"Oh! Father, let me go home," cried Matt the sight and taste of the whisky now loathsome to him "I want to go home. My head is bursting."
"Dear! Dear!" replied Brodie, in a broad mimicry of his wife's voice. "Our Matt has a wee bit headache. That must have been where I struck you, son. That's terrible! What shall we do about it?" He affected to think deeply whilst he again emptied his glass.
"Man, I can't think of anything better than a leetle speerits. That's the remedy for an honest man like you some good honest whisky."
He filled out another full glass of the raw liquor and bending forward, seized his son's jaw with vicelike fingers, prised open the weak mouth, then quickly tilted the contents of the glass down Matt's gullet; whilst Matthew gasped and choked he continued, with a frightful assumption of conviviality, "That's better! That's much better! And now tell me don't hesitate, mind ye, but be quite frank about it tell me what ye thought of Nancy. She's maybe no so weel born as your mother, ye ken, but she doesna stink in her person. Na! she's a clean wee body in some respects. A man canna have it both ways, apparently." Then dropping his assumed smoothness, he suddenly snarled, in a devilish voice, "Was she to your taste, I'm askin' you?"
"I don't know. I can't tell," whined Matthew, realising that whatever answer he gave would be the wrong one.
Brodie nodded his big head reflectively.
"Man, that's true enough! I didn't give ye enough time to sample her. What a pity I came in so soon. I might have given ye another ten minutes thegither." Deliberately he whipped his own imagination on the raw with a dark unconscious sadism, knowing only that the more he tortured himself the more torment he gave his son. The more he saw his son's painful thoughts revolt from the consideration of his recent excesses, the more thickly he thrust these repugnant
ideas upon him.
"Man," he continued, "I couldna help but admire the bold, strong way you handled her, although she couldna have refused anything to a braw callant like you. Ye would have thocht ye were fechtin' wi' a man the way ye gripped her."
Matthew could endure it no longer. He had reached the limit of his endurance and laying his head, which throbbed with the beat of a hundred hammers, upon the table, and bursting outright into weak, blubbering tears, he cried:
"Father, kill me if ye like. I don't care. Kill me and be done with it but, for God's sake, let me be."
Brodie looked at him with baffled, embittered fury; the hope he had entertained of taunting his son into another wild assault so that he might experience the delight of again battering him senseless to the floor died within him. He saw that the other was too weak, too broken, too pitifully distressed to be provoked into another outburst and a sudden, rankling resentment made him bend over and catch him a tremendous buffet on the head, with his open hand.
"Take that, then, you slabbering lump," he shouted loudly; "you haven't even got the guts of a sheep." All the refinement of his anger, the sneering, the sarcasm, the irony vanished, and instead his rage foamed over like a raging sea whilst his face grew black with rabid fury like the dark clouding of an angry sky. "You would lay your fingers on my woman! You would lift your hand against me! Against me!" he roared.
Matt raised his eyes weakly, imploringly. "Don't look at me," bellowed Brodie, as though a sacrilege had been committed by the other. "Ye're not fit to lift your eyes above the level o' my boots. I canna look at ye but what I want to spit on ye. Take that, and that, and that." With every word he cuffed the other's head like an empty cask, sending it banging against the table. "God!" he cried in disgust, "what are ye? Your head sounds like an empty drum. Have ye got to be drunk before ye can stand up for yourself? Have ye no sense of pride in the blood that's in ye? Have ye no pride to be heir to the name I gave ye?" Then, in the height of his fury, he suddenly seized Matt by the arm and, lifting him like a huddled marionette, dragged him to his feet. "For what am I wasting my time on ye here? We'll go home!" he cried. "I'll take ye home. Now we must deliver ye safely to your mother, out o' this wicked house. It's not the place at all for the son of such a godly woman." He linked his arm through Matt's and propped the staggering, half-insensible figure against his own; then, flinging some money on the table, he rammed his hat on his head. "Can ye sing?" he shouted, as he trailed Matt out into the drab, empty street. "We maun have a bit chorus on the way home. Just you and me to show folks what good friends we are. Sing, you dog!" he threatened, twisting the other's arms agonizingly. "Sing, or
I'll kill ye!"
"What will what will I sing?" came the panting, tormented voice of his son.
"Sing anything. Sing a hymn. Ay!" He gloated over the idea; "that's verra appropriate. Ye've just missed murdering yer faither ye maun sing a hymn o' praise and thanksgiving. Give us the Old Hundred, my big, braw man. Begin!" he ordered.
"All people that on earth do dwell," quavered Matt.
"Louder! Quicker!" shouted Brodie. "Give it pith! Put your heart into it. Pretend ye're just out o' the prayer meetin'." He marched the other off supporting him, dragging him, bolstering him up when he staggered on the uneven street, beating time to the tune and from time to time joining his voice in the refrain with a blasphemous satire.
Down the narrow Vennel they went towards their home, the words ringing sonorously through the stillness of the imprisoned air. Fainter grew their steps and more faintly came the sound until, finally, the last fading whisper was lost in the peaceful darkness of the night.
MRS BRODIE lay on the thin, straw mattress of her narrow bed, encompassed by the darkness of her room and the silence of the house.
Ncssie and Grandma were sleeping, but since Agnes had left her, she had remained strainingly awake for the sounds of Matt's return. Her mind, since the shock she had received earlier in the evening, was blank and dully incapable of thought, but, whilst she waited, she suffered physically. Her acute pain had returned to her! Restlessly she twisted from side to side, trying one position and then another in an effort to alleviate the boring volleys of pain which enfiladed the
entire length of her body. Her feet were cold and her hot hands moved constantly on the fretted surface of the patchwork quilt that covered the bed. Automatically, in the darkness, her fingers moved over each pattern as though she unconsciously retraced the labour of her needle. Dimly she longed for a hot bottle to draw the blood from her congested head into the icy numbness of her legs and feet, but she was too languid to stir and she feared, too, in a vague way, to move from the safe harbour of her room, dreading that some new misfortune might beset her, that she might perhaps encounter some fresh and terrifying experience on the stairs.
Slowly the seconds ticked into minutes, sluggishly the minutes dragged into hours and, through the peace of the night, she heard actually the faint distant note of the town clock as it struck twelve whispering notes. In effect, another day had begun when she must soon face again the melancholy round of the daylight hours and all that the new dawn would bring to her. But her introspection did not follow this course. As the significance of the hour broke upon her, she murmured only, "He's late; They're both awfu' late!" With the characteristic pessimism of a defeated spirit, she now sounded the abyss of melancholy possibility to its deepest extent, and wondered miserably if Matt had encountered his father in the town. Intangible contingencies following upon the chance of this meeting made her tremble, even as she lay passive upon the bed.
At length, when her anxiety had reached an intolerable pitch, she heard steps outside in the road. Desperately she wished to rush to the window to try to penetrate the gloom outside, but she could not make the effort and was compelled to lie still, waiting with anxious ears for the click of the front door latch. Soon, indeed, she heard this sound but with the opening of the door her perturbation increased, for, immediately, she distinguished the loud bawling voice of her husband, derisive, compelling, dominant, and in reply the cowed, submissive tones of her son. She heard the ponderous movement of a heavy body noisily ascending the stairs and the slurred footsteps
of a lighter, less vital and more exhausted frame following behind. On the landing outside her room her husband said, in a loud, hectoring voice:
"Go to your kennel now, you dog! I'll be ready for you again in the morning." There was no answer but the quick scuffle of feet and the loud bang of a door. Comparative quiet again descended upon the house, penetrated only by an occasional sound from Brodie's bedroom, the creaking of a board, the scrape of a chair, the clatter of his boots as he discarded them upon the floor, the creak of the springs as he flung his huge bulk upon the bed. With this final sound, unbroken silence again completely enveloped the house.
The helplessness of her position seemed to intensify her perception and give her intuition an added force. She realised that the possibility she had dreaded had actually taken place and, in addition, that some crushing misadventure had befallen her son. She had at once sensed this latter fact from the shambling irregularity of his step and the hopeless impotence of his voice, but now her imagination ran riot and she began to fill the torpid hush of the night with distressing sounds. She thought she heard some one weeping. Was it, she asked herself, a faint movement of air around the house or, in truth, the subdued sobbing of her son? If it were he, what rash act might not such misery induce? She pictured him, the errant but still beloved child, contemplating some desperate means of self-destruction. Immediately the sobbing turned to soft sad music which swelled with the funeral insistence of a dirge. She tried, with all her power, to compose herself to sleep but could not. In the suspended state of
her mind, swinging between reality and dreams, the lament broke over her like grey waves upon a forgotten shore, mingling with the lost, desolate cries of sea birds. She saw, amidst pouring rain and the raw, wet clods of fresh-turned clay, a rough, plank bier upon which lay a yellow coffin, saw this lowered, and the heavy clotted lumps of earth begin to fall upon it. With a low cry she twisted upon her back. Her half-conscious visions suddenly became dissipated by a fierce
onset of bodily suffering. The excruciating pang, that had stricken her occasionally before, now flung itself upon her with a fierce and prolonged activity. It was unbearable. Hitherto this particular spasm had been, though of deadly intensity, only of short duration, but now her agony was continual. It was, to her, worse by far than the pangs of childbirth, and it flashed upon her that she suffered so fearfully because she had betrayed her daughter and allowed her to be cast headlong in her labour into the storm. She felt her enfeebled heart tremble with the stunning violence of the pain. "O God!" she whispered, "take it from me. I canna thole it longer." Yet it did not leave her but increased in strength until it was impossible for her to endure it; wildly she struggled up, clutching her long nightgown about her. She swayed as she walked, but her anguish forced her on; she tottered in her bare feet into her son's room and almost fell across his bed.
"Matt," she panted, "my pain is on me. It willna leave me run run for the doctor. Run quick, son!"
He had been hardly asleep and now he sat up, startled to be confronted by this new, terrifying apparition; she frightened him horribly, for he could discern only a long white shape that lay supinely across his bed.
"What is it?" he cried, "What do you want with me?" Then, as he perceived dimly that she was ill, he exclaimed; "What's wrong with you, Mamma?"
She could hardly breathe. "I'm dyin'. For the Lord's sake, Matt a doctor! I canna live wi' this pain. It'll finish me if ye dinna hurry."
He leapt out of bed, his head swimming with the residue of his own recent experience, and, as a passion of remorse gripped his already prostrate spirit, he became again a frightened, remorseful boy.
"Is it my fault, Mamma?" he whined. "Is it because I took your money? I'll not do it again. I'll get the watch for you too. I'll be a good boy!"
She scarcely heard him, was far beyond understanding his words.
"Run quick!" she moaned. "I canna thole this longer."
"I'll go! I'll go!" he ejaculated, in a passion of abasement. Frantically he struggled into his trousers, flung on his jacket and pulled on his shoes, then ran downstairs and out of the house. With long, lurching steps he raced down the middle of the road whilst the wind of his passage lifted the matted hair from off his bruised and swollen forehead. "O God!" he whispered as he ran. "Am I going to kill my mother next? It's all my fault. It's me that's to blame. I haven't done right with her." In the dejection following his debauch he felt himself responsible, in every way, for his mother's sudden illness and a gross, lachrymal contortion shook him as he shouted out to the Deity wild, incoherent promises of reformation and amendment if only Mamma might be spared to him. As he careered along, with head thrown back, bent elbows pressed against his sides, his shirt widely open over his panting chest, his loose garments fluttering about him, he ran like a criminal escaping from justice, with no apparent motive but that of flight. Though his broad purpose was to reach the town, he had at first, in the misery and conflict of his thoughts, no definite objective, but now, when his breath came in short, flagging puffs and he felt a "stitch" in his side, making him fear that he could run no farther, he bethought himself more urgently of finding a doctor. In the distress of his exhausted condition he perceived that he could not continue the whole way to Knoxhill for Doctor Lawrie.
It was too far! Suddenly he remembered that Mamma, in one of her voluminous letters, had mentioned a Doctor Renwick of Wellhall Road in a sense which he imagined to be favourable. With this in mind, he swerved to the left at the railway bridge and, after spurring on his jaded body to a further effort, he saw, to his relief, a red light outside one of the shadowy houses in the road.
Panting, he drew up at the door, searched in a flurry for the night bell, found it, and tugged at the handle with all his pent-up fear. So violent had been his pull that, as he stood there, he heard a long-continued pealing inside the silent house; then, after a few moments, a window above him was thrown up and the head and shoulders of a man protruded.
"What is it?" called out an incisive voice from overhead.
"You're wanted at once, Doctor!" cried Matthew, his anxious
upturned face gleaming palely towards the other. "My mother's ill. She's been taken very bad."
"What's the nature of her trouble?" returned Renwick.
"I couldn't tell you, Doctor," exclaimed Matthew brokenly. "I knew nothing about it till she just collapsed. Oh! But she's in awful pain. Come quickly."
"Where is it, then?" said Renwick resignedly. He did not view the matter from the same unique and profoundly disturbing aspect as Matthew; it was, to him merely a night call which might or might not be serious, the repetition of a frequent and vexatious experience the loss of a good night's rest.
"Brodie's the name, Doctor. You surely know the house at the end of Darroch Road."
"Brodie!" exclaimed the doctor; then, after a short pause, he said in an altered, interrogative tone, "Why do you come to me? Your mother is not a patient of mine."
"Oh! I don't know anything about that," cried Matthew feverishly. "She must have a doctor. Ye must come she's suffering so much. I beg of ye to come. It's a matter of life or death."
It was a different Renwick from two years ago, one to whom success had given the power of differentiating, of refusing work he did not wish, but he could not resist this appeal.
"I'll come then," he said shortly. "Go on ahead of me. I'll be after you in a few moments."
Matthew sighed with relief, poured forth a babble of effusive gratitude towards the now closed window, then turning, hurriedly made his way home. Yet, when he arrived at the house, he was afraid to go in alone and stood shivering outside, in his insufficient garments, feeling that he must wait for the doctor's support before he could enter. Although he buttoned his jacket to the neck and held it close about him, the chilly night air pierced him like a knife, yet the fear that he might make some terrible discovery, that he might perhaps find Mamma lying lifeless upon his bed, kept him standing indecisively at the gate, trembling with cold an
d fear. He had not long to wait, however, for soon the yellow blurs of two gig lamps came into sight around the bend of the road. Finally they drew into the side of the road and stopped with their full glare upon him and, from the darkness behind, Renwick's voice came crisply:
"Why haven't you gone in? It's folly to stand like that after running. You'll catch your death of cold hanging about there, with every pore of you open." He jumped out of his gig and, from the contrasting obscurity beyond, advanced towards the other in the circle of light. "Man alive!" he said suddenly; "what's happened to your head? Have you had a blow?"
"No!" stammered Matthew awkwardly. "I I fell down."
"It's an ugly bruise," returned Renwick slowly, looking at the other questioningly; yet he said no more but swung his bag forward in his hand and with it motioned the other towards the house.
They went in. Stillness and blackness immediately surrounded them.
"Get a light, man, for heaven's sake," said Renwick irritably. The longer he was with Matthew, the more his quick judgment estimated and condemned the other's weakness and indecision. "Couldn't you have seen to all this before I arrived? You'll need to pull yourself together if you want to help your mother."
"It's all right," whispered Matthew, "I have a box in my pocket." With a shaking hand he struck a match and lit the small gas jet in the hall, and in this dim wavering gleam together they moved forward, following their own flickering shadows as they mounted the stairs. The door of Mrs. Brodie's room stood half open and from within came the sound of quick breathing, at which Matthew broke down and sobbed, "Thank God, she's alive!"
By a miracle of heroic endeavour she had made her way back to her own room and now lay helpless, like a wounded animal that, by a last supreme effort, has reached its lair. The doctor took the matches from Matthew's useless fingers and, having lit the gas in the bedroom, guided him quietly out of the room, then closing the door, he turned and seated himself beside the figure upon the bed His dark, sombre eyes fixed themselves upon the outlines of her ravaged figure and, as he gently felt the quick, compressible pulse and noted the sunken hollows where emaciation had already touched her, his face shadowed slightly at the suspicion already forming in his mind. Then he laid his palm upon her body softly, with a sensitive touch which registered immediately the abnormal resistance of her rigid muscles, and simultaneously the concern of his face deepened. At this moment she opened her eyes and fastened them appealingly upon his, then whispered slowly:
Hatter's Castle Page 41