'There you are now,' he cried largely, his good humour partially restored. 'Everything's ready and to your hand. Draw up your chair and begin. Don't say that I havena helped ye.' He put two fingers upon the pile of books and spread them widely over the surface of the table, disarranging them still more and losing all her places. 'See! There's plenty o' room for a' your orders. Can ye not say thank ye?'
'Thank you. Father,' she murmured submissively.
He watched her with a complacent eye whilst she sat down and bent her thin shoulders in a pretence of study, then he tiptoed with heavy, exaggerated caution from the room, protruding his head around the door as he went out to say:
'I'll be back in a minute to see how you're gettin' on.' As he returned to the kitchen, he told himself that he had done the right thing by Nessie, that he was the one to make her get on, and in a mood of self-congratulation he sat down again in his chair and in reward poured himself out another glass of whiskey. Only then did he become aware of his mother, still sitting motionless, stupid, like a bereaved woman, with a hollow look, as if some power had sucked her empty.
'Are ye still here?'' he shot at her. 'You're far too quiet for one that had such a glib tongue in her head a minute ago. When I didna hear ye, I thought ye would be away to sleep off your exertions. Go on get away now, then. Away ye go; I'm sick of the look o' ye.' And, as she was slow in moving, he shouted, 'Quick! out of my sight.'
While he had been in the parlour she had collected the wreckage of her dentures from the floor, and now, clutching these fragments tightly in her hand, she faded soberly from the room, her bowed, dejected carriage contrasting sadly with the gay eagerness with which she had rushed for the tumbler towards her own undoing.
Alone and untrammelled in the kitchen, Brodie addressed himself more assiduously to the bottle, washing away the unpleasant memory of her presence and the bitter recollections occasioned by her remarks. He knew, well, that unhappy truth lay at the foundation of her senile yet disconcerting reminiscences but now, as always, he chose to blind himself to their accuracy a process never difficult to his obtuse and lumbering mind and one now rendered easier than ever by the liberality of his potations. Soon he had forgotten the entire incident, except for the ludicrous remembrance of her sudden and embarrassing edentation, and reclining at ease in his chair and toping steadily, he mounted into the higher altitudes of intoxication. With the gradual elevation of his spirits he began to regret his solitary condition and with an impatient, swinging foot and eager glances at the clock, he sought to anticipate the return of Nancy. But it was only nine o'clock; he knew that she would not arrive before ten, and, as the hands moved with a regular and monotonous slowness despite his efforts to expedite their progress, he got up and began to walk about the room. A wild idea of promenading the streets of the town, of bursting in upon the assembly at the club and disconcerting them with a few, lurid and well-chosen words presented itself to him, but although he played with the appealing notion, he finally rejected it on the grounds that his Nancy would not approve. He had now lost his morose and gloomy oppression and, striding clumsily within the confines of the kitchen, his hair ruffled, his wrinkled clothes hanging more awkwardly upon him, his hands dangling like inactive flails, he felt he wanted to express the exultation of his mood in some definite and appropriate action. His past was for the moment forgotten and his outlook bounded only by the compass of the next few hours; he was himself again, yet from time to time, when the sound of his steps rang too loudly in his ears, he would pause with a profound concern for his student next door and, admonishing himself with a shake of his head, resume his pacing more silently, with a greater and more exaggerated caution.
At length the limits of the room became inadequate, failed to contain him. Insensibly he passed out of the doorway and began to wander about the house. He ascended the stairs, moved across the top landing, opened the door of his mother's room and flung an objectionable remark at her, chuckled to himself, entered Matt's bedroom, where he viewed with disgust the array of toilet lotions and hair pomades, and, having lit every gas jet so that the house blazed with light, finally he stood within his own room. Here, drawn by a hidden force, he went slowly forward to the chest of drawers where Nancy kept her clothing and, a sly leer mingling with his shamed consciousness, he commenced to pull out and examine the fine embroidered garments which she had bought with the money he had given her. He handled the smooth lace-edged vestments, touched soft lawn, fingered thin cambric, held the long empty stockings in his ponderous grasp, and his mouth curved with an upward slant while he invested the fragrant garments with the person of their owner. His shot eye, fixed upon the whiteness before him, saw actually the alabaster of her body, always to him a source of wonder and delight, and to his mind the texture of the stuff he handled seemed to have absorbed its colour from contact with that milky skin. As he remained there, displaying with stretched arms and for his sole enjoyment these flimsy articles of finery, he looked like some old and uncouth satyr who, stumbling upon the shed raiment of a nymph, had seized upon it and now, by contemplation, whetted his worn fancy capriciously.
At length he closed the drawers by a pressure of his knee and glancing sideways as he walked, moved stealthily from the room, shutting the door silently behind him. Outside, it was as though he had accomplished successfully and without detection some secret enterprise, for his shamed slyness dropped from him, he rubbed his hands noisily together, puffed out his cheeks, and heavily descended
the stairs. In the hall he opened the parlour door and cried, with a facetious assumption of gravity:
'Can I come in, ma'am? Or are ye not at home?' Then without waiting for the reply, which indeed she did not utter, he entered the parlour, saying in the same manner, 'I've been round my house to see that everything's in order, so there'll be no burglars to trouble ye to-night. Lights in all the windows! A fine splore o' illumination to show a' the rotten swine that we're gay and bricht in the Brodie house.' She did not in the least understand whar he meant but watched him with her blue, placating eyes that now seemed to be enlarged, to stand out from her cold, stiff face. With arms crossed and shivering, her thin-stockinged legs curled under her for warmth, having lost all sensation but that of numbness in her feet and hand and, her impressionable mind stamped by the scene she had witnessed in the kitchen, having failed completely to make headway with her study, she now regarded him fearfully.
'How are ye gettin' on?' he continued, looking at her closely. 'Have ye enough quietness here to suit you? What have ye done since ye came in?'
She started guiltily, knowing that she had done nothing, unable to conceal anything from him.
'I haven't got on very well, Father,' she replied humbly. 'It's so terribly cold in here.'
'What! Ye havena got on well and me that's been keepin' as quiet, as quiet for ye. What are ye thinkin' of?'
'It's the cold room.' she repeated again. 'I think it must be freezing outside.'
'The room!' he cried, raising his brows with a tipsy gravity. 'Did ye not beg and beseech me to bring ye in here? Did I not carry in your books in my own hands, and light the gas for ye, and set you down to it? Ye wanted in here and now you turn on me and complain!' Here his flushed face indicated an aggrieved and exaggerated disapproval. 'Not got on well, forsooth! Ye better get a bend on and look sharp about it.'
'If there had been a fire!' she ventured diffidently, observing now that he was not in his severe vein towards her. 'I'm all goose flesh and shivering.'
Her words penetrated, struck some responsive chord in his soaked brain, for he started and, with a complete change of manner, cried with profuse pathos:
'My Nessie shiverin'! Here am I as warm as toast and my own, wee lassie freezin' and wantin' a fire! And what for no? It's reasonable. It's more than reasonable. Ye shall have a fire this minute, if I've got to get it with my own hands. Sit still now and wait and see what your father'll do for ye.' He held up an admonishing finger to bind her to her seat and, moving un wieldily out of the room and into the cellar that adjoined the scullery, he fumbled in the dark amidst the coal and finally secured what he sought a long, iron shovel. Then, brandishing this like a trophy, he advanced to the kitchen fire and knocked down the front bars of the grate; thrusting the shovel under the glowing coals, he secured a flaming heap of red-hot cinders which he bore triumphantly back to the parlour, leaving a smoky trail behind him. Flinging the burning embers into the cold fireplace he cried, in a knowing voice, 'Wait a minute! Just wait a minute! Ye ha vena seen it a' yet', and again disappeared, to return immediately with a huge bundle of sticks in one hand and the shovel, replenished this time with coal, in the other. Kneeling down clumsily, he laid the sticks upon the cinders and lying flat on his stomach, blew them stertorously until they blazed to his satisfaction. With a grunt he now raised himself and sitting within the confines of the hearth like a playful bull within its stall, he fed the flames sedulously with coal so that he achieved, eventually, a high crackling pyramid of fire. With both
