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."