But Christine thought her uncle was mad or maddened; and unco it was I should be right troubled by her thinking what near all Kinkeig had long thought. The thing was that Kinkeig was ever prepared to think and say any stite that had a spice to it, whereas Christine was a level lass and douce, and one that had learnt from Mistress Menzies and Guthrie to use words exactly. She meant what she said of the laird, and that her feeling was something she could scarce give convincing reason for didn’t make it trouble my mind the less.
Sudden it came to me I hadn’t asked her if she knew of any word lately from the American Guthries: might they not be worrying the laird after all – and the cool quean that had come that night to the Arms one of them? For it was clear that if Guthrie’s conduct these past months was to be accounted for there was more required than the matter of Christine and her Neil Lindsay. The parting with the Gamleys, the orders from Edinburgh, all that Isa Murdoch had seen and heard at the opening up of the meikle house and in the gallery: these seemed to be happenings before Guthrie had learnt who it was would be courting Christine, or that any was courting her. And I thought of the medical books the laird was pouring over, and of how he had fallen to beguiling himself with wee puzzles carven out of wood. And I thought of him cleaving his way in a fury into his long-deserted gallery, and of how he had wandered there, and of his standing at Isa’s last keek at him staring out over Loch Cailie. And ever Christine’s voice came back to me, hard as if she were facing deadly danger, saying her uncle was mad. And then, searching for the pattern that must be in all this, I seemed to hear the voice of the laird himself, crying out in the Latin refrain of that old Scottish poet that he was harried by the fear of death – nay, of Death himself.
At that I went ben and found the book and blew the dust from it and turned to the poem.
Lament for the Makaris
Quhen he was seik
I that in heill wes and glaidnes,
Am trublit now with gret seiknes,
And feblit with infirmitie;
Timor Mortis conturbat me…
And I read through that hundred-line lament for the dead poets of Scotland to the end:
Sen for the deth remeid is non,
Best is that we for deth dispone
Eftir our deth that lif may we;
Timor Mortis conturbat me.
11
It was a hard winter. Looking back on this prologue to what befell at Erchany I see the figures of it whiles driven helpless before the great storm that caught the schoolmistress, whiles sharp-etched on the memory in gestures as extravagant as the leafless star-hung trees showed in the long nights of black frost; and ever the fatal hurrying story of them punctuated by the falling and melting curtain of the snows. When the Thoughtful Citizen got his papers through the drifts – which he didn’t always – he would come ploutering down to the Arms and tell us the Fleet Street chiels had said things were right hard in Scotland, there were tremendous snows, and the season was a record just as he’d said. It was the stationy himself was a record, Will Saunders put in – a right cracked one and would to God he’d run out of needles or break a spring.
The very day Christine visited me it was that the leaden skies opened above the ready snow-covered braes and the fine flakes fell and fell, the glen and all the rolling parks thicker and thicker mantled, as pure and silent and still as the marble floor of heaven before the Almighty thought to create the Angelic host. Often in those days, days that went flitting by towards Christmas as white and quiet as stainless ghosts, I would wonder what was happening up the glen. I scarcely expected news; none could get through that deepening barrier unless it might be Tammas, who took an unnatural strength to himself with the coming of the snow, folk said, like as if he were a creature in a fairy-tale. Many is the mile of deep snow I’ve struggled through myself as a lad, when every week, winter and summer, I’d tramp to my bit reading in the Dunwinnie Institute. But I doubted if I’d ever made such a journey as now lay between Kinkeig and Erchany, and I was right surprised when, in fact, Tammas did come through.
As dead beat he was as Satan after he’d fought his way through Chaos – and, indeed, he was like a visitor from another world. There had been a car or two struggle through from Dunwinnie on the previous day – the twenty-second December – with news of great doings there at the tail of the Loch: curlers coming by the hundred, ’twas said, in special trains. But on the twenty-third nothing came and we doubted if anything more could come; Kinkeig was cut off from the world, and Erchany from Kinkeig again. All except for Tammas, hoasting and gasping on my doorstep, the breath steaming from the great slavering mouth of him like a dragon.
But a dragon would have had more sense than was left in the daftie after his trudge. What he said was a mere yammering there was nothing to be made of, he never heeded my invitation to come in but thrust a bit letter at me and was louping away down the road before I could speak again. I looked at the letter and it was from Christine: at that I never heeded more about the daftie but took it straight ben and read it by the fire.
Uncle Ewan Bell – I was a little fool with my fancies: will you forgive me? It is all right – I am sure it is all right, though strange – and I have only to wait till Christmas Day!
Uncle came in this morning; he seemed in a rare pleased mood; he stood in front of the little fire he had made Mrs Hardcastle light for me, and he said ‘I’ve finished the biggest of all the jigsaws.’ Then he must have seen my thoughts were far away, for suddenly he said softly ‘Must you have him, Christine?’ I said just ‘Yes,’ no more – for I’ve told him long ago how much it is yes and how I can’t help myself. He said ‘You shall go with him.’
I don’t know why, I trembled and couldn’t speak, perhaps with my sick fancies lately I thought he was speaking meaninglessly from a distraught mind. But he repeated ‘You shall go with him.’ And then he spoke harshly of the disgrace and that we must go, if we did go, once and for ever; that there was money for me that I should have and that Neil should come for me at Christmas and that we might away to Canada. But that he would have no wedding or word of a wedding in these parts, and that – but I needn’t repeat words I want and shall soon have the chance to forget.
So this is Goodbye: I won’t forget you, Uncle Ewan Bell. I am so happy, happy – and yet afraid. I’m fey, I almost think – but that is foolish! If there are things I don’t understand – what does it matter when I’m going with Neil?
Tammas is being made to go down – I suppose for letters – though the snow is drifting deep now: I hope he’ll come to no harm. He’s my chance to send this – otherwise you mightn’t hear from me till I was far away – and what oceans of Kinkeig gossip, in that case, you’d hear first! Goodbye and love, dear Ewan Bell.
CHRISTINE MATHERS.
I shall be safe with Neil, and he with me.
So it was goodbye to Christine – and at the thought she was going far from Kinkeig I felt heavier-hearted than for her sake I should have done. Over and over again that night I read her letter – and ever I was the heavier-hearted. At last I must have fallen asleep, old man that I am, over my dying fire, for I awoke chilled in the night and with Ranald Guthrie’s voice again in my ears: It was right anxiously I spent the next three days.
12
The evening of the day Tammas came – Monday the twenty-third it was – saw a bit stir in Kinkeig. For long after ’twas thought the roads were closed for that fall, when the gloaming was falling in shadows of grey and silver over the snows, there came a wee closed car ploughing and slithering into the village from none knew where: it had missed the North Road through Dunwinnie maybe and was seeking it again. Folk got no more than a keek at it through their windows, for everyone was indoors that weather – all except the bairn Wattie McLaren, that had run out from his tea to have a look at a snow man he and the other bairns had been making that morning. The wee car stopped; it was a young wife was in it, Wattie said, and she called out to him Was she right for the road south? And then mayb
e she misunderstood Wattie – which is likely enough – or the bairn told her a right mischievous falsehood he was frightened to own to later. Anyway, the wee car gave a snort and a shake, its back wheels slithered a minute before they got a bit bite in the snow, and then it turned right and held up the glen for Erchany.
Meanwhile Mistress McLaren – and you know enough of her to known she hasn’t much sense – had missed Wattie from among her bairns – and she has enough of them, Will Saunders says, to be a right grand example to her own sows – and out she went to find him, just in time to see the red tail light of the wee car disappearing over the first brow of the hill. And at the same moment there came a great blast of a trumpet that put Mistress McLaren – who is fell religious in a gossiping way – in mind, she said, of the Herald Angels: a devout and seasonable thought, it can’t be denied. But it was nothing but the horn of another car, one near as big as a house this time and with a solitary slip of a lad in it, and with chains to its wheels that put it in a better way than the other against the snow. No doubt it had gone astray through following the wee machine in front, and I know now that when the lad called out to the smith’s wife it was to ask Was he right for London? Mistress McLaren, you needn’t be told, had about as much chance of picking that up aright as if the loon had asked her was he right for Monte Carlo; she took it into her head he was asking Which way had the wee car gone? – always liking to think, Will said, that the loons are after the lasses. So she pointed, right pleased, up the darkening road to the glen and away went the great car with a roar for Castle Erchany. Most folk thought it unlikely the cars would get there, and equally unlikely they’d get back; the greengrocer Carfrae had a bit joke, you may be sure, about their helping keep each other’s engines warm that night in the solitude of the glen.
After that nothing more that anyone knew of came through Kinkeig. A wind got up that night that swept the yet falling snow along as if it grudged the fine flakes of it their resting place on the mantled earth; all Christmas Eve it blew the fallen snow into great drifts all these lands about. On Christmas morning the wind fell but whiles the snow came softly down still; going early past the kirk I could scarcely hear the bell for the early service Dr Jervie likes to hold, so muffled was the tolling of it in the fall.
It was when the few folk in Kinkeig that will admit Christmas a Feast of the Kirk were at service that Tammas came again, and clearer than the tolling bell I heard the great cry of him as he breasted the last rise, crying the awful death of his master Ranald Guthrie of Erchany.
And here, Reader, I lay down my wandering and unready pen and you’ll be hearing, I think, what the English lad Noel Gylby, him that was in the great car, wrote to his quean in London. But you and I will meet in with one another again ere the story’s told.
PART TWO
THE JOURNAL LETTER OF NOEL GYLBY
1
24th December
Diana darling: Leaves – as Queen Victoria said – from the Journal of my Life in the Highlands. Or possibly of my Death in the Lowlands. For I don’t at all know if I’m going to survive and I don’t know – I’m kind of guessing, as my girlfriend here says – where I am. YES, I have a girlfriend, a most formidable and charming and rather mysterious American miss, and we are staying at a castle somewhere in Scotland and I have a feeling – kind of feel – that our throats may be feudally cut at any time by the seneschal, who – mark you! – bears the most appropriate name of Hardcastle, no doubt with underlings (though I haven’t yet seen them) Dampcastle, Coldcastle and Crazycastle – a whole progeny of Crazycastles would be by no means out of the way. And we kind of feel – Miss Guthrie and I – that we are presently to be besieged, no doubt by the paynim knights Sansjoy, Sansfoy and Sansloy – and if you say, Diana, that the paynims are out of the Scottish picture I retort that I’ve had a quite awful night and a little inconsistency must be allowed.
Don’t be furious, Diana, that I shan’t be in town for Christmas after all; it’s not my fault. Listen. I’ll tell you about it. By way of apology, all about it. It is – and promises to be – amusing.
I got away from Kincrae and the horrors of my aunt’s unseasonable sojourn there – do you know, positively, icicles were depending from the noses of those melancholy stags’ heads in the hall? – I got away quite early yesterday morning, and though the roads were shocking I reckoned to get to Edinburgh last night (where there is a tolerable hotel) and tonight to strike off the north road to York, and then to make town in excellent time for our Christmas dinner – just as I wired.
But I’d got it wrong. The snows have been tremendous and even on the Highland road – where the snowploughs have been out – I was losing time on schedule badly. I had luncheon – a bit dinner you’d be wanting? the pothouse keeper said wonderingly – Lord knows where, and at the end of it my eye was already on my Edinburgh dinner. So I stepped on it – but still the going was bad. I had to catch the William Nuir at Queensferry; otherwise it meant round by Stirling and in late. Diana, you know what I did. I stopped and got out the map and saw it would be ever so much quicker such a way. Alas!
The route was all right, I think; it was the snow undid me. I was running along nicely on chains at about forty m.p.h. when the snout of the car went down and the tail went up, just like a launch dropping into the trough of a wave – only the feel wasn’t that of water but of cotton wool. In about three yards I had come from that forty m.p.h. to a dead stop, and without a jolt or a tremble. That is how snow behaves in Scotland: its ballistic properties quite different, it seems to me, from the Swiss variety. But that’s by the way. What had happened was I’d breasted one of those enormously humpy bridges (left about, I believe, by Julius Caesar) and there was a great drift on the farther side and down I’d sunk.
Luckily there was a group of North Britons in the centre foreground, bringing hay, they said, to the beasts; very kindly, they brought the beasts to me and yanked the car out backwards, and away I drove the way I’d come, the incident having put me back – as Miss G. says – two hours and ten shillings.
We approach Miss G. now – again at about forty m.p.h. and in the progressive municipality of Dunwinnie. I stopped there for petrol, Miss G. had stopped for gas – and we got it from the same pump, ladies first. You know, I always feel embarrassed when I’m out with the car in the society of smaller cars, and Miss G. has a fleeting appraising glance that said puppy! in a quite devastating sort of way. So I followed her modestly out of this Dunwinnie and – having heard her make competent inquiries about the south road – I followed her again all humbly second to the right. Unfortunately, Miss G. had tripped on it.
But she could drive. It was a narrow road – suspiciously narrow – and I didn’t overtake her. We did about ten miles and then, turning into some nameless hamlet, I lost her: by this time it was nearly dark. I didn’t like it a bit; for miles the road had been virgin snow and I was next to certain I was lost in the heart of Scotland. So I stopped to inquire: the village seemed deserted – like sweet Auburn – and I thought I’d have to go thumping on people’s doors, when suddenly the figure of an old wife started up magically at my elbow. Of course I ought to have grabbed my map, said ‘My good woman, what little place is this?’ and then worked it out for myself. Instead, I asked her for the south road; I may even have asked her for London – habit, you know, creeping in with fatigue. Anyway, she seemed a most reliable old party, pointed at once and with immense decision to a turn among the cottages ahead – and away your devoted mutt went.
About a mile on I picked up Miss G.’s tail light, and I was still humble enough to feel momentarily encouraged: my cousin Tim, who was Third Secretary or something at Washington, says they really are a most fearfully efficient race. Of course Tim himself is so nitwitted – But I wander.
Point is, I was wandering; a few miles on there could be no doubt of it. Miss G. had tripped and I was tripping after her – plunging and slithering rather through anything up to two feet of snow. I think I’d have turned back if t
here had been any turning, which there wasn’t, the road being no road clearly, but the most miserable of tracks. Besides, the admired Miss G. was still ahead – I can’t imagine how she kept going – and likely to be much worse landed than I was: if need be one could survive the night in my car. Gallant gentleman, you see, chugging chivalrously along behind. And presently I came upon her.
Came upon her is the word. I had done, I suppose, six miles; I could just pick out her tracks with my headlights and I was following them rather than the occasional posts that marked the track, when very much the same thing happened as at the humpy bridge. Or began to happen. Down went my nose and up went my tail – and then there was the most appalling crash. In the stillness that followed, and as my wits were coming back to me, a female voice said gratefully: ‘Well, that’s just sweet of you, stranger.’ Miss G.’s voice.
Sybil Guthrie – we may as well get a little more familiar – Sybil Guthrie had missed the track, gone over a bank, turned on her side, and crawled out. I had followed her over – a little higher up for the Rolls had come down with a splintering concussion dead on top of her car. But I hadn’t overturned and there I sat like a fool; I might have killed her. Anxious to do the right thing, I said solicitously: ‘Are you hurt?’ She said: ‘Yes, really offended,’ and then she added more cheerfully: ‘Of course, if we’re on fire there’s plenty of snow. Does snow put out fires, though?’
But we weren’t on fire. We sat each on a front wing of my car – the whole wreck seemed quite securely wedged – and warmed our hands on the radiator as we considered. Sybil – a nice girl – Sybil said she thought the village we’d gone finally wrong at was called Kinkeig; she’d been through it before and there was a pub if we could get back to it. Would that be best?
Lament for a Maker Page 8