Читать книгу Flemington And Tales From Angus - Violet Jacob - Страница 12

THE HOUSE of Hedderwick the grieve was a furlong east of the kirk, divided from it by a country road and a couple of ploughed fields. From its windows the sunset could be seen spreading, like a fire, behind the building, of which only the belfry was visible as it rose above the young larch plantation pressing up to the kirkyard gate. The belfry itself was a mere shelter, like a little bridge standing on the kirk roof, and the dark shape of its occupant showed strong against the sky, dead black when the flame of colour ran beyond the ascending skyline to the farm on the hill. This farm with its stacks and byres would then share importance with the bell, the two becoming the most marked objects against the light.

Hedderwick’s house was grey and square, with an upper storey and a way of staring impartially on the world. At the death of his wife, three years before the date of this history, it began to give signs, both within and without, of the demoralisation that sets in on a widower’s possessions.

Mrs. Hedderwick had been a shrew and there were many who pitied the grieve more during her life than after her death. It was experience that made the bereaved man turn an ear as deaf as that of the traditional adder to the voices of those who urged on him the necessity of a housekeeper. But discomfort is a potent reasoner and the day came when a tall woman with a black bonnet and a corded wooden box descended from the carrier’s cart at his door.

Hedderwick was a lean, heavy-boned man of fifty-two, decent with the decency of the well-to-do lowland Scot, sparing of words, just of mind, and only moderately devout-so the minister said – for a man who lived so near the church. In his youth he had been a hard swearer, and a bedrock of determination lay below the surface of his infrequent speech, to be struck by those who crossed him. He had no daughters; his son Robert, who was apprenticed to a watchmaker in Dundee, came home at intervals to spend Sunday with his father and to impress the parish with that knowledge of men and matters which he believed to be the exclusive possession of dwellers in manufacturing towns.

In spite of his just mind, Hedderwick’s manner to his housekeeper, during the first year, showed the light in which he saw her. She was a necessary evil, but an evil nevertheless, and he did not allow her to forget the fact. He wasted fewer words on her than he did on any other person; when she came into the room he looked resentful; and though he had never before known such comfort as she had brought with her into the house, he would have died sooner than let her suspect it. If obliged to mention her, he spoke of ‘yon woman,’ and while so doing gave the impression that, but for his age and position, he would have used a less decorous noun.

‘Margaret Burness, a single woman’ – so she had described herself when applying for the place – was a pale, quiet person, as silent as the grieve, with the look of one who has suffered in spirit without suffering in character. Her eyes were still soft and had once been beautiful, and her dark, plainly parted hair was turning grey. Though the sharp angles of jaw and cheekbone gave her face a certain austere pathos, it was easy, when looking at her, to suppose that her smile would be pleasant. But she rarely smiled.

When another six months had gone by, Hedderwick’s obstinacy, though dying hard, began to give way in details. ‘Yon woman’ had become ‘she,’ and her place at the fireside commanded, not his side aspect, but his full face; for he sat no longer in the middle of the hearth, but with his chair opposite to hers. Occasionally he would read her bits from the newspaper. Robert, who had always treated her as though she did not exist, returned one Sunday, and, remarking sourly on her cooking, perceived a new state of things.

‘If yer meat disna please ye, Rob, ye can seek it some other gait,’ observed Hedderwick.

Margaret smiled a little more in these days; she was as quiet as ever, but her eyes, when they rested upon the grieve, seemed to have taken back something of their youth. She was experiencing the first taste of security she had ever known, and, with his dawning consideration, a tenderness she scarcely realised was growing up for him in her heart.

Nothing had prepared Hedderwick to find peace and a woman’s society compatible. He began to look on the evening as a pleasant time, and on one occasion, when chance delayed her return from marketing by a couple of hours, he went down the road to meet her, swearing as each turn of the way revealed a new piece of empty track and foreseeing the most unlikely mishaps. He waited for her now on Sundays instead of letting her follow him to the kirk, and her Bible made the journey there in his pocket with his own. No stranger who saw them sitting in the pew below the gallery would have doubted that the grim-looking grieve and the pale woman beside him were man and wife. By the time a few more months had gone by she had become ‘Marget.’

It was early November. Hedderwick, who had business in Dundee, had returned there with his son, leaving her in charge of the house. She was expecting him home, and, her work being over and the tea set in the kitchen, she stood at an upper window looking at the sky which flamed behind the belfry. The four small pinnacles at its corners were inky black, and the bell below them was turned, by the majesty of the heavens, from the commonplace instrument of the beadle’s weekly summons into a fateful object. It hung there, dark and still, the spokes of its wheel and the corners and angles of the ironwork standing out into unfamiliar distinctness, and suggesting some appurtenance of mediaeval magic. Behind it, the west had dissolved into a molten sea of gold that seemed to stretch beyond the bounds of this present world, and to be lying, at a point far outrunning human sight, upon the shores of the one to come. The farm, with its steadings, was like the last outpost of this earth. The plain darkness of the ploughed fields before the house made the glory more isolated, more remote, more a revelation of the unattainable – a region between which and humanity stood the narrow portal of death. The tops of the larches by the kirk were so fine that in the great effulgence the smaller twigs disappeared like little, fretted souls, swallowed into eternal peace. And above them hung the bell whose sound would one day proclaim for each and all within range of its voice that the time had come to rise up and go out into the remoteness.

As she watched, the figure of Hedderwick turned off the road and came up the muddy way skirting the fields. She went down quickly to make the tea and put the slices of bread she had cut into the toaster. As she bent over the fire she heard him kicking the mud off his boots against the doorstep and hanging up his hat on the peg.

He said little during the meal, but when it was over he went out and returned with a parcel which he laid before her on the table.

‘A bocht this tae ye in Dundee, Marget,’ said he.

She opened the paper shyly. It held a Paisley shawl of the sort worn at that time by nearly every woman of her class who could afford the luxury. The possession of such a thing was, in itself, a badge of settled position. The colour ran to her face.

‘Oh, but yon’s pretty!’ she exclaimed, as the folds fell from her hands to the floor in the subdued reds and yellows of the intricate Oriental pattern. She put it round her and it hung with a certain grace from her thin shoulders to her knees.

‘Ye set it fine,’ observed Hedderwick, from his chair.

Her heart sang in her all the evening. No woman, no matter of what age, can be quite cold to the charm of a new garment; and this one, though it did not differ from those she saw, on good occasions, on the backs of most well-to-do working-men’s wives, was, perhaps, the more acceptable for that. It seemed to give her a place among them. As she imagined the grieve entering the Dundee shop with the intention of buying such a thing for her, her cheek kindled again. He had chosen well, too; the fine softness of the gift told her that. She laid her treasure away in her box, glad that it was only the middle of the week, that she might have the more time to realise its beauty before wearing it. But its overwhelming worth, to her, was neither in its texture nor its cost.

She sat in her place on Sunday in the midst of a great spiritual peace. Love, as love, was a thing outside her reckoning, and she would have checked the bare thought that she loved the grieve. But there was on her the beatitude of a woman who finds herself valued by the being most precious to her. She had come into such a haven as she had never hoped to see in the days of her hard, troubled existence, and there was only one point on which she was not quite easy. It stood out now before her, its shadow deepened by the light shining in her heart.

There was a secret in Margaret’s life which she had kept from everyone, which lay so far back in the years that its memory was almost like the memory of a dream; and she wished now that she had told Hedderwick the truth. But, sinless as that secret was, she had recoiled from sharing it with all but the few who had known her in youth, fearing, in her sore need of work by which to keep herself, that it would go against her in her quest. And, as the good opinion of the grieve grew, she hid it the more closely, for she had so little to cling to that she could not bear to jeopardise what consideration she had earned. There was not one cloud upon her content and the peace which enfolded her; but that small concealment, a concealment advised by those who had concerned themselves for her after the storm burst, and by whose suggestion she had taken back her maiden name, would rise, at times, to her mind and make her sigh. She wished, as she sat with her eyes on her book and the clean pocket-handkerchief folded beside it, that she had told Hedderwick. She was so much preoccupied that she never looked up, nor settled herself against the pewback, as did her neighbours, when the sermon began. It was a few minutes before she shook herself from her abstraction and composed herself to listen to the minister’s voice.

The kirk was a plain square place with a gallery, supported on thin pillars, running round all but its western side where the tall pulpit stood between high windows. The minister, under the umbrella-like sounding-board poised over him, was far above the heads of the congregation and on a level with the occupants of the upstair pews, looking across the intervening chasm into the faces of the laird and his family. The north wall, by which Hedderwick sat, was unbroken, but on the farther side of the kirk two small windows under the gallery floor looked out upon the little kirkyard surrounding the building. There were not many tombstones on that side of it, and the light, chilly autumn wind rippled the long grass till it looked like grey waves.

Margaret never knew what made her turn her head sharply and glance across to the diamond-shaped panes. Between her and one of the windows the seats were almost empty, and there was nothing to interrupt her view of a shambling figure that moved among the graves. While she watched, the leaded panes darkened, as a man approached and looked through; the sill was cut so deep in the wall that few of the congregation could see him, and the two or three whose positions would allow them to do so had their attention fixed upon the pulpit. The man’s eyes searched as much of the interior of the kirk as he could command, and, stopping at Margaret, became centred upon her.

She looked down at her knee, faint with the suggestion shot into her terror-struck heart by the face staring in at her from outside. Hedderwick, who could have seen what she saw, was drowsy, and his closed lids shut out from him the new act of that long-buried tragedy that was being revived for the woman at his side. When she raised her head again the figure had retreated a few paces from the pane, and its outlines turned her apprehension into certainty.

The preacher’s voice ran on through the silence, but it seemed to Margaret as though her heartbeats drowned it; she forced herself to overcome the mental dizziness that wrapped her like the shawl whose fringes lay spread on the slippery wood of the pew. Its warmth was turned to a chill mockery. She closed her eyes that she might shut out the familiar things about her; the accustomed faces, the high pulpit, the red cushion on its ledge, the long, pendent tassels swinging into space; the grieve’s bulky shoulders and Sunday clothes, his brown leather Bible with its corners frayed by its weekly sojourns in his pocket. All these things had become immeasurably dear; and now, this Sunday morning might be – probably would be – the last time she should ever see them.

When the congregation dispersed she sat still. Hedderwick would have waited for her, but she motioned him dumbly to go on. After the last shuffle of feet had retreated over the threshold and the beadle came in to shut the doors, she rose and went out.

The man was waiting there for her among the gravestones as she rounded the angle of the wall. Though he was a few years younger than herself he looked much older; there was white on his unshaven chin, and she saw, as she approached, that he was almost in rags. Whether he were a beggar or not, he had the unmistakable shifting look of mendicancy. But his features were unchanged and she would have known the set of his eyebrows anywhere. She opened her lips to speak, but the pounding of her heart choked her breath.

‘A’ve been seekin’ ye,’ he said, in the thick voice that told of long drinking. ‘A speired at Netherside an’ they tellt me ye was here.’

Netherside was Margaret’s old home; a village over the county border.

‘We got word ye was deid after ye cam’ oot o’ jail,’ said she, ‘but a didna ken whether tae believe it. But when sic a time gaed by—’

‘Heuch!’ rejoined he, with a flicker of grim humour, ‘a was fine an’ pleased tae be deid; a grave’s a bonnie safe place. They canna catch ye there, ye ken.’

‘And what way was it ye didna send me word? A micht hae gi’ed ye a hand, Tam.’

‘A tell ye a was deid. An’ a wasna needin’ ye in Ameriky.’

A throb of pity came to her as she saw his shaking hands, and the way he drew his ragged coat together as the wind played in gusts over the grass. It is terrible to see the professional attitudes of the beggar in one we have once loved, no matter how far life may have drifted him from us. Margaret had not a spark of affection left for the wretched creature before her, but she had a long memory.

‘Ye’re gey an’ braw,’ he said, with a sidelong glance at her tidy clothes and the rich colouring of her fine shawl. ‘Ye bide wi’ the grieve, a’m tellt. Maybe ye’ve pit by a bittie.’

Margaret’s lips shook, and, for a moment, her eyes looked on beyond him into space.

‘Tam, we’ll need to do oor best,’ she began tremulously, brought back to the present by the mention of Hedderwick. ‘A’ve a bit saved. Maybe we micht gang to Dundee an’ get work i’ the mills—’

‘An’ wha tellt ye a was seekin’ work? A’m no needin’ work an’ a’m no needin’ you. Bide you wi’ the grieve – I’ll no tak’ ye frae him; but a’ll be here-about till the new year an’ a’ll come tae the hoose the nicht. Ye can gie me a piece an’ a wheen siller tae gang on wi’.’

‘A’ll no let ye near the hoose,’ said Margaret firmly.

‘An’ a’m no askin’ ye. A’m tae come.’

‘But Hedderwick’ll see ye, Tam.’

‘Dod, a’m no carin’ for Hedderwick.’

‘But a’ll come oot-by an’ bring ye a piece!’ she exclaimed in terror. ‘Ye’ll no need tae come then.’

They parted a few minutes later and she returned home. Her world had indeed grown complicated in the last hour, and the light of duty, for which, in all her troubled life, she had been wont to look, seemed to have gone out, extinguished by some diabolical hand. It was plain that her husband would have none of her, and had no desire that she should throw in her lot with his; he feared respectability as she feared sin, and, while she was in a position to minister to his wants, his present way of living would suit him well. She had promised, before leaving him, to bring him a little money, if he would wait after dusk, where the larch-wood hid the road from the kirk. She refused to bring him food, for though her small savings were her own, every crumb in the house was the grieve’s and she would sooner have died than take so much as a crust. Whosoever might suffer for what had happened that day, it should not be Hedderwick.

It was almost dark that evening as she slipped out of the house and went towards the larches; she had a little money in her hand, taken out of the box in which she kept her savings. The owls were beginning to call and hoot from the wood by the manse, and she hurried along among the eerie voices floating in shrill mockery over the plough-land. Tom Weir was lurking like a shadow at the appointed place, and when she had given him her dole he departed towards the farm on the hill; a deserted cottage which stood in a field over the crest would shelter him that night, he said, and be a place to which he could come back in the intervals of tramping. He was going off on the morrow and would expect her to meet him on his return with a further pittance. Her hesitation brought down a shower of abuse.

Margaret knew well to what slavery she was condemning herself when she put the money into his dirty palm; but she dared not tell Hedderwick, for, besides her dismay at the thought of confessing what she had kept from him so long, she had a vague dread that the law, were her case known, would force her to return to Weir. Weir did not want her, but she had known of old that his spite was a thing to be reckoned with, and it might be gratified by her downfall, when her savings came to an end. That knowledge and the fear that he might make a public claim on her, were she to refuse him help, bound her hand and foot. She had not the courage to turn her back on all she had grown to love, and she quieted her scruples by vowing that, while keeping the grieve in ignorance, she would not bestow on her tormentor one crust that she had not paid for herself; but she was prepared, were it necessary, to threaten her own departure from her employment and the consequent stoppage of her means of supply, should he approach the grey house. She was prepared, also, to keep her word. It should be her last resource.

And so the final, dying month of autumn went by and winter fell on the land, crisping the edges of the long furrows and setting a tracery of bare boughs against the diminished light. Weir came and went, haunting the towns within reach, and coming back every seven days to take his tithe of her dwindling purse; and winter fell, too, upon Margaret’s heart. Saturday brought a sinister end to her week; and her troubles, as dusk set in, were intensified by the presence of Rob Hedderwick, who now returned by the midday train on that day to spend Sunday at his father’s house. It was difficult to escape his sharp eye and restless mind – made, perhaps, more intrusive by perpetual prying into the workings of complicated things. It did not take the young man long to notice her absences. In the evenings by the fireside he would look covertly at her from behind his paper, or over the top of his book, as she sat at her knitting; his thoughts were busy with the mystery he scented. Once or twice he had left the kitchen before dark, and, from the shadow of the wash-house door, watched her go silently towards the road with something in her apron. He did not like Margaret. Once, too, he had mentioned his suspicions to the grieve, bidding him look to his money-box; and, angered by the scant encouragement that he got, and by the scathing definitions of the limits of his own business, he determined to justify himself; for his growing suspicion that his father’s housekeeper sold the food, or disposed of it in some way profitable to herself, could, he believed, be proved. He was bent upon proving it, for, in addition to his dislike, he had the thirsty rabidness of the would-be detective.

There was a cessation of his visits through January and February, as the master watchmaker was called away and his assistant left for a two months’ charge of the shop; therefore it was on a moonless March evening that Rob Hedderwick hid himself in the manse wood. It touched the road just where the path to the grieve’s house joined it, and in its shelter he waited till he heard a woman’s step come down the track. Margaret passed within a few yards of him, her head muffled in a woollen wrapper and her apron gathered into a bag and bulging with what she carried in it. He had never yet followed her, but he meant to do so now, for there was just enough of hidden starlight behind the thin clouds to enable him to keep her in sight from a little distance.

Her figure disappeared among the larches by the kirk; he almost came upon her, for the road between them made a bend, and she had stopped, apparently expecting to be joined by someone. Her back was to him and he retreated softly. The cold was considerable and Rob had forgotten to put on his greatcoat; so when, after what seemed to him nearer to half an hour than a quarter, she went swiftly up the hill towards the farm on its summit, he followed again, thankful to be moving.

She never slackened her pace till she had reached the top. Led more by sound than by sight, he trod in her wake; the desolation of night was wide around them, and from the ridge the land was as though falling away into nothingness before and behind. The farm was quiet as they passed it and began to descend, he taking advantage of a scanty cover of hedge to get closer to her. As the ground grew level again, he could hear the gurgle of a small burn crossing their road at a place where a hamlet of thatched mud houses had once stood. There was but one ruin of a cottage left, a little way from the country road, and he was near enough to see Margaret strike off towards it. He went round the roofless hovel till he came to its door, which was still standing. She had entered and closed it after her.

There was a gleam of light inside, and, putting his eye to a gaping crack in the wood, he could see what took place within the walls. A man was sitting on a bundle of straw covered with sacking and a battered lantern beside him shed its light on him and on the woman. As it flickered in the draught, the shadows, ghastly and fantastic, played among the broken beams and the tufts of dried vegetation, springing up where rain had fallen in upon the floor.

Rob held his breath as Margaret unfolded her apron and laid a loaf with a large piece of cheese upon the straw. It was just such a loaf as he had seen her buy from the baker’s cart at his father’s doorstep. The idea that she might have paid for it herself did not enter his mind, for it was of a type to which such ideas are foreign. It was not easy to distinguish what they said. He pressed nearer in his eagerness, and a brick on which he trod turning under his foot, he slipped, lurching heavily against the rotten panel. The immediate silence which followed told him that the blow had startled Margaret and her companion, so, regaining his balance, he fled towards the road and made his way home in the darkness. He had seen all that he needed for his purpose.

The grieve was out when he reached the house and his disappointment was keen; he had hoped, his tale once told, to make his father confront the ill-doer as she entered fresh from her errand. But he had to keep his discovery till the morrow, for it was nearing ten o’clock when Hedderwick came home and went to bed in silence with the uncommunicativeness of a weary man. Rob followed his example sulkily. The next day as the two men strolled down the road after their midday dinner, he embarked on the story of what he had seen and done overnight.

Rob Hedderwick drove his words home with the straight precision of a man assured of the convincing power of his case. He could reason well, and the education which the grieve lacked, but had given to his son, clothed his opinions with a certain force. Hedderwick’s mind was turned up as by a ploughshare. His anger at the long chain of petty thefts, which seemed to have been effectively proved before the young man’s eyes, lay on him like a weight of lead; and that the one who had been forging that chain these many months sat at his hearth and ate of his food made it all the heavier. Treachery was what he could not bear. He was honest himself and dishonesty was a fault to which he was pitiless. The thing, unendurable in an enemy, was doubly so in the woman who had come to be, to him, indispensable. But, as he pictured the house without Margaret, his heart sank. Now, and only now, was he to realise what she had been – what she was – to him. He stood leaning his arms on a gate; Rob, having done his duty, had gone off to spend the afternoon with some neighbours; and he remained, sore at heart, where he was – looking towards his own house and drawn this way and that by resentment, disillusion and another feeling which was perhaps more painful than either. Rob had been right, no doubt, but that did not prevent his father from hating him because he had destroyed his peace, and he was glad that he would be leaving early next morning. What steps he might take in consequence of his hateful discovery should be taken after he had gone; for he suspected a touch of malicious satisfaction in his son that he would be careful not to gratify. He turned grimly from the gate and went home.

The two following days went by and he remained silent. At times he had almost made up his mind to ignore everything he had heard, so great was his dread of parting with Margaret. On the evening after Rob left he opened his mouth to speak, but it was as though an unseen hand closed his lips. He could not do it. He desired and yet feared to be alone with her; and when, on the second day of his torment, he saw her start for the farm on some business of domestic supply, he stood in the patch of garden and watched her go with a feeling of relief.

The days were lengthening now, and the wistful notes of blackbirds told their perpetual spring story of the fragility of youth and the pathos of coming pain; but Margaret took time to do her business and the light was beginning to fall as she came out of the farm-gate. Somehow, the heavy load she had carried for so many months seemed to press less cruelly in the alluring quiet of the outdoor world. Instead of going back to the house she turned into a rough way that circled westward and would bring her home by the manse.

She wandered on; behind her, at a little distance, a boy was carrying a milk-can, whistling as he went. The road took her past a disused quarry, a place where steep angles of ragged stone struck out, like headlands, into the garment of weed and bush with which the years were clothing it. It was deep, and, through the dusk, she could just see its bottom and a dark object which lay among the pieces of fallen rock. She peered down – for the remnant of a crazy rail was all that protected unwary passengers from the chasm – and then held up her hand to stop the boy’s whistle. From the heap below came a sound like a human voice.

Margaret was an active woman. At the point where she stood the earth had slipped in an outward incline, and a few young ashes that had seeded themselves in the thick tangle of wood offered a comparatively easy descent. She began to go down, waist-deep in the dried thistle-fluff, keeping her foothold in the sliding soil by clinging to the undergrowth.

Among the roots and boulders lay a man, face downwards. From the helpless huddle in which he lay, and the moans which struck her ear as she scrambled towards him, she knew that he must be desperately hurt. At sight of the blood on the surrounding stones she paused and cried to the boy who watched her from above to run for help. Then she sat down and raised the unhappy creature to lie with his head on her knee, and saw, through the growing dusk, that she was looking into the face of her husband.

How long she sat with her half-conscious burden she never knew; but the moments till the return of her messenger were double their length to her. The shadow fell deeper about them and bats began to come out of their fastnesses in the creeks and holes of the stone. It was chilly cold. A tuft of thistle, half-way up the slope she had descended, was catching the remaining light, and the cluster of its blurred, sere head stared on her like a face, with the fantastic attraction that irrelevant things will take on for humanity in its hours of horror.

Weir stirred a little and his eyes opened for a moment.

‘It’s me,’ she whispered, bending lower; but she could not tell whether he knew her or not, for he had slipped back into unconsciousness.

Just before the boy came back he looked up once more; this time with comprehension; it seemed to her that he had grown heavier in her arms.

‘Ye’ll no gang?’ he asked feebly.

‘No; a’ll no gang,’ replied Margaret.

A minute later the voices of the boy and the men he had brought came to her from above. Her arms tightened protectingly, for the thought of the transport made her shudder. Then she gazed down at Weir and saw that she need fear pain for him no more.

IT WAS THE DAY of the inquiry. Parish details were not so complete forty years ago as they are now and communication with towns was more difficult; so Tom Weir’s body lay in an outhouse of the farm. The ‘fiscal’ was summoned, and Margaret, the whistling boy, and the handful of men who had carried the vagrant from his rough deathbed were on their way to attend at the place appointed.

Margaret Weir walked alone, her face set in the hard-won peace of a resolution long dreaded, but accomplished at last. The time spent in the quarry had merged her dumb patience, her rebellion against the wreck of her content and growing love, into a vast, steadfast pity. The dead man had been thief, jail-bird, destroyer of her youth; but the old, broken bond had been drawn together again by his appeal as he died in her arms among the nettles. ‘Ye’ll no gang?’ he had said. ‘No, a’ll no gang,’ she had replied, And she was not going now; not till all was done. She was on her way to identify his body and to declare herself his widow; and what money he had not taken from her was to buy him the decent ‘burying’ which, with her kind, stands for so much.

The shadow of disrespectability lying on Hedderwick’s household was a thing she would not contemplate, and she was sure that the answer to all difficulties lay in her own departure. She could not, in justice to him, reveal herself for what she had been – the wife of a tramp – and keep her place. So she reasoned. She was a simple person, in spite of her concealments, and at this crisis she saw her way simply. She had mended all his clothes, put the house in order and packed her box, which would be fetched by the carrier and sent after her. She had written two letters; one to the minister about Weir’s funeral, the money for which she gave into his charge, and the other to Hedderwick. In the latter she explained her position as fully as her small scholarship permitted and bade him good-bye. The balance of the sum he had given her for domestic expenses last market day would, she told him, be in a packet under her pillow. The letter was placed on the kitchen table to await him, for she did not expect him in till evening.

It was past noon when she came out of the room where the ‘fiscal’ sat and went down the hill. She looked neither to right nor left, for she was afraid. She needed all her great courage to reach the station; all her strength to sail steadfastly out of her late-found haven into the heavy weather. Had she raised her eyes she would have seen the tall figure of Hedderwick emerge from his house and come striding towards her across the fields.

They met in the larch plantation, just where she had so often met Weir. He walked up to her and took her by the wrist.

‘Marget,’ said he, ‘come awa’ hame.’

She began to tremble. Her strength of purpose was ebbing in this new trial. Was she to be spared nothing? The tears she believed she had left behind with her youth rose and choked her utterance.

‘But a wrote ye, Hedderwick,’ she faltered. Her eyes were too much blinded to see the corner of her envelope sticking out of his pocket.

‘Ye’ll just come hame wi’ me,’ said the grieve.

‘Marget, there’s naethin’ can part you and me, for a canna live wantin’ ye.’