The Able McLaughlins Margaret Wilson (best ebook reader under 100 TXT) 📖

almost mechanically, the ends of the lines to play with. They pleased him, for a while. Then he turned again to his mother, unable to fathom her sternness. Never before had her hands touched him so coldly. Looking right ahead of her, she would pull that little shawl tightly around him again, after he had succeeded in working his bare arms out of it, tucking him in without a kiss or any coaxing. His eyes studied her face, and found there no thought for him. He stood up in her lap. He put his arms around her neck, and stroked the forbidden feather. She failed even to reprove him. He seized the chance⁠—he put the curling thing into his mouth, and chewed the end of it experimentally. He spit it out in disgust. He sat down again in her lap, and began playing with the frogs on her new coat. He fingered the interesting fringe. He squirmed about more vigorously than ever. He called to her. He put his hands up to her face. She bent down and kissed him, but not as she usually gathered him against herself with warmth. The caress was hard and preoccupied, and he whispered a little. He tried pat-a-caking, to get her to smile upon him. That, too, failed. Wully handed him the whip, and he shook it so fiercely that they had both hastily to rescue their faces from the blows he might have inflicted. Still his mother looked straight ahead.

They came then to a low place. The horses could go only very slowly. The baby adjusted himself to the new motion of the wagon. There was a splashing of mud that made him giggle delightedly. It would have been a choice morning for any baby whose mother wasn’t sitting frozen. Wee Johnnie made the best of it. He kicked, and giggled, and squirmed about.

The horses failed of their own accord to take their proper pace again. Wully had to speak to them. He slapped them lightly with the lines.

“Get up, Nellie!” he exclaimed. “What’s the matter of you?”

Wee Johnnie moved his arms exactly as Wully had done.

“Get up, Nellie!” he said. “What’s the matter of you?”

He said all that, plainly, if not perfectly, and before he knew what was happening, his mother had seized him, and was hugging him up against her, in the good old way, kissing him.

“Get up, Nellie!” he cooed. “What’s the matter of you!”

She had been so surprised, so delighted with her son’s first sentence that she had turned, even kissing him, to Wully, no joy complete unless he shared it.

“Did you hear that!” she cried triumphantly, her face blossoming towards him. “Say it again, Lammie!”

And almost before Wully could smile in return, he stopped. He turned around. He thought he heard a groan from his load. He couldn’t even smile at her with that man possibly spying upon them. He looked⁠—and from the end of the wagon that man had lifted his head a little, like a snake, and had seen the smile that Chirstie had turned upon her husband. And Wully⁠—when he saw that face⁠—it was the last thing in the world that he intended doing⁠—but some way, in spite of himself, he achieved generosity⁠—the spoil, it may have been, of ancestral struggle. At the terrible sight of that face, he pitied his enemy. That coward, in his damned way, had loved Chirstie. And in his tormented sunken dying he had seen all the sweet intimacy from which he had been shut out and had sunk back, felled by the blow of that revelation. Wully had foregone revenge. He had forborne running a sword less sharp through his fallen enemy than Chirstie’s wifely smile had been. In a flash Wully saw himself sitting there by the woman, loved, living, not dying, full of strength and generations, while that man, loathed and rejected, was already burning in hell.

The poor devil!

He pulled the horses up suddenly, and gave his wife the lines. He climbed back to lift his cousin into a position less painful. Through holes in the old blanket, straws from beneath were scratching the ghastly face. There was a farmhouse not so far down the road.

“I’ll stop there and buy him a pillow,” Wully resolved.

Colophon

The Able McLaughlins
was published in 1923 by
Margaret Wilson.

This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
John Rambow,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2019 by
Tim Lindell, David E. Brown, and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans available at the
Internet Archive.

The cover page is adapted from
After a Summer Shower,
a painting completed in 1894 by
George Inness.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by
The League of Moveable Type.

The first edition of this ebook was released on
January 13, 2022, 6:41 p.m.
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