driving alongside; once they passed within a foot of a tree which rode the torrent, plunging, its roots sticking up like gaunt arms supplicating mercy from the shrouded sky.
Finally they found themselves drifting in the comparative quiet of the broad sheet of tidal water, among the bits of seaweed carried inland above the deeps of the river-bed. The terrors of death had blinded Janet as they were swept along, and she now awoke as from a nightmare. An oar had been reft from her grasp in the stress of their anguished journey. Thievie was staring at her like an animal; his sufferings, as they were battered between one death and another on the boiling river, were nothing compared to hers. His god had upheld him. He had crawled back to his seat in the stern.
‘Aye, he micht cry on us,’ he said. ‘We’re far awa’ frae him noo – he’ll no ken what I’ve got here!’
He began to rock about, laughing as he thought of the river-watcher’s fruitless attempt to find him.
‘Haud still,’ said Janet sternly. ‘God, hae ye no done eneuch mischieve the day? Gin yon mist doesna lift an’ let them see us frae the shore we’ll be oot tae sea when the tide gangs back.’
‘Naebody’ll see us, naebody’ll see us!’ he exclaimed, hugging the box and rocking himself again.
Janet rose to her feet, fury in her eyes; she could no longer keep her hands off him.
As he saw her movement, he snatched the box from where it lay at his feet.
‘Stand still, or I’ll tak’ it frae ye!’ she cried loudly, making towards him.
He gave one cry of horror and, with the box in his arms, hurled himself sideways into the waters that closed over him and his god.
THE TIDE WAS on the turn and the rain had ceased. A wind had sprung up in the west, driving the ‘haar’ before it back to the sea whence it came. Some men from the fishing village near the lighthouse were rowing smartly out into the tideway where a boat drifted carrying a solitary human being, a woman who sat dazed and frozen and who had not so much as turned her head as they hailed her.
As they brought her ashore one of them took off his coat and wrapped it round her. She seemed oblivious of his action.
‘Hae,’ said he, with clumsy kindness, ‘pit it on, lass. What’ll yer lad say gin ye stairve?’
Janet thrust the coat from her.
The Disgracefulness of Auntie Thompson
AUNTIE THOMPSON came round the corner of her whitewashed cottage with a heavy zinc pail in either hand. The sun beat hot upon her back and intensified the piercing scarlet and yellow of the climbing nasturtiums which swarmed up the window-sills and seemed likely to engulf the windows of her dwelling. The whole made a strident little picture in the violence of its white and scarlet and in the aggressive industry of its principal figure; and the squeaking of one of the pails, the handle of which fitted too tightly in its socket, seemed to be calling attention to Auntie Thompson all down the road. There lacked but one further touch to the loud homeliness of the scene, and that was added as the two immense pigs in the black-boarded sty for which Auntie Thompson was bound raised their voices to welcome their meal. There is no sound so unrelievedly low as the gross and ignoble outcry by which a pig marks his interest in the events which concern him.
Perhaps there was something appropriate about the unseemly noise with which Auntie Thompson was hailed, for in this quiet neighbourhood she was not far from being a public scandal. Her appearance, which was intensely plebeian; her tongue, which was very outspoken; and her circumstances, which were a deal better than her habits warranted – all these disagreed in some undefined way with the ideas of her small world. A woman who had laid by as much as she was reported to own had no business to keep no servant and to speak her mind on all subjects to those who did, as if she were on the same social level as themselves. She was unabashed and disgraceful; she did not deride convention, because she seemed to be unaware that it existed. She kept her fingers out of everyone else’s affairs, and though she expected other people to take the same line, she met their interference without malice, for she was perfectly good-tempered. But her disregard of them being instinctive and complete, it was more effective than mountains of insult. At this moment the censuring eyes of several of the dwellers down the road were upon her as she heaved the pails on to the top of the pigsty fence with her strong red arms and tipped their gushing contents into the troughs.
Auntie Thompson was no beauty. She had a large, determined pink face and her tiny eyes looked out under fierce, sandy eyebrows set close on either side of her rather solemn-looking nose. Her hair was sandy too, and was brushed tidily from her parting and given a twist just over her ears before it was gathered into an old-fashioned, black chenille net at the back of her head. She was of moderate height and solid, with the bursting solidity of a pincushion. On every conceivable occasion she wore a grey wincey dress short enough to reveal her stout ankles. Her hair was beginning to grizzle, and now, as the sun struck on it, bits of it shone like spots of mica on a hillside. She had only two feminine weaknesses; one was a tender heart and the other was a consuming horror of bats.
Whilst she stood watching her pigs, a neighbour passed up the road and sent a cold glance in at her over the low wall, patched with stonecrop, which enclosed the garden. Auntie Thompson turned her head and nodded with an impersonal smile, as though in answer to a greeting; she did not notice that there was none to answer. Had she lived on a desert island, she might not have observed that there was no one else present.
Only one being stood out against the background of thrift, pigs, healthy work and placidity in which she revelled, and that was her nephew, Alec, whom she had brought up since his sixth year. Twenty years ago he had come to her as an orphan and he was with her still. The pair lived together in great peace by the roadside.
‘The Muir Road,’ as it was called, connected two important highways and ran across the piece of heathy land which had once been the muir of Pitairdrie, but which was now enclosed and cultivated and cribbed in between fences and dykes. It had not lost all its attractions, for stretches of fir-wood broke its levels; and, as it stood high, with the distant Grampians on its northern side, the back of Auntie Thompson’s cottage looked over a sloping piece of country across which the cloud-shadows sailed and flitted towards the purple of the hills.
Auntie Thompson turned from her swine and re-entered her house without looking up the road, or she would have seen Alec Soutar, who was stepping homeward with an expression of deep content on his face. No wonder he was contented; for on this Saturday afternoon he had seen the end of his long courting and was coming home with Isa’s consent fresh in his mind.
It had been uphill work. Isa was the only daughter of William MacAndrew, and as everybody was well aware, MacAndrew, who had, by reason of a timely legacy, transformed himself from a cottager into a small farmer, was a man full of vainglory and the husband of a wife who matched himself. They were not a popular pair; and though they lived far enough from Auntie Thompson to be surrounded by a different community, their fame had spread to the cottage. It was rumoured that they drove their four miles to Pitairdrie kirk every Sunday so that the world might see that they could afford to arrive there on wheels. There was a church so near MacAndrew’s farm that, when its door was open, a man could follow the sermon from the stackyard; but only chronic invalidism, or the fact of being overturned, can make it possible to ascend and descend from a vehicle within the same fifty yards. Isa had been to a boarding school in Aberdeen, and her dress and manners were the envy of every young lass who beheld her as she sat in her father’s high-backed pew with her silk parasol beside her. It had taken Alec Soutar a long time to make himself acceptable to her and a longer one
