on her daughter for news of Miss Leggatt.
‘She was all right on Friday,’ said Martha, staring out at the weather. A storm had broken the day before and she did not relish her ten miles’ cycle run to the Slack.
‘It’s nae near han’ by,’ said Emmeline, peering out over her shoulder. ‘See to that roarie-bummlers.’
Glittering bergs of cloud knocked against the south-east horizon, and turned and floated on again, and gave place to others; or stayed and piled themselves in toppling transient magnificence.
‘The sooner I’m off the better,’ said Martha. The ground was coated with a powdery snow; not enough seriously to impede progress, had it not been for the wind. Through the lifted snowclouds a ferocious wind seethed and twisted. One could watch its form in the writhing powder as one watches the reflection of branches broken in a pool. A dragon-shaped wind. With the sifted snow stinging her cheek and clogging on her spokes, Martha was glad enough to see Crannochie; and too grateful for Aunt Josephine’s fire and cup of tea to pay overmuch attention to Aunt Josephine’s appearance. On the Friday of that same week, however, she could not be blind to the alteration of the old lady.
The cold snap had gone, giving place to a muggy Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, days without spirit or smeddum. But here was a day for you, blue as a kingfisher, pungent as tang’l! − tonic. Martha sprang on her cycle and came to Crannochie flushed and towsled with the spring.
Aunt Josephine sat in her chair, dull-eyed, dowie, indifferent. She was without enthusiasm and without food. Even from the cup of tea that Martha prepared she turned away her head. Aunt Josephine refuse a cup of tea! But when one has been sick for days −
Martha persuaded her to go to bed.
‘I’ll tell you what, I’ll come back and stay with you. I’ll run home first and tell them.’
By light of Saturday she saw everywhere the evidences of Aunt Josephine’s unfitness. The house was grey with dust, clothes smelly with dirt were flung in a corner, on the pantry shelf she found a dish with scraps of stinking meat, hairy-moulded. Scunnered, she turned the contents into the fire and carried the dish hastily to the door. Peter Mennie the postie was coming up the path.
‘But the dish smells still,’ she said, ‘even though I’ve washed it. Throw it away for me, Peter.’
‘Bury it, lassie, bury it in the earth,’ answered Peter, ‘the earth’s grand at cleanin’.’
And thrusting on her the bundle of letters he was holding, he took the cause of offence in his hand and strode with it round the end of the house.
‘It’s in ahin the white breem buss,’ he said when he returned. ‘You dig it up in twa-three weeks an’ it’ll be as sweet’s the earth itsel’. There’s mair buried in the earth nor fowk kens o’.’
With a spasm of dismay, an hour or two later, Martha was wondering whether Aunt Josephine might not soon be laid there too. Plainly she was very ill. There was hurrying back and fore … by night Miss Leggatt had been carried to the infirmary. They operated thrice in all before they sent her home, haggard, shrunken, a ghost of herself; and with the knowledge that shortly she must die.
‘They should ’a’ lat me dee in peace,’ she said, weary of hospital routine, of chloroform and the knife and all the elaborate paraphernalia by which science prolongs a life that is doomed like hers. ‘They canna cure an’ I micht ’a’ been deid ere now an’ laid in the bonny grun’, an’ nae trouble to naebody. Weel, weel, but here I am.’ And contemplating herself in her own bed among her own belongings, she cantled up and looked around her with a shining pleasure. ‘It’s rale fine nae to be deid,’ she pronounced. She cantled up a little farther when Aunt Jean, who had accompanied her from the hospital, began to tell her the arrangements made for looking after her. ‘A nice body that had been a nurse, nae ane o’ the hospital kind, ye ken −’ ‘Nurse!’ quoth Miss Josephine; and with that she perked up and there was no more word of dying. Never a nurse would Aunt Josephine have, no, nor any hired woman. A pretty pass things were come to, if she had to take a hired woman under her roof, she who had relished her jaunty independence through so many years. Oh, she knew there were unpleasant necessities, her wound to dress and so forth, but the district nurse was coming in about every morning to do that; and for the rest −
‘There’s Matty there,’ she said, ‘’ll bide wi’ me. That would be mair wiselike nor a stranger body, surely. She can easy get ower to the Slack on her bicycle. An’ it’s little that a craitur like me’ll want an’ brief time that I’ll want it.’
Aunt Jean approved the suggestion. Quite right for Matty to make herself useful.
Martha was undergoing at the moment one of her fierce revulsions from a bout of passion. She wanted to dash up out of the waters that had engulfed her, to stand high and dry on common ground; and it seemed to her that the more hard work she had to perform, plain and ordinary tasks that would use her up, the freer she would become. ‘Even more than I’ve strength for,’ she thought, ‘so that I’ll be tired out always and never have time to think.’ There would be an astringent quality in days that included an eight miles’ cycle run night and morning through all weathers, the tending of an old woman stricken with cancer and the keeping of her house, in addition to the day’s teaching in school: something antiseptic to draw out from her what at the moment she felt as poison. An ounce of civet, good apothecary.
‘Of course I will stay with you,’ she said; and to her father, who demurred a little at the arrangement, though conceding, ‘Ye’ll hae to pleesure her. It canna be for lang,’ she repeated, ‘Of course I’ll stay with her. I can easily manage.’
Later, when the sharpest of her revulsion had worn off and she no longer thirsted to scourge herself, she had a sagging of the heart over what she had undertaken. ‘Shall I be able?’ she queried: and with the insidious creeping in again of desire she thought, ‘I shan’t have time enough for Luke.’ To gather her forces and pour them out on him seemed just then the only worthy use in life: though in her heart she knew that the outpouring would turn, as it always did, to grasping. She wanted time too. … But it had never been in her nature to step aside from necessary labour and she held steadily to her task, stifling the impulses that sometines she counted madness and sometimes the noblest sanity she knew.
Aunt Josephine made an astonishing patient. As Peter the postie said, ‘I never saw her in twa minds. She’s aye grand pleased wi’ hersel’.’ Pain, sickness, comfort, the kindliest of attentions, the most wearisome of waiting, a clean house or a dirty, won from her the same divine acquiescence. On her worst days of pain she said, ‘Weel, weel, ye canna mak a better o’t. There’s fowk waur nor me.’ ‘If you knew where to find them,’ Martha said once. She was humbled by Aunt Josephine’s shining gratitude for attentions that were often, tired as she was by the time she arrived back at evening, scanted and hasty. ‘That’s richt, ma dear,’ Aunt Josephine would say, when Martha had not time to shake the mats or lift the ornaments and dust behind them. ‘They’ll wait fine till the morn. A lick an’ a promise, that’ll dae grand.’
‘A dicht an’ a promise − it’ll serve my day,’ she often said. Yet as the weeks slipped by and summer came in, she seemed far indeed from dying. Every day she took a firmer grip again of life. She left her bed, sat most of the day in her chair; then moved about the room doing odd jobs herself; by and by could take a turn in the garden.
‘I’m a bittie better ilka day,’ she proclaimed delightedly. ‘I’ll seen be tae the road again at this rate.’ And jubilation
