The Weatherhouse

by Nan Shepherd

  ‘A byword and a laughing stock,’ repeated Miss Theresa to herself. His name in everyone’s mouth. You would need Garry Forbes to you; Hine up on the head o’ the house like Garry Forbes and his two fools; and though like seeking needles among preens was an old phrase, or sane folk among fools had been added to it locally because of Garry. Mrs Craigmyle herself had made the addition, with a meaning eye upon her daughter Ellen. Theresa remembered the occasion well: an occasion when Ellen had said, unexpectedly, that Garry Forbes was liker a Christ than any other man she knew. A Christ—now what did she mean by a Christ? It gave them all a queer shock, coming like that from Ellen’s gaunt, pale lips. Annie had said, ‘Well, Bawbie now—she’s never in the kirk from one year’s end to another, and I doubt the young man’s much the same.’ Theresa remembered that she herself had cried, ‘Well, there’s no need for blasphemy about it,’ and it was later the same evening that Mrs Craigmyle, using the phrase like seeking needles among preens, added or sane folk among fools.

  ‘And indeed it’s real hard whiles to tell the one from the other,’ thought Miss Theresa complacently.

  But there was no doubt of it, Lindsay was happy. Miss Theresa regarded her again. ‘But when you’ve got your poke’, she thought, ‘you just have to be doing with the pig that’s in it.’ Even when the pig was one whose grumphs and squeaks made something of a family scandal. ‘Old Garry’s just hanging on for the next Coal Strike,’ Frank Lorimer had said. ‘Wait till you see—he’ll come out strong, stronger than this time.’ Some of his utterances had even been in the papers. A horrid disgrace. A mere asking for ridicule. Miss Theresa wondered that Lindsay would put up with it, but she didn’t seem to care—just laughed and said, ‘But that’s the kind of thing that Garry does.’ Well, she might repent it yet. Nine years was not so very long a time, and the wedding had been hasty enough, in all conscience. Theresa remembered how Mrs Robert Lorimer had come out to give them the news.

  There they were, preparing for a marriage in the grand style a fortnight ahead; and that very morning, in the drawing-room at home, Lindsay had become Mrs Dalgarno Forbes; and the bridegroom was returning to the trenches the following day.

  ‘Oh,’ Theresa had said. ‘Active service again. I thought he wasn’t fit.’

  Mrs Robert explained that it was his own desire. ‘Would get himself sent. And it appears he was able enough all the time. It was just his nerves.’

  So it had been a gey hasty affair, Annie supposed. And Mrs Robert told them that even the minister was not to be had in time, and so that old done man, the Reverend Mr Watson, tied the knot. ‘And if he didn’t forget the ring!—pronounced a benediction on them, and the ring still in the best man’s fingers, and him fidgeting about and not knowing what to do. Such an unfortunate affair.’

  ‘Well, well,’ Theresa had said. ‘Who will to Cupar maun to Cupar. That’s her getting married in May. And the service all in a snorl. And no wedding frock and no party.’

  ‘And her father,’ continued Mrs Robert, ‘he would blurt out anything, would Andrew. He said right out, “You’re in a terrible hurry,” he said, “come back and pay your loaf.” And then they got the ring put on.’

  ‘Sic mannie sic horsie,’ old Mrs Craigmyle had said with a chuckle. ‘Andrew’s his father’s son. You’ll never see a Lorimer trauchled with overmuch respect for the kirk. And us all to come out of a manse, too.’

  ‘And then,’ Mrs Robert had proceeded, ‘when he turned to kiss his wife, she actually skipped into his arms. Kicked her heels up—a regular dancing step. The trickiest you ever saw.’

  ‘Oh, well,’ Theresa had said, ‘she grat sore enough about that wedding not so long ago, and she’ll maybe greet again for all her dancing.’

  ‘Yes, that was what I said,’ she thought. ‘And then mother began with her ballads.’ She remembered perfectly what her mother had sung. She had sat aloof, as usual, just listening. One might be sure that in time she would put in her word. A song, most likely. She diddled away at old tunes most of the time. Hitherto, since Mrs Robert had arrived, she had spoken nothing but that chuckling proclamation of Lorimer disrespect. A gey life she and her brother must have led the old Reverend! But with her mind on the walled manse garden she reflected, ‘He was real fond of a funnie himself.’ Theresa was half a Craigmyle, a dourer folk than the Lorimers—dour, hard of grain, acquisitive; but even Theresa had spent hilarious days in her grandfather’s patch of wood. And as she sat watching her sister die, Theresa’s mind was a pleasant jumble of apple trees and the ploys of a pack of bairns, through which Lindsay’s eager dance step and her mother’s nine year old singing recurred like a refrain. The very tune came back and the mocking words:

  He bocht an aul horse an’ he hired an aul man

  An’ he sent her safe back to Northumberland.

  It was then that Ellen had interfered. Opening her mouth for the first time, ‘That’s a cruel inference, mother,’ she had cried sharply. Neither Theresa nor Annie paid much heed to what their mother sang. She was always singing, though there had been little singing since Ellen took ill. Dowie, the old lady was, peering anxiously. She wasn’t in the habit of caring. Theresa thought it strange. ‘It’s the callow that worry,’ she said to herself. A very old woman like her mother was past feeling strongly.

  ‘What did the old ballads signify?’ she thought, reverting to the wedding; but Ellen was always finding that her mother meant something—meant more than she should, Ellen intended to say. Well, and if she had meant to hint that the marriage might turn out ill, it was no more than they all thought at the time. ‘But we were wrong, and it’s a mercy,’ she thought, daft Bawbie Paterson’s nephew though he was. Would Bawbie have gone to the wedding now, she pondered; and with the black trallop hanging down her back? ‘There was nothing amiss with the song, I’m sure,’ Theresa said to herself. ‘Mother had a rhyme about the ring too, if I could remember it:

  a guid gowd ring

  Made oot o’ the auld brass pan, ay, ay.

  But they had all cried out against that one—a sluttish thing, not to be associated with Lindsay. Mrs Craigmyle had let them cry, humming away at her tune, pleasuring herself with the unsavoury words.

  The dying woman began to mutter restlessly. Miss Theresa put aside these ancient thoughts and went to the bedroom.

  ‘How she speaks!’ Miss Annie said to Lindsay. ‘Such conversations as she holds, you never would believe. She’s been taking a lot to your husband, my dear.’

  ‘To my—to Garry? But how strange! Why, she hardly knows Garry. Talking to Garry?’

  ‘Talking, my dear, and answering too.’ Miss Annie broke off. ‘But you never know what a body will say when they’re dottled.’ She sighed a little, looked towards her mother, and shook her head. The thought had come to her that to speak to Lindsay of Ellen’s infatuation was less than kind. ‘I remember,’ she began again, ‘when I was but a little thing, an old, old man—’

  Her pleasant voice ran on; but while she told her story she looked again, anxiously and in a puzzled way, at her mother. Lindsay, too, looked at her aged grand-aunt who at ninety four, straight as a pine-bole and with all her faculties unimpaired, was seated on the high-backed sofa, knitting at her shank; but her eyes, Lindsay noticed, never left her daughter’s face—Ellen, her second daughter, dottled and dying at sixty nine.

  The muttering continued.

  ‘Poor old craitur!’ said grand-aunt Craigmyle.

  And her voice had still tune to it.

  ‘Yes,’ said Miss Annie, reading Lindsay’s thought, ‘it’s the old generation that has the last in it, I say to mother. There’s Mrs Morgan now, as blithe and active at her tea-makings as ever you saw, and Louie a poor wasted thing.’

  Louie Morgan! thought Lindsay. Strange that she should be mentioned then. Lindsay’s thoughts, like Miss Theresa’s, had been travelling in the past. And Louie Morgan, as well as Cousin Ellen, had had her part in the singular drama that preceded that hasty marriage service.

>   She said aloud, ‘I haven’t seen Louie for—oh, such a long time.’

  ‘And needn’t seek to,’ said Theresa, returning from the bedroom. ‘She’s not a sight for self-respecting eyes. The drink. She’s drinking hard. Bleared. And her stockings cobbled with a yellow thread. That’s you and your religion and no meal in the house.’

  ‘Religion—is she so pious, then? She used to pray—’

  ‘Oh, pray tonight and pray tomorrow. She would pray your head into train oil. But no one minds her—her big words and her grand speeches. They know what to make of her declarations.’

  Lindsay had a movement of compassion for poor simple Louie, outcast from the love and reverence of the earth.

  ‘But she wasn’t saying them that time,’ she thought and remembered how she and Garry, when she had stayed at the Weatherhouse before her marriage, had come on Louie kneeling in the wood as though in audible prayer; but when they came behind her, what she was saying was ludicrous. I’m on the Fetter-Rothnie committee—may I introduce myself?’ she was saying. And she smirked to an imaginary audience. They had laughed about it often afterwards, though Garry didn’t like her to tell the story in public. ‘Oh, leave her alone,’ he always said. But what harm did it do, Lindsay would ask, with people who didn’t know her? Aloud she said, ‘Fancy Louie coming to that! Poor soul! I liked Louie,’ she added in a moment. ‘She used to take me for walks—long ago, when I was a little thing. And tell me stories. She had a dog—Demon, wasn’t it? Oh, I remember how he could run. Through the wood. I can see him still.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ rapped Miss Theresa. ‘Louie had never a dog.’

  ‘But I remember. I can see him. A whippet hound he was.’

  ‘Nonsense! She hadn’t a dog. She wanted one—one of the Knapperley whippets, Miss Barbara’s dogs. But old Mrs Morgan wouldn’t have an animal about the place. Louie kicked up a waup over not getting it, I can tell you. And after a while she used to pretend she had it—made on to be stroking it, spoke to it and all. A palavering craitur.’

  Lindsay looked doubtfully.

  ‘Did she? I know she pretended about a lot of things. But Demon—? He seems so real when I look back. Did she only make me think I saw him? He used to go our walks with us. We called to him—Demon, Demon—loud out, I know that.’

  She pondered. The dog, bounding among the pines, had in her memory the compelling insistence of imaginative art. He was a symbol of swiftness, the divine joy of motion. But Lindsay preferred reality to symbol.

  ‘Queer, isn’t it?’ she said, coming out of her reverie. ‘I remembered Demon was a real dog.’

  She was unreasonably angry with Louie, as though by her own discovery of Demon’s non-existence Louie had defrauded her of a recollected joy. And Garry had proved her a cheat. Lindsay’s mind reverted to all that had followed that odd encounter in the wood, and so came back to Cousin Ellen. She shifted a little on her chair, bringing her eye into line with the open door and the muttering old woman who lay on the bed; and suddenly Mrs Falconer began to shout, ‘They have despised him and rejected him. Cry aloud, spare not. A stubborn people who will pay no heed.’

  Theresa stood over her, saying, ‘Now, now. There, lie down again. Weesht ye, weesht. It’s all right.’ But Annie, who had caught the Biblical cadence of the words, folded her knotted and swollen hands together in her lap; and Ellen continued to shout, harshly and without intermission, tossing her long, fleshless arm above her head.

  That evening Lindsay, who was on holiday at her old home, said to her father, ‘Daddy, you must go out and see her. No, I don’t mean Cousin Ellen. She wouldn’t know you, of course. I mean old Aunt Craigmyle. She was always so fond of you. Perhaps you could comfort her a little.’

  ‘Comfort!’ grumbled Andrew Lorimer. ‘The old lady never needed much comforting that I could see. You don’t take things hard at ninety four, bairn.’

  ‘Oh, I know, daddy. I know she never seemed to care about anything. She looked at us all as though she were reading about us in a book. But she is distressed—really she is.’

  ‘Oh, well, we’ll see.’

  Andrew Lorimer took his car and ran out the nine odd miles that separated the Weatherhouse from the city, and by that time Mrs Falconer was dead.

  ‘Oh, Andrew, I’m right glad to see you,’ said Annie, who opened the door to him. ‘Come away in. Mother’s so dowie. I never saw her so come-at.’

  ‘Eh?’ said Andrew.

  He remained standing on the doorstep.

  ‘What a brae that is!’ he grumbled. ‘It’s not fit for any car. I’ve a rheumatic here,’ he added, feeling his shoulder. And because he wished to protract the moment before he must go in and talk to his aunt, he asked, ‘How’s your own rheumatism, Ann?’

  Miss Annie looked down at her shapeless lumps of hands. ‘It’s as much as I could do to open the door for you,’ she said. A gleam flickered on her pleasant face. ‘I’ve aye been handless, Andrew, but I’m getting terrible handless among the feet forbye.’

  Andrew allowed himself to laugh. He felt less constrained. He disliked heartily the job on which he was engaged; but he had always enjoyed Miss Annie.

  ‘What’ll I say to her?’ he queried, following her across the threshold. ‘You’d better tell me what to say.’

  He sat down beside his aged aunt and began to tell her about his rheumatism, wresting his shoulder round to show her where the pain lay; but all the while he spoke his thoughts were on the woman who had just died. He realised that he was thinking of her as an old woman. ‘But she can’t be old,’ he thought. She wasn’t so much older than himself when they were all bairns together, the three Lorimer boys and the three Craigmyle lassies, and played in the Manse garden at Inverdrunie, and grandfather Lorimer gave them prizes for climbing the elm trees. ‘To keep them out of the apple trees,’ he explained to his wife. What a climber Paradise had been, with her long foalie’s legs! Tris and he were of an age, and Ellen some three years older. Not yet seventy, then. Pretty near it, though. And he thought, seventy years without event. Oh, to be sure, there had been the episode with that Falconer chap who let her down so badly; but that must have meant four years at the most—long ago. Kate—why, Kate must be going on for forty. And at that moment Kate Falconer entered the room.

  An able-looking girl—he had forgotten that she looked so well. Matron in some sort of Children’s Home, and exceptionally capable, they said. Looked as though her wits were at her service. She could do well for herself, if she liked—marry well. There couldn’t be much money in that Charity Home business, anyway, though he supposed Kate would take what she was offered and make no bones. She wouldn’t push for her own advantage. Took that from her father. Couldn’t hold off himself. Let any shaver cheat him. And then slipped out of it all and left his wife and child without a copper. Kate wouldn’t have a penny but what she earned. Yes, she would marry.

  ‘That’s Stella Ferguson gone up the road,’ said Miss Theresa, who was adjusting a blind.

  A moment later came a sharp ring at the bell. Kate went to the door.

  They heard the stranger ask in a loud, challenging voice, ‘What are the blinds down for?’

  Kate’s soft answer was inaudible.

  ‘She’s not dead? Her? Lord alive!’ The girl broke into noisy blubbering.

  ‘Stella Ferguson?’ said Andrew Lorimer. ‘Oh, yes, old Jeames’s grand-child. No? I remember, I remember.’ With a movement of the head towards the noise of her sobbing, he added, ‘I suppose that’s the etiquette of mourning with that stamp.’

  ‘No,’ said Paradise, ‘that’s not a pose. Stella has a warm heart. A bold bessy but a warm heart. She’s done well for herself, Stella has, she’s a smartie. She’s typist at Duncan Runciman’s and making good money, though she’s but eighteen. Quite my lady now, and keeps her mother in her place. But she has a warm heart. When Mr John Grey died—they found him dead in bed one May morning, a year past, and all the days he lay, you would have said a lying-in-state—not a cloud, n
ot a breath of wind. Summer in its glory. Halcyon days they were—you would have thought his very garden knew. Well, Stella came and brought her flower. Gean blossom it was—black the next day. And so his cousin, that had come because he had none of his own, she threw away the shrivelled thing. Stella was like a play-actress—ramped and raged. Picked the very branch out of the rubbish heap and put it in his hand again. “I’ll not take another,” she declared. “I said a prayer over that, I did. I don’t say a prayer so often that I want one wasted.” So her bit of blossom went to the grave with him,’ concluded Paradise. ‘Quite right to leave it too, I think.’

  Andrew Lorimer had gone only a little way down the hill on his journey home when the girl Stella, leaping from the dyke on which she had been seated, intercepted him.

  ‘Look here,’ she said. ‘They don’t like me much in there. My mother was a bad woman, and they think I’m a bad girl, but I’m not. Gospel.’ As she said Gospel the girl breathed noisily and crossed her breath with a forefinger. ‘But if I’m not a bad girl,’ resumed Stella, ‘it’s to that precious saint lying dead in there that it’s due. My eye! They don’t none of them know the kind she was. Never goes to church, doesn’t she? She was a stunner, I can tell you. Look here, she’s got to get my roses in her hand.’

  She displayed a cluster of hardy yellow scotch roses.

  ‘Stella,’ said Mr Lorimer, stepping from his car, ‘if you were the worst sinner that ever was, you’d have the right to pay your tribute to the dead. But you’re a good honest girl. Come with me.’

  And, quite unconscious of the high scorn in the look that Stella cast on him, he led the way back to the Weatherhouse.

  ‘You can come and put it in her hand yourself, Stella,’ Miss Theresa said.

  So Mrs Falconer lay that night, white and still, her face, beset so long with pain and darkened by failure, serene at last, and the rose of the girl Stella in her hand.