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
