"Now," he sneered, "we'll make a fine comfortable night o' it, just you and me. Fill up your glass! Fill it up, I say!"
"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.