"You are better, Robert!" I said, smiling too. Dully, and yet with dogged cheerfulness, I said it, as men lie to the dying—and are not believed.
He stretched out his thin hand, the ploughman's horn clean gone from it, and the veins blue and convex upon the shrunk wrist.
"Ave atque vale, Alec, lad!" he answered. "That is what it has come to with Robert Fraser. But how are all at Drumquhat? Ye will be on your road ower to the Nether Neuk?"
This he said, though he knew different.
"I have brought you this from Edinburgh," I said, giving him the little, thin, green volume of Tennyson. I had cut it to save him trouble, and written his name on the blank page before the title.
I shall never forget the way he looked at it. He opened it as a woman unfolds a new and costly garment, with a lingering caress of the wasted finger-tips through which I could almost see the white of the paper, and a slow soft intake of the breath, like a lover's sigh.
His eyes, of old blue and clear, had now a kind of glaze over them, a veiling Indian summer mist through which, however, still shone, all undimmed and fearless, the light of the simplest and manfulest spirit I have ever known. He turned the leaves and read a verse here and there with evident pleasure. He had a way of reading anything he loved as it listening inly to the cadences—a little half-turn of the head aside, and a still contented smile hovering about the lips, like one who catches the first returning fall of beloved footsteps.
But all at once Robert Fraser shut the book and let his hands sink wearily down upon his knee. He did not look at me, but kept his eyes on the red peat ash in the "register" grate.
"It's bonnie," he murmured softly; "and it was a kind thing for you to think on me. But it's gane frae me, Alec—it's a' clean gane. Tak' you the book, Alec. The birdies will never sing again in ony spring for me to hear. I'm back upon the Word, Alec. There's nocht but That for me noo!"
He laid his hand on a Bible that was open beside him on the stand which held his medicine bottles, and a stocking at which his wearied fingers occasionally knitted for a moment or two at a time.