He had always a feeling of depression when he must sit down to his books. It was the start that gravelled him. He would look round his room and hate it, mutter "Damn it, I must work;" and then, with a heavy sigh, would seat himself before an outspread volume on the table, tugging the hair on a puckered forehead. Sometimes the depression left him, when he buckled to his work; as his mind became occupied with other things the vision of the Howff was expelled. Usually, however, the stiffness of his brains made the reading drag heavily, and he rarely attained the sufficing happiness of a student eager and engrossed. At the end of ten minutes he would be gaping across the table, and wondering what they were doing at the Howff. "Will Logan be singing 'Tam Glen'? Or is Gillespie fiddling Highland tunes, by Jing, with his elbow going it merrily? Lord! I would like to hear 'Miss Drummond o' Perth' or 'Gray Daylicht'—they might buck me up a bit. I'll just slip out for ten minutes, to see what they're doing, and be back directly." He came back at two in the morning, staggering.

On a bleak spring evening, near the end of February, young Gourlay had gone to the Howff, to escape the shuddering misery of the streets. It was that treacherous spring weather which blights. Only two days ago the air had been sluggish and balmy; now an easterly wind nipped the gray city, naked and bare. There was light enough, with the lengthening days, to see plainly the rawness of the world. There were cold yellow gleams in windows fronting a lonely west. Uncertain little puffs of wind came swirling round corners, and made dust and pieces of dirty white paper gyrate on the roads. Prosperous old gentlemen pacing home, rotund in their buttoned-up coats, had clear drops at the end of their noses. Sometimes they stopped—their trousers legs flapping behind them—and trumpeted loudly into red silk handkerchiefs. Young Gourlay had fled the streets. It was the kind of night that made him cower.

By eight o'clock, however, he was merry with the barley-bree, and making a butt of himself to amuse the company. He was not quick-witted enough to banter a comrade readily, nor hardy enough to essay it unprovoked; on the other hand, his swaggering love of notice impelled him to some form of talk that would attract attention. So he made a point of always coming with daft stories of things comic that befell him—at least, he said they did. But if his efforts were greeted with too loud a roar, implying not only appreciation of the stories, but also a contempt for the man who could tell them of himself, his sensitive vanity was immediately wounded, and he swelled with sulky anger. And the moment after he would splurge and bluster to reassert his dignity.

"I remember when I was a boy," he hiccupped, "I had a pet goose at home."

There was a titter at the queer beginning.

"I was to get the price of it for myself, and so when Christmas drew near I went to old MacFarlane, the poulterer in Skeighan. 'Will you buy a goose?' said I. 'Are ye for sale, my man?' was his answer."

Armstrong flung back his head and roared, prolonging the loud ho-ho! through his big nose and open mouth long after the impulse to honest laughter was exhausted. He always laughed with false loudness, to indicate his own superiority, when he thought a man had been guilty of a public silliness. The laugh was meant to show the company how far above such folly was Mr. Armstrong.

Gourlay scowled. "Damn Armstrong!" he thought, "what did he yell like that for? Does he think I didn't see the point of the joke against myself? Would I have told it if I hadn't? This is what comes of being sensitive. I'm always too sensitive! I felt there was an awkward silence, and I told a story against myself to dispel it in fun, and this is what I get for't. Curse the big brute! he thinks I have given myself away. But I'll show him!"

He was already mellow, but he took another swig to hearten him, as was his habit.

"There's a damned sight too much yell about your laugh, Armstrong," he said, truly enough, getting a courage from his anger and the drink. "No gentleman laughs like that."

"'Risu inepto res ineptior nulla est,'" said Tarmillan, who was on one of his rare visits to the Howff. He was too busy and too wise a man to frequent it greatly.

Armstrong blushed; and Gourlay grew big and brave, in the backing of the great Tarmillan. He took another swig on the strength of it. But his resentment was still surging. When Tarmillan went, and the three students were left by themselves, Gourlay continued to nag and bluster, for that blatant laugh of Armstrong's rankled in his mind.

"I saw Hepburn in the street to-day," said Gillespie, by way of a diversion.

"Who's Hepburn?" snapped Gourlay.

"Oh, don't you remember? He's the big Border chap who got into a row with auld Tam on the day you won your prize essay." (That should surely appease the fool, thought Gillespie.) "It was only for the fun of the thing Hepburn was at College, for he has lots of money; and, here, he never apologized to Tam! He said he would go down first."

"He was damned right," spluttered Gourlay. "Some of these profs. think too much of themselves. They wouldn't bully me! There's good stuff in the Gourlays," he went on with a meaning look at Armstrong; "they're not to be scoffed at. I would stand insolence from no man."

"Ay, man," said Armstrong, "would you face up to a professor?"

"Wouldn't I?" said the tipsy youth; "and to you, too, if you went too far."

He became so quarrelsome as the night went on that his comrades filled him up with drink, in the hope of deadening his ruffled sensibilities. It was, "Yes, yes, Jack; but never mind about that! Have another drink, just to show there's no ill-feeling among friends."

When they left the Howff they went to Gillespie's and drank more, and after that they roamed about the town. At two in the morning the other two brought Gourlay to his door. He was assuring Armstrong he was not a gentleman.

When he went to bed the fancied insult he had suffered swelled to monstrous proportions in his fevered brain. Did Armstrong despise him? The thought was poison! He lay in brooding anger, and his mind was fluent in wrathful harangues in some imaginary encounter of the future, in which he was a glorious victor. He flowed in eloquent scorn of Armstrong and his ways. If I could talk like this always, he thought, what a fellow I would be! He seemed gifted with uncanny insight into Armstrong's character. He noted every weakness in the rushing whirl of his thoughts, set them in order one by one, saw himself laying bare the man with savage glee when next they should encounter. He would whiten the big brute's face by showing he had probed him to the quick. Just let him laugh at me again, thought Gourlay, and I'll analyze each mean quirk of his dirty soul to him!

The drink was dying in him now, for the trio had walked for more than an hour through the open air when they left Gillespie's rooms. The stupefaction of alcohol was gone, leaving his brain morbidly alive. He was anxious to sleep, but drowsy dullness kept away. His mind began to visualize of its own accord, independent of his will; and, one after another, a crowd of pictures rose vivid in the darkness of his brain. He saw them as plainly as you see this page, but with a different clearness—for they seemed unnatural, belonging to a morbid world. Nor did one suggest the other; there was no connection between them; each came vivid of its own accord.

First it was an old pit-frame on a barren moor, gaunt, against the yellow west. Gourlay saw bars of iron, left when the pit was abandoned, reddened by the rain; and the mounds of rubbish, and the scattered bricks, and the rusty clinkers from the furnace, and the melancholy shining pools. A four-wheeled old trolley had lost two of its wheels, and was tilted at a slant, one square end of it resting on the ground.

"Why do I think of an old pit?" he thought angrily; "curse it! why can't I sleep?"

Next moment he was gazing at a ruined castle, its mouldering walls mounded atop with decaying rubble; from a loose crumb of mortar a long, thin film of the spider's weaving stretched bellying away to a tall weed waving on the crazy brink. Gourlay saw its glisten in the wind. He saw each crack in the wall, each stain of lichen; a myriad details stamped themselves together on his raw mind. Then a constant procession of figures passed across the inner curtain of his closed eyes. Each figure was cowled; but when it came directly opposite, it turned and looked at him with a white face. "Stop, stop!" cried his mind; "I don't want to think of you, I don't want to think of you, I don't want to think of you! Go away!" But as they came of themselves, so they went of themselves. He could not banish them.

He turned on his side, but a hundred other pictures pursued him. From an inland hollow he saw the great dawn flooding up from the sea, over a sharp line of cliff, wave after wave of brilliance surging up the heavens. The landward slope of the cliff was gray with dew. The inland hollow was full of little fields, divided by stone walls, and he could not have recalled the fields round Barbie with half their distinctness. For a moment they possessed his brain. Then an autumn wood rose on his vision. He was gazing down a vista of yellow leaves; a long, deep slanting cleft, framed in lit foliage. Leaves, leaves; everywhere yellow leaves, luminous, burning. He saw them falling through the lucid air. The scene was as vivid as fire to his brain, though of magic stillness. Then the foliage changed suddenly to great serpents twined about the boughs. Their colours were of monstrous beauty. They glistened as they moved.

He leapt in his bed with a throb of horror. Could this be the delirium of drink? But no; he had often had an experience like this when he was sleepless; he had the learned description of it pat and ready; it was only automatic visualization.

Damn! Why couldn't he sleep? He flung out of bed, uncorked a bottle with his teeth, tilted it up, and gulped the gurgling fire in the darkness. Ha! that was better.

His room was already gray with the coming dawn. He went to the window and opened it. The town was stirring uneasily in its morning sleep. Somewhere in the distance a train was shunting; clank, clank, clank went the wagons. What an accursed sound! A dray went past the end of his street rumbling hollowly, and the rumble died drearily away. Then the footsteps of an early workman going to his toil were heard in the deserted thoroughfare. Gourlay looked down and saw him pass far beneath him on the glimmering pavement. He was whistling. Why did the fool whistle? What had he got to whistle about? It was unnatural that one man should go whistling to his work, when another had not been able to sleep the whole night long.

He took another vast glut of whisky, and the moment after was dead to the world.

He was awakened at eight o'clock by a monstrous hammering on his door. By the excessive loudness of the first knock he heard on returning to consciousness, he knew that his landlady had lost her temper in trying to get him up. Ere he could shout she had thumped again. He stared at the ceiling in sullen misery. The middle of his tongue was as dry as bark.

For his breakfast there were thick slabs of rancid bacon, from the top of which two yellow eggs had spewed themselves away among the cold gravy. His gorge rose at them. He nibbled a piece of dry bread and drained the teapot; then shouldering into his greatcoat, he tramped off to the University.

It was a wretched morning. The wind had veered once more, and a cold drizzle of rain was falling through a yellow fog. The reflections of the street lamps in the sloppy pavement went down through spiral gleams to an infinite depth of misery. Young Gourlay's brain was aching from his last night's debauch, and his body was weakened with the want both of sleep and food. The cold yellow mist chilled him to the bone. What a fool I was to get drunk last night, he thought. Why am I here? Why am I trudging through mud and misery to the University? What has it all got to do with me? Oh, what a fool I am, what a fool!

"Drown dull care," said the devil in his ear.

He took a sixpence from his trousers pocket, and looked down at the white bit of money in his hand till it was wet with the falling rain. Then he went into a flashy tavern, and, standing by a sloppy bar, drank sixpenny-worth of cheap whisky. It went to his head at once, owing to his want of food, and with a dull warm feeling in his body he lurched off to his first lecture for the day. His outlook on the world had changed. The fog was now a comfortable yellowness. "Freedom and whisky gang thegither: tak aff your dram," he quoted to his own mind. "That stuff did me good. Whisky's the boy to fettle you."

He was in his element the moment he entered the classroom. It was a bear garden. The most moral individual has his days of perversity when a malign fate compels him to show the worst he has in him. A Scottish university class—which is many most moral individuals—has a similar eruptive tendency when it gets into the hands of a weak professor. It will behave well enough for a fortnight, then a morning comes when nothing can control it. This was a morning of the kind. The lecturer, who was an able man but a weakling, had begun by apologizing for the condition of his voice, on the ground that he had a bad cold. Instantly every man in the class was blowing his nose. One fellow, of a most portentous snout, who could trumpet like an elephant, with a last triumphant snort sent his handkerchief across the room. When called to account for his conduct, "Really, sir," he said, "er-er-oom—bad cold!" Uprose a universal sneeze. Then the "roughing" began, to the tune of "John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave"—which no man seemed to sing, but every man could hear. They were playing the tune with their feet.

The lecturer glared with white repugnance at his tormentors.

Young Gourlay flung himself heart and soul into the cruel baiting. It was partly from his usual love of showing off, partly from the drink still seething within him, but largely, also, as a reaction from his morning's misery. This was another way of drowning reflection. The morbidly gloomy one moment often shout madly on the next.

At last the lecturer plunged wildly at the door and flung it open. "Go!" he shrieked, and pointed in superb dismissal.

A hundred and fifty barbarians sat where they were, and laughed at him; and he must needs come back to the platform, with a baffled and vindictive glower.

He was just turning, as it chanced, when young Gourlay put his hands to his mouth and bellowed "Cock-a-doodle-do!"

Ere the roar could swell, the lecturer had leapt to the front of the rostrum with flaming eyes. "Mr. Gourlay," he screamed furiously—"you there, sir; you will apologize humbly to me for this outrage at the end of the hour."

There was a womanish shrillness in the scream, a kind of hysteria on the stretch, that (contrasted with his big threat) might have provoked them at other times to a roar of laughter. But there was a sincerity in his rage to-day that rose above its faults of manner; and an immediate silence took the room—the more impressive for the former noise. Every eye turned to Gourlay. He sat gaping at the lecturer.

If he had been swept to the anteroom there and then, he would have been cowed by the suddenness of his own change, from a loud tormentor in the company of others, to a silent culprit in a room alone. And apologies would have been ready to tumble out, while he was thus loosened by surprise and fear.

Unluckily he had time to think, and the longer he thought the more sullen he became. It was only an accident that led to his discovery, while the rest escaped; and that the others should escape, when they were just as much to blame as he was, was an injustice that made him furious. His anger was equally divided between the cursed mischance itself, the teacher who had "jumped" on him so suddenly, and the other rowdies who had escaped to laugh at his discomfiture; he had the same burning resentment to them all. When he thought of his chuckling fellow-students, they seemed to engross his rage; when he thought of the mishap, he damned it and nothing else; when he thought of the lecturer, he felt he had no rage to fling away upon others—the Snuffler took it all. As his mind shot backwards and forwards in an angry gloom, it suddenly encountered the image of his father. Not a professor of the lot, he reflected, could stand the look of black Gourlay. And he wouldn't knuckle under, either, so he wouldn't. He came of a hardy stock. He would show them! He wasn't going to lick dirt for any man. Let him punish all or none, for they had all been kicking up a row—why, big Cunningham had been braying like an ass only a minute before.

He spied Armstrong and Gillespie glinting across at him with a curious look: they were wondering whether he had courage enough to stand to his guns with a professor. He knew the meaning of the look, and resented it. He was on his mettle before them, it seemed. The fellow who had swaggered at the Howff last night about "what he would do if a professor jumped on him," mustn't prove wanting in the present trial, beneath the eyes of those on whom he had imposed his blatancy.

When we think of what Gourlay did that day, we must remember that he was soaked in alcohol—not merely with his morning's potation, but with the dregs of previous carousals. And the dregs of drink, a thorough toper will tell you, never leave him. He is drunk on Monday with his Saturday's debauch. As "Drucken Wabster" of Barbie put it once, "When a body's hard up, his braith's a consolation." If that be so—and Wabster, remember, was an expert whose opinion on this matter is entitled to the highest credence—if that be so, it proves the strength and persistence of a thorough alcoholic impregnation, or, as Wabster called it, of "a good soak." In young Gourlay's case, at any rate, the impregnation was enduring and complete. He was like a rag steeped in fusel oil.

As the end of the hour drew near, he sank deeper in his dogged sullenness. When the class streamed from the large door on the right, he turned aside to the little anteroom on the left, with an insolent swing of the shoulders. He knew the fellows were watching him curiously—he felt their eyes upon his back. And, therefore, as he went through the little door, he stood for a moment on his right foot, and waggled his left, on a level with his hip behind, in a vulgar derision of them, the professor, and the whole situation. That was a fine taunt flung back at them!

There is nothing on earth more vindictive than a weakling. When he gets a chance he takes revenge for everything his past cowardice forced him to endure. The timid lecturer, angry at the poor figure he had cut on the platform, was glad to take it out of young Gourlay for the wrongdoing of the class. Gourlay was their scapegoat. The lecturer had no longer over a hundred men to deal with, but one lout only, sullen yet shrinking in the room before him. Instead of coming to the point at once, he played with his victim. It was less from intentional cruelty than from an instinctive desire to recover his lost feeling of superiority. The class was his master, but here was one of them he could cow at any rate.

"Well?" he asked, bringing his thin finger-tips together, and flinging one thigh across the other.

Gourlay shuffled his feet uneasily.

"Yes?" inquired the other, enjoying his discomfiture.

Gourlay lowered. "Whatna gate was this to gang on? Why couldn't he let a blatter out of his thin mouth, and ha' done wi't?"

"I'm waiting!" said the lecturer.

The words "I apologize" rose in Gourlay, but refused to pass his throat. No, he wouldn't, so he wouldn't! He would see the lecturer far enough, ere he gave an apology before it was expressly required.

"Oh, that's the line you go on, is it?" said the lecturer, nodding his head as if he had sized up a curious animal. "I see, I see! You add contumacy to insolence, do you?... Imphm."

Gourlay was not quite sure what contumacy meant, and the uncertainty added to his anger.

"There were others making a noise besides me," he blurted. "I don't see why I should be blamed for it all."

"Oh, you don't see why you should be had up, indeed? I think we'll bring you to a different conclusion. Yes, I think so."

Gourlay, being forced to stand always on the one spot, felt himself swaying in a drunken stupor. He blinked at the lecturer like an angry owl—the blinking regard of a sodden mind, yet fiery with a spiteful rage. His wrath was rising and falling like a quick tide. He would have liked one moment to give a rein to the Gourlay temper, and let the lecturer have it hot and strong; the next, he was quivering in a cowardly horror of the desperate attempt he had so nearly made. Curse his tormentor! Why did he keep him here, when his head was aching so badly? Another taunt was enough to spring his drunken rage.

"I wonder what you think you came to College for?" said the lecturer. "I have been looking at your records in the class. They're the worst I ever saw. And you're not content with that, it seems. You add misbehaviour to gross stupidity."

"To hell wi' ye!" said Gourlay.

There was a feeling in the room as if the air was stunned. The silence throbbed.

The lecturer, who had risen, sat down suddenly as if going at the knees, and went white about the gills. Some men would have swept the ruffian with a burst of generous wrath, a few might have pitied in their anger; but this young Solomon was thin and acid, a vindictive rat. Unable to cow the insolent in present and full-blooded rage, he fell to thinking of the great machine he might set in motion to destroy him. As he sat there in silence, his eyes grew ferrety, and a sleek revenge peeped from the corners of his mouth. "I'll show him what I'll do to him for this!" is a translation of his thought. He was thinking, with great satisfaction to himself, of how the Senatus would deal with young Gourlay.

Gourlay grew weak with fear the moment the words escaped him. They had been a thunderclap to his own ears. He had been thinking them, but—as he pleaded far within him now—had never meant to utter them; they had been mere spume off the surge of cowardly wrath seething up within him, longing to burst, but afraid. It was the taunt of stupidity that fired his drunken vanity to blurt them forth.

The lecturer eyed him sideways where he shrank in fear. "You may go," he said at last. "I will report your conduct to the University."

* * * * *

Gourlay was sitting alone in his room when he heard that he had been expelled. For many days he had drunk to deaden fear, but he was sober now, being newly out of bed. A dreary ray of sunshine came through the window, and fell on a wisp of flame blinking in the grate. As Gourlay sat, his eyes fixed dully on the faded ray, a flash of intuition laid his character bare to him. He read himself ruthlessly. It was not by conscious effort; insight was uncanny and apart from will. He saw that blatancy had joined with weakness, morbidity with want of brains; and that the results of these, converging to a point, had produced the present issue, his expulsion. His mind recognized how logical the issue was, assenting wearily as to a problem proved. Given those qualities, in those circumstances, what else could have happened? And such a weakling as he knew himself to be could never—he thought—make effort sufficient to alter his qualities. A sense of fatalism came over him, as of one doomed. He bowed his head, and let his arms fall by the sides of his chair, dropping them like a spent swimmer ready to sink. The sudden revelation of himself to himself had taken the heart out of him. "I'm a waster!" he said aghast. And then, at the sound of his own voice, a fear came over him, a fear of his own nature; and he started to his feet and strode feverishly, as if by mere locomotion, to escape from his clinging and inherent ill. It was as if he were trying to run away from himself.

He faced round at the mirror on his mantel, and looked at his own image with staring and startled eyes, his mouth open, the breath coming hard through his nostrils. "You're a gey ill ane," he said; "you're a gey ill ane! My God, where have you landed yourself?"

He went out to escape from his thoughts. Instinctively he turned to the Howff for consolation.

With the panic despair of the weak, he abandoned hope of his character at its first collapse, and plunged into a wild debauch, to avoid reflecting where it would lead him in the end. But he had a more definite reason for prolonging his bout in Edinburgh. He was afraid to go home and meet his father. He shrank, in visioning fear, before the dour face, loaded with scorn, that would swing round to meet him as he entered through the door. Though he swore every night in his cups that he would "square up to the Governor the morn, so he would!" always, when the cold light came, fear of the interview drove him to his cups again. His courage zigzagged, as it always did; one moment he towered in imagination, the next he grovelled in fear.

Sometimes, when he was fired with whisky, another element entered into his mood, no less big with destruction. It was all his father's fault for sending him to Edinburgh, and no matter what happened, it would serve the old fellow right! He had a kind of fierce satisfaction in his own ruin, because his ruin would show them at home what a mistake they had made in sending him to College. It was the old man's tyranny, in forcing him to College, that had brought all this on his miserable head. Well, he was damned glad, so he was, that they should be punished at home by their own foolish scheme—it had punished him enough, for one. And then he would set his mouth insolent and hard, and drink the more fiercely, finding a consolation in the thought that his tyrannical father would suffer through his degradation too.

At last he must go home. He drifted to the station aimlessly; he had ceased to be self-determined. His compartment happened to be empty; so, free to behave as he liked, he yelled music-hall snatches in a tuneless voice, hammering with his feet on the wooden floor. The noise pleased his sodden mind, which had narrowed to a comfortable stupor—outside of which his troubles seemed to lie, as if they belonged not to him but to somebody else. With the same sodden interest he was staring through the window, at one of the little stations on the line, when a boy, pointing, said, "Flat white nose!" and Gourlay laughed uproariously, adding at the end, "He's a clever chield, that; my nose would look flat and white against the pane." But this outbreak of mirth seemed to break in on his comfortable vagueness; it roused him by a kind of reaction to think of home, and of what his father would say. A minute after he had been laughing so madly, he was staring sullenly in front of him. Well, it didn't matter; it was all the old fellow's fault, and he wasn't going to stand any of his jaw. "None of your jaw, John Gourlay!" he said, nodding his head viciously, and thrusting out his clenched fist—"none of your jaw; d'ye hear?"

He crept into Barbie through the dusk. It had been market-day, and knots of people were still about the streets. Gourlay stole softly through the shadows, and turned his coat-collar high about his ears. He nearly ran into two men who were talking apart, and his heart stopped dead at their words.

"No, no, Mr. Gourlay," said one of them; "it's quite impossible. I'm not unwilling to oblige ye, but I cannot take the risk."

John heard the mumble of his father's voice.

"Well," said the other reluctantly, "if ye get the baker and Tam Wylie for security? I'll be on the street for another half-hour."

"Another half-hour!" thought John with relief. He would not have to face his father the moment he went in. He would be able to get home before him. He crept on through the gloaming to the House with the Green Shutters.



CHAPTER XXIV.

There had been fine cackling in Barbie as Gourlay's men dropped away from him one by one; and now it was worse than ever. When Jimmy Bain and Sandy Cross were dismissed last winter, "He canna last long now," mused the bodies; and then when even Riney got the sack, "Lord!" they cried, "this maun be the end o't." The downfall of Gourlay had an unholy fascination for his neighbours, and that not merely because of their dislike to the man. That was a whet to their curiosity, of course; but, over and above it, they seemed to be watching, with bated breath, for the final collapse of an edifice that was bound to fall. Simple expectation held them. It was a dramatic interest—of suspense, yet certainty—that had them in its grip. "He's bound to come down," said Certainty. "Yes; but when, though?" cried Curiosity, all the more eager because of its instinct for the coming crash. And so they waited for the great catastrophe which they felt to be so near. It was as if they were watching the tragedy near at hand, and noting with keen interest every step in it that must lead to inevitable ruin. That invariably happens when a family tragedy is played out in the midst of a small community. Each step in it is discussed with a prying interest that is neither malevolent nor sympathetic, but simply curious. In this case it was chiefly malevolent—only because Gourlay had been such a brute to Barbie.

Though there were thus two reasons for public interest, the result was one and the same—a constant tittle-tattling. Particular spite and a more general curiosity brought the grain merchant's name on to every tongue. Not even in the gawcey days of its prosperity had the House with the Green Shutters been so much talked of.

"Pride will have a downcome," said some, with a gleg look and a smack of the lip, trying to veil their personal malevolence in a common proverb. "He's simply in debt in every corner," goldered the keener spirits; "he never had a brain for business. He's had money for stuff he's unable to deliver! Not a day gangs by but the big blue envelopes are coming. How do I ken? say ye! How do I ken, indeed? Oh-ooh, I ken perfectly. Perfectly! It was Postie himsell that telled me."

Yet all this was merely guesswork. For Gourlay had hitherto gone away from Barbie for his moneys and accommodations, so that the bodies could only surmise; they had nothing definite to go on. And through it all the gurly old fellow kept a brave front to the world. He was thinking of retiring, he said, and gradually drawing in his business. This offhand and lordly, to hide the patent diminution of his trade.

"Hi-hi!" said the old Provost, with a cruel laugh, when he heard of Gourlay's remark—"drawing in his business, ay! It's like Lang Jean Lingleton's waist, I'm thinking. It's thin eneugh drawn a'readys!"

On the morning of the last market-day he was ever to see in Barbie, old Gourlay was standing at the green gate, when the postman came up with a smirk, and put a letter in his hand. He betrayed a wish to hover in gossip, while Gourlay opened his letter, but "Less lip!" said surly John, and the fellow went away.

Ere he had reached the corner, a gowl of anger and grief struck his ear, and he wheeled eagerly.

Gourlay was standing with open mouth and outstretched arm, staring at the letter in his clenched fist with a look of horror, as if it had stung him.

"My God!" he cried, "had I not enough to thole?"

"Aha!" thought Postie, "yon letter Wilson got this morning was correct, then! His son had sent the true story. That letter o' Gourlay's had the Edinburgh postmark; somebody has sent him word about his son.—Lord! what a tit-bit for my rounds."

Mrs. Gourlay, who was washing dishes, looked up to see her husband standing in the kitchen door. His face frightened her. She had often seen the blaze in his eye, and often the dark scowl, but never this bloodless pallor in his cheek. Yet his eyes were flaming.

"Ay, ay," he birred, "a fine job you have made of him!"

"Oh, what is it?" she quavered, and the dish she was wiping clashed on the floor.

"That's it!" said he, "that's it! Breck the dishes next; breck the dishes! Everything seems gaun to smash. If ye keep on lang eneugh, ye'll put a bonny end till't or ye're bye wi't—the lot o' ye."

The taunt passed in the anxiety that stormed her.

"Tell me, see!" she cried, imperious in stress of appeal. "Oh, what is it, John?" She stretched out her thin, red hands, and clasped them tightly before her. "Is it from Embro? Is there ainything the matter with my boy? Is there ainything the matter with my boy?"

The hard eye surveyed her a while in grim contempt of her weakness. She was a fluttering thing in his grip.

"Every thing's the matter with your boy," he sneered slowly, "every thing's the matter with your boy. And it's your fault too, damn you, for you always spoiled him!"

With sudden wrath he strode over to the famous range and threw the letter within the great fender.

"What is it?" he cried, wheeling round on his wife. "The son you were so wild about sending to College has been flung in disgrace from its door! That's what it is!" He swept from the house like a madman.

Mrs. Gourlay sank into her old nursing chair and wailed, "Oh, my wean, my wean; my dear, my poor dear!" She drew the letter from the ashes, but could not read it for her tears. The words "drunkenness" and "expulsion" swam before her eyes. The manner of his disgrace she did not care to hear; she only knew her first-born was in sorrow.

"Oh, my son, my son," she cried; "my laddie, my wee laddie!" She was thinking of the time when he trotted at her petticoat.

It was market-day, and Gourlay must face the town. There was interest due on a mortgage which he could not pay; he must swallow his pride and try to borrow it in Barbie. He thought of trying Johnny Coe, for Johnny was of yielding nature, and had never been unfriendly.

He turned, twenty yards from his gate, and looked at the House with the Green Shutters. He had often turned to look back with pride at the gawcey building on its terrace, but never as he looked to-day. All that his life meant was bound up in that house—it had been the pride of the Gourlays; now it was no longer his, and the Gourlays' pride was in the dust—their name a by-word. As Gourlay looked, a robin was perched on the quiet roof-tree, its breast vivid in the sun. One of his metaphors flashed at the sight. "Shame is sitting there too," he muttered, and added with a proud, angry snarl, "on the riggin' o' my hoose!"

He had a triple wrath to his son. He had not only ruined his own life; he had destroyed his father's hope that by entering the ministry he might restore the Gourlay reputation. Above all, he had disgraced the House with the Green Shutters. That was the crown of his offending. Gourlay felt for the house of his pride even more than for himself—rather the house was himself; there was no division between them. He had built it bluff to represent him to the world. It was his character in stone and lime. He clung to it, as the dull, fierce mind, unable to live in thought, clings to a material source of pride. And John had disgraced it. Even if fortune took a turn for the better, Green Shutters would be laughed at the country over, as the home of a prodigal.

As he went by the Cross, Wilson (Provost this long while) broke off a conversation with Templandmuir, to yell, "It's gra-and weather, Mr. Gourlay!" The men had not spoken for years. So to shout at poor Gourlay in his black hour, from the pinnacle of civic greatness, was a fine stroke: it was gloating, it was rubbing in the contrast. The words were innocent, but that was nothing; whatever the remark, for a declared enemy to address Gourlay in his shame was an insult: that was why Wilson addressed him. There was something in the very loudness of his tones that cried plainly, "Aha, Gourlay! Your son has disgraced you, my man!" Gourlay glowered at the animal and plodded dourly. Ere he had gone ten yards a coarse laugh came bellowing behind him. They saw the colour surge up the back of his neck, to the roots of his hair.

He stopped. Was his son's disgrace known in Barbie already? He had hoped to get through the market-day without anybody knowing. But Wilson had a son in Edinburgh; he had written, it was like. The salutation, therefore, and the laugh, had both been uttered in derision. He wheeled, his face black with the passionate blood. His mouth yawed with anger. His voice had a moan of intensity.

"What are 'e laughing at?" he said, with a mastering quietness.... "Eh?... Just tell me, please, what you're laughing at."

He was crouching for the grip, his hands out like a gorilla's. The quiet voice, from the yawing mouth, beneath the steady, flaming eyes, was deadly. There is something inhuman in a rage so still.

"Eh?" he said slowly, and the moan seemed to come from the midst of a vast intensity rather than a human being. It was the question that must grind an answer.

Wilson was wishing to all his gods that he had not insulted this awful man. He remembered what had happened to Gibson. This, he had heard, was the very voice with which Gourlay moaned, "Take your hand off my shouther!" ere he hurled Gibson through the window of the Red Lion. Barbie might soon want a new Provost, if he ran in now.

But there is always one way of evading punishment for a veiled insult, and of adding to its sting by your evasion. Repudiate the remotest thought of the protester. Thus you enjoy your previous gibe, with the additional pleasure of making your victim seem a fool for thinking you referred to him. You not only insult him on the first count, but send him off with an additional hint that he isn't worth your notice. Wilson was an adept in the art.

"Man," he lied blandly, but his voice was quivering—"ma-a-an, I wasn't so much as giving ye a thoat! It's verra strange if I cannot pass a joke with my o-old friend Templandmuir without you calling me to book. It's a free country, I shuppose! Ye weren't in my mind at a-all. I have more important matters to think of," he ventured to add, seeing he had baffled Gourlay.

For Gourlay was baffled. For a directer insult, an offensive gesture, one fierce word, he would have hammered the road with the Provost. But he was helpless before the bland, quivering lie. Maybe they werena referring to him; maybe they knew nothing of John in Edinburgh; maybe he had been foolishly suspeecious. A subtle yet baffling check was put upon his anger. Madman as he was in wrath, he never struck without direct provocation; there was none in this pulpy gentleness. And he was too dull of wit to get round the common ruse and find a means of getting at them.

He let loose a great breath through his nostrils, as if releasing a deadly force which he had pent within him, ready should he need to spring. His mouth opened again, and he gaped at them with a great, round, unseeing stare. Then he swung on his heel.

But wrath clung round him like a garment. His anger fed on its uncertainties. For that is the beauty of the Wilson method of insult: you leave the poison in your victim's blood, and he torments himself. "Was Wilson referring to me, after all?" he pondered slowly; and his body surged at the thought. "If he was, I have let him get away unkilled," and he clutched the hands whence Wilson had escaped. Suddenly a flashing thought stopped him dead in the middle of his walk, staring hornily before him. He had seen the point at last that a quicker man would have seized on at the first. Why had Wilson thrust his damned voice on him on this particular morning of all days in the year, if he was not gloating over some news which he had just heard about the Gourlays? It was as plain as daylight: his son had sent word from Edinburgh. That was why he brayed and ho-ho-hoed when Gourlay went by. Gourlay felt a great flutter of pulses against his collar; there was a pain in his throat, an ache of madness in his breast. He turned once more. But Wilson and the Templar had withdrawn discreetly to the Black Bull; the street wasna canny. Gourlay resumed his way, his being a dumb gowl of rage. His angry thought swept to John. Each insult, and fancied insult, he endured that day was another item in the long account of vengeance with his son. It was John who had brought all this flaming round his ears—John whose colleging he had lippened to so muckle. The staff on which he leaned had pierced him. By the eternal heavens he would tramp it into atoms. His legs felt John beneath them.

As the market grew busy, Gourlay was the aim of innumerable eyes. He would turn his head to find himself the object of a queer, considering look; then the eyes of the starer would flutter abashed, as though detected spying the forbidden. The most innocent look at him was poison. "Do they know?" was his constant thought; "have they heard the news? What's Loranogie looking at me like that for?"

Not a man ventured to address him about John—he had cowed them too long. One man, however, showed a wish to try. A pretended sympathy, from behind the veil of which you probe a man's anguish at your ease, is a favourite weapon of human beasts anxious to wound. The Deacon longed to try it on Gourlay. But his courage failed him. It was the only time he was ever worsted in malignity. Never a man went forth, bowed down with a recent shame, wounded and wincing from the public gaze, but that old rogue hirpled up to him, and lisped with false smoothness: "Thirce me, neebour, I'm thorry for ye! Thith ith a terrible affair! It'th on everybody'th tongue. But ye have my thympathy, neebour, ye have tha-at—my warmetht thympathy." And all the while the shifty eyes above the lying mouth would peer and probe, to see if the soul within the other was writhing at his words.

Now, though everybody was spying at Gourlay in the market, all were giving him a wide berth; for they knew that he was dangerous. He was no longer the man whom they had baited on the way to Skeighan; then he had some control, now three years' calamities had fretted his temper to a raw wound. To flick it was perilous. Great was the surprise of the starers, therefore, when the idle old Deacon was seen to detach himself and hail the grain merchant. Gourlay wheeled, and waited with a levelled eye. All were agog at the sight—something would be sure to come o' this—here would be an encounter worth the speaking o'. But the Deacon, having toddled forward a bittock on his thin shanks, stopped half-roads, took snuff, trumpeted into his big red handkerchief, and then, feebly waving, "I'll thee ye again, Dyohn," clean turned tail and toddled back to his cronies.

A roar went up at his expense.

"God!" said Tam Wylie, "did ye see yon? Gourlay stopped him wi' a glower."

But the laugh was maddening to Gourlay. Its readiness, its volume, showed him that scores of folk had him in their minds, were watching him, considering his position, cognizant of where he stood. "They ken," he thought. "They were a' waiting to see what would happen. They wanted to watch how Gourlay tholed the mention o' his son's disgrace. I'm a kind o' show to them."

Johnny Coe, idle and well-to-pass, though he had no business of his own to attend to, was always present where business men assembled. It was a gra-and way of getting news. To-day, however, Gourlay could not find him. He went into the cattle mart to see if he was there. For two years now Barbie had a market for cattle, on the first Tuesday of the month.

The auctioneer, a jovial dog, was in the middle of his roaring game. A big red bullock, the coat of which made a rich colour in the ring, came bounding in, scared at its surroundings—staring one moment and the next careering.

"There's meat for you," said he of the hammer; "see how it runs! How much am I offered for this fine bullock?" He sing-songed, always saying "this fine bullock" in exactly the same tone of voice. "Thirteen pounds for this fine bullock; thirteen-five; thirteen-ten; thirteen-ten for this fine bullock; thirteen-ten; any further bids on thirteen-ten? why, it's worth that for the colour o't; thank ye, sir—thirteen-fifteen; fourteen pounds; fourteen pounds for this fine bullock; see how the stot stots[7] about the ring; that joke should raise him another half-sovereign; ah, I knew it would—fourteen-five; fourteen-five for this fine bullock; fourteen-ten; no more than fourteen-ten for this fine bullock; going at fourteen-ten; gone—Irrendavie."

Now that he was in the circle, however, the mad, big, handsome beast refused to go out again. When the cattlemen would drive him to the yard, he snorted and galloped round, till he had to be driven from the ring with blows. When at last he bounded through the door, he flung up his heels with a bellow, and sent the sand of his arena showering on the people round.

"I seh!" roared Brodie in his coarsest voice, from the side of the ring opposite to Gourlay. "I seh, owctioner! That maun be a College-bred stot, from the way he behaves. He flung dirt at his masters, and had to be expelled."

"Put Brodie in the ring and rowp him!" cried Irrendavie. "He roars like a bill, at ony rate."

There was a laugh at Brodie, true; but it was at Gourlay that a hundred big red faces turned to look. He did not look at them, though. He sent his eyes across the ring at Brodie.

"Lord!" said Irrendavie, "it's weel for Brodie that the ring's acqueesh them! Gourlay'll murder somebody yet. Red hell lap out o' his e'en when he looked at Brodie."

Gourlay's suspicion that his son's disgrace was a matter of common knowledge had now become a certainty. Brodie's taunt showed that everybody knew it. He walked out of the building very quietly, pale but resolute; no meanness in his carriage, no cowering. He was an arresting figure of a man as he stood for a moment in the door and looked round for the man whom he was seeking. "Weel, weel," he was thinking, "I maun thole, I suppose. They were under my feet for many a day, and they're taking their advantage now."

But though he could thole, his anger against John was none the less. It was because they had been under his feet for many a day that John's conduct was the more heinous. It was his son's conduct that gave Gourlay's enemies their first opportunity against him, that enabled them to turn the tables. They might sneer at his trollop of a wife, they might sneer at his want of mere cleverness; still he held his head high amongst them. They might suspect his poverty; but so far, for anything they knew, he might have thousands behind him. He owed not a man in Barbie. The appointments of Green Shutters were as brave as ever. The selling of his horses, the dismissal of his men, might mean the completion of a fortune, not its loss. Hitherto, then, he was invulnerable—so he reasoned. It was his son's disgrace that gave the men he had trodden under foot the first weapon they could use against him. That was why it was more damnable in Gourlay's eyes than the conduct of all the prodigals that ever lived. It had enabled his foes to get their knife into him at last, and they were turning the dagger in the wound. All owing to the boy on whom he had staked such hopes of keeping up the Gourlay name! His account with John was lengthening steadily.

Coe was nowhere to be seen. At last Gourlay made up his mind to go out and make inquiries at his house, out the Fleckie Road. It was a quiet, big house, standing by itself, and Gourlay was glad there was nobody to see him.

It was Miss Coe herself who answered his knock at the door.

She was a withered old shrew, with fifty times the spunk of Johnny. On her thin wrists and long hands there was always a pair of bright red mittens, only her finger-tips showing. Her far-sunken and toothless mouth was always working, with a sucking motion of the lips; and her round little knob of a sticking-out chin munched up and down when she spoke, a long, stiff whitish hair slanting out its middle. However much you wished to avoid doing so, you could not keep your eyes from staring at that solitary hair while she was addressing you. It worked up and down so, keeping time to every word she spoke.

"Is your brother in?" said Gourlay. He was too near reality in this sad pass of his to think of "mistering." "Is your brother in?" said he.

"No-a!" she shrilled—for Miss Coe answered questions with an old-maidish scream, as if the news she was giving must be a great surprise both to you and her. "No-a!" she skirled; "he's no-a in-a. Was it ainything particular?"

"No," said Gourlay heavily. "I—I just wanted to see him," and he trudged away.

Miss Coe looked after him for a moment ere she closed the door. "He's wanting to barrow money," she cried; "I'm nearly sure o't! I maun caution Johnny when he comes back frae Fleckie, afore he gangs east the toon. Gourlay could get him to do ocht! He always admired the brute—I'm sure I kenna why. Because he's siccan a silly body himsell, I suppose!"

It was after dark when Gourlay met Coe on the street. He drew him aside in the shadows, and asked for a loan of eighty pounds.

Johnny stammered a refusal. "Hauf the bawbees is mine," his sister had skirled, "and I daur ye to do ony siccan thing, John Coe!"

"It's only for a time," pleaded Gourlay; "and, by God," he flashed, "it's hell in my throat to ask from any man."

"No, no, Mr. Gourlay," said Johnny, "it's quite impossible. I've always looked up to ye, and I'm not unwilling to oblige ye, but I cannot take the risk."

"Risk!" said Gourlay, and stared at the darkness. By hook or by crook he must raise the money to save the House with the Green Shutters. It was no use trying the bank; he had a letter from the banker in his desk, to tell him that his account was overdrawn. And yet if the interest were not paid at once, the lawyers in Glasgow would foreclose, and the Gourlays would be flung upon the street. His proud soul must eat dirt, if need be, for the sake of eighty pounds.

"If I get the baker or Tam Wylie to stand security," he asked, "would ye not oblige me? I think they would do it. I have always felt they respected me."

"Well," said Johnny slowly, fearing his sister's anger, "if ye get the baker and Tam Wylie for security. I'll be on the street for another half-hour."

A figure, muffled in a greatcoat, was seen stealing off through the shadows.

"God's curse on whoever that is," snarled Gourlay, "creeping up to listen to our talk!"

"I don't think so," said Johnny; "it seemed a young chap trying to hide himself."

Gourlay failed to get his securities. The baker, though a poor man, would have stood for him, if Tam Wylie would have joined; but Tam would not budge. He was as clean as gray granite, and as hard.

So Gourlay trudged home through the darkness, beaten at last, mad with shame and anger and foreboding.

The first thing he saw on entering the kitchen was his son—sitting muffled in his coat by the great fender.

FOOTNOTES:

[7] Stot, a bullock; to stot, to bound.



CHAPTER XXV.

Janet and her mother saw a quiver run through Gourlay as he stood and glowered from the threshold. He seemed of monstrous bulk and significance, filling the doorway in his silence.

The quiver that went through him was a sign of his contending angers, his will struggling with the tumult of wrath that threatened to spoil his revenge. To fell that huddled oaf with a blow would be a poor return for all he had endured because of him. He meant to sweat punishment out of him drop by drop, with slow and vicious enjoyment. But the sudden sight of that living disgrace to the Gourlays woke a wild desire to leap on him at once and glut his rage—a madness which only a will like his could control. He quivered with the effort to keep it in.

To bring a beaten and degraded look into a man's face, rend manhood out of him in fear, is a sight that makes decent men wince in pain; for it is an outrage on the decency of life, an offence to natural religion, a violation of the human sanctities. Yet Gourlay had done it once and again. I saw him "down" a man at the Cross once, a big man with a viking beard, dark brown, from which you would have looked for manliness. Gourlay, with stabbing eyes, threatened, and birred, and "downed" him, till he crept away with a face like chalk, and a hunted, furtive eye. Curiously it was his manly beard that made the look such a pain, for its contrasting colour showed the white face of the coward—and a coward had no right to such a beard. A grim and cruel smile went after him as he slunk away. "Ha!" barked Gourlay, in lordly and pursuing scorn, and the fellow leapt where he walked as the cry went through him. To break a man's spirit so, take that from him which he will never recover while he lives, send him slinking away animo castrato—for that is what it comes to—is a sinister outrage of the world. It is as bad as the rape of a woman, and ranks with the sin against the Holy Ghost—derives from it, indeed. Yet it was this outrage that Gourlay meant to work upon his son. He would work him down and down, this son of his, till he was less than a man, a frightened, furtive animal. Then, perhaps, he would give a loose to his other rage, unbuckle his belt, and thrash the grown man like a wriggling urchin on the floor.

As he stood glowering from the door Mrs. Gourlay rose, with an appealing cry of "John!" But Gourlay put his eye on her, and she sank into her chair, staring up at him in terror. The strings of the tawdry cap she wore seemed to choke her, and she unfastened them with nervous fingers, fumbling long beneath her lifted chin to get them loose. She did not remove the cap, but let the strings dangle by her jaw. The silly bits of cloth waggling and quivering, as she turned her head repeatedly from son to husband and from husband to son, added to her air of helplessness and inefficiency. Once she whispered with ghastly intensity, "God have mercy!"

For a length of time there was a loaded silence.

Gourlay went up to the hearth, and looked down on his son from near at hand. John shrank down in his greatcoat. A reek of alcohol rose from around him. Janet whimpered.

But when Gourlay spoke it was with deadly quietude. The moan was in his voice. So great was his controlled wrath that he drew in great, shivering breastfuls of air between the words, as if for strength to utter them; and they quavered forth on it again. He seemed weakened by his own rage.

"Ay, man!" he breathed.... "Ye've won hame, I observe!... Dee-ee-ar me!... Im-phm!"

The contrast between the lowness of his voice and his steady, breathing anger that possessed the air (they felt it coming as on waves) was demoniac, appalling.

John could not speak; he was paralyzed by fear. To have this vast hostile force touch him, yet be still, struck him dumb. Why did his father not break out on him at once? What did he mean? What was he going to do? The jamb of the fireplace cut his right shoulder as he cowered into it, to get away as far as he could.

"I'm saying ... ye've won hame!" quivered Gourlay in a deadly slowness, and his eyes never left his son.

And still the son made no reply. In the silence the ticking of the big clock seemed to fill their world. They were conscious of nothing else. It smote the ear.

"Ay," John gulped at last from a throat that felt closing. The answer seemed dragged out of him by the insistent silence.

"Just so-a!" breathed his father, and his eyes opened in wide flame. He heaved with the great breath he drew.... "Im-phm!" he drawled.

He went through to the scullery at the back of the kitchen to wash his hands. Through the open door Janet and her mother—looking at each other with affrighted eyes—could hear him sneering at intervals, "Ay, man!"... "Just that, now!"... "Im-phm!" And again, "Ay, ay!... Dee-ee-ar me!" in grim, falsetto irony.

When he came back to the kitchen he turned to Janet, and left his son in a suspended agony.

"Ay, woman, Jenny, ye're there!" he said, and nipped her ear as he passed over to his chair. "Were ye in Skeighan the day?"

"Ay, faither," she answered.

"And what did the Skeighan doctor say?"

She raised her large pale eyes to his with a strange look. Then her head sank low on her breast.

"Nothing!" she said at last.

"Nothing!" said he. "Nothing for nothing, then. I hope you didna pay him?"

"No, faither," she answered. "I hadna the bawbees."

"When did ye get back?" he asked.

"Just after—just after——" Her eyes flickered over to John, as if she were afraid of mentioning his name.

"Oh, just after this gentleman! But there's noathing strange in tha-at; you were always after him. You were born after him, and considered after him; he aye had the best o't.—I howp you are in good health?" he sneered, turning to his son. "It would never do for a man to break down at the outset o' a great career!... For ye are at the outset o' a great career; are ye na?"

His speech was as soft as the foot of a tiger, and sheathed as rending a cruelty. There was no escaping the crouching stealth of it. If he had leapt with a roar, John's drunken fury might have lashed itself to rage. But the younger and weaker man was fascinated and helpless before the creeping approach of so monstrous a wrath.

"Eh?" asked Gourlay softly, when John made no reply; "I'm saying you're at the outset o' a great career; are ye no? Eh?"

Soft as his "Eh" was in utterance, it was insinuating, pursuing; it had to be answered.

"No," whimpered John.

"Well, well; you're maybe at the end o't! Have ye been studying hard?"

"Yes," lied John.

"That's right!" cried his father with great heartiness. "There's my brave fellow! Noathing like studying!... And no doubt"—he leaned over suavely—"and no doubt ye've brought a wheen prizes home wi' ye as usual? Eh?"

There was no answer.

"Eh?"

"No," gulped the cowerer.

"Nae prizes!" cried Gourlay, and his eyebrows went up in a pretended surprise. "Nae-ae prizes! Ay, man! Fow's that, na?"

Young Gourlay was being reduced to the condition of a beaten child, who, when his mother asks if he has been a bad boy, is made to sob "Yes" at her knee. "Have you been a good boy?" she asks—"No," he pants; and "Are you sorry for being a bad boy?"—"Yes," he sobs; and "Will you be a good boy now, then?"—"Yes," he almost shrieks, in his desire to be at one with his mother. Young Gourlay was being equally beaten from his own nature, equally battered under by another personality. Only he was not asked to be a good boy. He might gang to hell for anything auld Gourlay cared—when once he had bye with him.

Even as he degraded his son to this state of unnatural cowardice, Gourlay felt a vast disgust swell within him that a son of his should be such a coward. "Damn him!" he thought, glowering with big-eyed contempt at the huddled creature; "he hasna the pluck o' a pig! How can he stand talk like this without showing he's a man? When I was a child on the brisket, if a man had used me as I'm using him, I would have flung mysell at him. He's a pretty-looking object to carry the name o' John Gourla'! My God, what a ke-o of my life I've made—that auld trollop for my wife, that sumph for my son, and that dying lassie for my dochter! Was it I that bred him? That!"

He leapt to his feet in devilish merriment.

"Set out the spirits, Jenny!" he cried; "set out the spirits! My son and I must have a drink together—to celebrate the occeesion; ou ay," he sneered, drawling out the word with sharp, unfamiliar sound, "just to celebrate the occeesion!"

The wild humour that seized him was inevitable, born of a vicious effort to control a rage that was constantly increasing, fed by the sight of the offender. Every time he glanced across at the thing sitting there he was swept with fresh surges of fury and disgust. But his vicious constraint curbed them under, and refused them a natural expression. They sought an unnatural. Some vent they must have, and they found it in a score of wild devilries he began to practise on his son. Wrath fed and checked in one brings the hell on which man is built to the surface. Gourlay was transformed. He had a fluency of speech, a power of banter, a readiness of tongue, which he had never shown before. He was beyond himself. Have you heard the snarl with which a wild beast arrests the escaping prey which it has just let go in enjoying cruelty? Gourlay was that animal. For a moment he would cease to torture his son, feed his disgust with a glower; then the sight of him huddled there would wake a desire to stamp on him; but his will would not allow that, for it would spoil the sport he had set his mind on; and so he played with the victim which he would not kill.

"Set out the speerits, Jenny," he birred, when she wavered in fear. "What are ye shaking for? Set out the speerits—just to shelebrate the joyful occeesion, ye know—ay, ay, just to shelebrate the joyful occeesion!"

Janet brought a tray, with glasses, from the pantry. As she walked, the rims of the glasses shivered and tinkled against each other, from her trembling. Then she set a bottle on the table.

Gourlay sent it crashing to the floor. "A bottle!" he roared. "A bottle for huz twa! To hell wi' bottles! The jar, Jenny, the jar; set out the jar, lass, set out the jar. For we mean to make a night of it, this gentleman and me. Ay," he yawed with a vicious smile, "we'll make a night o't—we two. A night that Barbie'll remember loang!"

"Have ye skill o' drink?" he asked, turning to his son.

"No," wheezed John.

"No!" cried his father. "I thought ye learned everything at College! Your education's been neglected. But I'll teach ye a lesson or this nicht's by. Ay, by God," he growled, "I'll teach ye a lesson."

Curb his temper as he might, his own behaviour was lashing it to frenzy. Through the moaning intensity peculiar to his vicious rage there leapt at times a wild-beast snarl. Every time they heard it, it cut the veins of his listeners with a start of fear—it leapt so suddenly.

"Ha'e, sir!" he cried.

John raised his dull, white face and looked across at the bumper which his father poured him. But he felt the limbs too weak beneath him to go and take it.

"Bide where ye are!" sneered his father, "bide where ye are! I'll wait on ye; I'll wait on ye. Man, I waited on ye the day that ye were bo-orn! The heavens were hammering the world as John Gourla' rode through the storm for a doctor to bring hame his heir. The world was feared, but he wasna feared," he roared in Titanic pride, "he wasna feared; no, by God, for he never met what scaured him!... Ay, ay," he birred softly again, "ay, ay, ye were ushered loudly to the world, serr! Verra appropriate for a man who was destined to make such a name!... Eh?... Verra appropriate, serr; verra appropriate! And you'll be ushered just as loudly out o't. Oh, young Gourlay's death maun make a splurge, ye know—a splurge to attract folk's attention!"

John's shaking hand was wet with the spilled whisky.

"Take it off," sneered his father, boring into him with a vicious eye; "take it off, serr; take off your dram! Stop! Somebody wrote something about that—some poetry or other. Who was it?"

"I dinna ken," whimpered John.

"Don't tell lies now. You do ken. I heard you mention it to Loranogie. Come on now—who was it?"

"It was Burns," said John.

"Oh, it was Burns, was it? And what had Mr. Burns to say on the subject? Eh?"

"'Freedom and whisky gang thegither: tak aff your dram,'" stammered John.

"A verra wise remark," said Gourlay gravely. "'Freedom and whisky gang thegither;'" he turned the quotation on his tongue, as if he were savouring a tit-bit. "That's verra good," he approved. "You're a great admirer of Burns, I hear. Eh?"

"Yes," said John.

"Do what he bids ye, then. Take off your dram! It'll show what a fine free fellow you are!"

It was a big, old-fashioned Scotch drinking-glass, containing more than half a gill of whisky, and John drained it to the bottom. To him it had been a deadly thing at first, coming thus from his father's hand. He had taken it into his own with a feeling of aversion that was strangely blended of disgust and fear. But the moment it touched his lips, desire leapt in his throat to get at it.

"Good!" roared his father in mock admiration. "God, ye have the thrapple! When I was your age that would have choked me. I must have a look at that throat o' yours. Stand up!... Stand up when I tall 'ee!"

John rose swaying to his feet. Months of constant tippling, culminating in a wild debauch, had shattered him. He stood in a reeling world. And the fear weakening his limbs changed his drunken stupor to a heart-heaving sickness. He swayed to and fro, with a cold sweat oozing from his chalky face.

"What's ado wi' the fellow?" cried Gourlay. "Oom? He's swinging like a saugh-wand. I must wa-alk round this and have a look!"

John's drunken submissiveness encouraged his father to new devilries. The ease with which he tortured him provoked him to more torture; he went on more and more viciously, as if he were conducting an experiment, to see how much the creature would bear before he turned. Gourlay was enjoying the glutting of his own wrath.

He turned his son round with a finger and thumb on his shoulder, in insolent inspection, as you turn an urchin round to see him in his new suit of clothes. Then he crouched before him, his face thrust close to the other, and peered into his eyes, his mouth distent with an infernal smile. "My boy, Johnny," he said sweetly, "my boy, Johnny," and patted him gently on the cheek. John raised dull eyes and looked into his father's. Far within him a great wrath was gathering through his fear. Another voice, another self, seemed to whimper, with dull iteration, "I'll kill him; I'll kill him; by God, I'll kill him—if he doesna stop this—if he keeps on like this at me!" But his present and material self was paralyzed with fear.

"Open your mouth!" came the snarl—"wider, damn ye! wider!"

"Im-phm!" said Gourlay, with a critical drawl, pulling John's chin about to see into him the deeper. "Im-phm! God, it's like a furnace! What's the Latin for throat?"

"Guttur," said John.

"Gutter," said his father. "A verra appropriate name! Yours stinks like a cesspool! What have you been doing till't? I'm afraid ye aren't in very good health, after a-all.... Eh?... Mrs. Gourla', Mrs. Gourla'! He's in very bad case, this son of yours, Mrs. Gourla'! Fine I ken what he needs, though.—Set out the brandy, Jenny, set out the brandy," he roared; "whisky's not worth a damn for him! Stop; it was you gaed the last time—it's your turn now, auld wife, it's your turn now! Gang for the brandy to your twa John Gourla's. We're a pair for a woman to be proud of!"

He gazed after his wife as she tottered to the pantry.

"Your skirt's on the gape, auld wife," he sang; "your skirt's on the gape; as use-u-al," he drawled; "as use-u-al. It was always like that; and it always scunnered me, for I aye liked things tidy—though I never got them. However, I maunna compleen when ye bore sic a braw son to my name. He's a great consolation! Imphm, he is that—a great consolation!"

The brandy bottle slipped from the quivering fingers and was smashed to pieces on the floor.

"Hurrah!" yelled Gourlay.

He seemed rapt and carried by his own devilry. The wreck and ruin strewn about the floor consorted with the ruin of his fortunes; let all go smash—what was the use of caring? Now in his frenzy, he, ordinarily so careful, seemed to delight in the smashings and the breakings; they suited his despair.

He saw that his spirit of destruction frightened them, too, and that was another reason to indulge it.

"To hell with everything," he yelled, like a mock-bacchanal. "We're the hearty fellows! We'll make a red night now we're at it!" And with that he took the heel of a bottle on his toe and sent it flying among the dishes on the dresser. A great plate fell, split in two.

"Poor fellow!" he whined, turning to his son; "poo-oor fellow! I fear he has lost his pheesic. For that was the last bottle o' brandy in my aucht; the last John Gourlay had, the last he'll ever buy. What am I to do wi' ye now?... Eh?... I must do something; it's coming to the bit now, sir."

As he stood in a heaving silence the sobbing of the two women was heard through the room. John was still swaying on the floor.

Sometimes Gourlay would run the full length of the kitchen, and stand there glowering on a stoop; then he would come crouching up to his son on a vicious little trot, pattering in rage, the broken glass crunching and grinding beneath his feet. At any moment he might spring.

"What do ye think I mean to do wi' ye now?" he moaned.... "Eh?... What do ye think I mean to do wi' ye now?"

As he came grinning in rage his lips ran out to their full width, and the tense slit showed his teeth to their roots. The gums were white. The stricture of the lips had squeezed them bloodless.

He went back to the dresser once more and bent low beside it, glancing at his son across his left shoulder, with his head flung back sideways, his right fist clenched low and ready from a curve of the elbow. It swung heavy as a mallet by his thigh. Janet got to her knees and came shuffling across the floor on them, though her dress was tripping her, clasping her outstretched hands, and sobbing in appeal, "Faither, faither; O faither; for God's sake, faither!" She clung to him. He unclenched his fist and lifted her away. Then he came crouching and quivering across the floor slowly, a gleaming devilry in the eyes that devoured his son. His hands were like outstretched claws, and shivered with each shiver of the voice that moaned, through set teeth, "What do ye think I mean to do wi' ye now?... What do ye think I mean to do wi' ye now?... Ye damned sorrow and disgrace that ye are, what do ye think I mean to do wi' ye now?"

"Run, John!" screamed Mrs. Gourlay, leaping to her feet. With a hunted cry young Gourlay sprang to the door. So great had been the fixity of Gourlay's wrath, so tense had he been in one direction, as he moved slowly on his prey, that he could not leap to prevent him. As John plunged into the cool, soft darkness, his mother's "Thank God!" rang past him on the night.

His immediate feeling was of coolness and width and spaciousness, in contrast with the hot grinding hostility that had bored so closely in on him for the last hour. He felt the benignness of the darkened heavens. A tag of some forgotten poem he had read came back to his mind, and, "Come, kindly night, and cover me," he muttered, with shaking lips; and felt how true it was. My God, what a relief to be free of his father's eyes! They had held him till his mother's voice broke the spell. They seemed to burn him now.

What a fool he had been to face his father when empty both of food and drink! Every man was down-hearted when he was empty. If his mother had had time to get the tea, it would have been different; but the fire had been out when he went in. "He wouldn't have downed me so easy if I had had anything in me," he muttered, and his anger grew as he thought of all he had been made to suffer. For he was still the swaggerer. Now that the incubus of his father's tyranny no longer pressed on him directly, a great hate rose within him for the tyrant. He would go back and have it out when he was primed. "It's the only hame I have," he sobbed angrily to the darkness; "I have no other place to gang till! Yes, I'll go back and have it out with him when once I get something in me, so I will." It was no disgrace to suck courage from the bottle for that encounter with his father, for nobody could stand up to black Gourlay—nobody. Young Gourlay was yielding to a peculiar fatalism of minds diseased: all that affects them seems different from all that affects everybody else; they are even proud of their separate and peculiar doom. Young Gourlay not thought but felt it—he was different from everybody else. The heavens had cursed nobody else with such a terrible sire. It was no cowardice to fill yourself with drink before you faced him.

A drunkard will howl you an obscene chorus the moment after he has wept about his dead child. For a mind in the delirium of drink is no longer a coherent whole, but a heap of shattered bits, which it shows one after the other to the world. Hence the many transformations of that semi-madness, and their quick variety. Young Gourlay was showing them now. His had always been a wandering mind, deficient in application and control, and as he neared his final collapse it became more and more variable, the prey of each momentary thought. In a short five minutes of time he had been alive to the beauty of the darkness, cowering before the memory of his father's eyes, sobbing in self-pity and angry resolve, shaking in terror—indeed he was shaking now. But his vanity came uppermost. As he neared the Red Lion he stopped suddenly, and the darkness seemed on fire against his cheeks. He would have to face curious eyes, he reflected. It was from the Red Lion he and Aird had started so grandly in the autumn. It would never do to come slinking back like a whipped cur; he must carry it off bravely in case the usual busybodies should be gathered round the bar. So with his coat flapping lordly on either side of him, his hands deep in his trousers pockets, and his hat on the back of his head, he drove at the swing-doors with an outshot chest, and entered with a "breenge." But for all his swagger he must have had a face like death, for there was a cry among the idlers. A man breathed, "My God! What's the matter?" With shaking knees Gourlay advanced to the bar, and, "For God's sake, Aggie," he whispered, "give me a Kinblythmont!"

It went at a gulp.

"Another!" he gasped, like a man dying of thirst, whom his first sip maddens for more. "Another! Another!"

He had tossed the other down his burning throat when Deacon Allardyce came in.

He knew his man the moment he set eyes on him, but, standing at the door, he arched his hand above his brow, as you do in gazing at a dear unexpected friend, whom you pretend not to be quite sure of, so surprised and pleased are you to see him there.

"Ith it Dyohn?" he cried. "It ith Dyohn!" And he toddled forward with outstretched hand. "Man Dyohn!" he said again, as if he could scarce believe the good news, and he waggled the other's hand up and down, with both his own clasped over it. "I'm proud to thee you, thir; I am that. And tho you're won hame, ay! Im-phm! And how are ye tummin on?"

"Oh, I'm all right, Deacon," said Gourlay with a silly laugh. "Have a wet?" The whisky had begun to warm him.

"A wha-at?" said the Deacon, blinking in a puzzled fashion with his bleary old eyes.

"A dram—a drink—a drop o' the Auld Kirk," said Gourlay, with a stertorous laugh down through his nostrils.

"Hi! hi!" laughed the Deacon in his best falsetto. "Ith that what ye call it up in Embro? A wet, ay! Ah, well, maybe I will take a little drope, theeing you're tho ready wi' your offer."

They drank together.

"Aggie, fill me a mutchkin when you're at it," said Gourlay to the pretty barmaid with the curly hair. He had spent many an hour with her last summer in the bar. The four big whiskies he had swallowed in the last half-hour were singing in him now, and he blinked at her drunkenly.

There was a scarlet ribbon on her dark curls, coquettish, vivid, and Gourlay stared at it dreamily, partly in a drunken daze, and partly because a striking colour always brought a musing and self-forgetting look within his eyes. All his life he used to stare at things dreamily, and come to himself with a start when spoken to. He forgot himself now.

"Aggie," he said, and put his hand out to hers clumsily where it rested on the counter—"Aggie, that ribbon's infernal bonny on your dark hair!"

She tossed her head, and perked away from him on her little high heels. Him, indeed!—the drunkard! She wanted none of his compliments!

There were half a dozen in the place by this time, and they all stared with greedy eyes. "That's young Gourlay—him that was expelled," was heard, the last an emphatic whisper, with round eyes of awe at the offence that must have merited such punishment. "Expelled, mind ye!"—with a round shake of the head. "Watch Allardyce. We'll see fun."

"What's this 'expelled' is, now?" said John Toodle, with a very considering look and tone in his uplifted face—"properly speaking, that is," he added, implying that of course he knew the word in its ordinary sense, but was not sure of it "properly speaking."

"Flung oot," said Drucken Wabster, speaking from the fullness of his own experience.

"Whisht!" said a third. "Here's Tam Brodie. Watch what he does."

The entrance of Brodie spoiled sport for the Deacon. He had nothing of that malicious finesse that made Allardyce a genius at nicking men on the raw. He went straight to his work, stabbing like an awl.

"Hal-lo!" he cried, pausing with contempt in the middle of the word, when he saw young Gourlay. "Hal-lo! You here!—Brig o' the Mains, miss, if you please.—Ay, man! God, you've been making a name up in Embro. I hear you stood up till him gey weel," and he winked openly to those around.

Young Gourlay's maddened nature broke at the insult. "Damn you," he screamed, "leave me alone, will you? I have done nothing to you, have I?"

Brodie stared at him across his suspended whisky glass, an easy and assured contempt curling his lip. "Don't greet owre't, my bairn," said he, and even as he spoke John's glass shivered on his grinning teeth. Brodie leapt on him, lifted him, and sent him flying.

"That's a game of your father's, you damned dog," he roared. "But there's mair than him can play the game!"

"Canny, my freendth, canny!" piped Allardyce, who was vexed at a fine chance for his peculiar craft being spoiled by mere brutality of handling. All this was most inartistic. Brodie never had the fine stroke.

Gourlay picked himself bleeding from the floor, and holding a handkerchief to his mouth, plunged headlong from the room. He heard the derisive roar that came after him stop, strangled by the sharp swing-to of the door. But it seemed to echo in his burning ears as he strode madly on through the darkness. He uncorked his mutchkin and drank it like water. His swollen lip smarted at first, but he drank till it was a mere dead lump to his tongue, and he could not feel the whisky on the wound.

His mind at first was a burning whirl through drink and rage, with nothing determined and nothing definite. But thought began to shape itself. In a vast vague circle of consciousness his mind seemed to sit in the centre and think with preternatural clearness. Though all around was whirling and confused, drink had endowed some inner eye of the brain with unnatural swift vividness. Far within the humming circle of his mind he saw an instant and terrible revenge on Brodie, acted it, and lived it now. His desires were murderers, and he let them slip, gloating in the cruelties that hot fancy wreaked upon his enemy. Then he suddenly remembered his father. A rush of fiery blood seemed to drench all his body as he thought of what had passed between them. "But, by Heaven," he swore, as he threw away his empty bottle, "he won't use me like that another time; I have blood in me now." His maddened fancy began building a new scene, with the same actors, the same conditions, as the other, but an issue gloriously diverse. With vicious delight he heard his father use the same sneers, the same gibes, the same brutalities; then he turned suddenly and had him under foot, kicking, bludgeoning, stamping the life out. He would do it, by Heaven, he would do it! The memory of what had happened came fierily back, and made the pressing darkness burn. His wrath was brimming on the edge, ready to burst, and he felt proudly that it would no longer ebb in fear. Whisky had killed fear, and left a hysterical madman, all the more dangerous because he was so weak. Let his father try it on now; he was ready for him!

And his father was ready for him, for he knew what had happened at the inn. Mrs. Webster, on her nightly hunt for the man she had sworn to honour and obey, having drawn several public-houses blank, ran him to earth at last in the bar-room of the Red Lion. "Yes, yes, Kirsty," he cried, eager to prevent her tongue, "I know I'm a blagyird; but oh, the terrible thing that has happened!" He so possessed her with his graphic tale that he was allowed to go chuckling back to his potations, while she ran hot-foot to the Green Shutters.

"Eh, poo-oor Mrs. Gourlay; and oh, your poo-oor boy, too; and eh, that brute Tam Brodie——" Even as she came through the door the voluble clatter was shrilling out the big tidings, before she was aware of Gourlay's presence. She faltered beneath his black glower.

"Go on!" he said, and ground it out of her.

"The damned sumph!" he growled, "to let Brodie hammer him!" For a moment, it is true, his anger was divided, stood in equipoise, even dipped "Brodie-ward." "I've an account to sattle wi' him!" he thought grimly. "When I get my claw on his neck, I'll teach him better than to hit a Gourlay! I wonder," he mused, with a pride in which was neither doubt nor wonder—"I wonder will he fling the father as he flang the son!" But that was the instinct of his blood, not enough to make him pardon John. On the contrary, here was a new offence of his offspring. On the morrow Barbie would be burning with another affront which he had put upon the name of Gourlay. He would waste no time when he came back, be he drunk or be he sober; he would strip the flesh off him.

"Jenny," he said, "bring me the step-ladder."

He would pass the time till the prodigal came back—and he was almost certain to come back, for where could he go in Barbie?—he would pass the time by trying to improve the appearance of the house. He had spent money on his house till the last, and even now had the instinct to embellish it. Not that it mattered to him now; still he could carry out a small improvement he had planned before. The kitchen was ceiled in dark timber, and on the rich brown rafters there were wooden pegs and bars, for the hanging of Gourlay's sticks and fishing-rods. His gun was up there, too, just above the hearth. It had occurred to him about a month ago, however, that a pair of curving steel rests, that would catch the glint from the fire, would look better beneath his gun than the dull pegs, where it now lay against a joist. He might as well pass the time by putting them up.

The bringing of the steps, light though they were, was too much for Janet's weak frame, and she stopped in a fit of coughing, clutching the ladder for support, while it shook to her spasms.

"Tuts, Jenny, this'll never do," said Gourlay, not unkindly. He took the ladder away from her and laid his hand on her shoulder. "Away to your bed, lass. You maunna sit so late."

But Janet was anxious for her brother, and wanted to sit up till he came home. She answered, "Yes," to her father, but idled discreetly, to consume the time.

"Where's my hammer?" snarled Gourlay.

"Is it no by the clock?" said his wife wearily. "Oh, I remember, I remember! I gied it to Mrs. Webster to break some brie-stone, to rub the front doorstep wi'. It'll be lying in the porch."

"Oh, ay, as usual," said Gourlay—"as usual."

"John!" she cried in alarm, "you don't mean to take down the gun, do ye?"

"Huts, you auld fule, what are you skirling for? D'ye think I mean to shoot the dog? Set back on your creepie and make less noise, will ye?"

Ere he had driven a nail in the rafter John came in, and sat down by the fire, taking up the great poker, as if to cover his nervousness. If Gourlay had been on the floor he would have grappled with him there and then. But the temptation to gloat over his victim from his present height was irresistible. He went up another step, and sat down on the very summit of the ladder, his feet resting on one of the lower rounds. The hammer he had been using was lying on his thigh, his hand clutched about its haft.

"Ay, man, you've been taking a bit walk, I hear."

John made no reply, but played with the poker. It was so huge, owing to Gourlay's whim, that when it slid through his fingers it came down on the muffled hearthstone with a thud like a pavior's hammer.

"I'm told you saw the Deacon on your rounds? Did he compliment you on your return?"

At the quiet sneer a lightning-flash showed John that Allardyce had quizzed him too. For a moment he was conscious of a vast self-pity. "Damn them, they're all down on me," he thought. Then a vindictive rage against them all took hold of him, tense, quivering.

"Did you see Thomas Brodie when ye were out?" came the suave inquiry.

"I saw him," said John, raising fierce eyes to his father's. He was proud of the sudden firmness in his voice. There was no fear in it, no quivering. He was beyond caring what happened to the world or him.

"Oh, you saw him," roared Gourlay, as his anger leapt to meet the anger of his son. "And what did he say to you, may I speir?... Or maybe I should speir what he did.... Eh?" he grinned.

"By God, I'll kill ye," screamed John, springing to his feet, with the poker in his hand. The hammer went whizzing past his ear. Mrs. Gourlay screamed and tried to rise from her chair, her eyes goggling in terror. As Gourlay leapt, John brought the huge poker with a crash on the descending brow. The fiercest joy of his life was the dirl that went up his arm as the steel thrilled to its own hard impact on the bone. Gourlay thudded on the fender, his brow crashing on the rim.

At the blow there had been a cry as of animals from the two women. There followed an eternity of silence, it seemed, and a haze about the place; yet not a haze, for everything was intensely clear; only it belonged to another world. One terrible fact had changed the Universe. The air was different now—it was full of murder. Everything in the room had a new significance, a sinister meaning. The effect was that of an unholy spell.

As through a dream Mrs. Gourlay's voice was heard crying on her God.

John stood there, suddenly weak in his limbs, and stared, as if petrified, at the red poker in his hand. A little wisp of grizzled hair stuck to the square of it, severed, as by scissors, between the sharp edge and the bone. It was the sight of that bit of hair that roused him from his stupor—it seemed so monstrous and horrible, sticking all by itself to the poker. "I didna strike him so hard," he pleaded, staring vaguely, "I didna strike him so hard." Now that the frenzy had left him, he failed to realize the force of his own blow. Then with a horrid fear on him, "Get up, faither," he entreated; "get up, faither! O man, you micht get up!"