Scotland -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
"Mummie, mummie, I know I've been naughty!" And as he felt the wetness
of her face he cried out, "Oh, mummie, have I made you cry? I will be
good! I will be good! I'll never make you cry again! I know I was a
beast to go 'cos you really were frightened of us getting measles, but
oh, mummie, I did so want to see a tiger!"
They clung to each other, weeping, and he said things into her neck that
were far more babyish than usual and yet fiercely manly, and they almost
melted into each other in the hot flow of loving tears.
"You were quite right to whip me," he told her. "I wouldn't have
believed you were really cross if you hadn't hurt me." Presently, when
he was lying quietly in her arms, all sticky sweetness like toffee, he
sighed, "Oh, darling, the circus was lovely! There were such clever
people. There was a Cossack horseman who picked up handkerchiefs off the
ground when he was riding at full speed, and there was a most beautiful
lady in pink satin. Mummie, you'd look lovely in pink satin!--and she'd
bells on her legs and arms, and she waggled them and it made a tune.
That was lovely, but I liked the animals best. Oh, darling, the lions!"
She rebuked him for his continued enjoyment of an illicit spectacle that
ought now to be regarded only as material for repentance, but he
protested: "Mummie, you are mean. Now you've whipped me for going,
surely I've a right to enjoy it." But he lay back and just gave himself
up to loving her. "Oh, you beautiful mummie. You've such lots and lots
of hair. If there were two little men just as big as my fingers, they
could go into your hair, one at each ear, and walk about it like people
do in the African forests, couldn't they? And they'd meet in your
parting, and one would say to the other, 'Mr. Livingstone, I presume?'"
They both laughed and hugged each other, and he presently fell asleep as
suddenly as children do.
She lingered over him for long, peering at him through the dusk to miss
nothing of his bloomy brownness. He curled up when he slept like a
little animal, and his breath drove through him deeply and more serenely
than any adult's. At last she felt compelled to kiss him, and, without
waking up, he shook his head about and said disgustedly, "Wugh!" as she
rose and left him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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