time that a man had ever attempted such a thing and her heart almost stopped. She was torn between wrath and a thrilling, overmastering sense of something achieved. She stood panting, her bundle fallen into the mud. Then she snatched it and dashed into the greyness. It took but a moment to swallow up her figure, but he stayed where he was, staring, his coarse shoulders shaking with laughter. She could hear his jesting voice calling after her as she went. When she had gone a little distance she paused, listening to discover whether he was following; but there was no sound of footsteps.
She hurried on though she had ceased to think of her goal. Her thoughts drove her, rushing and tumbling like birds with beating wings, crowding and jostling and crying in her ears. Black’s words had let them loose, stirring her as much as his action. Yes, it was quite true. She was tied, as she had been all her life, to her father and his box. She drudged for him, year in, year out, and got nothing by it, while he clung like an old dog in the manger to the thing he would neither use nor share. She would be a wife worth having for any man with the contents of that box to start housekeeping on! Willie Black would realise that. She remembered her years at the ferry in fair weather and foul, the picking and scraping she had done and suffered in the house, that the hoarding might go on that was no good to anyone. There had never been any love lost between herself and Thievie, and though he was her father she had long known that she hated him. Yes, she hated him. She had no fear of work and had taken it as a normal condition, but it had come between her and all that was worth having; the toil that had been a man’s toil, not a woman’s, had built a barrier round her to cut her off from a woman’s life. All this had lurked, unrecognised, in her mind, but now it had leaped up, aroused by a man’s careless, familiar horseplay.
Her breath came quick as she thought of her own meagre stake in the world. She knew herself for some kind of a power, and that was awaking the dormant realisation of her slavery, all the more bitter for its long sleep. She pushed back her hat and the drops came tumbling to her shoulder from the draggled blue flower, now a flower in name only, a sodden streak of blackened colour. She found herself shaking all over and she longed to sit down, but the milestone, which had often served her for a seat on her walks to and from the town, was a good way on.
The roadside landmarks were growing a little clearer. It was almost noon, and the flash of false brightness which that hour will often bring hovered somewhere in the veiled sky. She heard the ring of a hammer coming muffled from the smithy ahead, and pushed on, thinking to sit a little in some corner behind the ploughs and harrows. She was unnerved by the tumult in her; anger and self-pity were undermining her self-control; she was a self-controlled woman, and the agony of disorganised feeling was, in consequence, all the worse. It seemed that she had never been aware of the large injustices of life till now. Her difficulties had been small, physical ones and she had known how to scatter them with a high hand; but these new ones pressed round her like a troop of sturdy, truculent beggars, clamouring and menacing. Another woman might have wept but she only suffered.
She reached the smithy door and looked in. The smith was at his anvil, holding a red-hot horseshoe with the tongs. The blowing had ceased and in the dimness of the shed a pair of huge, patient Clydesdales were in process of being shod. A young ‘horseman’ was standing by, his hands in his pockets, watching the sputter of flaming sparks that rose with each blow and fell here and there. The hot scent of horses and leather and scorching hoof seemed one with the rich browns and warm shadows that hang about smithy fires. Behind the mysterious limbs of the bellows the elf-like face of the smith’s ’prentice-lad peered at Janet, though both the men’s interest in the matter in hand made them unaware of the woman who slipped noiselessly in.
She laid her bundle down behind a cart that stood jacked up with a wheel off, amid a medley of implements, and sat down, concealed by the litter, in a cobwebby corner of the long building. The hammering stopped and one of the carthorses shifted its feet and blew a shattering sigh into the rafters; the horseman gave one of those sudden expostulatory cries that his profession addresses to its charges, and all was still again. The smith threw down his hammer and left the shoe to cool a little.
‘They’ll be haein’ a bad time doon at the hooses yonder,’ said he, nodding his head backwards in the direction of the low ground.
‘Aye, coorse,’ said the horseman.
‘I wad believe that,’ continued the smith, whose noisy trade gave him less opportunity of hearing his own voice than he liked. ‘I mind weel eneuch when we got a terrible-like spate – saxteen year syne, come Martinmas. I was doon aboot Pairthshire way then, an’ I wasna lang merriet, an’ the wife was that ta’en up aboot it. She was fae the toon, ye understan’, an’ she didna like tae see the swine an’ the sheep jist rowin’ past i’ the water. Ah weel, ye see, we’ll jist hae tae dae oor best.’
‘Aye,’ said the horseman.
‘There’ll be big losses. Aye, weel, weel, we canna control the weather, ye see.’
‘Na,’ said the horseman.
‘An’ I doot auld Thievie doon at the ferry’ll be swampit. Aye, ye see, ye canna tell when yer time’s tae come.’
‘The auld scabbit craw,’ said the horseman.
The smith took up his tools, and approaching one of the horses, laid hold of an enormous hind foot and began, strenuously, to pare the hoof. The beast looked round with an all-embracing toleration. The horseman spat.
Janet sat still, trying to quell the storm within her and to think connectedly. There had been no need for the blacksmith’s words to bring her father’s plight before her. In all likelihood the riverside cottage was already surrounded, and the fact that the few neighbours were well aware that none knew better than she how to handle oars might easily make them slow to bestir themselves on Thievie’s behalf. The old ferry-boat, still seaworthy, lay in its shed some way up the bank, ready for the occasional use to which it was put; and no one but the little boy who had been in to help the old man on the preceding night knew that Janet was absent; and the boy was probably at school.
Even now her freedom might be coming to her on the rising spate! She shivered, chilled after her excitement and her transit from hot heart-burning to the cold horror upon which, with the inward eye, she looked. Thievie could not get up the ladder-like stair – not even with the gurgling water behind him – without a helping hand. It was years since he had even been willing to try. Perhaps she had only to stay where she was and to take what gift this day might bring! Her hands were shaking, though she had clasped them tightly on her lap, and she set her teeth, almost fearing that their chattering would betray her to the smith and his taciturn companion. Of what use was that old withering life by the riverside to itself or to any other living thing? It was as dead, already, as the dead money in the box below the bed. But the money would be dead no longer. Willie Black would not think it dead. She would wait where she was; the smith might go to his dinner when the shoeing was done, but the smithy door stood always open and she would sit, unmolested, till such time as she judged…
Her thoughts stopped there and she closed her eyes, leaning her head against the wall.
She could not hang about the road in such weather, waiting. She had not the courage to do that, for fear of drawing attention and making her neighbours ask inconvenient questions … afterwards. Though she assured herself that no one would guess, or be sufficiently interested to try to guess, what was causing her to loiter, her nerves would not allow her to face so much as an innocent stranger. She wished the lad behind the bellows had not peered at her in that way. Suppose he should tell the smith – but anything was better than the public road! She tried to force herself into composure.
All at once a loud voice sounded at the door. She opened her eyes and recognised a local carrier through her screen of lumber. He took off the sack which enveloped him and shook it till the drops flew.
