A Knight of the Nets

by Amelia E. Barr

“Let them look.”

“Well, they have their own fashion of dealing with men who ill use a fisher lass. Sophy was born among them.”

“You are a bad lot! altogether a bad lot!”

“Go now, and go quick, or we’ll prove to you that we are a bad lot!” cried Janet. “I wouldn’t myself think anything of putting you in a blanket and tossing you o’er the cliff into the water.” And Janet, with arms akimbo and eyes blazing with anger, was not a comfortable sight.

So, with a smile of derision, Braelands turned his back on the women, walking with an affected deliberation which by no means hid the white feather from the laughing, jeering fisher-wives who came to their door at Janet’s call for them, and whose angry mocking followed him until he was out of sight and hearing. Then there was a conclave in Janet’s house, and every one told a different version of the Braelands trouble. In each case, however, Madame was credited with the whole of the sorrow-making, though Janet stoutly asserted that “a man who was feared for his mother wasn’t fit to be a husband.”

“Madame’s tongue and temper is kindled from a coal out of hell,” she said, “and that is the God’s truth; but she couldn’t do ill with them, if Archie Braelands wasn’t a coward—a sneaking, trembling coward, that hasn’t the heart in him to stand between poor little Sophy and the most spiteful, hateful old sinner this side of the brimstone pit.”

But though the birr and first flame of the village anger gradually cooled down, Janet’s and Christina’s hearts were hot and heavy within them, and they could not work, nor eat, nor sleep with any relish, for thinking of the poor little runaway wife. Indeed, in every cottage there was one topic of wonder and pity, and one sad lament when two or three of the women came together: “Poor Sophy! Poor Sophy Braelands!” It was noticeable, however, that not a single woman had a wrong thought of Sophy. Madame could easily suspect the worst, but the “worst” was an incredible thing to a fisher-wife. Some indeed blamed her for not tholing her grief until her husband came back, but not a single heart suspected her of a liaison with her old lover.

Archie, however, returned from his ineffectual effort to find her with every suspicion strengthened. Madame could hardly have hoped for a visit so completely in her favour, and after it Archie was entirely under her influence. It is true he was wretchedly despondent, but he was also furiously angry. He fancied himself the butt of his friends, he believed every one to be talking about his affairs, and, day by day, his sense of outrage and dishonour pressed him harder and harder. In a month he was quite ready to take legal steps to release himself from such a doubtful tie, and Madame, with his tacit permission, took the first step towards such a consummation by writing with her own hand the notice which had driven Sophy to despair.

While events were working towards this end, Sophy was helpless and senseless in the Glasgow hospital. Archie’s anger was grounded on the fact that she must know of his return, and yet she had neither come back to her home nor sent him a line of communication. He told himself that if she had written him one line, he would have gone to the end of the earth after her. And anon he told himself that if she had been true to him, she would have written or else come back to her home. Say she was sick, she could have got some one to use the pen or the telegraph for her. And this round of reasoning, always led into the same channel by Madame, finally assumed not the changeable quality of argument, but the positiveness of fact.

So the notice of her abandonment was sent by the press far and wide, and yet there came no protest against it; for Sophy had brought to the hospital nothing by which she could be identified, and as no hint of her personal appearance was given, it was impossible to connect her with it. Thus while its cruel words linked suspicion with her name in every household where they went, she lay ignorantly passive, knowing nothing at all of the wrong done her and of the unfortunate train of circumstances which finally forced her husband to doubt her love and her honour. It was an additional calamity that this angry message of severance was the first thing that met her consciousness when she was at all able to act.