them. What wit they might have had had been dulled and blunted by their labour on the Achgammie fields. He regretted that circumstance had compelled them to go into the world without education for without knowledge they would be slaves to the land and the men who owned the land all the days of their lives.
What a difference there was in the life he now lived from what he had imagined in his youth and even in the first days of marriage!
His step became slower on the road. It was nothing but sheer necessity, the compulsion of food and shelter that drove him towards the Suie. And yet, as he thought of his family, there was one touch of promise – his youngest son. He thought he recognised about the lad David a suggestion of brightness and alertness he had not seen in his other children, with the exception of Richard who was at sea.
Only the thought of David, his youngest born, brought Andrew Ramsay any satisfaction on his way through the Sabbath night of darkness and rain. But when at last he came within sight of his kitchen window he found himself warming to it: for the wind coming in from the loch was biting and cold and the sough of it in the darkness was unspeakably lonely.
THE ORPHAN
At the age of seven, Jean Gibson was a sturdy child well used to working in the fields of Craigdaroch, whether at singling turnips in summer or cutting the shaws from the turnips in early winter. In the winter of her seventh year the frosts were severe and the shawing of the turnips was a painful task.
Jean had inherited her father’s tremendous capacity for hard work. Old Jacob Scanlon, the field ganger, considered her by far the best worker in his gang of child labourers. As she was always willing and conscientious and worked as hard when he was looking as when he was not he had reason to be well pleased with her.
But Jean did not like old Jacob. He was sly and cunning and as crafty as an old dog. He was continually mumbling prayers and quoting Biblical texts. Jean, quick and alert, was not deceived by old Jacob’s holy pretences. She knew most of his tricks. He would come upon them quietly, sit down at the end of the drills, and, slowly filling his pipe, watch them from under his grey bushy eyebrows. At last he would light his pipe. But he did not throw away the match: he would quietly and surreptitiously stick it into a drill so that he might know exactly how much progress had been made when he came back.
It hadn’t taken long for Jean to discover this practice and, having discovered it, immediately to nullify its results. Coming to the end of a drill that Jacob had marked, she would pick out the match and throw it away. When Jacob came back she would quietly enjoy his obvious discomfort at failing to locate the match. He would become extremely irritable and mumble and pray and mutter about the wicked flourishing like the green bay tree. For old Jacob Scanlon who had lived as wicked and dissolute a life as his limited means and more limited time had allowed him in the prime days of his manhood had, towards his later days, become ‘converted’ while listening one market day to an evangelical service in Stranraer.
Jacob’s declining years were lonely. The doctrine of salvation came as a great comfort to him especially as it allowed him to dwell on the wickedness and sin in the world. The greatest sin was to fail to work hard enough for his master, Ned MacWhirrie. Jacob realised that as his years and the effectiveness of his labour were sadly declining, his master might well dispense with his services at any term day. As the term months, May and November, drew near he became especially anxious and worried day and night whether his master would engage him for another term or dispense with his services.
Undoubtedly Jacob had his worries at those periods. His mumbling and praying would become almost incessant while he drove the harder the children under his supervision.
It was on a morning of early November frost that he first realised to what extent Jean Gibson was a true child of her father’s loins.
He was on the second round that morning, about nine o’clock, when he got his eye on John MacMime. John was an illegitimate orphan. His mother, a milker on Cardow farm, had died with childbed fever and he had been brought up by his grandmother who, also widowed and childless, was still employed as a milker on Craigdaroch farm – not from any sentiment but since she was still, despite her years, one of the best milkers in the byre. As she had no family of her own to support, Craigdaroch paid her little enough: it was all the woman could do to keep her own body and soul together without considering her grandson’s.
John MacMime was regarded as a pitiful object of starvation and neglect. Had he been given sufficient nourishment he would have been of a health and strength above average: both his parents had been strong and healthy. The struggle between his frame and his flesh became dreadfully accentuated. He was pathetically and shamefully emaciated. On his pinched white face there was stamped a look of dumb and perplexed misery. It was a face that had never smiled. His heart had never known joy and his stomach had never been wholly free from the gnawing pangs of hunger.
He had just passed his fifth birthday and this winter was his first experience of the fields. But his three pence reward for a day’s work was sorely needed.
When Jacob Scanlon’s attention was first drawn to him he was wiping the tears from his eyes with the back of his cold-blae hand. Immediately Jacob’s teeth were set on edge. A child cannot wipe away his tears with his hands and shaw turnips at the same time. Already the children were well advanced on their drills. Jean Gibson was actually coming down her second drill while he had completed no more than a quarter of his first.
Jean had also seen John MacMime crying. She knew the cause. He was the only child working in his bare feet. Every one else had some sort of foot protection – a pair of old boots or a pair of wooden clogs. The ground was iron bound with the frost. It took all the strength of her arm to wrest the turnips from the earth and the shaws with their frozen dew were like cut glass to the hand. Whereas she could pull her turnip out at the first wrench and cleave the shaw from the root with one blow from her iron snedder, John MacMime had to tug and tear till he freed his root and hack and slash with his knife till he separated the root from the shaw. The task was plainly beyond his under-nourished strength.
But John MacMime suffered most from his feet. The frost burned them dreadfully. There were hacks between his toes and the hacks bled. The backs of his hands were crisscrossed with small chaps and they too bled and smarted, while the turned-up cuffs of an old green-black adult’s jacket chafed painfully on them.
But this did not concern Jacob Scanlon. The boy was shirking his work, had actually stopped working to cry. Jacob counted on his presence driving him to activity. He would wait and watch and note how the boy responded.
As soon as the boy became conscious of the ganger’s presence he did make an attempt to overcome his pain and weakness.
The alert Jean was equally conscious that Jacob had got his eye on John MacMime and she feared for the boy. She had meant to forge ahead with her own drills so that she could lend a hand and bring him up in line with the others before the midday break. But she was apprehensive of the evil look that had settled on the ganger’s face.
The pain in John MacMime’s feet became terrible to bear. The frozen earth became an agony. In despair he took off his bonnet and placed it under his feet, not so much in hope of warmth as for protection from the sharp ground.
But this was too much for the ganger. The shirking wretch was actually trying to coddle himself. He moved stealthily up the drill behind him.
Jean Gibson was coming down her drill and was facing them. She suppressed a desire to call to John MacMime – to warn him of the danger from behind. But she was afraid this would have been construed as an act of open and defiant rebellion.
As Jacob Scanlon came up on the boy his anger turned to a cold fury. He seized him by the collar and shook him like a rat. The boy screamed in terror. The rest of the children straightened their backs and turned round apprehensively. Jean Gibson dropped her iron knife and her small fists clenched and unclenched while her arms tautened at her sides.
The jacket with which John MacMime was clad was many sizes too large for him. It reached well below his knees and even the shoulders of it reached half-way down his arms. He dangled