Michael Innes - Lament for a Maker

Behind me Christine said in a new hard way: ‘He’s mad.’

10

Christine had a loyalty to the laird, and she was the kind that would strive to keep her loyalty while tholing much, or even right through a strait fight. So it was a scunner to hear her say that of Guthrie – and to hear the unco paradox she backed her speak with forbye. For what made her right sure that the man was truly skite at last was that he was spending a bit silver like a rational being. ‘He’s violating himself,’ Christine said.

It was only one had lived long at Erchany, I thought, could estimate the force of her evidence. The first thing was the putting away of the Gamleys: some sort of quarterly or yearly agreement Gamley had from the laird in writing, and to get them away he had paid out a little hantle of gold – real gold that Christine had seen him taking from his bureau, and that was the only ready coin at Erchany might serve in an emergency. Fell strange it was, Christine said, for the gold was her uncle’s plaything.

I opened my eyes at that. Well I knew Guthrie’s near-going ways, his sad dealings with the bogles and all, but I had never thought of him somehow as the simple picturesque miser you might meet in with in a book. ‘You mean,’ I cried, ‘he sits thumbing the stuff over?’

‘Yes. He calls it numismatics, and he’s even taught me a little. Have you ever seen a Spanish gold quadruple of Philip V, Mr Bell – or a genovine twenty-three carats fine, or a bonnet piece of James V, or the coinage of the Great Mogul? I think I could be a miser myself easy as easy when I look at them. But uncle likes to be thumbing little piles of guineas and sovereigns as well, the same that he must have paid Gamley with. And doesn’t that show?’

It showed, I thought, that the laird had been unco eager to rid himself of those at the home farm, for if he had the disease of gold as bad as that it must have been a fair violation, like Christine said, to hand a pile to his grieve. And for a minute I had a picture in my mind, almost as vivid maybe as the vision of Mistress McLaren I’ve told you about, of Guthrie sitting in his dark tower, with no more than the bit candle that was another right miser’s touch to him, thumbing and thumbing at the gold, a symbol no doubt of something we could have no knowledge of, and whiles calling on the quean to watch and admire numismatic-like, that he might have some feeling of a rational basis to the irrational lust was driving him. And little as I knew of Neil Lindsay I was glad Christine had found him; the glint of that gold, like the glint of gold some folk thought to see in Guthrie’s eye, had somehow made the whole picture of the man and his castle darker for me.

‘Doesn’t that show?’ Christine repeated. And then she added: ‘But he doesn’t play with the gold so much now; he’s got the puzzles instead.’

I looked at her fair startled – not by the words, which I didn’t understand, but by the tone of them and the growing strain on her face. It was plain there was an atmosphere about events at Erchany that was working on the quean and that she found it hard to express the force of. ‘Puzzles?’ I said, fair puzzled myself.

‘Uncle has been ordering all sorts of things from Edinburgh – that’s another strange spending. There have been provisions as if we were going to be besieged at Erchany, expensive things some of them I’ve never seen or heard of! And a big crate of books.’

‘Surely the laird has ever been a great reader, Christine.’

‘Yes – but he doesn’t buy books! And these are a kind he’s never heeded before: medical books. Up there in the tower he’s poring over them night after night.’

I thought for a minute I saw a right horrible light here. Was Guthrie really going skite – as Christine thought and as the Harley Street sumph had said might happen – and, feeling it come on him, was he reading desperately to get light on himself and cure? ‘Christine,’ I asked gently, ‘would they be books about the mind?’

Fine she understood me as she shook her head. ‘The ones I’ve seen are not. There’s one by a man Osler on General Medicine, and one by Flinders on Radiology, and one by Richards on Cardiac Disease–’ She broke off with a frown, and her noting and remembering the hard words brought home to me right vividly the effort she had been making to plumb things at the meikle house.

Myself, I could make nothing of this fancy of Guthrie’s, so I harked back to something else. ‘What of the puzzles, Christine?’

‘Jigsaw puzzles they’re called – you know them? I think he got them cheap from a catalogue. Spirited war scenes, Mr Bell. You’re awfully puzzled for a time about the German soldier’s head, and then you find it’s been blown right from his body and fits snug in the top left-hand corner. The whole thing will be called the Battle of the Marne, maybe – and Uncle likes me to help him. There’s little I have to learn about tanks and hand-grenades and the sinking of the Lusitania . Perhaps it’s Uncle’s idea of a finishing school for me.’

There was a spark of fun in Christine’s voice; nevertheless, she’d spoken the first bitter words I’d ever heard from her. I said: Well it seemed a foolish ploy enough but with no vice in it, so need she worry?

Christine gave a half-impatient, half-despairing toss to the lovely hair of her. ‘It’s taken the place of the gold!’ she said. ‘So don’t you see?’

For a minute I must have stared at her like an owl. And then, uncertainly enough, I did see. For had I not been saying to myself that the gold was a symbol that answered to something deep in the man?

But Christine’s mind had turned another way. ‘Mr Bell,’ she said, ‘why did little Isa Murdoch leave us? Has there been a story going round about that?’

It was a question I’d been fearing, this. Christine had enough to fash over these days without a bit more worry about the daftie Tammas, and yet if she didn’t know of the unchancy way he’d turned on Isa it seemed but right to warn her. But syne she settled this by saying: ‘Was it just Tammas?’

‘Partly that. But partly it was she was driven to hide in your uncle’s gallery and heard him murmuring his verses and talking strangely to the air. She was easily frighted. But Christine, did you ever hear of your uncle holding in with any folk called Walter Kennedy and Robert Henderson?’

At that it was her turn to stare like an owl – but only for a moment. Then she laughed as clear as clear: right sweet it was to hear her. ‘Oh Uncle Ewan Bell,’ she cried, ‘did you ever hold in with Geoffrey Chaucer?’ And at that her spirits suddenly came on her wildly; she jumped up as if the worry were gone from her entirely and fell to pacing up and down my bit shop, her hands clasped behind her and her eye on the middle air like as if it was Ranald Guthrie himself. And then she chanted:

‘He has done petuously devour,

The noble Chaucer, of makaris flouir,

The Monk of Bery, and Gower, all thre;

Timor Mortis conturbat me.

‘In Dumfermelyne he hast tane Broun

With Maister Robert Henrisoun;

Schir Iohne the Ros enbrast hes he;

Timor Mortis conturbat me.’

Christine turned at this and laughed again. Then she went on in her own right voice, grave and sweet:

‘Gud Maister Walter Kennedy,

In poynt of dede lyis veraly,

Gret reuth it were that so suld be;

Timor Mortis conturbat me…’

I laid down my awl. ‘So that was who!’ I said. ‘Folk in a poem.’

Christine nodded. ‘Quoth Dunbar when he was sick. And quoth my uncle in his gallery – also sick, maybe.’ And syne she chanted another verse:

‘Sen he has all my brother tane,

He will naught lat me lif alane,