The Able McLaughlins

by Margaret Wilson

  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 any way!” 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 I If Jeannie had been alive, she would have gone to her, in humiliation, though it killed her I 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, or themselves anything common. They were far too British for that. Until lately it had never occurred to them that anyone else might manage some way to be equal to a Scot. Until the war, when some young McLaughlin had shown signs of intolerable depravity, his father had entirely extinguished the last glimmer of it by saying, as he took his pipe out of his economical mouth, “Dinna ye act like a Yankee!” So withering was that reproach that no iniquity ever survived it. Now that that Yankee of the Yankees, Harvey Stowe, had been a very brother to Wully through campaigns and prisons, that denunciation was to be heard no more. But surely, Isobel McLaughlin moaned, her husband and herself had not let the children think that they were anything common. Had she not hated all that democracy that justified meanness of life, and pointed out faithfully to her children its fallacy? She remembered the first time she had taken them all to a Fourth of July celebration in the Yankee settlement, where a bare-footed, tobacco-spitting, red-haired orator of the day, after an hour of boastings and of braggings, had shouted out his climax, saying that in this free land we are all kings and queens. “A fine old king, yon!” she had chuckled again and again, explaining his folly to her flock. A man like that had no idea what a king was! He most likely had never even seen a gentleman!

  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 I She was only an old, tired, disappointed woman.

  If her first-born, 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.

  CHAPTER 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 sympathetic as possible, blaming Alex McNair for this fruit of his unfatherly desertion. Mrs. McLaughlin had come at once to see Chirstie after Wully’s revelation, apparently utterly pleased over the prospect of a grandchild, never intimating by a syllable that she saw anything deplorable in the unchristian haste of his advent. Her kindness had naturally humbled the girl more than any reproof could have done, and after a long cry the two had been friends, both relieved that estrangement was a thing of the past.

  One afternoon late in November Mrs. McLaughlin came as far as Chirstie’s with her husband, who was going on to the Keiths’ on an errand. It seemed to Chirstie then, and often afterwards, that one who had not seen loving-kindness incarnate in her mother-in-law, had never seen it at all. Her own mother had been a sad, repressed woman, well-loved, indeed, by her children, but as far different as possible from this great, cordial, brimming woman, who seemed so capable of anything that might ever be required of her. One couldn’t imagine her hesitating, complaining, broken in spirit.

  Chirstie sat beside her sewing, an awe-filled pupil in the things of maternity. It was comforting, when one was feeling daily more wretched, to be assured by the mother of thirteen huskies that a baby is just nothing whatever but a joy, no trouble worth speaking of. Did Chirstie remember that her brother Jimmie had been just Wully’s age? Many was the time Jeannie McNair and Isobel McLaughlin had sat together waiting for those two, and sewing, and Jeannie had said so and so, and Isobel had answered thus and thus. Once she had said to Chirstie’s grandmother that she wouldn’t like to have just a common bairn, and the old woman had replied that there was not the least chance of it, for no woman yet had mothered just a common child. In Scotland, too, when a baby was born, one had to lose the flavor of joy wondering where its food was to come from. But in this land crying aloud to the heavens for inhabitants, there was no anxiety of that sort to dull one’s happiness. What had it been to them but an omen of the new home’s abundance, that the John McLaughlins had had twins born the year of their arrival, that the Squires had had twins within six months, and that before the year was gone, the Weirs, from the same Ayrshire village, were also blessed in the same way. To be sure, Squire McLaughlin had uttered a word which might not have been taken to signify altogether pure satisfaction with these godsends, the morning after the double increase in his family. He had gone to his barn, and finding that his dearly-bought cow, which was to have furnished him milkers, had given birth to twins, he had sighed a sigh which became a tradition, and murmured, “Bull calves, and lassie wee’uns!” The men had laughed at that, but the women considered it a rather cheap thing of the old wag, even as a joke.

  And so they talked on, until the clouds covered the sun again, and they heard the wind rising noisily as they drew near the fire to consider their knitting in the light of it. The elder Mrs. McLaughlin, who was, as usual, doing most of the talking, looked enviously around the kitchen from time to time. She knew she was considered a capable woman. And she had a fine family—yes, certainly, a fine family—in spite of this—affair of Wully’s. But she could never keep house as Jeannie did, or even Chirstie. She could, of course, polish her kitchen to some such a degree of luster for special occasions, but to maintain such a brightness was out of the question for her. There had been no white sheets on the wall here for some time now. But each little pane in the window glowed from its daily polishing. The bits of rag carpet seemed always scarcely yet to have lost the marks of their folding, so recently had they been spread down after washing. Even the fireplace was more kept than any other fireplace. The back of it had always just been scraped and scrubbed and whitewashed. Isobel wondered if her son realized the degree of this beautiful neatness.

  After a while they heard a wagon drive in, and Mrs. McLaughlin, thinking it was her husband, rose and began leisurely wrapping her knitting. There was no hurry about going. Her man had best come in and warm himself. She stood buttoning her old gray faded coat about her. It had been made, mantle-fashion, in Scotland, before she had grown so large, and she had increased its capacity by the simple device of putting broad black strips of cloth down either side of the front, where it fastened. Afterwards it had needed new sleeves, and hadn’t apparently sulked about having new ones of a brownish gray homespun woolen. It had nothing to sulk about, in fact. It was still given plenty–of honor as a good serviceable garment. Mistress McLaughlin was wrapping round and round her throat a knitted scarf, pulling it carefully up around her ears, when the door opened. . . .

  And in walked—not John McLaughlin, but that tall, gaunt, thin-faced Alex McNair! With those little round, black, piercing eyes shining out from under straight black brows! . . .

  And after him, a woman!

  A woman in Olive green silk, with black fringe around a puffy overskirt, and such fur and gloves as Isobel McLaughlin had seen only in her travels, and Chirstie never remembered seeing in all her life! The two of them! Coming right into the room!

  McNair, seeing Isobel standing there, cried, blinking,

  “Weel, weel! You here, Isobel! Weel, weel! This is Barbara, Isobel!”

  Chirstie had shrunk in fear and confusion, back into her seat. But the elder woman showed no signs of confusion. She looked the grand wee body over majestically and replied:

  “Is’t, indeed! I hope she fares better than Jeannie, Alex, dying here alone.”

  Alex had bent down to kiss his daughter, and seemed to be not so much impressed by this greeting as the little woman was. She continued:

  “I have just been sitting a while with my son’s wife. You may not remember Chirstie was married, you having so grand a time in Scotland!”

  “Warm yourself!” he said to his wife, indicating a chair. “I’ll be bringing in the kist.” He went out of the door, which had not yet been shut, so suddenly and quickly had it all happened. Mrs. McLaughlin’s manner changed at once, and she began helping the amazing stranger out of her wraps. How could those two who watched, so impressed by the richness of them, and so unbetraying of their impressions, how could they have imagined, seeing her, the deceitfulness of those little innocent hesitating airs! The garments were scarcely laid gingerly on the bed until Alex returned, carrying, with Bob McNorkel’s help, a great box, which they seemed to plan to leave in the middle of the floor. Chirstie remonstrated and gave them directions. It seemed from Alex’s grunting and hard-breathing words as the box was put in the only possible place for it, that he and his bride had ridden out with Bob, who had to be hurrying on. Alex went out of the door with him, and after Alex, Isobel the avenger.

  “I’ll just have a word with you!” she said to him, stepping inside the barn to be out of the wind. It was a powerful word. Had she not planned it many a night as she lay sleepless thinking of Jeannie and her daughter! “I mind the day you brought Jeannie home a bride,” she began. “ ’Twas no day like this.” None o
f them would ever forget the day she died deserted. Never had Isobel McLaughlin had an occasion worthier of her tongue, and never a stronger motive for making the best of the occasion. McNair was a slow-moving, slow-thinking man, not without tenderness. Isobel’s recital of grim detail after grim detail as he stood there amazed, remorseful, humiliated, angry, tired of his journey, and chilled to the bone, overwhelmed him. He could scarcely follow her. It seemed that the whole clan was bitter against him, not only because of his wife’s death, but because, some way, his absence had brought disgrace beyond disgrace upon the McLaughlins. He could scarcely understand. Wully and Chirstie had waited and waited for him to come home, and he would not, and fine results these were of his delay! They were married now, but not soon enough. . . . The girl feared to marry without his permission. . . . If he had only come when they wrote for him to. . . . He wasn’t to blame the Keiths or any of the neighbors for this. They had done what they could. He was to be very careful what he said to Wully, none too pleased with him, and always hot-headed . . . and to Chirstie. . . . It was all his own fault, he was to remember. . . .

  The man was staggered. He liked this news all the less because all the day the little new wife’s spirits had been sinking as they traveled over the prairies away from the world. Now to bring her into a disgrace of this sort! He was shivering. He wanted to get in to the fire.

  “I have nothing against Wully!” he murmured to the woman who bearded him. “He’s a fine man for the lassie!”

  Nevertheless, when they were inside again, Isobel watching saw his face darken with anger as he realized Chirstie’s condition. She saw too that the girl had seen it, and she determined not to leave the house till Wully would come. She busied herself to make tea for the strange woman, sparing her daughter-in-law with the consideration which so beautiful and so fruitful a woman deserved. She sat herself to make the wee body feel at home. Dod came in from school, and she noticed without relenting the warmth of his father’s greeting. Even the little lassie was persuaded to go to his lap. Alex was probably wishing Isobel would go home and leave his family in peace. But she would wait.