Christine and loath to leave her in so coarse a place, and some said it was the grown Gamley lads, that they had all the soft and fragrant carpeting of Erchany Forest for their sporting with the quean and didn’t fail to take advantage of it. But whether it was Christine or the Gamleys that kept Isa at the meikle house, none doubted her story that it was Guthrie himself that drove her away at last.
Most times it was little that Isa saw of the laird. Nigh all day he’d bide in his study high in the great tower and when he went out to dander through the woods or whiles fish the Drochet it would be down the long tower staircase that dropped past his own private rooms and out by a little postern door remote from the rest of the house, a door of which the key was ever in his pocket. Isa would see no more of him than a keek at meals, and that was maybe enough. Only once a week she was allowed up to his bedroom for the thoroughing of it and then she would hear him pacing the study above, murmuring verses, another’s or his own. For you must know that Guthrie was poet as well as scholar. Years ago he put out a book of poems, a slender thing in black and yellow covers that fair scunnered those who thought a Scottish laird’s poems would naturally take after Rabbie Burns. I was a younger man myself then, unwilling to admit that a sutor will do well if he but knows a few classics, and once a week I used to read what they were writing of the new books, over in the Dunwinnie Institute – ten miles there and ten back, and long before the Saturday bus. And there bides in my memory a review in one of the London papers that ended:
But to return to Isa Murdoch. A glimpse at meals was all she saw of her master, and the murmur of his chanted verses was all she heard, until a bit after the Gamleys left. Then one day when she was sweeping the corridor outside Christine’s room – the schoolroom, they still called it – she turned round and saw Guthrie standing over her and glowering. It almost sent her clean skite at once, she said, she’d never met in with him about the house before and never before had his awful gowking eye fallen on her – Guthrie, as I’ve told, going ever about with his gaze fixed on the middle air. She saw the glint of gold in his eye, she said, there in the dusky, dusty corridor, and when his lips parted – Guthrie who had uttered fient the syllable to her in all her Erchany days – she expected to hear a spell that would undo her surely.
Guthrie said quietly: ‘Open the house.’
5
A strange day they had of it, Christine Mathers and Isa and the Hardcastle wife, opening up Castle Erchany. They forced back the lofty shutters on their rusted hinges and set the slant autumn sunlight feeling through the dirt and destruction of forty years, blight, mildew and rot, and cobwebs as big as in the transformation scene at a pantomime. Isa turned the key in a pair of doors she had never glimpsed before and found herself in a billiard room, the great swathed table looming like some monster in his shroud, or like a stretcher in a giants’ morgue. She went up and touched it, wondering and a bit feared, never the like had she seen before. And at her touch on the corner of the thing a mouldering pocket gave way and down fell a couple of balls with a crash to the floor and rolled into the darkness. Isa said she felt a real clutch of fear at her thrapple then; it was as if the great muffled mysterious thing had stirred to life as she put her hand to it. She ran out, crying for Miss Christine, and the next thing she knew she had nearly spitted herself on a sword; it was the laird had taken down a rusty claymore from the wall and was doitering about with it like mad Hamlet looking for King Claudius of Denmark. But this time Guthrie looked straight over Isa’s head as usual and muttered something about having such airs that folk might know you kept a sword upstairs – and, at that, upstairs he went, sword and all, and wasn’t seen again that forenoon.
But at lunch time came another shock, for the laird must needs be served in the great chamber, a dark grand place that spoke of the pride of the Guthries in times gone by. Chill and echoing, the echo half muted by the chill damp air, it was choke full of lumber at one end and had a regular minstrel chorus of rats in the gallery at the other. Before a carven fireplace, that big you could have stalled two–three shetland ponies in it, was a long Flemish table, sore eaten by the worm, and down this Guthrie and his ward Christine Mathers faced each other – with wee Isa Murdoch, right feared now by the whole unco stour, bringing them their bit stewed rabbit not on some old cracked ashet but on a half-polished silver dish. Syne Guthrie ordered up wine from the cellar and when the dusty bottles were before him he gowked at them as if they held some strange elixir new-sent him from another planet, as well he might seeing that nothing but water and milk was ever drunk at Erchany. Mistress Hardcastle had sent in a corkscrew, Guthrie’s hand hovered on it as if he would open a bottle and see, then he started up and called to them to get on with their work and that they hadn’t yet opened the gallery.
Going upstairs Isa asked Christine did she know what the laird was about, and after all these years was he going to hold in with the gentry? But Christine seemed to know nothing, her thoughts were far away as ever, it was but a dreaming life she had led at Erchany, though with passion maybe behind every dream. So Isa was none the wiser, and presently they were at the stair head and facing the gallery door.
The Erchany gallery was the work of some late seventeenth century laird, building before the lust for distant commerce nigh beggared Scotland and the Guthries. He had been among the English and liked fine the way they builded their great houses in Tudor times; at Erchany he knocked all the topmost rooms together and made a long low gallery. Three turns it had to it and would have been a right roundabout but for the tower – for he couldn’t drive his fancy through the nine foot walls of that. ’Tis said that after building it the Guthrie was fair out of patience on all but smoring wet days: then he would dander round his gallery getting exercise, as blithe as a laverock. For a Guthrie ’twas an innocent pleasure enough.
None had ever been in the gallery in Ranald’s time and when Christine and Isa took a keek at the door they must have felt none would ever enter it again. There was but the one door, massive and iron-bound, and it was here that Guthrie, closing nigh all Erchany forty years since, had cheated the locksmith of his labour. Christine turned pale, Isa said, as she glimpsed the fury that had gone to the closing of that door. Great nails had been driven slantwise through the boards deep into the jamb, the blows with the strength and skill to them of a man who had handled axe and hammer in the Australian bush. It was to save his silver that Guthrie, near-going that he was, had put shutter and key to Erchany, but here surely was some other passion, forty years past or forty years hidden, that had yet left record of itself like a sculptor’s passion, deep bitten into the dark oak.
Up to this the laird, save for an order here and an order there, had taken small part in the confloption he was causing; almost, Isa said, he seemed misdoubting of what he was about. But now he came upstairs and saw the two women standing helpless before the gallery door, and sudden he fell into a fair stamash. It was seldom Guthrie raged, cold and proud he was and with a strange cruel courtesy, and it sore frighted poor Isa anew to see him fair rampage before that door, as it might have been Satan raging before the portals warded by Sin and Death. Syne he strode to the landing window and called out, hoarse and high, to Tammas ploutering in the court below to bring him his axe and see that it was fell keen. For turned seventy though he was Guthrie ever felled his own timber, and could have given points at it to the coarse creature Gladstone, him that fooled the Midlothian folk in ’eighty. Up came Tammas then with the axe, him with his great gomeril mouth open and slavering, it with a subtle curve to its long handle that was unlike the common woodmen’s axes here about. Guthrie threw off his jacket and standing spare and straight in his sark cried ‘Stand back!’ in such a voice that Tammas tripped over his own mucky feet and fell head over heels downstairs. Isa scraiched and Christine ran down to see if he had mischieved himself, but fient the glance did the laird give to anything but the great oak door of the gallery. In a moment he was hacking at it as a man might try to hack his way out of a burning biggin – only he was fair skilly, the blows came light and fast and where any slummock of a chiel would have bedded the axe like Excalibur in that tough wood Guthrie took chip and chip just where he wanted, the axe leaping back free every time. At the first blow there was a great scampering behind the door, the gallery rats fair frantic at the shattering of generations of repose. And at the second blow the Erchany dogs in the court gave tongue and Tammas down the stair recovered sufficient breath to set up a yowling like a soul in the eternal bonfire. Down in the kitchens the Hardcastle wife heard the rumption and, half blind and half dottled that she was, she ran out to the court and tolled the great cracked rusty bell that had meant fire or foray centuries past. Almost, there had been no such uproar in a Scottish keep since they found King Duncan with his bloody sheets about him.
But Guthrie worked on unheeding, driving deep furrows here and there about the door. After an hour, the sweat pouring from him, he called for water, washed out his mouth and spat; then he drove at the living wood
