“There’s one thing,” he said, pausing in front of her, but not looking at her, “that money, Mary: we must get it somehow. I cannot reconcile it with my conscience, I can’t endure the feeling of it: if it should ruin us, we must pay it back.”
“Nothing will ruin us, Claude,” she said, steadily, “so long as it is all honest and above board. Let it be paid back; I know well it has been on your mind this many a day.”
“It has been a thorn in my flesh; it has been poison in my blood!”
“Lord bless us,” cried Mrs. Buchanan, with a little fretfulness, “what for? and what is the use of exaggeration? It is not an impossibility that you should rave about it like that. Besides,” she added, “I said the same at first--though I was always in favour of paying, at whatever cost--yet I am not sure that I would disappoint an old friend in his grave, for the sake of satisfying a fantastic woman like yon.”
“I must get it clear, I must get it off my mind! Not for her sake, but for my own.”
“Aweel, aweel,” said Mrs. Buchanan, soothingly; and she added, “we must all set our shoulders to the wheel, and they must give us time.”
“But it is just time that cannot be given us,” cried her husband, almost hysterically. “The fifth of next month! and this is the twenty-fourth.”
“Morrison, Morrison!” cried the minister. “You seem to have no idea but Morrison! and it is just to him that I cannot speak.”
His wife gazed at him with surprise, and some impatience.
“Claude! you are just as foolish as that woman. Will ranting and raving, and ‘I will not do that,’ and ‘I will not do this,’ pay back the siller? It is not so easy to do always what you wish. In this world we must just do what we can.”
“In another world, at least, there will be neither begging nor borrowing,” he cried.
“There will maybe be some equivalent,” said Mrs. Buchanan, shaking her head. “I would not lippen to anything. It would have been paid long ago if you had but stuck to the point with Morrison, and we would be free.”
“Morrison, Morrison!” he cried again, “nothing but Morrison. I wish he and all his books, and his bonds, and his money, were at the bottom of the sea!”
“Claude, Claude! and you a minister!” cried Mrs. Buchanan, horrified. But she saw that the discussion had gone far enough, and that her husband could bear no more.