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 to get her parents to give the reluctant consent that he was carrying home.
‘Pridefu’ folk,’ Auntie Thompson had said.
Alec, who worked on a farm half-way between his own home and that of his love, was very honest, rather stupid, and extremely good looking. He had Auntie Thompson’s sandy hair, but his head was set finely on his broad shoulders, and the outline of his bony face had some suggestion of power that made observant people look at him with interest as he stood on the half-made stack against the sky or sat on the dashboard of a cart behind the gigantic farm-horses. He loved his aunt sincerely and without the slightest suspicion of the real originality of her character, for he had no eye for her quaintnesses and would have been immensely surprised had he been told that he lived with a really remarkable person. But he needed no one to tell him of the gratitude he owed her; and mere gratitude will carry some people a long way.
He was too happy even to whistle as he swung along the road, for he grudged anything that might take his thoughts from Isa. She had walked along the field with him as far as the road and had only turned back there because she said that she could not risk being seen by strangers in her working-clothes. Alec did not quite understand her reasons, but he had a vague feeling that they must be right, though they were of so little profit to himself. Her ‘working-clothes’ struck him as being very different from those of Auntie Thompson – as indeed they were – but then Isa’s and Auntie Thompson’s definitions of work were hardly identical. He thought she looked beautiful in them and he told her so.
‘Mrs. Thompson is very thrifty,’ she had observed, disengaging herself from his arms. (They were still in the field.)
‘Aye, is she,’ he replied heartily. ‘There’s no very mony like her.’
‘No, indeed,’ simpered Isa, with a sidelong look that he did not see; ‘but, Alec, we’ll no need to be a burden to her. I was thinking it would be better if we could go nearer to Aberdeen. There’s plenty of work to be got thereabout. And it’s no so far off but I could go back and see mama when I like,’ she added, in the genteel accent she had cultivated so carefully.
She pronounced ‘mama’ as though it rhymed with ‘awe.’
‘Oh, we’ll dae weel eneuch here,’ said he. ‘Ye’ll niver need tae gang far frae yer mither, ye see, Isa.’
‘No,’ said Isa faintly.
It was her future distance from Auntie Thompson that she was considering.
But Alec did not suspect that, any more than he suspected that this aunt supplied the reasons both for and against his marriage. The MacAndrew family were fully alive to the disgracefulness of Auntie Thompson, but they did not forget that she had solid savings and that Alec was her adopted son.
When he turned into the cottage garden his aunt had gone out again and was wheeling a heavy barrow of manure from the pigsty to the midden at the back of the house. It was Saturday, and she liked to have everything clean for the morrow. Alec followed her retreating figure.
‘Weel,’ he said plainly, ‘a’m tae get her.’
She sat down on a shaft of the empty barrow.
‘Ye’ll be fine an’ pleased,’ she said, looking up at him.
His own good fortune obliterated everything else from his mind. He did not ask what she thought about it and she gave no opinion. She looked neither glad nor sorry. At last she rose.
‘A dinna think vera muckle o’ MacAndrew,’ she observed as she took up the shafts of the barrow again.
They sat very silent over their supper that evening. Experience had made the young man so well aware of her support on every occasion that he needed no outward sign of it. He, himself, was not given to talking.
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