Next morning, although he awoke early, it was nine o'clock before Mamma let him get up.
"Don't rush! We'll take it easy. Conserve your strength, my boy," she said, as she brought him his morning tea. "We've plenty of time and you've a long journey ahead of you."
She apparently visualised him journeying to Calcutta without repose, and in consequence of his deferred rising he was only half-dressed when his father called to him from the foot of the stairs.
Brodie would not depart an inch from his habit; he would, indeed, have considered it a weakness to wait to sec his son away, and at half- past nine he was off to business in the usual fashion. As Matthew came scuttering down the stairs in his braces, a towel in his hand, his wet hair over his pallid brow, and came up to his father in the hall, Brodie fixed a magnetic eye upon his son and held for a moment the other's wavering glance. "Well, Matthew Brodie," he said, looking down at his son, "you're off to-day, and that means good-bye to your home for five years. I hope to God you are goin' to prove yourself in these years. You’re a sleekit, namby-pamby fellow and your mother has a' but spoiled ye, but there must be good in ye. There must be good," he cried, "because you're my son! I want that brought out in ye. Look a man between the eyes and don't hang your head like a dog. I'm sendin' you out there to make a man of ye. Don't forget that you're the son, ay, and the heir of James Brodie.
"I've got you everything you want," he continued. "A position of trust and of great possibilities. I've given you the best outfit money can buy, and best of all I've given you a name. Be a man, sir, but above all be a Brodie. Behave like a Brodie wherever you are, or God help you."
He shook hands firmly, turned and was gone.
Matthew finished dressing in a maze, aided by Mamma who continually darted in and out of his room ate his breakfast without tasting it, and was startled by the cab at the door before he could collect himself. Other farewells were showered upon him. Old Grandma Brodie, cross at being disturbed so early, called out from the head of the stairs as she clutched her long nightgown above her bare, bony feet, "Good-bye to ye, then, and watch you don't get drouned on the way over!' Nessie, in tears long before the time, from the very solemnity of the occasion, could only sob incoherently, "I'll write to you, Matt! I hope the compass will be useful to you." Mary was deeply affected. She clasped her arms round Matthew's neck and kissed him fondly. "Keep a stiff upper lip, Matt dear. Be brave, and nothing can hurt you, and don't forget your own, loving sister."
He was in the cab with Mamma, sitting in hunched apathy, being bumped unmercifully, on the way to the station, while Mrs. Brodie looked proudly out of the window. In her mind's eye she saw people nudging each other as they watched the swe^p of her spanking equipage, and saying, "That's Mrs. Brodie seein' her laddie off to Calcutta. She's been a good mother to that boy, ay, and a fine fellow, he is too, an' all, an' all." Indeed it was not every day that a mother in Levenford took her son to the boat for India, she reflected complacently, drawing her paletot more becomingly around her and sitting up grandly in the decrepit vehicle as though it were her private carriage.
At the station she paid the cabman with a conscious air, glancing sideways from under her hat at the few chance loungers under the archway, and to the man who carried the luggage she could not forbear to remark, casually, "This young gentleman is for India."
The porter, staggering under the heavy case and stupefied by the reek of camphor which emanated from it, twisted his red neck around the angle of the box and gaped at her obtusely, too overcome to speak.
Although they were now on the platform, the train of destiny was late, for the schedule of the Darroch and Levenford joint railway, never the object of public approbation, did not to-day belie its reputation and was apparently not working to any degree of accuracy.
Mamma tapped her foot restlessly, pursed her lips impatiently, looked repeatedly at the silver watch that hung around her neck by its chain of plaited hair; Matthew, filled with a despairing hope that there might have been a breakdown on the line, looked vaguely, disconsolately, at the porter who, in turn, gazed with open mouth at Mrs. Brodie. He had never seen her before and, as his oafish look
engulfed her brisk, nonchalant demeanour, so outside the scope of his local experience, he took her for a prodigy a traveller of at least European experience.
At last a clanking noise was heard in the distance, sounding the knell of Matt's last hope. The train smoked its way into the station and in a few minutes puffed out again with Mrs. Brodie and Matthew inside, facing each other on the hard wooden seats and leaving the porter looking incredulously at the penny piece which the lady had magnificently pressed into his palm. He scratched his head, spat disgustedly, dismissed the whole episode as a mystery beyond the powers of his comprehension.
In the train Mrs. Brodie utilised every lull in the din, when her voice might be audible, to utter some lively remark to Matthew, and between these parentheses she contemplated him vivaciously. Matthew squirmed in his seat; he knew he v/as the object of a cheering-up process and he loathed it. It's all right for her, he thought moodily; she hasn't got to go.
At length they reached Glasgow, after a journey that was, for Matthew, mournfully short. They made their way out of the station down Jamaica Street and along the Broomielaw to where the S.S. Irrawaddy was lying at Stobcross dock with steam up and two tugs in attendance. She seemed to them an enormous ship with paddles wide as the spread of a bat's wings and a funnel which dwarfed the masts of all the other shipping, and Mamma remarked admiringly: "My word! That's a great, big boat, Matt! I'll not be so feared for ye when I think on ye aboard o' that. That lum is as high as the town steeple. Look at a' these folks on deck too. I suppose we maun go on board." Together they advanced up the gangway and gained the deck, where the flurry of embarkation had begun and an exaggerated
bustle and confusion prevailed. Sailors leaped about the deck performing miracles with ropes; officers in gold braid shouted importantly and blew whistles loudly: stewards pursued passengers and passengers ran after stewards; Anglo-Indians % returning to the country of their selection glared passionately at all who got in their way; relatives on the verge of bereavement stubbed their toes over iron stanchions and piles of luggage.
In the face of this hustling activity Mrs. Brodie's spirit quailed. The superior look of the purser as he directed them below intimidated her and though she had intended at least to approach the captain of the vessel and turn over Matthew, in the appropriate manner, to his especial care, now she wilted; as she sat in the stuffy confines of the den which was to serve Matt as cabin for the next eight weeks and felt the gentle lift and fall of the boat against the fenders of the quay, she realised that the sooner she went ashore the better.
Now that the actual farewell was at hand, the spurious exaltation - derived from her romantic imagination collapsed, as her husband had sardonically foreseen, like a pricked bladder. She was herself again, the weak woman who had given birth to this child, suckled him at her breast, seen him grow to manhood, and now was about to see him leave her. A tear crept slowly down her cheek.
"Oh Matt," she cried, "I've tried to bear up well for ye, son for your own dear sake, but I'm sorry to lose you. I doubt if you're the man for these foreign parts. I would rather you stayed at home."