The squad would soon set off to Morrison’s. Things would go well if once she got there, she assured herself. At present she wished that she had someone to confide in, somebody to whom she could tell her story. But in the squad there was none whom she could take into her confidence. The old women from Glenmornan and Frosses, brimful of a narrow, virtuous simplicity, were not the ones to sympathise with her; they would only condemn. If Gourock Ellen was here, Norah felt that she could sigh her misfortune into that woman’s heart; but neither Gourock Ellen nor Annie had turned up for the last two years, and nobody knew what had become of them.
One day Norah felt that her secret was discovered. No one spoke of it; no one hinted at her condition, but all at once a curious feeling of restraint, of suspicion, charged the atmosphere of the barn and potato field. Whenever she asked a question those to whom she spoke fixed on her a stare of thinly-veiled pity, not pity in essence but in design, before replying. Once or twice when ploughing through the fields, her head bent upon her work, she glanced round covertly to see the eyes of everybody in the squad fixed on her. No one spoke and all silently resumed their work when she looked at them. The silence terrified and crushed the girl. “How much do they know?” she asked herself. That afternoon as she ploughed her way through the wet fields Micky’s Jim came up and stood behind her. Instinctively she knew that he was going to speak and she waited his words in fear and trembling.
“Norah Ryan,” he said, and his words came out very slowly, “who is to blame? Is it——”
Jim bent down, lifted a potato which she had passed over, threw it into the barrel and left the sentence unfinished.
It was Friday, the day on which the weekly wages of the party were paid. That night, when Norah received her money, she stole away from the squad intending to call on Alec Morrison.
II
IT was the last day of August. The swallows and swifts circled above Norah’s head and from time to time swept down over the sodden pastures where the farm cattle were grazing. The birds snapped greedily at the awkward crane-flies that were now rising on their great September flights. Morrison’s farm was twenty miles distant, and not wanting to spend the money which she had earned at her work, Norah travelled all night long. In the morning she found that she had lost her way and had to retrace her steps for full seven miles in order to regain her former course. At a wayside post-office she sent half the money in her possession home to her mother. Late in the evening, feeling footsore and very weary, she came to the farm. Although she had not eaten food since leaving the squad she did not feel in the least hungry. Now and again dizziness seized her, however, and a sharp pain kept tapping as if with a hammer in her head.
“Everything will be all right now,” she said as she saw the lights of the farm glowing through the haze of the evening, but for all that she said the grave doubts which weighed upon her could not be shaken away. She entered the farmyard. A few stars were out in the sky, a low wind swept round the newly-built hayrick and the scent of hay filled her nostrils. Alec would surely be at home. She uttered the word “Alec” aloud; she had never given it utterance in his presence, she recollected, and wondered why she thought of that now.
The windows of the house were lighted up, and a long stream of light quivered out into the darkness. Norah approached the door, stood for a moment looking at the shiny brass knocker but refrained from lifting it. She was very frightened; the heart within her fluttered like a little bird that struggles violently against the bars of the cage in which it is imprisoned. One frail white hand was slowly lifted to the knocker; between the girl’s fingers it felt very cold and she let it go without moving it. A great weariness had gripped her limbs, and her hand, heavy and dead, seemed as if it did not belong to her.
She came away from the door and approached the window. She could hear loud laughter from the inside and somebody was playing on the piano. A dark blind hid the interior of the room from her view, but the light streaming out showed where the blind had been displaced at one corner, and pressing her brow against the pane Norah looked in.