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
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
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
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?’
