Michael Innes - Lament for a Maker

Jervie came out and stood beside me, looking at the loch and the mountains in silence. Then he said softly: ‘How peaceful it is.’

A longer silence was split from the direction of the loch by a sound like a pistol shot: the ice was cracking. The sound, sharp in that quiet, roused him. ‘Mr Appleby – come in.’ And he turned back to the schoolroom.

Stewart had gone up to the tower; Gylby had just returned to the room with a load of wood. Jervie crossed to where he had sat, carefully folded Gylby’s journal letter, laid it on a table beside Ian Guthrie’s testament. Then his eye caught something at the other end of the room, he took up a candle, was presently studying the Indian bird paintings on the wall. He came back, stood before the fire and there recited – with an oddly moving effect of familiar statement:

‘Sen for the deth remeid is non,

Best is that we for deth dispone

After our deth that lif may we;

Timor Mortis conturbat me.’

He turned to Wedderburn. ‘Ranald Guthrie,’ he said, ‘has long since given himself to the Devil. And the Devil gave him the Devil’s own gift in return: pride.’

Uneasily Wedderburn said: ‘No doubt.’

‘Mr Appleby, you wonder if, in all the complex of motives you have discovered, the master motive is avarice – the miserliness that is his ruling passion. I think the master motive is his other ruling passion, pride. Pride that is fiercer in him than was the avarice that sent him haunting among the scarecrows. Pride that made him take a tortuous and diabolical path to an imperative end. He forbade the marriage of Neil Lindsay and Christine Mathers. It couldn’t be. But pride in turn forbade him to give the reason. Neil and Christine are brother and sister.’

Sybil Guthrie gave a little cry that ebbed into silence.

‘Actually, half-brother and half-sister. Christine has been supposed – if only dubiously and by implication – to be the child of Guthrie’s mother’s brother, who was known to have been killed with his wife in a railway accident in France. In reality, Christine is the daughter of Guthrie’s own sister, Alison Guthrie.

‘Alison was an eccentric and solitary woman, with a passion for birds–’

I interrupted. ‘Christine–’

‘Quite so. She has something of the same passion. But if Alison had a passion for the creatures of the air she had too a passion, less innocent, for her own menservants. The type is known. And a certain Wat Lindsay, Neil’s father, took service with her for a time when he was already a married man and shortly after Neil’s birth. Christine was–’

Suddenly, as if a flood had broken, Sybil Guthrie broke into a passion of weeping. Jervie waited for a minute and went on gently. ‘Christine’s mother died in some lonely place at the child’s birth. Ranald Guthrie took the little girl but concealed her parentage with all the ingenuity of which you know him to be capable. It could, of course, have been ferreted out: Mr Wedderburn will doubt if the estate could have been settled at Ranald’s supposed death without the truth emerging. But Ranald was a driven creature and his clear-sightedness had limits. He was passionately determined that the thing he morbidly regarded as shameful should never be known.

‘And so it was pride, you see, and not avarice that drove him to the greatest wickedness of all. There was no need that the family history become public. An explanation to Neil and Christine as soon as he knew of their attachment, though unspeakably sad, would have stopped short of real tragedy. But it seems he couldn’t do it. What the psychologists in whom Mr Appleby is interested call the inhibition – that was absolute. He could not speak: he came to see he could not prevent the marriage unless he spoke. So here is the motive against Lindsay for which Mr Appleby has been seeking. We can feel it, I think: the massive fear, hate, horror mounting in him. In front of these young people he saw the commission of a sin – an unwitting sin, if such a thing can be – which has always appeared peculiarly terrible to the neurotic mind. He is responsible, and he can prevent it only by speaking – or acting. And he cannot speak.’

Sybil Guthrie stood up, now dry-eyed. ‘Where is Christine? Could I drive down – ?’

Jervie shook his head. ‘Time enough in the morning. Christine is asleep by now in the manse – and Neil at Ewan Bell’s.’

‘I say Guthrie couldn’t speak. And that he therefore planned to act. The sense of guilt that lies heavy on his type, that had grown and grown on him with the contemplation of his treachery or cowardice in Australia, he would now tend to unload, I suppose, on Lindsay. He would project it upon Lindsay – Lindsay whose father had, in a sense, betrayed a Guthrie; who was now marching stiff-necked upon deadly sin. Nothing would save the situation, and nothing would be adequate to it, save that Lindsay should die.’

In a rather husky voice Noel Gylby interrupted. ‘As Christine said of him, he would pit extremes only against extremes. Or what he thought extremes.’

‘And so,’ said Jervie, ‘we come to a new view of the jigsaw. Mr Appleby has seen Ranald incorporating Lindsay into his plot against his brother; I see him incorporating his brother into his plot against Lindsay.’ Again he made his weary gesture. ‘I suppose that, criminologically, it is a pretty case.’ He rose. ‘I must find strength for the duty that is laid upon me tomorrow.’ Wedderburn too rose. ‘Jervie, you are sure? There can be no question of the truth of the facts you have told us?’

‘I am afraid none. But you must know how we have come by them. We don’t yet know if the child’s birth – Christine’s birth – was falsely registered. But whatever course Guthrie took – and we may be sure it would be clever enough – required the connivance of some other person of status in the country. He went to Sir Hector Anderson of Dunwinnie, an eccentric old man with extravagant views on blood and race. Sir Hector died fifteen years ago, so Guthrie in his present plot has had nothing to fear from him. But he has reckoned without Lady Anderson – not unreasonably, for she is now over ninety. She knew the truth, though she has never divulged it. And she still follows the local news. When she heard that Neil and Christine had been brought back from an attempted elopement she acted at once. The summons that took Stewart hurriedly away late this afternoon was from Dunwinnie Lodge. He had the whole story.’

‘But the recollection of so very old a lady – ?’

Jervie shook his head. ‘There were a couple of letters preserved. Not much detail, but as to the fact – conclusive.’

Sybil Guthrie said: ‘Dr Jervie – nobody else knows yet? They won’t be told – brutally?’

‘Nobody else knows yet. And I will tell them myself.’

Gylby broke in almost with violence. ‘Why need they know? It’s not a real relationship – a buried relationship like that! It must have happened hundreds of times, and nobody the wiser or the worse.’

I laid my hand on his arm. ‘No good, Gylby – no good at all. At Ranald’s trial it must come out. Even if we concealed it – Lady Anderson and ourselves – Ranald would almost certainly divulge it in the end. It would be his only way to triumph, and almost certainly it would overcome his silence.’

Sybil Guthrie jumped up and came over to me. ‘But, Mr Appleby, if we left the whole thing entirely alone! At present Mr Wedderburn’s case holds the field. Ranald is off, undetected, to his retirement and his pension. Lindsay is no longer in any danger of being hanged. He and Christine are making their plans for Canada–’ She broke off, turned to Dr Jervie in sudden appeal. ‘Dr Jervie, couldn’t you agree?’