My thoughts wandered from the point because the story suddenly caught my attention. I was not particularly interested while Miss Warrielaw was occupied in denouncing the doings of her sister Jessica. Her voice was curiously even and toneless, and I had only gathered vaguely that Jessica was outraging her sister and her family by the proposed sale of some family property, when Rhoda’s voice broke in, clear and incisive.
“Don’t bother John with all that again, Aunt Mary. John knows and we all know, since Cora Murray brought that lawsuit against Aunt Jessica, and lost it, that Aunt Jessica can sell all the family property but the house, and do what she likes with the fairy jewel and throw away the money as she pleases. I thought it was about this attempt at burglary that you came to see John.”
I had only been married then for two months, and it was still entrancing to me to observe how impassive and non-committal my tall, dark husband became when acquaintances tried to get legal advice from him outside his office. It was, as he often complained, the favourite economy of his Edinburgh clients to extract an opinion from him in ordinary social life without wasting six shillings and eightpence. But at Rhoda’s sudden turn in the conversation, a look of relief and interest crossed his face. The Warrielaws, I gathered, had used an old friendship for legal discussions unmercifully in the past, and any change was welcome.
“Why, Miss Mary,” he asked, “what’s happened? You know I’ve always told your sister you really ought to get some man into one of the lodges now that poor old Macdonald’s had to go to the Infirmary for good.”
Evidently, I gathered, the Warrielaws were yet another of those families, whom I met not infrequently, who were clinging with true Scottish determination and self-sacrifice to some place handed down to them by richer and luckier ancestors. That would explain Christina’s obvious respect, for the possession of land is still the only certain criterion of gentility to the descendants of clansmen.
“It was only yesterday,” said Miss Mary, her poor hands fluttering painfully, her sentences tumbling out confusedly in her dull, even voice. “And I don’t think you can call it a burglary because nothing has been taken as far as we can make out, and of course this evening the house is shut up properly, but, as you know, most of our locks are out of order, and Jessica won’t spend anything on repairs that isn’t strictly necessary.”
“What do the police think?” asked John briskly. “We haven’t summoned them, John. Jessica said it was absurd when nothing was missing, and she never has liked our local man, Maclure, since his boys were found stealing apples from the walled garden among her bedding-out plants. Besides, it would hurt Effie’s feelings so dreadfully as things are, and Effie has served us faithfully for thirty years!”
“Of course she should have called in the police at once,” said Rhoda decidedly. “I urged it most strongly.”
“Too strongly, my dear,” put in Miss Mary with sudden sharpness. “You know how Jessica dislikes being dictated to.”
“Suppose,” John suggested patiently, “suppose you tell me just what did happen.”
“Jessica didn’t seem quite to approve of that,” said Mary distractedly, “but I insisted that you should know, as our lawyer and estate agent. Then at least, I said, it will be in the hands of the Law!”
“I think I’d better tell you,” said Rhoda, interrupting her aunt’s incoherent sentences with her brisk, cool voice, “especially as I was the one to discover it. Yesterday I bicycled down to see Aunt Mary. I knew the Aunts were worried because there has been a good deal of trouble over Annie.”
“Annie?” queried John. Apparently there were limits even to his knowledge of the Warrielaw establishment.
“Annie is Effie’s niece,” said Rhoda, hurriedly forestalling her aunt. “You know Effie has managed all the work in that big place alone since Aunt Jessica had this absurd mania for economy, which isn’t really necessary, I’m sure.” A note of enquiry crept into her voice, but my husband ignored it, and Miss Mary seized her opportunity.
“Effie’s sister, Hope, was with us for years in my mother’s day,” she broke in; “such a nice sensible woman and then she ran off with a tinker. Surely you remember, John, in the old days when you used to come down to play at Warrielaw, with Neil and Cora and Rhoda, how Neil used to annoy Effie by singing—‘She’s awa’ with the raggle-taggle gipsies, Oh!’ Poor thing! She died leaving two daughters, one such a good respectable soul who married a gardener at Carglin, and one this poor creature Annie, who is—well I don’t know how to describe it. She’s a fine big girl and an excellent worker at times, but she’s rather—well she isn’t quite—”
“She’s overdeveloped physically and underdeveloped mentally,” said Rita with cold distaste. “She works well if she’s told just what to do, but she’s the intelligence of a child of twelve, and has violent fits of temper and sulkiness. I never thought her safe in that household, but Jessica insisted on keeping her for Effie’s sake. Two days ago, however, she was discovered coming back from a funeral in Aunt Jessica’s black hat and cloak—she’s a passion for funerals, like all uneducated Scottish people, and that was too much even for Effie. So Annie had her notice, and I was really rather afraid lest she should have one of her queer turns. So I went down to Warrielaw. It was about five o’clock and, as it was dark and my bicycle lamp isn’t up to much, I walked down the avenue very slowly. It took quite ten minutes, for you know how shockingly it’s kept. From the first corner I noticed a light in Aunt Jessica’s bedroom. I wasn’t surprised, as I thought she might have gone up there to avoid me. You know, John, there’s been a lot of ill-will in the family about this selling of our last real heirloom—the fairy jewel. Of course it’s nothing to do with me, there was no question of my having it, but I’d felt obliged just once to remonstrate against its going out of the family. I went up to the house and then round to the back, to save Effie or Annie coming all the way up to the front door from the basement. The door into the kitchen courtyard was open, and so was the back door. I went into the kitchen and found it nearly dark—only a flicker from the fire in that dreadful huge range, and one candle guttering on the table. I was surprised, and looked down the passage to the rooms where Effie and Annie sleep, but they were in absolute darkness. Then I remembered that one or both of them often give the dogs a run across the gardens about that time, and as neither of the spaniels were barking, I supposed the maids were out with them, though I did feel it rash of them to leave the door like that. I stumbled up the basement stairs in the dark and found the big hall just lit with that absurd little oil-wick lamp Aunt Jessica likes. Then it occurred to me that I would just run up to see Aunt Jessica before I went to Aunt Mary in the library. I am sorry for her, you know, and I thought we might make friends. You can’t help being sorry for anyone who makes herself disliked as universally as Jessica. There was no one on the stairs, and no light in the long corridor, except a gleam from her door. I knocked, and went in when no answer came. The window was wide open and nearly blew out the candle on the dressing-table. There was no one there, but I had a horrible shock to find the whole place in confusion. Aunt Jessica is as tidy as anyone can be who hoards so many possessions, and her room is always neat. But there lay all the contents of her drawers on the floor, tumbled about anyhow. Her dresses were torn out of the wardrobe, her bed was all crumpled and upset. It looked as if someone had turned the room upside down in search of something. I ran downstairs to the library and found the Aunts sitting there, each at her own end of the room, doing their embroidery as usual. Aunt Jessica had not been upstairs since tea-time, Aunt Mary had ony run up for a minute afterwards, without a light she told us. I tried not to frighten them, but I had to tell them of course.”
“Rhoda was most considerate,” put in Mary confusedly.
“We were ringing the bell just as Effie came upstairs with the dogs. She’d been out alone—”
“Tit and Tat never cared for Annie. I always noticed that, though Jessica said it was nonsense,” persisted Mary.
> “And she hadn’t seen Annie anywhere. We heard the girl’s step outside while we were questioning Effie, but she was in one of her sulky fits—she’s been crying ever since she had notice, Effie says, and wouldn’t answer when we asked answer where she had been. We all went upstairs then to examine Aunt Jessica’s room, leaving Annie downstairs howling like a baby. We looked through everything, and nothing seemed to be missing, but when Aunt Jessica looked at the little safe in the wall—the safe grandmother had made for all her jewellery—we thought there were the marks of new scratches on it. It can’t have been opened, for nothing had been touched. But it did look as if someone, as if Annie, had been hunting for the key everywhere.”
“It does,” said John slowly. “Only I should have expected a girl of that mentality to have picked up a few odds and ends she coveted rather than jewellery, somehow—the magpie sort of instinct, you know.”
“But she’s cunning, very cunning,” represented Rhoda. “And of course, you see, we can’t fix the blame on to her. Someone may have got in at any moment when Effie was out in the garden. Effie herself thinks that Annie probably was out at the back lodge speaking to someone. One horrid part of the whole affair is that there are tinkers near just now, camping down in that bit of waste land by the burn. Effie owned to us then that Annie has been off with the tinkers once or twice since she left school, with her father’s relations you see. She may have let one of them in, for all we know. It’s rather a horrible idea to think of that camp so near that old, big, lonely, unprotected house.”
“But you’ll send the girl away at once?” I broke in. By this time I was shuddering at the vision of the solitary ill-lit barracks of a house with its rabbit-warrens of passages, and the three lonely old women huddled in the confines of its dark rooms, listening helplessly to every footfall, while down the passages wandered the big half-witted girl, intent on theft or revenge, or, at least, on some message to the caravans of her silent, dirty kinsmen by the desolate burn outside. I could see the picture present itself, though doubtless in much more sober colouring, to my husband, as he shook his head.
“You must have the police. For one thing, if they looked up the camp the tinkers would certainly be off. Tell Miss Jessica to put the police on to them and have the locks everywhere seen to and get rid of this girl at once.”
“Jessica won’t,” complained Miss Mary. “She will not hurt Effie’s feelings, she says, by letting the police suspect her niece. And she won’t send Annie away till April because …”
“Because Ellen Hay, Annie’s sister, is going to have her sixth or seventh baby,” explained Rhoda, as Miss Mary broke off in confusion. “It’s the only place to send Annie to, and Effie says it would upset Ellen dreadfully to have Annie back on her hands before the event takes place. Effie is to go off to help her at the crisis for a night or so and take Annie with her. If she murders the whole household before that, Jessica is responsible!”
“She must get rid of her and we must get the police on to the tinkers,” repeated John. “Do you think if I ran down to see Miss Jessica …”
“That’s just what we want, John,” said Miss Mary eagerly. “The only effect of all this is to make her more determined than ever to sell the jewel, and I thought you might perhaps put in a word against that too. In any case you could reason with her about getting the locks seen to and disposing of Annie. I can hardly bear to see her big, silly, greasy face about the place any more, and I’m sure she knows something, for her eyes have that cunning look just now which Rhoda mentioned. I managed to get Jessica to see that we’ve been most remiss in not calling sooner on John’s wife”—she turned to me with a faint smile—“and I persuaded her to let me ask if Mrs. Morrison would pardon the informality and come down with you to tea to-morrow. That would give you a chance to say something about repairs. Why there isn’t even a proper snib to the French windows in the library!”
“But I hoped”, said John, looking puzzled, “that the sale of the Raeburn last autumn would give her plenty of ready money for all necessary repairs.”
“The Raeburn?” Rhoda said bitterly. “All that went to Neil Logan as usual. It paid for his visit to Italy and for the sort of amusements he enjoys in Rome.”
This sudden addition to the personnel of the Warrielaw family puzzled me, and I started a little as John gave me a nod. Then I recalled myself and accepted the invitation to Warrielaw.
“At four,” said Miss Mary, getting up at last and moving uncertainly to the door. “At least that’s the time I like tea, but perhaps I had better say half-past as Jessica likes to get as much daylight as possible for digging in the garden.” The bitterness of her tone suggested such an age-long feud over the details of life as often obtains in the establishment of two sisters. “But of course,” added Miss Mary, recollecting herself, “it is really wonderful of her to keep the gardens as she does when she refuses to have any help. Good-bye, my dear. Good-bye, John. It is such a comfort to have an old friend like you to rely upon.”
“Now my old friend,” I said as John returned to the drawing-room after his farewells, “I rely on you to tell me the story of this extraordinary family at once. And don’t be legal or cautious, as I’ve evidently got to be plunged into this affair socially!”
“I suppose you’ve got to know about them,” said John. “You’re bound to meet some of them in Edinburgh, Cora Murray at any rate. I’m surprised she hasn’t come to-day to find out about this mysterious burglary. All the Warrielaws hate each other, but they always know everything about each other’s affairs.”
“Well, go on,” I said, settling down beside him. “I know they’re only big tin cases in your office to you, but I look upon them as History.”
This story of mine is now I suppose historical. My own children apply the term to that period, so far away from modern youth, when King Edward VII lived, and skirts were long and motors few, and the term Victorian was not yet a reproach. Yet as I look back I see no very profound differences in modern youth and my own upbringing. Before I married I lived with a literary father and artistic mother in Kensington Square, and that life seems to me to have changed but little in essentials. But when, after my marriage, I went to live in Edinburgh, I did feel that I had stepped back definitely into history. I am not speaking of the stricter social and ceremonial proprieties, already undermined by the charming youth of the city. It was not these things which surprised me, but a deeper truth, unimagined by a post-war generation. Edinburgh was not in those days a city, but a fortuitous collection of clans. Beneath a society always charming and interesting on the surface, and delightful to strangers, lurked a history of old hatreds, family quarrels, feuds as old as the Black Douglas. Nor were the clans united internally, except indeed at attack from without. Often already my mother-in-law had placidly dissuaded me from asking relations to meet, on the ground that they did not recognise each other. In a book of Stevenson’s, I had read of two sisters who inhabited one room in the Canongate, a chalk line dividing them and their possessions, and never spoke to each other for twenty years. Now clearly I had stumbled into the story of a clan divided within itself by internecine war.
Five hundred years ago the Warrielaw family were, it appeared, new-comers and parvenus in the Lothians. They came from the Borders with the money and cattle they had looted in raids upon England, and built themselves a small baronial manor in the safer meadows of the West Lothians, seven miles from Edinburgh. By purchase or marriage they added to their property until, by the end of the eighteenth century, they were amongst the largest landowners in the county. In the next thirty years coal was discovered on their estate: mines and shale-pits and the railway began to defile the pleasant fields and gentle woodlands and clear streams of the Lothians, but they brought to the Warrielaws hoards of gold in their grimy clutches. About 1840 the Warrielaw of the day transformed his little castle with pretentious Palladian additions, and since then the Warrielaws had spent their money and squandered their possessions with reckless persistence.
Now the owners of the property were two old maids, Jessica of whom I had heard, and Mary whom I had seen. In a corner of the great lonely old house the sisters carried on the Warrielaw name and tradition. “And the chief one is”, said my husband, smiling, “that all Warrielaws hate each other. Just you notice to-morrow, Betty, how the old ladies love to tell you that ‘all Warrielaws’ do so-and-so. I don’t know if all their generalisations are true, but the hatred certainly is.”
Arrest the Bishop? Page 25