And Guthrie said: ‘Married or unmarried, I say, and if it’s not too late, she’ll never be bairned by you.’
And at that there was the sound of an open-handed blow, and then Lindsay, low and shocked. ‘Christ forgive me – you that might be my grandfather! I’m sorry, Guthrie; not all the bad blood that is between our folk–’
Guthrie said: ‘You’ll pay.’
And these words, as melodramatic as an old play in a barn, were the last the schoolmistress heard. For at that moment the first blast after the lull blew open some door in the biggins and she, that must have been more scared than she’d allow, took it for a pistol shot and started up in the loft scraiching murder.
A fair scunner it must have been for them below. Lindsay took himself off straightways and Guthrie turned at once, cool enough, to deal with the surprise. Straight out and up the outside stair he must have gone, for before the schoolmistress had so much time as to fall into a tremble at the fool she’d made of herself he was through the loft door and gowking at her. ‘Madam,’ he said, ‘am I to understand you are in some distress?’
It didn’t comfort Miss Strachan any to find that she had to deal with the English travelled Guthrie, him that was all black irony and politeness; she’d sooner have had the Guthrie Lindsay had been dealing with, the laird who affected more of the Scots than the gentry have allowed themselves this century past. She gave a bit snivel – we may suppose – as she replied: ‘Oh Mr Guthrie, sir, I’m the schoolmistress at Kinkeig and I was riding by when the storm came and–’
‘I am very glad,’ said Guthrie – and standing outlined in the doorway he gave, she could see, a bit bow – ‘I am very glad the farm has given you shelter. But I think you cried out? You have been alarmed? Our hospitality has been at fault?’
She could feel his louring eye, black shadow though he was, and the awful edge to his smooth words fair unnerved her quite. ‘It was a rat, Mr Guthrie,’ she cried; ‘I was sore frightened for a minute by a rat.’
‘Ah yes,’ said Guthrie. ‘The rats are troublesome round here. As it happens, I have just been dealing with one myself.’
At that horrid speak the schoolmistress fair felt her blood go chill in her veins; she was that miserable that had she dared she would just have sat down and grat. And some further snivel she must have given, for the next words she reported of the laird were: ‘You are over-wrought; let me take you to a less disturbed asylum.’ The word ‘asylum’ really suggested to her muddled head for a moment that she was to be handed over to the daftie, she would have juiked past him if she could and out into the storm and the night. But the laird advanced with his heavy courtesy, like Sir Charles Grandison in Richardson’s fine novel, and fair handed her out of the loft as if it had been a ballroom. In the open she got another turn, for darkling as it was she could see his face as pale as Pepper’s Ghost and across it the great weal of a blow from an open hand. All the way round the arm of the loch and to the meikle house, where the laird wheeled her bicycle with one hand and armed her with the other like she had been the Duchess of Buccleuch, she could hear dinning in her lug his last words to the Lindsay chiel: ‘You’ll pay.’ And then at the meikle house he suddenly tired of his play and summoned the Hardcastle wife and said: ‘Provide for this young woman for the night.’ With that he gave her a cold bow and went his own gait, and the schoolmistress was probably as mortified by her sudden drop from ‘madam’ to ‘young woman’ as by anything had happened to her that awful day – though for that matter ‘young’ was a word of charity she might be grateful for: you must remember Guthrie hadn’t seen her in a full light.
Nor did Miss Strachan see anything more of Guthrie save for a glimpse of him in the morning. She was up at keek of dawn, the rats had given her fient the wink of sleep all night and the supper she’d been offered was that meagre that long before she could decently get up she’d nibbled as much of the rest of her chocolate as the vermin hadn’t snatched from her bedside. Fell eager to get away she was, the storm had abated, and her best plan, she thought, was to trudge back to Kinkeig wheeling her machine – there would be no riding it, certain, with the track the way it was. So she wheedled a bit bread and treacle out of the old witch of a wife Hardcastle, said ta-ta to her right willingly, and away down the path she went. You must know that the path goes hard by the neck of the loch that comes close up to Castle Erchany, the same that they used to fill the moat from in the olden time. And there was Guthrie staring down Loch Cailie at the watery angry sunrise, intent as if he expected a message dropped for him from the chariot of the sun. And sudden as the schoolmistress looked he raised both arms and held them, hands outspread, against the lift like as if he were trying to see the blood coursing through the transparence of them. Uncanny it was and the schoolmistress minded the daft speak of how he would whiles pray to the idols of the coarse old heathen; she fair louped it round the first twist among the larches and I doubt she didn’t stop once, any more than wee Isa had done, on the first of the miles that took her clear of Castle Erchany. But at least she bore her spoils with her: never had such fuel for claiking been brought down the glen before.
And that was the last anyone but myself in Kinkeig heard of Ranald Guthrie before the tragedy. It was the night of the twenty-eighth November Miss Strachan spent at the meikle house. It was on the tenth December, just before the great snows all but closed the glens entirely, that Christine Mathers came to me with her story.
9
It was seldom Christine came down to Kinkeig. After all, beer at the Arms and gossip in the kitchens and maybe a bit sprunting[1] about exhaust the attractions of the place except on the Sabbath. And Guthrie would never let Christine sit under Dr Jervie; he had small use for the kirk and less for our minister. For a bit after his coming, when he’d got to know the affairs of his parish right well, the minister walked up to Erchany and got a bit talk with the laird and hinted it was a pity to breed up so fine a quean as Christine so lonely as he did and so much the mark for idle talk. Perhaps it was because Dr Jervie was a scholar and he respected that – scholar himself that he was – that Guthrie didn’t set the dogs on him as he did on the last minister – who was but an empty pulpit- thumping billy enough with neither matter nor doctrine to him, ’tis true. But he listened coldly and coldly bowed Dr Jervie out at the end, and ever after if they met in a lane the laird would walk unheeding by. He had never, sure, been seen in the kirk, nor Christine nor the Hardcastles either – and as for Tammas I doubt if the poor daftie had ever heard there is such a thing as the Shorter Catechism.
Christine, I say, came seldom to Kinkeig, and when she did it was to visit Ewan Bell the sutor. She and I had been long acquaint, for the first nurse that Guthrie ever got for her was my own sister’s child. There was a pony- carriage at the meikle house then and the laird, who had some mellower years during the childhood of the quean, let them drive about much as they pleased, and often they came down to visit Uncle Ewan, for I was that to the bairn as well as to my right niece. A childless and unmarried man, I grew right fond of little Christine Mathers. And when she grew and Guthrie got Mistress Menzies to the house, the weak-minded gentle fine-bred lady he kept to give Christine her strange and lonely breeding, whiles she would still come to see me, bringing maybe her troubles at Erchany and maybe just her questions about the world. Then as she grew again and her maidenhood came to her and she saw the strangeness of her life, a Miranda islanded with a black-thoughted Prospero, she became a secret quean, and with a growing sorrowfulness too, deep at the heart of her. Whiles she still came to see me, but her contacts now all mute: curled on a table, she would give herself to the scent and the texture of my bit leathers, as if she drew from them the strength one can draw from raw strong things. And now her comings had been rarer, she would look at me as if she might open her heart, but in the end nothing would she speak of but idle matter of the day. Dreaming she would sit, toying with a bit leather, all opening into womanhood as simply and resistlessly as the flower of the heather on the braes. Fine I knew what had happened long ere the schoolmistress brought the unlucky name of the lad to Kinkeig.
You must know something of the Guthries and the Lindsays – a little more, maybe, than you’ll find in Pitscottie’s
You’ll know that while in the highlands the organization of folk was ever by clans, branch upon branch each under its chieftain ramifying out from the stock of the chief, in the lowland parts was no such thing, the unit being ever the family. And great and spreading as a family might be it had seldom the cohesion of the clan, so that the strait binding together of families, and alliance betwixt this family and that, made ever the labour of the lowland landowners. The district was secure and strong in which the lairds were well bound together by band and covenant.
Now while the Guthries were yet but bonnet-lairds at Erchany the Lindsays of Mervie were great folk, barons that held in chief from the Crown, and whose land ran nigh to the Inneses’, the coarse Fleming creatures, between
