by Nan Shepherd
‘Well, ye like to be honest, but ye canna be ower honest or ye’d hae naething to yersel.’ He added, spreading a dirty paw against the door-jamb, ‘The missus is to her bed.’
‘Oh,’ said Miss Theresa. She said it tartly. The bag poised in her arms, she was judicially considering its weight. ‘Not so heavy, after all,’ she thought. Francie’s way had formerly been, ‘I just put in a puckle by guess like.’ He hadn’t been long at the school, he said, wasn’t used with your weights and measures. But his lavishness, Miss Theresa could see, was receiving a check: beyond a doubt the work of the missus. Miss Theresa was not disposed to sympathy. ‘She’s a din-raising baggage,’ she reflected, and heard Francie out with a face as set as the frost.
Francie was grumbling heartily at life. He knew fine that the potatoes were scanty measure. He did not confess it, of course, but since Miss Theresa was sure to discover, he detailed the mitigating circumstances: a sick wife, a cow gone dry, forty barren besoms of hens and a daughter soft-hearted to the point of letting all the rabbits off the snares—ay, and giving them a bit of her piece, no less, any one that looked pitiful at her. Francie had remonstrated, of course, but might as well speak to the wind blowing by. ‘A gey-like swippert o’ a queyne, she is that,’ he said, not without a certain conscious pride. And meat-whole, he added, ‘They’re a’ that—the wife as weel.’
‘She would be,’ said Miss Theresa. ‘She’s about stotting off the ground with fat. And what is’t that ails her, like?’
Francie laboured to explain.
‘Oh, a stoun’ of love,’ said Miss Theresa shortly. ‘It’ll have come out at the wrong place. Wait you.’ And laying down the potatoes, she brought a good-sized pudding from the pantry and thrust it on Francie.
‘You can’t take that before the court and swear to it that you’re hungered,’ she said, and shut the door on him.
In the parlour she repeated the conversation.
‘He does all the cooking himself, he tells me. I wouldn’t be any curious about eating it. He stewed a rabbit. “It was gey tough,” he says, “it gart your jaws wonder.”’
‘Fancy the little girl and the rabbits,’ cried Lindsay. ‘That’s the child we saw yesterday, isn’t it, Katie? With the coal-black eyes. She looked a mischief! She’s not like her father, anyway. You’d never suppose she was his daughter.’
‘You never would, for the easy reason that she’s not.’
‘I’m glad to see he calls her his daughter, it’s kindly of the body.’
‘What other could he do? You can’t give a gift a clyte in the mouth, and the bairns were her marriage gift to the craitur, as you might say.’
‘They looked so neglected, these children,’ cried Lindsay. ‘And with their mother ill. Couldn’t we give them a party? They can’t have had much of a Christmas.’
‘Oh, party away at them,’ conceded Theresa. ‘Would you really like it, Lindsay?’
Lindsay was aglow with eagerness. ‘And a Christmas tree?’ she said. ‘Oh, I know it’s January now, but I don’t believe they’ve ever seen a tree. One of those big spruce branches would do.’ She was given over entirely to her excitement. A mere child, thought Theresa. Well, and here was a change of countenance from the earlier days. The affair could not mean much when she threw it off so easily. The pale and moody Lindsay who had gone wanly about the house on her arrival, displeased Miss Theresa, who disliked a piner. Like many robust people, she resented the presence of suffering; pain, physical or mental, was an inconvenience that she preferred not to see. A Lindsay absorbed in trifling with a Christmas tree was a relief Miss Theresa might well afford herself; and she afforded it with grace.
‘Have you time, Kate,’ she asked of her niece Kate Falconer, who was spending her hour of leave at home, ‘to go round on your way back to the Hospital and bid them come?’
‘Why, yes,’ said Kate, ‘if we start at once. You come too, Linny.’
‘Go in by to Craggie,’ pursued Miss Theresa, ‘and bid Mrs Hunter too. We’ve been meaning to have her to tea this while back. She’ll be grand pleased at the tree. She’s like a bairn when you give her a thing.’
Kate went to make ready, and Lindsay would have followed; but as she passed, her grand-aunt detained her with a look. Mrs Craigmyle had few gestures; she held herself still; only her eyes glittered and her lips moved, and often her fingers went to and fro as she knitted—a spider stillness. The film of delicate lace upon hair as fine as itself was not the only thing about her that betokened the spider. One had the sense of being caught upon a look, lured in and held.
Lindsay drew up to her, and stood.
‘So, so, you are to turn my house into a market, Leezie Lindsay?’
‘Why do you call me that, Aunt Leeb?’
Lang Leeb sang from the old ballad.
‘Surely you know,’ she said, ‘that Leezie Lindsay came to Kingcausie with that braw lad she ran away with, and it’s not far from Kingcausie that you’ve come, Mistress Lindsay.’
The scarlet rushed on Lindsay’s brow and stood in splat-ches over neck and chin.
She pushed back her mop of curls and stared at the old woman; and her words seemed to be drawn from her without her will.
‘Kingcausie? That’s—isn’t that the place among trees, a line of beeches and then some scraggy firs? Beyond the Tower there.’
‘Hoots! Never a bit. That’s Knapperley. Daft Bawbie Paterson’s place. Kingcausie lies to the river.’
The scarlet had deepened on Lindsay’s throat. ‘Have I given myself away?’ she was thinking.
She had discovered what she had wanted to know since ever she came to Fetter-Rothnie. Often as she had visited the Weatherhouse, she had not stayed there, and its surroundings were unfamiliar. It had seemed so easy, in imagination, when she walked with Kate, to ask it in a careless way, ‘Isn’t that Knapperley over there, Katie?’ or ‘What place is that among the trees?’ But when the moment came her heart had thumped too wildly; she was not strong enough to ask. Now that she knew she sheered off nervously from the subject, as though to linger were deadly. And she plunged, ‘But why a market, Aunt Leeb? I’m sure we shan’t be very rowdy.’
‘A lot you know about the fisher folk, if that’s your way of thinking. It was them that cracked the Marykirk bell, jingle-janglin’ for a burying.’
‘But they’re not fisher folk here—Francie?’
‘She is.’
And Lindsay, because she was afraid to hear further of the lady who had brought the black-eyed bairns as a wedding gift to her husband, glanced rapidly around, and saw Mrs Falconer put her head in at the door and look at them. There was something pathetic about Cousin Ellen, Lindsay thought—her straying gaze, her muttering to herself. A poor old thing. And what was she wanting now, watching them both like that?
A poor young thing, Ellen was thinking. She must protect her from her mother’s sly and studied jests. So she said, ‘Kate must be off, Linny,’ and the girl fled gladly.
Francie was shouting a lusty song as he worked:
I’ll never forget till the day that I dee
The lumps o’ fat my granny gied me,
The heids o’ herrin’ an’ tails o’cats—
He broke off abruptly and cried, ‘Are ye cleanin’ yersels, littlins? Here’s ladies to see you.’
The children hove in sight, drying their half-washed hands on opposite ends of a towel. Bold-eyed youngsters, with an address unusual in country bairns. Each hurried to complete the drying first and so be saved from putting away the towel; and both dropping it at one moment, it fell in a heap. The children began to quarrel noisily.
‘Put you it by, Stellicky,’ said the man, who stood watching the bickering bairns for awhile with every appearance of content. Francie had a soft foolish kindly face, and while the girl, with black looks, did as she was bidden, he swung the loonie to his shoulder and said, ‘He’s a gey bit birkie, isna he, to be but five year auld?’
‘And how’s the wife?’ said Kate.
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Francie confided in her that whiles she took a tig, and he thought it was maybe no more than that.
‘They were only married in August,’ said Kate, laughing, as the girls followed a field path away from the croft.
‘Oh, look,’ cried Lindsay. ‘A bramble leaf still. Blood-red.’
‘So it is,’ Kate replied. ‘And engaged for over twenty years.’
‘I don’t particularly want to hear about it, Katie.’
‘But why,’ said Kate, ‘it’s an entertaining tale.’
And she began to relate it.
Francie was son to old Jeames Ferguson, who had helped to make the Weatherhouse; and Francie’s taking of a wife had been a seven days’ speak in Fetter-Rothnie. He had been betrothed for two and twenty years. All the countryside knew of the betrothal, but that it should end in marriage was a surprise for which the gossips were not prepared. A joke, too. A better joke, as it turned out, than they had anticipated.
The two and twenty years of waiting were due to Francie’s brother Weelum. Weelum in boyhood had discovered an astounding aptitude for craftsmanship. He had been apprenticed to a painter in Peterkirk, and in course became a journeyman. From that day on Francie referred invariably to his brother as ‘The Journeyman.’ Weelum’s name was never heard to cross his lips; he remained ‘The Journeyman,’ though he did not remain a painter.
Weelum’s career as a journeyman was mute and inglorious. He was a taciturn man: he wasted no words; and when his master’s clients gave orders about the detail of the work he undertook he would listen with an intent, intelligent expression, and reply with a grave and considering nod. Afterwards he did exactly what he pleased. Folk complained. Weelum continued to do what he pleased. In the end his master dismissed him; reluctantly, for he had clever hands.
He established himself with Francie. There was not work on the croft for two men; but as there was no woman on it, Weelum took possession of the domestic affairs. He did what he pleased there too, and made much to-do about his industry. Francie could not see that there was much result from it all. ‘He’s eident, but he doesna win through,’ he would sometimes say sorrowfully. ‘Feel Weelum,’ the folk called him. ‘Oh, nae sae feel,’ said Jonathan Bannochie the souter. ‘He kens gey weel whaur his pottage bickers best.’ To Francie he was still ‘The Journeyman.’
When Weelum came home to bide, Francie was already contracted to a lassie in the fishing village of Bargie, some twenty miles away, down the coast. A bonny bit lass, but her folk were terrible tinks; they had the name of being the worst tinks in Bargie. Weelum had some family pride, if Francie had none, and there were bitter words between the brothers. The Journeyman set his face implacably against the marriage, and stood aggrieved and silent when Francie tried to thresh the matter out. ‘He has ower good a downsit, and he kens it,’ said the folk. Francie’s respect for his brother was profound. On the Sunday afternoons when he cycled across to Bargie, he would slink out in silence by the back way from his own house. One Sunday the brothers came to high words. Francie mounted his cycle, and trusted—as he always did trust—that all would be well on his return. That Weelum did not speak on his return gave him no anxiety: Weelum often stunkit at him and kept silence for days. But this time Weelum kept silence for ever. He never again addressed a word to his brother, though he remained under his roof, eating of his bread, for over twenty years. Through all that time the brothers slept in the same bed, rising each in the morning to his separate tasks.
One afternoon the Journeyman fell over with a stroke. That was an end to the hope of his speaking. ‘I some think he would have liked to say something,’ Francie declared. He climbed in beside his brother to the one bed the room contained, and wakened in the hour before dawn geal cauld to find the Journeyman dead beside him.
Some months later Francie was cried in the kirk. A burr of excitement ran through the congregation. So the Bargie woman had waited for him! When the day of the wedding came, Francie set out in the early morning, with the old mare harnessed to the farm cart.
‘Take her on the hin step o’ yer bike, Francie, man,’ cried one of the bystanders. ‘That would be mair gallivantin’ like than the cairt.’
‘There’s her bits o’ things to fesh,’ Francie answered.
‘She’ll hae some chairs an’ thingies,’ said the neighbours. ‘The hoosie’ll nae be oot o’ the need o’ them. It’s terrible bare.’
Francie had not dreamed of a reception; but when, late in the evening, the bridal journey ended and the cart turned soberly up the cart-road to the croft, he found a crowd about his doors.
Francie bartered words with no man. He handed out his bride, and after her one bairn, and then another; and then a bundle tied up in a Turkey counterpane. The bride and the bairns went in, and Francie shut the door on them; and turned back to tend his mare.
‘She’ll hae been a weeda, Francie?’ said Jonathan Bannochie. A titter ran round the company.
Francie unharnessed the mare.
‘Weel, nae exactly a weeda,’ he said in his slow way; and led the mare to stable.
Next morning he harnessed her again and jogged in the old cart to town. All Fetter-Rothnie watched him come home with a brand-new iron bedstead in the cart. ‘For the bairns,’ they said. ‘He might have made less do with them.’ But the bed was not for the bairns.
‘Aunt Tris was the first of us to see her,’ Kate told Lindsay. ‘She invented an errand over. Aunt Tris would invent an errand to the deil himself, Granny says, if she wanted something from him. She came home and sat down and took off all her outdoor things before she would say a word. And then she said, “He was fond of fish before he fried the scrubber.” She told us about the bed. “She won’t even sleep with him,” she told us. “Him and the laddie sleeps in the kitchen, and her and the lassie’s got the room. It’s six and sax, I’m thinking, for Francie, between the Journeyman and the wife.” And she told us the bairns’ names.’
The bairns’ names were a diversion to Fetter-Rothnie. In a community that had hardly a dozen names amongst its folk, Francie’s betrothed had been known as Peter’s Sandy’s Bell; but she was determined that her children should have individual names, and called the girl Stella Dagmar and the boy Sidney Archibald Eric. Bargie treated the names after its fashion. The children became Stellicky Dagmaricky and Peter’s Sandy’s Bellie’s Sid.
‘Granny sat and listened to Aunt Tris,’ Kate continued. ‘Licked her lips over it. Granny loves a tale. Particularly with a wicked streak. “A spectacle,” she said, “a second Katherine Bran.” Katherine Bran was somebody in a tale, I believe. And then she said, “You have your theatres and your picture palaces, you folk. You make a grand mistake.” And she told us there was no spectacle like what’s at our own doors. “Set her in the jougs and up on the faulters’ stool with her, for fourteen Sabbaths, as they did with Katherine, and where’s your picture palace then?” A merry prank, she called it. Well!— “The faulter’s stool and a penny bridal,” she said, “and you’ve spectacle to last you, I’se warren.” Granny’s very amusing when she begins with old tales.’
Lindsay’s attention was flagging. ‘Besides,’ she thought, ‘I don’t like old tales. Nor this new one either.’ They had come out of the wood on to a crossroad and the country was open for miles ahead.
‘And that’s Knapperley, is it, Katie?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ said Kate. ‘But we don’t go near it to get to Mrs Hunter’s.’
TWO
The January Christmas Tree
Snow fell that night, and the night following, and the frost set harder than before. The guests were stamping at the doorstep, knocking off the snow that had frozen in translucent domes upon their heels, shaking their garments free from the glittering particles of ice that hung in them. The children eyed the house with awe, mingled in Stella Dagmar with disdain. ‘It’s a terrible slippery floor, I canna get traivelled,’ she objected in the long, polished lobby. But the glories of the Christmas tree silenced critic
ism for awhile. Lindsay had made a very pretty thing of it; and when by and by she slipped from the room and Miss Theresa said ostentatiously, ‘She’s away to take a rest—she’s been ill, you see,’ the girl herself was as deliciously excited as any bairn. She giggled with pleasure as she draped an old crimson curtain round her and adjusted her Father Christmas beard. ‘Now what all nonsense shall I say?’ And she said it very well, disguising her voice and playing silly antics.
‘My very toes is laughin’,’ Mrs Hunter declared.
The room grew hot, and Lindsay in her wrappings choked for air. She slid her hand behind the curtain that covered the glass door to the garden. But the door blew open at her touch. The wind and a woman entered together: a woman in the fifties, weathered and sinewy, clad in a rough, patched Lovat tweed and leggings caked with mud and battered snow. On her head sat a piece of curious finery that had been once a hat and from it dangled a trallop of dingy veiling.
‘Bawbie Paterson,’ cried Miss Theresa. ‘Who would have expected that?’
Miss Paterson marched across the room.
‘It’s you I’m seekin’, Barbara Hunter,’ she announced. ‘Will you send for Maggie? There’s my lassie up and left me. The third one running. Will you send for Maggie? Maggie’s the lass for me.’
‘Barbara Paterson,’ said Mrs Hunter, ‘that I will not. Maggie’s in a good place. I’d be black affronted to bid her up and awa’. And mair than that, Miss Barbara, nae lass o’ mine’ll ever be at your beck and ca’. Ye dinna feed your folk, Miss Barbara. I’ve seen my chickens hanging in to the bare wa’s o’ a cabbage as though they hadna seen meat this month an’ mair, and your kitchen deemie, Barbara Paterson, had the same hungry e’e. Ye’ll nae get Maggie.’
‘And what am I to do wanting a kitchen lass?’
‘Ye can tak the road an’ run bits, Miss Barbara.’
‘Since you are in my house, Bawbie Paterson,’ said Miss Theresa, ‘you’d better take a seat.’
‘I’ll not do that, Tris Craigmyle. You’d have me plotted with heat, would you? But I’ll wait a whilie or I go in a lowe. And who might this be?’ And she wheeled round to stare at Lindsay, who had dropped the curtain and was staring hard at her.
