From the window Isbel watched. Her thin hair fell over her wasted temples, and she pressed her hand on her breast, searching as though something were missing there. And so there was. It was about a lung and a half which she missed. Nevertheless there had fallen a peace upon Isbel to which she had been unaccustomed. Faint tremors ran through her body, and though the window was wide open, she often gasped for breath. A blissful, painless weariness stole over her.
Cleg was playing below. He had achieved a victory, complete, yet not quite bloodless, for Tam Gillivray was staunching his nose at the smith's cauldron with a lump of cold iron at the back of his neck. Cleg, prancing in haughty state and followed by a little train of admirers, was now dragging the basin in triumph round the yard. He was pretending that it was a railway train drawn by an engine of extremely refractory disposition, which curvetted and reared in a most unenginely manner.
Isbel watched him from her window.
"He is happy, puir laddie – maybe happier than he'll ever be again. Let him bide a wee. I'll gie him a cry, in time."
Then she looked again. She prayed a little while with her eyes shut. Beneath, Cleg was holding his court. He had crowned himself with the basin, and pulled his hair through it in the shape of a plume. As an appropriate finish for the whole, he had stuck the mop of protruding locks full of feathers, and now he was presiding over a court of justice at which Michael Hennessy was being tried for his life on the charge of murdering a "yellow yoit." In due course the verdict of justifiable homicide was returned, and the culprit sentenced to kill another, or be belted round the brickyard.
Then, wearying for a fresher ploy, the boys decided to build a fortress, and instantly, as soon as they had thought of it, they set to work with a mountain of refuse bricks, Cleg Kelly putting no hand to the manual labour, but being easily first in the direction of affairs. This "gaffership" suited Cleg so well that he turned three excellent wheels in the greatness of his content, and then immediately knocked over several boys for presuming to imitate him, when they ought to have been fulfilling orders and building bricks into a fortress.
From the window his mother still watched him. She smiled to see his light-heart joy, and said again, as if to herself, "In a while I shall cry to him – I dinna need him yet!"
All about there grew up in her ears a sound of sweet music, as of the many singers at the kirk on still, warm Sabbath days, singing the psalms which she remembered long ago in Ormiland, only they sounded very far away. And at times the brickyard reeled and dazzled, the arid trodden ground and steaming bricks fell back, the cracked walls opened out, and she saw the sun shining upon golden hills, the like of which she had never seen before.
"What is this? Oh, what's this?" she asked herself aloud, and the sound of her own voice was in her ears as the roaring of many waters.
It seemed to her to be almost time now. She leaned forward wearily to call her son to help her. But he was sitting on a throne in the midst of his castle, dressed as Robin Hood, with all his merry men about him. He looked so happy, and he laughed so loud, that Isbel said again to herself —
"I can manage yet for half an hour, and then I shall cry to him."
But her son caught sight of her at the window. He was so elated that he did not mind noticing his mother, as a common boy would have done. He waved his hand to her, calling out loud —
"Mither, mither, I'm biggin' a bonny hoose for ye to leeve in!"
Isbel smiled, and it was as if the sun which shone on the hills of her dream had touched her thin face and made it also beautiful for the last time before sundown.
"My guid boy – my nice boy," she said, "the Lord will look till him! He said he was biggin' a hoose for his mither. Let him big his hoose. In an hour I shall cry to him – my ain laddie!"
Yet in an hour she did not cry, and it was the only time she had ever broken her word to her son.
But that was because Isbel Kelly had journeyed where no crying is. Neither shall there be any more pain.
ADVENTURE V.
THE BRIGANDS OF THE CITY
Cleg Kelly's mother lay still in her resting grave, and had no more need of pity. Cleg abode with his father in the tumble-down shanty by the brickfield at Easter Beach, and asked for no pity either. Cleg had promised his mother, Isbel, that he would not forsake his father.
"Na, I'll no rin awa' frae ye," so he told his father, frankly, "for I promised my mither; but gin ye lick me, I'll pit my wee knife intil ye when ye are sleepin'! Mind ye that!"
And his father minded, which was fortunate for both.
Cleg was now twelve, and much respected by his father, who fully believed that he was speaking the truth. Tim Kelly, snow-shoveller, feared his son Cleg with his sudden wild-cat fierceness, much more than he feared God – more, even, than he feared Father Donnelly, to whom he went twice a year to ease his soul of a portion of his more specially heinous sins.
Yet Tim Kelly was a better man, because of the respect in which he held his son. He even boasted of Cleg's cleverness when he was safe among his old cronies in Mother Flannigan's kitchen, or in the bar-parlour at Hare's public.
"Shure, there's not the like av him in this kingdom av ignorant blockheads. My Clig's the natest and the illigantest gossoon that stips in his own boot-leather. Shure, he can lick anything at all near his own weight. Sorra's in him, he can make his ould man stand about. Faith, 'tis him that's goin' to be the great man intoirely, is our little Clig."
These were the opinions of his proud father.
But Jim Carnochan, better known as the "Devil's Lickpot," demurred. If Cleg was so clever a boy, why was he not set to work? A boy so smart ought long ere this to have been learning the profession. To this Mother Flannigan agreed, for she shared in the profits.
"My Peether, rest his sowl for a good lad – him as was hanged be token of false evidence – and the bobbies findin' the gintleman's goold watch in Peether's pocket, was at wurrk whin he was six years av his age. Take my wurrd for it, Timothy Kelly, there never yet was a thruely great man that didn't begin his education young."
"Maybe," said Tim, "and that's the raison, Misthress Flannigan, that so few av them grew up to be ould men."
"Gin he was my boy," said Sandy Telfer, whose occupation was breaking into houses during the summer holidays (one of the safest "lays" in the profession, but looked down upon as mean-spirited), "I wad be haein' him through the windows and openin' the front doors every dark nicht."
"Ah, you wud, wud ye?" replied Tim Kelly contemptuously; "you're the great boy to talk, you that has no more manhud in ye than a draff-sack wid a hole in it. Yuss, ye can do yer dirthy way wid your own mane-spirited spalpeens, wid no more spunk than a dure-mat. But I'd have ye know that my Clig cud make hares av you an' ivvery Telfer av the lot o' ye – hear to me now!"
And Tim Kelly shook his fist within an inch of the nose of Sandy Telfer, who, not being a man of war, showed by the curl of his nostril and the whitening of his lip, that he did not find the bouquet of Tim Kelly's bunch-of-fives an agreeable perfume. Tim Kelly waited to see if on any pretext he could bring his fist into closer contact with Sandy Telfer's face, but he found no cause.
"My Clig," he said emphatically, "is goin' to be a great characther. He is jist the boy that is to climb the top laddher av the profession. It's his father that must be out at night, an' run the risk av the dirthy bobby wid his lanthern, an' the gintleman av the house in his night-shirt wid a cruel poker. But Clig shall sit safe and aisy in his chair, an' make his thousands a year wid the scrap av his pen. He'll promothe companies, an' be out av the way when they burst. He'll write so illegant that he cud turn ye off another gintleman's signathure as fast as his own, an' worth a deal more on a bit av paper than anny av our names – "
"Come away hame, faither, sittin' bletherin' there. Ye hae been here lang enough."
It was the