He stood looking at the coarse-grained, furious creature, astonished. Then he turned to Isa, prim and aloof, in her flounces.
‘Isa—’
Mrs. MacAndrew opened her mouth again, but Alec stepped towards her. His eyes were so fierce that she drew back.
‘Haud yer whisht, woman,’ he said hoarsely, ‘dinna get in my road. Isa, what are ye tae say? Ye wasna this way, yesterday.’
The girl looked rather frightened, and the corners of her small mouth drooped. She liked Alec, but she liked other things better. She was weak, but she was obstinate, and she had never overcome the feeling that she was throwing herself away. Before her mind’s eye rose the vision of the stranger in church.
‘What’s wrang wi’ me that wasna wrang yesterday?’ he demanded.
Isa’s vision, the vision with the trim hair, a gold tie-pin and a prospective farm, was making her feel rather guilty. It was so real to her that she felt she must hide it.
‘It’s – it’s Mrs. Thompson,’ faltered she.
‘What?’
‘Ye’ll need to have no more to do with Mrs. Thompson if you’re to marry me,’ said she, plucking up courage.
An angry exclamation broke from him.
‘Awa’ ye gang!’ cried Mrs. MacAndrew.
‘Isa,’ said Alec, ‘d’ye mean that ye’re seeking tae gar me turn ma back on m’ Auntie Thompson?’
‘Aye,’ said the girl, nodding stubbornly.
He turned and went. On the threshold he looked back.
‘Ye can bide whaur ye are,’ said he. ‘A’m no wantin’ ye.’
NOT MANY DAYS afterwards Isa walked down the Muir Road with a little packet in her hand. The hairy pony was at work on the farm, or she would have had herself driven in the basket carriage. But although she was on foot, she wore her best hat with the drooping feather and her blue flounced dress.
She had two excellent reasons for this extravagance. She was going to the very door of the white cottage, and she was anxious that Auntie Thompson’s neighbours should have a good chance of observing how superior she was to Alec; also, she hoped that some happy stroke of fortune might throw her against the interesting stranger. She had heard nothing about him since the last eventful Sunday, when he and Auntie Thompson respectively had produced so much effect. Though she and her mother would have maintained with their last breaths that it was the woman who had brought about the change in Isa’s situation, each knew in her secret heart that it was the man. As she stepped along the girl told herself that he must surely be somewhere in the neighbourhood. Why had he come to Pitairdrie kirk if he had no connection with Pitairdrie parish?
The parcel she carried contained some little presents her lover had given her – a silk handkerchief, some strings of beads, a pair of earrings.
She could not forgive him for his last words to her; her vanity smarted and she longed to repay him for them. There was something of her mother in her, for all her elegant looks and refined aspirations. The pair had agreed that the returning of the gifts by her own hand would be an effective means of showing how little the parting from Alec troubled her. If he should come to the door she would hand him the packet with a few scornful words, and if Auntie Thompson came, she would know how to crush her by her manners and appearance. She had never spoken to Auntie Thompson.
She turned into the little garden path. The tangle of nasturtiums by the kitchen window prevented her from seeing the two people who were observing her approach from the hearth at which they sat. She knocked at the door.
Words almost forsook her a moment later when it was opened by the stranger, the object of all her day-dreams and speculations. This time he was not dressed for Sunday. But he had lost little by the change.
She was absolutely bewildered. He made no offer to admit her; he did not even ask her business. She gathered her wits as quickly as she could and addressed him, smiling and gracious. Her heart was beating.
‘Does Mrs. Thompson live here?’ she inquired, snatching, by the unnecessary question, at the chance of conversation.
‘Yes.’
He had a strange accent.
‘Perhaps you will kindly give this to Mr. Soutar?’
She held out the little packet.
‘Thanks.’
He took it and shut the door in her face. The blood rushed to her cheeks. He had looked at her as though she were a puddle to be avoided in the road. There was nothing to do but to walk away with what dignity she could command.
Just as she went through the little gate an elderly woman passed. She was presumably a neighbour, for she had come from a house close by.
She overtook her in a few paces.
‘What is the name of the gentleman who lives there?’ she asked her, pointing back to the nasturtium-covered walls.
‘Alec Soutar,’ said the woman.
‘I don’t mean him,’ said Isa, whose wits were coming back. ‘I mean the gentleman I was speaking to.’
‘Have ye no heard? Yon man’s newly come frae Ameriky wi’ a fortune. He’s seekin’ a wife, they tell me,’ added the other, with a twinkle in her eye.
‘But who is he? What is his name?’
‘Dod, that’s just Mistress Thompson’s ither nephew, John MacQueen, that gaed awa’ when he was a sma’ laddie,’ said the woman.
OF THE birth and origin of Jessie-Mary no one in the parish knew anything definite. Those who passed up the unfrequented cart-road by her grandmother’s thatched hovel used to see the shock-headed child among the gooseberry bushes of the old woman’s garden, peering at them, like an animal, over the fence.
Whether she were really the granddaughter of the old beldame inside the mud walls no one knew, neither, for that matter, did anybody care. The hovel was the last remaining house of a little settlement which had disappeared from the side of the burn. Just where it stood, a shallow stream ran across the way and plunged into a wood in which Jessie-Mary had many a time feasted on the plentiful wild raspberries, and run, like a little squirrel, among the trees.
It was not until she was left alone in the world that much attention was paid to her existence, and then she presented herself to the parish as a problem; for her life was lived a full half-century before the all-powerful Board School arose to direct rustic parents and guardians, and she had received little education. She had grown into a sturdy girl of twenty, with brown hair which the sun had bleached to a dull yellow, twisted up at the back of her head and hanging heavily over her brows. She was a fierce-looking lass, with her hot grey eyes. The parish turned its mind to the question of how she might earn a living and was presently relieved when Mrs. Muirhead, who was looking for an able-bodied servant, hired her in that capacity. She was to have a somewhat meagre wage and her clothes, and was to help her mistress in house and yard. When the matter was settled she packed her few possessions into a bundle and sauntered up the green loaning which ran between the hovel and Mrs. Muirhead’s decent roof, marking where one fir-wood ended and another began.
Mrs. Muirhead was the widow of a joiner, and she inhabited a cottage standing just where the woods and the mouth of the loaning touched the high road that ran north to the hills. She was well to do, for a cottager, and her little yard, besides being stacked with planks which her son, Peter, sawed and planed as his father had done before him, contained a row of hen-coops and a sty enclosing a pig whose proportions waxed as autumn waned. When the laird trotted by, he cast a favourable eye on the place, which was