How terrible mothers are! Fool was a word she hated so greatly that she never allowed her children to pronounce it. It was her ultimate condemnation. He had never heard her use it before. And now she used it for him!
“This is why you have been ailing all summer! You’d reason to be! Did you think you could do evil and prosper?”
He wasn’t going to stand any more of that tone. He got up.
“I’ll be going,” he exclaimed. “There’s no place for me here!” No sooner had he used those words than he regretted them. They might seem to appeal to her pity. That was what he had said once when he was a little lad, upon seeing a new baby in her arms, and afterwards, whenever she had shown him a new child, she had reminded him of it gaily.
“Don’t go!” she answered, unrelenting. “There is always a place for you, whatever you elect to do. This is a sore stroke, Wully!” Then she added, wearily and passionately,
“When I was a girl, I wanted to be some great person. And when you all were born, I wanted only to have you great men. And when you grew up, I prayed you might be at least honest. And I’m not to have even that, it seems.”
He had heard her say that before. He was so sorry for her pain that he hardly knew what to do. If only there had been any other way out! Maybe Chirstie had been right in demanding he tell at least his mother the truth. But he would not! He would share his wife’s blame.
“I’m sorry about it, mother,” he pleaded. “I’m sick about it. I’ve done what I could to make it right!”
“To make it right! Do you think you can ever make wrong right! You have spoiled your own marriage. You’ll never be happy in it!”
“Don’t worry about that!”
“And you the oldest!” she added, suddenly. “I suppose the other six will be doing the same, now!”
“If a brother of mine did a thing like that, I’d kill him!” cried Wully fiercely.
It soothed her to have something not tragic to reprove him for.
“Wully,” she said severely, “don’t you speak words like them here! ’Tis something you learned in the army! A fine one you’d be to say who should live and who should die! We dinna say the like here!”
“I can’t please you anyway!” he cried, stung by her upbraidings.
“Strange ways you have of trying!” she retorted. He said nothing. She cried again, presently,
“If only it had been some other girl, Wully! Not Jeannie’s!”
What could he answer?
“Mother, you come and see her! She needs someone!”
“Thanks to you! To my son! I won’t can speak to her, that shamed I’ll be of you!” She thought a bitter moment. “Alex McNair’ll be home before December. You’d best come here to me! Wully, if any other mouth in the world had told me this, I wouldn’t have believed it! You were always a good boy. Always! Before the war!”
“I’ve got to go!” he cried in answer. He rushed away, damning Peter Keith into the nethermost hell. The open air was some relief. If only women wouldn’t take these things so hard! Well, that was over. The worst part. Any taunt that he might ever have to defend himself from would be easy, after that.
After her unkissed son had gone, Isobel McLaughlin, reeling from the blow he had dealt her, sat with her hands covering her face. Nothing but Wully’s own recital could ever have made her believe such a story! It was even thus incredible. If only it had been any other girl but Jeannie’s! And her dead! Scarcely dead, either, till her son, betraying years of trust, had shamed her daughter! If Jeannie had been alive, she would have gone to her, in humiliation, though it killed her! Now there was not even that comfort! There was only Chirstie left, and her in such a state! It was not possible to believe her good, beautiful son had done such a base thing! If it had been any boy but Wully! Had he ever given her a moment of anxiety before? Did not the whole clan like him, knowing him for a quiet, honorable, sweet-tempered boy, eminently trustworthy! And now a thing like this to fall upon her! She refused to remember that Allen’s irresponsibility, his extravagant pleasure in the society of women, of any size or kind of woman, had made her anxious many an hour. That son, from the time he was twelve, had fairly glowed when there was a woman about to admire him. But Wully had only chuckled over his brother’s kaleidoscopic love affairs, things so foreign to his nature. His mother, remembering Allen’s escapades, exempted the dead loyally from blame. If Wully had been like that, she might have understood this tale. But he was not like that. He had never been at all like that. It must be the army that had wrought such evil changes in him. That was what had undone her years of teaching. That was what had made all this frontier sacrifice barren. Was it not for the children’s sake they had endured this vast wilderness, and endured it in vain if the children were to be of this low and common sort? In their Utopia it was not to have been as it had been in the old country, with each family having a scholar or two in it, and the rest toilers. Here they were all to have been scholars and great men. And now the war had taken away Wully’s schooling and Allen’s life—and not only Wully’s schooling, which was after all, not essential to life, but that ultimate gift, his very sense of being a McLaughlin.
Some Americans might have smiled to know that this immigrant family never for a moment considered Americans in general their equal,
