Having arrived at the scene of his humiliation5 the next morning, he saw his father coming from the cornfield with his hands and pockets full of chosen ears of seed corn. Wully met him in the path just behind the barn, and they greeted each other without a sign of affection. What did Wully think of these ears? Wully felt them critically, one after another, with his thumb, and found them good. His father started on towards the barn.
“I want to tell you something, father.”
He stopped without a word, and stood listening.
“We’re going to have a baby.”
“’Tis likely.”
“I mean—in December.”
“December? In December!”
“Yes. That’s what I mean.”
John McLaughlin’s long keen face, which changed expression only under great provocation6, now surrendered to surprise. He stood still, looking at his son penetratingly a long time. Wully[79] kicked an imaginary clod back and forth7 in the path. Presently the father said, with more bitterness than Wully had ever heard in his voice,
“It seems we have brought the old country to the new!”
Wully pondered this unexpected deliverance without looking up.
After a little the older man added, sighing,
“I prayed my sons might be men who could wait.”
“A lot he knows about waiting!” thought Wully, half angrily. “Thirteen of us!”
“I will not!”
“I wish you would. I can’t—very well!”
“You’d best!”
Wully stood watching him tie the yellow ears into clusters on the sheltered side of the barn. He was trying with all his might to gather courage to face his mother. He hadn’t felt such a nervous hesitancy since the first time he went into action. He remembered only too well the last time he had really stirred her displeasure. Allen and he had quarreled, and had nursed their anger, in spite of her remonstrances9, for two days. He had growled10 out something to his brother across the supper table, and after that, she had put the little children to bed, and had set her two sons down before the fireplace—it was in the first house they were living then. She had drawn11 her chair near them, and had[80] proceeded quietly and grimly to flay12 them with her tongue. She had continued with deliberateness till they were glad to escape half crying to bed. He remembered still how she had begun. It might be natural, she said, for brothers to quarrel. But she believed that it would never again be natural for her sons to quarrel in her presence. And she had been perfectly13 right about that. What she would say now, upon an occasion like this with her dismaying self-control, he couldn’t even imagine. It would be nothing common, he felt sure.
On the bed which she had just finished spreading with a “drunkard’s path” quilt, they sat down together in a low room of the second story, where three beds full of boys were accustomed to sleep. She kissed him fondly when he came to her, saying it was a lonely house with him away so much. She wondered why they had not been at church. Was Chirstie not well again?
“I’m listening,” she said encouragingly, her eyes studying him tenderly. How beautiful a head he had! How beautiful a man he was!
“We’re going to have a baby! In December, mother!”
Over her face there spread swiftly a smile of soft amusement. She had always looked that way when one of her children said something especially innocent and lovable.
He couldn’t look at her.
“I know what I mean!” he said, doggedly15. “I mean December. I understand.” The silence became so ominous16 that at length he had to steal a look at her. Her incredulous face was flushed red with shame and anger. He rose to defend his love from her.
“You aren’t to say a word against her. It wasn’t her fault!”
Then the storm broke.
“Do you think I’m likely to say a word against the poor, greetin’ bairn!” she cried. “Her sitting there alone among the wolves and snakes, and a son of mine to bring her to shame! I’ll never lift my head again!” Her rush of emotion quite choked her.
“My fine, brave soldier of a son!” she burst out, recovering herself. “You did well, now, to choose a lassie alone, with neither father nor mother to defend her from you!”
“Mother!” he cried.
“Jeannie’s wee Chirstie!” she went on. “No one else could please you, I suppose! Oh, she did well to die when her son was but a laddie!”
Wretchedly ashamed of his deceit as he was, he was not able to take more of her reproof17 without trying to defend himself.
“And why did you not think!” she demanded,[82] furiously. “Have you no mind of your own! You didn’t know what you were doing, I suppose! Oh, that I should have a son who is a fool!”
How terrible mothers are! Fool was a word she hated so greatly that she never allowed her children to pronounce it. It was her ultimate condemnation19. He had never heard her use it before. And now she used it for him!
“This is why you have been ailing20 all summer! You’d reason to be! Did you think you could do evil and prosper21?”
He wasn’t going to stand any more of that tone. He got up.
“I’ll be going,” he exclaimed. “There’s no place for me here!” No sooner had he used those words than he regretted them. They might seem to appeal to her pity. That was what he had said once when he was a little lad, upon seeing a new baby in her arms, and afterwards, whenever she had shown him a new child, she had reminded him of it gayly.
“Don’t go!” she answered, unrelenting. “There is always a place for you, whatever you elect to do. This is a sore stroke, Wully!” Then she added, wearily and passionately22,
“When I was a girl, I wanted to be some great person. And when you all were born, I wanted only to have you great men. And when you grew up, I prayed you might be at least honest. And I’m not to have even that, it seems.”
He had heard her say that before. He was so[83] sorry for her pain that he hardly knew what to do. If only there had been any other way out! Maybe Chirstie had been right in demanding he tell at least his mother the truth. But he would not! He would share his wife’s blame.
“I’m sorry about it, mother,” he pleaded. “I’m sick about it. I’ve done what I could to make it right!”
“To make it right! Do you think you can ever make wrong right! You have spoiled your own marriage. You’ll never be happy in it!”
“Don’t worry about that!”
“And you the oldest!” she added, suddenly. “I suppose the other six will be doing the same, now!”
“If a brother of mine did a thing like that, I’d kill him!” cried Wully fiercely.
“Wully,” she said severely25, “don’t you speak words like them here! ’Tis something you learned in the army! A fine one you’d be to say who should live and who should die! We dinna say the like here!”
“I can’t please you any way!” he cried, stung by her upbraidings.
“Strange ways you have of trying!” she retorted. He said nothing. She cried again, presently,
“If only it had been some other girl, Wully! Not Jeannie’s!”
What could he answer?
[84]“Mother, you come and see her! She needs someone!”
“Thanks to you! To my son! I won’t can speak to her, that shamed I’ll be of you!” She thought a bitter moment. “Alex McNair’ll be home before December. You’d best come here to me! Wully, if any other mouth in the world had told me this, I wouldn’t have believed it! You were always a good boy. Always! Before the war!”
“I’ve got to go!” he cried in answer. He rushed away, damning Peter Keith into the nethermost26 hell. The open air was some relief. If only women wouldn’t take these things so hard! Well, that was over. The worst part. Any taunt27 that he might ever have to defend himself from would be easy, after that.
After her unkissed son had gone, Isobel McLaughlin, reeling from the blow he had dealt her, sat with her hands covering her face. Nothing but Wully’s own recital28 could ever have made her believe such a story! It was even thus incredible. If only it had been any other girl but Jeannie’s! And her dead! Scarcely dead, either, till her son, betraying years of trust, had shamed her daughter! If Jeannie had been alive, she would have gone to her, in humiliation, though it killed her! Now there was not even that comfort! There was only Chirstie left, and her in such a state! It was not possible to believe her good, beautiful son had done such a base thing! If it had been any boy but Wully! Had he ever given her a moment of anxiety[85] before? Did not the whole clan29 like him, knowing him for a quiet, honorable, sweet-tempered boy, eminently30 trustworthy! And now a thing like this to fall upon her! She refused to remember that Allen’s irresponsibility, his extravagant31 pleasure in the society of women, of any size or kind of woman, had made her anxious many an hour. That son, from the time he was twelve, had fairly glowed when there was a woman about to admire him. But Wully had only chuckled32 over his brother’s kaleidoscopic33 love affairs, things so foreign to his nature. His mother, remembering Allen’s escapades, exempted34 the dead loyally from blame. If Wully had been like that, she might have understood this tale. But he was not like that. He had never been at all like that. It must be the army that had wrought35 such evil changes in him. That was what had undone36 her years of teaching. That was what had made all this frontier sacrifice barren. Was it not for the children’s sake they had endured this vast wilderness37, and endured it in vain if the children were to be of this low and common sort? In their Utopia it was not to have been as it had been in the old country, with each family having a scholar or two in it, and the rest toilers. Here they were all to have been scholars and great men. And now the war had taken away Wully’s schooling38 and Allen’s life—and not only Wully’s schooling, which was after all, not essential to life, but that ultimate gift, his very sense of being a McLaughlin.
[86]Some Americans might have smiled to know that this immigrant family never for a moment considered Americans in general their equal, or themselves anything common. They were far too British for that. Until lately it had never occurred to them that anyone else might manage some way to be equal to a Scot. Until the war, when some young McLaughlin had shown signs of intolerable depravity, his father had entirely39 extinguished the last glimmer40 of it by saying, as he took his pipe out of his economical mouth, “Dinna ye act like a Yankee!” So withering41 was that reproach that no iniquity42 ever survived it. Now that that Yankee of the Yankees, Harvey Stowe, had been a very brother to Wully through campaigns and prisons, that denunciation was to be heard no more. But surely, Isobel McLaughlin moaned, her husband and herself had not let the children think that they were anything common. Had she not hated all that democracy that justified43 meanness of life, and pointed44 out faithfully to her children its fallacy? She remembered the first time she had taken them all to a Fourth of July celebration in the Yankee settlement, where a barefooted, tobacco-spitting, red-haired orator45 of the day, after an hour of boastings and of braggings, had shouted out his climax46, saying that in this free land we are all kings and queens. “A fine old king, yon!” she had chuckled again and again, explaining his folly47 to her flock. A man like that[87] had no idea what a king was! He most likely had never even seen a gentleman!
She recalled that Wully, once when he was quite a small boy, had alone and unaided found and identified a gentleman whose team was struggling in a swamp. He was a poor old gentleman, trying manfully to get an orphan48 grandson to a son’s home farther west, and Wully had brought him proudly home, and his mother had “done” for him till he was able to travel on. Having him in the house had been like having a pitiable angel with them. When he was better, they had called all the neighbors in, and the old New Englander had preached them a sermon. He had preached to the children about the Lamb of God, using as his text the lamb tied near the door, and they had never forgotten how gentleness, he said, had made God great. And when he had been starting on, John McLaughlin had taken a bill from his pocket—and bills were things not often seen by the children—and given it to him humbly49, for the benefits his presence had bestowed50 upon the family. Afterwards when his mother had asked Wully how he had known the stranger would be welcome, he had said he knew he was some great man by the way he spoke51 to his floundering horses. Oh, surely in that wilderness Wully had known the better ways of living. And he had chosen despicable ways! She was only an old, tired, disappointed woman.
If her first-born, that lad Wully, had done a thing like this, what might not the rest of them[88] choose to do! Pride did not let her remember that if the family had been in no generation without a man of more or less eminence52, neither had it been without a precedent53 for Wully’s conduct. She was a woman who had sympathy with the mother of Zebedee’s sons. If she had been there with Christ, she would have asked unashamed for four places on his right, and for four on his left, the nearest eight seats for her eight sons. What dreams she had dreamed for them! Once she had beheld54 the President of the United States consulting his cabinet, and behold55, her Wully was the President, and Allen the Vice-President, and the Cabinet consisted of her younger lads, even young Hughie sitting there, still only nine, with a freckled56 little nose, and a wisp of a curling lock straying down from his cowlick towards eyes shining with contemplated57 mischief58. She had felt at the time that such a dream might be somewhat, perhaps, foolish, and profiting by Joseph’s distant but well-known experience, she had told it only to her husband. He diagnosed her case in one instant. “You dreamed that wide awake, woman!” She had thought at times that Allen was to be another Burns, a maker59 of songs for a new country. In her dreams, to be great was to be one of three things, a Burns, a Lincoln, or a Florence Nightingale. And now one dream, her first and longest, was permanently60 over. Wully was a man now, and a man who brought women to ruin. Sometimes it seemed to her as she lay there moaning[89] that surely the girl must have enticed61 him into this evil. Then she came swiftly to blaming the whole thing on Alex McNair. If he had come home when he should have, if he had not left the girl unprotected there, this would never have happened. Blaming Alex violated no fond loyalty62. In time it came to seem to her that the whole fault was his.
But that afternoon, the small McLaughlins coming home from school found a state of affairs new in their experience. There was absolutely no sign of a baby in the house, and yet their mother was in bed! Once she said when they asked her anxiously, that her head ached. And once she said that her heart was troubling her.
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1
inevitable
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| adj.不可避免的，必然发生的 | |
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determined
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| adj.坚定的；有决心的 | |
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ken
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| n.视野，知识领域 | |
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reassure
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| v.使放心，使消除疑虑 | |
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humiliation
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| n.羞辱 | |
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provocation
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| n.激怒，刺激，挑拨，挑衅的事物，激怒的原因 | |
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forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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entreaty
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| n.恳求，哀求 | |
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remonstrances
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| n.抱怨，抗议( remonstrance的名词复数 ) | |
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growled
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| v.（动物）发狺狺声， （雷）作隆隆声( growl的过去式和过去分词 )；低声咆哮着说 | |
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drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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flay
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| vt.剥皮；痛骂 | |
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perfectly
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| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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stammered
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| v.结巴地说出( stammer的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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doggedly
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| adv.顽强地，固执地 | |
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ominous
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| adj.不祥的，不吉的，预兆的，预示的 | |
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reproof
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| n.斥责，责备 | |
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mumbled
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| 含糊地说某事，叽咕，咕哝( mumble的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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19
condemnation
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| n.谴责; 定罪 | |
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20
ailing
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| v.生病 | |
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prosper
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| v.成功，兴隆，昌盛；使成功，使昌隆，繁荣 | |
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passionately
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| ad.热烈地，激烈地 | |
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23
soothed
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| v.安慰( soothe的过去式和过去分词 )；抚慰；使舒服；减轻痛苦 | |
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tragic
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| adj.悲剧的，悲剧性的，悲惨的 | |
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severely
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| adv.严格地；严厉地；非常恶劣地 | |
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nethermost
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| adj.最下面的 | |
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taunt
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| n.辱骂，嘲弄；v.嘲弄 | |
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recital
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| n.朗诵，独奏会，独唱会 | |
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clan
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| n.氏族，部落，宗族，家族，宗派 | |
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eminently
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| adv.突出地；显著地；不寻常地 | |
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extravagant
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| adj.奢侈的；过分的；(言行等)放肆的 | |
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32
chuckled
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| 轻声地笑( chuckle的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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kaleidoscopic
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| adj.千变万化的 | |
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34
exempted
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| 使免除[豁免]( exempt的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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wrought
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| v.引起；以…原料制作；运转；adj.制造的 | |
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undone
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| a.未做完的，未完成的 | |
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wilderness
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| n.杳无人烟的一片陆地、水等，荒漠 | |
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schooling
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| n.教育；正规学校教育 | |
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entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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glimmer
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| v.发出闪烁的微光；n.微光，微弱的闪光 | |
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withering
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| 使人畏缩的，使人害羞的，使人难堪的 | |
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iniquity
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| n.邪恶；不公正 | |
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justified
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| a.正当的，有理的 | |
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pointed
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| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
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orator
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| n.演说者，演讲者，雄辩家 | |
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climax
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| n.顶点；高潮；v.(使)达到顶点 | |
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folly
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| n.愚笨，愚蠢，蠢事，蠢行，傻话 | |
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48
orphan
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| n.孤儿；adj.无父母的 | |
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49
humbly
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| adv. 恭顺地，谦卑地 | |
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50
bestowed
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| 赠给，授予( bestow的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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51
spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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52
eminence
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| n.卓越，显赫；高地，高处；名家 | |
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53
precedent
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| n.先例，前例；惯例；adj.在前的，在先的 | |
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54
beheld
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| v.看，注视( behold的过去式和过去分词 )；瞧；看呀；（叙述中用于引出某人意外的出现）哎哟 | |
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55
behold
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| v.看，注视，看到 | |
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56
freckled
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| adj.雀斑；斑点；晒斑；（使）生雀斑v.雀斑，斑点( freckle的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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57
contemplated
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| adj. 预期的 动词contemplate的过去分词形式 | |
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58
mischief
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| n.损害，伤害，危害；恶作剧，捣蛋，胡闹 | |
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59
maker
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| n.制造者，制造商 | |
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60
permanently
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| adv.永恒地，永久地，固定不变地 | |
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61
enticed
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| 诱惑，怂恿( entice的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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62
loyalty
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| n.忠诚，忠心 | |
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