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.’
YOUNG BOB Davidson had an odd assortment of tastes. He combined the average out-of-door sporting tendencies with a curious love of straying down intellectual byways. He was not clever and he had been very idle at school; he knew no Greek, had forgotten such Latin as had been hammered into him, was innocent of modern languages, and abhorred mathematics. The more amusing passages of history gave him true pleasure and heraldry was a thing that he really knew something about. He was twenty, and in mortal combat with his father over the choice of a profession. Old Mr. Davidson favoured the law and his son’s mind was for a land agency. In the midst of the strife Bob’s godfather, Colonel Alexander Lindsay of Pitriven, invited him to spend a fortnight with him and to shoot the dregs of the Pitriven coverts. Bob hesitated, for he had never seen Sandy Lindsay and had at that moment some private interests in Edinburgh; but Mr. Davidson, a Writer to the Signet, had no idea of offending a godfather who was also a well-to-do bachelor. So Bob, grumbling, packed his portmanteau and a copy of Douglas Whittingham’s Armorial Bearings of the Lowland Families and departed for Pitriven. The young lady who represented the private interests cried a little and desired the housemaid to abstract her early letters, daily, from the hall table.
Pitriven was a small, shabby house with an unlived-in atmosphere that laid hold upon the young man as he entered; a long-disused billiard-table almost choked the hall, and only the comforting smell of tobacco cheered him as the butler led him into his godfather’s presence. At any rate, he reflected, he would be allowed to smoke. Somehow, the place had suggested restrictions.
‘Sandy Lindsay,’ as he was always called, astonished Bob more than anyone he had seen for some time. He was so immensely tall that his head nearly touched the ceiling of the low smoking-room, and in the dusk of the December afternoon his gigantic outline practically blocked up the window in front of which he stood. He had stiff, white whiskers which curled inwards; his brassy voice had the harshness of a blow as it broke the silence. His features were not ill-favoured, but they looked
