“And what would become of my flowers, with your hens and their families about?”
“Flooers!” said Janet, contemptuously: and her mistress had not spirit to continue the discussion.
“And now,” she said, “that all’s ready, I must go down and see after my son.”
“Eh, mem, but you’re a proud woman this night to say thae words again! and him grown sic a grand buirdly man!”
The poor lady smiled--she could do no more--in her old servant’s face, and went down-stairs to the dining-room, which she found to her astonishment full of smoke, and those fumes of whisky which so often fill a woman’s heart with sickness and dismay, even when there is no need for such emotion. Robert Ogilvy sat with his chair pushed back from the table, a pipe in his mouth, and a tumbler of whisky-and-water at his hand. The whisky and the food had perhaps given him a less hang-dog look, but the former had not in the least affected him otherwise, nor probably had he taken enough to do so. But the anguish of the sight was not less at the first glance to his mother, so long unaccustomed to the habits of even the soberest men. She said nothing, and tried even to disguise the trouble in her expression, heart-wrung with a cumulation of experiences, each adding something to those that had gone before.
“Your room is ready, Robbie, my dear. You will be wearied with this long day--and the excitement,” she said, with a faint sob, “of coming home.”
“I do not call that excitement,” he said: “a man that knows what excitement is has other ways of reckoning----”
“But still,” she said, with a little gasp accepting this repulse, “it would be something out of the common. And you will have been travelling all day. How far have you come to-day, my dear?”
“Don’t put me through my catechism all at once,” he said, with a hasty wrinkle of anger in his forehead. “I’ll tell you all that another time. I’m very tired, at least, whether I’ve come a short way or a long.”
“I have put your bed all ready for you--Robbie.” She seemed to say his name with a little reluctance: his bonnie name! which had cost her so keen a pang to think of as stained or soiled. Was it the same feeling that arrested it on her lips now?
“Am I bothering you, mother, staying here a little quiet with my pipe? for I’ll go, if that is what you want.”