As Jessie-Mary, with her bundle, came through the whins and opened the gate, Peter Muirhead, who was in the yard, heard the latch click and looked up from his work. At sight of the yellow head by the holly bushes he laid down the spokeshave he was using and came round to the front. The girl was looking at him with eyes whose directness a youth of his type is liable to misunderstand. He began to smile.
‘Will Mistress Muirhead be ben?’ said Jessie-Mary tentatively.
Peter did not answer, but approached, his smile taking meaning.
‘Will Mistress Muirhead be ben the hoose?’ she inquired, more loudly.
It occurred to her that he might not be in his right senses, for the mile or two of debatable track which separated her old home from her future one might as well have been ten, for all she had seen of the world at the other end of it. She knew very well that Muirhead the joiner had lived where she now stood, and she had seen the old man, but the shambling figure before her was entirely strange. Once, at the edge of the wood, she had listened to the whirr of sawing in the vicinity of the road and had gathered that the work went on, though Muirhead himself had departed.
‘She’s no here. Ye’ll just hae to put up wi’ me,’ said Peter jocosely. His mother was in the house, but he saw no reason for divulging the fact.
Jessie-Mary stood silent, scarcely knowing what to say.
‘Ye’re a fine lassie,’ observed Peter, still smiling alluringly.
She eyed him with distrust and her heavy brows lowered over her eyes; she began to walk towards the cottage. He sprang forward, as though to intercept her, and, as she knocked, he laid hold of her free hand. Mrs. Muirhead, from within, opened the door just in time to see him drop it. She was a short, hard-featured woman, presenting an expanse of white apron to the world; a bunch of turkeys’ feathers, in which to stick knitting needles, was secured between her person and the band of this garment, the points of the quills uppermost. She looked from one to the other, then drawing Jessie-Mary over the threshold, she slammed the door.
‘Dinna think a didna see ye, ye limmer!’ she exclaimed, taking the girl roughly by the shoulder.
And so Jessie-Mary’s working life began.
The little room allotted to her, looking over the yard, was no smaller than the corner she had inhabited in the mud cottage, yet it had a stifling effect; and its paper, which bore a small lilac flower on a buff ground, dazzled her eyes and seemed to press on her from all sides. In the cracked looking-glass which hung on it she could see the disturbing background behind her head as she combed and flattened her thick hair in accordance with Mrs. Muirhead’s ideas. In leisure moments she hemmed at an apron which she was to wear when completed. Mrs. Muirhead was annoyed at finding she could hardly use a needle; she was far from being an unkind woman, but her understanding stopped at the limits of her own requirements. Jessie-Mary’s equally marked limitations struck her as the result of natural wickedness.
Wherever the yard was unoccupied by the planks or the pigsty, it was set about with hencoops, whose inmates strayed at will from the enclosure to pervade the nearer parts of the wood in those eternal perambulations which occupy fowls. Just outside, where the trees began, was a pleasant strip of sandy soil in which the hens would settle themselves with much clucking and tail-shaking, to sit blinking, like so many vindictive dowagers, at their kind. Through this, the Dorking cock, self-conscious and gallant, would conduct the ladies of his family to scratch among the tree-roots; and the wood for about twenty yards from the house wore that peculiar scraped and befeathered look which announces the proximity of a hen-roost. At night the lower branches were alive with dark forms and the suppressed gurgling that would escape from them. It was part of Jessie-Mary’s duty to attend to the wants of this rabble.
There were times when a longing for flight took the half-civilised girl. Life, for her, had always been a sort of inevitable accident, a state in whose ordering she had no part as a whole, however much choice she might have had in its details. But now there was little choice in these; Mrs. Muirhead ordered her day and she tolerated it as best she could. She hardly knew what to do with her small wage when she got it, for the finery dear to the heart of the modern country lass was a thing of which she had no knowledge, and there was no dependent relative who might demand it of her.
The principal trouble of her life was Peter, whose occupations kept him of necessity at home, and whose presence grew more hateful as time went on. There was no peace for her within sight of his leering smile. There was only one day of the week that she was free of him; and on these Sunday afternoons, as he went up the road to join the loitering knot of horsemen from the nearest farm, she would thankfully watch him out of sight from the shelter of the loaning. She hated him with all her heart.
He would lurk about in the evenings, trying to waylay her amongst the trees as she went to gather in the fowls, and once, coming suddenly on her as she turned the corner of the house, he had put his arm about her neck. She had felt his hot breath on her ear, and, in her fury, pushed him from her with such violence that he staggered back against a weak place in the yard fence and fell through, cutting his elbow on a piece of broken glass. She stood staring at him, half terrified at what she had done, but rejoicing to see the blood trickle down his sleeve. She would have liked to kill him. The dreadful combination of his instincts and his shamblingness was what physically revolted her, though she did not realise it; and his meanness had, more than once, got her into trouble with his mother. She had no consideration to expect from Mrs. Muirhead, as she knew well. To a more complicated nature the position would have been unendurable, but Jessie-Mary endured stubbornly, vindictively, as an animal endures. She was in a cruel position and her only safeguard lay in the fact that Peter Muirhead was repulsive to her. But neither morality nor expediency nor the armed panoply of all the cardinal virtues have yet succeeded in inventing for a woman a safeguard so strong as her own taste.
It was on a Sunday afternoon towards the end of September that Peter emerged from the garden and strolled up the road. The sun was high above the woods, his rim as yet clear of the tree-tops, and the long shadow from the young man’s feet lay in a dark strip between himself and the fence at his side. He wore his black Sunday suit and a tie bought from a travelling salesman who had visited Montrose fair the year before. In his best clothes he looked more ungainly than usual, and even the group of friends who watched his approach allowed themselves a joke at his expense as he neared them. He could hear their rough laughter, though he was far from guessing its cause. Nature had given him a good conceit of himself.
Jessie-Mary drew a breath of relief as his steps died away and she hailed the blessed time, granted to her but weekly, in which she might go about without risk of meeting him. Everything was quiet. Mrs. Muirhead was sitting in the kitchen with her Bible; the door was ajar and the girl could just see a section of her skirt and the self-contained face of the cat which blinked on the hearth beside her. She had accompanied her mistress to the kirk that morning and had thought, as they returned decorously together, that she would go down the loaning again to see the thatched cottage by the burn – perhaps stray a little in the wood among the familiar raspberry-stalks. She had not seen these old haunts since she left them for Mrs. Muirhead’s service.
She took off her apron and went out bareheaded. On the outskirts of the trees the hens were rustling and fluttering in the dust; as she passed, they all arose and followed her. She had not remembered that their feeding-time was due in half an hour and for a moment she stood irresolute. If she were to go on her intended way there would be no one to give them their food. She determined to make and administer it at once; there would be plenty of time afterwards to do what she wished to do.
She was so little delayed that, when the pail was put away and the water poured into the tin dishes, there was still a long afternoon before her. She threaded her way slowly through the fir-stems, stopping to look at the rabbit-runs or to listen to the cooing of wood pigeons, her path fragrant with the scent of pine. After walking some way she struck across the far end of the loaning into the road which led to the mud hovel.
Autumn