“I know what you are not,” she cried, with the energy of despair. “You are no vagrant, nor yet a gentleman astray. You would have gone away when I bid you, either for fear or for right feeling, if you had been the one or the other. I know you not. But go, for God’s sake go, and I will say no word to your hurt, if all the world were clamouring after you. Oh, man, will ye go?”
She thought she heard that well-known click of the gate,—the sound which she had listened for, for years—the sound most unwished and unlooked for now—of Robbie coming home. He saw her momentary pause and the holding of her breath, the almost imperceptible turn of her head as she listened. It had now become almost dark, and she was not much more than a shadow to him, as he was to her; but the whiteness of her shawl and cap made her outline more distinct underneath the faintly waving shadows of the surrounding trees. The stranger settled himself into the corner of the bench. He watched her repressed movements and signs of agitation with amusement, as one watches a child. She would not betray him—but even in the dimness of the evening air she betrayed herself. Her eagerness, her agitation, were far more, he judged rightly, being a man accustomed to study the human race and its ways, than any chance accident would have brought about. She was a plucky old lady. A vagrant would have had no terrors for her, still less a gentleman—a gentleman! that name that the English give such weight to. Her appeal to him as being like one had gone deep into his soul.
“I will do better,” he said, “mother, than seek a bed in any strange place; you will give me one here.”
“I hope you will not force me—to take strong measures,” she said, with consternation which she could scarcely conceal. “There is a constable—not far off. I will have to send for him, loath, loath though I would be to do so, if ye will not go away.”
The stranger laughed, and made again that movement towards his pocket. “You will have to provide then for his widow and his orphans: and a country constable has always a large family,” he said.
“Man,” cried the little lady with passion, “will ye mock both at the law and at what is right? Then you shall not mock at me. I will put you forth from my door with my own hands.”
“Ah,” he said, startled, “that’s a different thing.” He was moved by this extraordinary threat. Even in her agitation Mrs Ogilvy felt there must be some good in him, for he was visibly moved. And she felt her power. She went forward undaunted to take him by the arm. When she was close to him he put out his hand, and smiled in her face, not with a smile of ridicule but of appeal. “Mother,” he said, “is it the act of a mother to turn a man out of doors to the wild beasts that seek his life—even if he has deserved it, and if he is not her son?”
There came from her strained bosom a faint cry. A mother, what is that? The tigress that owns one cub, and would murder and slay a thousand for it, as men sometimes say—or something that is pity and help and love, the mother of all sons through her own? Her hand dropped from his shoulder. The sensation that she would have done what she threatened, that he would not have resisted her, made her incapable even of a touch after that.
“Besides,” he said in another tone, having, as he perceived, gained the victory, “I have come to tell you of your son.”
A swift and sudden change came over Mrs Ogilvy’s mind. He did not know, then, that Robbie had come back. He had come in ignorance, not meaning any harm, meaning to appeal to her for help for Robbie’s sake. And she was in no danger from him, though Robbie was. She might even help him secretly, and do her son no harm. If only a good Providence would keep Robbie late to-night.