Читать книгу Flemington And Tales From Angus - Violet Jacob - Страница 10

OF THE birth and origin of Jessie-Mary no one in the parish knew anything definite. Those who passed up the unfrequented cart-road by her grandmother’s thatched hovel used to see the shock-headed child among the gooseberry bushes of the old woman’s garden, peering at them, like an animal, over the fence.

Whether she were really the granddaughter of the old beldame inside the mud walls no one knew, neither, for that matter, did anybody care. The hovel was the last remaining house of a little settlement which had disappeared from the side of the burn. Just where it stood, a shallow stream ran across the way and plunged into a wood in which Jessie-Mary had many a time feasted on the plentiful wild raspberries, and run, like a little squirrel, among the trees.

It was not until she was left alone in the world that much attention was paid to her existence, and then she presented herself to the parish as a problem; for her life was lived a full half-century before the all-powerful Board School arose to direct rustic parents and guardians, and she had received little education. She had grown into a sturdy girl of twenty, with brown hair which the sun had bleached to a dull yellow, twisted up at the back of her head and hanging heavily over her brows. She was a fierce-looking lass, with her hot grey eyes. The parish turned its mind to the question of how she might earn a living and was presently relieved when Mrs. Muirhead, who was looking for an able-bodied servant, hired her in that capacity. She was to have a somewhat meagre wage and her clothes, and was to help her mistress in house and yard. When the matter was settled she packed her few possessions into a bundle and sauntered up the green loaning which ran between the hovel and Mrs. Muirhead’s decent roof, marking where one fir-wood ended and another began.

Mrs. Muirhead was the widow of a joiner, and she inhabited a cottage standing just where the woods and the mouth of the loaning touched the high road that ran north to the hills. She was well to do, for a cottager, and her little yard, besides being stacked with planks which her son, Peter, sawed and planed as his father had done before him, contained a row of hen-coops and a sty enclosing a pig whose proportions waxed as autumn waned. When the laird trotted by, he cast a favourable eye on the place, which was as neat as it befitted the last house on a man’s property to be. When he had passed on and was trotting alongside the farther wood he was no longer on his own ground, for the green, whin-choked loaning was debatable land lying between him and his neighbour.

As Jessie-Mary, with her bundle, came through the whins and opened the gate, Peter Muirhead, who was in the yard, heard the latch click and looked up from his work. At sight of the yellow head by the holly bushes he laid down the spokeshave he was using and came round to the front. The girl was looking at him with eyes whose directness a youth of his type is liable to misunderstand. He began to smile.

‘Will Mistress Muirhead be ben?’ said Jessie-Mary tentatively.

Peter did not answer, but approached, his smile taking meaning.

‘Will Mistress Muirhead be ben the hoose?’ she inquired, more loudly.

It occurred to her that he might not be in his right senses, for the mile or two of debatable track which separated her old home from her future one might as well have been ten, for all she had seen of the world at the other end of it. She knew very well that Muirhead the joiner had lived where she now stood, and she had seen the old man, but the shambling figure before her was entirely strange. Once, at the edge of the wood, she had listened to the whirr of sawing in the vicinity of the road and had gathered that the work went on, though Muirhead himself had departed.

‘She’s no here. Ye’ll just hae to put up wi’ me,’ said Peter jocosely. His mother was in the house, but he saw no reason for divulging the fact.

Jessie-Mary stood silent, scarcely knowing what to say.

‘Ye’re a fine lassie,’ observed Peter, still smiling alluringly.

She eyed him with distrust and her heavy brows lowered over her eyes; she began to walk towards the cottage. He sprang forward, as though to intercept her, and, as she knocked, he laid hold of her free hand. Mrs. Muirhead, from within, opened the door just in time to see him drop it. She was a short, hard-featured woman, presenting an expanse of white apron to the world; a bunch of turkeys’ feathers, in which to stick knitting needles, was secured between her person and the band of this garment, the points of the quills uppermost. She looked from one to the other, then drawing Jessie-Mary over the threshold, she slammed the door.

‘Dinna think a didna see ye, ye limmer!’ she exclaimed, taking the girl roughly by the shoulder.

And so Jessie-Mary’s working life began.

The little room allotted to her, looking over the yard, was no smaller than the corner she had inhabited in the mud cottage, yet it had a stifling effect; and its paper, which bore a small lilac flower on a buff ground, dazzled her eyes and seemed to press on her from all sides. In the cracked looking-glass which hung on it she could see the disturbing background behind her head as she combed and flattened her thick hair in accordance with Mrs. Muirhead’s ideas. In leisure moments she hemmed at an apron which she was to wear when completed. Mrs. Muirhead was annoyed at finding she could hardly use a needle; she was far from being an unkind woman, but her understanding stopped at the limits of her own requirements. Jessie-Mary’s equally marked limitations struck her as the result of natural wickedness.

Wherever the yard was unoccupied by the planks or the pigsty, it was set about with hencoops, whose inmates strayed at will from the enclosure to pervade the nearer parts of the wood in those eternal perambulations which occupy fowls. Just outside, where the trees began, was a pleasant strip of sandy soil in which the hens would settle themselves with much clucking and tail-shaking, to sit blinking, like so many vindictive dowagers, at their kind. Through this, the Dorking cock, self-conscious and gallant, would conduct the ladies of his family to scratch among the tree-roots; and the wood for about twenty yards from the house wore that peculiar scraped and befeathered look which announces the proximity of a hen-roost. At night the lower branches were alive with dark forms and the suppressed gurgling that would escape from them. It was part of Jessie-Mary’s duty to attend to the wants of this rabble.

There were times when a longing for flight took the half-civilised girl. Life, for her, had always been a sort of inevitable accident, a state in whose ordering she had no part as a whole, however much choice she might have had in its details. But now there was little choice in these; Mrs. Muirhead ordered her day and she tolerated it as best she could. She hardly knew what to do with her small wage when she got it, for the finery dear to the heart of the modern country lass was a thing of which she had no knowledge, and there was no dependent relative who might demand it of her.

The principal trouble of her life was Peter, whose occupations kept him of necessity at home, and whose presence grew more hateful as time went on. There was no peace for her within sight of his leering smile. There was only one day of the week that she was free of him; and on these Sunday afternoons, as he went up the road to join the loitering knot of horsemen from the nearest farm, she would thankfully watch him out of sight from the shelter of the loaning. She hated him with all her heart.

He would lurk about in the evenings, trying to waylay her amongst the trees as she went to gather in the fowls, and once, coming suddenly on her as she turned the corner of the house, he had put his arm about her neck. She had felt his hot breath on her ear, and, in her fury, pushed him from her with such violence that he staggered back against a weak place in the yard fence and fell through, cutting his elbow on a piece of broken glass. She stood staring at him, half terrified at what she had done, but rejoicing to see the blood trickle down his sleeve. She would have liked to kill him. The dreadful combination of his instincts and his shamblingness was what physically revolted her, though she did not realise it; and his meanness had, more than once, got her into trouble with his mother. She had no consideration to expect from Mrs. Muirhead, as she knew well. To a more complicated nature the position would have been unendurable, but Jessie-Mary endured stubbornly, vindictively, as an animal endures. She was in a cruel position and her only safeguard lay in the fact that Peter Muirhead was repulsive to her. But neither morality nor expediency nor the armed panoply of all the cardinal virtues have yet succeeded in inventing for a woman a safeguard so strong as her own taste.

It was on a Sunday afternoon towards the end of September that Peter emerged from the garden and strolled up the road. The sun was high above the woods, his rim as yet clear of the tree-tops, and the long shadow from the young man’s feet lay in a dark strip between himself and the fence at his side. He wore his black Sunday suit and a tie bought from a travelling salesman who had visited Montrose fair the year before. In his best clothes he looked more ungainly than usual, and even the group of friends who watched his approach allowed themselves a joke at his expense as he neared them. He could hear their rough laughter, though he was far from guessing its cause. Nature had given him a good conceit of himself.

Jessie-Mary drew a breath of relief as his steps died away and she hailed the blessed time, granted to her but weekly, in which she might go about without risk of meeting him. Everything was quiet. Mrs. Muirhead was sitting in the kitchen with her Bible; the door was ajar and the girl could just see a section of her skirt and the self-contained face of the cat which blinked on the hearth beside her. She had accompanied her mistress to the kirk that morning and had thought, as they returned decorously together, that she would go down the loaning again to see the thatched cottage by the burn – perhaps stray a little in the wood among the familiar raspberry-stalks. She had not seen these old haunts since she left them for Mrs. Muirhead’s service.

She took off her apron and went out bareheaded. On the outskirts of the trees the hens were rustling and fluttering in the dust; as she passed, they all arose and followed her. She had not remembered that their feeding-time was due in half an hour and for a moment she stood irresolute. If she were to go on her intended way there would be no one to give them their food. She determined to make and administer it at once; there would be plenty of time afterwards to do what she wished to do.

She was so little delayed that, when the pail was put away and the water poured into the tin dishes, there was still a long afternoon before her. She threaded her way slowly through the fir-stems, stopping to look at the rabbit-runs or to listen to the cooing of wood pigeons, her path fragrant with the scent of pine. After walking some way she struck across the far end of the loaning into the road which led to the mud hovel.

Autumn was approaching its very zenith, and the debatable land offered gorgeous tribute to the season. Like some outlandish savage ruler, it brought treasures unnumbered in the wealth of the more civilised earth. Here and there a branch of broom stood, like a sceptre, among the black jewels of its hanging pods, and brambles, pushing through the whin-thickets like flames, hung in ragged splashes of carmine and orange and acid yellow. Bushes of that sweetbrier whose little ardent-coloured rose is one of the glories of eastern Scotland were dressed in the scarlet hips succeeding their bloom, and between them and the whin the thrifty spider had woven her net. Underfoot, bracken, escaping from the ditches, had invaded the loaning to clothe it in lemon and russet. Where the ground was marshy, patches of fine rush mixed with the small purple scabious which has its home in the vagabond corners of the land. As Jessie-Mary emerged from the trees her sun-bleached hair seemed the right culmination to this scale of natural colour; had it not been for the dark blue of her cotton gown she might as easily have become absorbed into her surroundings as the roe-deer, which is lost, a brown streak, in the labyrinth of trunks.

The air had the faint scent of coming decay which haunts even the earliest of autumn days, and the pale, high sky wore a blue suggestive of tears; the exhalations of earth were touched with the bitterness of lichen and fungus. Far away under the slope of the fields, and so hidden from sight, Montrose lay between the ocean and the estuary of the South Esk, with, beyond its spire, the sweep of the North Sea.

A few minutes later she found herself standing on the large, flat stone which bridged the burn where the footpath crossed it by her grandmother’s hovel. She remained gazing at the walls rising from the unkempt tangle to which months of neglect were reducing the garden. The fence was broken in many places, and clumps of phlox, growing in a corner, had been trodden by the feet of strayed animals. Beneath her, the water sang with the same irresponsible babble which had once been the accompaniment to her life; she turned to follow it with her eyes as it dived under the matted grasses and disappeared into the wood.

All at once, from beyond the cottage, there rose a shout that made her heart jump, and she started to see two figures approaching through the field by the side of the burn; the blood left her face as she recognised one of them as Peter Muirhead. She sprang quickly from the stone and over the rail dividing the wood from the path; it was a foolish action and it produced its natural result. As she did so, a yell came from the field and she saw that Peter and his companion had begun to run.

Through the trees she fled, the derisive voices whooping behind her. She was terrified of her tormentor and the unreasoning animal fear of pursuit was upon her. As she heard the rail crack she knew that he had entered the wood, and instinct turned her towards the loaning, where the cover was thick and where she might turn aside in the tangle and be lost in some hidden nook while they passed her by. It was her best chance.

She plunged out from among the firs into the open track. For a hundred yards ahead the bushes were sparse and there was no obstacle to hinder her flight. She was swift of foot, and the damp earth flew beneath her. Through the whins beyond she went, scratching her hands on protruding brambles and stumbling among the roots. Once her dress caught on a stiff branch and she rent it away, tearing it from knee to hem. The voices behind her rose again and her breath was giving out.

Emerging from the thicket, she almost bounded into a little circle of fire, the smoke of which she had been too much excited to notice, though it was rising, blue and fine, from the clearing she had reached. A small tent was before her, made of tattered sail-cloth stretched over some dry branches, and beside it a light cart reposed, empty, upon its tailboard, the shafts to the sky.

In front of the tent stood a tall, lean man. His look was fixed upon her as she appeared and he had evidently been listening to the sound of her approaching feet. His face was as brown as the fir-stems that closed him in on either side of the loaning, and his eyes, brown also, had a peculiar, watchful light that was almost startling. He stood as still as though he were an image, and he wore a gold ring in either ear.

To Jessie-Mary, a living creature at this moment represented salvation, and before the man had time to turn his head she had leaped into the tent. Inside, by a little heap of brushwood, lay a tarpaulin, evidently used in wet weather to supplement its shelter, and she flung herself down on the ground and dragged the thing over her. The man stood immovable, looking fixedly at the bushes, from the other side of which came the noise of jeering voices.

As Peter Muirhead and his friend pushed into the open space, red and panting, they came upon the unexpected apparition with some astonishment. Tinkers and gipsies were far from uncommon in the debatable land, but the tall, still figure, with its intent eyes, brought them to a standstill. Peter mopped his forehead.

‘Did ye see a lassie gae by yon way?’ he inquired, halting dishevelled from his race through the undergrowth, the sensational tie under one ear.

The brown man nodded, and, without a word, pointed his thumb over his shoulder in the direction in which they were going.

Peter and his companion glanced at each other; the former was rather blown, for he was not naturally active.

‘Huts! a’ve had eneuch o’ yon damned tawpie!’ he exclaimed, throwing his cap on the ground.

The brown man looked him carefully over and smiled; there was a kind of primitive subtlety in his face.

Like many ill-favoured persons, Peter was vain and the look displeased him, for its faint ridicule was sharpened by the silence that accompanied it.

‘A’ll awa’ to Montrose an’ get the pollis tae ye the nicht,’ he said, with as much superiority as he could muster; ‘the like o’ you’s better oot o’ this.’

‘Ye’ll no can rin sae far,’ replied the other.

The answer was a mere burst of abuse.

‘Come awa’ noo, come awa’,’ said Peter’s friend, scenting difficulties and unwilling to embroil himself.

But Peter was in a quarrelsome humour, and it was some time before the two young men disappeared down the track and Jessie-Mary could crawl from her hiding-place. She came out from under the sail-cloth, holding together the rent in her gown. The brown man smiled a different smile from the one with which he had regarded Peter; then he stepped up on a high tussock of rush to look after the pursuers.

‘Are they awa’?’ she asked, her eyes still dilated.

‘Aye,’ he replied. ‘A didna tell on ye, ye see.’

‘A’d like fine tae bide a bit,’ said the girl nervously, ‘they michtna be far yet.’

‘Just sit ye doon there,’ said he, pointing to his tattered apology for a dwelling.

She re-entered the tent and he seated himself before her on the threshold. For some minutes neither spoke and he considered her from head to foot. It was plain he was one chary of words. He took a short pipe from his pocket and, stuffing in some tobacco, lit it deliberately.

‘A saw yon lad last time a was this way,’ he said, jerking his head in the direction in which Peter had disappeared.

As she opened her mouth to reply the snort of a horse came through the bushes a few yards from where they sat. She started violently. There was a sudden gleam in his face which seemed to be his nearest approach to a laugh. ‘Dod, ye needna be feared,’ he said. ‘Naebody’ll touch ye wi’ me.’

‘A was fine an’ glad tae see ye,’ broke out the girl. ‘Yon Muirhead’s an ill lad tae hae i’ the hoose – a bide wi’ his mither, ye ken.’

As she spoke the tears welled up in her eyes and rolled over. She was by no means given to weeping, but she was a good deal shaken by her flight, and it was months since she had spoken to anyone whose point of view could approach her own. Not that she had any conscious point of view, but in common with us all she had a subconscious one. She brushed her sleeve across her eyes.

He sat silent, pulling at his pipe. From the trees came the long-drawn note of a wood-pigeon.

‘A’ll need tae be awa’ hame and see tae the hens,’ said the girl, at last.

The man sat still as she rose, watching her till the whins closed behind her; then he got up slowly and went to water the pony which was hobbled a few yards off. When evening fell on the debatable land, it found him sitting at his transitory threshold, smoking as he mended the rabbit-snare in his hand.

For Jessie-Mary, the days that followed these events were troublous enough. The tear in her gown was badly mended, and Mrs. Muirhead, who had provided the clothes her servant wore, scolded her angrily. Peter was sulky, and, though he left her alone, he vented his anger in small ways which made domestic life intolerable to the women. Added to this, the young Black Spanish hen was missing.

The search ranged far and near over the wood. The bird, an incorrigible strayer, had repaid previous effort by being found in some outlying tangle with a ‘stolen nest’ and an air of irritated surprise at interruption. But hens were not clucking at this season, and Mrs. Muirhead, in the dusk of one evening, announced her certainty that some cat or trap had removed the truant from her reach for ever.

‘There’s mony wad put a lazy cutty like you oot o’ the place for this!’ she exclaimed, as she and Jessie-Mary met outside the yard after their fruitless search. ‘A’m fair disgustit wi’ ye. Awa’ ye gang ben the hoose an’ get the kitchen reddit up – just awa in-by wi’ ye, d’ye hear?’

Jessie-Mary obeyed sullenly. The kitchen window was half open and she paused beside it before beginning to clear the table and set out the evening meal. A cupboard close to her hand held the cheese and bannocks but she did not turn its key. Her listless look fell upon the planet that was coming out of the approaching twilight and taking definiteness above a mass of dark tree-tops framed in by the window sash. She had small conscious joy in such sights, for the pleasures given by these are the outcome of a higher civilisation than she had yet attained. But even to her, the point of serene silver, hung in the translucent field of sky, had a remote, wordless peace. She stood staring, her arms dropped at her sides.

The shrill tones of her mistress came to her ear; she was telling Peter, who stood outside, the history of her loss. Lamentation for the Black Spanish hen mingled with the recital of Jessie-Mary’s carelessness, the villainy of serving-lasses as a body, the height in price of young poultry stock. like many more valuable beings, the froward bird was assuming after death an importance she had never known in life.

A high-pitched exclamation came from Peter’s lips.

‘Ye needna speir owre muckle for her,’ he said, ‘she’s roastit by this time. There’s a lad doon the loan kens mair aboot her nor ony ither body!’

‘Michty-me!’ cried Mrs. Muirhead.

‘Aye, a’m tellin’ ye,’ continued he, ‘the warst-lookin’ great deevil that iver ye saw yet. He gie’d me impidence, aye did he, but a didna tak’ muckle o’ that. “Anither word,” says I, “an’ ye’ll get the best thrashin’ that iver ye got.” He hadna vera muckle tae say after that, I warrant ye!’

Seldom had Mrs. Muirhead been so much disturbed. Her voice rose to unusual heights as she discussed the matter; the local policeman must be fetched at once, she declared; and, as she adjured her son to start for his house without delay, Jessie-Mary could hear the young man’s refusal to move a step before he had had his tea. She was recalled to her work by this and began hurriedly to set out the meal.

As she sat, a few minutes later, taking her own share at the farther end of the table, the subject was still uppermost, and by the time she rose mother and son were fiercely divided; for Peter, who had taken off his boots and was comfortable, refused to stir till the following morning. The hen had been missing three days, he said, and the thief was still in his place; it was not likely he would run that night. And the constable’s cottage was over a mile off. The household dispersed in wrath.

In the hour when midnight grew into morning, Jessie-Mary closed the cottage door behind her and stole out among the silent trees. The pine-scent came up from under her feet as she trod and down from the blackness overhead. The moon, which had risen late, was near her setting, and the light of the little sickle just showed her the direction in which she should go. In and out of the shadows she went, her goal the clearing among the whins in the debatable land. As the steeple of distant Montrose, slumbering calmly between the marshes and the sea, rang one, she slipped out of the bushes and, going into the tent, awakened the sleeping man.

IT WAS SOME time before the two came out of the shelter, and the first cock was crowing as the pony was roused and led from his tether under the tilted shafts. The sail-cloth was taken down and a medley of pots and pans and odd-looking implements thrown into the cart; the wheels were noiseless on the soft sod of the loaning as, by twists and turns, they thrust their way along the overgrown path.

Day broke on the figures of a man and woman who descended the slope of the fields towards the road. The man walked first.

And, in the debatable land among the brambles, a few black feathers blew on the morning wind.