And Guthrie is waiting too: only his waiting I just can’t guess at – perhaps he has a date with the ghosts of Clerk of Tranent and Sir Mungo Lockhart of the Lea. But, in a way, he was putting up even a better show than the competent Christine; his taciturnity was gone, he was leading the conversation with Sybil and doing her really proud in point of courteous attention. I suppose his craziness to go with a great sense of what is owing in a laird of Erchany. When my attention drifted to them he was showing Sybil a case of curios – gold coins and medals mostly – which he had fetched from another room. Christine made an excuse of my momentarily drifting eye to move me across the room; I’m terribly afraid that – tete a tete – she’d had enough of me.
Guthrie was handing a little medallion affair to Sybil. ‘You recognize,’ he said, ‘the device?’
I recognized it at once from the creatures on the staircase. It was Guthrie’s crest. Sybil took it, handled it delicately, and said nothing.
‘The family crest,’ said Guthrie. ‘It has occurred to me, my dear young lady, to wonder if we may be related?’
Guthrie, of course, is the sort of old person who can say
Rather unexpectedly, Sybil gushed. ‘Mr Guthrie, wouldn’t that be just wonderful! I know my father was terribly proud of his Scotch connections. And I’d just love to think I was related to a romantic old place like your castle. It must be terribly old?’
You mustn’t think Christine has extinguished my admiration for Sybil: I think Sybil quite remarkable, will-o’- the-wisp though she has been to me. And now I opened my eyes rather wide, for her reaction to Guthrie’s polite suggestion was just a little too good to be true. But if my eyes opened I believe Guthrie’s narrowed. Punctiliously, he answered his guest’s question. ‘It is old. There are thirteenth-century foundations.’ And then he went on carefully: ‘We have connections, I know, in the United States. Families like ours do not care to lose sight even of distant branches.’
‘Mr Guthrie – how exciting! And I am sure they love to come and visit Erchany.’
‘They have not visited me.’ And I think Guthrie smiled. ‘Not, that is, as far as I know.’ There was a pause. ‘But a year or two ago they sent – friends.’
Christine was not rubbing shoulders with me; I must have sensed, rather than felt, her shiver. I know I glanced round at her quickly. And I believe I caught on her face what I had already caught on her uncle’s: fear.
Guthrie waiting and Christine waiting – but not perhaps for the same thing. Guthrie afraid and Christine afraid – again not perhaps of the same thing. Here, in a word, is my preoccupation – almost my anxiety – of the moment; here – Diana – is the Mystery of Castle Erchany!
Sybil was not very oncoming about her family and Guthrie did not press her beyond his first polite suggestion of relationship. Instead his conversation drifted to his childhood, oddly, I thought – for though the picture of the elderly laird entertaining his guests with the golden memories of an Erchany infancy was pretty enough, it yet seemed false to the basic reserve of the man. Presently he was inviting Sybil’s memories in exchange and it occurred to me rather sleepily that he was going after her family again in a ferreting way. But his interest seemed actually to be more general; he might have been a student of American social history, interested in the trend and tone of American life some twenty years ago. Sybil comes from Cincinnati, Ohio – I gathered that much – and I’m not sure there isn’t something peculiarly hypnoidal about the words. Cincinnati, Ohio…Cincinnati, Ohio: beautiful, sleepy cadences I found myself drifting away on. And then I woke up with a jerk.
Guthrie had moved over to the dying fire and was standing before it with a small log in his hands: I think he didn’t want to provide more firing than need be. And as he hesitated Christine said: ‘You seem to be in two minds.’
Not much, you will say, to wake a chap up – rather less than the little crash with which the log immediately fell among the embers. But the remark held all the temper I had been expecting in Christine: into the words she was putting, I knew, a whole desperate situation and she was getting from them the fierce relief that a flash of wit can give. Whatever she felt Guthrie to be in two minds about was something that was vital to her.
And after this I remember, as they say, nothing more. We sat for some time longer, Sybil and myself waiting for bed and Guthrie and Christine waiting for I don’t know what – but certainly something as immediate as a step in the corridor or a cry in the night. But by half-past ten the charm of the mysterious had waned and I was glad when we were reconducted up the great staircase to our rooms.
I spare you details of the horror of the night – the more willingly as Mrs Hardcastle has just put her head into the room and said: ‘Won’t you be wanting your breakfast?’ The rats had certainly wanted their supper, as had a variety of lesser vermin too: meditate the discomposing effect of these before you judge hardly of my disjointed notes on Castle Erchany. I slept for a couple of hours or so and was awakened perhaps by a rat taking an exploratory nibble at my toe, perhaps merely by the owls in the snow-laden ivy by my window. Normally I rather dote on owls, but the owlishness of the Erchany variety is something overpowering. I counted several varieties, all hooting depression or despair, and at least one the note of which was strange to me – a high long-drawn-out
Believe it, Diana, that the most heroical efforts will be made by your lover
NOEL.
2
Christmas Eve at night
No go. Infuriatingly, I am hung up by blizzard for all the world like an Antarctic explorer a march short of his depot. The village – Kinkeig – is just a short Antarctic march away – nine miles or thereabouts – but the conditions are hopeless: the posts that serve to mark the track in common snowfalls will be most of them buried; a great wind and a steady fall between them surround one with a dizzying curtain of white the moment one steps beyond the door; and every hour the drifts must be becoming deeper and, I suppose, more dangerous. Even our prodigious Tammas – the Erchany odd lad, that is, who turns out to be a sort of low-grade moron (a nice finish, surely, to the amenities of the castle) – even Tammas is halted by this storm. So I must resign myself – Diana, maiden and mistress of the months and stars! – to your spending Christmas ignorant, alarmed and furious. That’s the worst of being so closely netted round by civilization; it’s hard to imagine a person dropping tolerably comfortably through and out of it without disaster suffered. I haven’t broken a limb – or anything more than a nice young lady’s baby car – and I haven’t been put in gaol; I’ve simply got myself nine miles from the nearest telephone in a spot of dirty weather.
And I’m bored. After all my lucubrations in the small hours this is something of an anti-climax, but the mystery of Erchany fades away rather – as you might expect – in the light of common day. My host was the linchpin of my imaginings and today he has remained invisible, sending civil messages that he is a little unwell. Perhaps the caviare was too much for him; I don’t believe somehow that caviare is a regular part of the Erchany diet. You know it
We have been left to ourselves rather, Sybil and I. Christine has presided at two meals – simple enough this time – and vanished away on the plea of vaguely described duties. After breakfast she took us up to a long sort of gallery-place, full of dead Guthries and still-born theology, and invited us with downright malice to choose a book; after luncheon she bowed us into a billiard room, whisked a dust-cloth off the identical table, one must believe, with which Noah beguiled the tedious hour, and said: All American women played? Tricks gaily and fantastically performed; the devil or an angel has entered into Christine today; she has put her fears – if I wasn’t imagining them – behind her. And still she is beautiful.
So Sybil and I played billiards. There are no cues, one of the pockets is missing, and a fair part of the cloth has gone to nourish generations of moths; still, wrapped in our overcoats, we have played a sort of billiards and
