Lament for a Maker

4

And so the Guthries have gone from these lands and Castle Erchany is to let. What gear was left in the place unrotted has been dispersed; the family portraits and all the schoolroom stuff were shipped away to Sybil and Christine and then there was a grand sale. The great Flemish table where they sat and had their caviare that night was bought by Dr Jervie for the kirk session. The globes that wee Isa Murdoch hid behind in the gallery were bought by Mistress Roberts of the Arms; she sits in the private now with her teapot on one side and the terrestrial globe on the other, ready to show you what port her bairns wrote from last. Fairbairn of Glenlippet – him that licenses his motor ever by the quarter – bought a great granite louping-stone from the court; folk were sore puzzled to know what use he would make of it but Will Saunders says it will bear a brave inscription to Mistress Fairbairn one day. And all the mouldering theology in the gallery I bought myself: right solid stuff to chew on it has proved and a grand stand-by in the discussions I whiles hold with the minister.

Today I have wandered through the meikle house perhaps for the last time. The winds that ever eddy about Erchany are sighing through the broken windows; warm and scented from the braes though they are they scarcely bring to the castle a suggestion of summer or of the sun. Utterly the place has slipped into the past: I doubt that its only tenants hereafter will be the rats – they have already forgotten the dottled Hardcastle wife – and the martins that know their season. Stone will fall from stone and this high tower to which I have climbed be as forgotten as the Lindsays’ tower in Mervie – the Guthries of Erchany, that have so passionately lived in the life of Scotland, like their rivals remembered only in footnotes to history.

But the Gamleys are back at the home farm. One of Gamley’s lads has taken a wife, a Speyside lass, and now I hear her singing in the field – some crude ephemeral tune such as has nigh killed the true minstrelsy of Scotland. And yet – because it rises joyous and full-throated from the earth – I hear it as an enduring song.