stammered incoherently, stretched her hand dumbly before her. Then, as her face grew grey with endeavour, suddenly she spoke:
'Matt,' she cried in a full, high tone. 'Matt! Come to me!' She now stretched out both her quivering arms as though sight failed her, calling out in a weaker, fading tone, 'Nessie! Mary! Where are ye?'
He wished to go to her, to start forward instantly, but he remained rooted to the floor; yet from his lips broke involuntarily these words, strange as a spray of blossoms upon a barren tree:
'Margaret, woman Margaret dinna mind what I said. I didna mean the hauf o't!'
But she did not hear him and with a last, faint breath she whispered slowly:
'Why tarry the wheels of thy chariot, O Lord? I'm ready to go to ye!'
Then she sank gently backwards upon the pillow. A moment later a last, powerful expiration shook the thin, withered body with a convulsive spasm and she lay still. Limp and flat upon her back, with arms outstretched upon the bed, the fingers slightly flexed upon the upturned palms, she lay, in shape and stillness, as if she had been crucified. She was dead.
XIII
BRODIE looked around the company assembled uncomfortably in the parlour with a brooding eye which passed over Nessie, Matthew and his mother, lit impatiently upon his wife's cousins Janet and William Lumsden and settled with a scowling finality upon Mrs. William Lumsden. They had just buried all that remained of Margaret Brodie, and the guests, clinging even in the face of Brodie's inhospitable frowns, to the privileges endowed to them by old established precedent, had returned to the house after the funeral to partake of refreshment.
'We'll give them nothing!' Brodie had exclaimed to his mother that morning. His momentary, belated tenderness towards his wife was now forgotten and he resented bitterly the threatened intrusion of her relations. 'I don't want them about my house. They can go hame whenever she's ditched.' The old woman had herself hoped
for a savoury high tea, but in the face of his remark she had modified her demands.
'James,' she had pleaded, 'ye maun gie them a sip o' wine and a bite o' cake for the honour o' the house.'
'None o' our ain folks are left to come,' he growled. 'What does it matter about hers? I wish I had choked them off when they wrote.'
'They're ower scattered for mony o' them to come,' she had placated, 'but ye canna get ower offerin' them something. It wouldna be decent to do otherwise.'
'Give them it, then,' he cried, and as a sudden thought struck him, he added, 'Ay, give them it, then. Feed the swine. There'll be somebody here to lend ye a hand.'
Now it gave him a saturnine pleasure to see Nancy enter briskly with cake, biscuits and wine and hand them around. He was his own man again, and it appeared a delicious stroke of satire for him to have her enter his house the moment his wife's body had been carried out; the two women the dead and the quick had, so to speak, passed each other at the gate; his eyes met hers in a glow of hidden buffoonery.
'Go ahead, Matt,' he jeered significantly at his son, as Nancy handed the latter wine, with a pertly conscious air. 'Take up a glass. It'll do ye good after all your greetin'. You'll be quite safe. I'm here to see it doesna fly to your head.' He watched his son's trembling hand with disgust. Matt had again disgraced him by breaking down abjectly at the graveside, snivelling and whimpering before these relations of Mamma's and grovelling hysterically on his knees as the first spadeful of earth clumped heavily upon the coffin.
'Nae wonder he's upset,' said Janet Lumsden, in a kindly voice. She was a fat, comfortable woman with a high, amiable bosom protruding above the upper edge of her ill-fitting corsets. Now she looked around the assembly and added agreeably, ' 'Twas a merciful release, though, I'm led to believe. She'll be happier where she is now, I'll warrant.'
' 'Tis a pity the puir thing wasna allowed a wreath or two,' said Mrs. William Lumsden, with a sniff and a toss of her head. Her lips were tight and her mouth downturned beneath her long, sharp, penetrating nose; as she helped herself from the tray she looked intently at Nancy, then looked away again with a slow and upward twist of her head. 'A funeral is never the same without flowers,' she added firmly.
'Ay, they're sort o' comfortin' like,' said Janet Lumsden placatingly. 'They big lilies are bonnie.'
'I had never been to a burial before, without flowers,' replied Mrs. Lumsden acrimoniously. 'The last interment I attended there was a full, open carriage of flowers, forbye what covered the coffin.'
Brodie looked at her steadily.
'Weel, ma'am,' he said politely, 'I hope yell have a' the blossoms ye require when ye go to yer ain last repose.'
The other looked along her nose at him doubtfully, not knowing exactly whether to accept the remark as a compliment or an insult; then, in her uncertainty, she turned commandingly to her husband for support. He, a small wiry man, uncomfortable in his stiff, shiny black suit, his starched dickey and tight 'made' tie, magnificent, yet none the less still smelling of the stable, interpreted the familiar look and dutifully began:
'Flowers gang well at a funeral it's a matter of opinion, no doubt, but I would say they were a consolation to the bereaved. But the strangest thing to my mind is that they should gang well with a weddin' too. It's a fair mystery to me how they should suit such opposite ceremonies.' He cleared his throat and looked sociably at Brodie. 'Ye ken I've been to many a funeral ay, and to many a weddin' too. Ance I went as far as forty miles away from hame, but would ye believe me, man,' he concluded triumphantly, 'for thirty- two years I havena slept a nicht out o' ma ain bed.'
'Indeed,' said Brodie curtly, 'I'm not interested.'
At this rudeness there was an uncomfortable pause, a silence punctuated only by a small residual sob from the red-eyed Nessie. The two groups looked at each other distrustfully, like strangers on opposite sides of a railway compartment.
'It's a gey appropriate day for a funeral, anyway,' said Lumsden at last defiantly, looking out at the drizzling rain; and at his remark a low conversation amongst the three visitors, and confined exclusively to them, again recommenced and slowly gained impetus.
'Ay! It's miserable enough for onything here.'
'Did ye mark how heavy the rain cam' on at the graveside whenever the cords were lowered?'
' Tis remarkable to me that the meenister wouldna come back to the house to gie us a few words.'
'He'll have his reasons, I have nae doubt.'
'What he did say at the grave's heid he said unco' weel, onyway. It's a pity she couldna have heard it hersel', puir body.'
'What was't he said, 'a loyal wife and a devoted mother,' wasn't no'?'
They looked out of the corners of their eyes at Brodie as though expecting him to confirm decently this last tribute, but he seemed not to have heard them and now gazed broodingly away from them out of the window. And now, seeing Brodie's apparent inattention, they grew bolder.
'I wad like to have seen the puir thing again, but I had the surprise o' my life when I heard she had been screwed down before we arrived.'
'She must have altered sadly wi' sicca trouble, ay and a' the worry she cam' through.'
'She was a bricht, lively kimmer in her young days. She had a laugh like the song o' a mavis.'
'She was a' that,' said Janet at last, with a reproachful look at the figure by the window, implying by her words, 'She was too good for you.'
There was a moment's pause, then, with a guarded look at Nessie that encompassed her blue serge dress, Mrs. Lumsden murmured:
'It fair affronts me to see that puir child without the decent mournin's to her back. It's nothing short of shameful.'
' 'Twas the sma', sma' funeral that surprised me,' returned Janet. 'Only the twa carriages and not a single body frae the town.'
He heard them, actually he had listened to every word only the heedlessness of his embittered humour had
