upbringing o' him.' Then his eyes darkened suddenly. 'Take care, though, ye don't interfere wi' my Nessie. She belongs to me. Don't lay a finger on her. Keep your soft fiddle-faddle away from her or I'll brain ye.'
'Ye'll give him a home, Father,' she moaned, 'Ye'll not show him the door?'
He laughed hatefully at her.
'It would kill me if ye turned him out like like ' She broke down completely.
'I'll have to think about it,' he replied, in an odious tone, revelling in the thought of keeping her in suspense, diverting against her all his indignant displeasure at Matthew's sudden defection and thrusting the entire blame of this failure of her son upon her. Hating her already in his defeated desire for the pleasure she could not give him, he loathed her the more inordinately because of this failure of her son, and he would, he told himself, let her pay for it dearly, make her the chopping block for the keen blade of his wrath. The fact that Matthew should have given notice and be sailing for home was entirely her offence; invariably the faults of the children made them hers, their virtues his.
'You're too just a man not to hear what he's to say or what he wants, Father,' she persisted, in a ridiculous, wheedling voice. 'A fine, big man like you wouldna do onything like that. Ye would give him a hearin', let him explain there's bound to be a reason.'
'There'll be a reason, right enough,' he sneered at her. 'He'll want to come and live off his father, I've no doubt, as if we hadna enough to do without feedin' his big, blabby mouth. That'll be the reason o' the grand home- comin'. I've no doubt he thinks he's in for a grand soft time here, wi' me to work for him and you to lick the mud off his boots. Damn it all It's too much for a man to put up wi'.' A gust of passion mixed with a cold sleet of antipathy caught him.
'It's too much,' he yelled at her again. 'Too blasted much.'
Raising up his hand as though to menace her with its power, he held it there for one tense moment, then with a sudden gesture he directed it towards the gas, turned out the light and, throwing the effacing darkness around her, went heavily out of the room.
Mrs. Brodie, left in the obliterating blackness, the last dying spark of the cinders of the fire barely silhouetting the amorphous outlines of her contracted figure, sat cowed and still. For a long time she waited, silent and reflective, while her sad thoughts flowed from her like dark waves, oppressing and filling the room with a deeper and more melancholy obscurity. She waited whilst the embers grew cold, until he would be undressed, in bed, and perhaps asleep; then she moved her set, unwilling frame, crept out of the kitchen, like a hunted animal from its cave, and crawled warily upstairs. The boards which had groaned and creaked when Brodie ascended were noiseless under her frail weight, but, though her movements were soundless, a faint sigh of relief emanated from her as, at the door of the bedroom, the heavy sound of her husband's breathing met her. He slept, and, feeling her way into and about the room she shed her shabby, spotted garments; laying them on a heap on her chair, ready for the morning, she crept cautiously into bed, fearfully keeping her wilted body away from his, like a poor weak sheep couching itself beside a sleeping lion.
'MAMMA,' said Nessie, on the following Saturday, 'what is Matt coming back for?'
She was playing about the house and dragging after her mother in the desultory, querulous manner of a child to whom a wet Saturday morning is the worst evil of the week.
'The climate wasna suitable to him,' replied Mrs. Brodie shortly.
It was deeply rooted in the mind of Mamma as an essential tenet of the Brodie doctrine that from the young must be kept all knowledge of the inner workings of the affairs, relationships, and actions of the house, the more so if they were disagreeable. To questions concerning the deeper and more abstract aspects of Brodie conduct and, indeed, of life in general, the consoling answer was, 'You'll know some day, dear. All in good time!' And, to divert interrogations, the issue of which could not be avoided, Mamma considered it no sin to lie whitely and speciously to maintain inviolate the pride and dignity of the family.
'There's dreadful fevers out there,' she continued; and a vague idea of improving Nessie's natural history made her add, 'and lions, tigers, elephants and giraffes, and all manner o' curious beasts and insects.'
'But, Mamma!' persisted Nessie. 'Jenny Paxton said it was all through the Yard that our Matt had got the sack for not attendin' to his work.'
'She told a wicked untruth then. Your brother resigned his position like a gentleman.'
'When will he be back, Mamma ? Will he bring me anything, do you think? Will he bring me a monkey and a parrot? I would like a parrot better than a monkey. A monkey would scratch me but a parrot would talk to me and say, 'Pretty Polly', and that's more than a canary can do, isn't it?' She paused meditatively, then resumed,
'No; I'll not have that. I would have to clean its cage. I think I would like a pair of honky-tonky, Morocco slippers or or a bonnie, wee string o' coral beads. Will ye tell him, Mamma?'
'Be quiet, girl! How can I write to him when he's on his way home? Besides, Matt has more to think of than beads for you. You'll see him soon enough.'
'Will he be here soon, then?'
'You'll know all in good time, Nessie.' Then, voicing her own hopes, she added, 'It might be in about ten days, if he left soon after his letter.'
'Ten days! That's fine,' Nessie chanted, and began to skip about with a more lively air. 'I'll maybe have some fun when Matt comes back, forbye the wee string o' beads. It's been terrible since '
She stopped abruptly against the blank, forbidding wall of a subject absolutely interdicted, looked timidly at her mother, paused for a moment in confusion, then, as she saw that she was not to be reprimanded, began again, by a childish association of ideas, 'What does it mean to be in deep water, Mamma?'
'What are ye talkin' about now, Nessie. Ye run on like a spoutin' waterfall. Can ye not let me get my work done!'
'One of the girls in the class asked if my father could swim, because she heard her father sayin' that James Brodie was gettin' into deep water.'
'Will you stop tormentin' me with your silly nonsense, Nessie,' cried Mamma. 'Your father can look after himself without your help. It's an impertinence for his name to be lifted like that.' Nevertheless, the childish question touched her with a sharp, sudden misgiving, and, as she picked up a duster and went out of the kitchen, she wondered vaguely if there was any intrinsic reason for the
exacerbation of Brodie's meanness with her, for the whittling and paring of her house-keeping allowance which had for months past made it impossible for her to make ends meet.
'Oh! It's not me, Mamma,' replied Nessie, narrowing her small mouth virtuously and following her mother into the parlour. 'It's what the other girls in the class say. You would think there was something funny about us the way they go on. Ym better than them, amn't I, Mamma? My father could beat all theirs tied together.'
'Your father's a man in a million.' It cost Mrs. Brodie an effort to say these words, but she uttered them heroically, unconscious of the ambiguous nature of her phrase, striving only to maintain the best traditions of the house. 'Ye must never listen to a thing against him. Folks say bitter things when they're jealous o' a man.'
'They're just a lot of cheeky, big things. I'm going to tell the teacher if they say another word about us,' concluded Nessie, pressing her nose against the window like a small blob of putty. 'It's still raining, coming down heavy as heavy hang it!'
'Nessie! Don't say hang it! It's not right. You're not to use bad words,' reprimanded Mamma, interrupting her polishing of the brass candlesticks on the walnut front of the piano. She would take no chances with Nessie! The first sign of error must be corrected!
'Remember, now, or I'll tell your father,' she threatened, addressing her heated face again towards the piano which, open for the nonce, smiled at her in fatuous agreement, its exposed keys grinning towards her like an enormous set of false teeth.
'I wanted to go out and play that was all,' came the plaint from the window, 'but there's puddles everywhere, even if it does go off. I've got to work so hard at these old lessons through the week, it's a shame if a girl can't get a little bit of playtime on a Saturday.'
Disconsolately, she continued to view the dismal prospect of the wet December landscape, the wet roadway, the rain-drenched fields, the still, dripping branches of the birches opposite, the melancholy lack of movement save for the steady fall of water. But her facile prattle did not cease for long and, despite the depressing scene, in a moment she had recommenced:
'There's a sparrow sittin' on our cannon. Oh! There's another that's two wee sparrows cowriein' down in the rain on our brass cannon. What do we keep a cannon like that for? It doesn't shoot and it always needs cleanin'.
