was mortal. She shivered, and a film of fear clouded her eyes like a faint, shadowy harbinger of the last, opaque pellicle of dissolution.
'Did he say I was dying then?' she quavered.
He glared at her, furious at the position into which he had been forced. Angry words now poured from his mouth.
'Can ye not shut up about that runt?' he cried. 'Ye wad think he was the Almighty to hear you. He doesna ken everything. If he canna cure ye, there's other doctors in Levenford! What's the use o' makin' such a fuss about it a'?'
'I see. I see now,' she whispered. 'I'll no' make any more fuss about it now.' Quiescent upon the bed she gazed at him and behind him; her gaze seemed to transcend the limits of the narrow room and focus itself fearfully upon a remoteness beyond. After a long pause she said, as though to herself, 'I'll not be muckle loss to you, James! I'm gey and worn out for you,' Then she whispered faintly, 'But, oh! Matt, my own son, how am I to leave you?'
Silently she turned to the wall and to the mystery of her thoughts, leaving him standing with a sullen, glouting brow, behind her. For a moment he looked lumpishly at her flaccid figure, then, without a word, he went heavily out of the room.
XII
A SUDDEN burst of vivid August sunshine, penetrating the diaphanous veil hung by the last drops of a passing shower, sprayed the High Street with a misty radiance, whilst the brisk breeze which had thrown the fleecy, wool- pack clouds from off the pathway of the sun, now moved the rain slowly onwards in a glow of golden haze.
'Sunny-shower! Sunny-shower!' chanted a group of boys, as they raced along the drying street on their way to bathe in the Leven.
'Look,' cried one of them importantly, 'a rainbow!' And he pointed upwards to a perfect arc which, like the thin beribboned handle of a lady's basket, spanned glitteringly the entire length of the street. Every one paused to look at the rainbow. They lifted their eyes above the drab level of the earth and gazed upwards towards the sky, nodded their heads, smiled cheerfully, exclaimed with delight, shouted to each other across the street.
'It's a braw sight!'
'Look at the bonnie colours!'
'It puts auld Couper's pole in the shade, richt enough.'
The sudden, unexpected delight of the phenomenon cheered them, elevating their minds unconsciously to a plane that lay above the plodding commonplace of their existence, and, when they looked downwards again, the vision of that splendid, sparkling arch remained, inspiring them for the day before them.
Out of the Winton Arms into this bright sunshine came James Brodie. He saw no rainbow, but walked dourly, with his hat pulled forward, his head down, his hands deeply in his outside pockets, seeing nothing, and, though a dozen glances followed his progress, saluting no one. As he plodded massively, like a stallion, over, the crest of the street, he felt that 'they' the peering inquisitive swine were looking at him with prying eyes; knew, though he ignored it, that he was the focus of their atention. For weeks past it had appeared to him that he and the moribund shop that he tenanted had been the nidus of a strange and unnatural attention in the Borough, that townspeople, some that he knew and some whom he had never seen before, strolled deliberately outside his business to stare openly, curiously, purposely, into the depths within. From the inner obscurity he imagined that these empty, prying glance mocked him; he had cried out to himself, 'Let them look then, the glaikit swine! Let them gape at me for all they're worth. I'll give them something to glower about.' Did they guess, he now asked himself bitterly, as he strode along, that he had been celebrating celebrating the last day in his business? Did they know that, with a
ferocious humour, he had just now swallowed a liberal toast to the wreck of his affairs? He smiled grimly to think that to-day he ceased to be a hatter, that shortly he would walk out of his office for the last time and bang the door behind him finally and irrevocably. Paxton, from across the road, whispered to his neighbour:
'Look, man, quick, there's Brodie.' And together they stared at the strong figure on the opposite pavement. 'Man! I'm sorry for him somehow,' continued Paxton; 'his comedown doesna fit him weel.'
'Na!' agreed the other, 'He's the wrang man to be ruined.'
'For a' his strength and power,' resumed Paxton, 'there's something blunderin' and helpless about him. It's been a fearfu' blow to him. Do ye mark how his shoulders have bowed, as if he had a load on his back.'
His neighbour shook his head.
'I canna see it like that! He's been workin 1 for this for a lang, kag time. What I canna stand about the man is his black, veecious pride that grows in spite o' a' things. It's like a disease that gets waur and waur, and the source o't is so downright senseless. If he could but see himself now, as others see him, it micht humble him a wee.'
Paxton looked at the other peculiarly.
'I wouldna talk like that about him,' he said slowly; 'it's a chancy thing even to whisper like that about James Brodie, and at this time more than ordinar'. If he heard ye he would turn on ye and rend ye.'
'He's not listenin' to us,' replied the other, a trifle uncomfortably; then he added, 'He has drink in him again, by the look o' him. Adversity micht bring some men to their senses but it's drivin' him the other way round.'
They both turned again and glanced at the slowly retreating figure. After a pause Paxton said:
'Have ye heard, lately, how his wife goes on?'
'Not a word! From what I can make out not a body sees her. Some leddies from the kirk took up a wheen jellies and the like for her, but Brodie met them at the gate and sent them a' richt-about turn. Ay, and waur nor that, he clashed the guid stuff they had brought about their ears.'
'Do ye say so! Nobody maun tamper wi' him or his,' exclaimed Paxton; then he paused and queried, ' Tis cancer, is't not, John?'
'Ay! So they say!'
'What a waesome affliction!'
'Man!' replied the other, as he moved away, 'it is bad, but to my mind 'tis no waur than for that puir woman to be bound body and soul to a man like James Brodie.'
By this time Brodie had entered his shop, his footsteps echoing loudly through the almost denuded premises where only a tithe of his stock remained, the rest having been disposed of through the interest and consideration of Soper. The evanescent boy had finally vanished and he was alone in the barren, unhappy, defeated place, where the faint gossamer of a spider's web, spun across the remaining boxes on the shelves, mutely indicated the ebb to which his business
had failed - Now, as he stood in the midst of this dereliction, unconsciously he peopled it with the figures of the past, the past of those lordly days when he had walked with a flourish about the place, disdaining the humbler of his clients but meeting equally and agreeably all persons of importance or consequence. It seemed incomprehensible to him that they should now be merely shadows, entering only in his imagination; that he would no longer laugh and jest and talk with them in these precincts which had enclosed his daily life for twenty years. It was the same shop, he was the same man, yet slowly, mysteriously, these living beings had withdrawn from him, leaving only unhappy, unsubstantial memories. The few old customers, chiefly the county gentlepeople, who had still clung to him, had seemed only to prolong the misery of his failure, and now that it was finished a vast surge of anger and sorrow invaded him. With his low forehead contracted he tried abortively to realise how it had been accomplished, to analyse how all this strange, unthinkable change had come about.
Somehow he had permitted it! A convulsive, involuntary sigh shook his thick chest, then, as if in rage and disgust at such a weakness, he bared his lips over his pale gums, ground his teeth and went slowly into his office. No letters, no daily paper now cumbered his desk, awaiting his disdainful attention; dust alone lay there, lay thickly upon everything. Yet, as he stood within the neglected office, like the leader of a hopeless cause when he has finally abandoned it, a faint measure of sad relief tinctured his regret, and he became aware that he now faced the worst, that the suspense of this unfair fight
was at an end.
The money he had raised by mortgaging his house was finished; though he had eked this out to the last driblet his resources were now entirely exhausted. But, he reflected, he had discharged his obligations to the utmost; he
