I went under the door-lintel, and stood a little abashed before him.
“Colin! Colin!” he cried in the Gaelic “Did I not ken it was you?” and he put his two hands on my shoulders.
“It is Colin sure enough, father dear,” I said, slipping readily enough into the mother tongue they did their best to get out of me at Glascow College. “Is he welcome in this door?” and the weariness weighed me down at the hip and bowed my very legs.
He gripped me tight at the elbows, and looked me hungrily in the face.
“If you had a murdered man’s head in your oxter, Colin,” said he, “you were still my son. Colin, Colin! come ben and put off your boots!”
“Mother———” I said, but he broke in on my question.
“Come in, lad, and sit down. You are back from the brave wars you never went to with my will, and you’ll find stirring times here at your own parish. It’s the way of the Sennachies’ stories.”
“How is that, sir?”
“They tell, you know, that people wander far on the going foot for adventure, and adventure is in the first turning of their native lane.”
I was putting my boots off before a fire of hissing logs that filled the big room with a fir-wood smell right homely and comforting to my heart, and my father was doing what I should have known was my mother’s office if weariness had not left me in a sort of stupor—he was laying on the board a stout and soldierly supper and a tankard of the red Bordeaux wine the French traffickers bring to Loch Finne to trade for cured herring. He would come up now and then where I sat fumbling sleepily at my belt, and put a hand on my head, a curious unmanly sort of thing I never knew my father do before, and I felt put-about at this petting, which would have been more like my sister if ever I had had the luck to have one.