“Oh, mother! how can you tell--how can you tell?” he cried, “when I that know tell you that I could not refuse him anything. I am just his slave at his chariot-wheels.”
“But I am not his slave,” said Mrs Ogilvy, with a glitter of spirit in her eyes. “I can face him, though you may not think it. He shall never come here!”
He flung himself down into a chair, and put the newspaper between her and himself, making a semblance of reading. But this he could not keep up: the stillness, and the peace, and the innocence about him affected the man, who, whatever he was now, had been born Robbie Ogilvy of the Hewan. He made a stifled sound in his throat once or twice as if about to speak, but brought forth no certain sound for some five minutes, when he suddenly burst forth in a high but broken voice, “What would you say if I were to tell you----?” and suddenly stopped again.
“What, Robbie?” she said, quivering like a leaf.
“Nothing,” he replied, looking up with sudden defiance in her face.
And there was a silence again in the room--the silence of the sweet morning: not a sound to break the calm: the birds in the trees, the scent of the roses coming in at the window--there was no such early place for roses in all Mid-Lothian--and the house basking in the sun, and the sun shining on the house, as if there was no roof-tree so beloved in all the basking and breathing earth. Then the voice of the little old lady uplifted itself in the midst of all that peace of nature--small, like her delicate frame; low--a little sound that could have been put out so easily,--almost, you would have said, that a sudden breath of wind would have put it out.
“Robbie, my son,” she said, “there is nothing you could tell me, or that any man could tell me, that would put bar or bolt between you and me. What is yours is mine, if there is any trouble to bear; and thankful will I be to take my share. There is no question nor answer between you and me. If you’ve been wild in the world, my own laddie, I’ve been here on my knees for you before the Lord. Whatever there is to tell, tell it to Him, and He will not turn His back upon you. Then, do you think your mother will? But that’s not the question--not the question. My house is my own house, and I will defend it and my son, and all that is in it--ay, if it were to the death!”