A Knight of the Nets

by Amelia E. Barr

“Thomas, you will have the carriage at the door in fifteen minutes, exactly,” and she drew out her little jewelled watch, and gave him the time with a smiling, invincible calmness.

Thomas looked from one woman to the other, and said, fretfully, “A man canna tak’ twa contrary orders at the same minute o’ time. What will I do in the case?”

“You will do as I tell you, Thomas,” said Madame. “You have done so for twenty years. Have you come to any scath or wrong by it?”

“If the carriage is not at the door in fifteen minutes, you will leave Braelands this night, Thomas,” said Sophy. “Listen! I give you fifteen minutes; after that I shall walk into Largo, and you can answer to your master for it. I am Mistress of Braelands. Don’t forget that fact if you want to keep your place, Thomas.”

She turned passionately away with the words, and left the room. In fifteen minutes she went to the front door in her cloak and hood, and the carriage was waiting there. “You will drive me to my aunt Kilgour’s shop,” she said with an air of reckless pride and defiance. It pleased her at that hour to humble herself to her low estate. And it pleased Thomas also that she had done so. His sympathy was with the fisher girl. He was delighted that she had at last found courage to assert herself, for Sophy’s wrongs had been the staple talk of the kitchen-table and fireside.

“No born lady I ever saw,” he said afterwards to the cook, “could have held her own better. It will be an even fight between them two now, and I will bet my shilling on fisherman Traill’s girl.”

“Madame has more wit, and more hold out” answered the cook. “Mrs. Archibald is good for a spurt, but I’ll be bound she cried her eyes red at Griselda Kilgour’s, and was as weak as a baby.”

This opinion was a perfectly correct one. Once in her aunt’s little back parlour, Sophy gave full sway to her childlike temper. She told all her wrongs, and was comforted by her kinswoman’s interest and pity, and strengthened in her resolution to resist Madame’s interference with her life. And then the small black teapot was warmed and filled, and Sophy begged for a herring and a bit of oatcake; and the two women sat close to one another, and Miss Kilgour told Sophy all the gossip and clash of gossip there had been about Christina Binnie and her lover, and how the marriage had been broken off, no one knowing just why, but many thinking that since Jamie Logan had got a place on “The Line,” he was set on bettering himself with a girl something above the like of Christina Binnie.

And as they talked Helen Marr came into the shop for a yard of ribbon, and said it was the rumour all through Pittendurie, that Andrew Binnie was all but dead, and folks were laying all the blame upon the Mistress of Braelands, for that every one knew that Andrew had never held up his head an hour since her marriage. And though Miss Kilgour did not encourage this phase of gossip, yet the woman would persist in describing his sufferings, and the poverty that had come to the Binnies with the loss of their only bread-winner, and the doctors to pay, and the medicine folks said they had not the money to buy, and much more of the same sort, which Sophy heard every word of, knowing also that Helen Marr must have seen her carriage at the door, and so, knowing of her presence, had determined that she should hear it.

Certainly if Helen had wished to wound her to the very heart, she succeeded. When Miss Kilgour got rid of her customer, and came back to Sophy, she found her with her face in the pillow, sobbing passionately about the trouble of her old friends. She did not name Andrew, but the thought of his love and suffering hurt her sorely, and she could not endure to think of Janet’s and Christina’s long hardships and sorrow. For she knew well how much they would blame her, and the thought of their anger, and of her own apparent ingratitude, made her sick with shame and grief. And as they talked of this new trouble, and Sophy sent messages of love and pity to Janet and Christina, the shop-bell rung violently, and Sophy heard her husband’s step, and in another moment he was at her side, and quite inclined to be very angry with her for venturing out in such miserable weather.