“Robbie, you will think I am but a poor old woman,” said his mother, with her faltering voice. “I could not stand up, you will think, to any strange man; but the shedder of blood is like nothing else. It shall never be said of me that I harboured a shedder of blood.”
“Oh, mother! how can you tell—how can you tell?” he cried, “when I that know tell you that I could not refuse him anything. I am just his slave at his chariot-wheels.”
“But I am not his slave,” said Mrs Ogilvy, with a glitter of spirit in her eyes. “I can face him, though you may not think it. He shall never come here!”
He flung himself down into a chair, and put the newspaper between her and himself, making a semblance of reading. But this he could not keep up: the stillness, and the peace, and the innocence about him affected the man, who, whatever he was now, had been born Robbie Ogilvy of the Hewan. He made a stifled sound in his throat once or twice as if about to speak, but brought forth no certain sound for some five minutes, when he suddenly burst forth in a high but broken voice, “What would you say if I were to tell you——?” and suddenly stopped again.
“What, Robbie?” she said, quivering like a leaf.
“Nothing,” he replied, looking up with sudden defiance in her face.
And there was a silence again in the room—the silence of the sweet morning: not a sound to break the calm: the birds in the trees, the scent of the roses coming in at the window—there was no such early place for roses in all Mid-Lothian—and the house basking in the sun, and the sun shining on the house, as if there was no roof-tree so beloved in all the basking and breathing earth. Then the voice of the little old lady uplifted itself in the midst of all that peace of nature—small, like her delicate frame; low—a little sound that could have been put out so easily,—almost, you would have said, that a sudden breath of wind would have put it out.
“Robbie, my son,” she said, “there is nothing you could tell me, or that any man could tell me, that would put bar or bolt between you and me. What is yours is mine, if there is any trouble to bear; and thankful will I be to take my share. There is no question nor answer between you and me. If you’ve been wild in the world, my own laddie, I’ve been here on my knees for you before the Lord. Whatever there is to tell, tell it to Him, and He will not turn His back upon you. Then, do you think your mother will? But that’s not the question—not the question. My house is my own house, and I will defend it and my son, and all that is in it—ay, if it were to the death!”
He looked at her for a moment, half impressed; but the glamour soon went out of Robert’s eyes. The reality was a very quiet feeble old woman, with the strength of a mouse, with a flash of high spirit such as he knew of old his mother possessed, and a voice that shook even while it pronounced this defiance of every evil thing. Short work would be made with that. He could remember scenes in which other old women had tried to protect their belongings, and short work had been made with them. He had never, never laid a finger on one himself. If he had ever dared to make his penitence, and could have disentangled his own story from that of those among whom he was, it might have been seen how little real guilt there ever was in his disorderly wretched life; but he could not disentangle it, even to himself: he felt himself guilty of many things in which he had had no share. Even in the confusion of the remorse that sometimes came upon him, he believed himself to have executed orders which were never given to him. The only thing he was not doubtful about was where these orders came from, and that if the same voice spoke them again suddenly at any moment, it would be his immediate impulse to obey.
And after this he took up the ‘Scotsman,’—that honest peaceable paper, with its clever articles, and its local records, and consciousness of the metropolitan dignity which has paled a little in the hurry and flash of the times—the paper that goes to every Scotsman’s heart, whatever may be his politics, throughout the world, which everywhere, even in busy London, compatriots will offer to each other as something always dear. Wild as his life had been, and distracted as he now was, the sight and the sound of the ‘Scotsman’ was grateful to Robert Ogilvy. The paper in his hands not only shielded his face from observation, but gradually calmed him down, drew back his interest, and, wonder of wonders, occupied his mind. He had himself said he could always read. After this scene, with its half revelation and its overmastering dread, he in a few minutes read the ‘Scotsman’ as if there had been neither crime nor punishment in the world. And Mrs Ogilvy had already taken up her knitting; but what was in her heart, still throbbing and aching with the energy of that outburst, and how much less quickly the high tide died down, I will not venture to say.