The Able McLaughlins

him her opinion, with the frank statement that she pitied any woman who married him. However, he still liked her. He had always liked her since that time in Ayrshire, soon after she had married his older brother, when she had saved him from a long and well-earned term in prison for poaching. His successful pursuers were almost upon him when they turned suddenly in the wrong direction, from which they had just heard firing. She had seen his plight, and fired cunningly into the air, and when the men had rushed into her cottage they found only a young woman demurely sewing on baby clothes. Now since, of course, it was impossible to poach in a land where not even God preserved game, he was a reformed man, and an eminent huntsman. But sometimes he still said jovially that he might as well have gone to prison as to have to listen to all she said to him on that occasion. Even yet he was not averse to giving her occasions of finding fault with him.

So when she lifted the baby up for his inspection, he rose, and squinted down thoughtfully upon the little bundle. He turned his head appraisingly from one side to the other. Then, knowing very well what she thought, he said recklessly;

“He’s a perfect little McNair, Isobel. He’s like Alex. That nose of his⁠—”

She enlightened him stoutly. He persisted in his error, and only asked:

“What’s he called?”

Now what to name the child was a question not altogether easy for Wully, who had been standing near his mother, looking with proper paternal pride upon the child. Each McLaughlin named his firstborn son, not boastingly, for himself, but gratefully, for his father; so that Johns and Williams came alternatingly down through the generations. That was the rub. Perhaps John McLaughlin might not relish having this irregular child bear his name. So Wully was too proud to seem to desire it.

“He’s such a husky little fighter for what he wants, we thought we’d call him Grant. There’s no better name than that, is there?”

His father was sitting by the stove, smoking, seeming as usual absorbed in a dream and only half-conscious of what was going on about him. At this he took his pipe from his mouth and said, without a sign of emotion;

“I wonder at you, Wully. The laddie’s name is John.”

Wully was greatly relieved.

“Oh, well,” he said lightly. “Maybe that would be better. There won’t be more than fourteen or fifteen John McLaughlins about in twenty years. Grant’ll keep. We’ll save it for the next one.”

Wully had rejoiced beyond measure at the child’s birth, not for the reason some supposed, but solely because Chirstie was safely through her ordeal. So gay he had become, so lighthearted, after that burden of anxiety for her had been taken from him, that he seemed quite like a rejoicing young father. It had been terrible for him to see her time unescapably approaching. Those days seemed to him now like a nightmare. He had planned what he would say to his wife when he adopted her baby for his own. He would go blithely in, and cry to her gaily, “Where’s my son, Chirstie?” And the child would be his. He had planned that. But it had been different. That one irrepressible moan he had heard from her before his mother had sent him for the doctor had driven him through the night cursing. Cursing that man, whose very name he hated to recall, cursing any man who lightly forced such hours upon any woman⁠—to say nothing of a dear woman like Chirstie. He wanted to kill such men, to pound them to bits. And yet, lightly or not lightly, what would his love of her bring her to, eventually, if not to such hours as these! It was a hellish night. Afterwards he had gone in to see her, not blithely, but otherwise. He had found her lying there, hollow-eyed, exhausted, all her strength taken from her, and her roundness, leaving her reduced, it seemed, to her essential womanhood. And then suddenly he had not been able to see her for the tears that burned his eyes. He had knelt down beside her, to put his face near hers, so unseeing that she had cried sharply, “Don’t! Be careful!” He had hurt her! But her hand was seeking for his. When she had shown him the child⁠—well he remembered that she had never asked him for pity for herself. But now her eyes were praying, “My baby! Love my baby, Wully!” With her lying there, even her familiar hands looking frail, her hair lying wearily against her pillow, if she had asked him to love a puppy, would he not have bent down to kiss it! Later he had marveled to see her with the child. A farmer, a man judging his very female animals by the sureness of their instincts for their young, he wouldn’t have wanted a wife not greatly maternal, he told himself. It came to be soon that in loving the child he was playing no role; he liked all his wife’s adornments.

So the terrible days passed away. His wife became altogether his. And wee Johnnie slept and thrived, his tiny hands doubled against his little red face, in the cradle that had served the five younger McLaughlins. When he opened his bonnie blue eyes, he saw only adoration bending over him. He felt only delighted and reverent hands lifting him. His grandmother, who “just couldn’t abide a house without a baby in it,” would sometimes allow one of her children, sitting carefully in just a certain chair, to hold him a little while as a mark of her favor. If Johnnie was a shame to the household, he was certainly an entertaining and a well-fed shame; if he was a disgrace, he was surely an amusing and a hungry one.

It was wonderful how completely Chirstie was sheltered from reproach. Though her humiliation was gossiped