The Quarry Wood. Nan Shepherd

receive it in silence: but they would know!

      ‘Ye can jist snifter awa’ there’ − she addressed an imaginary Aunt Leebie − ‘but ye canna say ye hinna seen’t.’

      ‘She’s got ma sister Sally’s gump.’ Geordie’s voice broke across her pleasant reverie. ‘She’s rale like Sally whiles.’

      ‘Sally!’ screamed Mrs. Ironside, her fancies scattering like a pack of cards. ‘Her that disna richt ken gin she’s merriet or no.’

      ‘Merriet or nae merriet,’ said Geordie, ‘she had a sicht mair gumption nor ony ither o’ fowk.’

      Sally Ironside’s life, indeed, had demanded, or perhaps developed, gumption. For nine brief days she had been the speak of the place. She had left home at the age of thirty, with neither wealth nor looks to commend her, and gone through a marriage with the man whose taste in womankind had roused the astonishment of all Peterkirk and Corbieshaw and Crannochie.

      ‘If Sally Ironside’s gotten a man, an’ her thirty an’ nae a stitch o’ providin’, there’s hope for me yet,’ said one old crone to another.

      ‘There’s queerer things happened,’ answered she. ‘But fat’s the notion in nae settin’ aboot it the proper gait, tell me that, will ye? A gey heelster-gowdie business, this rinnin’ awa’ to get yer man.’

      Eighteen months later, the sole addition to her worldly gear the bairn in her arms, Sally found herself on the street, her husband having given her to understand that their marriage was a form only, and invalid. Sally disputed nothing; nor did she offer any interference − legal or moral − with his subsequent marriage to a lassie with siller. Ten years later she paid a brief visit to her old home at Peterkirk, in the garb of the Salvation Army. She was well-doing and self-respecting, but what sieges and stratagems she had carried on in the interval against a callous world only Sally herself could tell. She did not choose to tell too much. The bairn had died. ‘Good thing,’ said Sally briefly.

      Questioned as to her marriage, she acknowledged her private suspicion that the ceremony had been valid enough but that the man had taken advantage of her ignorance to get rid of her. She had no marriage lines and did not even know the name of the place where the marriage took place.

      ‘He had a perfect right to tire of me,’ she said.

      Urged to set enquiries afoot, to seize what chance there was of being proved an honest woman,

      ‘Honest fiddleyorum!’ said Sally. ‘I’m honest enough in myself, I hope, and a name won’t make me any honester that I can see. I’m best quit of him − to start speirin’ might only raise the stew. Besides if it turned out I was his true wife, it would be a gey-like pliskey on the lassie wi’ the siller.’

      ‘Like Sally!’ screamed Mrs. Ironside. …

      She added, by and by,

      ‘It’s fae the Leggatts, onyway, she gets the brains. Your fowk’s a’ feel.’

      Which was a proposition Geordie did not take upon himself to contradict.