make preparations for the evening meal.
Soon Nessie came bounding in. She had seen the trunks in the hall and rushed up to Manwna in a flutter, crying:
'Is he home, Mamma? What great big boxes! Where is he? I wonder if he's brought me a present from India. Oh! I want to see Matt! Where is he?' At Mrs. Brodie's word she dashed upstairs, calling out expectantly to Matt, all eagerness to see him. In a few moments, however, she came down slowly, stood again before Mamma,
this time dejectedly, frowning her little petulant frown, her swelling excitement entirely collapsed.
'I hardly knew him,' she remarked, in her old-fashioned way. 'He's not like our Matt a bit. He didn't seem in the least glad to see me.'
'Tuts, Nessie!' exclaimed Mamma. 'You're haverin'. He's had a long journey. Give him time to settle down.'
'When I went in he was drinkin' something out a wee leather bottle. He said not to bother him.'
'He would be doing his unpackin', child. Don't be so impatient. He's got other things to think of just now, f orb ye you.'
'When I asked him about my compass he said he had thrown it away he said something I didna understand something about it bein' like your nose.'
Mrs. Brodic coloured deeply, but made no reply. She felt sure that Nessie must be making some mistake, must have misconstrued the remark, yet her heart was heavy at the thought of what might have been implied.
'I thought he might have brought me a wee string o' coral beads or something like that,' persisted Nessie. 'Grandma's real upset too; she thought he might have minded her with a keepsake. He seems to have brought nothing for anybody.'
'Don't be selfish, Nessie!' cried Mamma sharply, venting all her pent-up feeling in this rebuke. 'Your brother has enough to do with his money without squandering it on you. Not another word out of your head! Away and call Grandma down to make the toast,' and, pursing her lips closely together, Mrs. Brodie inclined her head more rigidly to its angle of endurance, set herself resignedly to arrange the tea things upon the table.
When tea time drew near, Matthew came down to the kitchen, A faint flush tinged the yellow of the skin around his prominent cheek bones, his speech was more profuse than when he had arrived, and, detecting a faint but suggestive odour upon his breath, instantly Mamma knew that he had been fortifying himself for the meeting with his father. Observing him covertly she perceived that, despite
his vaunting talk, he dreaded this coming encounter; at once her recent humiliation was forgotten and all her instincts rose again to his protection.
'Sit down by the table, on your chair, son! Don't tire yourself out any more.'
''S all right, Mamma,' he replied. 'I'll keep on my pins. Been cramped up travelling these last few days. I like to stretch myself a bit.' He moved restlessly about the room, nervously fingering everything within reach, looking repeatedly at the clock, and getting in her way as she passed to and from the table.
Grandma Brodie, who had entered behind him and now sat by the fireside, called out:
'Man! You're like a knotless thread. Is that a habit you've picked up off these black men, to wander about like that? It fair makes my head giddy to look at ye.' She was still bitter about not having received a present from him.
Eventually he sat down, joining the others at the table. In spite of all his resistance, the approach of half-past five was cowing him; all the firm resolutions which he had formed for days past to stand up to his father and assert himself as a man of the world began to ooze from him, and his especial determination to maintain a nonchalant assurance at this first interview gradually wilted. Coming home, it had been easy for him to tell himself that he cared nothing for his father now, as he sat in his old chair at the same table and within the same unaltered room, waiting, his ears anxiously alert for that firm heavy footstep, the overwhelming sweep of old associations deluged him and, losing all his acquired dash and hardihood, he became the nervously expectant youth once more. Instinctively he turned to his mother and to his annoyance found her limpid eye regarding him with a sympathetic understanding. He saw that she appreciated his emotions, that his apprehension was apparent to her, and a furious resentment against her stirred him as he exclaimed:
'What are you looking at now? It's enough to make a man jump when you look at him like that.' He stared at her angrily until she lowered her eyes.
At half-past five the well-remembered click of the door startled him; the sound was exactly to the second, for Brodie, after a prolonged period of irregularity in his meals, had now resumed, with an utter disregard for business, his habits of scrupulous punctuality. Now, as his father came into the room, Matthew gathered himself together, controlled the movements of his hands, prepared himself for a bitter onslaught of words. But Brodie did not speak, did not once
look at his son. He sat down and began to partake comfortably of his tea, which he seemed to enjoy immensely. Matthew was abashed. In all his visualisations of the meeting, nothing like this had ever occurred and now he had an almost irresistible impulse to cry out, like a schoolboy in disgrace, 'Look, Father, I'm here! Take notice of me!'
Brodie, however, took no notice of him, but went quietly on with his meal, staring straight ahead of him and saying no word, until it seemed as though he had no intention of recognising his son. But at last, after a long time, when the tension in the room had grown almost unbearable, he turned and looked at Matthew. It was a penetrating gaze which saw everything and expressed everything, pierced the outside shell of hard bravado into the soft, shrinking flesh beneath, permeated and illuminated the deep recesses of Matthew's mind, and which said:
'You've returned at last, then. I know you! Still a weakling and now a failure!'
Under that glance Matthew seemed to diminish visibly in stature and, although he fought with all the strength in him to meet his father's eyes, he could not. His own gaze wavered, quailed, and to the intense humiliation of his swaggering vanity fell downwards to the ground.
Brodie smiled grimly, then having, without uttering one word, brow-beaten the other to subjection, he spoke, saying only, with a cutting inflection:
'You've arrived!' Yet expressed within the short compass of these simple words were a dozen sarcastic, objectionable meanings. Mamma trembled. The baiting of her son had begun and, though she saw that it was going to be worse than she had feared, she dared not say a word for fear of aggravating her husband's mood. Her eyes fell upon her Matt with a terrified, compassionate sympathy as Brodie continued, 'It's a real pleasure to see your braw, handsome face again, although it has turned as yellow as a guinea. Ye were aye a bit pasty-faced, now I think o't, but all the gold ye've been savin' out by there has fair jaundiced ye.' He surveyed Matthew critically, warming to his work, finding an outlet in this sardonic onslaught for all his bitter sufferings of the past months.
'It's worth it, though, no doubt it's worth it,' he continued. 'You'll have brought us a hantle o' gold from these foreign parts ye've been slavin' in. Ye'll be a rich man now? Are ye rich?' he shot out suddenly.
Matthew shook his head dismally, and at this silent negation Brodie's eyebrows lifted in a stupendous sneer.
'What!' he cried. 'Ye havena brought back a fortune? That beats a 5 ! I thought from the way you've been jauntin' about Europe and from those grand big boxes in the hall that ye must be worth a mint o' money at least. Then, if ye're not as rich as all that, why did ye get yoursef thrown out o' your position?'
'I didn't like it,' muttered Matthew.
'Dear! Dear!' remarked Brodie, appearing to address the company at large. 'He didna like his position. He maun be a big man to be so hard to please as all that; and the downright honesty of the man to admit that he didna like it.' Then, turning to Matthew and hardening his tone, he exclaimed, 'Do ye not mean that it didna like you? I've been told here in Levenford that you were soundly kicked out o' it. That they got as sick of the sight o' ye out there as I am already.' He paused, then continued suavely, 'Still, I may be wronging you. I've no doubt ye've got something splendid in view some marvellous new position. Have ye not?'
His tone demanded a reply and Matthew muttered 'No' sulkily, hating his father now with a violence which shook him, feeling it an unbearable humiliation that he, the travelled, the experienced, the sophisticated buck, should be spoken to like this. He swore inwardly that though at present he made no resistance, when he was stronger, more recovered from his journey, he would be revenged for every
insult.
'No new post to go to!' Brodie continued, with assumed affability. 'No post and no money! You've just come
