Lament for a Maker

1

Yesterday I had a letter from Christine. The postmark – Cincinnati, Ohio, – that seemed outlandish but a year since is grown familiar now: wonderful it is how even an old man will get used to change.

Fient the change, though, could you find in the Kinkeig folk. Mistress Johnstone herself brought the letter over from the post-office and stood about for near ten minutes, fell interested in other folk’s old shoon. ‘Read your letter, Mr Bell,’ she said, ‘and never mind me.’ And half an hour later in came the schoolmistress, her nose maybe a ghost of a bittock longer than the wintry day she went up the glen to the meikle house. Would I take a ticket, she was 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.