She recalled that Wully, once when he was quite a small boy, had alone and unaided found and identified a gentleman whose team was struggling in a swamp. He was a poor old gentleman, trying manfully to get an orphan grandson to a son’s home farther west, and Wully had brought him proudly home, and his mother had “done” for him till he was able to travel on. Having him in the house had been like having a pitiable angel with them. When he was better, they had called all the neighbors in, and the old New Englander had preached them a sermon. He had preached to the children about the Lamb of God, using as his text the lamb tied near the door, and they had never forgotten how gentleness, he said, had made God great. And when he had been starting on, John McLaughlin had taken a bill from his pocket—and bills were things not often seen by the children—and given it to him humbly, for the benefits his presence had bestowed upon the family. Afterwards when his mother had asked Wully how he had known the stranger would be welcome, he had said he knew he was some great man by the way he spoke to his floundering horses. Oh, surely in that wilderness Wully had known the better ways of living. And he had chosen despicable ways! She was only an old, tired, disappointed woman.
If her firstborn, that lad Wully, had done a thing like this, what might not the rest of them choose to do! Pride did not let her remember that if the family had been in no generation without a man of more or less eminence, neither had it been without a precedent for Wully’s conduct. She was a woman who had sympathy with the mother of Zebedee’s sons. If she had been there with Christ, she would have asked unashamed for four places on his right, and for four on his left, the nearest eight seats for her eight sons. What dreams she had dreamed for them! Once she had beheld the President of the United States consulting his cabinet, and behold, her Wully was the President, and Allen the Vice-President, and the Cabinet consisted of her younger lads, even young Hughie sitting there, still only nine, with a freckled little nose, and a wisp of a curling lock straying down from his cowlick towards eyes shining with contemplated mischief. She had felt at the time that such a dream might be somewhat, perhaps, foolish, and profiting by Joseph’s distant but well-known experience, she had told it only to her husband. He diagnosed her case in one instant. “You dreamed that wide awake, woman!” She had thought at times that Allen was to be another Burns, a maker of songs for a new country. In her dreams, to be great was to be one of three things, a Burns, a Lincoln, or a Florence Nightingale. And now one dream, her first and longest, was permanently over. Wully was a man now, and a man who brought women to ruin. Sometimes it seemed to her as she lay there moaning that surely the girl must have enticed him into this evil. Then she came swiftly to blaming the whole thing on Alex McNair. If he had come home when he should have, if he had not left the girl unprotected there, this would never have happened. Blaming Alex violated no fond loyalty. In time it came to seem to her that the whole fault was his.
But that afternoon, the small McLaughlins coming home from school found a state of affairs new in their experience. There was absolutely no sign of a baby in the house, and yet their mother was in bed! Once she said when they asked her anxiously, that her head ached. And once she said that her heart was troubling her.
VIII
The autumn seemed to set itself against the house that Wully had determined to have ready for occupancy before winter. Week after week the roads continued so deep in mud that six oxen could not manage to haul a load of lumber the mere twenty-six miles. Chirstie was not as much disappointed by the delay as her husband; she rather liked being hidden away, just then, on the outskirts of the settlement, in her father’s lonely cabin. She had seen no one but Wully’s mother, and her aunts into whose chagrined ears the humbled Isobel McLaughlin had poured a story as
