Lament for a Maker

11

It was a hard winter. Looking back on this prologue to what befell at Erchany I see the figures of it whiles driven helpless before the great storm that caught the schoolmistress, whiles sharp-etched on the memory in gestures as extravagant as the leafless star-hung trees showed in the long nights of black frost; and ever the fatal hurrying story of them punctuated by the falling and melting curtain of the snows. When the Thoughtful Citizen got his papers through the drifts – which he didn’t always – he would come ploutering down to the Arms and tell us the Fleet Street chiels had said things were right hard in Scotland, there were tremendous snows, and the season was a record just as he’d said. It was the stationy himself was a record, Will Saunders put in – a right cracked one and would to God he’d run out of needles or break a spring.

The very day Christine visited me it was that the leaden skies opened above the ready snow-covered braes and the fine flakes fell and fell, the glen and all the rolling parks thicker and thicker mantled, as pure and silent and still as the marble floor of heaven before the Almighty thought to create the Angelic host. Often in those days, days that went flitting by towards Christmas as white and quiet as stainless ghosts, I would wonder what was happening up the glen. I scarcely expected news; none could get through that deepening barrier unless it might be Tammas, who took an unnatural strength to himself with the coming of the snow, folk said, like as if he were a creature in a fairy-tale. Many is the mile of deep snow I’ve struggled through myself as a lad, when every week, winter and summer, I’d tramp to my bit reading in the Dunwinnie Institute. But I doubted if I’d ever made such a journey as now lay between Kinkeig and Erchany, and I was right surprised when, in fact, Tammas did come through.

As dead beat he was as Satan after he’d fought his way through Chaos – and, indeed, he was like a visitor from another world. There had been a car or two struggle through from Dunwinnie on the previous day – the twenty-second December – with news of great doings there at the tail of the Loch: curlers coming by the hundred, ’twas said, in special trains. But on the twenty-third nothing came and we doubted if anything more could come; Kinkeig was cut off from the world, and Erchany from Kinkeig again. All except for Tammas, hoasting and gasping on my doorstep, the breath steaming from the great slavering mouth of him like a dragon.

But a dragon would have had more sense than was left in the daftie after his trudge. What he said was a mere yammering there was nothing to be made of, he never heeded my invitation to come in but thrust a bit letter at me and was louping away down the road before I could speak again. I looked at the letter and it was from Christine: at that I never heeded more about the daftie but took it straight ben and read it by the fire.

Uncle Ewan Bell – I was a little fool with my fancies: will you forgive me? It is all right – I am sure it is all right, though strange – and I have only to wait till Christmas Day!

Uncle came in this morning; he seemed in a rare pleased mood; he stood in front of the little fire he had made Mrs Hardcastle light for me, and he said ‘I’ve finished the biggest of all the jigsaws.’ Then he must have seen my thoughts were far away, for suddenly he said softly ‘Must you have him, Christine?’ I said just ‘Yes,’ no more – for I’ve told him long ago how much it is yes and how I can’t help myself. He said ‘You shall go with him.’

I don’t know why, I trembled and couldn’t speak, perhaps with my sick fancies lately I thought he was speaking meaninglessly from a distraught mind. But he repeated ‘You shall go with him.’ And then he spoke harshly of the disgrace and that we must go, if we did go, once and for ever; that there was money for me that I should have and that Neil should come for me at Christmas and that we might away to Canada. But that he would have no wedding or word of a wedding in these parts, and that – but I needn’t repeat words I want and shall soon have the chance to forget.

So this is Goodbye: I won’t forget you, Uncle Ewan Bell. I am so happy, happy – and yet afraid. I’m fey, I almost think – but that is foolish! If there are things I don’t understand – what does it matter when I’m going with Neil?

Tammas is being made to go down – I suppose for letters – though the snow is drifting deep now: I hope he’ll come to no harm. He’s my chance to send this – otherwise you mightn’t hear from me till I was far away – and what oceans of Kinkeig gossip, in that case, you’d hear first! Goodbye and love, dear Ewan Bell.

CHRISTINE MATHERS.

I shall be safe with Neil, and he with me.

So it was goodbye to Christine – and at the thought she was going far from Kinkeig I felt heavier-hearted than for her sake I should have done. Over and over again that night I read her letter – and ever I was the heavier-hearted. At last I must have fallen asleep, old man that I am, over my dying fire, for I awoke chilled in the night and with Ranald Guthrie’s voice again in my ears: It was right anxiously I spent the next three days.