The Weatherhouse

by Nan Shepherd

  ‘And now? It hasn’t altered?’

  ‘No. No, I think not.’ She thought, ‘As good a way as any to cover Lindsay.’

  Mother and daughter parted.

  ‘Stop your bumming, Ellen,’ sharply said Mrs Craigmyle. Leeb was accustomed to say, ‘Not one of my daughters has tune in her, and there’s Ellen would bum away half the time, if I would let her.’

  Ellen laughed and forebore. She went out to the long brown Weatherhill, where no one would resent her bumming. It was that hour of waning light when colours take on their most magical values. The clumps and thickets of whin, that had turned golden in the few days of sun, glowed with a live intensity, as though light were within them. The colours of life had for Ellen the same bright magical intensity. She was more excited than she knew. Had Kate a hidden life her mother had not suspected? She was so placid, so contained; Ellen had schooled herself for so long to the disappointment of believing that her daughter was thus contained because there was nothing to spill over. Had she misjudged her Kate? Ellen’s thoughts turned back to Kate’s girlhood, and she remembered how the girl had run about the moor with this Garry Forbes—a great awkward lad, she had never seen much in him. Wild ruffian, Theresa said. Yes, they had all condemned his madcap ways, and Kate had suffered in silence. But Ellen had woven a whole romance around the two and hidden it in her heart, hardly believing it had more foundation than the hundred other romances that she wove. But it had, it had. Foundation, and a new miraculous lustre. Kate took on a new dignity in her mother’s eyes—perhaps the grandeur of a tragic destiny. But no, that must not be—unless he were slaughtered. No, no, I must not fancy things like that. Kate’s love would reach its consummation. They would be wedded. He would call her mother. The boy had had no mother—and now he would tell her the things that a son keeps for a mother’s ear. ‘Mother, it is so easy to tell this to you. You have a way of listening—’ No, no. I must not fancy things like that.

  But on the morrow, when Garry came to the Weatherhouse, Mrs Falconer tingled with her excitement. She pressed herself upon the guest, eager to know him. ‘For Kate’s sake, I must get to understand him.’

  ‘You’ve no knives on your table, Nell,’ scolded Theresa.

  ‘No, no. No.’ She scuttered at the open drawer, sat down again by Garry, smiling.

  ‘See that your mother has those knives put down,’ said Theresa to Kate. ‘When my back’s about I can’t know what she’ll do. She’s been the deed of two or three queer things this day. I’ve got two or three angers with her.’

  ‘She’s tired today, I fancy.’

  ‘Tired! Your granny in a band-box.’

  Kate returned from the kitchen and set the knives herself. Mrs Falconer was smiling, looking up in Garry’s face, asking senseless unimportant questions.

  ‘You might have the wit to know that,’ Lindsay was thinking, impatient at the trivial turns the conversation took.

  ‘Mother, don’t giggle,’ said Kate, aside, passing her.

  ‘Why shouldn’t she giggle?’ Garry thought, watching for the first time the elderly lady with interest. ‘So, Miss Kate, you are growing like your aunt Theresa. You put people right.’ He gave Mrs Falconer’s questions a serious attention.

  Theresa brought in the tea.

  ‘There’, slapping down her pancakes before the guest, ‘you don’t get the like of that at Knapperley. It’s aye the same thing with Bawbie, a stovie or a sup kail.’

  Garry drawled, ‘A soo’s snoot stewed on Sunday and on Monday a stewed soo’s snoot.’ And he did not look at Miss Theresa, whom he hated, with her air of triumph, her determination to show him that man must live by bread alone.

  Miss Annie laughed delightedly. ‘When did I hear that last? And whiles it’ll be as tough’s the woodie, I’m thinking, your soo’s snoot.’

  Lindsay cried, ‘Garry, do you know them too, all these funny picturesque phrases? You must teach them to me.’

  But Theresa muttered, ‘Sarcastic deevil.’

  ‘I would have you know’—he addressed himself mentally to Theresa—‘I can’t stand people who humiliate me. The pancakes are excellent, Miss Craigmyle,’ he said aloud. ‘And now please tell me, why do you suppose Miss Louie Morgan was not engaged to David Grey?’

  ‘Did ever you suppose such a thing, Aunt Tris?’ asked Kate.

  ‘Garry has taken a dreadful idea into his head,’ cried Lindsay, ‘that Louie made the story up.’

  ‘There!’ cried Theresa triumphantly. ‘Didn’t I tell you that long ago, but you weren’t hearing me. I was right, you see. I’m not often wrong.’

  But was she right? Now, where did the tale begin? Let’s trace it out. But nothing came of that, except to disturb everyone’s sense of security. No, not a whisper before his death: that was plain. But shortly after, ‘I haven’t the right to wear mourning,’ she had said to Mrs Hunter. And she had the ring. And Mr Grey received her often. But counter-balance that with her character: well, a good character, a moral character. But they all knew she was out after a man. Oh yes, a flighty thing, always ogling the men. ‘Though there’s lots that’s taken in with her airs and her graces.’ Would a man like Grey be taken in? His character against her known assertiveness, her pretty dangling. But where does all this lead? Since the man is dead, it can’t be known for certain.

  ‘Since he is dead, I must put it to the proof. His reputation must be cleared. And publicly.’

  ‘Be wary, Garry,’ said Kate. ‘If you are wrong—no, accept the possibility for a moment—if you are wrong, you will have pilloried your friend.’

  ‘Publicly,’ Miss Annie cried. ‘You wouldn’t do the like of that. She’s a harmless craiturie that nobody seeks to mind.’

  ‘And it would hurt her. Garry, you don’t understand—it will hurt her horribly,’ Lindsay pleaded. ‘Suppose he did love her, after all.’

  ‘And David Grey,’ said Miss Theresa, ‘is hardly of the place now, as you might say. Since he went away to go to the college we’ve hardly seen or heard of him. Except his medals, to be sure, and prizes. But he might marry anyone you pleased to point at, and who would care? Not a soul would let their kail grow cold with thinking of it.’

  ‘And anyway,’ said Kate, ‘now that he’s dead, does it matter?’

  ‘Captain Forbes matters,’ said Mrs Falconer.

  Ellen’s hands were clasped tight together above her breast, and they shook rapidly from her excitement. They were like a tiny bald nodding head that gave assent to her speech. Her head nodded too, slightly and rapidly.

  The gaunt young man looked across the table; and remained looking, his jaw down, as though, having opened his mouth to speak, what he was about to say had become suddenly unimportant.

  ‘I mean,’ she continued, ‘honour matters. Whether people care or not, and whether she’s to be hurt or not, you’ve to get the truth clear. Because of truth itself. Because of his honour. And it matters to you, because you feel his honour’s in your keeping now he’s gone.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that’s why. Because of truth itself. It’s good of you to see that.’

  If one had never seen a bird before, never seen a flake of earth, loosened and blown into the air, change shape and rise, and poise, and speed far off, beyond the power of eye to follow; seeing one would understand the sharp delight that Mrs Falconer experienced at hearing the young man’s words. She kindled, her face became winsome, like that of a young girl. She laughed—a low, sweet laughter. When he talked to her, words bubbled on her lips.

  ‘But must you go so soon?’ she pleaded. ‘—Yes, yes, a pack of women, we can’t entertain you very hard.’

  Indeed, as he walked away the man felt relief from the pack of women. On the other side of the dyke Francie Ferguson, slicing turnips, droned a song. Garry leaned his arms on the dyke and looked over.

  ‘Ay, ay, you’re having a song to yourself.’

  Francie straightened his shoulders, pushed his cap farther back on his head, answered, ‘Imphm,’ scratch
ed himself a little, added, ‘Just that,’ and returned to the turnips.

  ‘Decent fellow,’ thought Garry. Yes, that Morgan creature had to be corrected. Beside the honesty of Francie she showed unclean.

  In the Weatherhouse: ‘Stop your bumming, Ellen,’ commanded Mrs Craigmyle.

  ‘Mother, don’t giggle,’ said Kate apart.

  As on the evening before, Mrs Falconer left them and walked alone on the Weatherhill. Again the sky was shining pure. Again the wide land waited. Annunciation of spring was in the brown ploughed fields, the swollen buds, the blackbird’s sudden late cascade of song, the smell of earth. A wood of naked birches hung on the hillside like a cloud of heather, so deep a glow of purple was in their boughs. And a bird had gone up out of Ellen’s heart, pursuing its unaccountable way into the distance. A flake from her earth had risen. Life had a second spring, and it was opening for this woman of sixty who had lived so long among her dreams. The earnest young man, his brows drawn in that anxious pucker, his eyes unsatisfied, roving from face to face, burdened with the pain and ugliness of life—yes, she was sure that that was it, that haunted look of his betrayed a soul unhappy over the torment and mystery of life, its unreason and its evil—this young man had brought her suddenly back into its throng and business. She who had been content to dream must now do.

  And her fancy was off. She saw that it was she who was to help the young man (she called him mentally her son-in-law) to establish the truth, to rout Louie.

  ‘How can I have lived among trivial matters for so long?’ she thought. ‘This is real, and good. I feel alive.’

  She wandered back slowly to the house. Light still lingered in the sky; the hills, that had been dissolved in its splendour, like floating shapes of light themselves, grew dark again. Ellen too, emerged from the transfiguring glory of light in which she had been walking. What did her happiness mean? Why, of course, she was happy because of Katie. This mysterious and tranquil glow that had irradiated life had its source in a mother’s satisfaction. Kate loved, Kate would be loved, Kate’s mother would be satisfied.

  But in the house there was no satisfaction. They were all talking together. Lindsay tossed back her disordered hair, angry tears were in her eyes. The leaping firelight gleamed on her face, her agitated movements, and on Theresa’s fingers as she put away the knives and silver, and on Leeb’s busy knitting needles and the glittering points her eyes made in the gloom.

  ‘Cousin Ellen,’ cried the girl, ‘Cousin Ellen, Louie is true. Oh, she is! Garry is wrong, wrong, wrong.’

  ‘It’s not worth the to-do, Lindsay,’ said Miss Theresa.

  Ellen flamed magnificently from the exaltation with which she had been suffused. ‘But yes. Always worth, always worth to follow truth. The young man is doing the right.’

  ‘To hurt her? Even if it wasn’t an engagement. If she just loved him—and never told?’

  ‘She never did. She just couldn’t stand being unimportant.’

  Ellen said it suddenly. She had not known it herself till that moment. ‘There’s all the girls round about, they all had their lads, and some of them killed and some wounded, and everybody making much of them and them on everyone’s lips. And Louie had nobody. She had a lot of talk one time about missing, missing, as though she wanted us to believe she had someone and him lost.’

  ‘What an idea, Mother!’ said Kate.

  ‘But she had. “It’s cruel, this Missing, Presumed Dead,” she would say. “It keeps one from starting fresh.”’

  ‘Yes, she said that to me.’ Lindsay stared across at Mrs Falconer. ‘She said, “It’s the faithfulness that is unto death. It deadens you. Keeps you from beginning life anew.” What a curious thing to say!’

  ‘Always what we couldn’t disprove, you see. And then she hit on David Grey. And so she paraded her tragedy. It made her important. They may say what they like about Louie looking miserable—she’s never looked so filled out as she has of late. She was a starved sort of thing before.’

  ‘But, Cousin Ellen, I can’t believe that it’s all a lie. If you had heard Louie talk about it. So tenderly. You can’t imagine. A lie couldn’t be lovely like that.’

  ‘There’s lots you can’t believe in life, Linny. Angels of darkness masquerading as angels of light. I’m some afraid she’s lived so much with her lie that she can’t feel it a lie any longer. Her head must know, but her heart is persuaded.’

  Lindsay’s eyes, mournful and still, were fixed on her. ‘Why, the child herself had some affair,’ Ellen remembered. Surely it was over. This eager Lindsay, following bird song, catching at country ways and sights, gathering windflowers, was quite changed from the pallid girl who had come to them at Christmas. ‘Yes, yes, she was too young. It must be over.’ But the girl’s eyes burned in the dusk; not eyes of light forgetfulness.

  Theresa put the last of the knives away, and stood scratching the side of her nose.

  ‘Such a to-do about a dead man,’ she said, ‘that can’t come back to set the matter right. I’ve had an itchy nose all day—itchy nose, you’ll hear of fey folk. It’s to be hoped no more of you are doomed, the way you’re carrying on. I always told you Louie made the story up. But to hold this parliament about it—’

  ‘Cousin Theresa, don’t you dare to mention it to anyone. Not anyone. That Louie made it up, I mean. Not till it’s proved, if Garry ever does prove it. To disgrace her publicly— If you begin to talk, she’ll have publicity enough.’

  Mrs Craigmyle chuckled from her corner. ‘Take you that to butter your skate.’ Without lifting her eyes or altering a muscle of her face, she began to hum a little tune.

  ‘You’re turning as rude as that young man, Miss Lindsay,’ retorted Theresa. ‘But you will note that he enjoyed his tea. You needn’t be in such a taking over Louie, bairn,’ she added, more kindly. ‘Grows there skate on Clochnaben? She was born with a want—you’ll get no sense yonder. But you needn’t turn your head about it. You greetin’ like a leaky pot, and Nell with a great baby’s face on her—I never saw the like. Worse than you’s useless.’

  The face that Ellen turned towards the fire was indeed strangely child-like. A soft smile played on it, pleased and innocent. She was still thinking, ‘I shall help him to proclaim the truth.’ But the sharpness of truth was not visible on her countenance. She had the look of the dreamer who has not yet tried to shape his dream from intractable matter.

  In the firelit room Mrs Craigmyle’s hum grew more audible. The words became clear:

  Duncan Forb’s cam here to woo,

  sang Mrs Craigmyle, with a subtle emphasis upon the altered word:

  Ha, ha, the wooin’ o’t.

  Ellen looked up. Her face quivered. She began to talk loud and quickly.

  ‘Hateful,’ she thought, ‘making it uncomfortable for Kate.’

  Later she found her mother alone. Mrs Craigmyle raised her voice (but not her eyes) at her daughter’s approach:

  Duncan Forb’s cam here to woo.

  She sang gaily, her foot tapping the time, and her snow-white head, crowned with its mist of fine black lace, nodding to the leap of the flames. And her face was innocent of any intention. She was singing an old song.

  ‘Mother,’ said Ellen, with burning cheeks, ‘you shouldn’t do that. Hinting. In your song. It isn’t nice.’

  Mrs Craigmyle turned an amused, appraising eye upon her widowed daughter.

  ‘You’re right, bairn,’ she answered blandly. ‘The young man has a good Scots name that won’t fit into the metre. You’re right. I shouldn’t spoil an old name as though I had an English tongue on me—feared to speak two syllables when one will do. I’ll not offend again.’

  She watched her daughter with a fine regard that had malice in it. Mrs Craigmyle, through her apparent unconcern, had noted Ellen, habitually so quiet and reserved, kindle and crackle, and it amused her.

  ‘Well,’ said Ellen, ‘but if Kate doesn’t like it.’

  ‘That’s right my lass, study you to please your fami
ly.’

  Ellen went away, her cheeks still hot; and a mocking laughter followed her, faint, that seemed to echo from very far off, centuries away, in ancient story.

  Lindsay was leaning from her open window. The spring night, hushed and dim, yet held a tumult. Out there, in every field, in boughs of the secret wood, life moved. Kate slept, but Lindsay could not sleep. Everything—the promise of spring in the air, an owl’s call up the valley, the tranquil radiance that the young moon had left above the hills, water tumbling with a thin clear note, the shame and trouble of her nature—all conspired to keep her exquisitely awake. And Lindsay thought, ‘I want everyone to be happy. It shouldn’t hurt like this—all that beauty.’

  She could not tell herself what the hurt was. All was vague and confused in her mind. Garry was different from what she had supposed him. But she had known him so little—only his kisses and those amazing talks, far into the night, until her father came and sent them all to bed. This Garry with the worried frown and haggard eyes was someone else. Worrying because he wanted to do a wicked thing—Lindsay was still convinced by Louie’s phrases. Or—were her confusion and trouble because she was no longer quite convinced? Was Louie, whom she had set admiringly in her temple, no god at all, but brittle clay?

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she cried, leaning to the night. ‘Life’s so strange. It isn’t what you want.’

  One grew and things altered, people altered, just being alive was somehow not the same. Spring was like that, changing the world, taking away the shapes and colours to which one was accustomed. Were seeds afraid, she wondered, and buds? Afraid to grow, afraid of life as she was afraid of it. Evil, and wrong—one knew there were such things in the world, but to find them in people, that was different. In people that one knew. Garry cruel, and Louie false; and all the while earth and sky brimmed with beauty. And she leaned farther into the tranquil night.

  Below her on the grass someone was moving. Who should be in the garden so late? If it were Garry! How good to have him seek her presence in the dark, in the still, sweet April glamour! A very night for lovers.