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 her; but that small concealment, a concealment advised by those who had concerned themselves for her after the storm burst, and by whose suggestion she had taken back her maiden name, would rise, at times, to her mind and make her sigh. She wished, as she sat with her eyes on her book and the clean pocket-handkerchief folded beside it, that she had told Hedderwick. She was so much preoccupied that she never looked up, nor settled herself against the pewback, as did her neighbours, when the sermon began. It was a few minutes before she shook herself from her abstraction and composed herself to listen to the minister’s voice.
The kirk was a plain square place with a gallery, supported on thin pillars, running round all but its western side where the tall pulpit stood between high windows. The minister, under the umbrella-like sounding-board poised over him, was far above the heads of the congregation and on a level with the occupants of the upstair pews, looking across the intervening chasm into the faces of the laird and his family. The north wall, by which Hedderwick sat, was unbroken, but on the farther side of the kirk two small windows under the gallery floor looked out upon the little kirkyard surrounding the building. There were not many tombstones on that side of it, and the light, chilly autumn wind rippled the long grass till it looked like grey waves.
Margaret never knew what made her turn her head sharply and glance across to the diamond-shaped panes. Between her and one of the windows the seats were almost empty, and there was nothing to interrupt her view of a shambling figure that moved among the graves. While she watched, the leaded panes darkened, as a man approached and looked through; the sill was cut so deep in the wall that few of the congregation could see him, and the two or three whose positions would allow them to do so had their attention fixed upon the pulpit. The man’s eyes searched as much of the interior of the kirk as he could command, and, stopping at Margaret, became centred upon her.
She looked down at her knee, faint with the suggestion shot into her terror-struck heart by the face staring in at her from outside. Hedderwick, who could have seen what she saw, was drowsy, and his closed lids shut out from him the new act of that long-buried tragedy that was being revived for the woman at his side. When she raised her head again the figure had retreated a few paces from the pane, and its outlines turned her apprehension into certainty.
The preacher’s voice ran on through the silence, but it seemed to Margaret as though her heartbeats drowned it; she forced herself to overcome the mental dizziness that wrapped her like the shawl whose fringes lay spread on the slippery wood of the pew. Its warmth was turned to a chill mockery. She closed her eyes that she might shut out the familiar things about her; the accustomed faces, the high pulpit, the red cushion on its ledge, the long, pendent tassels swinging into space; the grieve’s bulky shoulders and Sunday clothes, his brown leather Bible with its corners frayed by its weekly sojourns in his pocket. All these things had become immeasurably dear; and now, this Sunday morning might be – probably would be – the last time she should ever see them.
When the congregation dispersed she sat still. Hedderwick would have waited for her, but she motioned him dumbly to go on. After the last shuffle of feet had retreated over the