But long ere these things Martha’s path had turned. Late in August she was appointed to a school at Slack of Mar, some ten miles across country towards the Hill o’ Fare. There being no direct conveyance, it was not so near that she could stay at home, though not so far but that at weekends she could cycle back and fore. From Monday morning till Friday night, and later when the nights grew longer and darker from Sunday night till Saturday morning, she lodged in a cottage near the school.
‘A gey quaet missy − terrible keep-yersel’-tae-yersel-kin’,’ the folk around said of the new teacher. The other teachers in the school tried to draw her out, but she refused their advances. She was thankful to be left alone. Her inner life was too turbulent, too riotous, and absorbed her energies too fully to leave much possibility of interest in the external world.
Martha had discovered that she was by no means done with passion. The numbness of exhaustion worn off, she found herself delivered again to its power. She let herself go to it. Only in its flame did she feel herself alive. She luxuriated even in the black depths of pain to which her craving surrendered her. They were the earnest of an intensity of life beside which all else in the world was mean and flat. She lived for the incidence of those cyclones of desire that lifted her and drove her far beyond herself, to dash her back bruised, her very flesh aching as though she had been trampled. There were times when she felt the presence of Luke so close and vivid that the things she touched with her hands and saw with her eyes were as shadows. These were the times when she had been accustomed to pour herself out for him. Since the day when, dripping wet from the pelt of rain that had overtaken her, she had crouched on her bedroom floor and felt for the first time in absence of her spirit in immediate communion with his, she had satisfied by this means love’s imperative demand to give. Her life had seemed to pass out from her and be received in his.
But love’s imperative demand was now to take. She wanted Luke, his presence, his life, his laughing vitality; and it seemed to her, crouching mute upon the floor with the mood upon her, that reaching him she could draw his very life away and take it for her own. ‘I mustn’t. I mustn’t,’ she thought. It was like rape. And her exultant clutching was followed by an agony of shame. But next time the mood possessed her she clutched again. ‘He is mine. I can hold him. I can have his life in me.’ And she felt like a dabbler in black magic, the illicit arts. There had been nothing illicit in her loving Luke, nor in the outpouring of her spirit upon him; but this reckless grabbing was like a shameful and beloved vice. She fought frantically against it, only to succumb to a blacker and more gluttonous debauchery. Reason, that had been the adversary in her effort to give, mocking her with the ultimate inability of the mind to know that what she felt as true was actually so, was now her triumphant ally. ‘You cannot know,’ reason whispered, ‘that you really touch him. It is only idea.’ And as long as she could not be sure, she could not exert her will to check her thieving. Afterwards she was hagridden, with strained miserable eyes. The hollows had come again in her cheeks. Her face was hungry.
At home she was merrier and more vivacious than she had ever been. Mirth was her hiding-place. Anything rather than have them guess she had been hurt, and how! But she hated the effort it demanded and was thankful that the larger part of that winter was spent away from home.
The road from Slack of Mar to Wester Cairns ran through Crannochie, and every weekend as she passed on her bicycle, Martha paid Aunt Josephine a visit; but preoccupied with herself she failed to notice, what the neighbours round about Crannochie were noticing that spring, that Miss Leggatt was less alert than she had been. Her straight shoulder and steady foot were failing her. She sat too often and too long by the ingle, forgetting time; sometimes, she forgot to rise; her blind was not drawn up, her door was not opened, till far on in the day; but always she had a ready word for a visitor, and Martha, for whom Aunt Josephine had been just the same since ever she could remember her, went on perceiving the familiar image and missed its alteration.
‘Yer Aunt Josephine hasna come in aboot this lang while,’ said Emmeline one Sunday in February. ‘Is she weel eneuch?’ If it was long since Aunt Josephine had been to Wester Cairns, it was longer since Emmeline had been to Crannochie. Emmeline, in the parlance of the neighbourhood, was like a house-side. Walking was not for her. The mountain could not go to Mahomet, and Emmeline was dependent on her daughter for news of Miss Leggatt.
‘She was all right on Friday,’ said Martha, staring out at the weather. A storm had broken the day before and she did not relish her ten miles’ cycle run to the Slack.
‘It’s nae near han’ by,’ said Emmeline, peering out over her shoulder. ‘See to that roarie-bummlers.’
Glittering bergs of cloud knocked against the south-east horizon, and turned and floated on again, and gave place to others; or stayed and piled themselves in toppling transient magnificence.
‘The sooner I’m off the better,’ said Martha. The ground was coated with a powdery snow; not enough seriously to impede progress, had it not been for the wind. Through the lifted snowclouds a ferocious wind seethed and twisted. One could watch its form in the writhing powder as one watches the reflection of branches broken in a pool. A dragon-shaped wind. With the sifted snow stinging her cheek and clogging on her spokes, Martha was glad enough to see Crannochie; and too grateful for Aunt Josephine’s fire and cup of tea to pay overmuch attention to Aunt Josephine’s appearance. On the Friday of that same week, however, she could not be blind to the alteration of the old lady.
The cold snap had gone, giving place to a muggy Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, days without spirit or smeddum. But here was a day for you, blue as a kingfisher, pungent as tang’l! − tonic. Martha sprang on her cycle and came to Crannochie flushed and towsled with the spring.
Aunt Josephine sat in her chair, dull-eyed, dowie, indifferent. She was without enthusiasm and without food. Even from the cup of tea that Martha prepared she turned away her head. Aunt Josephine refuse a cup of tea! But when one has been sick for days −
Martha persuaded her to go to bed.
‘I’ll tell you what, I’ll come back and stay with you. I’ll run home first and tell them.’
By light of Saturday she saw everywhere the evidences of Aunt Josephine’s unfitness. The house was grey with dust, clothes smelly with dirt were flung in a corner, on the pantry shelf she found a dish with scraps of stinking meat, hairy-moulded. Scunnered, she turned the contents into the fire and carried the dish hastily to the door. Peter Mennie the postie was coming up the path.
‘But the dish smells still,’ she said, ‘even though I’ve washed it. Throw it away for me, Peter.’
‘Bury it, lassie, bury it in the earth,’ answered Peter, ‘the earth’s grand at cleanin’.’
And thrusting on her the bundle of letters he was holding, he took the cause of offence in his hand and strode with it round the end of the house.
‘It’s in ahin the white breem buss,’ he said when he returned. ‘You dig it up in twa-three weeks an’ it’ll be as sweet’s the earth itsel’. There’s mair buried in the earth nor fowk kens o’.’
With a spasm of dismay, an hour or two later, Martha was wondering whether Aunt Josephine might not soon be laid there too. Plainly she was very ill. There was hurrying back and fore … by night Miss Leggatt had been carried to the infirmary. They operated thrice in all before they sent her home, haggard, shrunken, a ghost of herself; and with the knowledge that shortly she must die.
‘They should ’a’ lat me dee in peace,’ she said, weary of hospital routine, of chloroform and the knife and all the elaborate paraphernalia by which science prolongs a life that is doomed like hers. ‘They canna cure an’ I micht ’a’ been deid ere now an’ laid in the bonny grun’, an’ nae trouble to naebody. Weel, weel, but here I am.’