry to Lochow. That’s a paper I have read with great interest, Mrs Ogilvy, but it would not be pleasant reading for you.”
“But is there danger?” she said, her face colouring and fading under her old friend’s eye, as she watched every word that fell from his lips.
“Well,” he said, “with a thing like that hanging over a man’s head, it’s rash to say that there’s no danger; but these wild offeecials in the wild parts of America—sheriffs they seem to call them—riding the country with a wild posse, and a revolver in every man’s hand—bless me, very unlike our sheriffs here!—have not their eyes fixed on Mid-Lothian nor any country place hereaway, we may be sure. They will look far before they will look for him here.”
“But is it him—him, my son—that they are looking for, my Robbie?” she said, with a sharp cry.
“I think I can give you a little comfort in that too—it’s not him in the first place, nor yet in the second. But he was there—and he was one of them, or supposed to be one of them. Mistress Ogilvy,” said the old gentleman, slowly and with emphasis, “we must be very merciful. A young lad gets mixed in with a set of these fellows—he has no thought what it’s going to lead to—then by the time he knows he’s so in with them, he has a false notion that his honour’s concerned. He thinks he would be a kind of a traitor if he deserted them,—and all the more when there’s danger concerned. I have some experience, as you will perhaps have heard,” he said, after a pause, with a break in his voice.
“God help us all!” she said, putting out her hand, her eyes dim with tears. He took it and grasped it, his hand trembling too.