Lament for a Maker

wondering, for a right trig play the bairns were to give in the church hall, choke-a-block it would be with self- expression and child psychology, and the whole written by the dux, a genius he was for certain, wee Geordie Gamley? And would there be any news from the world coming into Kinkeig these days?

And a week or two ago I had another letter from America, the postmark less familiar: San Luis Obispo, Cal. You could scarce, Mrs Johnstone said, look for anything more heathenish than that. And would it be from a black man, now? I opened the letter and said no, it was from a schoolfellow settled in those distant parts. Which was true enough. For he well remembered, Dr Flinders wrote, the two of us sitting under the old dominie, the time he came to the village school before being sent to Edinburgh. An unco thing for a man to write who was born in Australia when I was twenty. But Mistress Johnstone knows nothing of that.

Christine’s letter yesterday I took over to the manse and Dr Jervie and I read it together. I think he’s aged, the minister, this past year; certain his hand was trembling as he laid the letter on his desk – the letter that said Sybil Guthrie had told her the truth about Neil. And for a time he bided silent, looking out over the warm garden and the glebe where the harvest, heavy and yellow, was drawing on. ‘And time mellows everything, Ewan Bell,’ he said.

I put the letter back in my pocket. ‘Do you think,’ I said, ‘that one day she might find a man?’

‘And why not, Ewan? Maybe after Neil Lindsay Christine could never marry in the Scottish gentry. And never after Neil Lindsay another crofter lad. But now she’s in a new world. And see how already she’s opening to the strangeness of it, coming out of her shell to watch and puzzle and criticize. One day she’ll see not the strangeness only but the beauty and then–’ He stood up. ‘But it mayn’t be in our time, old friend.’

And today I’ve tramped up the glen. Eighteen months have passed since I first took pen to set this narrative in motion. I have a fancy to end it in the shadow of Castle Erchany.

2

John Appleby, that clever London man, would have it that the Guthrie case defeated him. He neglected, he says, the single element that changed its whole composition at the last. There was one question, he insists, he forgot to ask. But the reader will have seen that he did ask it – and would have asked it again that night but for the speed things happened with. Who was it slipped out of the schoolroom in front of Hardcastle and the lad Gylby when they were on their way to the tower? You know the answer, Reader. It was Ewan Bell.

Long I’d chewed over that strange letter the daftie brought me from Christine. But, old man and slow that I am, it was Christmas Eve before I saw that at the heart of it, unknown perhaps even to Christine herself, was an appeal. Nor perhaps did that truth of it rise clear in my own mind, for when I started up the glen in the gloaming I told myself it was only because I must bid the quean goodbye. But deep down I recognized the appeal and deeper still I must have felt the danger: I wouldn’t otherwise have attempted a road that was danger and daftness itself.

I reckoned to reach the meikle house by about eight o’clock and trust for the night to Guthrie’s hospitality or to a pallet like the schoolmistress had thought of in the loft at the farm. Only in such a reckoning I was thinking of myself as a younger man. By some freak of nature I reached Erchany alive through the storm that night, but it wanted only half an hour to midnight as I plodded up the last stretch of the drive, the storm lantern I had brought with me giving but the smallest glimmer in that yet driving snow. There was a light in the schoolroom; I climbed down to the moat and then, with some difficulty, up to the little terrace. Mr Wedderburn was right in spying in me the ruins of an athlete; but it seems I keep a bit of muscle still.

I wonder now that I took this secret road to Christine; no doubt it shows how strong was my instinct that Guthrie was an enemy. She let me in by the window and I could see she was right glad that I had come. She had a bit suitcase – no bigger than Mistress McLaren’s Sabbath handbag it looked – beside her, and a mackintosh over a chair. I said ‘Surely you’re not going tonight?’

She nodded. ‘It’s uncle’s way. And Neil says we can get fine to Mervie. He’s up with uncle in the tower now and we’re to go straight away when he comes down. It will be all right, don’t you think, Ewan Bell?’

She was too much in love, I suppose, to allow herself more than a troubled suspicion that it must be all wrong, that there was something crazy and sinister at the core of it. I said: ‘I’ll just be going up to see them, Christine. And when your Neil comes down away with you and write to me some day.’ And at that I kissed her. It was my idea, I believe, to act as a rearguard when they were gone. My mind didn’t stretch to the notion that it was their very getting away that might be fatal to them.

Christine said: ‘Go by the little stair and you’ll more likely avoid Hardcastle.’ And she found me a key in case the door at the bottom was locked.

I slipped from the schoolroom – it was when Gylby and Hardcastle glimpsed me – and held for the little stair. It’s something to remember that after all that trudge from Kinkeig I got up the little stair quicker than they got up the big one. And right different the story would have been had I lingered on the climb.

You must know I was familiar enough with the castle as a lad in the old laird’s time, but of the tower top I had little memory. Only I knew there was an entrance from the parapet walk and when I emerged through the trapdoor it was my plan to walk boldly in and say I’d come as a friend of Lindsay’s to see him safely away with his bride.

The wind was high and I stood for a moment wondering whether to turn to left or right along the open parapet walk. I chose left, which happened to be wrong. That is to say the scene Miss Guthrie came on by holding forward from her French window I came on from the other side. The American lassie’s presence I never knew of. Nor, I think, did Ranald Guthrie: she must have been wrong in thinking he heard her cry out.

I was on the scene a few seconds earlier than she; our movements can be fitted to each other accurately enough by the cry she heard – the cry that brought her away from her window. It was my cry. And I don’t doubt it was loud enough. For I was going cautiously along the battlement, my lantern at my feet, when something rolled out of the darkness that almost tripped me up and sent me over the tower. I put down my lantern and stooped over it. It was a human body.

Everything was a matter of seconds after that. I saw that there was another lantern burning in a niche above a door – the little bedroom door. And the next instant through the door came Guthrie. I straightened up from the huddled form I was stooping over – sore afraid it was Neil Lindsay’s – and took a step back that overturned and put out my lantern. Guthrie became aware of me on that and his axe came up in menace – which was the moment at which Miss Guthrie got her first imperfect sight of what was forward. He advanced on me; the step took him out of the light; the next minutes were a stealthy groping. I knew I was in mortal danger – knew it as well as if Guthrie had read out a declaration of war. And on getting out of it depended not only my own life but that of the man lying helplessly at my feet. For that it was murder that the laird was about I was certain.

He was crouching somewhere in the darkness, manoeuvring for position with all the cunning of that powerful brain. And suddenly he rose up by the parapet, full in the light. He had me in silhouette – as Miss Guthrie had; he had judged that it was enough and that he would take me by surprise that way. His axe was swung back low – a rising stroke that would either gut me or cleave me from the chin up. I had to get in first and I did. So much, Reader, for the death of Ranald Guthrie.

3

I knelt down by the figure in the snow – you’ll remember that Miss Guthrie had retreated and saw nothing of this – and said softly: ‘Man Lindsay – are you all right?’ And at that the figure stirred and turned over on its face. You may take it I was fair scunnered when I saw I was looking at a Guthrie. It was my first awful thought that in the darkness I’d killed the wrong man.

He was drugged, I think, but coming round rapidly. It was only seconds before he opened his eyes on me and whispered: ‘Who are you?’ And at my name his eyes lit up as if he had last heard it but yesterday. He said: ‘I’m Ian – Ian Guthrie. Get me away – secretly.’

Maybe I’d had my fair share of activity that night – enough to satisfy the Athletic Ideal of Miss Strachan herself. But there was no help for it. I pitched my own lantern over the parapet, took up the one burning in the