Lament for a Maker

night at this hour for orders – certainly Guthrie wasted no time in giving him an order now. ‘Hardcastle,’ he said peremptorily, ‘if the lad Lindsay comes – though I don’t think he can get up in the snow – you must let him in. I’ll see him once again.’

Hardcastle slowly drew a hand from behind his slouching back – I rather expected an open razor – and gave a dubious rub at an unshaven chin. Then he said – with what I took to be an effort at the surly fidelity characteristic of retainers in the best Scottish fiction – ‘If you’ll believe me, laird, the lad’s black dangerous.’

‘What’s that, man?’ The laird had stopped and was glaring at his factor with what looked, in the dusky corridor, downright malignity.

‘I say Neil Lindsay means mischief.’

The solicitous vassal turn or whatever it was cut, it seemed, very little ice with the laird. ‘Lindsay,’ he said dryly, ‘can come up to the tower. Mr Gylby, the ladies.’

And on we went. My responses were becoming sluggish; we were half-way down the corridor before it occurred to me to doubt whether Guthrie had been quite as unmoved by the curious soothsayer-business as he had appeared. I think it may have been that I was not unmoved myself: the incident gave me something I had been searching for. I had dubbed the Erchany atmosphere suspense; I now suspected I might equally well have dubbed it fear. But who was afraid – and of what?

I had got to this point in my meditations – you will say I was badly in need of bed and sleep – when I nearly jumped out of my skin. Guthrie had said aloud: ‘Fear.’ Or rather he had said it in Latin: ‘Timor…’ Softly but distinctly he had murmured: ‘Timor Mortis conturbat me.’

A glance at him showed he had forgotten my existence – at that I remembered I believed him mad. And striding down the corridor with his eye fixed somewhere near the ceiling he continued to recite.

‘Clerk of Tranent eik he has tane,

That maid the anteris of Gawane;

Schir Gilbert Hay endit has he;

Timor Mortis conturbat me.

‘He has Blind Hary, et Sandy Traill

Slaine with his schour of mortall haill,

Quhilk Patrik Iohnestoun myght nought fle;

Timor Mortis conturbat me…’

Diana, you have never assisted at anything half so weird as the spectacle of this uncanny Scottish gentleman walking wrapt down his windy crumbling corridor, chanting that tremendous dirge of Dunbar’s!

‘He hes tane Roull of Aberdene,

And gentill Roull of Corstorphine;

Two bettir fallowis did no man se;

Timor Mortis conturbat me…’

We turned a corner and the wind blew the words away from me, so that they became only a murmuring. At the same moment the candle spurted and I had momentarily a better view of his face than I have yet had in this murky house. And I swear the fear of Death was really stark on him.

The second corridor seemed interminable. At length we halted before a door, and I guessed that Sybil and Christine were on the other side. Guthrie was immobile, the rhythm of his murmuring had changed, he was looking at or through the door with an expression that now, I thought, held something of exultation. And then he cried out – but softly – ‘Oh my America, my new-found land !’

Once more, it was a scunner. And so was the succeeding moment. His hand fell to the latch of the door, and instantly his mind flicked back to me. He gave me a polite smile and said: ‘I usually spend half an hour here with my niece.’ I believe he can have had no recollection whatever of that chanting progress down the corridor. In other words, he seems almost a case of dissociated personality: two distinct Guthries, you know, playing hide and seek like twins in a stage farce. I was developing this picturesque thought – the miserly Guthrie A who starved his dogs and wouldn’t repair his windows, the lavish Guthrie B who stuffed tinned caviare – I was developing this for some time after we had joined Christine and Sybil in what is called the schoolroom. It suggested another possible explanation of Hardcastle’s calling out about the doctor: the laird was having a bout of this mild madness and the household was waiting quietly to smuggle in a leech. Not perhaps a brilliant idea – but that phrase of the indescribable Hardcastle’s was beginning to worry me. Is that the doctor? I have decided that if Erchany holds a secret the key to it is in the explanation of that question.

Diana, if this rambling recital is interesting no doubt you will want to interrupt here and say: ‘Guthrie expects the dangerous Neil Lindsay; Hardcastle expects the mysterious doctor: surely they are likely to be one and the same person – Dr Neil Lindsay, who is not necessarily expected in a professional way? What about his being, say, an undesirable suitor of your romantic Christine?’

On this nice point I can give you no reasonable satisfaction. That Christine has a lover – that she is in the state of having nothing but a lover on her whole horizon – I readily agree. And the lover may be Neil Lindsay – or he may be Hardcastle’s ‘doctor’. But that these two are one I somehow don’t believe: something in the abominable Hardcastle’s voice in speaking of them forbids it. Time may show.

It is time perhaps to say a word on time. It is now eight o’clock on the morning of Tuesday, 24th December; these dedicated pages, dear Diana, have occupied me for just three and a half hours – including pauses to relight the candle. For the wind has been rising steadily and this room is a very hall of Aeolus: giant winds bumping about on the ceiling, baby winds gamboling like cinquecento putti and trying out their tender voices beneath the bed. My last night’s fire is a remote memory; it is quite fiendishly cold; I am sitting by the window – that being no colder than anywhere else – in a sort of igloo made of feather mattress, hoping for some sort of present summons to breakfast. Outside, the still falling snow is being drifted quite terrifically and I see hardly a chance of getting away for days. There was some talk last night, though, of the miraculous prowess as a snow traveller of Erchany’s odd lad. So, if I am stuck, there is just a chance of getting a wire away to you by him. It must be long past dawn now, but visibility still poor, the sky is so leaden. From this window I see just dim, whirling whiteness. Only left-centre is there a break, a dark gleam that has been puzzling me for the last twenty minutes. It is as if the snow were melting away from a surface of hot dark steel: I believe it must be water – the frozen arm of a loch that curls right up to the castle – and this howling gale driving the ice clear of snow.

No sign of life or breakfast – so I add a few further notes on last night. The schoolroom where Christine had her learning – she has seldom if ever been away from Erchany, I gather – is now a pleasant, rather bare, species of den – Miranda’s corner of the cave, furnished with a few elegant mementoes of Milan: in this case a really beautiful Flemish cabinet and some Indian bird-paintings that deserve a better light than the couple of candles that seem the standard illumination in public rooms in Erchany. When Guthrie and I entered we found Christine and Sybil sitting side by side on a low stool beside the fire, apparently on the way to becoming friends. They both got up: Sybil’s glance, I noticed, came straight to Guthrie; Christine’s was lingering with something like puzzlement on Sybil. I remember wondering how we were all going to get on together without the help of eating and drinking.

Formality was our refuge. I was handed, more or less on a plate, to Christine, and presently found myself conscientiously developing a vein of subdued gaiety – embodied earlier in this budget, my dear – on my day’s adventures. I don’t think Christine is normally the sort that wouldn’t relish a young man abruptly pitched out of the world into Erchany on a winter’s night, or that she hasn’t the wit and will to prick and quicken the gaiety of such a one with mockery. I am a sociable person; I meet dozens of young women in a year; and half a dozen, perhaps, are right for something like interesting personal relations. One knows at once, does one not? And Christine is right: very shy though she is, we ought to have been reacting to each other in from eight to ten minutes. Do you observe, Diana, the note of pique creeping in? She was quite charming, but if you imagine a political duchess thinking out a difficult manoeuvre at a party while being quite charming meantime to a stray young man who may be of middling importance in thirty years’ time, you will get the effect almost exactly. Exactly – because Christine, though a slip of a rural lass, has an old-fashioned poise that is very engaging: I am consumed with curiosity as to how she has been brought up here. Point is, though, that there we sat, and there I went through my tricks, and that she registered just the right interest and amusement, and put in just the necessary number of words of her own – and that all the time she was profoundly unaware of me. Occasion, as I say, for slight pique.

Christine – I perhaps wearisomely reiterate – is waiting: waiting as brides must have waited when the world was younger. Undoubtedly, it is a lover!