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

the McNairs. The women and the girls were clearing away the dinner things in the big kitchen, and the men had withdrawn to the Sabbath parlor, where the best rag carpet was, and the basket quilt spread on the bed. In the stiff propriety of that room they had been talking with less cordiality than usual. McNair had only scorn for Wully’s folly in leaving his farm, and Wully had no great patience with his father-in-law’s disapproval. He had been saying that he would get a renter, and McNair had commented scoffingly that that was a likely thing. Who would rent land that could be had almost for the asking? The place would go back to weeds, he averred. Wully protested that he never would allow that. Somebody would come along glad to get a bit of broken ground for a crop. If not, he would drive back and forth from town every day, and care for it himself. That would be great farming, McNair had remarked, significantly. Farming was just now beginning to amount to something. Look at the years they had spent miles from markets. Consider the money they had lost before the war when they had got for their produce greenbacks which depreciated in value before they could get them spent. And now when the iron horse was here to serve them, when their millennium was at hand, Wully was going to quit farming! (They never called the railroad anything but the iron horse at that time and place.) Hadn’t they prayed for its coming? Hadn’t they waited and paid in their hard-earned dollars for its advent? John McLaughlin himself had contributed three hundred dollars when the subscription paper went round for funds to help out the prospective builders of the road, and McNair himself had been moved to give a hundred and fifty. Well, that money had been wasted. That company had failed. But now⁠—Ah, now, the day was at hand. They had the land. The nation needed food. The railroad solved their last problem. How rich they were to be! They sat exulting in hope of years that were to be born starved and dying. And now the young men talked of selling lumber!

The Keiths came driving in, and the men joined the women in the kitchen to welcome them. Even the children playing at the door followed them in. Libby Keith took off her hat and wrap and gave them to a niece. She was more gray, more flabby than ever now, and her eyes were dull and brooding. But just as she went to sit down, Bonnie Wee Johnnie came in, and she saw him, and instantly her face grew soft and warm with tenderness, and her eyes grew bright. She ran and knelt down on the floor, and folded her arms about him.

“Oh, the bonnie wee laddie!” she murmured, kissing him. “Oh, the gay lit’lin’!” And then, kneeling as she was, she turned her face up towards her old husband and exclaimed,

“Look, John! Is he not like him?”

The unimportant John, peering intently out of his kindly old face, smiled down on them, sighing.

“As like as two peas!” he said gently.

Then Libby, fumbling with one hand while her other held the little boy, pulled from a pocket in her voluminous cotton skirt a picture in a little case. No other woman of her class had dreamed in Scotland of aping the gentry to such an extent as having a picture of her children made. But Libby Keith had, of course, gone without food to save the necessary money. She could starve more easily than lose the remembrance of those tender child faces of hers. She opened the case, and looked at it intently for only a moment. Then she handed it to Isobel McLaughlin.

“Look at this, Isobel! You said he was more like Wully!”

Isobel took the picture, and looked at it. Tears came unexpectedly into her eyes. There before her was Libby’s Davie, a little, innocent, broad-faced laddie, with his arm protestingly around his sister Flora, who, with her head shyly on one side, looked out at the world with wondering round eyes. And seated before them, on a stool with fringe, one leg crossed under him, sat little Peter, with a plaid cap lying proudly in his lap. Isobel blinked away her tears. “Ah, Davie was like that!” she murmured. And then she turned and looked at her grandson still in Libby’s arms. He had on his best Sunday dress that his stepgrandmother had made for him, of scarlet wool nun’s veiling, a little frock that Chirstie keeps to this day folded immaculately away. It was low in the neck, and had no sleeves to hide the soft dimpled arms. Around the neck and the flaring skirt were three rows of very narrow black velvet ribbon. Chirstie had curled his hair that morning around her finger. The curls at the back of his head were still in shape, and the long one that came down the top of his head to his forehead, disarranged as it was, still showed what a soft, sweet thing it must have been before his romp with the children. And there in the frame Isobel looked at what might have been the picture of the child before her, the very forehead, the same childish nose. Only little Johnnie had a winsome way of screwing his mouth into smiles which he must have got from his secret grandfather Keith who, quite unadmired, stood watching him indulgently.

Isobel McLaughlin said gently;

“You’re right, Libby. He’s like it. Peter is a McLaughlin if ever there was one.” And having taken away any cause for apprehension that Chirstie might have had, and having given her husband’s family a little knock from which under the circumstances, the two McLaughlin men were not able to defend themselves, she handed the picture calmly to Chirstie, saying again;

“It might have been our baby’s picture.” She never again had any doubt about the paternity of the child. And