Lament for a Maker

by Michael Innes

  He was standing beyond and below her by a great outcrop of rock, a young man in a blue shirt and old grey trousers, gentle or common he might have been and beautiful he was, standing absorbed and still. So still he stood he might have been a figure in the granite he was studying, until his hand moved – sensitively, Christine knew with a knowledge that strangely moved her – over the weathered surface. With just such a touch must the old Pictish men that held these lands long syne have felt for the stone that was the end and the beginning of their craft.

  It was but few lads that Christine in her solitary growing-up had known, and if I spoke of her a while back as Miranda I was thinking of a Ferdinand, maybe, in this Neil Lindsay. For a long minute Christine gazed at him and then she made to slip by unseen. But Nature, that moves in us by strange courses enough if need be, caught at the sure foot the quean had been congratulating herself on and sent her tumbling down that unchancy seven-eight feet to the heather, for all the world as if she fair wanted to hurl herself at the stranger’s head.

  In a moment Neil Lindsay was up with her; he must have turned at the sound of her couping and louped across like a panther. Christine was all dazed, she felt the earth spin and the heather heave under her, once it heaved and again, and the second time was the lad raising her in his arms. She opened her eyes and he was looking into them with a kind of amazement and he said, ‘Are you hurt, lass?’ as sorry and as anxious as if she were his own sister. She said she was fine and he made her move all her limbs right gently to make sure, and then he said quietly, ‘Well, don’t do it again; it’s not what Ben Cailie’s for this fine morning.’ Christine laughed at that, but he seemed straight to have forgotten he’d tried to make a bit joke, he was looking again into her eyes and as a lover looks.

  So that was their meeting. Neil took her to the summit of Ben Cailie and she rubbed her face with snow that Midsummer Day, and all tingling from the snow and the long climb she grew bold to ask him what he was doing up on the Ben? He tossed his head at that and flushed slow and dark; it turned out he had a bit book with him, the Geology of the Grampians, and was far advanced in the lore of it, though lone and secret his studying had been. And Christine, that had been gently bred and yet in a manner so strange and lonely that she felt all her own knowledge had been a struggle too, listened to the talk of him near all that day, never wondering that a strange crofter chiel, with the silence of his kind written on his face, should be talking to her and talking so, eager and wary, as if he would turn that sensitive and exploring touch he had from the hard granite to the very contours of her mind. It was only when they were far down the Ben again and Mervie in sight that he grew shy, and then perplexed as if a thought had come to him that might have come before. He was Neil Lindsay, he said, and who was she? And when she told him and he realized it was her that lived with Guthrie of Erchany and was his daughter said to be he gave her a look she had no understanding of, for though she knew well of the old daft feeling between Lindsays and Guthries she had never thought it a thing her generation could take any heed of, evil old folly that it was. But the blood had come to the lad’s face when she named herself, then it drained away to leave a pallor under the tan of him, then he uttered a curse that startled her, and then he took her in his arms.

  From that moment it was all over with Christine. Through all the varying moods of their later meetings, secret always, and though sometimes she said it and sometimes she didn’t, she knew she was his for ever. And Neil, many-mooded too though he proved to be, was as fixed as the great rock they’d met in the lithe of; wedded to him and bedded she would be and the two of them would away to Canada, where he had a cousin, a scholar grown, would set him in the way of the work he wanted.

  This, then, was the story Christine told me at last, and that it came out after a world of hesitation and false starts was no more than partly because of the natural shamfastness of the maid. Partly it was because of the strain she was being put to at Erchany; the way the laird was going on she was grown nervous and doubting there could be any confidence in the world except the one confidence between Neil and her. Guthrie was absolute against the lad; ever since the day he had met in with him at the home farm he had fair been like a demon, silent, but with rage or a like passion burning in him. No more was Neil easy, he was right passionate against Guthrie in his turn and he churned the thing up in his brooding mind with all the ancient wrongs of the Lindsays in a way Christine had little patience with. It was a highland temper he had of his mother came out in Neil in those months of waiting and brooding; Christine misliked the seeing it gaining on him, and it wasn’t long after the home-farm affair that she knew the time for acting had come. Neil was for storming Erchany like young Lochinvar and carrying her to some place they could be married in secret: he had just the money put by to carry the two of them to Canada, but fient the penny more. Christine was loth to go in secret, her instinct was against it, she felt Guthrie had some power over her she could break only by fighting him in the open: she knew, though, that did Neil but say it in a particular way away she’d go, that that was how she was to be to him. For it was the power in the thing she most felt. When I asked her – perhaps in foolish words enough – ‘And you really want to marry him, Christine?’ she looked at me almost mockingly for a moment and just said ‘I’m driven.’

  So Christine wasn’t to argue with in her choosing; all I could aim at was help as I might be able. And the first thing she asked me was: ‘Mr Bell, is there a lawyer in Dunwinnie?’

  I told her there had been old Mr Dunbar and that now there was a young lad, Stewart his name, that had been in his office and had the business after him. Though I wondered a little at her question I thought better not to ask what was in her mind; syne she got up from the corner of the bench she’d been sitting on and crossed over to my bit shop-window and stared out absently at Kinkeig in its returning blanket of snow. ‘There must be papers,’ she said quietly and without turning round, ‘certificates’.

  I said indeed there must be papers – things were far wrong if there weren’t – but if she was Guthrie’s right ward and a minor, and if he was that eccentric he would say or show nothing, it was hard for me to tell whether she had a right to see them or no. She might send her Neil to see Stewart, the lawyer lad in Dunwinnie, if she wanted, but it was an old man’s advice to bide her time: when the laird got accustomed to the way things had fallen out he’d see that both Guthries and Lindsays should have more sense than to be playing Montagues and Capulets. And she would do well, I said, to din the same thing into her Neil; after all, when a crofter loon with nothing but remote hopes in Canada came courting the ward of a rich laird he must expect a rebuff or two before he got his way.

  But Christine shook her head. ‘It’s all very different from that.’ And she picked up a bit leather and fell to tracing little waves on it with her finger, like as if she was copying the furrows that had gathered on her pretty brow. ‘Have you seen my uncle lately?’ she asked.

  I shook my head. ‘I haven’t seen him, my dear, this year past.’

  ‘But you’ll have heard talk?’

  ‘I haven’t lost my hearing yet, Christine.’

  She smiled at this. ‘Yes, there’s always talk in Kinkeig, I’m sure.’ She hesitated. ‘But you may have heard that – that he’s gone mad?’

  She was that anxious-looking that I left my last and gave her a bit hug – a thing I hadn’t done for many a long year. ‘Don’t fash yourself over that,’ I said; ‘they were saying no less of him before you were born. It’s what Kinkeig would say of any laird that didn’t talk grouse and oats and pretend to be right kirkgreedy on Sundays. And the Guthries have had the name of it since the days of Malcolm Canmore.’

  She gave a bit laugh, and fine I thought I’d comforted her until my old ear caught the note of it. Then I walked to the window and had a look out myself.

  Behind me Christine said in a new hard way: ‘He’s mad.’

  10

  Christine had a loyalty to
the laird, and she was the kind that would strive to keep her loyalty while tholing much, or even right through a strait fight. So it was a scunner to hear her say that of Guthrie – and to hear the unco paradox she backed her speak with forbye. For what made her right sure that the man was truly skite at last was that he was spending a bit silver like a rational being. ‘He’s violating himself,’ Christine said.

  It was only one had lived long at Erchany, I thought, could estimate the force of her evidence. The first thing was the putting away of the Gamleys: some sort of quarterly or yearly agreement Gamley had from the laird in writing, and to get them away he had paid out a little hantle of gold – real gold that Christine had seen him taking from his bureau, and that was the only ready coin at Erchany might serve in an emergency. Fell strange it was, Christine said, for the gold was her uncle’s plaything.

  I opened my eyes at that. Well I knew Guthrie’s near-going ways, his sad dealings with the bogles and all, but I had never thought of him somehow as the simple picturesque miser you might meet in with in a book. ‘You mean,’ I cried, ‘he sits thumbing the stuff over?’

  ‘Yes. He calls it numismatics, and he’s even taught me a little. Have you ever seen a Spanish gold quadruple of Philip V, Mr Bell – or a genovine twenty-three carats fine, or a bonnet piece of James V, or the coinage of the Great Mogul? I think I could be a miser myself easy as easy when I look at them. But uncle likes to be thumbing little piles of guineas and sovereigns as well, the same that he must have paid Gamley with. And doesn’t that show?’

  It showed, I thought, that the laird had been unco eager to rid himself of those at the home farm, for if he had the disease of gold as bad as that it must have been a fair violation, like Christine said, to hand a pile to his grieve. And for a minute I had a picture in my mind, almost as vivid maybe as the vision of Mistress McLaren I’ve told you about, of Guthrie sitting in his dark tower, with no more than the bit candle that was another right miser’s touch to him, thumbing and thumbing at the gold, a symbol no doubt of something we could have no knowledge of, and whiles calling on the quean to watch and admire numismatic-like, that he might have some feeling of a rational basis to the irrational lust was driving him. And little as I knew of Neil Lindsay I was glad Christine had found him; the glint of that gold, like the glint of gold some folk thought to see in Guthrie’s eye, had somehow made the whole picture of the man and his castle darker for me.

  ‘Doesn’t that show?’ Christine repeated. And then she added: ‘But he doesn’t play with the gold so much now; he’s got the puzzles instead.’

  I looked at her fair startled – not by the words, which I didn’t understand, but by the tone of them and the growing strain on her face. It was plain there was an atmosphere about events at Erchany that was working on the quean and that she found it hard to express the force of. ‘Puzzles?’ I said, fair puzzled myself.

  ‘Uncle has been ordering all sorts of things from Edinburgh – that’s another strange spending. There have been provisions as if we were going to be besieged at Erchany, expensive things some of them I’ve never seen or heard of! And a big crate of books.’

  ‘Surely the laird has ever been a great reader, Christine.’

  ‘Yes – but he doesn’t buy books! And these are a kind he’s never heeded before: medical books. Up there in the tower he’s poring over them night after night.’

  I thought for a minute I saw a right horrible light here. Was Guthrie really going skite – as Christine thought and as the Harley Street sumph had said might happen – and, feeling it come on him, was he reading desperately to get light on himself and cure? ‘Christine,’ I asked gently, ‘would they be books about the mind?’

  Fine she understood me as she shook her head. ‘The ones I’ve seen are not. There’s one by a man Osler on General Medicine, and one by Flinders on Radiology, and one by Richards on Cardiac Disease–’ She broke off with a frown, and her noting and remembering the hard words brought home to me right vividly the effort she had been making to plumb things at the meikle house.

  Myself, I could make nothing of this fancy of Guthrie’s, so I harked back to something else. ‘What of the puzzles, Christine?’

  ‘Jigsaw puzzles they’re called – you know them? I think he got them cheap from a catalogue. Spirited war scenes, Mr Bell. You’re awfully puzzled for a time about the German soldier’s head, and then you find it’s been blown right from his body and fits snug in the top left-hand corner. The whole thing will be called the Battle of the Marne, maybe – and Uncle likes me to help him. There’s little I have to learn about tanks and hand-grenades and the sinking of the Lusitania. Perhaps it’s Uncle’s idea of a finishing school for me.’

  There was a spark of fun in Christine’s voice; nevertheless, she’d spoken the first bitter words I’d ever heard from her. I said: Well it seemed a foolish ploy enough but with no vice in it, so need she worry?

  Christine gave a half-impatient, half-despairing toss to the lovely hair of her. ‘It’s taken the place of the gold!’ she said. ‘So don’t you see?’

  For a minute I must have stared at her like an owl. And then, uncertainly enough, I did see. For had I not been saying to myself that the gold was a symbol that answered to something deep in the man?

  But Christine’s mind had turned another way. ‘Mr Bell,’ she said, ‘why did little Isa Murdoch leave us? Has there been a story going round about that?’

  It was a question I’d been fearing, this. Christine had enough to fash over these days without a bit more worry about the daftie Tammas, and yet if she didn’t know of the unchancy way he’d turned on Isa it seemed but right to warn her. But syne she settled this by saying: ‘Was it just Tammas?’

  ‘Partly that. But partly it was she was driven to hide in your uncle’s gallery and heard him murmuring his verses and talking strangely to the air. She was easily frighted. But Christine, did you ever hear of your uncle holding in with any folk called Walter Kennedy and Robert Henderson?’

  At that it was her turn to stare like an owl – but only for a moment. Then she laughed as clear as clear: right sweet it was to hear her. ‘Oh Uncle Ewan Bell,’ she cried, ‘did you ever hold in with Geoffrey Chaucer?’ And at that her spirits suddenly came on her wildly; she jumped up as if the worry were gone from her entirely and fell to pacing up and down my bit shop, her hands clasped behind her and her eye on the middle air like as if it was Ranald Guthrie himself. And then she chanted:

  ‘He has done petuously devour,

  The noble Chaucer, of makaris flouir,

  The Monk of Bery, and Gower, all thre;

  Timor Mortis conturbat me.

  ‘In Dumfermelyne he hast tane Broun

  With Maister Robert Henrisoun;

  Schir Iohne the Ros enbrast hes he;

  Timor Mortis conturbat me.’

  Christine turned at this and laughed again. Then she went on in her own right voice, grave and sweet:

  ‘Gud Maister Walter Kennedy,

  In poynt of dede lyis veraly,

  Gret reuth it were that so suld be;

  Timor Mortis conturbat me…’

  I laid down my awl. ‘So that was who!’ I said. ‘Folk in a poem.’

  Christine nodded. ‘Quoth Dunbar when he was sick. And quoth my uncle in his gallery – also sick, maybe.’ And syne she chanted another verse:

  ‘Sen he has all my brother tane,

  He will naught lat me lif alane,

  On forse I man his nyxt pray be;

  Timor Mortis conturbat me.’

  And at that she came and sat down beside me, sudden as heavy-thoughted as before. ‘Dunbar’s Lament for the Makers, that he made when he knew another poet, and that himself, was going to die. Uncle often chants it now, and no doubt Isa heard him.’

  I remembered then Isa had said Guthrie’s verses seemed to have a run of Scottish names to them and then a bit of foreign stite forbye. So Dunbar’s poem it must have been, and the names Kennedy and Henderson she’d thought to he
ar through her swoon were no more than echoes from the poem again. And fine I could have solved the mystery myself and without Christine joking at me about Chaucer had I only had the wit to think, for Dunbar’s poems have been familiar to me long enough, and stand on my shelf indeed in the right learned and elegant edition of Dr Small.

  And that was the end of my talk with Christine that day, for syne she looked at the clock and picked up her bonnet and was away through the snow that briskly that I guessed Neil Lindsay was somewhere at the end of her journey. Rambling and inconclusive the talk had been; I had an uncanny feeling at the last of having been left groping for I didn’t know what in the shadowy rooms and crumbling corridors of Castle Erchany. That evening I sat by my bench long into the gloaming, never thinking to put up the shutters and take a dander to the Arms; the thing was working on me and I wanted solitude.

  Strange that young Neil Lindsay, looking to break from the traditions of his folk and make a new life in a new land, should concern himself with the old bitterness of the Lindsays against the Guthries. And stranger that Guthrie, a scholar and once a poet, whose meditations must be of time and change and the nature of things, should have any thought for that past and narrow hate against the Lindsays. For if the latterday Lindsays, common folk and poor, might maybe take Ranald Guthrie as a type of those that have all and in taking more have beggared the simple folk of Scotland, and but add to that real resentment the colour of a long-past history, what was that to Guthrie – a rich man in the security of his possessions, that should never heed or mind the common envy of the poor? Was the laird doing more than treat Neil Lindsay’s suit as any man, proud of his lineage and his lands, would treat the suit of a crofter billy to one that lived as a daughter in his house?