The Able McLaughlins by Margaret Wilson (small books to read .TXT) 📕

which obviously hid no dying man. They refreshed themselves more and more frequently in waters wherein no drowned man was floating. Most of them went home in time for their neglected chores that night, discouraged, hopeless.

Isobel McLaughlin was still at the Keiths’, detained by Libby’s need of her. Libby, though she used men easily for her purpose, was not a woman to depend on them. Her mild old husband could give her no sufficient support in her affliction. He had never been a mother. He was just a man whom life and marriage had left blinking, swallowing as best he might his realization of his own unimportance in the universe. Libby would have Isobel with her. So Chirstie in her mother-in-law’s house put the younger McLaughlins and Bonnie Wee Johnnie to bed, and came out to sit on the doorstep with her weary and outraged husband. Presently she asked him wistfully;

“Do you really think he’s dead, Wully?”

“It’s getting to look like it.”

She gave a great sigh. If only she could be sure he was dead!

“You don’t think he’s just gone away now?” she continued.

“Nobody thinks that now.”

“Why don’t they?”

“It don’t look reasonable to them.”

“It looks reasonable enough to me.”

He longed to reassure her.

“If he had gone back to town, he would have had to stop in some place to get something to eat. He didn’t stop anywhere.”

She slapped away a mosquito.

“But if he didn’t stop as he came, why should he stop going back?”

“He may have stopped at a dozen places coming, and found no one at home. He may have gone to his mother’s when she was at the picnic. That’s what she keeps wailing about⁠—because she wasn’t there when he came!”

In the silence of the starlight, she gave a great sigh.

“It’s all my fault!” she declared.

He was too tired to listen to that.

“Our fault, indeed!” he answered sharply. “We never told him to come sneaking back and get lost, did we! We didn’t tell him never to write to his mother.”

“I didn’t say it was your fault. I said mine! Really, all auntie’s trouble seems to come from me. Sometimes I just seem to make everybody miserable.” She had been wondering what she was to do if Peter’s death made Wully’s lie permanent.

“Havers, Chirstie!” he remonstrated, “her trouble comes through her own foolishness. She was never less than a fool about that⁠—that⁠—”

“She was always good to me, Wully, whatever you say. I mind how she stayed with me after mother’s death. If she’s been foolish about Peter, she’s paid well for it.”

“So’ve you!” said Wully. “He’s dead, I tell you!” And there was another thing to be said. Wully might be bewildered, uncomfortable, frustrated, cheated of any assurance of safety for Chirstie. But there was one triumph, and not a small one. “He’s dead. And we never speak ill of the dead, Chirstie!”

She understood his triumph. She would have been glad to have him dead, and not putting Wully into danger. She would be relieved, too, of that sense of terror, if she saw him dead. Then she thought of that great sinful lie, and of Isobel McLaughlin.

“I can’t tell what to wish!” she sighed miserably. “It can’t end well. I wish they’d find him dead. But if he’s dead, how can I ever.⁠ ⁠…” Her voice gave way to despair.

“Yes,” repeated Wully. “How can you ever.⁠ ⁠…” They sat silent.

“You never can!” he said securely, at length.

XVIII

The night after the second day’s search Libby Keith had gone to bed for a while, because she was unable longer to stand up. Again she had risen when the moon rose, and Isobel McLaughlin, hearing her in the kitchen, had risen to find her washing out a shallow tin milk pan. Libby had managed to make her purpose known. Her voice was altogether gone now, after so much calling to her Lammie, and she was starting out with the pan and the poker, so that when her Peter heard the noise she was making, he would know that help was near. With Isobel following her as best she might, she beat back and forth up and down the roads again till morning, when she fell exhausted near the McCreaths’ at dawn, so that they had to hitch up and take her home. And lying in the wagon, she muttered and moaned. Isobel understood that sometimes she was simply saying her son’s name. Sometimes she was trying to tell what a good lad he had always been. And sometimes she said, “Only forty yards from home”; sometimes, “A wee’an’s bones!” But some of the neighbors gathering had heard her pan’s din and praying, and the hunt was on again, before the sun was well up.

Later that morning Isobel McLaughlin sat telling Wully about that night, in the Keiths’ kitchen, whispering, looking carefully towards the door of the room where Libby was supposed to be resting. She was sitting by the breakfast table. On the red cloth three cold half-drunk cups of tea told how negligible a thing food was in that household. Suddenly she said passionately:

“Wully, you’ve got to bring him home alive today!” and with that, to her son’s consternation, she burst into great weeping.

Wully, fearing the sight of his aunt’s grief, hadn’t wanted to come that morning to the accursed house. But his father had asked him to, looking at him, Wully thought, with an unusual sharpness, so that hurriedly, to avoid suspicion, he had said he would come. He had dreaded the errand. But he had never foreseen this. He never remembered seeing his mother cry before, not even at the time of his brother’s death, though she must have wept then. And now⁠—well, it was no wonder she was undone, after forty-eight hours of such nightmare. But he was beside himself at the sight. He got up and strode around the room, at his wits’ end. Life was upside down. Chirstie at his mother’s broken and nervous from her shock; his aunt raving